“A huge plantation wagon was loaded with my father’s invaluable library … and the contents were scattered upon the muddy road between the Flowers plantation and the Big Black River, so that for a mile and a half, as we were told, one might have walked on books.”
When Rebel soldiers surrendered their arms, Union soldiers watched respectfully.
AT TEN O’CLOCK on the morning of July 4, 1863, Confederate soldiers lined up, saluted the Confederate flag, and laid down their guns. Union soldiers, flush with victory, could have jeered. But none did. They stood by their trenches in silence, watching the thin, worn-out Rebels who had fought well and suffered gravely. Then one of the Northern boys started to clap. A few others joined in, and then more and more, until all up and down the line could be heard clapping, and then shouting, in recognition of a brave foe. At the tops of their voices, the boys in blue cheered themselves hoarse for the boys in gray. Breaking line, they came over to shake hands and to press food upon these defenders of Vicksburg who were enemies no more.
IN TOWN, in front of their damaged home, Lucy and her brothers and parents watched the Confederate soldiers gathering for the formal surrender. Lucy wrote, “How sad was the spectacle that met our gaze; arms stacked in the center on the streets; men with tearful eyes and downcast faces walking here and there; men sitting in groups feeling that they would gladly have given their life-blood on the battlefield rather than hand over the guns and sabers so dear to them!”
Lucy watched as “the drummer-boy of a Tennessee regiment, rather than give up his drum, gave it to my brother, but it was very soon taken away from him … The instruments of the band of the Tennessee regiment were stacked in the middle of the street. Men looked so forlorn, some without any shoes, some with tattered garments, yet they would have fought on.”
Like everyone in Vicksburg, she knew the town could not have held out much longer. Still, she reported, “men felt very bitterly toward General Pemberton because they were so determined that the place should not be taken on the Fourth and never dreamed that a surrender was ever thought of.”
In 1865, when this photograph was taken, the Stars and Stripes had been flying over the Vicksburg courthouse for nearly two years, a painful sight for many in the city.
As townspeople watched, most from behind the curtains of their homes, they saw several units of Grant’s army march into town accompanied by a band playing Northern patriotic songs. In her badly damaged house, Willie’s mother reported, “You can imagine our feelings when the US Army entered, their banners flying and their hateful tunes sounding in our ears … You may be sure none of us raised our eyes to see the flag of the enemy in the place where our own had so proudly and defiantly waved so long.”
The Union soldiers had waited for this moment when they would see their flag flying atop the grand courthouse. As they watched the Stars and Stripes replace the Confederate flag, they stood at attention and saluted with pride.
Then, just as the men who fought in the trenches had done, Union soldiers broke line and shared whatever they had with the Confederates. Grant arrived in the city a short time later and observed, “Our men had had full rations from the time the siege commenced, to the close. The enemy had been suffering, particularly towards the last. I myself saw our men taking bread from their haversacks, and giving it to the enemy they had so recently been engaged in starving out. It was accepted with … thanks.”
Missouri was split in its support of the war and had troops fighting on both sides at Vicksburg. A Union captain from Hannibal, Missouri, recalled one particular incident that day in Vicksburg that he would never forget. One of his young soldiers had a brother in the Rebel army at Vicksburg. In town, the brothers spotted each other and fell out of ranks. Wrapping their arms around each other’s waists, they walked together, one strong, in a fresh blue uniform, the other thin and weak, dressed in gray rags.
Union doctors set to work helping Confederate doctors with the sick and injured. Grant ordered that flour, coffee, sugar, tea, bacon, and other rations be distributed to townspeople, which drew them out of their homes and caves, in spite of their despair over what had happened. Then Grant went to the docks to personally greet Admiral Porter, who was bringing in all of his gunboats, rams, and transports to share the day’s triumph. The two men grinned and firmly shook hands as they congratulated each other.
Over a year after Union officers first demanded the surrender of Vicksburg, the guns overlooking the Mississippi River were finally silent.
