They pitched their tent near other residents also seeking safety and went to sleep. Just before daylight they were awakened by the thunderous boom of cannon “and before we could think where we were, a cannonball that had spent its force on the side of the hill came rolling into the tent… and in less time than it takes to tell it we were all up and out of the tent. Balls were whizzing, cannon booming from the rear, mortars replying in rapid succession from the front.”
Lucy’s mother called out orders. “Rice! Take that tent up and let us go to town!” Rice replied, “Yes, Ma’am,” and set to work “while the shot were falling around. An officer whom Mother knew rushed up and cried, ‘Mrs. McRae, keep close under the bank, and don’t take the road until you are obliged to.’ He afterward said he never expected us to reach town.”
Lucy would never forget that treacherous journey to reach safety and the fear that stalked every moment of it. “On we came,” she remembered, “jumping behind trees, fences, or into trenches, shells exploding above us, scattering their pieces around us. We children were crying, Mother praying, all running between the shells … trying to reach Glass Bayou Bridge … Rice had dropped the tent and Mary Ann the lunch basket, and as we came to the bridge a mortar shell exploded at the other end. We all fell to the ground, and when we got to our feet again not a word was spoken except ‘Run!’ and we did run. Mother had me by the hand pulling me, while my brothers were close by us.”
Finally reaching safety, they collapsed, both exhausted and thankful.
AS THE SIEGE WORE ON, food supplies dwindled. There was still water in the city’s cisterns, but only enough for cooking and drinking, with none to spare for bathing or washing clothes. Residents went weeks without changing clothes, their skin grimy with the dirt from the caves and the residue from all the explosions. At night they huddled in darkness underground, stuffed together, sweltering from the heat and humidity, enduring mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, and other biting insects, fearful of snakes and lizards, suffering temporary deafness from the thunderous explosions, their nerves frayed from fear. Each day houses and businesses burned or were pounded into rubble. Deep craters created by the shelling dotted the landscape. Hospitals overflowed, and those who could do so assisted the Sisters of Mercy in nursing patients.
Yet in spite of how bad the situation was becoming, when several citizens started a petition to get Pemberton to ask Grant for a truce so women and children could leave the city, only those few who proposed it would sign it. Others felt strongly that this was their city and this was their cause and they were in this fight to the finish.
Every day, everyone looked hopefully to the east, straining to hear the sounds of Joe Johnston corning to their rescue. Though persistent rumors said he would appear any moment leading 100,000 Rebel troops ready to fight, try as they might, nobody in Vicksburg could hear anything.
GROWING DESPERATION
Mid June 1863
Ulysses Grant knew those Joe Johnston rumors and he took them seriously. With the arrival of reinforcements, he now had 77,000 troops under his command—over twice Pemberton’s numbers. Grant needed every man. He had to be prepared for the possibility of a two-sided fight: Pemberton on one side of him and Joe Johnston on the other. But as June wore on, he wondered if Johnston would ever get there. So did Pemberton. The Union kept cutting the telegraph lines, and it could take couriers as long as two weeks to deliver messages from one general to the other, for to avoid capture they had to stay off main roads and travel through woods and swamps. In his messages to Johnston, Pemberton voiced both confidence and desperation. Johnston told him to hold on, that help was coming. Pemberton asked, “When shall I expect you?” Another time he wrote, “I am waiting most anxiously to know your intentions … I shall endeavor to hold out as long as we have anything to eat.”
Rumors to the contrary, Johnston had only 32,000 men in his Army of Relief. Still, that was enough when combined with Pemberton’s 30,000 to take on Grant. But Johnston wasn’t moving. He had received a serious wound in battle months earlier, and some speculated that he was still recovering, while others wondered if he had lost his will to fight. Jefferson Davis urged him to go to Vicksburg’s aid, but Johnston replied that he did not have enough men and thought saving Vicksburg was hopeless. So he did nothing.
