Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  The first part of the plan went just as he’d envisioned it. Federal work crews forced a breach in a levee on the Sunflower, and Porter’s convoy glided across it, out from the river and into the flooded woodlands. But their progress after that was excruciatingly slow. After four days, they’d barely made forty miles. The forests closed in impenetrably around them. Each day seemed to bring them no closer to the goal. As the boats crept through the endless corridors of half-submerged trees, the crews saw nothing on either side, mile after mile, but hushed glades lit by a few passing shafts of dim sunlight. The leaf canopies were a solid mass overhead, and the thorny bristles of ancient treetops hung down low; the boats were increasingly battered by clanging, crashing, splintering collisions with the heavy, moss-draped branches. By the time they’d cut their way through to the Yazoo, Porter wrote, “most of the light vessels were perfect wrecks in their upper works.”

  The only chance the plan had of succeeding was through secrecy and surprise. But the passage through the flooded forests had been so slow, and had kicked up such a racket, the Confederates must have known about it almost from the beginning. Porter later wrote: “I am quite satisfied in my own mind that, while we were steaming along and performing naval evolutions in the woods, the President of the Southern Confederacy was reading something like the following dispatch to his Cabinet: ‘Sherman and Porter pirouetting through the woods in steamers and ironclads. Are keeping a lookout on them. Hope to bag them all before to-morrow.’ ”

  But at last they emerged onto the Yazoo and began their descent. They quickly found that their worst expectations had been correct: the river was held in force against them. The Confederates had had time to sink a line of boats to form a barricade across the river and had even thrown up a new fort with a battery of cannon trained on the spot upstream where the Yankees were most likely to appear. Porter recognized at once that the situation was hopeless and that he was obliged to order an immediate retreat. That meant executing another, even more awkward pirouette and steaming backward around a river bend before they could figure out a safe plan of escape across the flood lands toward the Sunflower and the Mississippi.

  It had been a complete waste of time, like just about everything the Yankees tried that fall and winter. But Porter, looking back, found that he couldn’t entirely regret it. At least, he never did shake the memory of that surreal forest passage. It looked, he wrote, “as though the world had suddenly got topsy-turvy, or that there was a great camp-meeting in the woods on board ironclads and transports.”

  “Today we actually had cake,” Kate Stone wrote at the end of September, “a most rare occurrence, due to Mrs. Hardison’s sending us a little homemade flour.” That was the sort of deprivation that Vicksburg was suffering—not much, and partly voluntary. They could have had flour whenever they wanted it; all through that autumn, there were trading boats from the North, laden with essential supplies and luxuries, passing the blockades with the permission of the Yankee military command. They sold their goods at what Stone noted were “ridiculously low prices.” But, she declared stoutly, “of course no patriot could think of buying from them.”

  Stone even found some things about the situation cheering. She liked how the makeshift informalities of wartime life had cleared away the stuffiness that Vicksburg’s aristocrats had cultivated for so many generations. “We have been a race of haughty, indolent, and waited-on people,” she observed. “A year ago a gentleman never thought of carrying a bundle, even a small one, through the streets.” But now, she wrote, “one gentleman I saw walking down the street in Jackson, and a splendid-looking fellow he was, had a piece of fish in one hand, a cavalry saddle on his back, bridle, blankets, newspapers, and a small parcel in the other hand; and over his shoulder swung an immense pair of cavalry boots. And nobody thought he looked odd.”

  (The mood was not so sanguine among the Southerners who’d fled their plantations and left their slaves behind. In St. Louis, the writer Galusha Anderson observed, many of the refugees from the lower valley proved to be spoiled, petulant, and literally incapable of getting into and out of their clothes without slaves to help them.)

