Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  The last of the food was running out by the end of June. People were so desperate for salt that they were tearing apart the butchers’ smokehouses so they could scrape out the salt from the ancient fat drippings that had soaked into the floorboards. At night, one witness recalled, “an army of rats, seeking food, would scamper around your very feet, and across the streets, and over the pavements.” There were constant jokes about how all the local pets were disappearing—by the beginning of July it was no longer clear that they were jokes. The mule meat was gone from the butchers’ windows; several memoirs claimed that it was replaced by neatly skinned rat carcasses. Mary Loughborough, who was by then almost helpless with “the languid feeling of utter prostration,” recalled that a soldier brought to her cave a jaybird he had caught, and offered it as a pet to Loughborough’s daughter, who was sick with fever. But instead, inside of an hour, the girl was presented with “a cup of soup, and a little plate, on which lay the white meat of the poor little bird.”

  The town had become a shambles. There were barricades at all the intersections—but most of them had been abandoned because so few soldiers were fit for duty. Many soldiers were wandering the streets asking the citizens for food. Here and there, Willie Tunnard wrote, you saw “hunger-pinched, starving and wounded soldiers, or guards lying on the banquettes, indifferent to the screaming and exploding shells.” Bombed houses went unrepaired, and many of them had been looted; fences and sheds all over town had been torn down for firewood. The rows of dark and silent houses on every street made the town look like a cemetery—particularly because all their former inhabitants were now underground.

  The Yankees had hoped all along for a quick, decisive victory on the battlefield that would force Pemberton and the Confederate forces to accept the inevitable. But it became clear—especially after the Yankees did get exactly the battlefield victory they wanted in mid-May—that the Confederates would not surrender no matter how many battles they lost. So instead the Yankees gradually evolved a new strategy. They kept hearing from the ever-increasing number of Confederate deserters about the labyrinthine cave system under the town, and when they tried their own excavations, they were startled by how easy the loess of the hills was to dig. A Yankee military engineer, Brigadier Andrew Hickenlooper, described the loess as “a reddish clay of remarkable tenacity, easily cut and requiring but little bracing.” So in late May they began digging tunnels from beneath their positions toward the Confederate lines.

  It was slow, exhausting, dangerous work. “Every man in the investing line,” one soldier later recalled, “became an army engineer day and night.” They came in at slants and zigzags to provide cover from the Confederate sharpshooters. “The soldiers got so they bored like gophers and beavers,” another recalled, “with a spade in one hand and a gun in the other.” At each turning they excavated further entrenchments and rifle pits, and cut deeper entrenchments at odder angles around those. Gradually, inexorably, they approached the Confederate lines.

  From behind their barricades, the Confederates watched this flurry of new activity with alarm. They couldn’t fathom at first what the Yankees were up to, and the alarm only increased when the truth began to sink in. The Yankees were excavating tunnels all along the line, and if they weren’t stopped somehow, they’d eventually be burrowing directly underneath the Confederate defenses. The Confederates frantically began sinking countermines to try to puncture their way into the Yankee tunnels. But they could never quite manage to hit any of them. Sometimes the sappers at the bottom of the mineshaft reported hearing the continual muffled thumps of pickaxes and shovels, and sometimes ghostly conversations and laughter, from the Yankee tunnel crews somewhere nearby.

  The first of the Yankee tunnels reached beneath the Confederate defensive works in late June. The Yankees stuffed the end of the tunnel with explosives and gunpowder, and then they lit a long fuse. But they had slightly miscalculated their position: the resulting blast took out only a sparsely guarded section of the exterior defenses and didn’t cause anywhere near as much damage or as many casualties as they had hoped. They tried again in a different tunnel a few days later. This blast went off directly beneath a Confederate redan. There was a geyser of dirt, of splintered and charred wood, of bodies and body parts and blood, and then a desperate mêlée as the Yankees attempted to force their way into the breach and the Confederates beat them back. The fighting had been so close that many of the Confederate wounded who came streaming into the town had skulls shattered by rifle butts or intestines spilling out from bayonet wounds.

  The Confederates technically won that battle. But they knew that the victory was worth nothing: their strategic position had at last become untenable. The Yankees were already digging new tunnels. At least twelve tunnels were currently in progress, and the Yankees obviously had the capacity to excavate as many more as were necessary. If they weren’t stopped, they would keep going until they could reach under the bluff and set off enough blasts to send the whole of Vicksburg tumbling into the Mississippi.

  ———

  By the beginning of July, General Pemberton had given up on Johnston’s relief expedition. It was inescapable that the Army of Relief, as it was called, was not going to arrive. In fact, it had never gotten under way in the first place. Johnston had been ordered months earlier to relieve Vicksburg, but he’d never had any intention of obeying. He wasn’t about to risk his honor or his reputation on a venture that he considered hopeless. All his dispatches to Pemberton—orders to rendezvous at positions that Johnston himself had already abandoned, to rely on reinforcements that Johnston had never sent, to coordinate plans for a major counterattack that was patently never going to materialize—had simply been an attempt to create a paper trail that would prove to his superiors afterward that he’d done everything he could, when all along he’d simply been stalling until Vicksburg fell.

