IN AND ABOUT VICKSBURG.
On the afternoon of the third day we came in sight of Vicksburg,—four
hundred miles from Memphis by water, although not more than half that
distance in a straight line, so voluminous are the coils of the Great
River.
The town, seen across the intervening tongue of land as we approached
it,—situated on a high bluff, with the sunlight on its hills and roofs
and fortifications,—was a fine sight. It diverted my attention, so that
I looked in vain for the famous canal cut across the tongue of land,
which pushes out from the Louisiana shore, and about which the river
makes an extensive curve.
“You couldn’t have found it without looking mighty close,” said a native
of the country. “It’s a little small concern. The Yankees made just a
big ditch to let the water through, thinking it would wash out, and make
a cut-off. If it had, Farragut’s fleet could have got through, and
Vicksburg would have been flanked, high and dry. But, in the first
place, they did not begin the ditch where the current strikes the shore;
in the next place the water fell before the ditch was completed, and
never run through it at all.”
On the opposite shore, overlooking this peninsula and the winding river,
stands Vicksburg, on the brow of a line of bluffs which sweep down from
the north, here first striking the Mississippi. In this ridge the town
is set,—to compare gross things with fine,—like a diamond in the back of
a ring. It slopes up rapidly from the landing, and is built of brick and
wood, not beautiful on a nearer view.
The hills are cut through, and their sides sliced off, by the deeply
indented streets of the upper portion of the city. Here and there are
crests completely cut around, isolated, and left standing like yellowish
square sugar-loaves with irregular tops. These excavations afforded the
inhabitants fine facilities for burrowing during the siege. The base of
the hills and the cliff-like banks of the dug streets present a most
curious appearance, being completely honey-combed with caves, which
still remain, a source of astonishment to the stranger, who half fancies
that a colony of large-sized bank-swallows has been industriously at
work there.
The majority of the caves were mere “gopher-holes,” as the soldiers call
them. Others were quite spacious and aristocratic. The entrance was
usually large enough to admit a person stooping slightly; but within,
the roofs of the best caves were hollowed sufficiently to permit a man
to stand upright. The passage by which you entered commonly branched to
the right and left, forming with its two arms a sort of letter Y, or
letter T.
Every family had its cave. But only a few of the more extensive ones
were permanently occupied. “Ours” (said a lady resident) “was very large
and quite comfortable. There was first the entrance, under a pointed
arch; then a long cross-gallery. Boards were laid down the whole length
and covered with carpets. Berths were put up at the sides, where we
slept very well. At first we did not take off our dresses when we lay
down; but in a little while we grew accustomed to undressing and
retiring regularly. In the morning we found our clothes quite wet from
the natural dampness of the cave. Over the entrance there was built a
little arbor, where our cooking was done, and where we sat and talked
with our neighbors in the daytime, when there were no shells dropping.
In the night the cave was lighted up. We lived this sort of life six
weeks.”
But few buildings were destroyed by the shells. Those that were
partially injured had generally been patched up. After the twenty-sixth
of May, when the bombardment became almost incessant, being continued
night and day, it was estimated that six thousand shells were thrown
into the city by the mortars on the river-side every twenty-four hours.
Grant’s siege guns, in the rear of the bluffs, dropped daily four
thousand more along the Rebel lines. The little damage done by so great
a bombardment is a matter of surprise. The soldiers had also their
“gopher-holes,” and laughed at the projectiles. Of the women and
children in the town, only three were killed and twelve injured.
Both citizens and troops suffered more from the scarcity of provisions
than from the abundance of shells. On both the river and land sides the
city was completely cut off from supplies. The garrison was put upon
fourteen-and-a-half-ounce rations; and in the town, mule-meat, and even
dog-meat, became luxuries.
The day after my arrival I joined a small equestrian party, got up by
Lieutenant E—— for my benefit, and rode out to visit the fortifications
behind the city. We first came to the line of works thrown up by our
troops after the capitulation. Exterior to these, zigzagging along the
eastern brow of the bluffs, from the Mississippi, below Vicksburg, to
the Yazoo River on the North, a distance of near fifteen miles, were the
original Rebel defences, too extensive to be manned by less than a large
army.
Three miles northeast of the city we passed Fort Hill, in the “crater”
of which, after the Rebel bastions had been successfully mined and blown
up, occurred one of the most desperate fights that marked the siege.
Pushed up dangerously near to the Rebel position, is the advanced
Federal line. Between the two, a little way down the slope from Fort
Hill, is the spot rendered historic by the interview which terminated
the long struggle for the key to the Mississippi. There, in full view of
the confronting armies, the two commanding generals met under an
oak-tree, and had their little talk.
Every vestige of the tree, root and branch, had long since
disappeared,—cut up, broken up, dug up, and scattered over the country
in the form of relics; and we found on the spot a monument, which bids
fair to have a similar fate.
This was originally a neat granite shaft, erected by a private
subscription among officers and soldiers of the national army, and
dedicated on July 4th, 1864, the first anniversary of the surrender of
the city. It bears the following inscription:—
SITE OF
INTERVIEW BETWEEN
MAJOR-GENERAL GRANT, U. S. A.,
AND
LIEUTENANT-GENERAL PEMBERTON,
JULY 4,
1863.
