Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  The wreckage spread out in great heaps along the floe, which was still creeping downriver. At the south end of the levee the floe met up with another line of boats, mostly wood rafts and flatboats. Over the next hour, fifty of them were reduced to kindling. Then the river surface began to change. As the floe glided away, it left behind a churn of ice shards and meltwater. One newspaper report described the river as being in “a frothy, crumbled condition, with an occasional solid piece.” The current of free-running water strengthened. The shards and boulders and bergs being carried downriver began to pile up along the shoreline. The day was bitterly cold, and the pieces soon froze into place. By evening the levee had been covered over by ice; by morning there was a mountain range of ice twenty feet high. People peering into it could see the wreckage of the steamboats—the railings and chandeliers, the gambling tables and the wine goblets—preserved within the gleaming shadows of the ice mountains, where it would remain until the spring thaw came.

  Poling a keelboat against the current, circa 1800

  (Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation)

  A drawing of a houseboat by Alfred Waud, a British-born illustrator of Civil War and frontier themes

  (Louisiana Digital Library)

  The Great Earthquake at New Madrid, Missouri. A nineteenth-century woodcut from R. M. Devens’s Our First Century. The 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes were the strongest recorded in the continental United States.

  Fog on the Mississippi, circa 1840. Note the flatboat in the foreground about to be struck.

  (Center for Louisiana Studies)

  A broadside advertising a lecture by Montroville Dickeson. During the nineteenth century, Dickeson excavated and lectured about hundreds of sites along the Mississippi, including those of the Native American Mound Builders.

  (Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Museum Archives, Dickeson Collection)

  Huge Mounds and the Manner of Opening Them. A scene from the Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, which the Irish-born artist John J. Egan painted from Montroville Dickeson’s sketches.

  (Saint Louis Art Museum)

  Murder of Woods, the South Carolinian. An illustration showing the outlaw John Murrell and an associate disposing of a victim, from The Life and Adventures of John A. Murrell, the Great Western Land Pirate, with Twenty-one Spirited Illustrative Engravings, 1847.

  Our Peculiar Domestic Institutions. Life in the lower valley: duels, brawls, slave torture, and the lynching of the Vicksburg gamblers during the insurrection hysteria. From the Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1840, New York.

  (Library of Congress)

  The Shirley in Vicksburg—known as the White House to soldiers on both sides during the Civil War—circa 1863. The caves served as bombproof shelters for the Forty-fifth Illinois Regiment.

  (Library of Congress)

  A Currier and Ives lithograph of Admiral David Porter’s fleet running the Rebel blockade of the Mississippi at Vicksburg, April 16, 1863

  (Library of Congress)

  A newspaper depiction of the Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans, March 6, 1867

  (Library of Congress)

  The Champions of the Mississippi: A Race for the Buckhorns. A lithograph by Currier and Ives of a steamboat race, 1866.

  (Library of Congress)

  The ill-fated Sultana, in Helena, Arkansas, on its last voyage, April 27, 1865

  (Library of Congress)

  The Sultana’s end. This illustration first appeared in Harper’s Weekly on May 20, 1865.

  (Library of Congress)

  A photograph of the great levee at St. Louis, by Hoelke and Benecke circa 1860

  (Library of Congress)

  The construction of the Eads Bridge in St. Louis, Missouri, early 1870s

  (Library of Congress)

  PART FOUR

  BEHEMOTH

  14

  The Sky Parlor

  BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR, the gentlemen and ladies of Vicksburg had a private refuge. It was a little park, reserved for the best people, on a grassy hilltop near the heart of town. They reached it by a wooden stairway snaking up from steet level. The stairway allowed the ladies to ascend with dignity, their hoop skirts unencumbered by tangles and their parasols still trim; the gentlemen were able to keep up their gallant banter without losing a step to a jutting tree root or an ill-placed ravine. Slaves followed behind, bearing the picnic baskets—in those days, none of the best people were ever seen in public doing anything so menial as carrying objects.