A West Point graduate, Joe Johnston was often at odds with Jefferson Davis. He was or contributed to losses at Vicksburg, Stones River, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and Atlanta.
While this stalemate in Confederate leadership continued, both the Yankees and the Rebels persisted in their daily standoff in the trenches at Vicksburg. Every day General Grant rode along the twelve miles of front lines. He dressed like a private so Rebel sharpshooters wouldn’t recognize him as he visited various state regiments. Fred was usually with his father, even though he wasn’t feeling well. “The wound I had received early in the campaign now began to trouble me very much,” he said, “and, under Dr. Hewitt’s expressed fears of having to amputate my leg, I remained much at headquarters.”
Few medicines existed to help fight infections like Fred’s. Penicillin had not yet been discovered, and soldiers who did not bleed to death from their wounds often died from such infections, particularly if they were wounded in the stomach or chest. Doctors could amputate wounded arms or legs to prevent infection or to keep it from spreading—though the amputation site itself could also become infected and prove fatal.
Instead of spending his time with the soldiers, Fred wanted to be near his father. As a result, he said, “I saw a great deal of my father’s methods, his marvelous attention to detail, and his cool self-possession. I also witnessed the devotion of his men to him, and the enthusiasm with which they greeted … him, when he passed along the line. Father was a splendid horseman, and visited many points of his army every day.”
A volunteer health inspector who was visiting the camp remembered Fred, who had turned thirteen in May, on his daily rounds with his father: “Almost every day as I drove about the lines, at some point or other I would see General Grant and his brave little assistant, riding at full speed in the face of the long lines of the enemy’s batteries, and within range of their murderous fire.
“Fred Grant shared his father’s dangers; and although he was one of the nicest boys I ever saw, few knew his real merits and bravery. Like his distinguished father, he was free from bombast and was quiet and reserved, so his heroic services during the siege were not paraded before the public… It was fortunate that his devoted mother was not there at that time to see his danger as he went out under the guns daily. Her anxiety would have been unbearable.”
Julia Grant would also have been concerned about her son’s health, for Fred was now suffering from typhoid fever and dysentery as well as the infection in his leg. Grant finally became alarmed enough that he sent Fred to Kentucky to recuperate with Julia Grant’s sister, Emma Casey. Bands of Confederate guerrillas roamed the Kentucky countryside, and a week after Fred arrived, a man dressed like a Confederate officer came into Emma Casey’s yard on his horse and asked for a drink of water.
She later wrote, “He said casually, ‘I guess Fred Grant is visiting you, isn’t he?’ Instantly a cold suspicion struck me like a dart through the heart and I answered him as casually as he had questioned me, ‘Why, no.’
“‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Isn’t he?’
“‘No, he’s gone.’
“‘Gone, has he? Is that so?’”
The man left and Fred’s badly frightened aunt immediately put him on a boat back to Vicksburg, certain he was safer there. Emma Casey said that later that day, eight “hard-riding, grim-looking, and tattered cavalrymen rode up to the gate. One of them, heavily armed, and looking as fierce as a Greek bandit, came up to the porch.” The man asked if a boy was visiting there and Emma said that a boy had been there but was now gone. When the man questioned whether she was sure, she said she was and that some Union gunboats would be coming up the river shortly. “Perhaps you gentlemen will be intere
sted in seeing them,” she said bravely. The men laughed, wished her a good day, and rode away. Emma later worried about what impact Fred’s capture might have had on the Union cause. Fortunately, Fred reached his father safely. When he arrived, Grant wrote to his wife that their son did not look very well but insisted on staying until Vicksburg fell.
So Fred stayed, and he did not lose his confidence that Vicksburg would soon surrender. He was still determined to be there on that great day.
