VICKSBURG OLD AND NEW
I should advise the traveler who is interested in cities not to enter
Vicksburg by the Alabama & Vicksburg Railroad, which has a dingy little
station in a sort of gulch, but by the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley
Railroad--a branch of the Illinois Central--which skirts the river bank
and flashes a large first impression of the city before the eyes of
alighting passengers.
The station itself is a pretty brick colonial building, backed by a neat
if tiny park maintained by the railroad company, and facing the levee
(pronounce "_lev_-vy"), along which the tracks are laid. Beyond the
tracks untidy landing places are scattered along the water front, with
here and there a tall, awkward, stern-wheel river steamer tied up,
looking rather like an old-fashioned New Jersey seacoast hotel, covered
with porches and jimcrack carving, painted white, embellished with a
cupola and a pair of tall, thin smokestacks, and set adrift in its old
age to masquerade in maritime burlesque.
At other points along the bank are moored a heterogeneous assortment of
shanty boats of an incredible and comic slouchiness. Some are nothing
but rafts made of water-soaked logs, bearing tiny shacks knocked
together out of driftwood and old patches of tin and canvas, but the
larger ones have barges, or the hulks of old launches, as their
foundation. These curious craft are moored in long lines to the
half-submerged willow and cottonwood trees along the bank, or to stakes
driven into the levee, or to the railroad ties, or to whatever objects,
ashore, may be made fast an old frayed rope or a piece of telephone
wire. Long, narrow planks, precariously propped, connect them with the
river bank, so that the men, women, children, dogs, and barnyard
creatures who inhabit them may pass to and fro. Some of the boats are
the homes of negro families, some of whites. On some, negro fish markets
are conducted, advertised by large catfish dangling from their posts and
railings.
Whether fishing for market, for personal use, or merely for the sake of
having an occupation involving a minimum of effort, the residents of
shanty boats--particularly the negroes--seem to spend most of their days
seated in drowsy attitudes, with fish poles in their hands. Their eyes
fall shut, their heads nod in the sun, their lines lag in the muddy
water; life is uneventful, pleasant, and warm.
When Porter's mortar fleet lay in the river, off Vicksburg, bombarding
the town, that river was the Mississippi, but though it looks the same
to-day as it did then, it is not the Mississippi now, but the Yazoo
River. This comes about through one of those freakish changes of course
for which the great stream has always been famous.
In the old days Vicksburg was situated upon one of the loops of a large
letter "S" formed by the Mississippi, but in 1876 the river cut through
a section of land and eliminated the loop upon which the town stood.
Fortunately, however, the Yazoo emptied into the Mississippi above
Vicksburg, and it was found possible, by digging a canal, to divert the
latter river from its course and lead its waters into the loop left dry
by the whim of the greater stream. Thus the river life, out of which
Vicksburg was born, and without which the place would lose its
character, was retained, and the wicked old Mississippi, which has
played rough pranks on men and cities since men and cities first
appeared upon its banks, was for once circumvented. This is but one item
from the record of grotesque tricks wrought by changes in the river's
course: a record of farms located at night on one side of the stream,
and in the morning on the other; of large tracts of land transferred
from State to State by a sudden switch of this treacherous fluid line of
boundary; of river boats crashing by night into dry land where yesterday
a deep stream flowed; of towns built up on river trade, utterly
dependent upon the river, yet finding themselves suddenly deserted by
it, like wives whose husbands disappear, leaving them withering,
helpless, and in want.
Where the upper Mississippi, above St. Louis, flows between tall bluffs
it attains a grandeur which one expects in mighty streams, but that is
not the part of the river which gets itself talked about in the
newspapers and in Congress, nor is it the part of the river one
involuntarily thinks of when the name Mississippi is mentioned. The
drama, the wonder, the mystery of the Mississippi are in the lower
river: the river of countless wooded islands, now standing high and dry,
now buried to the tree tops in swirling torrents of muddy water; the
river of black gnarled snags carried downstream to the Gulf with the
speed of motor boats; the river whose craft sail on a level with the
roofs of houses; the river of broken levees, of savage inundations.
The upper river has a beauty which is like that of some lovely, stately,
placid, well-behaved blond wife. She is conventional and correct. You
always know where to find her. The lower river is a temperamental
mistress. At one moment she is all sweetness, smiles and playfulness; at
the next vivid and passionate. Even when she is at her loveliest there
is always the possibility of sudden fury: of her rising in a rage,
breaking the furniture, wrecking the house--yes, and perhaps winding her
wicked cold arms about you in a final destroying embrace.
Being the "Gibraltar of the river" (albeit a Gibraltar of clay and not
of rock), Vicksburg does not suffer when floods come. Turn your back
upon the river, as you stand on the platform of the Yazoo & Mississippi
railroad station, and you may gather at a glance an impression of the
town piling up the hillside to the eastward.