THE UNFINISHED WAR
July 1863 and Beyond
Newspapers in the North triumphantly reported the capture of Vicksburg, but the story was quickly overshadowed by the news out of Pennsylvania. The three-day battle of Gettysburg, which took over 50,000 lives, ended on July 3, 1863, the same day Pemberton and Grant negotiated the surrender of Vicksburg. Together the Confederacy’s losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg ensured that the North would win the war—though it would take another twenty-one months to stop the fighting.
FOUR DAYS AFTER THE SURRENDER, Joe Johnston was on the run with Sherman’s army in pursuit. Ultimately Sherman pulled back, for his troops were needed elsewhere. Some time later, because Johnston was his superior officer, Pemberton had to report to him. According to stories of that meeting, Johnston rose to greet him warmly as a friend, but Pemberton saluted stiffly, turned, and walked away. The two men would never meet again.
Some historians regard Grant’s victory at Vicksburg at least in part as a result of Johnston’s failure. Grant had his own view. He wrote, “Johnston evidently took in the situation and wisely, I think, abstained from making an assault on us because it would simply have inflicted loss on both sides without accomplishing any result.”
SHORTLY AFTER THE FALL OF VICKSBURG, Grant put Fred aboard a steamboat to St. Louis. He was worried about his son’s health and wanted his wife to look after him. Though Fred’s leg was at last healing and there was no longer a danger that it would have to be amputated, he was still sick with typhoid fever and dysentery—illnesses that had killed many soldiers. Julia Grant found expert medical care for him, and when Fred recovered, he accompanied his father to Washington, D.C. There he met Abraham Lincoln and saw his father receive a gold medal from Congress for his conquest of Vicksburg. Fred glowed with pride as people clamored to meet the famous general, cheering him wherever he went, but he saw how uncomfortable this attention made his father. The modest Grant told his wife, “Really, it was very embarrassing. I heartily wished myself back in camp.”
Union general James McPherson (seated second from right) is shown with his staff outside the Balfour home where he headquartered during the occupation.
Grant returned to Vicksburg to oversee the occupation of the city and the orderly processing of the surrendered Confederates. Julia, Fred, and the three other children joined him, and they lived for a while in an elegant mansion high in the Vicksburg hills that had sustained little damage during the siege. Other Union generals also selected private homes for their personal use, sometimes ejecting the owners. Emma Balfour and her family had to share their home with General James Birdseye McPherson and his family. To regain the citizenship they lost when the South seceded from the United States, men in the community were required to sign a loyalty oath to the United States government. (Women were exempted from this since they did not have the right to vote.) Dr. Balfour refused to sign the hated oath, and as a result he was under constant surveillance and subjected to military harassment. More than once he was ordered to give money to Union sympathizers.
About 700 of Pemberton’s men also refused to take the oath, a requirement for parole, so they went to prison. A nineteen-year-old Confederate soldier who was leaving for a prison camp in the North wrote: “I stopped and looked back at the crestfallen city of Vicksburg … and thought of how many months we had nobly held the place against all the efforts of the Yankee nation, and bore privations and hardships of all kinds. Tears rose to my eyes and my very heart swelled with emot
ion. Being a prisoner did not in the least affect me, but the loss of the place, which was such a great downfall to the Confederacy … caused me much pain.”
Mary Loughborough’s husband also chose prison, and Mary moved to St. Louis to be closer to him. Boarding a steamboat with her small daughter, she knew she would miss the city she was leaving behind. “Vicksburg, with her terraced hills, with her pleasant homes and sad memories, passed from my view in the gathering twilight,” she wrote, “passed, but the river flowed on the same.”
