The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (83 page)

One item he would have liked more of was trained engineers. Only two such officers were serving in that capacity now in his whole army. However, as one of them afterwards declared, this problem was solved by the “native good sense and ingenuity” of the troops, Middle Western farm boys for the most part, who showed as much aptitude for such complicated work as they had shown for throwing bridges over creeks and bayous during the march that brought them here. According to the same officer, “Whether a battery was to be constructed by men who had never built one before, [or] a sap-roller made by those who had never heard the name … it was done, and after a few trials well done.” Before long, a later observer remarked, “those who had cut wood only for stoves would be speaking fluently of gabions and fascines; men who had patiently smoothed earth so that radishes might grow better would be talking affectionately of terrepleins for guns.” In all of
this they were inspired by the same bustling energy and quick adaptability on the part of the generals who led them; for one thing that characterized Grant’s army was the youth of its commanders. McClernand, who was fifty-one, was the only general officer past fifty. Of the twenty-one corps and division commanders assigned to the Army of the Tennessee in the course of the campaign, the average age was under forty. And that promotion had been based on merit was indicated by the fact that the average age of the nine major generals was as low as that of the dozen brigadiers; indeed, excepting McClernand, it was better than one year lower. Moreover, nine of these twenty-one men were older than Grant himself, and this too was part of the reason for his confidence in himself and in the army which had come of age, so to speak, under his care and tutelage. He considered it more than a match for anything the Confederates could bring against him—even under Joe Johnston, whose abilities he respected highly. One day a staff officer expressed the fear that Johnston was planning to fight his way into Vicksburg in order to help Pemberton stage a breakout; but Grant did not agree. “No,” he said. “We are the only fellows who want to get in there. The rebels who are in now want to get out, and those who are out want to stay out. If Johnston tries to cut his way in we will let him do it, and then see that he don’t get out. You say he has 30,000 men with him? That will give us 30,000 more prisoners than we now have.”

This was not to say that the two repulsed assaults had taught him nothing. They had indeed, if only by way of confirming a first impression that the rebel works were formidable. One officer, riding west on the Jackson road, had found himself confronted by “a long line of high, rugged, irregular bluffs, clearly cut against the sky, crowned with cannon which peered ominously from embrasures to the right and left as far as the eye could see.” Beyond an almost impenetrable tangle of timber felled on the forward slopes, “lines of heavy rifle pits, surmounted with head-logs, ran along the bluffs, connecting fort with fort, and filled with veteran infantry.” The approaches, he said, “were frightful enough to appall the stoutest heart.” Sherman agreed, especially after the two assaults which had cost the army more than four thousand casualties. “I have since seen the position at Sevastopol,” he wrote years later, “and without hesitation I declare that at Vicksburg to have been the more difficult of the two.” Skillfully constructed, well sited, and prepared for a year against the day of investment, the fortifications extended for seven miles along commanding ridges and were anchored at both extremities to the lip of the sheer 200-foot bluff, north and south of the beleaguered city. Forts, redoubts, salients, redans, lunets, and bastions had been erected or dug at irregular intervals along the line, protected by overlapping fields of fire and connected by a complex of trenches, which in turn were mutually supporting. There simply was no easy way to get at the defenders. Moreover, Grant’s three-to-one
numerical advantage was considerably offset, not only by the necessity for protecting his rear from possible attacks by the army Johnston was assembling to the east, but also by the fact that, because of the vagaries of the up-ended terrain, his line of contravallation had to be more than twice the length of the line he was attempting to confront. “There is only one way to account for the hills of Vicksburg,” a Confederate soldier had said a year ago, while helping to survey the present works. “After the Lord of Creation had made all the big mountains and ranges of hills, He had left on His hands a large lot of scraps. These were all dumped at Vicksburg in a waste heap.” One of Grant’s two professional engineers was altogether in agreement, pronouncing the Confederate position “rather an intrenched camp than a fortified place, owing much of its strength to the difficult ground, obstructed by fallen trees to its front, which rendered rapidity of movement and
ensemble
in an assault impossible.”

Yet even this ruggedness had its compensations. Although the hillsides, as one who climbed them said, “were often so steep that their ascent was difficult to a footman unless he aided himself with his hands,” the many ravines provided excellent cover for the besiegers, and Grant had specified in his investment order: “Every advantage will be taken of the natural inequalities of the ground to gain positions from which to start mines, trenches, or advance batteries.” With the memory of slaughter fresh in their minds as a result of their two repulses, the men dug with a will. Knowing little or nothing at the outset of the five formal stages of a siege—the investment, the artillery attack, the construction of parallels and approaches, the breaching by artillery or mines, and the final assault—they told one another that Grant, having failed to go over the rebel works, had decided to go under them instead. Fortunately the enemy used his artillery sparingly, apparently conserving ammunition for use in repelling major assaults, but snipers were quick to shoot
at targets of opportunity: in which connection a Federal major was to recall that “a favorite amusement of the soldiers was to place a cap on the end of a ramrod and raise it just above the head-logs, betting on the number of bullets which would pass through it within a given time.” Few things on earth appealed to them more, as humor, than the notion of some butternut marksman flaunting his skill when the target was something less than flesh and blood. Mostly, though, they dug and took what rest they could, sweating in their wool uniforms and cursing the heat even more than they did the snipers. Soon they were old hands at siege warfare. “The excitement … has worn away,” a lieutenant wrote home from the trenches in early June, “and we have settled down to our work as quietly and as regularly as if we were hoeing corn or drawing bills in chancery.”

