Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  The hills and bluffs of Vicksburg were made up primarily of loess, a fine-grained clay soil easy to excavate. In the weeks after the Yankees ran the gantlet downriver, the shelling of the town intensified, and the townspeople grew more and more skilled at digging out deep shelters in the loess slopes behind their houses or along backstreets and alleys. “Caves became the fashion—the rage,” one Vicksburg woman remembered. Mary Loughborough had, or thought she had, one of the better shelters: it was around the size of a large drawing room, had several sturdy and comfortable chairs, and was high enough for anyone to stand upright. But her husband thought she deserved better, and paid to have a more elaborate cave dug. This one had a main room about six feet deep that led to two branches—one was her bedroom and the other her drawing room. It seemed luxurious to her, but by the rapidly rising standards of the town, it was still fairly primitive. The cave belonging to the town minister, William Lord, was an enormous excavation with five separate entrances from the alleys and backyards, and a hatchway up to the slope serving as both a ventilation shaft and an emergency exit. A long central gallery that could hold more than sixty people was flanked by galleries that served as dormitories, kitchens, and slave quarters. Most nights it was packed with crying children, squabbling parents, and people coughing from the smoke that poured out of the kitchens. But Lord’s son remembered it as “the Arabian Nights made real.” He wrote: “The sound of a guitar here, a hymn there, and a negro melody somewhere else, all coming to us from among swaying Oriental draperies, sent me off at night to fairyland.”

  At first people hid out in the caves only in dire emergencies, when the bombardment was particularly heavy and their own neighborhood seemed to be the target. But as the Yankees gradually encircled Vicksburg in April and May and their guns moved inexorably closer, the shells started coming down everywhere, unpredictably, at all hours of the day and night. That was when people abandoned their houses and began staying in and around their caves full-time. They took great care to preserve a feeling of normality. Neighbors in adjoining caves paid each other formal visits frequently throughout the day, to trade supplies and to exchange the latest rumors. The slaves did the cooking and washing just outside the cave entrances, under the overhang of the bluff, and ducked into the shelter only when the bombardment was particularly fierce. Gradually the cave came to seem like an ordinary home. When Loughborough came to write her memoirs, she titled them My Cave Life in Vicksburg.

  “The hill called the Sky Parlor,” an anonymous diarist wrote that April, “has become quite a fashionable resort for the few upper-circle families left here.” The ladies and the idle gentlemen would spend hours each day surveying the occupied landscape through the spyglass. The Federal forces no longer felt any need for secrecy and their movements of men and matériel took place in the open, in broad daylight. Across the river in the swamplands, long lines of wagons bearing supplies were trundling down newly cut trails, and there was a continual flurry of couriers riding up and down the western bank. Tugboats and rowboats shuttled back and forth among the Union fleet, obviously carrying orders—Mary Loughborough noticed that every time a tugboat visited one of the gunboats, the gunboat would shortly afterward shift position. “Altogether,” she wrote, “the Federal encampment and movements were far more stirring and interesting than the quiet fortified life of Vicksburg.”

  The mood among the watchers at Sky Parlor was somber. Day after day, there was nothing but bad news. The Yankees now held both banks of the river above its confluence with the Red, and that meant that, upriver and down, the Mississippi was now wholly closed to Confederate traffic: no more supplies were coming in by boat. News soon came that they had captured the eastern rail depot. With both rail lines and the river lost, Vicksburg was now entirely cut off from the outside world. To keep up morale, the Confederate military command had spread the word that there were at least sixty days of provisions stockpiled. That was more than enough to last until a promised relief expedition arrived. But at the Sky Parlor one afternoon in the middle of May, Loughborough saw something that made her realize she and the other townspeople were being lied to. Two large rafts crowded with men pushed off from Vicksburg Landing and crossed to the Federal encampment on the Louisiana shore. The men were Yankee prisoners, and they were being released because the Confederates couldn’t feed them. “The idea made me serious,” Loughborough wrote. “We might look forward truly now to perhaps real suffering.”

