What Vicksburg Means to Me: Part 1

Ironclads Running the Batteries at Vicksburg

Abraham Lincoln called Vicksburg “the key to the war,” and his Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, labeled it “the nailhead that holds the South’s two halves together.” So it was that the Confederate States of America invested heavily in Vicksburg’s defense, while the Union invested even more heavily in bringing the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy” to its knees in what became a 16-month-long campaign defined by many battles and fought along many fronts. My father first sat me astride a Vicksburg cannon 69-years ago, and the sacred soil of Vicksburg continues to bear fruit in my heart as the scene of a great event in my Southern homeland and as the birthplace of my wife.

David Farragut

England, Germany, fifteen other nations, and the continent of Africa, were represented in Vicksburg’s antebellum population; and the city was praised for its beauty, culture, literacy, diversity, cleanliness, and prosperity. Even Vicksburg’s slaves—many of them anyway—lived better than they would have in other places. Joseph Davis (brother to the Confederate president), even encouraged his 365 slaves to pursue an education, assume managerial duties, and run their own judicial system.

The wealthy riverports of Vicksburg and Natchez (the latter had more millionaires than New York City) were pro-Unionist until Mississippi voted to secede. After his gunboats captured New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Natchez, Admiral David Farragut reluctantly obeyed Abraham Lincoln’s order to move his fleet upriver to the city of Vicksburg, a city he knew he couldn’t defeat. When Farragut demanded the city’s surrender, its military commander responded: “Mississippians don’t know, and refuse to learn, how to surrender to an enemy. If Commodore Farragut or Brigadier General Butler [Butler wasn’t present] can teach them, let them come and try.”

Shots were exchanged, but Farragut couldn’t elevate his cannon sufficiently to hit the higher parts of the city, so he soon returned to New Orleans. His fellow admiral and foster brother, David Dixon Porter, critiqued the absurdity of sending an unassisted Navy to capture Vicksburg: “Ships and mortar vessels…can not crawl up hills 300 feet high.”

David Dixon Porter

During the fall and winter of 1862, Admiral Porter, and Generals Sherman and Grant, floated downriver from Memphis to find the bluff-top city protected by swamps, cliffs, seasonal flooding, the mile-wide Mississippi, nine hilltop forts, 13 riverfront gun batteries, and eight miles of land-facing rifle pits and artillery batteries. Porter’s guns couldn’t hit Vicksburg, but his men could be killed by riflemen on the riverbank. To the horror of Abraham Lincoln and the nation’s newspapers, Grant spent the next six months undertaking a series of unlikely measures to capture the city. Some examples...

He channeled through a bend in the Mississippi in an effort to change its course, leaving Vicksburg high and dry. He tried to make Vicksburg irrelevant by dredging a ship channel through a series of Louisiana lakes. He nearly lost a fleet of gunboats when he sent them through a flooded forest in order to attack the city from the east. As hundreds died in these and other misadventures, an enraged Northern press portrayed Grant as a drunken imbecile. 

Neither accusation was accurate. Grant was modest, soft-spoken, tenacious, aggressive, and a quick learner. He realized that the North had far more troops than the South, but that it was running out of patience with the war, and this led him to sacrifice his men to the point that he came to be called “Grant the butcher.” He was also an occasional binge drinker whose friends kept liquor away from him when they could and kept other people away from him when they couldn’t. General Sherman—who suffered from clinical depression, paranoid delusions, and periods of emotional collapse—described his relationships with Grant as follows: “Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.”

PVT Orion P. Howe

Far more deadly than the Confederate defenses were enemies that the troops couldn’t see. At any given time during the cold and wet winter of 1862-63, over half of Union troops and sailors  were too sick to fight. Some were trapped in warships; some amidst the filth of livestock on overcrowded transport ships; and some in the levee-top encampments to which they had fled from floodwaters. When people died in these encampments, they were wrapped in blankets and buried underfoot from where, the earth being saturated, they often floated to the top. 