Life in the trenches across the way—though the occupants did not call them that; they called them “ditches”—was at once more sedentary and more active. With their own 102 guns mostly silent and Grant’s opposing 220 roaring practically all the time, they did nearly as much digging as the bluecoats, the difference being that they did it mainly in the same place, time after time, repairing damages inflicted by the steady rain of shells. Nor were they any less inventive. “Thunder barrels,” for example—powder-filled hogsheads, fuzed at the bung—were found to be quite effective when rolled downhill into the enemy parallels and approaches. Similarly, such large naval projectiles as failed to detonate, either in the air or on contact with the ground, could be dug up, re-fuzed, and used in the same fashion to discourage the blue diggers on the slopes. However, despite such violent distractions, after a couple of weeks of spadework the two lines were within clod-tossing distance of each other at several points, and this resulted in an edgy sort of existence for the soldiers of both sides, as if they were spending their days and nights at the wrong end of a shooting gallery or in a testing chamber for explosives. “Fighting by hand grenades was all that was possible at such close quarters,” a Confederate was to recall. “As the Federals had the hand grenades and we had none, we obtained our supply by using such of theirs as failed to explode, or by catching them as they came over the parapet and hurling them back.”

Resistance under these circumstances implied a high state of morale, and such was indeed the case. Grant’s heavy losses in his two assaults—inflicted at so little cost to the defenders that, until they looked out through the lifting smoke and saw the opposite hillsides strewn with the rag-doll shapes of the Union dead, they could scarcely believe a major effort had been made—convinced them that the Yankees could never take the place by storm. What was more, they had faith in “Old Joe” Johnston, believing that he would raise the siege as soon as he got his troops assembled off beyond the blue horizon, whereupon the two gray forces would combine and turn the tables on the besiegers. Until then,
as they saw it, all that was needed was firmness against the odds, and they stood firm. Thanks to Pemberton’s foresight, which included pulling corn along the roadside and driving livestock ahead of the army during its march from the Big Black, food so far was more plentiful inside the Confederate lines than it was beyond them. The people there were the first to feel the pinch of hunger; for the Federals, coming along behind the retreating graybacks, had consumed what little remained while waiting for roads to be opened to their new base on the Yazoo. “The soldiers ate up everything the folks had for ten miles around,” a Union private wrote home. “They are now of necessity compelled to come here and ask for something to live upon, and they have discovered that they have the best success when the youngest and best-looking one in the family comes to plead their case, and they have some very handsome women here.” This humbling of their pride did not displease him; it seemed to him no more than they deserved. “They were well educated and rich before their niggers ran away,” he added, but adversity had brought them down in the world. “If I was to meet them in Illinois I should think they were born and brought up there.”

Whether this last was meant as a compliment, and if so to whom, he did not say. But at least these people beyond the city’s bristling limits were not being shot at; which was a great deal more than could be said of those within the gun-studded belt that girdled the bluff Vicksburg had been founded on, forty-odd years ago, by provision of the last will and testament of the pioneer farmer and Methodist parson Newitt Vick. In a sense, however, the bluff was returning to an earlier destiny. All that had been here when Vick arrived were the weed-choked ruins of a Spanish fort, around which the settlement had grown in less than two generations into a bustling town of some 4500 souls, mostly devoted to trade with planters in the lower Yazoo delta but also plagued by flatboat men on the way downriver from Memphis, who found it a convenient place for letting off what they called “a load of steam” that would not wait for New Orleans. As it turned out, though, the ham-fisted boatmen with knives in their boots and the gamblers with aces and derringers up their sleeves were mild indeed compared to what was visited upon them by the blue-clad host sent against them by what had lately been their government. Now the bluff was a fort again, on a scale beyond the most flamboyant dreams of the long-departed Spaniards, and the residents spent much of their time, as one of them said, watching the incoming shells “rising steadily and shiningly in great parabolic curves, descending with ever-increasing swiftness, and falling with deafening shrieks and explosions.” The “ponderous fragments” flew everywhere, he added, thickening the atmosphere of terror until “even the dogs seemed to share the general fear. On hearing the descent of a shell, they would dart aside [and] then, as it exploded, sit down and howl in a pitiful manner.” Children, on the other hand, observed the uproar with
wide-eyed evident pleasure, accepting it as a natural phenomenon, like rain or lightning, unable to comprehend—as the dogs, for example, so obviously did—that men could do such things to one another and to them. “How is it possible you live here?” a woman who had arrived to visit her soldier husband just before the siege lines tightened asked a citizen, and was told: “After one is accustomed to the change, we do not mind it. But becoming accustomed: that is the trial.” Some took it better than others, in or out of uniform. There was for instance a Frenchman, “a gallant officer who had distinguished himself in several severe engagements,” who was “almost unmanned” whenever one of the huge mortar projectiles fell anywhere near him. Chided by friends for this reaction, he would reply: “I no like ze bomb: I cannot fight him back!” Neither could anyone else “fight him back,” least of all the civilians, many of whom took refuge in caves dug into the hillsides. Some of these were quite commodious, with several rooms, and the occupants brought in chairs and beds and even carpets to add to the comfort, sleeping soundly or taking dinner unperturbed while the world outside seemed turned to flame and thunder. “Prairie Dog Village,” the blue cannoneers renamed the city on the bluff, while from the decks of ironclads and mortar rafts on the great brown river, above and below, and from the semicircular curve of eighty-nine sand-bagged battery emplacements on the landward side, they continued to pump their steel-packaged explosives into the checkerboard pattern of its streets and houses.