by Tony Horwitz
Vicksburg differed from Shiloh in other essential ways. By mid-1863, generals had overcome their earlier disdain for digging in. Shovels proved as crucial as guns, with the two sides gouging 60,000 feet of zigzag trenches. Also, civilians suffered alongside soldiers, enduring heavy bombardment and near-starvation during the siege. Vicksburg, in sum, offered a preview of the sort of grinding, total warfare that Grant and Sherman would later wage in the East—and that European armies would pursue with even greater savagery in the twentieth century.
The battlefield park’s most conspicuous feature was its “monument overload,” as one ranger put it. The plaques and memorials totaled 1,323, and that was after a significant subtraction; during a 1942 metal drive, half the cast-iron tablets were donated to the World War II effort. One monument stood out. Modeled on the Pantheon in Rome, it was inscribed with the names of 36,000 Illinois soldiers, including an extraordinary private named Albert D. J. Cashire.
“In handling a musket in battle,” a comrade recalled, “he was the equal of any in the company.” Cashire also “seemed specially adept at those tasks so despised by the infantryman,” such as sewing and washing clothes. Cashire fought in forty skirmishes and battles and became active in veterans’ affairs, marching in parades for decades after the War.
Then, in 1911, while working as a handyman in Illinois, Cashire was hit by an automobile and taken to the hospital with a leg broken close to the hip. The doctor who examined Cashire discovered what the Illinois veteran had so long concealed; Cashire was a woman, an Irish immigrant née Jennie Hodgers. Hodgers was eventually sent to an insane asylum and forced to wear women’s clothing until her death in 1915.
“I left Cashier the fearless boy of twenty-two at the end of the Vicksburg campaign,” one former comrade wrote after visiting her at the asylum. “I found a frail woman of seventy, broken, because on discovery she was compelled to put on skirts. They told me she was as awkward as could be in them. One day she tripped and fell, hurting her hip. She never recovered.”
A former sergeant said that Hodgers told him, “The country needed me, and I wanted excitement.” Money may have tempted her as well; for a poor Irish immigrant, the soldier’s pay of $13 a month represented a stable if modest income. Vicksburg’s battlefield museum displayed a picture of Hodgers in uniform, a mannish figure with short hair who stood conspicuously shorter than her comrades (she was barely five feet tall). The museum also told of 400 other women who went to war disguised as men. One, Sarah Emma Edmonds, chose to reveal her sex in 1884, when she appeared for a reunion of the 2nd Michigan Infantry as a woman.
Hodgers’s secret, at least, lived after her, with her assumed name etched on the Illinois monument at Vicksburg, and on a veterans’ headstone the War Department placed by her grave. Decades later, another stone was added that read:
ALBERT D. J. CASHIRE
CO. G, 95 ILL INF CIVIL WAR
BORN
JENNIE HODGERS
IN CLOGHER HEAD, IRELAND
1843-1915
The Vicksburg siege produced other oddities. The Confederacy experimented with camels, and one colonel used a dromedary to carry his personal baggage—until a Union sharpshooter killed the animal. There were also Vicksburg’s famed caves, dug by civilians as protection against the Union bombardment. Some of these burrows became elaborate affairs, furnished with carpets and beds and serviced by slaves. But most were crude, crowded dugouts that one resident described as “rat-holes.” Like the soldiers, civilians also saw food supplies dwindle to a meager daily ration. When beef ran out, they ate mule meat, frogs and rats. Flour was replaced by a blend of corn-meal and ground peas. “It made a nauseous composition, as the corn-meal cooked in half the time the pea-meal did, so this stuff was half raw,” one Southerner wrote. “It had the properties of india-rubber and was worse than leather to digest.”
By early July, both soldiers and civilians were on the brink of starvation, and surrender became inevitable. The Confederate commander, an émigré from Pennsylvania named John Pemberton, told his officers: “I know their peculiar weaknesses and their national vanity. I know we can get better terms from them on the Fourth of July than on any other day of the year.” He was right. Grant generously agreed to parole the 30,000 Confederate troops within the Vicksburg defenses.