  The effect of Johnston’s prevarications was to deepen an agony in the town that was already unsupportable. Pemberton was finally left with no options. He smuggled out a message to Johnston saying that if the Army of Relief wasn’t coming forthwith, he would have to surrender; the message came back that surrender would be on Pemberton’s head. And so, after “the last pound of beef, bacon, and flour, the last grain of corn, the last cow and hog and horse and dog” had been consumed, Pemberton capitulated to the Yankees.

  In the first week of July the guns fell silent. One Yankee soldier, Lieutenant Richard L. Howard, later wrote about how startling that silence was after months of continual thunder: “It was leaden. We could not bear it; it settled down so close; it hugged us with its hollow, unseen arms until we could scarcely breathe.” The Yankee forces “did not seem to exult much over our fall,” William Foster wrote, “for they knew that we surrendered to famine, not to them.” As the first Yankees streamed into the commercial district, they broke into the shuttered stores, and they found that the worst suspicions of the townspeople had been correct: there were stacks of barrels and bags and cans hoarded in the basements. The Yankees immediately gave their finds away to the malnourished Confederate soldiers. That afternoon, Foster wrote: “Sugar, whiskey, fresh fruit in air-tight cans are enjoyed in great abundance.” The Yankees as they ransacked the stores also found scads of Confederate paper currency, which they considered worthless; they left it strewn behind them in the street.

  The day was July 4, 1863. This procession of Yankee soldiers, heedlessly scattering food and money in its wake, was the only thing passing for an Independence Day parade in Vicksburg that year. And it would prove to be the last parade on that date for decades to come. The Fourth became a day of mourning in Vicksburg: a tradition that would endure until the last survivors of the siege were gone. Vicksburg didn’t rejoin the rest of the nation in celebrating Independence Day until after the Second World War.

  “At the close of the day,” William Foster wrote on the Fourth, “I visit once more the Sky-Parlor. How changed now the scene.” The landscape around the town was alive with
movement. Line after line of Yankee soldiers, company after company, regiment after regiment, reserve after reserve, emerged from behind the siege lines and marched up the bluff—looking, one watcher at the Sky Parlor said, “like huge blue snakes coiling around the city.” At twilight they were still surging through the streets and passing back out into the country again while countless crews of Yankee sappers, working by torchlight and by bonfire, were disassembling the fierce tangles of Confederate barricades.

  There was movement on the river, too. The gunboats of the Yankee navy, which had for so many months been lurking like toads out in the shallows, came huffing up to the levee. As they passed the silenced batteries of the Confederacy, they fired off the national salute. Behind them, more boats were approaching. The fall of Vicksburg meant that the Mississippi was now in Union hands from its headwaters to the delta (“The Father of Waters,” Abraham Lincoln declared when he got the news, “flows unvexed to the sea”); the Yankees were ending the blockades and the free flow of traffic was resuming. Around the bend in the twilight the first steamboats were already coming downriver: a line of glittering jewels, gliding up to Vicksburg Landing in a whirl of whistles and clanging bells, loaded with food for the starving town.

  15

  The Alligator

  ON APRIL 15, 1865, the steamboat Sultana left Cairo, Illinois, for New Orleans. The Sultana was a large boat, one of the largest on the river—almost 250 feet long, and rated to carry a maximum of 376 passengers. But on that run it had an errand more urgent than simple transport. Its lines and flagpoles were hung with black pennants and black banners; its railings and portholes were draped in long, fluttering ribbons of black crêpe. It was an amazing apparition to the people of the lower valley. When they saw this vessel of mourning emerge around a bend in the golden afternoon light, or loom out of the river mists at midnight, they all came running down to the levees to greet it. It stopped at every town and village and plantation along the banks, announcing its arrival not with the customary whistles but with a single tolling bell. The passengers along the railings were all dressed in black. When the boat docked, they fanned out through the streets; some of them did no more than stand and silently hold up the black-bordered newspapers they’d brought from Cairo. Then they boarded again and the Sultana moved off and vanished downriver, to bring to the next town the news of Lincoln’s assassination.

  Constructed over the winter of 1862–63, the Sultana had been one of the first steamboats to begin making regular runs in the lower valley after the surrender of Vicksburg. Its frequent passengers had gotten an excellent view of the way the reopening of the river had transformed the valley. The landscape still bore the immense scars left by the passage of the war—the craters and slides in the hills, the burned-out forests, the gutted and abandoned plantation houses, the remnants of the immense earthworks constructed along the battle lines—but the riverfronts were thriving and the commercial districts were jumping with new business. The tough times of the blockades had been quickly forgotten. The people on the streets looked healthy and prosperous. In Vicksburg, which had taken the worst of the war, the buildings had all been repaired, the stores had all been restocked, and the flow of luxury goods to the specialty shops had resumed. “You can get anything you want,” one townsman reported in amazement barely a month after the surrender.

