The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (84 page)

Like the men in the trenches, civilians of both sexes and all ages were convinced that their tormentors could never take Vicksburg by storm, and whatever their fright they had no intention of knuckling under to what they called the bombs. For them, too, Johnston was the one bright hope of deliverance. Old Joe would be coming soon, they assured each other; all that was needed was to hold on till he completed his arrangements; then, with all the resources of the Confederacy at his command, he would come swooping over the eastern horizon and down on the Yankee rear. But presently, as time wore on and Johnston did not come, they were made aware of a new enemy. Hunger. By mid-June, though the garrison had been put first on half and then on quarter rations of meat, the livestock driven into the works ahead of the army back in May had been consumed, and Pemberton had his foragers impress all the cattle in the city. This struck nearer home than even the Union shells had done, for it was no easy thing for a family with milk-thirsty children to watch its one cow being led away to slaughter by a squad of ragged strangers. Moreover, the army’s supply of bread was running low by now, and the commissary was directed to issue instead equal portions of rice and flour, four ounces of each per man per day, supplementing a quarter-pound of meat that was generally stringy or rancid or both. When these grains ran low, as they soon did, the experiment
was tried of baking bread from dough composed of equal parts of corn and dried peas, ground up together until they achieved a gritty consistency not unlike cannon powder. “It made a nauseous composition,” one who survived the diet was to recall with a shudder, “as the corn meal cooked in half the time the peas meal did, so the stuff was half raw.… It had the properties of india-rubber, and was worse than leather to digest.” Soon afterwards came the crowning indignity. With the last cow and hog gone lowing and squealing under the sledge and cleaver, still another experiment was tried: the substitution of mule meat for beef and bacon. Though it was issued, out of respect for religious and folk prejudices, “only to those who desired it,” Pemberton was gratified to report that both officers and men considered it “not only nutritious, but very palatable, and in every way preferable to poor beef.” So he said; but soldiers and civilians alike found something humiliating, not to say degrading, about the practice. “The rebels don’t starve with success,” a Federal infantryman observed jokingly from beyond the lines about this time. “I think that if I had nothing to eat I’d starve better than they do.” Vicksburg’s residents and defenders might well have agreed, especially when mule meat was concerned. Even if a man refused to eat such stuff himself, he found it disturbing to live among companions who did not. It was enough to diminish even their faith in Joe Johnston, who seemed in point of fact a long time coming.

Though at the outset the Virginian had sounded vigorous and purposeful in his assurance of assistance, Pemberton himself by now had begun to doubt the outcome of the race between starvation and delivery. “I am trying to gather a force which may attempt to relieve you. Hold out,” Johnston wrote on May 19, and six days later he made this more specific: “Bragg is sending a division. When it comes, I will move to you. Which do you think is the best route? How and where is the enemy encamped? What is your force?” Receiving this last on May 29—the delay was not extreme, considering that couriers to and from the city had to creep by darkness through the Federal lines, risking capture every foot of the way—the Vicksburg commander replied as best he could to his superior’s questions as to Grant’s dispositions and strength. “My men are in good spirits, awaiting your arrival,” he added. “You may depend on my holding the place as long as possible.” After waiting nine days and receiving no answer, he asked: “When may I expect you to move, and in what direction?” Three more days he waited, and still there was no reply. “I am waiting most anxiously to know your intentions,” he repeated. “I have heard nothing from you since [your dispatch of] May 25. I shall endeavor to hold out as long as we have anything to eat.” Three days more went by, and then on June 13—two weeks and a day since any word had reached him from the world outside—he received a message dated May 29. “I am too weak to save Vicksburg,” Johnston told him. “Can do no more than attempt to save
you and your garrison. It will be impossible to extricate you unless you co-operate and we make mutually supporting movements. Communicate your plans and suggestions, if possible.” This was not only considerably less than had been expected in the way of help; it also seemed to indicate that Johnston did not realize how tightly the Union cordon was drawn about Vicksburg’s bluff. In effect, the meager trickle of dispatches left Pemberton in a position not unlike that of a man who calls on a friend to make a strangler turn loose of his throat, only to have the friend inquire as to the strangler’s strength, the position of his thumbs, the condition of the sufferer’s windpipe, and just what kind of help he had in mind. So instead of “plans and suggestions,” Vicksburg’s defender tried to communicate some measure of the desperation he and his soldiers were feeling. “The enemy has placed several heavy guns in position against our works,” he replied on June 15, “and is approaching them very nearly by sap. His fire is almost continuous. Our men have no relief; are becoming much fatigued, but are still in pretty good spirits. I think your movement should be made as soon as possible. The enemy is receiving reinforcements. We are living on greatly reduced rations, but I think sufficient for twenty days yet.”

