sudden,
yet inevitable, disappointment.

Grant, believing himself free to dispose of McClernand's new levies,
had projected a combined movement by his own forces, marching by
Grand Junction, and Sherman's, moving by water from Memphis, on
the front and rear of Vicksburg.

Sherman set out from Memphis on the 20th of December in complete
ignorance of Halleck's telegram of the 18th, conveying the President's
positive order that McClernand was to command the expedition.
Forrest cut the wires on the morning of the 19th just in time to
intercept this telegram, as well as its counterpart, addressed to
McClernand at Springfield, Illinois. On the 29th of December,
Sherman met with the bloody repulse of Chickasaw Bluffs. On the
2d of January he returned to the mouth of the Yazoo, and there
found McClernand armed with the bowstring and the baton.

Where was Grant? While his main body was still at Oxford, in march
to the Yallabusha, Forrest, the ubiquitous, irrepressible Forrest,
struck his line of communications, and, on the 20th of December,
at the instant when Sherman was giving the signal to get under way
from Memphis, Van Dorn was receiving the surrender of Holly Springs
and the keys of Grant's depots. There seemed nothing for it but
to fall back on Memphis or starve. Of this state of affairs Grant
sent word to Sherman on the 20th. Eleven days later the despatch
was telegraphed to Sherman by McClernand; nor was it until the 8th
of January that Grant, at Holly Springs, learned from Washington
the bad news from Sherman, then ten days old. As if to complete
a very cat's-cradle of cross-purposes, Washington had heard of it
only through the Richmond newspapers.

The collapse of the northern column, coupled with the Confederate
occupation of Port Hudson, had completely changed the nature of
the problem confided to Banks for solution. If he was to execute
the letter of his instructions at all, he had now to choose between
three courses, each involving an impossibility: to carry by assault
a strong line of works, three miles long, defended by 16,000 good
troops; to lay siege to the place, with the certainty that it would
be relieved from Mississippi, and with the reasonable prospect of
losing at least his siege train in the venture; to leave Port Hudson
in his rear and go against Vicksburg, upon the supposition, in the
last degree improbable, that he might find Grant, or McClernand,
or Sherman there to meet him and furn