  The hilltop was a small plot of mown grass, set with wrought-iron chairs and tables and a spyglass. In the evenings the tables would be swathed in white tablecloths, and the wineglasses would be brimming. Around the plot were poles drooping with clusters of Chinese lanterns. Sometimes the parties went on long past midnight. By then the lanterns had guttered, and the lights of the town below were out; with the embers of sunset faded, the sky became an ornate drapery of starlight. The view gave the hilltop its name: the Sky Parlor.

  Vicksburg stood on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi about 250 miles northwest of New Orleans. The hilltop offered a commanding view of the town, the river, and the enclosing countryside. To the north and east of the Sky Parlor, past the last rooftops of the town, was a vista of a jumbled wilderness terrain: thickly forested hills and valleys and sloughs and ravines, romantically shrouded in mist, and as wildly lush and overgrown as a tropical jungle. To the south and southeast, the land was flatter and more passable: low hills and wide meadows and—more and more toward midcentury—the ruled fields and parceled-out expanses of the cotton plantations. To the west, across the Mississippi on the Louisiana shore, was a tangle of swampland. Cutting through the heart of the landscape, between the wilderness and the swamp, was a gigantic curve of the river. Vicksburg had been built on the outer bank of a hairpin turn: from the Sky Parlor you could see the river flowing northeast toward the town, and then bending sharply around a narrow tongue of swampland, and then flowing away again to the southwest, where it went on unfolding its slow, shining arabesques out to the horizon.

  Vicksburg was a cosmopolitan town. It had always been rich, and in the years before the war, it was getting richer. Immense quantities of cotton from the plantations were passing out through the warehouses of Vicksburg Landing on their way to the delta, to the brokers in New York, and ultimately to the consignment markets of Europe. Coming back in were money and bulk goods and fine products from around the world. Vicksburg’s population was only around four thousand, and yet its commercial district was able to support jewelers, custom tailors, portrait photographers, deluxe specialty bakers and confectioners, a grocery store selling fancy tinned goods from Europe, a milliner carrying fabrics from Asia, a perfumery stocked with scents from the Middle East, and a bookstore called Clarke’s Literary Depot with the latest and raciest novels from New York, London, and Paris.

  The coming of the war was not viewed in Vicksburg with much enthusiasm. There was no significant sentiment for abolition—but neither was there any for secession. That was in fact a common view among the river towns. They lived and died by the free passage of people and cargo up and down the Mississippi, from the northern forests to the Gulf, and whatever else the outbreak of the war meant, it was certain to start with river blockades. In New Orleans, after the state had voted for secession and even as the war began, there was a popular movement to declare neutrality and preserve its status as an open city.

  The beginning of hostilities in April 1861 was anticlimactic. There was no great calamity in Vicksburg, not at first. The heaviest fighting was back east, far away from the frontier. The Mississippi blockades did duly appear, at Cairo, Illinois, at the north and at the river mouth in the Gulf, and many of the big steamboat lines did cease running. But the nearby tributaries remained open—most vitally, the Red River, which led west up through Louisiana into Texas—and each night a glittering boat city still assembled on the waters before Vicksburg Landing.

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nbsp; There were also the railroads. The trains from the western states ran to a depot on the Louisiana shore, where an armada of ferries was waiting to shuttle goods and people over the mile-wide water to town. In the east, another line ran through the wilderness country toward the heart of the Confederacy. Over the first months of the war, as more and more of the ocean and Gulf ports were blockaded, the railroad connection at Vicksburg became the main surviving link between the Deep South and the outside world. Jefferson Davis called Vicksburg “the nailhead holding the South’s two halves together.” Abraham Lincoln told his military commanders: “Vicksburg is the key. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.”