GRANT HAD SELECTED SHERMAN to take charge of the eastern front. During the long days of the siege, while he and his army watched and waited for Joe Johnston, Sherman sometimes took breaks by riding his horse through the countryside. One day he stopped at a nearby plantation where a number of Southern families had sought refuge. He learned that one of them was the Wilkinson family of New Orleans and asked if their son had been a cadet at Alexandria, Louisiana, when he was superintendent of the military academy there. Mrs. Wilkinson confirmed this and said her son was now fighting for the South at Vicksburg.
Sherman wrote, “I then asked about her husband, whom I had known, when she burst into tears, and cried out in agony, ‘You killed him at Bull Run, where he was fighting for his country!’ I disclaimed killing anybody at Bull Run; but all the women present (nearly a dozen) burst into loud lamentations, which made it most uncomfortable for me, and I rode away.”
Ordinary soldiers couldn’t go on country rides, but they still found ways to take breaks. Pemberton’s men had to stay in the trenches, but the Yankees got time off and played cards, sang, wrote letters to the folks back home or wrote in their journals (provided they could write), cleaned their guns, played baseball, whittled on pieces of wood, swapped stories with tent mates, and carried on camp life. Books were treasured, and at night around a campfire, men who were literate sometimes read aloud to an eager audience. The novels of Charles Dickens were especially popular. The 8th Wisconsin Infantry had a distraction in their pet eagle, nicknamed Old Abe in honor of the president. The young eagle traveled with the men on his own perch. Stories—which may or may not be true—abounded that he also went into battle with them, screeching loudly as he flew above the heads of the enemy.
A game of cards was a popular way to pass time when soldiers weren’t on duty.
Life under the broiling Mississippi sun proved difficult for both sides. Southerners, who were used to the heat and humidity, had some advantage. They also knew how to co-exist with native creatures—unlike one Yankee from Michigan who almost lost his life when he went swimming in the Yazoo River and was attacked by an alligator. Rats infested the trenches, and mosquitoes, flies, chiggers, fleas, lice, and lizards bedeviled everybody, especially at night. Officers lucky enough to sleep on cots set the cot legs in jars of water, which kept lizards from climbing into their beds.
The 8th Wisconsin Infantry’s pet eagle, Old Abe, on his perch.
Believing that perspiration was good for the body, nobody questioned soldiers’ wearing wool uniforms, even though they added to the men’s misery. The camps stank. Sanitation, always a problem for an army, was made worse by the oppressive heat. Anyone approaching either army could smell it before they saw it. Horses and mules compounded the problem. Soldiers on both sides suffered all kinds of health maladies. Epidemics of measles and mumps broke out. Malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and smallpox killed many. Some water sources became contaminated from dead animals, causing yet more sickness.
Where hillsides allowed it, the Union army sometimes carried out its work on two levels, with soldiers topside doing the fighting, while soldiers below rested or attended to other duties.
When the men were in the trenches, they had to stay alert every moment against sudden attack and to keep their heads down so they wouldn’t be spotted by enemy sharpshooters. Sometimes, as a diversion, a soldier would put a hat on a stick and hold it up for the sport of seeing how many enemy bullets would be fired at it. Or soldiers attached mirrors to poles and held them up so they could see into the other side’s trenches, which in some places were only a few yards away.
At night when officers weren’t around, the Rebels and Yanks occasionally visited back and forth or even left their trenches to talk, joke, taunt each other, and share photos of loved ones. A Union soldier later wrote of one of these meetings, “From the remarks of some of the Rebels, I judged that their supply of provisions was getting low, and that they had no source from which to draw more. We gave them from our own rations some fat meat, crackers, coffee, and so forth.”
One day a private from Wisconsin simply said to the Yanks around him that he was going to shake hands with the Rebs. He set down his gun and climbed out of his trench. Before long, several hundred men from both sides were out in the open exchanging news and trading Southern tobacco for Northern coffee. When a Union officer broke up the party, the men returned to their trenches and resumed shooting at each other.
Said one soldier of the enemy, “They agreed with us perfectly on one thing: If the settlement of this war was left to the enlisted men of both sides, we would soon go home.”