Even so, the fierce and protracted fighting in Vicksburg left the community deeply embittered. Though the city and its surrounding county had been one of only two in Mississippi to vote against secession (Natchez was the other), post-War Vicksburg hallowed the Cause and disdained the national battlefield as a “Yankee park.” Mississippians initially refused to erect a state monument there, and never put up a memorial to Pemberton, the Northern-born rebel commander. As late as the 1950s, Joe Gerache had told me, “folks didn’t talk about the surrender here. It was a ‘cessation of hostilities.’ The people of Vicksburg never gave up, it was only that Yankee general Pemberton who lost the city.”
As elsewhere, a great deal of myth underlay this romance. Just before the surrender, Confederates petitioned Pemberton in a letter signed “Many Soldiers,” telling him: “If you can’t feed us, you had better surrender, horrible as the idea is, than suffer this noble army to disgrace themselves by desertion.” Nor were cruel modern tactics limited to the Northern side. The Confederates placed Union prisoners in Vicksburg’s courthouse as a human shield to deter Northern gunners from firing on the building.
The courthouse survived with only one hit, and now housed Vicksburg’s city museum. It was the most eccentric—and politically incorrect—collection I’d yet visited in the South. In the “Confederate Room,” alongside a piece of orginal hardtack and a copy of the Vicksburg Citizen printed on wallpaper because newsprint ran out, I found a pair of Confederate trousers “made by a plantation mammy” and a photograph of a Southern matron with “her slaves who refused to accept freedom.” An exhibit on Jefferson Davis, who delivered his first public speech on the courthouse grounds, stated: “There was a very special relationship between Jefferson Davis and his slaves. He was not only their master but also their friend.” Another display pointed out: “Ironically, Gen. U.S. Grant was a slave owner while Gen. Robert E. Lee freed his slaves.”
This last was a hoary bit of Southern propaganda. Grant’s in-laws were Missourians who owned slaves before the War; Grant acquired one from them and set him free a year later. As for Lee, the slaves in question were those his wife inherited in October 1857, with the stipulation that Lee, as executor, emancipate them within five years. Lee missed the deadline and didn’t free the slaves until December 29, 1863.
In another room, I found a Ku Klux Klan hood with eye holes and a red tassel. “The Klan’s purpose was to rid the South of the carpetbag-scalawag-black governments, which were often corrupt,” the accompanying text said. “Atrocities were sometimes attributed to the Klan by unscrupulous individuals.”
But the most striking exhibit of all was titled “The Minié Ball Pregnancy.” It featured a Civil War bullet and a picture of a Vicksburg doctor whose medical feat was described as follows:
During the battle of Raymond, Miss. in 1863 a minié ball reportedly passed through the reproductive organs of a young rebel soldier and a few seconds later penetrated a young lady who was standing on the porch of her nearby home. The story was written later by Dr. Le Grand G. Capers of Vicksburg for the American Medical Weekly. Capers claimed that he tended their wounds, that the girl became pregnant from the fertile minié ball, that he delivered the baby, introduced her to the soldier, that the two were married and had two more children by the conventional method.
I realized with a start that I’d heard a bowdlerized version of this tale on my elementary school playground. Was it possible that this proto-urban legend had some basis in fact?
I found the museum’s curator, Gordon Cotton, sifting papers in a backroom. Cotton was a striking Shelby Foote look-and-sound-alike, a kinship partly explained by the two men having grown up in the same part of the Mis
sissippi Delta. “I heard someone laughing out loud and knew you must be reading about the Minié Ball Pregnancy,” he said.
I asked if he thought the story could possibly be true.
“The girl’s mother believed it, and nothing else matters,” he replied. “I guess you could say that baby was the original son-of-a-gun.”
Part of the story was indeed factual. Dr. Le Grand Capers was the real name of a Confederate surgeon who wrote about the minié ball pregnancy in the American Medical Weekly in 1874, under the headline: “Attention Gynaecologists! Notes from the Diary of a Field and Hospital Surgeon CSA.” However, Capers intended the article as a spoof of the wildly inflated stories of medical prowess reported by other doctors in the War. Not everyone got the joke and Capers’s medical reputation never recovered.
“I decided to just present the story as Capers did,” Cotton said with a shrug. “History shouldn’t be dull.” The same attitude extended to the other exhibits, which Cotton himself had arranged with what he freely admitted was a strong Southern bias. “This is Vicksburg’s attic,” he said. “Our story is the story of Vicksburg, not somewhere in Pennsylvania. People might say, ‘that’s a Southern view,’ but this is a Southern town.”