  The encirclement of the town was complete by mid-May. Soon the field hospitals in the countryside were overwhelmed, and after each day’s skirmishing along the siege lines, the wagons came rolling into Vicksburg bearing the sick and the wounded. New field hospitals were set up anywhere room could be found. Rows of white tents popped up in the public parks, on estate grounds, down residential streets, in cemeteries; in some of the cemeteries they laid the wounded men out in mausoleums and used gravestones as operating tables. The hospitals were segregated by the patients’ condition. By far the majority of the field hospitals were for those with infectious diseases. The Confederate garrison was being devastated by wave after wave of yellow jack, malaria, dysentery, and measles; according to one estimate, by late May more than a third of the soldiers had fallen sick. The remainder of the hospitals were for the wounded.

  The procession of wounds was appalling. “Every part of the body is pierced,” the minister William Foster wrote after his first visit to the tents. “All conceivable wounds are inflicted. The heart sickens.” Foster saw a man with his hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes blasted off and his face burned to a crisp. A thick river of drool was perpetually cascading from his scalded and charred mouth. Another man had been shot through the jaw. His tongue had been tied back so he wouldn’t choke on it. Another man had his jaw torn off; another had a pair of screwdrivers driven into his jaw and temples. “He floods the bed with his blood,” Foster wrote. The care the wounded were receiving was minimal at best, and the conditions in the tents were dire—especially as the summer heat deepened and the insects came swarming. Wounds teemed with so many maggots that the delirious victims kept clawing their bandages off to try to get momentary relief from the torment. The flies on one wounded man, Foster wrote, were “like bees in a hive.”

  Most of the workers in the hospital tents quickly grew inured to such sights. But no matter how jaded they became, there was one place they had a hard time nerving themselves to enter: the surgery tent. Most of the surgeons at Vicksburg had received their training before the advent of chloroform—many were in fact opposed to its use on religious grounds, because the suffering of the wounded had been sent by God. The driving principle of their surgical training had been to get the operation over with as fast as possible before the patient died. This meant that most procedures more complicated than amputation were ruled out from the start (and would have been fatal anyway, without antisepsis), and amputation itself was seen as a move of desperation. William Foster estimated that more than half of the wounded who passed through the surgery tents died.

  The procedure was simple. A patient with a wounded limb was given chloroform, as long as chloroform was still available. He was laid out on the surgeon’s table and a tight cord was wrapped around the limb. The surgeon took a stiff jolt of brandy to fortify himself; then he quickly cut through the flesh with his knife and pulled back the flap of skin and muscle to reveal the bone. He took up a saw and used it to cut through the bone with one stroke. He looped a cord around the open artery, which was by then gushing out a torrent of blood, tied it off, pulled the flap of skin around the stump, and stitched it shut. The patient was carried to another tent, the amputated part was pushed off the edge of the table, and the next patient was brought in.

  Beside the surgeon’s table, amputated arms and legs, hands and feet, piled up over the course of the day. In the heat of summer they soon putrefied. The Confederate command issued orders that the limbs be disposed of in some sort of respectful manner. But one slave assigned the duty later admitted that t
hey were simply loaded up on a cart and dumped into an abandoned well.

  By late May, the townspeople and the troops had come to blame their desperate position on the Confederate military—particularly on General Pemberton. “Our troops,” wrote Foster, “have no confidence in either the head or the heart of our commanding general.” Everyone viewed Pemberton—not without justice—as a weakling, as a vacillating and uncertain officer unable to exert authority over his subordinates. What was worse, he was a Yankee: he’d only joined the Confederate cause in the first place because he’d married into a Southern family. As the siege worsened, more and more people in town were saying openly that he was a traitor secretly working with the other side.

  Pemberton was acutely aware of the decline in his reputation. As the Yankee lines closed in around the town, the word began to spread that the Confederate troops were going to rise in mutiny. Pemberton issued a public denial of all the rumors:

  You have heard that I was incompetent, and a traitor, and that it was my intention to sell Vicksburg. Follow me, and you will see the cost at which I will sell Vicksburg. When the last pound of beef, bacon, and flour, the last grain of corn, the last cow and hog and horse and dog shall have been consumed, and the last man shall have perished in the trenches, then, and only then will I sell Vicksburg.