The first buildings, occupying the narrow shelf of land at the water's
edge, are small warehouses, negro eating houses, dilapidated little
steamship offices, and all manner of shacks in want of paint and
repairs. From the station Mulberry Street runs obliquely up the hillside
to the south. This street, which forms the main thoroughfare to the
station, used to be occupied by wholesale houses, but has more lately
been given over largely to a frankly and prominently exposed district of
commercialized vice--negro and white. Not only is it at the very door of
Vicksburg, but it parallels, and is but one block distant from, the
city's main street.
Other streets, so steep as hardly to be passable, directly assault the
face of the hill, mounting abruptly to Washington Street, which runs on
a flat terrace at about the height of the top of the station roof, and
exposes to the view of the newly arrived traveler the unpainted wooden
backs of a number of frame buildings which, though they are but two or
three stories high in front, reach in some cases a height of five or six
stories at the rear, owing to the steepness of the hillside to which
they cling. The roof lines, side walls, windows, chimneys, galleries,
posts, and railings of these sad-looking structures are all
picturesquely out of plumb, and some idea of the general dilapidation
may be gathered from the fact that, one day, while my companion stood on
the station platform, drawing a picture of this scene, a brick chimney,
a portrait of which he had just completed, softly collapsed before our
eyes, for all the world like a sitter who, having held a pose too long,
faints from exhaustion.
A brief inspection of the life on the galleries of these foul old fire
traps reveals them as negro tenements; and, though they front on the
main street of Vicksburg, it should be explained that about here begins
the "nigger end" of Washington Street--the more prosperous portion of
the downtown section lying to the southward, where substantial brick
office buildings may be seen.
Between the ragged, bulging tenements above are occasional narrow gaps
through which are revealed cinematographic glimpses of street traffic;
and over the tenement roofs one catches sight of sundry other buildings,
these being of brick, and, though old, and in no way imposing, yet of a
more prosperous and self-respecting character than the nearer
structures.
Altogether, the scene, though it is one to delight an etcher, is not of
a character to inspire hope in the heart of a humanitarian, or an expert
on sanitation or fire prevention. Nor, indeed, would it achieve
completeness, even on the artistic side, were it not for its crowning
feature. Far off, over the roofs and above them, making an apex to the
composition, and giving to the whole picture a background of beauty and
of ancient dignity, rises the graceful white-columned cupola of
Vicksburg's old stone courthouse, partially obscured by a feathery
green tree top, hinting of space and foliage upon the summit of the
hill.
* * * * *
Pamphlets on Vicksburg, issued by railroad companies for the enticement
of tourists, give most of their space to the story of the campaign
leading to Grant's siege of Vicksburg and to descriptions of the various
operations in the siege--the battlefield, now a national military park,
being considered the city's chief object of interest.
Though I am not constitutionally enthusiastic about seeing battlefields,
I must admit that I found the field of Vicksburg engrossing. The siege
of a small city presents a comparatively simple and compact military
problem which is, therefore, comprehensible to the civilian mind, and in
addition to this the Vicksburg battlefield is splendidly preserved and
marked, so that the visitor may easily reconstruct the conflict.
The park, which covers the fighting area, forms a loose crescent-shaped
strip over the hills which surround the city, its points abutting on the
river above and below. The chief drives of the park parallel each other,
the inner one, Confederate Avenue, following, as nearly as the hills
permit, the city's line of defense, while the other, Union Avenue, forms
an outer semicircle and follows, in a similar manner, the trenches of
the attacking forces.
That the battlefield is so well preserved is due in part to man and in
part to Nature. Many of the hills of Warren County, in which Vicksburg
is situated, are composed of a curious soft limy clay, called marl,
which, normally, has not the solidity of soft chalk. Marse Harris
Dickson, who knows more about Vicksburg--and also about negroes, common
law, floods, funny stories, geology, and rivers--than any other man in
Mississippi, tells me that this marl was deposited by the river, in the
form of silt, centuries ago, and that it was later thrown up into hills
by volcanic action. He did not live in Vicksburg when this took place,
but deduces his facts from the discovery of the remains of shellfish in
the soil of the hills.
Whatever its geological origin, this soil has some very strange
characteristics. In composition it is neither stone nor sand, but a
cross between the two--brown and brittle. One can easily crush it to
dust in one's hand, in which form it has about the consistency of talcum
powder, and it may be added that when this brown powder is seized by the
winds and whirled about, Vicksburg becomes one of the most mercilessly
dusty cities on this earth.
On exposed slopes the marl washes very badly, forming great caving
gullies, but, curiously enough, where it is exposed perpendicularly it
does not wash, but slicks over on the outside, and stands almost as well
as soft sandstone, although you can readily dig into it with your
fingers.