Most of the items came from local households. The Klan hood had literally come from an attic, stowed in a trunk by a relative of Cotton’s. The outfit originally belonged to Cotton’s great-grandfather, a Confederate private. “The Klan’s part of our history, good or bad,” he said. “People often ask me if my great-grandfather hated blacks. No, I tell them. He hated Yankees. Anyway, if it hadn’t been for the Yankee occupation, we wouldn’t have any good stories to tell.”
Cotton lived in the same 1840s farmhouse where he, his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been born. One of Cotton’s cousins still slept in a bed riddled by bullets when Yankees killed her great-great-grandmother during a plantation raid. “Her killers were tried upstairs in this courthouse,” Cotton said. “So you see, we’re never far from our history. I’m not going to go through this museum rewriting the past just to please someone in the present.”
Anyway, the present wasn’t very pleasing to Cotton, particularly the casinos. “I’m still of that old Protestant work ethic, you work for what you get. I don’t believe in ill-gotten gains and games of chance.” Not that he was a prude. “We had a wonderful whorehouse district,” he said. “It’s gone.” He acknowledged, too, that the casinos had created thousands of jobs and pumped millions of dollars in tax revenues into a state that had long been the poorest in the nation.
But Cotton felt the casinos were spoiling the town’s historic atmosphere and peddling a false version of the past. It was true that antebellum Vicksburg, like many river towns, was a rough place renowned for its vice and violence. But the riverboats themselves were usually tame commercial vessels that frowned on gambling. “If steamboats caught a professional gambler on board, they’d put him off at the next stop,” Cotton said.
Vicksburg also had fought to rid its streets of vice. Its namesake, Reverend Newitt Vick, was a stern evangelical Methodist who founded the town as a model outpost of Christianity. When it became a den of iniquity instead, citizens organized to chase the gamblers out. One notorious gambling den called the Kangaroo refused to close. So in 1835, vigilantes led by a doctor named Hugh Bodley armed themselves and marched on the Kangaroo. As they approached, someone shot through the door, killing Bodley. The crowd then burned roulette and faro wheels in the streets and lynched several gamblers. “Some of the others ended up as catfish food,” Cotton said, gazing out at the water.
A few blocks from the courthouse stood a small obelisk that read: “Erected by a grateful community to the memory of Dr. Hugh Bodley Murdered by the Gamblers July 5, 1835 while defending the morals of Vicksburg.” When the new casinos arrived in Vicksburg, representatives of Harrah’s came to Cotton for advice about prettying the shore and integrating the city’s history into their design. He showed them a picture of the Bodley monument, though not its inscription. Harrah’s asked if the memorial could be moved down by the water, close to the casinos.
“I think that would be ideal,” Cotton told them. Then he showed them the monument’s words. He chuckled. “They were not amused,” he said.
FROM HIS OLIVE SKIN and unusual surname, I’d guessed that the pharmacist Joe Gerache was of southern European extraction. But when I arrived at his home in suburban Vicksburg, I noticed a Jewish menorah perched on the living room mantel. Then, as we began chatting, he referred to Vicksburg’s schvartze. He caught himself and said, “That’s Yiddish for black people.”
“I know. My grandfather used that word all the time.”
“You’re Jewish?” he asked.
When I nodded, Gerache yelled to his wife in the kitchen. “Ann, you know what? Tony’s an M.O.T.!” Then to me: “That’s ‘member of tribe.’” Before I could say pastrami on rye, I’d been invited—commanded—to attend synagogue the next night and hustled into the living room to watch a documentary Ann had taped about Jewish life in Mississippi. By the time I’d finished, dinner was ready and I found myself at the kitchen table as Joe intoned the Hebrew prayers for food and wine.
“Actually, I’m Catholic,” Joe said, noshing on a dill pickle. “My grandparents came from Italy. But I go to Ann’s services and she comes to mass with me.”
