March 17, 1863, The New York Herald
From Cairo, Cincinnati, Chicago and other points we continue to receive very encouraging, though very meagre and mysterious, reports of the success of the Yazoo expedition and of the probable evacuation of Vicksburg by the rebels. Our latest despatches from the West inform us that our Yazoo gunboat squadron had successfully descended the river to Haines’ Bluff, near the mouth of the river; that in their descent they had captured twenty-six steamboats, eighteen of which were destroyed; that rumors were rife of the evacuation of Vicksburg, and that it was supposed that the greater part of the rebel force would go to Chattanooga and endeavor to overwhelm General Rosecrans.
We can trace none of these reports to an authentic source. We have nothing from general Grant or Admiral Porter tending to confirm them – except a despatch form the latter that the naval expedition has reached the Yazoo in safety – and yet we are inclined to the belief that they are substantially correct. We think it altogether probable that the danger, the necessities and the desperate game of the rebels may have brought them to the extremity of abandoning Vicksburg, in order to save their army at that place and its artillery and munitions of war, and in order to join that army with the army of Bragg in Tennessee, and to make a bold dash with an overwhelming force upon General Rosecrans before reinforcements can reach him from the army of General Grant. The ablest general of the rebels, Jo. Johnston, is their supreme in command in the Southwest. His peculiar strategy was effectively illustrated in the first battle of Bull Run. Abandoning temporarily the Shenandoah valley to General Patterson, it was this same Johnston who achieved the most important victory of the rebellion by bringing his whole army to a timely junction with that of Beauregard. Subsequently, at Shiloh, Sidney Johnston tried the same strategical combination, though not with the same success. Beauregard, in abandoning Corinth and in sending forward a portion of his troops to the relief of Richmond, and Stonewall Jackson, in slipping out of the valley of Virginia and in pushing forward to the Chickahominy, repeated on a larger scale, and more disastrously to our weakened army, the successful game of Manassas. With Jo. Johnston, therefore, the originator of this system of rebel warfare, in charge of the rebel armies of the Southwest, we think it altogether likely that he may have resolved to abandon Vicksburg in order to make a bold effort for the capture of Nashville.
We think, too, that the probabilities of success are sufficiently tempting to induce him to undertake this daring enterprise. From Vicksburg, across the State of Mississippi, and into the heart of Alabama, and thence northward through that State and Georgia, there is a continuous line of railways (with one break connected by steamboats) to Chattanooga. By this route the whole rebel army may be removed from Vicksburg to Chattanooga in twenty days. We know not but this task may even now be more than half completed. Let us suppose that the junction indicated has been effected; that the united armies of Pemberton and Bragg have commenced their advance upon General Rosecrans, while the forces of General Grant are some five hundred miles below on the Mississippi, and we may well inquire, how are the rebels to be prevented from capturing Nashville, or from overrunning the State of Kentucky, even to Louisville?
All accounts agree in representing the cotton States very near a general famine. For the first year of the war the rebel armies were subsisted from the abundant supplies of the wheat, corn, beef and pork producing border slave States which they occupied; for the cotton States down to the outbreak of the rebellion were devoted to cotton, and drew the bulk of their solid articles of subsistence from the border slave States and form the Northwest. But expelled from the supplies of the border States, the rebels, in the second year of the war, proceeded to the necessary task of producing their subsistence from the soil of the cotton States. Their experiment, however, was only a partial success. The cultivation of their soil was materially interrupted by the absorbing business of the war, including a heavy conscription, and the season in many districts was unfavorable. Thus the supplies raised within the limits of the rebellion last year are nearly consumed by their wasteful armies and improvident negroes. The surplus crops of Western Louisiana and Texas yet remain to them; but with these in imminent danger of being absolutely cut off with the loss of Vicksburg, is it not natural that Johnston should realize the necessity of a bold movement for the granaries and pork houses and fat cattle of Kentucky and the teeming valley of the Ohio river?
Perhaps, too, the rebel chiefs may have been deluded by the late copperhead movements in the Northwest into the idea of a powerful insurrectionary diversion in that quarter with another formidable invasion of Kentucky. The all important question of rebel subsistence, however, ought to be sufficient to admonish President Lincoln and the heads of the War Office of the danger of leaving General Rosecrans in his present exposed position without reinforcements. Whatever may be the exact state of things at Vicksburg, the safety of Nashville should not be left in doubt. We know that Gen. Rosecrans and his heroic soldiers, against any odds, will do all that skill, prudence and daring bravery can accomplish; but we may well dread a collision between him and a half starved rebel army of twice the numerical strength of his own. Granted that while we are in the dark as to the precise situation of affairs in the Southwest the government is well advised, still, from the scanty light before us, we see enough, to our own judgment, to suggest the necessity of strengthening Gen. Rosecrans, and without delay.
We have the rebellion now fairly upon the hip; but a single grand mistake may spoil all our promising combinations, from Fredericksburg to Vicksburg. Hence, as an organ of the people of the loyal States, who supply the soldiers and foot the bills of the government, we call upon it to see to that in the event of its evacuation of Vicksburg the rebel army from that quarter shall never find its way to Nashville, but shall be driven back in the attempt to the alternative of submission, dispersion or destruction.