Many of the highways leading in and out of the city pass between tall
walls of this peculiar soil, through deep cuts which a visitor might
naturally take for the result of careful grading by the road builders;
but Marse Harris Dickson tells me that the cuts are entirely the result
of erosion wrought by a hundred years of wheeled traffic.
So far as I know there is but one man who has witnessed this phenomenon
without being impressed. That man is Samuel Merwin. Merwin went down and
visited Marse Harris in Vicksburg, and saw all the sights. He was polite
about the battlefield, and the river, and the negro stories, and
everything else, until Marse Harris showed him how the highways had
eroded through the hills. That did not seem to impress him at all.
Moreover, instead of being tactful, he started telling about his trip to
China. In China, he said, there were similar formations, but, as the
civilization of China was much older than that of Vicksburg (fancy his
having said a thing like that!) the gorges over there had eroded to a
much greater extent. He said he had seen them three hundred feet deep.
The more Marse Harris tried to get him to say something a little bit
complimentary about the Vicksburg erosions, the more Merwin boasted
about China. He declared that the Vicksburg erosions didn't amount to a
hill of beans compared with what he could show Marse Harris if Marse
Harris would go with him to a certain point on the banks of the Wa Choo,
in the province of Lang Pang Si.
Evidently he harped on this until he touched not only his host's local
pride, but his pride of discovery. Before that, Marse Harris had been
content to stick around in Mississippi, with perhaps a little run down
to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, or up to Dogtail to see a break in the
levee, but after Merwin's talk about China he began to grow restless,
and it is generally said in Vicksburg that it was purely in order to
have something to tell Merwin about, the next time he saw him, that he
made his celebrated trip to the source of the Nile. As for Merwin, he
has never been invited back to Vicksburg, and it is to be observed that,
even to this day, Marse Harris, by nature of a sunny disposition, shows
signs of erosion of the spirit when China is mentioned.
It is apropos the battlefield that I mention the peculiarities of the
soil. Had the bare ground been exposed to the rains of a few years, the
details of redoubts, trenches, gun positions, saps, and all other
military works would have melted away. Fortunately, however, there is a
kind of tough, strong-rooted grass, called Bermuda grass, indigenous to
that part of the country, and this grass quickly covered the
battlefield, holding the soil together so effectually that all outlines
are practically embalmed. So, although those in charge of the park have
contributed not a little to its preservation--putting old guns in their
former places, perpetuating saps with concrete work, and placing white
markers on the hillsides, to show how far up those hillsides the
assaulting Union troops made their way in various historic charges--it
is due most of all to Nature that the Vicksburg battlefield so well
explains itself.
Could Grant and Pemberton look to-day upon the hills and valleys where
surged their six weeks' struggle for possession of the city, I doubt
that they would find any important landmark wanting, and it is certain
that they could not say, as Wellington did when he revisited Waterloo:
"They have spoiled my battlefield!"
Besides the old guns and the markers, the field is dotted over with
observation towers and all manner of memorials. Of the latter, the
marble pantheon erected by the State of Illinois, and the beautiful
marble and bronze memorial structure of the State of Iowa, are probably
the finest. The marble column erected by Wisconsin carries at its summit
a great bronze effigy of "Old Abe," the famous eagle, mascot of the
Wisconsin troops. Guides to the battlefield are prone to relate to
visitors--especially, I suspect, those whose accents betray a Northern
origin--how "Old Abe," the bird of battle, went home and disgraced
himself, after the war, by his ungentlemanly action in laying a setting
of eggs.
The handsomest monument to an individual which I saw upon the
battlefield was the admirable bronze bust of Major General Martin L.
Smith, C.S.A., and the one which appealed most to my imagination was
also a memorial to a Confederate soldier: Brigadier-General States
Rights Gist. Is there not something Roman in the thought that, thirty or
more years before the war, a southern father gave his new-born son that
name, dedicating him, as it were, to the cause of States Rights, and
that the son so dedicated gave his life in battle for that cause? The
name upon that stone made me better understand the depth of feeling that
existed in the South long years before the War, and gave me a clearer
comprehension of at least one reason why the South made such a gallant
fight.
* * * * *
Of more than fourscore national cemeteries in the United States, that
which stands among the hills and trees, overlooking the river, at the
northerly end of the military park, is one of the most beautiful, and
is, with the single exception of Arlington, the largest. It contains the
graves of nearly 17,000 Union soldiers lost in this
campaign--three-fourths of them "unknown"!
It is interesting to note that, because the surrender of Pemberton to
Grant occurred on July 4, that date has, in this region, associations
less happy than attach to it elsewhere, and that the Fourth has not been
celebrated in Vicksburg since the Civil War, except by the negroes, who
have taken it for their especial holiday. This reminds me, also, of the
fact that, throughout the South, Christmas, instead of the Fourth of
July, is celebrated with fireworks.