Under Siege! (22 page)

Forty thousand Confederate and Union soldiers are estimated to have perished from wounds or illness during the entire Vicksburg campaign. The siege itself claimed almost 3,000 Confederate soldiers and 4,900 Federal soldiers.

The American population at the time of the war was 30 million. The Union army had between 2.5 and 2.75 million men in uniform, while the less populated South had 750,000 to 1.23 million. The figure usually given for the number of soldiers who died in the Civil War is 620,000 (more than the combined deaths of all other American wars). But if you count the number of men who subsequently died of injuries or illness inflicted during the Civil War, the figure might be as high as 1.5 million. Because regiments were made up of soldiers from the same area, in one battle some small towns lost most or even all of their men and boys between the ages of fifteen and fifty. Many of these solders were buried in unmarked graves, far from home and lost to their families forever.

The Union awarded 128 Medals of Honor to Union soldiers who fought at Vicksburg.

Vicksburg had the most elaborate trench system ever devised prior to World War I.

The typical Civil War soldier was twenty-six years old; stood five feet, eight inches tall; and weighed 135 pounds.

Few regular soldiers in either the North or the South had military experience prior to the war, and they received little more than basic training before seeing actual combat. Most volunteer soldiers were farmers and small business owners, and it’s possible that as many as 400,000 were boys under the age of eighteen. Though post-traumatic stress disorder was not a known diagnosis at the time, many soldiers who returned home from the war suffered from depression and nightmares and could not resume normal lives.

During the war, it was not unusual for officers to bring their wives and children with them or at least to have visits from them. Some soldiers also had their families with them, living alongside the army wherever it went.

The Union armies were named for rivers, and the Rebel armies for states. Thus, Grant’s Army of the Tennessee was so named because the men were on the Tennessee River when it was organized, while one of the Southern armies was the Army of Northern Virginia because that’s where it was organized.

In spite of primitive living conditions, families sometimes accompanied soldiers to war.

Tens of thousands of children lost their fathers in the Civil War. If they subsequently lost their mothers and did not have relatives to take over, they faced great difficulty. Responses to this problem varied from place to place. The state of Pennsylvania lost 50,000 soldiers in the war and established orphanages and schools for its fatherless children. The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum opened in 1868 for Jewish children who were orphaned by the war. The Kentucky Female Orphan School in Midway cared for forty-six girls in 1858. By 1871, that number had doubled because of war orphans. Churches and other religious groups set up homes and orphanages across the country in the post-war years, and some orphaned or half-orphaned children—many of whom lost their fathers in the Civil War—rode orphan trains from one place to another in search of new families.

Jennie Hodgers (right) disguised herself as a man and fought at Vicksburg.

When men went off to war, many women had to take over their roles at home. To help with the war effort, women all over the country pitched in to do what they could. They knitted socks, made clothing and quilts, and gathered and shipped supplies like blankets and towels, soap, rifle cartridges, writing paper, Bibles, and food. They held fund-raisers and often donated personal possessions, or sold them and donated the money. They visited army camps and prisons. They wrote letters to lonely soldiers or helped wounded soldiers write to loved ones.

Religious Sisters left their convents to help nurse the ill and wounded, often traveling long distances. Some died on battle-fields. Many were overworked and hungry. In Vicksburg, the Sisters of Mercy moved about the city even though they were in direct danger from the shelling. Because of this, their bishop asked that they travel separately, concerned that they could all be killed in a single explosion.

While 2,000 women are thought to have been nurses in both the North and South during the war, countless others volunteered in hospitals
and military camps and took the sick and injured into their own homes. Both Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton, who helped nurse wounded soldiers, led efforts to organize their care.

An estimated 600 women dressed in uniform and passed as men to fight alongside their male comrades. A woman named Jennie Irene Hodgers gave herself the name of Albert Cashier and fought with the Union army at Vicksburg. Disguised as a man, she was considered a brave and dependable soldier. When her identity as a woman was discovered many years after the war ended, her fellow soldiers convinced the United States Pension Bureau to drop charges that she had defrauded the government—an action that allowed her to continue receiving a military pension.