The State of Jones (15 page)

He was a myriad-natured man, a warrior who hated blood. He had shuddered as a boy at his father’s tanning business and would only eat his meat well done. He could be cruel to opposing soldiers but couldn’t stand to see beasts mistreated. He was a virtuoso horseman. His mount during the Vicksburg campaign was a creature named “Kangaroo,” which he had rescued from the Shiloh battlefield when no one else had any use for the scarred, neglected animal. Grant recognized that under the mud and gore was a high-bred horse and nursed the animal back to form. He said of himself, “The truth is I am more of a farmer than a soldier.” He was wrong. Grant would use bombardment, assaults, and finally famine-inducing siege over the next forty-five days in winning one of the most backbreaking victories of the war at Vicksburg.

Newton and the men of the 7th Mississippi Battalion were fully invested in their part of the trenchworks by 8:00 a.m. on May 18—just
in time to receive one of Grant’s crueler assaults. The Mississippians covered their heads from a series of artillery salvos, the opening of an attack straight at their position. They were smack in the center of Vicksburg’s labyrinthine inner defenses, an interlacing series of fortified trenches, batteries, lunettes, redoubts, and redans that twisted through the gorges around the perimeter of town. Newton and his mates hunkered down facing eastward, between the Jackson and Graveyard roads, and looked at Grant’s headquarters across the ravines. Their entrenchments were fortified with sandbags, cotton bales, and logs. They stretched blankets overhead, not just for shade, but to screen the dirt that rained on their heads from the continual artillery blasts.

A Union soldier from Iowa climbed a hill and trained a spyglass on the Confederate entrenchments and described what he saw in his diary: “The rebels works seem to consist of a line of large hills which extend in a half circle around the city, they present a powerful view, hard to take by assault, on account of their abrupt ascent, and the felled timber in the ravine before them, at one place a large stockade is seen on the works built of timber 7 feet high and 3 feet in diameter.”

Despite this perfectly lucid view of the elaborate fortifications that zigzagged along the hills, Grant decided to try an all-out assault, seeking a quick victory to end the long campaign. His hope was to dislodge the rebels before they got too comfortable, and he sensed that his men wouldn’t be content until they had at least made an attempt to take the town, or so he later claimed. But he also may have been overconfident after two weeks of consecutive victories, “a little giddy with pride,” as Sherman described the mood of the blue troops.

On May 19, Sherman sent a column of men massed six deep charging up the embankments at the dirt and log walls of the rebels. Yankee infantrymen scrambled through the gullies, heads low under steam-whistling projectiles of grape and canister. Somehow they maintained order, until they came within seventy yards of the
trenches. Then the rebels on the front line, who had patiently held their fire, rose up and shouldered their rifles and fired a volley that flashed like lightning. The curtain of lead was so thick that one Union outfit reported fifty-five holes in its regimental flag. To Sherman, it looked as if men disappeared “as chaff thrown from the hand on a windy day.” Bluecoats could only lie in ditches and ravines and hope not to catch bullets in the back. One group of Yankees was trapped in a no-man’s-land gully full of cane, which was gradually cut down by bullets, the stalks “lopped gently upon us.”

The fragmented companies of Yankees continued to try to scale the hills, as rebels unleashed more sheet-lightning musketry—as well as flaming bales of cotton and ignited balls of twelve-pound shot, which they rolled down the hills with fuses sizzling. Some of the Yankees fielded the cannon balls like sparking baseballs and tried to hurl them back into the ditches. The rebels won the homicidal game of catch. The makeshift grenades finally discouraged the Union side. Grant halted for the day with 934 casualties, while administering just 200 or so.

Grant, however, was undiscouraged; he seemed to think the attack failed merely because it wasn’t large enough. Still convinced the Vicksburg defenses could be overwhelmed, he ordered a second assault for May 22, this one grander. It seemed to him the city might fall in a day; at most, “I would say one week.”

The Yankees dreaded the prospect of another rush at the rebel barricades. On the evening before the engagement, an idealistic eighteen-year-old soldier in the 72nd Illinois named Anson Hemingway scribbled in his diary. Hemingway was a neatly combed, abstemious sort who devoted his free time to prayer meetings rather than drinking. Anson and his brother Rodney had enlisted in Company D of the 72nd Illinois Infantry when he was still a month short of his eighteenth birthday, and their older brother George was with the 18th Illinois Infantry. Both Rodney and George would die of disease before the war was over, and Anson, up to this point, had spent more time battling filth and chronic dysentery than rebels.

