Under Siege! (16 page)

Instead of spending his time with the soldiers, Fred wanted to be near his father. As a result, he said, “I saw a great deal of my father’s methods, his marvelous attention to detail, and his cool self-possession. I also witnessed the devotion of his men to him, and the enthusiasm with which
they greeted … him, when he passed along the line. Father was a splendid horseman, and visited many points of his army every day.”

A volunteer health inspector who was visiting the camp remembered Fred, who had turned thirteen in May, on his daily rounds with his father: “Almost every day as I drove about the lines, at some point or other I would see General Grant and his brave little assistant, riding at full speed in the face of the long lines of the enemy’s batteries, and within range of their murderous fire.

“Fred Grant shared his father’s dangers; and although he was one of the nicest boys I ever saw, few knew his real merits and bravery. Like his distinguished father, he was free from bombast and was quiet and reserved, so his heroic services during the siege were not paraded before the public… It was fortunate that his devoted mother was not there at that time to see his danger as he went out under the guns daily. Her anxiety would have been unbearable.”

Julia Grant would also have been concerned about her son’s health, for Fred was now suffering from typhoid fever and dysentery as well as the infection in his leg. Grant finally became alarmed enough that he sent Fred to Kentucky to recuperate with Julia Grant’s sister, Emma Casey. Bands of Confederate guerrillas roamed the Kentucky countryside, and a week after Fred arrived, a man dressed like a Confederate officer came into Emma Casey’s yard on his horse and asked for a drink of water.

She later wrote, “He said casually, ‘I guess Fred Grant is visiting you, isn’t he?’ Instantly a cold suspicion struck me like a dart through the heart and I answered him as casually as he had questioned me, ‘Why, no.’

“‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Isn’t he?’

“‘No, he’s gone.’

“‘Gone, has he? Is that so?’”

The man left and Fred’s badly frightened aunt immediately put him on a boat back to Vicksburg, certain he was safer there. Emma Casey said that later that day, eight “hard-riding, grim-looking, and tattered cavalrymen rode up to the gate. One of them, heavily armed, and looking as fierce as a
Greek bandit, came up to the porch.” The man asked if a boy was visiting there and Emma said that a boy had been there but was now gone. When the man questioned whether she was sure, she said she was and that some Union gunboats would be coming up the river shortly. “Perhaps you gentlemen will be interested in seeing them,” she said bravely. The men laughed, wished her a good day, and rode away. Emma later worried about what impact Fred’s capture might have had on the Union cause. Fortunately, Fred reached his father safely. When he arrived, Grant wrote to his wife that their son did not look very well but insisted on staying until Vicksburg fell.

So Fred stayed, and he did not lose his confidence that Vicksburg would soon surrender. He was still determined to be there on that great day.

G
RANT HAD SELECTED
S
HERMAN
to take charge of the eastern front. During the long days of the siege, while he and his army watched and waited for Joe Johnston, Sherman sometimes took breaks by riding his horse through the countryside. One day he stopped at a nearby plantation where a number of Southern families had sought refuge. He learned that one of them was the Wilkinson family of New Orleans and asked if their son had been a cadet at Alexandria, Louisiana, when he was superintendent of the military academy there. Mrs. Wilkinson confirmed this and said her son was now fighting for the South at Vicksburg.

Sherman wrote, “I then asked about her husband, whom I had known, when she burst into tears, and cried out in agony, ‘You killed him at Bull Run, where he was fighting for his country!’ I disclaimed killing anybody at Bull Run; but all the women present (nearly a dozen) burst into loud lamentations, which made it most uncomfortable for me, and I rode away.”

Ordinary soldiers couldn’t go on country rides, but they still found
ways to take breaks. Pemberton’s men had to stay in the trenches, but the Yankees got time off and played cards, sang, wrote letters to the folks back home or wrote in their journals (provided they could write), cleaned their guns, played baseball, whittled on pieces of wood, swapped stories with tent mates, and carried on camp life. Books were treasured, and at night around a campfire, men who were literate sometimes read aloud to an eager audience. The novels of Charles Dickens were especially popular. The 8th Wisconsin Infantry had a distraction in their pet eagle, nicknamed Old Abe in honor of the president. The young eagle traveled with the men on his own perch. Stories—which may or may not be true—abounded that he also went into battle with them, screeching loudly as he flew above the heads of the enemy.