EMPTY STOMACHS Late June 1836
Late June 1863
In the North, pressure mounted on Grant to finish the job. Vicksburg had been under siege for five long weeks—since May 18—and still had not surrendered. Trench warfare could go on endlessly. Grant and his army were needed to fight in other places, especially now, when Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s most powerful general, was invading the North.
Grant pushed harder. He had his men dig a tunnel under the Rebel lines and pack it with explosives. The blast that followed created a huge crater that allowed the Federals to rush through the tunnel, climb up and out of the crater, and emerge behind enemy lines. They thought they would quickly overpower their stunned opponents. Instead, the Rebels had heard the digging, guessed what the Yanks were up to—and were waiting for them. Bloody hand-to-hand combat ensued, until the Federals had to retreat. They lost 200 men and the Confederates lost 100.
Grant didn’t give up on tunnel warfare. He put his men to work digging more tunnels. He continued around-the-clock shelling of the Confederate lines and the city. Something would have to make these Southerners give up! Maybe it would finally be starvation. They couldn’t hold out forever—and it sure didn’t look like Joe Johnston planned to do anything about it.
Thirty-five Union soldiers who had been coal miners before the war dug a forty-five-foot-long tunnel under Rebel entrenchments. The explosion of 2,200 pounds of gunpowder in the tunnel created a crater that gave Union forces access behind enemy lines.
INSIDE VICKSBURG, townspeople worried about the suffering of the soldiers in the trenches but could barely take care of themselves. Night and day shells fell, exploding into a thousand dangerous fragments. Because people stayed in the caves, there were few deaths, but Willie said that “all lived in a state of terror.”
A woman who was busy cooking when a shell exploded nearby grabbed a hot pot off her stove and ran through the streets to her cave, not even aware that she was still holding the pot. Lucy reported that “one lady standing in a cave door had her arm taken off” by a minié ball whizzing by. When the writer Mark Twain later interviewed Vicksburg residents about this time, one told him, “Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no turning room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn’t have made a candle burn in it.”
AN INCIDENT OCCURRED on a narrow footpath up a steep hill from the Lord cave that revealed how slaves often regarded whites. According to Willie, a young black boy was guiding a white nun along the footpath from the hospital where she had assisted wounded soldiers. They met a Confederate corporal who saluted the Sister and stepped aside so she could pass, but, Willie wrote, “as she was about to do so a shell of the smaller kind, with a slowly burning fuse, fell in the pathway at his feet.” Realizing the danger, the soldier tumbled backward down the hill to safety. At that moment, “the black hero,” as Willie referred to the boy, grabbed the s
hell and pitched it away.
“‘Why did you not do that at once?’ asked the trembling Sister. ‘The moment you waited might have cost us all our lives.’”
The slave child carefully replied that he had “too much respect” for white folks to do a thing like that while the “gentleman” was standing there—meaning he didn’t dare reach in front of a white man to do what the white man should have done, for a slave could be whipped or sold for such an infraction.
A white soldier at Milliken’s Bend reported that the Union’s untested black recruits fought like tigers.
But slavery was coming to an end. Unless they lived on isolated plantations, blacks in the South during the Civil War knew about Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued in January 1863, giving freedom to slaves in states under Union control. Grant had 10,000 to 12,000 newly liberated slaves with his army at Vicksburg.
Blacks must have been jubilant to hear that former slaves who had joined the Union army had fought bravely in a battle against Confederate troops on June 7 at Milliken’s Bend, not far from Vicksburg. Though the black regiment had suffered heavy casualties, the men had held their own and beaten back their attackers. This event had changed the minds of many who felt blacks did not have the ability to fight. Frederick Douglass, the famous black abolitionist, had pleaded, “Give them a chance. I don’t say that they will fight better than other men. All I say is, give them a chance!” When they got the chance and proved their mettle, a Southern senator commented, “If slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”
Under Siege! Page 8