Having thus placed the limit of Vicksburg’s endurance only one day beyond the Fourth of July—now strictly a Yankee holiday—Pemberton followed this up, lest Johnston fail to sense the desperation implied, with a more outspoken message four days later: “I hope you will advance with the least possible delay. My men have been thirty-four days and nights in the trenches, without relief, and the enemy within conversation distance. We are living on very reduced rations, and, as you know, are entirely isolated.” He closed by asking bluntly, “What aid am I to expect from you?” This time the answer, if vague, was prompt. On June 23 a courier arrived with a dispatch written only the day before. “Scouts report the enemy fortifying toward us and the roads blocked,” Johnston declared. “If I can do nothing to relieve you, rather than surrender the garrison, endeavor to cross the river at the last moment if you and General Taylor communicate.” To Pemberton this seemed little short of madness. Taylor had made his gesture against Young’s Point and Milliken’s Bend more than two weeks ago; by now he was all the way down the Teche, intent on menacing New Orleans. But that was by no means the worst of Johnston’s oversights, which was to ignore the presence of the Union navy. The bluejacket gun crews would have liked nothing better than a chance to try their marksmanship on a makeshift flotilla of skiffs, canoes, and rowboats manned by the half-starved tatterdemalions they had been probing for at long range all these weeks. Besides, even if the boats required had been available, which they were not, there was the question of whether the men in the trenches were in any condition for such a strenuous effort. They looked well enough to a casual eye, for all their rags and hollow-eyed
gauntness, but it was observed that they tired easily under the mildest exertion and could serve only brief shifts when shovel work was called for. The meager diet was beginning to tell. A Texas colonel reported that many of his men had “swollen ankles and symptoms of incipient scurvy.” By late June, nearly half the garrison was on the sick list or in hospital. If Pemberton could not see what this meant, a letter he received at this time—June 28: exactly one week short of the date he had set, two weeks ago, as the limit of Vicksburg’s endurance—presumed to define it for him in unmistakable terms. Signed “Many Soldiers,” the letter called attention to the fact that the ration now had been reduced to “one biscuit and a small bit of bacon per day,” and continued:

“Grant is now deservedly the hero,” Sherman wrote home in early June, adding characteristically—for his dislike of reporters was not tempered by any evidence of affection on their part, either for himself or for Grant, with whom, as he presently said, “I am a second self”—that his friend was being “belabored with praise by those who a month ago accused him of all the sins in the calendar, and who next will turn against him if so blows the popular breeze. Vox populi, vox hum-bug.”

In point of fact, however, once the encompassing lines had been drawn, the journalists could find little else to write about that had not been covered during the first week of the siege. And it was much the same for the soldiers, whose only diversion was firing some fifty to one hundred rounds of ammunition a day, as required by orders. Across the way—though the Confederates lacked even this distraction, being under instructions to burn no powder needlessly—the main problem, or at any rate the most constant one, was hunger; whereas for the Federals it was boredom. “The history of a single day was the history of all the others,” an officer was to recall. Different men had different ways of trying to hasten the slow drag of time. Sherman, for instance, took horseback rides and paid off-duty visits to points of interest roundabout, at
least one of which resulted in a scene he found discomforting, even painful. Learning that the mother of one of his former Louisiana Academy cadets was refugeeing in the neighborhood—she had come all the way from Plaquemine Parish to escape the attentions of Butler and Banks, only to run spang into Grant and Sherman—he rode over to tender his respects and found her sitting on her gallery with about a dozen women visitors. He introduced himself, inquired politely after her son, and was told that the young man was besieged in Vicksburg, a lieutenant of artillery. When the general went on to ask for news of her husband, whom he had known in the days before the war, the woman suddenly burst into tears and cried out in anguish: “You killed him at Bull Run, where he was fighting for his country!” Sherman hastily denied that he had “killed anybody at Bull Run,” which was literally true, but by now all the other women had joined the chorus of abuse and lamentation. This, he said long afterwards, “made it most uncomfortable for me, and I rode away.”

Other men had other spare-time diversions. Grant’s, it was said, was whiskey. Some denied this vehemently, protesting that he was a teetotaler, while some asserted that this only appeared to be the case because of his low tolerance for the stuff; a single glass unsteadied him, and a second gave him the glassy-eyed look of a man with a heavy load on. He himself seemed to recognize the problem from the outset, if only by the appointment and retention of John A. Rawlins as his assistant adjutant general. A frail but vigorous young man, with a “marble pallor” to his face and “large, lustrous eyes of a deep black,” Rawlins at first had wanted to be a preacher, but had become instead a lawyer in Galena, where Grant first knew him. His wife had died of tuberculosis soon after the start of the war, and he himself would die of the same disease before he was forty, but the death that seemed to have affected him most had been that of his father, an improvident charcoal burner who had died at last of the alcoholism that had kept him and his large family in poverty all his life. Rawlins, a staff captain at thirty and now a lieutenant colonel at thirty-two, was rabid on the subject of drink. He was in fact blunt in most things, including his relationship with Grant. “He bossed everything at Grant’s headquarters,” Charles Dana later wrote, adding: “I have heard him curse at Grant when, according to his judgment, the general was doing something that he thought he had better not do.” Observing this, many wondered why Grant put up with it. Others believed they knew. “If you hit Rawlins on the head, you’ll knock out Grant’s brains,” they said. But they were wrong. Rawlins was not Grant’s brain; he was his conscience, and a rough one, too, especially where whiskey was concerned. “I say to you frankly, and I pledge you my word for it,” he had written eighteen months ago to Elihu Washburne, the general’s congressional guardian angel, “that should General Grant at any time become an intemperate man or
an
habitual drunkard, I will notify you
immediately, will ask to be removed from duty on his staff (kind as he has been to me) or resign my commission. For while there are times when I would gladly throw the mantle of charity over the faults of my friends, at this time and from a man of his position I would rather tear the mantle off and expose the deformity.” Grant had cause to believe that Rawlins meant it. And yet, despite the danger to his career and despite what a fellow staffer called Rawlins’ “insubordination twenty times a day,” he kept him on, both for his own good and the army’s.