On the 13th we reembarked; the whole expedition returned out of the river by the direct route down the Arkansas during a heavy snow-storm, and rendezvoused in the Mississippi, at Napoleon, at the mouth of the Arkansas.  Here General McClernand told me he had received a letter from General Grant at Memphis, who disapproved of our movement up the Arkansas; but that communication was made before he had learned of our complete success.  When informed of this, and of the promptness with which it had been executed, he could not but approve.  We were then ordered back to Milliken’s Bend, to await General Grant’s arrival in person.  We reached Milliken’s Bend January 21st.

McClernand’s report of the capture of Fort Hindman almost ignored the action of Porter’s fleet altogether.  This was unfair, for I know that the admiral led his fleet in person in the river-attack, and that his guns silenced those of Fort Hindman, and drove the gunners into the ditch.

The aggregate loss in my corps at Arkansas Post was five hundred and nineteen, viz., four officers and seventy-five men killed, thirty-four officers and four hundred and six men wounded.  I never knew the losses in the gunboat fleet, or in Morgan’s corps; but they must have been less than in mine, which was more exposed.  The number of rebel dead must have been nearly one hundred and fifty; of prisoners, by actual count, we secured four thousand seven hundred and ninety-one, and sent them north to St. Louis.

CHAPTER XIII.

Vicksburg.

January to July, 1888.

The campaign of 1863, resulting, in the capture of Vicksburg, was so important, that its history has been well studied and well described in all the books treating of the civil war, more especially by Dr. Draper, in his “History of the Civil War in America,” and in Badeau’s “Military History of General Grant.”  In the latter it is more fully and accurately given than in any other, and is well illustrated by maps and original documents.  I now need only attempt to further illustrate Badeau’s account by some additional details.  When our expedition came out of the Arkansas River, January, 18,1863, and rendezvoused at the river-bank, in front of the town of Napoleon, Arkansas, we were visited by General Grant in person, who had come down from Memphis in a steamboat.  Although at this time Major-General J. A. McClernand was in command of the Army of the Mississippi, by virtue of a confidential order of the War Department, dated October 21, 1862, which order bore the indorsement of President Lincoln, General Grant still exercised a command over him, by reason of his general command of the Department of the Tennessee.  By an order (No. 210) of December 18, 1862, from the War Department, received at Arkansas Post, the Western armies had been grouped into five corps d’armee, viz.:  the Thirteenth,