GRANT WANTED TO RESTORE ORDER to the community as quickly as possible. He imposed martial law and a strict curfew. Freedom of speech was curtailed, and people were readily arrested and jailed for minor offenses. Only citizens who signed the loyalty oath could hold jobs and operate businesses. Those who refused to sign had to obtain a pass to go anywhere outside town. They could even be banished from the city for a year if they made threats against the United States government or insulted Federal officers. In one incident, five women were banished after walking out of a church service rather than participate in a prayer for President Lincoln.
The Union occupation army of 7,500 soldiers was kept busy. According to Willie Lord, Grant was “a popular conquering general. He suppressed with an iron hand looting, violence and vandalism.” Townspeople appreciated that, but some were concerned about black soldiers helping to patrol the city. They worried that these former slaves might retaliate against whites for the injustices of slavery. They soon realized, however, that white soldiers caused as many problems as blacks. Willie’s mother, for one, had no use for any Yankee. She had a run-in one day with several Union soldiers who, for sport, had turned over her filled laundry basket when she was hanging clothes on the line. She confronted them angrily: “I should think soldiers would have too much feeling in this hour of our distress to intrude even to the privacy of a lady’s home.”
They pointed to the badly damaged church rectory and sneered, “Do you call this a lady’s home? You ought to keep it in better order.” Margaret Lord was livid. “It is all you have left to us for a home,” she declared, “and I will tell you now that I have lived for months in the midst of thirty-thousand Confederate soldiers and this is the first insult I have ever received.”
When Vicksburg surrendered, the Union put confiscated cannon and artillery into service against the South.
After years of war, few Southerners had enough money to pay wages to their former slaves in exchange for their help, so, like Margaret Lord, they now did their own work. Some plantation and farm wives, whose husbands had not yet returned from the war or were dead, had to learn how to grow crops. Many mothers and their children were plunged into poverty, and women did whatever they could to earn money, from taking in sewing to teaching school or selling eggs. Some of them turned their homes into boardinghouses. Others competed with former slaves for any menial tasks that would pay a little something. Vicksburg overflowed with homeless people. The Union army had so wasted the countryside that after the siege, hunger forced an estimated 25,000 people, including freed slaves and camp followers, into the city so they could receive Union army rations. Housing was almost nonexistent, so people set up makeshift camps. In the unrelenting summer heat, the air so thick with humidity that it was hard to breathe, disease was rampant and many died.
Officially only a dozen civilians had been killed and about fifty injured in the siege, but in the next few years many more died, some of them from lung problems related to the dampness in the caves, or exposure to the caustic powder in the shells that had exploded around them for forty-seven days. When Mark Twain interviewed survivors a few years later, one of them said about his friends, “Hunger and misery and sickness and fright and sorrow, and I don’t know what all, got so loaded into them that none of them were ever rightly their old selves after the siege. They all died but three of us within a couple of years.”
In the weeks and months following the siege, Vicksburg trudged a slow road to recovery. Townspeople cleaned up the debris and filled in the caves or boarded them up. They repaired their homes and businesses. After the war, faced with high property taxes, many lost their homes when they could not pay them. Some homes were eventually torn down because of neglect, and the city never recovered its pre-war glory.
FRED GRANT ATTENDED a private school in New Jersey the year following the siege. During one of his breaks he went to visit his father, then stationed in Virginia, where the war was still being fought. Dressed in his gray and black school uniform, he was duck hunting in a small boat on the James River when he passed a Union gunboat. It fired on him and ordered him to surrender. He was brought aboard, and, according to his mother, “had some trouble in convincing his captors that he was not an enemy though he wore the gray, but the son of their General Grant.”
Lucy McRae also returned to school, but in Vicksburg at the all-girls academy she had previously attended. Vicksburg became a busy Union port and Yankee soldiers were everywhere, including Sky Parlor Hill, where off-duty soldiers liked to watch the barges, steamboats, and ironclads coming and going on the river.