  In the later years of the war, the Sultana had also brought in a flood of strangers. They were people with peculiar accents: Northerners, Europeans. The lifting of the blockades meant the resumption of the cotton trade, and brokers and factors from all over the world were streaming into the lower valley to cash in. With most of the great plantations of the Deep South still behind the battle lines, the planters along the Mississippi found that they had a spectacular seller’s market. Locals whose livelihood had been ruined by the siege were setting up as cotton speculators—or else were looking to strike it rich by supplying the speculators with whatever else they might desire. As the harvest came in, the various Landings and Under-the-Hills were all springing back to life, more gaudy than they had ever been, with saloons and gambling houses and the fanciest brothels to be found outside of New Orleans.

  The river valley was still under the control of the Union military government, and the burgeoning trade was leading to a complicated new weave of bureaucratic corruption. The river commerce was administered by the staff officers of the Union army, who were the only ones authorized to disgorge the most prized document in the occupied valley: a trading license. These licenses were required for any and all cargo carried by the steamboats. The idea was to give priority to items of immediate military necessity or urgent humanitarian need, but in practice those concepts were defined in an easygoing, elastic way, so as to create for the staff officers a thriving business in bribes and kickbacks. Judging by the licenses issued for one Christmas week, the valley had either an immediate military necessity or an urgent humanitarian need for the following: five barrels of brandy, thirty cases of champagne, one hundred cases of assorted liquors, twenty thousand cigars, 420 dozen pairs of women’s shoes, fifty dozen pairs of white gloves, fifteen yards of green velvet, fifteen yards of red velvet, and one pound of silver spangles.

  The rebirth of the river economy struck a lot of old-timers as a travesty. By the spring of 1865, the most common remark heard around the valley was that you could barely recognize the place any longer, what with all these Yankees and foreigners—and with all the new money pouring in. And of course there was one more enormous social change that the whites of the lower valley were finding impossible to adjust to: emancipation. So far, the worst nightmare of the whites had failed to materialize—they weren’t being murdered in their beds by vengeful gangs of ex-slaves. Instead there had developed a new routine of casual, grinding hostility. The old hair-trigger rage of the frontier was back, only now it was almost exclusively racial. Day after day, the whites were stunned and outraged by the lack of deference shown to them by their former property. Every sidelong glance between white and black was a potential provocation; every mutter, every bumped shoulder was the pretext for a fight. Public sentiment among the whites, one Union officer observed, “has not come to the attitude in which it can conceive of the negro having any rights at all.”

  In the midst of this rising tension came the news brought by the Sultana. The reaction among the whites was public silence and private jubilation. While in the North, Lincoln’s views on slavery had always been a matter of debate (and remain so to this day), in the South there had never been the slightest doubt. To them Lincoln had been the maddest of the abolitionist madmen, the demonic persecutor who had slaughtered their men and destroyed their country for no better reason than sheer spite. One diarist of that time, Sarah Morgan of New Orleans, could only suppose that Lincoln had been driven by a kind of psychotic class envy. “Lincoln’s chief occupation,” she wrote, “was thinking what death, thousands who ruled like lords when he was cutting logs, should die.” But now that had all changed: “A moment more, and the man who was progressing to murder countless human beings, is interrupted in his work by the shot of an assassin.” Kate Stone of Vicksburg put it more simply in her diary: “All honor to J. Wilkes Booth, who has rid the world of a tyrant and made himself famous for generations.”

  On April 23, 1865, the Sultana, returning from New Orleans, stopped off at Vicksburg. Its errand of mourning was completed and it was an ordinary steamboat again, carrying a full complement of passengers and cargo. It laid over at Vicksburg Landing for the day while one of its boilers was repaired, a routine procedure for steamboats on the river—the Sultana’s boilers had already been patched twice that spring. During the layover, arrangements were concluded for it to carry a very large number of Union soldiers upriver to Cairo.

  These soldiers were prisoners of war who had been brought to Vicksburg by the Confederate command for exchange with the North. They had been held at the prison camps of Cahaba and Andersonville in the Deep South, and they had arrived at Vicksburg earlier t
hat spring. They were in horrible shape—sick, malnourished, emaciated, scurvied. Many had open and infected wounds; many were limping in on crutches; some couldn’t walk at all and were being dragged on pallets by their fellow soldiers. They told horrifying stories of their captivity. Cahaba, where most of them had been held, had been designed for five hundred men and ultimately was crammed with more than three thousand, and their only drinking water was from a fouled stream that doubled as a cesspool. But that was nothing compared with what some of the other prisoners said about Andersonville. Forty-five thousand men had been held there at the war’s height, and almost thirteen thousand of them had died; the rest were described as “walking skeletons.” One typical story was told by a survivor:

  A large wagon, drawn by four mules, was used in drawing out the dead. They were laid in as we pile cordwood and taken to the burying ground, generally putting fifty in a grave, and returning would bring mush in the same wagon, where worms that came from the dead could be seen crawling all over it; but we were starving, therefore we fought for it like hungry dogs.