The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

by Shelby Foote

  Life in the trenches across the way—though the occupants did not call them that; they called them “ditches”—was at once more sedentary and more active. With their own 102 guns mostly silent and Grant’s opposing 220 roaring practically all the time, they did nearly as much digging as the bluecoats, the difference being that they did it mainly in the same place, time after time, repairing damages inflicted by the steady rain of shells. Nor were they any less inventive. “Thunder barrels,” for example—powder-filled hogsheads, fuzed at the bung—were found to be quite effective when rolled downhill into the enemy parallels and approaches. Similarly, such large naval projectiles as failed to detonate, either in the air or on contact with the ground, could be dug up, re-fuzed, and used in the same fashion to discourage the blue diggers on the slopes. However, despite such violent distractions, after a couple of weeks of spadework the two lines were within clod-tossing distance of each other at several points, and this resulted in an edgy sort of existence for the soldiers of both sides, as if they were spending their days and nights at the wrong end of a shooting gallery or in a testing chamber for explosives. “Fighting by hand grenades was all that was possible at such close quarters,” a Confederate was to recall. “As the Federals had the hand grenades and we had none, we obtained our supply by using such of theirs as failed to explode, or by catching them as they came over the parapet and hurling them back.”

  Resistance under these circumstances implied a high state of morale, and such was indeed the case. Grant’s heavy losses in his two assaults—inflicted at so little cost to the defenders that, until they looked out through the lifting smoke and saw the opposite hillsides strewn with the rag-doll shapes of the Union dead, they could scarcely believe a major effort had been made—convinced them that the Yankees could never take the place by storm. What was more, they had faith in “Old Joe” Johnston, believing that he would raise the siege as soon as he got his troops assembled off beyond the blue horizon, whereupon the two gray forces would combine and turn the tables on the besiegers. Until then, as they saw it, all that was needed was firmness against the odds, and they stood firm. Thanks to Pemberton’s foresight, which included pulling corn along the roadside and driving livestock ahead of the army during its march from the Big Black, food so far was more plentiful inside the Confederate lines than it was beyond them. The people there were the first to feel the pinch of hunger; for the Federals, coming along behind the retreating graybacks, had consumed what little remained while waiting for roads to be opened to their new base on the Yazoo. “The soldiers ate up everything the folks had for ten miles around,” a Union private wrote home. “They are now of necessity compelled to come here and ask for something to live upon, and they have discovered that they have the best success when the youngest and best-looking one in the family comes to plead their case, and they have some very handsome women here.” This humbling of their pride did not displease him; it seemed to him no more than they deserved. “They were well educated and rich before their niggers ran away,” he added, but adversity had brought them down in the world. “If I was to meet them in Illinois I should think they were born and brought up there.”

  Whether this last was meant as a compliment, and if so to whom, he did not say. But at least these people beyond the city’s bristling limits were not being shot at; which was a great deal more than could be said of those within the gun-studded belt that girdled the bluff Vicksburg had been founded on, forty-odd years ago, by provision of the last will and testament of the pioneer farmer and Methodist parson Newitt Vick. In a sense, however, the bluff was returning to an earlier destiny. All that had been here when Vick arrived were the weed-choked ruins of a Spanish fort, around which the settlement had grown in less than two generations into a bustling town of some 4500 souls, mostly devoted to trade with planters in the lower Yazoo delta but also plagued by flatboat men on the way downriver from Memphis, who found it a convenient place for letting off what they called “a load of steam” that would not wait for New Orleans. As it turned out, though, the ham-fisted boatmen with knives in their boots and the gamblers with aces and derringers up their sleeves were mild indeed compared to what was visited upon them by the blue-clad host sent against them by what had lately been their government. Now the bluff was a fort again, on a scale beyond the most flamboyant dreams of the long-departed Spaniards, and the residents spent much of their time, as one of them said, watching the incoming shells “rising steadily and shiningly in great parabolic curves, descending with ever-increasing swiftness, and falling with deafening shrieks and explosions.” The “ponderous fragments” flew everywhere, he added, thickening the atmosphere of terror until “even the dogs seemed to share the general fear. On hearing the descent of a shell, they would dart aside [and] then, as it exploded, sit down and howl in a pitiful manner.” Children, on the other hand, observed the uproar with wide-eyed evident pleasure, accepting it as a natural phenomenon, like rain or lightning, unable to comprehend—as the dogs, for example, so obviously did—that men could do such things to one another and to them. “How is it possible you live here?” a woman who had arrived to visit her soldier husband just before the siege lines tightened asked a citizen, and was told: “After one is accustomed to the change, we do not mind it. But becoming accustomed: that is the trial.” Some took it better than others, in or out of uniform. There was for instance a Frenchman, “a gallant officer who had distinguished himself in several severe engagements,” who was “almost unmanned” whenever one of the huge mortar projectiles fell anywhere near him. Chided by friends for this reaction, he would reply: “I no like ze bomb: I cannot fight him back!” Neither could anyone else “fight him back,” least of all the civilians, many of whom took refuge in caves dug into the hillsides. Some of these were quite commodious, with several rooms, and the occupants brought in chairs and beds and even carpets to add to the comfort, sleeping soundly or taking dinner unperturbed while the world outside seemed turned to flame and thunder. “Prairie Dog Village,” the blue cannoneers renamed the city on the bluff, while from the decks of ironclads and mortar rafts on the great brown river, above and below, and from the semicircular curve of eighty-nine sand-bagged battery emplacements on the landward side, they continued to pump their steel-packaged explosives into the checkerboard pattern of its streets and houses.