Lucy watched, too, but from the safety of the upper porch of her home. Her brother John had survived the siege of Vicksburg. It was not until many months later, when he finally returned to them, that she and her family knew that her oldest brother, Allen, was also safe. He had been stationed a thousand miles away, assigned to help protect Jefferson Davis. Lucy wrote that Allen “was the last man who stood guard at President Davis’ tent, and when discharged by him, was given a letter, a horse and a $20 gold piece. My brother rode from Virginia on that horse, carrying the gold piece in the bottom of his boot.”
Shortly after the siege ended, the Lords decided to leave Vicksburg. They could have gone to St. Louis to stay with Dr. Lord’s brother, a prominent judge. Indeed, General Grant, who knew the judge, offered Dr. Lord written permission to cross through Federal lines. But the Reverend was still committed to the Southern cause. He asked instead for passage by riverboat deeper into the South so he could continue his work as a Confederate army chaplain. Willie reported that General Grant agreed, for he “admired courageous persistence in the fulfillment of duty.”
The Lords dug up the family silver they had buried in the churchyard before the start of the siege and converted the rest of their belongings into Confederate money (which soon became worthless). Willie wrote of their emotional departure from Vicksburg, “As we stepped aboard the boat which was to bear us on toward the unknown experiences that awaited us during the death struggles of the Confederacy, a group of our loving friends and my father’s devoted parishioners waved us a sad farewell … and we became … refugees adrift upon the hopeless current of a losing Cause.”
WHEN THE CIVIL WAR officially ended in April 1865, much of the South lay in ruins. In describing the desolation of towns burned and plantations deserted, a woman spoke of having no future and no hope. Southerners, she said, were exiles in their own land. Returning soldiers found their homes destroyed and their families displaced. Some soldiers were emotionally traumatized by the horrors they’d witnessed and would never be the same. Many more were suffering from disease or injuries—in Mississippi alone in the year following the war, twenty percent of the state budget went to the purchase of artificial arms and legs for veterans.
By the end of the war, Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, had been largely destroyed.
Most Southern boys and men who had signed up to fight weren’t trying to defend slavery. They’d grown up in a culture that believed blacks to be inferior, but only ten percent of them came from slave-owning families. Instead, they marched off to war because they supported states’ rights, or because they were determined to defend their homeland. Some went because they were loyal to the South, others because they would be accused of being cowardly if they didn’t. They became soldiers because they were drafted or needed a steady paycheck or wanted the adventure.
None of them could have known what they were getting i
nto. When it was over, almost all would have agreed with the Vicksburg resident who declared, “I never want to live through another war, never, never.”
Left: Young Southern recruits in Virginia, before the war started.
Right: Seasoned Union soldiers at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863.
AFTERWORD
Postscripts
The Lord family left Vicksburg for Mobile, Alabama, and then moved to Charleston, South Carolina. They fled Charleston when General Sherman and his army arrived. After the war they returned to Vicksburg and lived there a number of years before moving to New York, where they were originally from. Dr. Lord led a congregation in Cooperstown. Willie is buried in a local cemetery near his parents. Unfortunately, while one photo of Dr. Lord exists and is in this book, there are no known photos of Willie and the entire Lord family.
Lucy McRae continued to live in Vicksburg. When she married, she moved to Lewisburg, West Virginia, and mothered one daughter, also named Lucy. She died in 1930 and is buried in Lewisburg.
The McRaes’ country home at Bolton’s Depot, where Lucy and her family stayed before the siege started, was in the direct path of Union troops and was destroyed by them. But Lucy’s wartime home still stands in Vicksburg today, and one can imagine her as a child on the upper porch, looking out at the river.
Rice and Mary Ann, the McRaes’ two house slaves, gained their freedom. There are no records of what became of either of them after they left the McRae family. Some freed slaves moved to the North to look for work. Others went west to become homesteaders or even moved to other countries. Some blacks joined the military and served out West in the campaigns against Native Americans. But like whites, most blacks stayed and tried to rebuild their lives. Some continued to work for the families they had served—but for pay.
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