The overland road and the frontal assault were dead. So for four months over the winter of 1862 and 1863, Grant tried to get at Vicksburg through the water, and for four months the water beat him. It made for a miserable, mud-caked, disease-ridden season that nearly cost him his command. Each scheme had the same logic: if the army couldn’t pass the batteries on the river, maybe it could go around them through the tangle of swamps and side-channels that laced the bottomland north and west of the city.

The first attempt was a literal ditch. Across De Soto Point, the low, swampy peninsula on the Louisiana side, inside the hairpin bend opposite the city, Grant’s men dug a canal, hoping to cut a new channel that would let the boats skip the bend and the guns entirely. The river refused to cooperate; the cut wouldn’t take the current, and Grant’s Canal was abandoned around March 1863. Upstream they tried Lake Providence, a scheme to open a long looping bayou route through Louisiana to rejoin the river far below Vicksburg, a project so unpromising that the campaign’s own historians later nicknamed it the "Lake Providence Boondoggle." It too was given up in late March.

The army went deeper into the swamp after that. The Yazoo Pass Expedition blew a hole in a levee near Moon Lake and sent boats winding down a chain of smaller rivers to try to land troops on dry, high ground above the city; they were stopped cold by a fort the Confederates threw up out of cotton bales, Fort Pemberton, sitting squarely in the only navigable channel. Then came the strangest of all. In the Steele’s Bayou Expedition, Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter (North), who commanded the river fleet of gunboats and ironclads, pushed his warships up a twisting bayou through the Yazoo delta to slip around Fort Pemberton from behind. The Confederates simply felled trees into the narrow water ahead of the boats and behind them, and Porter’s ironclad fleet found itself boxed in and lost in a flooded forest, warships stuck among the trees and nearly captured, until Sherman marched infantry through chest-deep swamp to hack them loose. It is the rare moment in the war when the navy had to be rescued, on foot, from the woods.

Every one of these had now failed. From a distance, and the Northern press was watching from a distance, it looked like Grant was finished: bogged in the mud, his army sick and dying of camp fever in the flooded lowlands, the man himself drinking. The whiskey stories were rumor and political knife-work, the kind of charge that trailed Grant his whole career; treat them as a press attack of the moment, not fact.

What the press could not see was that the failures had taught Grant there was no way through the water from the north. If he wanted Vicksburg, he would have to do something far more dangerous.