A game of cards was a popular way to pass time when soldiers weren’t on duty.

Life under the broiling Mississippi sun proved difficult for both sides. Southerners, who were used to the heat and humidity, had some advantage. They also knew how to co-exist with native creatures—unlike one Yankee from Michigan who almost lost his life when he went swimming in the
Yazoo River and was attacked by an alligator. Rats infested the trenches, and mosquitoes, flies, chiggers, fleas, lice, and lizards bedeviled everybody, especially at night. Officers lucky enough to sleep on cots set the cot legs in jars of water, which kept lizards from climbing into their beds.

The 8th Wisconsin Infantry’s pet eagle, Old Abe, on his perch.

Believing that perspiration was good for the body, nobody questioned soldiers’ wearing wool uniforms, even though they added to the men’s misery. The camps stank. Sanitation, always a problem for an army, was made worse by the oppressive heat. Anyone approaching either army could smell it before they saw it. Horses and mules compounded the problem. Soldiers on both sides suffered all kinds of health maladies. Epidemics of measles and mumps broke out. Malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and smallpox killed many. Some water sources became contaminated from dead animals, causing yet more sickness.

Where hillsides allowed it, the Union army sometimes carried out its work on two levels, with soldiers topside doing the fighting, while soldiers below rested or attended to other duties.

When the men were in the trenches, they had to stay alert every moment against sudden attack and to keep their heads down so they wouldn’t be spotted by enemy sharpshooters. Sometimes, as a diversion, a soldier would put a hat on a stick and hold it up for the sport of seeing how many enemy bullets would be fired at it. Or soldiers attached mirrors to poles and held them up so they could see into the other side’s trenches, which in some places were only a few yards away.

At night when officers weren’t around, the Rebels and Yanks occasionally visited back and forth or even left their trenches to talk, joke, taunt each other, and share photos of loved ones. A Union soldier later wrote of one of these meetings, “From the remarks of some of the Rebels, I judged that their supply of provisions was getting low, and that they had no source from which to draw more. We gave them from our own rations some fat meat, crackers, coffee, and so forth.”

One day a private from Wisconsin simply said to the Yanks around
him that he was going to shake hands with the Rebs. He set down his gun and climbed out of his trench. Before long, several hundred men from both sides were out in the open exchanging news and trading Southern tobacco for Northern coffee. When a Union officer broke up the party, the men returned to their trenches and resumed shooting at each other.

Said one soldier of the enemy, “They agreed with us perfectly on one thing: If the settlement of this war was left to the enlisted men of both sides, we would soon go home.”

EMPTY STOMACHS Late June 1836
Late June 1863

I
n the North, pressure mounted on Grant to finish the job. Vicksburg had been under siege for five long weeks—since May 18—and still had not surrendered. Trench warfare could go on endlessly. Grant and his army were needed to fight in other places, especially now, when Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s most powerful general, was invading the North.

Grant pushed harder. He had his men dig a tunnel under the Rebel lines and pack it with explosives. The blast that followed created a huge crater that allowed the Federals to rush through the tunnel, climb up and out of the crater, and emerge behind enemy lines. They thought they would quickly overpower their stunned opponents. Instead, the Rebels had heard the digging, guessed what the Yanks were up to—and were waiting for them. Bloody hand-to-hand combat ensued, until the Federals had to retreat. They lost 200 men and the Confederates lost 100.

Grant didn’t give up on tunnel warfare. He put his men to work digging more tunnels. He continued around-the-clock shelling of the Confederate lines and the city. Something would have to make these Southerners give up! Maybe it would finally be starvation. They couldn’t hold out forever—and it sure didn’t look like Joe Johnston planned to do anything about it.