Nothing certainly could be more simple and modest. Not a syllable is
there to wound the sensibilities of a fallen foe. Yet, since the close
of the war, when the returning Confederates first obtained access to
this monument, it had been shamefully mutilated. The fact that it was
never injured before, and the circumstance that the eagle and shield of
the escutcheon surmounting the inscription had been nearly obliterated
by persistent battering and grinding, showed that no mere relic-hunters
had been hammering here, but that the mischief had been done by some
enemy’s hand. The shaft was enclosed by a handsome iron fence, which we
found broken and partly thrown down.
From the monument we rode northward over ridges crowned with zigzag
fortifications, around steep crests and slopes, and past deep ravines
green with tangled cane-brakes,—a broken and wild region; crossing over
through woods and hilly cotton-fields to the western brow of the bluffs,
where Sherman made his unsuccessful assault in the gloomy last days of
1862.
We reined up our horses on a commanding point, and looked down upon the
scene of the battle. Away on our left was the Mississippi, its bold
curve sweeping in from the west, and doubling southward toward the city.
Before us, under the bluff, was the bottom across which our forces
charged, through the bristling abatis and their terrible entanglements,
and in the face of a murderous fire captured the Rebel rifle-pits,—a
most heroic, bloody, but worse than useless work.
Finding a road that wound down the steep hill-sides, we galloped through
the cotton-fields of the bottom to Chickasaw Bayou, which bounded them
on the west,—a small stream flowing down through swamps and lagoons,
from the Yazoo, and emptying into the Mississippi below the
battle-field. We rode along its bank, and found one of the bridges by
which our forces had crossed. Beyond were ancient woods, sombre and
brown, bearded with long pendant moss.
Returning across the bottom, the Lieutenant guided us to three prominent
elevations in the midst of the plain, which proved to be Indian mounds
of an interesting character. The largest was thirty feet in height, and
one hundred and fifty feet across the base. Leaving the ladies in the
saddle, the Lieutenant and myself hitched our horses to a bush on one of
the smaller mounds, and entered an excavation which he had assisted in
making on a former visit.
We found the earth full of human bones and antique pottery. A little
digging exposed entire skeletons sitting upright, in the posture in
which they had been buried,—who knows how many centuries before? Who
were these ancient people, over whose unknown history the past had
closed, as the earth had closed over their bodies? Perhaps these
burial-mounds marked the scene of some great battle on the very spot
where the modern fight took place.
We found the surface of the mound, washed by the storms of centuries,
speckled with bits of bones, yellowish, decayed, and often friable to
the touch. Fragments of pottery were also exposed, ornamented in a
variety of styles, showing that this ancient people was not without rude
arts.
The cotton-fields on the bluffs and in the bottom were cultivated by a
colony of freedmen, whose village of brown huts we passed, on the broad
hill-side above the river, as we returned to the city.
The ride back over the western brow of the bluffs was one to be
remembered. The sun was setting over the forests and plains of
Louisiana, which lay dark on the horizon, between the splendid sky and
the splendid, wide-spreading river reflecting it. Every cloud, every
fugitive fleece, was saturated with fire. The river was a flood of
molten gold. The ever-varying glory seemed prolonged for our sakes. The
last exquisite tints had scarcely faded, leaving the river dark and
melancholy, sweeping between its solitary shores, when we left the
crests, with the half-moon sailing in a thinly-clouded sky above our
heads, and descended, by the deep-cut, narrow streets, and through the
open gates at the breastworks, into the city.
The next day, in company with Major-General Wood, in command of the
Department of Mississippi, I visited the fortifications below Vicksburg.
For a mile and a half we rode along beside banks perforated with
“gopher-holes” dug by the Rebel soldiers, and lines of rifle-pits, which
consisted often of a mere trench cut across the edge of a crest. These
were the river-side defences. The real fortifications commenced with a
strong fort constructed on a commanding bluff. This did not abut on the
river, as maps I had seen, and descriptions I had read, had led me to
expect. Below the city a tract of low bottom-land opens between the
river and the bluffs, of such a nature that no very formidable attack
was to be apprehended in that quarter. Standing upon the first redan, we
saw a mile or two of low land and tangled and shaggy cypress swamps
intervening between us and the glimpses of shining light which indicated
the southward course of the Mississippi.
In this excursion, as in that of the previous day, I noticed on every
side practical answers to the question, “Will the freedmen work?” In
every broken field, in every available spot on the rugged crests, was
the negro’s little cotton patch.
Riding through the freedmen’s quarter below the town the General and I
called at a dozen or more different cabins, putting to every person we
talked with the inquiry,—how large a proportion of the colored people he
knew were shiftless characters. We got very candid replies: the common
opinion being that about five out of twenty still had a notion of living
without work. Yet, curiously enough, not one would admit that _he_ was
one of the five,—every man and woman acknowledging that labor was a
universal duty and necessity.