But now there seemed to Anson a pretty good chance he could die. “How I do wish this war would end,” Anson wrote. “This place is very strongly fortified and it will cost a man a life to take it—but it must fall. We must take it.” Anson would survive, to imbue his grandson Ernest with an obsession with physical courage and a penchant for war reporting.

At daybreak artillery barrages from two hundred Yankee guns began to blow cascades of dirt and flesh in the air. At 10:00 a.m. a Union detachment came down the graveyard road carrying ladders and planks to be used in the onslaught. This presaged a coordinated wave of forty thousand troops. Another Illinoisan, Charles E. Wilcox, waited taut with nerves under a rain of shell fragments for the order to advance. “Oh how my heart palpitated!” Wilcox wrote in his diary. “The sweat from off my face run in a stream from the tip ends of my whiskers. God only knows all that passed through my mind. Twice I exclaimed aloud, ‘My God why don’t they order us to charge.’”

Again the 7th Mississippi Battalion was in the way of the Yankee advance. For the next eight hours there was no letup in the fighting that roiled all around the hills. Flags were shredded into rags, and the corpses of men walled up. Yankees were forced to simply lie down in “a hail storm of bullets, shot and shell” and wait for a chance to crawl backward, while more cannonballs with burning fuses rolled down upon them.

Some Yankees survived the uphill rushes only to keel over dead of sunstroke. After three failed dashes, Sherman said, “This is murder; order those troops back.” This time Grant’s casualties were 3,199, to just 500 or so for the Confederates—he had lost almost as many men in three days as he had in the previous three weeks. “This last attack only served to increase our casualties without giving any benefit whatever,” he admitted. There would be no more assaults.

For the next three days, Newton and the men of Jones County sat in their stifling trenches, kerchiefs over their faces, trying not to retch or faint from the stench of the putrefying dead, visible just
yards away, bloated and sun blackened and crawling with white maggots. At last Grant and Pemberton agreed to a truce to collect the dead. At 6:00 p.m. on May 25 men of both sides came out from their trenches, and for the next two hours they did the gruesome job of burying the dead, also pausing to trade news, greet old friends, swap coffee and tobacco, or search for kin fighting for the other side. Some men even played cards. “I saw my old chum, the friend of my boyhood, the best friend I ever had coming from the rebel works,” one man wrote. “… I had a long talk with him. He seems to be a staunch rebel. God save him.”

With the field cleared, the rebel soldiers returned to their rifle pits and settled down to a steady routine of digging, ducking fire, and suffering. Soldiers and civilians alike burrowed into the hills like moles, trying to escape the continual gusts of jagged metal from hundreds of pieces of artillery and gunboats offshore. Since Grant could not storm the town by force, he resolved to bombard and shovel his way there. The Yankees stabbed at the earth with picks and spades, tunneling toward the Confederate lines and laying charges that blew through the sand and clay hills. As they dug and detonated ever closer to the rebel fortifications, the Southerners had to toil around the clock to raise their own works. Vicksburg began to resemble a gigantic swarming anthill.

When men weren’t moving earth, they encamped in shebangs, hollowed-out holes in the steep embankments covered with planked roofs and blankets. It was oven hot in the trenches, but a man who stood up to get a breath of air risked being riddled by Minié balls from sharpshooters; Union snipers fired as many as 150 rounds daily. There was nothing to do but dig and then lay still as the sweat rolled off their bodies. “Have nothing to do but eat, sleep, read, walk about, talk and dodge rebel bullets,” one Yankee wrote in his diary. “I feel dirty and lazy.”

Night was hardly any cooler, and artillery continued to boom and shriek through the dark. There was no safe rear area in which to hide from the fire. One Illinois unit sought shelter behind a stately manor on a hill outside of town and had just put a pot of beans on for
their dinner when a stray fragment flew shrilly into the campsite—and landed in the kettle, blowing it into the ground. “Boys, your beans have gone to hell,” a cook said.