  It did little to quell the unhappiness about him, but it did go to show, as things ultimately turned out, that he was a man of his word.

  The townspeople came to trust instead in rumors of victory elsewhere. For a while these were centered back east. There was a brief period of wild excitement when a story spread, which someone had supposedly read in “a Northern newspaper,” that General Lee, having destroyed General Meade’s army, had advanced out of Virginia and now surrounded and was shelling the city of Washington. Union surrender was expected momentarily. Then it was expected within a few days. And then not at all.

  Bitterly disappointed, people began to hope for salvation from closer at hand. These hopes coalesced around the figure of Pemberton’s superior, General Joseph Johnston. Johnston was based in the town of Jackson in central Mississippi, and he was said to be gathering troops for a relief expedition to Vicksburg. Johnston was everything Pemberton was not: gallant, impetuous, authoritative, and purely Southern. He was a brilliant military leader—and he was also the sort of chivalrous gentleman for whom honor was everything and defeat was inconceivable.

  Johnston’s dispatches to Pemberton concerning the relief expedition were supposed to be secret, but Pemberton’s staff officers, who accepted them at face value, continually leaked them. Partly this was to keep morale up, but it was also intended to undermine the ineffectual Pemberton by contrasting him with a bustlingly energetic hero. The word went out after each new dispatch that Johnston was getting closer, that he had almost arrived, that he was expected hourly. One townswoman, Dora Miller, heard that “expert swimmers are crossing the Mississippi at night to bring and carry news to Johnston.” People gathered on the hillsides and ascended to the Sky Parlor and kept watch for telltale signs of movement in the eastern forests that would mean Johnston was approaching. By June the local newspaper had run out of newsprint and switched to rolls of wallpaper: the first issue in the new format contained the breaking story that Johnston was now expected within three days.

  The shells falling on Vicksburg were not as destructive as modern artillery shells. They would detonate with a ferocious bang that would puncture the roof and shatter the windows and turn rooms into avalanches of plaster, but the building would typically remain standing, and people were rarely killed except by a direct hit. The main effect of the shelling was psychological. The bombardments went on remorselessly, all day and all night. There were a few lulls, chiefly to allow the cannon muzzles to cool, around sunrise, noon, and dusk; then the deafening barrage would resume again. One soldier stationed in Vicksburg, Willie Tunnard, recalled the distinct sounds each weapon gave off: “The hoarse bellowing of the mortars, the sharp report of rifled artillery, the scream and explosion of every variety of deadly missiles, intermingled with the incessant, sharp reports of small-arms.” It was so loud that the endless low throbbing like thunder could be heard a hundred miles away.

  Gradually it frayed and unraveled the will of the townspeople. Mary Loughborough wrote:

  I shall never forget my extreme fear during the night, and my utter hopelessness of ever seeing the morning light.… My heart stood still as we would hear the reports from the guns, and the rushing and fearful sound of the shell as it came toward us. As it neared, the noise became more deafening; the air was full of the rushing sound; pains darted through my temples; my ears were full of the confusing noise; and, as it exploded, the report flashed through my head like an electric shock, leaving me in a quiet state of terror the most painful that I can imagine—cowering in a corner, holding my child to my heart—the only feeling of my life being the choking throbs of my heart, that rendered me almost breathless.

