June 4, 1863, The New York Herald
The great struggle for the Mississippi is now reduced to two points, the capture of which will give to the government the complete control of the great river from its sources to the sea, and the loss of which by the rebellion will be as decisive against it as the cutting in two of an army on the field of battle. These two points are Vicksburg and Port Hudson, both completely invested by the land and naval forces of the Union, and with every prospect in each case of complete success.
General Pemberton, the rebel commander at Vicksburg, estimates the investing force of Gen. Grant at sixty thousand men. The rebel force inside the defences of the besieged city hardly exceeds, we dare say, twenty thousand men. Forty-five miles inland, at Jackson city, is Gen. Joe Johnston, with the fragment of an army reported as not exceeding fifteen thousand men. When driven out of Jackson by General Grant it was less than six thousand. The additional nine thousand have doubtless been picked up from the debris of General Pemberton’s army, left behind in his disastrous retreat to Vicksburg. From these data, not omitting the powerful co-operation of Admiral Porter’s gunboat squadron, all the advantages of the situation at Vicksburg appear to be so largely in the possession of General Grant as to discountenance the remotest misgiving of a failure.
Next, with regard to Port Hudson, some three hundred miles below, the strength and the chances seem to be as strongly in our favor. The rebel garrison is represented as not exceeding ten thousand men. They are invested on the land side by General Banks, with a veteran army which, we presume, musters more than twenty thousand men, and on the water side by the gunboat squadron of that famous and fearless old sea lion, Admiral Farragut. Here, too, as at Vicksburg, the rebel garrison is reported to be on a very short allowance of provisions, while all resources from the outside are entirely cut off. Surely, then, in view of all these facts, the fate of Vicksburg and Port Hudson is sealed, and there is no escape for them.
But there may be other facts and probabilities worthy of consideration. We have no means of knowing what has been going on all this time behind Joe Johnston. Reinforcements from Mobile, Savannah, Charleston, North Carolina and from Tennessee may have been moving to join him by thousands. He may thus, possibly, this day have an army around him of fifty thousand men, and with this force moving upon the rear of General Grant there would probably be an end of the siege of Vicksburg. We hope, however, that before this day the siege has been ended by General Grant’s occupation of the city. We think that the destructive raids of our cavalry all through the State of Mississippi and across the northern counties of Alabama and Georgia, and the destructive inland march of General Grant army, have so broken up the enemy’s communications and railway facilities, and have made such havoc of their depots and stores of supplies, that General Johnston has found it slow work to increase his army, and extremely difficult to feed even the limited force under his command.
But as we know from experience that the rebels can subsist almost upon nothing, and march for a week from twenty to thirty miles a day barefooted, and as Joe Johnston is the man who stole away from General Patterson in the Shenandoah valley, and crossed over the Blue Ridge and came into the first battle of Bull run just in time to turn a rebel defeat into a great rebel victory, we know that he requires vigilant watching. The only way to make assurance doubly sure at Vicksburg and Port Hudson is to push down reinforcements to Grant and Banks. To render them completely successful all the forces of General Burnside in Kentucky could be spared; for, with the much greater object in view, Kentucky might be wisely left for a few weeks to defend herself against apprehended raids of rebel guerrillas. General Halleck and the Secretary of War have the game in their hands. If they win they will liberally share in the glory of the crowning triumphs of the war; but if they lose nothing but their immediate expulsion from office will save the administration from penalties of the righteous indignation of the loyal States. The people have the fullest confidence in Grant and Banks and in the sterling soldiers whom they command; but they have learned to be distrustful of the sluggishness of the War Office.
Give us Vicksburg and Port Hudson, and Secretary Stanton and General Halleck will be excused all their past blunders; but let them fail to secure the great prizes within their grasp, and the President will be compelled to cut them adrift.