Civilians took refuge in black-mouthed siege caves that honeycombed the bluffs. The hills were so pockmarked with holes “that the streets look like avenues in a cemetery,” a Vicksburger observed. The caves were stifling and plagued by mosquitoes and snakes. Those who tried to stay in their homes risked being atomized or buried under collapsed walls, as formerly fine residences were battered into slack-roofed ruins. Sidewalks buckled and the sky continually rained a fine mist of stone, plaster, splintered glass, and wood. “We are utterly cut off from the world, surrounded by a circle of fire,” one Vicksburg woman wrote in her diary. “… People do nothing but eat what they can get, sleep when they can, and dodge the shells.”

On Sundays, chaplains conducted religious services and tried to preach over the screaming of shot and shell. There were just three intervals when the murderous bedlam stopped, to cool the guns and feed the artillerymen, at 8:00 a.m., noon, and 8:00 p.m.

The soldiers passed the time by trying to identify the caliber of shells that passed over them from the pitch of their whistling. “That’s a mortar shell,” someone would say. “There goes a Parrott. No, that’s a rifle shell.” They played varieties of card games, mostly poker, and began wagering hugely out of pent-up boredom. “Whether we lost or won was of little consequence,” one soldier wrote. “This sport soon grew stale and one could pick up $20 and $50 bills anywhere in camp.”

There were times during the daily bombardments when the hot air, mixed with smoke, made it difficult to breathe, and men passed out. The Union forces tunneled so close to the 7th Mississippi Battalion lines that men in opposite trenches could hear one another conversing. On June 25, Union mines packed with 2,200 pounds of explosives blew up the Louisiana Redan, a giant fortification near the 7th Mississippi Battalion. It ripped a hole forty feet wide and thirteen feet deep.

Corpses floated by in the Mississippi, fish gnawing at them. Malaria
and dysentery set in, and so did inflation. A barrel of flour sold for six hundred dollars. A Vicksburg wife noted in her diary, “I think all the dogs and cats must be killed or starved, we don’t see any more of the pitiful animals prowling around.” The
Daily Citizen
, the town newspaper, published under increasing difficulty as supplies dwindled. On May 28 it was printed on a strip of paper a foot and a half long and six inches wide. By June 18 it was printed on strips of wallpaper.

Mule meat became a staple. In one Confederate encampment, men amused themselves by drawing up a faux restaurant menu on a scrap of paper. They labeled it “Hotel De Vicksburg, Bill of Fare for July, 1863” and accompanied it with a sketch of a mule’s head, with a knife poised above it:

• Soup
  

• Mule Tail
  

• Boiled
  

• Mule bacon with poke greens Mule ham canvassed
  

• Roast
  

• Mule sirloin
  

• Mule rump stuffed with rice
  

• Vegetables
  

• Peas and rice
  

• Entrees
  

• Mule Head stuffed a-la-Mode
  

• Mule Beef jerked a-la-Mexicana
  

• Mule ears fricassed a-la-gotch
  

• Mule side stewed, new style, hair on
  

• Mule spare ribs plain
  

• Mule liver, hashed
  

• Side dishes
  

• Mule salad
  

• Mule hoof soused
  

• Mule brains a-la-omelette
  

• Mule kidney stuffed with peas
  

• Mule tripe fried in pea meal batter
  

• Mule tongue cold a-la-Bray.
  

• Jellies
  

• Mule foot.
  

• Pastry
  

• Pea meal pudding, blackberry sauce
  

• Cotton-wood berry pies China berry tart.
  

• Dessert
  .
  

• White-oak acorns
  

• Beech nuts.
  

• Blackberry leaf tea
  

• Genuine Confederate Coffee.
  

• Liquors
  

• Mississippi Water, vitage of 1498, superior, $3.00
  

• Limestone Water, Late Importation, very fine, $2.75
  

• Spring Water, Vicksburg Brand, $1.50
  

• Meals at all hours. Gentlemen to wait upon themselves. Any inattention on the part of the servants will be promptly reported at the office. Jeff. Davis & Co., Proprietors.
  

Union soldiers discovered the menu after the surrender while wandering through the town. It was published in the
Chicago Tribune
and also picked up for Confederate audiences by
Southern Punch
magazine, which added the feeling comment, “The most melancholy thing about it is the reflection which must suggest to a thoughtful Yankee—if there be such an animal—on the prospect of conquering men who can live and jest on such fare.”