  The town bore up well even when the increasingly desperate Federal forces closed the blockades completely and began training their heaviest guns on the bluff. Every day that winter, mortars were fired from the Yankee gunboats anchored in the river. The shells came floating up lazily: most fell short; a few reached the town and punched through roofs or sent geysers of dirt up from the streets. But they did little to dampen morale, and strategically they accomplished nothing. After several weeks of incessant shelling, fewer than ten people in Vicksburg had been killed and only thirty or forty injured. From the Sky Parlor, the attacks had a certain beauty. “There was a strange fascination,” one observer wrote, “in watching these huge missiles at night, as they described their graceful curves through the darkness, exploding with a sudden glare, followed by the strange sounds of their descending fragments.”

  By the beginning of the spring of 1863, people were growing hopeful that the campaign would soon be over. It had been going on for almost a year, and the Yankees had gotten nowhere at all. Even in the midst of the bombardments, Vicksburg was still lively and crowded. The Confederate command had issued a proclamation that “earnestly recommended” all noncombatants evacuate, but few had obeyed: instead they dug makeshift bomb shelters for themselves in the steep sides of the hills to ride out the mortar attacks. And the long-range strategic position of the town remained strong. There had been one bad loss over the winter—the Yankees had captured the depot on the Louisiana shore and had put a stop to the train shipments from the west. But the Red River was still in Confederate hands and some supply boats continued to come in. While the prices in the stores were getting astronomically high, at least the shelves weren’t bare: the groceries and clothiers and dry-goods stores in the commercial district were still open for business. People began saying publicly, with something like confidence, that when the summer came in and brought along Old Yellow Jack with it, the Yankees were bound to give up and go away for good.

  The first weeks of April were unusually beautiful. There was music at the Sky Parlor and there were midnight hunting parties in the woods. The nights were cloudless; in the moonlight, the river and the wilderness looked almost as pristine as they had before the war. While the gunboats of the Yankees were still squatting in the water out of range of the Vicksburg batteries, there was little sign of movement on the banks. The thought didn’t occur to anyone in town—or, in fact, in the Confederate command—that the Yankees might be waiting for the new moon.

  The Union command had concluded that their attempts to take the town were accomplishing nothing and that there was no other strategy open to them but one of sheer desperation: they would have to take the main strength of their forces downriver, below the town, where they would then try to encircle it from the open country from the south. This meant that they would have to run the gantlet of Confederate batteries massed on the shore and the bluff; it also meant that if the Confederates managed to mount a counterattack and regain control of the river, the Yankee force would be cut off in the middle of hostile territory. The Union command proceeded with extreme caution. They moved their troops slowly and surreptitiously through the swamps on the west bank of the river, out of sight of the Confederate spotters. Meanwhile, they massed their supplies in large transport ships, which they were going to send downriver once the nights were dark enough to give them some cover.

  They did not go completely unobserved. All through those weeks, the Confederate scouts below Vicksburg were sending in reports of odd Yankee troop movements on the Louisiana shore. Eventually the commander of the Confederate forces there ordered a detachment across the river to reconnoiter. This proved to be an almost impossible task. The land was a trackless swamp at the best of times, and that year the river was rising early: the Confederate troops had to wade and thrash through mile after mile of icy water and mud. They gave up b
efore they could complete their reconnaissance—but they had seen enough to terrify them. They returned to camp with an urgent warning: very large numbers of Yankee troops were moving south through the swamps. An enormous Yankee force was being secretly built up on the western banks, positioned for a major incursion across the river.

  The report was duly sent up the line of the Confederate command, until it reached General John Pemberton, the man in charge of Vicksburg’s defenses. Pemberton had already convinced himself that the Yankees were on the brink of withdrawing from Vicksburg and moving on to a new campaign to the east, based in the recently recaptured city of Memphis. He greeted the report of a secret massing of Yankee troops in the swampland with contempt. His only response was: Much doubt it. Those three words, it was later said, cost the Confederacy the war.