  About a year after the war began, Confederate forces started arriving in large numbers to defend Vicksburg and keep its railroad lines open. Over the spring and summer of 1862, interminable lines of wagons and troops came winding in from the train depots and the river ferry, and by the autumn of that year, the observers at the Sky Parlor saw enormous earthworks being constructed around the town—mazes of trenches and revetments and redans and barricades. At the same time, Yankee forces were gradually occupying the wilderness areas beyond; at night their countless campfires were brighter than the stars. By the time the Vicksburg campaign was at its height, in the summer of 1863, there were more than 150,000 soldiers contending for the town, and from the Sky Parlor it looked as though there were nothing left in the world but the war.

  The Federal campaign on the Mississippi began in earnest in April 1862. That was when a large Federal naval force entered the river mouth from the Gulf. They were greeted by a spectacular gesture of outrage at New Orleans: the citizens had emptied the warehouses and had piled the levee high with bales of cotton and other goods waiting for export, and as the ships of the expeditionary force approached, the mountains of goods were all set on fire. But after that there was little else in the way of overt violence. The Federal force took the city essentially unopposed. Nor did they meet much more resistance as they moved on upriver, to Baton Rouge and then Natchez: both towns surrendered without firing a shot. The river was open all the way to Vicksburg.

  The convoy advanced slowly. From the shrouded swamps and bayous on either side there would occasionally be the white puff and the remote sharp report of a sniper’s fired rifle; otherwise there was silence. The wide waters of the river were deserted. Above Natchez, the Federal flagship detained two men poling downriver in a skiff. David Porter, a naval lieutenant, questioned the men closely. They claimed to be getting on with their business the way they always had. One of them said, “This is a highway, and I think we have a right to travel it.” Porter decided they had a point and let them go.

  They passed the big plantations on either bank. Some of them had been abandoned by their owners; the slaves were all gathered at the levee to cheer the convoy on. Other plantations were being guarded by committees of vigilance, who were keeping the slaves confined to their quarters and were sullenly patrolling the docks. Some plantations were shrouded in black billows of choking smoke: their owners, still in residence, had been inspired by the defiance at New Orleans and were burning their cotton. Many of them piled the bales along the levees before setting them afire. As the convoy approached, they would then shove the bales out onto the water. The bales unraveled and scattered in brilliant drifts and shoals and archipelagoes, while sparkling tufts of burning cotton blew with the smoke in thin shreds across the river’s surface. The last of the fires would swirl and gutter in the wake of the convoy—harmless, David Porter remembered, but an impressive sight after sunset.

  The convoy reached Vicksburg on May 18. By then the first of the Confederate reinforcements were already in place; new artillery batteries bristled from the shoreline and from the town on the high bluff. The expedition’s commander, Admiral David Farragut, normally a vigorous and headlong attacker, quailed at the sight of them—much to the contempt of his junior officers. David Porter thought that the Confederate forces were probably still in disarray and that Vicksburg would be as easy a conquest as New Orleans had been. To the end of his life, Porter remained outraged at Farragut’s timidity; he believed that if they’d stormed Vicksburg that day, they might have captured the town and put an end to the Confederacy then and there.

  Instead they began digging in for a long campaign. Farragut believed that the major strategic problem he faced was to find a way to move his forces up and down the river out of range of Vicksburg’s guns. His solution was to excavate a canal across the narrow tongue of swampland inside the hairpin turn of the river. This project occupied the Federal forces the rest of that spring and into the summer. The work crews spent weeks hacking through the overgrown tangle of cypresses and scrub pines and the thick, treacherous walls of grasses and cattails and reeds; then they had to shovel out the oozing, root-woven mud. The air was punishingly hot and muggy, and the swamps swarmed with battalions of mosquitoes and flies. The work progressed by inches, and the Yankees began falling sick. Mostly they suffered from dysentery and malaria, but there were also outbreaks of measles, and by the summer Old Yellow Jack was everywhere. Their pace slowed from a crawl to a snail’s creep.

