The Experiments
January to March 1863
Grant had a problem, he was determined to find a way to bring his forces against Vicksburg without approaching from the river under the Confederate guns and he couldn’t find a way to approach the city from the north because of the swamps. In a nut shell, the problem was that the bulk of Grant’s troops were north of the city while the most promising approaches were to the south and east.
Grant had tried to attack Vicksburg from the east early on but he had found his supply lines were impossible to maintain overland through Confederate territory. Grant had a strong naval presence under Porter who could run the Vicksburg gamete heading down river, but could not hope to do so going up river because the boats would be moving so slowly, against the current, they would be sitting ducks for the Confederate guns. Men and supplies couldn’t be brought up river from New Orleans, either because the Confederates still held Port Hudson which blocked the river 150 miles south of Vicksburg.
Unless he was willing to invest a fortune in building a fleet of one-way boats, Grant couldn’t get supplies to his men, assuming they made it past the city in one piece. Accordingly he decided to make another attempt at digging a canal across the De Soto Peninsula and ordered Sherman to take his men down river to do it. Sherman’s men launched in with a will but the Mississippi flooded and filled in much of the canal with silt; combined with heat and other problems Grant decided the job was bigger than his men could pull off working with shovels alone.
Source: The CivilWarAlbum
Grant was nothing if not stubborn; giving up on the De Solo Peninsula route he next ordered Brig. Gen. James B. McPherson to dig a canal between Lake Providence and the Mississippi. Lake Providence connects to the Red River through a series of winding channels. The Red River joined the Mississippi south of the Vicksburg which would allow Grant to join forces with Maj. Gen. Nathanial P. Banks besieging Port Hudson. The canal was successfully completed on March 18th but was only navigable by small flat bottom boats and proved to be useless in any practical sense.
Some 150 miles up river from Vicksburg was the mouth of an abandoned waterway that connected to the Coldwater River. The Coldwater followed a series of rivers on into the Yazoo River east of Vicksburg, exactly what Grant had been looking for. The Yazoo Pass, as this old channel was called, had been sealed off by a levee near Moon Lake in 1856. By blowing up the levee and reopening the channel Grant could bring his troops against the east side of the city and supply them by river. A Union flotilla of ten boats entered the Yazoo Pass and worked its way south removing obstacles along the way. The route had not been used for six years and was overgrown with trees and hanging moss. For once the swamps worked in the Unions favor. Southern soldiers tried to block the channel with downed trees but the little flotilla discovered that the remains of the blown dyke channeled water into the Pass and they could move through the swamps in any direction and were not restricted to the old channel.
Men were stationed on the decks of the ships to sweep off the spiders, snakes and other wildlife that dropped from the trees. While low hanging branches made quick work of the smokestacks, the whole thing looked doable until they reached the Yalobusha River. At the mouth of the Yalobusha the little Union fleet discovered a fort built by the Confederates blocking any further progress.
Because the fort was surrounded by swamps there was no way to launch a land attack against it. The boats tried to shell the fort but to no avail, the Confederates works were much better protection against cannonballs than the wooden walls of the riverboats and the little fleet had no choice but to sail back the way it came.
While the whole expedition ended in failure the soldiers who had been doing the grunt work of reopening the channel and sweeping the decks of wildlife had had a thoroughly enjoyable time of it and considered the Yazoo Pass Expedition to have been great fun. Grant on the other hand refused to give up and on March 16th ordered Porter to take another flotilla up the Yazoo River and to establish a beachhead Deer Creek. This route proved to be impassable and the boats became immobilized when their paddlewheels were fouled by reels. Sherman had to launch an infantry assault just to save the boats from capture and the whole thing was given up as a lost cause.
The Duckport Canal was Grants last attempt find away around Vicksburg. The canal was nearly completed when the river dropped leaving the ditch to shallow to use. Grant had had enough: it was time for a desperate move. Later Grant came in for a lot of criticism for wasting so much time with all of these sideshows; Grant claimed that he was just keeping his men busy while he concentrated his forces for an attack. I don’t buy it, but I also can’t help but wonder how much criticism he would have received if he hadn’t tried so hard to avoid a bloody battle and a prolonged siege of the city.