Dysentery, pneumonia, mumps, measles, scurvy, cholera, smallpox, typhoid, and tuberculosis, raged among tightly packed troops who lacked clean water and toilets. Lice were ubiquitous; some men suffered from gonorrhea or syphilis; few of the sick received adequate medical care; and many had to suffer outdoors. Even so, they were all better off than the thousands of sick and starving slaves who lay half-naked and hungry in the mud. Springtime warmth brought hope but with it yellow fever and malaria, diseases to which Northerners were more vulnerable than their Southern counterparts. General Sherman’s visiting nine-year-old son, Willie, joined the ranks of the dead despite Sherman’s assurance to worried Ohio relatives, “I have a healthy camp, and I have no fear of yellow or other fevers.”

13-inch Siege Mortar

In May, 1963, Grant undertook an amphibious invasion that wouldn’t be surpassed in size until D-Day, but even after his army was ashore below the city, he had to fight five battles to reach it. As he chased refugees, livestock, and a defeated rebel army into Vicksburg, Grant worried that in the absence of a quick victory, he was at risk of being trapped between the city’s defenses on the west and the army of General Joseph Johnston on the east. To avoid this, he ordered two all-out assaults in two days. These attacks cost many Union lives but didn’t compromise Vicksburg’s network of 19-foot-high earthen forts (which were themselves protected by seven-foot-deep trenches and a forest of abatis (see photo). Grant’s men were already angered over their losses when he further infuriated them by refusing a Confederate offer of a cease-fire that would have allowed them to retrieve their dead and wounded. As their injured begged for water and their dead bloated, blackened, and burst, Grant’s men accused him of getting them killed “for nothing.” He agreed to the cease-fire and said there would be no further assaults.

Abatis

Thus began a 47-day siege during which Union snipers worked two hour shifts, and coal miners tunneled beneath Union forts where they planted tons of explosives. Grant and Porter bombarded the city around the clock with, among other guns, 17,000-pound siege mortars that could lob shells more than two miles. Their guns hit every building in the city at least once. Dead mules, horses, and cattle clogged the streets, but human casualties remained low thanks to the city’s 500 hillside-tunnels. Diarists described the deadly beauty of 220-pound shells traveling in a high arch, trailing smoke in the daytime and becoming one with the stars at night. Vicksburg being encircled by artillery, shells often crossed paths en route to their targets, and inventive troops added to their arsenal by making mortars from the trunks of sweet gum trees. The following site has a working model: (https://starkvillecivilwararsenal.com/the-sweet-gum-mortar/).

As their city collapsed around them, a petition was created demanding that Grant allow the city’s women and children to escape. Vicksburg’s women refused to go, saying that they could withstand the trials of war as well or better as any man. Today’s women might have fled to save their children, but 19th century Americans were less protective. Grant even took his twelve-old-son, Fred, on the Vicksburg Campaign and kept him there even after Fred was shot in the leg during one battle and barely eluded capture in two others. It was also at Vicksburg that Private Orion P. Howe, a 14-year-old Ohio drummer boy—who had joined the army with his younger brother—received the Medal of Honor for completing a dangerous mission while seriously wounded.

Kitten Fricassee

When Vicksburg’s residents and defenders ran low on food, they ate mules, horses, dogs, cats, rodents, and even tree bark. One of the South’s most beautiful, literate, and diverse cities was down to a single newspaper, and it had to be printed on wallpaper.

After 47-days of hunger, terror, and death, Vicksburg’s Pennsylvania-born commander, John Pemberton, surrendered the city on July 4, 1863, amid baseless cries of treason. July 4 remained an occasion for mourning in Vicksburg until 1945, when the city renamed the day “The Carnival of the Confederacy.” Finally, in 1976, 113 years after its surrender, the day that America declared its independence from Britain in 1776 was again celebrated in Vicksburg.