  Dora Miller fiercely resisted hiding out in the caves and defiantly insisted that she and her family carry on their ordinary life in their house—until the day she was blindsided by a terror she’d never felt before. She called that day “the most horrible yet to me, because I’ve lost my nerve.” A shell came through the roof of the house and exploded in an upper bedroom; debris and dust scattered and ricocheted all the way down to the cellar. A neighbor had her thigh crushed by debris flying out across the yard; a slave girl lost an arm. Afterward Miller discovered that for the first time she was terrified, and she could not force herself to calm down again. “I do not think people who are physically brave deserve much credit for it,” she wrote. “I am constitutionally brave, and seldom think of danger till it is over; and death has not the terrors for me it has for some others. Every night I had lain down expecting death, and every morning rose to the same prospect, without being unnerved.” But there was one particular fear that hadn’t occurred to her until she heard about the slave girl losing her arm: that she might be crippled and not killed. That was all it took to cast her into despair. “Life, without all one’s powers and limbs,” she wrote, “was a thought that broke down my courage.”

  By June the daily ration of food in the Confederate garrison had dwindled to one cup of rice and one cup of peas. These were called cowpeas—not true peas but a variety of hard and tasteless bean normally fed to cattle. Cowpeas and corn flour were ground together and baked into bread, which the soldiers called cush-cush. It was impossible to bake evenly; either the peas or the flour came out raw or rock hard. “It presented a black, dirty appearance,” William Foster wrote, “and was most unwholesome—as heavy as lead and most indigestible.”

  Variety in their diet came only through the hazards of war. A mule or a horse killed in battle meant a little meat for the troops. There was a very odd animal at Vicksburg: a camel—one of the last survivors of an experiment the military had conducted in importing camels from Africa to use as beasts of burden. He was considered “a quiet, peaceable fellow” and his death in a shelling was widely mourned—but that did not stop the soldiers from immediately cutting up his corpse for food.

  In Vicksburg itself there weren’t many bulk provisions left. Soldiers in town would sometimes spend all their pay on the only delicacy still available: sugar. It was ruinously expensive, but they would simply buy fistfuls of it and lick it out of their hands on the spot. Most store shelves were empty, and the few items on sale tended toward the mysterious. GINGER BEER and SWEET CIDER were two signs that Willie Tunnard recalled seeing sticking out from barrels, but “it would have puzzled a scientific druggist,” he observed, to determine what the barrels really held.

  Beef and pork were unobtainable. They were replaced in butcher shops by mule meat—which several memoirists later claimed wasn’t as bad as they’d thought it would be. One jokester printed up a mock menu for a local hotel restaurant offering Mule Tail Soup, Mule Head Stuffed à la Mode, Mule Brains Omlette, and Mule Foot Jelly. Desserts included acor
ns, nuts, Pea Meal Pudding, and—what may have been the bitterest joke of all—Genuine Confederate Coffee.

  There was a near-universal belief that people around town were hoarding. Suspicion fell first on the local plantation owners. They had become notorious for their lack of patriotism—they openly disdained the Confederate government just as much as they had once loathed the Yankees. They wanted the war over on almost any terms (short of abolition) so that they could get their cotton to market again—in fact they were known, or at least were heavily suspected, to have secretly stockpiled their cotton harvest and burned only a token amount of it for show. They also refused to contribute to the defense of the town; they said they couldn’t send in their slaves as work crews because it was too dangerous. Everybody took for granted that they were major hoarders of food. By late spring it was remarked that the plantation slaves looked better fed than the townspeople.

  As the siege deepened, the rage turned instead on the grocers and other shopkeepers in the commercial district. They were accused of holding back essential supplies so they could price-gouge at will. One night in early June the town was awakened by the sound of alarms and the frantic rattle of the fire wagons: an entire block in the commercial district was burning, and several groceries and dry-goods stores were destroyed. Suspicion naturally fell on what the local newspaper called “spies and emissaries of the enemy in the city”—in particular, on a mysterious man in a Yankee uniform reported to have been wandering around town a few days earlier, asking many questions and being evasive about answering any himself. But for some reason no one had thought to detain this spectral personage, and by the time the military authorities had been alerted, he had disappeared. And anyway the real cause of the fire had already become known. It had been set by some of Vicksburg’s own citizens as payback for the price-gouging of the downtown merchants. This would be the single most destructive occurrence in the siege—more damage was done in that one night than in the months of Yankee shelling put together.