  Like the men in the trenches, civilians of both sexes and all ages were convinced that their tormentors could never take Vicksburg by storm, and whatever their fright they had no intention of knuckling under to what they called the bombs. For them, too, Johnston was the one bright hope of deliverance. Old Joe would be coming soon, they assured each other; all that was needed was to hold on till he completed his arrangements; then, with all the resources of the Confederacy at his command, he would come swooping over the eastern horizon and down on the Yankee rear. But presently, as time wore on and Johnston did not come, they were made aware of a new enemy. Hunger. By mid-June, though the garrison had been put first on half and then on quarter rations of meat, the livestock driven into the works ahead of the army back in May had been consumed, and Pemberton had his foragers impress all the cattle in the city. This struck nearer home than even the Union shells had done, for it was no easy thing for a family with milk-thirsty children to watch its one cow being led away to slaughter by a squad of ragged strangers. Moreover, the army’s supply of bread was running low by now, and the commissary was directed to issue instead equal portions of rice and flour, four ounces of each per man per day, supplementing a quarter-pound of meat that was generally stringy or rancid or both. When these grains ran low, as they soon did, the experiment was tried of baking bread from dough composed of equal parts of corn and dried peas, ground up together until they achieved a gritty consistency not unlike cannon powder. “It made a nauseous composition,” one who survived the diet was to recall with a shudder, “as the corn meal cooked in half the time the peas meal did, so the stuff was half raw.… It had the properties of india-rubber, and was wors
e than leather to digest.” Soon afterwards came the crowning indignity. With the last cow and hog gone lowing and squealing under the sledge and cleaver, still another experiment was tried: the substitution of mule meat for beef and bacon. Though it was issued, out of respect for religious and folk prejudices, “only to those who desired it,” Pemberton was gratified to report that both officers and men considered it “not only nutritious, but very palatable, and in every way preferable to poor beef.” So he said; but soldiers and civilians alike found something humiliating, not to say degrading, about the practice. “The rebels don’t starve with success,” a Federal infantryman observed jokingly from beyond the lines about this time. “I think that if I had nothing to eat I’d starve better than they do.” Vicksburg’s residents and defenders might well have agreed, especially when mule meat was concerned. Even if a man refused to eat such stuff himself, he found it disturbing to live among companions who did not. It was enough to diminish even their faith in Joe Johnston, who seemed in point of fact a long time coming.

  Though at the outset the Virginian had sounded vigorous and purposeful in his assurance of assistance, Pemberton himself by now had begun to doubt the outcome of the race between starvation and delivery. “I am trying to gather a force which may attempt to relieve you. Hold out,” Johnston wrote on May 19, and six days later he made this more specific: “Bragg is sending a division. When it comes, I will move to you. Which do you think is the best route? How and where is the enemy encamped? What is your force?” Receiving this last on May 29—the delay was not extreme, considering that couriers to and from the city had to creep by darkness through the Federal lines, risking capture every foot of the way—the Vicksburg commander replied as best he could to his superior’s questions as to Grant’s dispositions and strength. “My men are in good spirits, awaiting your arrival,” he added. “You may depend on my holding the place as long as possible.” After waiting nine days and receiving no answer, he asked: “When may I expect you to move, and in what direction?” Three more days he waited, and still there was no reply. “I am waiting most anxiously to know your intentions,” he repeated. “I have heard nothing from you since [your dispatch of] May 25. I shall endeavor to hold out as long as we have anything to eat.” Three days more went by, and then on June 13—two weeks and a day since any word had reached him from the world outside—he received a message dated May 29. “I am too weak to save Vicksburg,” Johnston told him. “Can do no more than attempt to save you and your garrison. It will be impossible to extricate you unless you co-operate and we make mutually supporting movements. Communicate your plans and suggestions, if possible.” This was not only considerably less than had been expected in the way of help; it also seemed to indicate that Johnston did not realize how tightly the Union cordon was drawn about Vicksburg’s bluff. In effect, the meager trickle of dispatches left Pemberton in a position not unlike that of a man who calls on a friend to make a strangler turn loose of his throat, only to have the friend inquire as to the strangler’s strength, the position of his thumbs, the condition of the sufferer’s windpipe, and just what kind of help he had in mind. So instead of “plans and suggestions,” Vicksburg’s defender tried to communicate some measure of the desperation he and his soldiers were feeling. “The enemy has placed several heavy guns in position against our works,” he replied on June 15, “and is approaching them very nearly by sap. His fire is almost continuous. Our men have no relief; are becoming much fatigued, but are still in pretty good spirits. I think your movement should be made as soon as possible. The enemy is receiving reinforcements. We are living on greatly reduced rations, but I think sufficient for twenty days yet.”