  April 16 was another lovely day. The afternoon was cloudless and the sunset was serene. Mary Loughborough, the wife of a Confederate officer serving on Pemberton’s staff, later recalled in her memoirs the beauty of the evening. She and a few friends went on a carriage ride through town and came home early; they took their ease at her rented house, which had a spectacular view of the river. The air was warm and pleasant. They could hear a band playing at a nearby park, and in the ruby glow of twilight, the huge Federal transports out on the water were black silhouettes with a few twinkling lamps.

  After dark there was a ball at one of the town’s grandest mansions. There young ladies danced with gallant officers from the Confederate headquarters. The girls wore their finest frocks—corn silk with black lace, white silk with blue point, grass-green with white lace. The officers were all in full dress uniform. The party spilled out onto the grounds of the estate, lit up by clusters of paper lanterns beneath a starry sky. It was the night of the new moon. The darkness of the countryside around Vicksburg was flecked here and there by the golden campfires.

  On the river, near the Federal transports, a flotilla of small boats had gathered, around thirty in all. They were crowded with Yankee officers, newspaper correspondents, and an assortment of Northern civilians, both men and women, who’d come down with the Federal troops as observers. General Grant was there; so were his wife and children—they’d just arrived from Illinois for a visit. The atmosphere was festive. It often was before a big battle; the custom was for parties of civilians to position themselves out of the line of fire and watch the fighting unfold as though they were attending a sporting event. That night the correspondent for The New York Times reported laughter, singing, flirting, and “a running fusillade of champagne corks.”

  The night deepened; the lights of the town winked out. Everyone in the flotilla waited. Around ten o’clock they fell silent: a huge black shape was gliding past them in the water. It was Admiral Porter’s flagship—the first of ten ironclads and large transports that were carrying the supplies to provision the expeditionary force below Vicksburg.

  The convoy was seen first by the scattering of Confederate spotters who were perpetually darting around the river in canoes and small boats. They quickly crossed to Vicksburg Landing, where they alerted the sentries patrolling the riverbank. The sentries fired the signal cannon. The alarm rapidly became general. Then the convoy began its passage of the river before the town. That was when, to the amazement of the Yankees, the darkness was suddenly broken. A line of dazzling lights began springing up onshore. The Confederates had prepared for an assault on the riverfront by positioning along the full length of the levee rows of barrels of tar and pitch, interspersed with huge stacks of cotton bales soaked in oil. They had even commandeered all the abandoned waterfront sheds and barns and warehouses and had stacked them with kindling. As soon as the convoy approached and the alarm was sounded, Confederate troops carrying torches raced around the levee and set everything on fire.

  The wall of flames towered over the river and lit up the surface of the water for a mile offshore. The slow, lumbering convoy was caught in the glare. It was immediately targeted by the Confederate batteries. The ironclads of the convoy returned fire. The brilliance of the flames along the levee was rapidly intensified by the spangled, crisscrossing fireworks of the cannonades. It was a “terrible” scene, General Grant said in his memoirs, but he conceded that it was also “magnificent.”

  The river had turned into a panorama of vast visual confusion. The roils of flame, the billows of smoke, and the dazzling lines of the soaring shells so baffled the spectators that some of them began to see strange things in the light. Several of the Northerners watching from the flotilla became convinced that a gigantic illuminated tower was looming above the town. It was most likely just Sky Parlor Hill underlit by the fires on the levee, but reports were solemnly printed in Northern newspapers for weeks afterward that the Confederates had secretly constructed some kind of infernal machine, a beacon tower that normally was hidden underground but could be raised up to a commanding and terrifying height whenever danger threatened.

  By then everybody in Vicksburg was awake and was watching the battle unfold. Mary Loughborough remembered being roused by the booming of the signal cannon and going back out to her veranda, where her friends had already gathered. They could see on the blazing surface of the river the black line of the Federal convoy gliding downstream, firing off artillery as it neared the wall of fire on the levee, and they could feel the concussions as the shells landed on the streets around them. Meanwhile, Confederate couriers on horseback were hurtling frantically through the streets, the soldiers on the levee were shouting and running, and the sound of the falling shells was getting closer. Loughborough kept putting off the decision to take shelter. She waited until the flashes of light from the portholes in the Federal ships seemed to be directly facing her. “While I hesitated,” she later wrote, “fearing to remain, yet wishing still to witness the termination of the engagement, a shell exploded near the side of the house. Fear instantly decided me.”

