Battle
General Carr scouted the ground before him and determined that a frontal assault through the canebrakes would be fruitless. He devised a turning movement whereby one brigade would move slowly forward through the canebrake while the second brigade would descend into the Widow's Creek bottoms and from there strike for the Confederate left flank. Brig. Gen. Alvin P. Hovey's 12th Division arrived and surged forward just as Carr's men were storming the Confederate position. Both flanks having been turned, Green's men broke and ran. McClernand stopped to reorganize and then, always the politician, launched into a series a grandiose speeches until Grant pointed out that the Confederates had merely withdrawn to a more tenable position. Reinforced by Brig. Gen. A. J. Smith's 10th Division and Stevenson's Brigade of McPherson's XVII Corp, McClernand resumed the pursuit. With 20,000 men crowded into a 1.5-mile (2.4 km) front, McClernand's plan appeared to be to force his way past the Confederate line. A flanking assault by Col. Francis Cockrell's Missourians crumpled the Federal right flank and gave McClernand pause. Sundown found the two sides settling into a stalemate along a broad front on the Rodney Road several miles from Port Gibson.
On the Bruinsburg Road front, Osterhaus had been content to pressure Tracy's command with federal sharpshooters and artillery, occasionally launching an unsupported regiment against the Confederate line. Maj. Gen. James B. McPherson showed up late in the afternoon with John E. Smith's brigade. Donning a cloak to disguise his rank, he reviewed the front lines and quickly devised a turning movement that would render untenable the entire Confederate right flank. Twenty minutes after the troops had been staged for the assault, the Confederates were retreating into the Bayou Pierre bottoms, having left behind several hundred prisoners. The road to his rear now threatened, Bowen commenced retreating through Port Gibson to the north shore of Bayou Pierre.
Read more about this topic: Battle Of Port Gibson
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“It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth ... and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.”
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“For WAR, consisteth not in Battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to content by Battle is sufficiently known.... So the nature of War, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)