  Having thus placed the limit of Vicksburg’s endurance only one day beyond the Fourth of July—now strictly a Yankee holiday—Pemberton followed this up, lest Johnston fail to sense the desperation implied, with a more outspoken message four days later: “I hope you will advance with the least possible delay. My men have been thirty-four days and nights in the trenches, without relief, and the enemy within conversation distance. We are living on very reduced rations, and, as you know, are entirely isolated.” He closed by asking bluntly, “What aid am I to expect from you?” This time the answer, if vague, was prompt. On June 23 a courier arrived with a dispatch written only the day before. “Scouts report the enemy fortifying toward us and the roads blocked,” Johnston declared. “If I can do nothing to relieve you, rather than surrender the garrison, endeavor to cross the river at the last moment if you and General Taylor communicate.” To Pemberton this seemed little short of madness. Taylor had made his gesture against Young’s Point and Milliken’s Bend more than two weeks ago; by now he was all the way down the Teche, intent on menacing New Orleans. But that was by no means the worst of Johnston’s oversights, which was to ignore the presence of the Union navy. The bluejacket gun crews would have liked nothing better than a chance to try their marksmanship on a makeshift flotilla of skiffs, canoes, and rowboats manned by the half-starved tatterdemalions they had been probing for at long range all these weeks. Besides, even if the boats required had been available, which they were not, there was the question of whether the men in the trenches were in any condition for such a strenuous effort. They looked well enough to a casual eye, for all their rags and hollow-eyed gauntness, but it was observed that they tired easily under the mildest exertion and could serve only brief shifts when shovel work was called for. The meager diet was beginning to tell. A Texas colonel reported that many of his men had “swollen ankles and symptoms of incipient scurvy.” By late June, nearly half the garrison was on the sick list or in hospital. If Pemberton could not see what this meant, a letter he received at this time—June 28: exactly one week short of the date he had set, two weeks ago, as the limit of Vicksburg’s endurance—presumed to define it for him in unmistakable terms. Signed “Many Soldiers,” the letter called attention to the fact that the ration now had been reduced to “one biscuit and a small bit of bacon per day,” and continued:

  The emergency of the case demands prompt and decided action on your part. If you can’t feed us, you had better surrender us, horrible as the idea is, than suffer this noble army to disgrace themselves by desertion. I tell you plainly, men are not going to lie here and perish, if they do love their country dearly. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and hunger will compel a man to do almost anything.… This army is now ripe for mutiny, unless it can be fed. Just think of one small biscuit and one or two mouthfuls of bacon per day. General, please direct your inquiries in the proper channel, and see if I have not stated the stubborn facts, which had better be heeded before we are disgraced.

  “Grant is now deservedly the hero,” Sherman wrote home in early June, adding characteristically—for his dislike of reporters was not tempered by any evidence of affection on their part, either for himself or for Grant, with whom, as he presently said, “I am a second self”—that his friend was being “belabored with praise by those who a month ago accused him of all the sins in the calendar, and who next will turn against him if so blows the popular breeze. Vox populi, vox hum-bug.”

  In point of fact, however, once the encompassing lines had been drawn, the journalists could find little else to write about that had not been covered during the first week of the siege. And it was much the same for the soldiers, whose only diversion was firing some fifty to one hundred rounds of ammunition a day, as required by orders. Across the way—though the Confederates lacked even this distraction, being under instructions to burn no powder needlessly—the main problem, or at any rate the most constant one, was hunger; whereas for the Federals it was boredom. “The history of a single day was the history of all the others,” an officer was to recall. Different men had different ways of trying to hasten the slow drag of time. Sherman, for instance, took horseback rides and paid off-duty visits to points of interest roundabout, at least one of which resulted in a scene he found discomforting, even painful. Learning that the mother of one of his former Louisia
na Academy cadets was refugeeing in the neighborhood—she had come all the way from Plaquemine Parish to escape the attentions of Butler and Banks, only to run spang into Grant and Sherman—he rode over to tender his respects and found her sitting on her gallery with about a dozen women visitors. He introduced himself, inquired politely after her son, and was told that the young man was besieged in Vicksburg, a lieutenant of artillery. When the general went on to ask for news of her husband, whom he had known in the days before the war, the woman suddenly burst into tears and cried out in anguish: “You killed him at Bull Run, where he was fighting for his country!” Sherman hastily denied that he had “killed anybody at Bull Run,” which was literally true, but by now all the other women had joined the chorus of abuse and lamentation. This, he said long afterwards, “made it most uncomfortable for me, and I rode away.”