CHAPTER L.

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.