  The Federal command then brought in a new army of workers: slaves from the abandoned plantations. The legal status of the slaves was just then at a point of maximum confusion; it was never altogether clear whether the slaves were conscripts, paid labor, or volunteers. But around a thousand of them set to work on the canal, and a few hundred women and children came in with them to cook their meals, take care of their camp, and run messages. The progress on the canal immediately picked up. By early summer there was a complete trench dug from bank to bank. But the work proved to be in vain: the river defeated them. Strong eddies were flowing away from the shore along the hairpin turn, which kept the main force of the current out of the canal trench. No matter how deep the canal was dug, it simply would not draw enough water to allow boats to pass. Then, in late June, the river rose. It was a big rise that year; the hairpin turn and most of the surrounding swampland were flooded out. The walls of the trench collapsed and avalanches of mud overfilled the entire excavation. When the water receded several days later, the canal had been erased and the work crews had to start over from scratch.

  But by then several more waves of disease had swept through the Yankee camp and their strength had worn down to almost nothing. Even though they had taken only a handful of casualties in their occasional low-level skirmishing with the Confederates, fewer than half the troops were fit for combat. In late July Admiral Farragut decided to withdraw back to New Orleans.

  “The Yankees have called off their gunboats and quit the river in disgust,” wrote one local girl, Kate Stone, who lived on a plantation just outside of Vicksburg. “Sometimes now we can get the papers.”

  The Yankees returned in force at the end of August. A large fleet descended the Mississippi from Cairo, while another, smaller fleet came up from New Orleans. The Yankee naval forces had a new commander: David Porter, who had been promoted to acting admiral. He had none of Farragut’s caution. He quickly bonded with his counterpart in the Federal army, General William Tecumseh Sherman, and he hugely admired Sherman’s superior, Ulysses S. Grant: both men, he felt, had come to Vicksburg to fight. Grant, wrote Porter, “saw from the first that there was no use in sitting down before Vicksburg and simply looking at it, or bombarding it to bring about a surrender; we would have lost time, and deposited our shell in the hills, increasing their weight in iron, without getting nearer to our object.”

  But even Porter realized that storming the town was no longer a real option. While the Federal troops had been building their useless canal, the Confederates had so heavily reinforced the town that a direct attack would have been suicidal. Instead the Federal forces were driven to attempt a new strategy: cutting through the wilderness country north of the town in order to encircle it from the rear.

  The wilderness proved to be a mysterious place. The hills were steep and impassably o
vergrown, and they were cut randomly by countless deep ravines. The Federal troops were disoriented by the ceaselessly infolding tangles of trackless underbrush; their supply trains routinely got lost, sometimes for days, just out of sight of their destination. Encounters with Confederate patrols rapidly deteriorated into confused and desperate fire-fights, with troops on both sides so bewildered by the labyrinths of foliage that they were charging randomly and firing wildly in all directions. They were even more baffled by the strange acoustic properties of the terrain. Sometimes vital reinforcements failed to arrive because they had inadvertently hidden themselves in the sound shadow of a steep ravine and couldn’t hear the roar of a battle a hundred yards away. Then the autumn rains came, and the marshy ground turned to soup; wounded men were often swallowed up without a trace in the mud before medics could reach them. The autumn and then the winter passed in inconclusive and deadly skirmishing. Porter one day found Sherman despondent because several hundred men had been wounded or killed in a useless attempt to take a ridge heavily defended by Confederate cannon. Porter told Sherman to cheer up because it was going to cost them ten times that or more before Vicksburg finally surrendered.

  Porter himself led one of the most ambitious campaigns of that autumn. The Mississippi always rose again after the low waters of late summer, but that season its rise was so high that its waters were washing back up into its tributaries and flooding the surrounding countryside. It gave Porter an audacious idea. He and Sherman would take a convoy with a large contingent of troops up to the Sunflower River north of Vicksburg. Then the convoy would cross out of the river and try to ride the floodwaters over the drowned bayou country to the south and east, until they reached the Yazoo River. From there they could descend upon Vicksburg from the rear.