CHAPTER 35

Vicksburg During the Trouble

WE used to plow past the lofty hill-city, Vicksburg, down-stream; but

we cannot do that now. A cut-off has made a country town of it, like

Osceola, St. Genevieve, and several others. There is currentless

water--also a big island--in front of Vicksburg now. You come down the

river the other side of the island, then turn and come up to the town;

that is, in high water: in low water you can't come up, but must land

some distance below it.

Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg's tremendous

war experiences; earthworks, trees crippled by the cannon balls,

cave-refuges in the clay precipices, etc. The caves did good service

during the six weeks' bombardment of the city--May 8 to July 4, 1863.

They were used by the non-combatants--mainly by the women and children;

not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion. They

were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicular clay bank, then

branched Y shape, within the hill. Life in Vicksburg, during the six

weeks was perhaps--but wait; here are some materials out of which to

reproduce it:--

Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three thousand

non-combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world--walled solidly

in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers and batteries;

hence, no buying and selling with the outside; no passing to and fro;

no God-speeding a parting guest, no welcoming a coming one; no printed

acres of world-wide news to be read at breakfast, mornings--a tedious

dull absence of such matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see

steamboats smoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing

toward the town--for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed;

no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no struggling over

bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen--all quiet

there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty, corn ten

dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound, rum a hundred dollars a

gallon; other things in proportion: consequently, no roar and racket of

drays and carriages tearing along the streets; nothing for them to

do, among that handful of non-combatants of exhausted means; at three

o'clock in the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured

tramp of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of

hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute: all in

a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery, the sky

is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming from soaring

bomb-shells, and a rain of iron fragments descends upon the city;

descends upon the empty streets: streets which are not empty a moment

later, but mottled with dim figures of frantic women and children

scurrying from home and bed toward the cave dungeons--encouraged by the

humorous grim soldiery, who shout 'Rats, to your holes!' and laugh.

The cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the iron

rain pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops;

silence follows, but the streets are still empty; the silence continues;

by-and-bye a head projects from a cave here and there and yonder, and

reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence still continuing, bodies follow

heads, and jaded, half smothered creatures group themselves about,

stretch their cramped limbs, draw in deep draughts of the grateful fresh

air, gossip with the neighbors from the next cave; maybe straggle off

home presently, or take a lounge through the town, if the stillness

continues; and will scurry to the holes again, by-and-bye, when the

war-tempest breaks forth once more.

There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers--merely the

population of a village--would they not come to know each other, after a

week or two, and familiarly; insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate

experiences of one would be of interest to all?

Those are the materials furnished by history. From them might not almost

anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg? Could

you, who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing it to the

imagination of another non-participant than could a Vicksburger who did

experience it? It seems impossible; and yet there are reasons why it

might not really be. When one makes his first voyage in a ship, it is

an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties;

novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person's

former experiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his

imagination and memory. By tongue or pen he can make a landsman live

that strange and stirring voyage over with him; make him see it all and

feel it all. But if he wait? If he make ten voyages in succession--what

then? Why, the thing has lost color, snap, surprise; and has become

commonplace. The man would have nothing to tell that would quicken a

landsman's pulse.

Years ago, I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants--a man

and his wife. Left to tell their story in their own way, those people

told it without fire, almost without interest.

A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues

eloquent for ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore

the novelty all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home

and into the ground; the matter became commonplace. After that, the

possibility of their ever being startlingly interesting in their talks

about it was gone. What the man said was to this effect:--

'It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week--to us,

anyway. We hadn't anything to do, and time hung heavy. Seven Sundays,

and all of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the

night, by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron.

At first we used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did

afterwards. The first time, I forgot the children, and Maria fetched

them both along. When she was all safe in the cave she fainted. Two or

three weeks afterwards, when she was running for the holes, one morning,

through a shell-shower, a big shell burst near her, and covered her all

over with dirt, and a piece of the iron carried away her game-bag of

false hair from the back of her head. Well, she stopped to get that

game-bag before she shoved along again! Was getting used to things

already, you see. We all got so that we could tell a good deal about

shells; and after that we didn't always go under shelter if it was a

light shower. Us men would loaf around and talk; and a man would say,

'There she goes!' and name the kind of shell it was from the sound of

it, and go on talking--if there wasn't any danger from it. If a

shell was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood

still;--uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn't safe to move. When it let

go, we went on talking again, if nobody hurt--maybe saying, 'That was a

ripper!' or some such commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe,

we would see a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead.

In that case, every fellow just whipped out a sudden, 'See you again,

gents!' and shoved. Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading

the streets, looking as cheerful as you please, and keeping an eye

canted up watching the shells; and I've seen them stop still when they

were uncertain about what a shell was going to do, and wait and make

certain; and after that they sa'ntered along again, or lit out for

shelter, according to the verdict. Streets in some towns have a litter

of pieces of paper, and odds and ends of one sort or another lying

around. Ours hadn't; they had _iron _litter. Sometimes a man

would gather up all the iron fragments and unbursted shells in his

neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monument in his front

yard--a ton of it, sometimes. No glass left; glass couldn't stand such

a bombardment; it was all shivered out. Windows of the houses

vacant--looked like eye-holes in a skull. _Whole _panes were as scarce

as news.

'We had church Sundays. Not many there, along at first; but by-and-bye

pretty good turnouts. I've seen service stop a minute, and everybody sit

quiet--no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then--and all the more so on

account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead; and

pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again.

Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful queer

combination--along at first. Coming out of church, one morning, we had

an accident--the only one that happened around me on a Sunday. I was

just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn't seen for a while,

and saying, 'Drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment; we've got

hold of a pint of prime wh--.' Whiskey, I was going to say, you know,

but a shell interrupted. A chunk of it cut the man's arm off, and left

it dangling in my hand. And do you know the thing that is going to stick

the longest in my memory, and outlast everything else, little and big, I

reckon, is the mean thought I had then? It was 'the whiskey _is saved_.'

And yet, don't you know, it was kind of excusable; because it was as

scarce as diamonds, and we had only just that little; never had another

taste during the siege.

'Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and close.

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. A child was born in one of those caves one night,

Think of that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk.

'Twice we had sixteen people in our cave; and a number of times we had a

dozen. Pretty suffocating in there. We always had eight; eight belonged

there. 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. One night a shell burst in front of the hole

and caved it in and stopped it up. It was lively times, for a while,

digging out. Some of us came near smothering. After that we made two

openings--ought to have thought of it at first.

'Mule meat. No, we only got down to that the last day or two. Of course

it was good; anything is good when you are starving.

This man had kept a diary during--six weeks? No, only the first six

days. The first day, eight close pages; the second, five; the third,

one--loosely written; the fourth, three or four lines; a line or two

the fifth and sixth days; seventh day, diary abandoned; life in terrific

Vicksburg having now become commonplace and matter of course.

The war history of Vicksburg has more about it to interest the general

reader than that of any other of the river-towns. It is full of variety,

full of incident, full of the picturesque. Vicksburg held out longer

than any other important river-town, and saw warfare in all its phases,

both land and water--the siege, the mine, the assault, the repulse, the

bombardment, sickness, captivity, famine.

The most beautiful of all the national cemeteries is here. Over the

great gateway is this inscription:--

“HERE REST IN PEACE 16,600 WHO DIED FOR THEIR COUNTRY IN THE YEARS 1861

TO 1865.”

The grounds are nobly situated; being very high and commanding a wide

prospect of land and river. They are tastefully laid out in broad

terraces, with winding roads and paths; and there is profuse adornment

in the way of semi-tropical shrubs and flowers,' and in one part is a

piece of native wild-wood, left just as it grew, and, therefore, perfect

in its charm. Everything about this cemetery suggests the hand of the

national Government. The Government's work is always conspicuous for

excellence, solidity, thoroughness, neatness. The Government does its

work well in the first place, and then takes care of it.

By winding-roads--which were often cut to so great a depth between

perpendicular walls that they were mere roofless tunnels--we drove out a

mile or two and visited the monument which stands upon the scene of the

surrender of Vicksburg to General Grant by General Pemberton. Its metal

will preserve it from the hackings and chippings which so defaced

its predecessor, which was of marble; but the brick foundations

are crumbling, and it will tumble down by-and-bye. It overlooks a

picturesque region of wooded hills and ravines; and is not unpicturesque

itself, being well smothered in flowering weeds. The battered remnant of

the marble monument has been removed to the National Cemetery.

On the road, a quarter of a mile townward, an aged colored man showed

us, with pride, an unexploded bomb-shell which has lain in his yard

since the day it fell there during the siege.

'I was a-stannin' heah, an' de dog was a-stannin' heah; de dog he went

for de shell, gwine to pick a fuss wid it; but I didn't; I says, “Jes'

make you'seff at home heah; lay still whah you is, or bust up de place,

jes' as you's a mind to, but I's got business out in de woods, I has!”'

Vicksburg is a town of substantial business streets and pleasant

residences; it commands the commerce of the Yazoo and Sunflower Rivers;

is pushing railways in several directions, through rich agricultural

regions, and has a promising future of prosperity and importance.

Apparently, nearly all the river towns, big and little, have made up

their minds that they must look mainly to railroads for wealth and

upbuilding, henceforth. They are acting upon this idea. The signs are,

that the next twenty years will bring about some noteworthy changes in

the Valley, in the direction of increased population and wealth, and in

the intellectual advancement and the liberalizing of opinion which go

naturally with these. And yet, if one may judge by the past, the river

towns will manage to find and use a chance, here and there, to cripple

and retard their progress. They kept themselves back in the days of

steamboating supremacy, by a system of wharfage-dues so stupidly graded

as to prohibit what may be called small _retail _traffic in freights and

passengers. Boats were charged such heavy wharfage that they could not

afford to land for one or two passengers or a light lot of freight.

Instead of encouraging the bringing of trade to their doors, the towns

diligently and effectively discouraged it. They could have had many

boats and low rates; but their policy rendered few boats and high

rates compulsory. It was a policy which extended--and extends--from New

Orleans to St. Paul.

We had a strong desire to make a trip up the Yazoo and the Sunflower--an

interesting region at any time, but additionally interesting at this

time, because up there the great inundation was still to be seen in

force--but we were nearly sure to have to wait a day or more for a New

Orleans boat on our return; so we were obliged to give up the project.

Here is a story which I picked up on board the boat that night. I insert

it in this place merely because it is a good story, not because it

belongs here--for it doesn't. It was told by a passenger--a college

professor--and was called to the surface in the course of a general

conversation which began with talk about horses, drifted into talk

about astronomy, then into talk about the lynching of the gamblers

in Vicksburg half a century ago, then into talk about dreams and

superstitions; and ended, after midnight, in a dispute over free trade

and protection.