When the gunboats could not suppress the guns at Grand Gulf in April 1863, Grant adjusted plans and crossed the Mississippi the next morning; he had learned of the landing just that night.
The story
In the spring of 1863, during the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant commanded the Union army trying to capture Vicksburg, Mississippi. The city sits on high bluffs on the east bank of the Mississippi River, and the Confederates had placed guns on those bluffs to fire on boats passing on the river. Taking Vicksburg would give the Union control of the river. Grant’s army was on the opposite bank, in Louisiana, where the land is low and that winter was flooded. As Grant later put it, the problem was “to secure a footing upon dry ground on the east side of the river.” All winter the army tried to reach that ground north of the city, and none of the attempts worked.
In April Grant tried a crossing south of the city instead. The army marched south down the Louisiana side of the river. In mid-April the Navy’s gunboats, commanded by David Porter, ran past the guns at Vicksburg along with several steamboats. Once they were south of the city, the steamboats could ferry the army across.
The first crossing point Grant chose was Grand Gulf, a town on another high bluff farther south on the east bank, where the Confederates also had guns. The plan was for the gunboats to silence those guns while about 10,000 soldiers waited on the steamboats, ready to land and take the bluff. Grant knew the gunboats might fail, and his written order of April 27 said what to do in that case. The steamboats would put the soldiers ashore on the Louisiana side, the soldiers would march south past Grand Gulf, and the boats would run past the guns without them and pick them up farther south.
On the morning of April 29 the gunboats attacked. By Grant’s account, after nearly five and a half hours they had not silenced a single gun. That afternoon Grant asked Porter to run the boats past Grand Gulf after dark. At dusk the soldiers got off the steamboats on the Louisiana side and marched south along the top of a levee, the raised bank along the river. Grant had already had the levee explored, so he knew the army could march on it. That night the gunboats and steamboats ran past the guns at Grand Gulf.
The remaining question was where to land on the east bank. Grant had also had the east bank below Grand Gulf scouted, and the army expected to have to go about nine miles farther south, to the town of Rodney, to find a landing. That night a Black man came to Grant and told him there was a good landing at Bruinsburg, a few miles closer than Rodney, with a good road leading inland. The man was right. Early on April 30 the boats carried the army across the river, and it landed at Bruinsburg without opposition.
Grant wrote that when the landing was done he “felt a degree of relief scarcely ever equalled since.” Vicksburg had not been taken, but, as he put it, “I was on dry ground on the same side of the river with the enemy.”
How we see it through leadership economics
We see this as a problem of Execution, which we think of as making choices in real time with imperfect information and adjusting as you learn more about the situation. On the morning of April 29, Grant did not know whether the gunboats would silence the guns at Grand Gulf, and he did not know about the landing at Bruinsburg. His order did not depend on knowing either one. It told the army what to do if the attack failed, and Grant had already had the levee explored, so the army could start moving that same evening.
That readiness is what let Grant use the landing. When the man brought him news of Bruinsburg that night, the soldiers were already marching south and the boats would pass Grand Gulf that same night, so the army could land there the next morning. Grant could not have planned for Bruinsburg, because he did not know about it. What he could plan for was an army able to change direction within a day. Planned agility like that enables a team to take advantage of opportunities that couldn’t have been known beforehand.
A quote we’re thinking about
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