Southern Jewry often made for this sort of colorful intermingling. When I’d lived in Mississippi, a Jewish co-worker and I were frequently asked by a small synagogue in Meridian to help make minyan, the quorum of ten worshipers needed for a Jewish prayer service. The Friday phone calls were always the same: “Y’all gonna come make minyan at church tonight? We’ll be playing poker after the service.” Jewish-Southern culture had also bred the ultimate in fusion food: Gershon Weinberg’s pork and ribs barbecue restaurant in Alabama.
At Vicksburg’s synagogue, the minyan often included three non-Jewish women who sang in the temple’s choir, and several black custodians as well. A visiting rabbi came only on High Holidays, so on other occasions the congregants took turns acting as lay reader. On the Friday night I attended, an insurance salesman in a seersucker suit read the Sabbath service in Southern-accented English. Few among the dozen worshipers appeared to be under sixty. “We haven’t had a bar mitzvah here in ten years,” the insurance salesman said when the short service ended.
As in Meridian, the congregation in Vicksburg kept a curious post-synagogue ritual. Usually, the entire group drove across the bridge to Louisiana to a crawfish joint called Po Boys. On the night I visited, Po Boys was closed, so we went instead to a local restaurant and dined on fried chicken, pork loin and hush puppies. For most of the meal, a woman named Betty Sue held court, quizzing everyone for family gossip, as Southerners were so fond of doing. “What was her maiden name? … Is he Earl’s cousin? … Did he marry that gal from Memphis?”
But there wasn’t much family to talk about, at least not locally. As in many Southern towns, Jews first came to Vicksburg in the nineteenth century as peddlers. Working their way up the Mississippi, they settled down and opened businesses. But in this century, young Jews began leaving for the city. This migration was hastened by Jewish boys going off to fight in World War II, and later by the civil rights movement, which brought a temporary influx of Northern Jews. Their long hair and liberal views unsettled the local community. “They lived in black areas and related to people differently than we did,” Ann Gerache said, echoing what Shelby Foote had told me. “We didn’t know how our Christian neighbors would treat us after that.”
In several Southern cities, white supremacists fire-bombed synagogues. While there was no such violence in Vicksburg, the Jewish community continued to dwindle and now numbered only about seventy. “That’s including folks who don’t live here anymore but plan to be buried in Vicksburg,” Ann said.
The next day, I visited the Jewish cemetery, wedged between a Pizza Hut and the battlefield park. The fighting at Vicksburg had spilled
across the cemetery grounds, and gravestones marked Levy and Metzger mingled weirdly with historic plaques to the Mississippi Light Artillery and the Green Brigade of Texas.
About 20,000 Jews lived in the Confederate states at the start of the Civil War. In some ways, the mid-nineteenth-century South had been more welcoming to Jews than the North, where anti-immigrant sentiment reached fever pitch in the 1850s. Grant, while fighting in Mississippi, often railed against Jewish “speculators” and issued orders proscribing their movements, at one point terming them “an intolerable nuisance” and demanding that army railroad conductors stop Jews from traveling south of Jackson.
But viewed from Vicksburg’s synagogue and graveyard, there was a sad, end-of-the-line feel to Southern Jewry, at least that portion of it living outside Florida and a few big cities. In another decade or two, it seemed likely that all trace of rural and small-town Jewish life would be gone, except for graveyards like this, and the Semitic names—Cohen, Kaufman, Lowenstein—still dimly visible on the front of abandoned shoe shops and department stores across the backcountry South.
MY SECOND WEEK IN Vicksburg, I was evicted from Harrah’s. I hadn’t bothered to book ahead to Memorial Day, naively supposing that no sane person would celebrate the start of summer here, in a town already so heat-struck that every time I stepped outside my glasses fogged and slid down my nose. But gamblers knew no seasons; what better way to while away the 100-degree days than in a climate-controlled casino? Every other hotel in town was also booked. So I cashed my few chips and headed for the Natchez Trace, as flatboatsmen and busted gamblers had so often done in the nineteenth century.
Driving out of town, I decided to make one last stop at the battlefield. The morning paper had mentioned a noonday wreath-laying at the cemetery. Like many Americans, I’d almost forgotten that Memorial Day meant something more than a three-day weekend at the beach or blackjack table. It was, in fact, the mass slaughter of the Civil War that had led to the holiday’s creation. Vicksburg seemed an appropriate place to see how Southerners honored their war dead.