  Elsewhere in town, the fancy ball was still in full swing. Many of the guests drifted up to the Sky Parlor to watch the battle unfold. But as the firefight grew more furious, and shells started falling all over town, the partygoers began to succumb to panic. One of the girls was dancing with a brigadier general, and she asked him desperately, “Where shall we go?” He answered, “To the country for safety.” He was joking—there was no time for them to go anywhere at all. But she and a group of her friends immediately started running down a road that led out of town into the forest. One of the gentlemen at the party noticed their departure and ran after them. “As a shell would be heard coming,” a witness recalled later, “he would cry, ‘Fall!’ and down they would drop in the dust, party dresses and all, lying until the explosion took place; then up, with wild eyes and fiercely beating hearts, flying with all speed onward.” Their energy and their initiative quickly ran out. They took shelter at the first house they passed, and they remained there until their friends and families sent carriages after them.

  Around midnight, Mary Loughborough returned to the veranda, at a friend’s urging, “that we might witness a beautiful sight.” She found that the river had grown dark again; the convoy had departed, the fires along the levee had all gone out, and there were only long wisps of smoke floating up and vanishing from the shore into the night air above the town. But just off the levee was the “beautiful sight”: one of the big Federal transports. Set afire by the shelling and abandoned, it was now drifting aimlessly in the shadows along the bank as it burned down to the waterline. But the sight did nothing to enliven the mood on the veranda. Loughborough’s neighbors, she writes, were all “astonished and chagrined” by the events of the evening. They couldn’t stop talking about the daring run of the Yankees and speculating on why it had worked. The abandoned transport had been the only one fatally struck; the others had glided through the gantlet and were now safely downriver. How could this have happened? As the guests went on talking late into the night, few were willing to believe that they had simply been outmaneuvered by the Yankees and that their great ri
ver defenses were worthless. (They wouldn’t start seriously discussing the possibility until a week later, when the Yankees ran another, larger convoy past them and didn’t lose a single boat.) Instead they fell back on their favorite explanation for everything that had gone wrong in the war: the confusion and incompetence of the Confederate military command. “Very few of the Confederate guns,” Loughborough reported people saying, “had been discharged at all. Several reasons had been assigned; the real one was supposed to have been the quality of the fuses that were recently sent from Richmond, and had not been tried since their arrival. This night of all others they were found to be defective.”

  In fact, the whole story appears to have been wishful thinking. The Confederate batteries had sent a storm of shells down on the convoy. The real reason the Yankees had succeeded was Admiral Porter’s characteristic bravado and willingness to gamble. He had noticed in previous skirmishes that the Confederate batteries had been relatively ineffectual whenever the action got near shore. There were only two likely explanations: either the Confederate gunners were poor shots (which he didn’t believe), or else the big guns could not be repositioned so as to fire accurately at close range. He’d therefore ordered the convoy to run as near to the levee as possible. His gamble paid off: while the shells did batter his boats unmercifully, not one took a hit below the waterline, and among his crews, all taking shelter belowdecks, only six were injured and none killed.

  But the truth about the Confederate failure probably wouldn’t have made much difference in the postmortem taking place on Loughborough’s veranda. Everybody was aware that, whatever the reason, the Yankees had scored a tremendous victory. From their new position, and with such a huge convoy of supplies to draw on, they could now cross the river, occupy the open and relatively passable countryside south of Vicksburg, and encircle the town at their leisure. Loughborough listened to the talk with increasing despondency and growing desperation. “The lurid glare from the burning boat fell in red and amber light upon the house, the veranda, and the animated faces turned toward the river,” she wrote. “Fair and beautiful, but false, the crimson, wavering light.”