The State of Jones (16 page)

But by the end of June, even mule steak became scarce. The rebels’ daily food issue fell to a quarter pound of bacon, a bit of rice
flour, and a twelfth of a quart of peas. Some men saved their rations and fasted for a day, so as to have a larger portion when they did eat. With no cornmeal, cooks ground the peas into a powder and tried baking it into bread. Men choked on the peabread, which tasted like green dust.

Soon there was no longer anything recognizable as food to be had. Rats appeared in the stalls of the town market dressed as meat. John Ellzey, who served with Newton in the 7th Mississippi Battalion, recalled that the men were so desperate they ate the rats and even tried to make soup from boiled shoestrings. Men were so emaciated that “one would believe them dead lying down,” wrote an observer.

The soldiers neared a state of mass insubordination and issued an
“appeal for help”
to Pemberton on June 28. “Our rations have been cut down to one biscuit and a small bit of bacon per day, not enough scarcely to keep soul and body together, much less to stand the hardships we are called upon to stand … Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and hunger will compel a man to do almost anything. You had better heed a warning voice, though it is the voice of private soldiers: This army is now ripe for mutiny, unless it can be fed.”

Pemberton briefly considered trying to cut his way out of Vicksburg. But when he surveyed his officers as to the condition of the men, he received a series of angry replies: the troops were no longer capable of walking, much less fighting. “This inability on the part of the soldiers does not arise from want of spirit, or courage, or willingness to fight,” wrote Newton’s brigade commander, Louis Hébert, “but from real physical disability, occasioned by the men having been so long shut up and cramped up in pits, ditches, &c., in the trenches; many are also in ill-health, who still are able to remain in the works. The unanimous opinion of my officers I fully concur in, and I unhesitatingly declare that it is my sincere conviction that, so far as my brigade is concerned, it cannot undergo the marches and fatigues of an evacuation. The spirit of my men to fight is unbroken, but their bodies are worn out.”

After forty-eight days, Pemberton was out of options. Pemberton officially contacted Grant, offering to discuss terms of surrender. “Gentlemen, I have done what I could,” he told his officers. An Iowa private observed that there were two good generals at Vicksburg, “General Grant and General Starvation.” On July 3, the shelling stopped. The battle was over.

On the morning of July 4, Vicksburg was strangely quiet save for the crying of a baby that had been born in the caves. A handful of soldiers in blue came up a street. Then a whole group of them gathered on the courthouse hill, “and the flag began to slowly rise to the top of the staff.” As the Stars and Stripes unfurled over the city, larger columns from the blue army began to file through the streets. “What a contrast to the suffering creatures we had seen so long were these stalwart, well-fed men, so splendidly set up and accoutered,” wrote a female resident. “Sleek horses, polished arms, bright plumes.”

As more Union troops entered Vicksburg, the eerie silence continued. It was the first time in almost two months that the Union guns were quiet. Despite the victory and Independence Day, Grant’s men were not celebrating. They were too shocked at the conditions of soldiers and citizens in Vicksburg, and relieved that the long siege was over.

The Yankee troops had spent more than a year conquering “a country where nearly all the people, except the negroes, were hostile to us and friendly to the cause we were trying to suppress,” as Grant noted. But instead of victorious gloating, there was only “a feeling of sadness among the Union soldiers at seeing the dejection of their late antagonists,” Grant wrote. Union boats arrived with supplies at the wharves, and starved Southerners rushed down and carried away goods in both arms.

Grant allowed the malnourished rebs to draw federal rations. “Very few of them could walk without aid twenty rods,” observed a Yankee soldier. “… The hip bones of some of them had worn through the skin, and their bodies were a mass of sores caused by the vermin.”
They were so lice and scurvy ridden that every article of their clothes would have to be burned.

In Washington, Lincoln greeted the news of Vicksburg’s surrender with such intense relief that he rose and threw an arm around his secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles. “I cannot in words tell you my joy over this result,” he said. “It is great, Mr. Welles; it is great.” There would be two more years of war ahead, but the key was in his pocket. As he later wrote, “The Father of Waters flows unvexed to the sea again.” Grant’s victory had secured the Mississippi River and cut the South in two. “Grant is my man, and I am his the rest of the war,” Lincoln declared.

Those Southern soldiers who still had the energy to feel something other than hunger were furious with Pemberton. Confederate casualties for the entire campaign were 9,091 killed and wounded, and there were nearly 30,000 prisoners garrisoned in the town. The brigade in which Newton and the 7th Mississippi Battalion served had lost 203 killed and 480 wounded. One Confederate soldier said to a Vicksburg woman who had endured the siege, “A child would have known better than to shut up men in this cursed trap to starve to death like useless vermin. Haven’t I seen my friends carted out three or four in a box, that had died of starvation! Nothing else madam! Starved to death because we had a fool for a general.”

The scarecrow Confederates of Vicksburg stacked arms—among the booty Grant captured were 172 cannon and sixty thousand muskets and rifles—and sat wearily down to wait for parole. There were simply too many prisoners for Grant to guard and feed them all. The job of transporting thirty thousand captured Confederates north to prison camps would tie up every transportation route and his whole army. Instead, Grant and Pemberton negotiated terms: the prisoners would take oaths pledging not to bear arms against the Union and report to a parole camp at Enterprise, Mississippi, to await exchange. The parolees could only return to fighting if the Confederacy released an equal number of Union prisoners.

Grant doubted many of the parolees would ever fight again, for
they were too starved and disenchanted. “I knew many of them were tired of the war and would get home just as soon as they could,” Grant wrote. He suspected that turning thirty thousand disaffected men loose on the Mississippi countryside might sow dissension and be a larger problem for the Confederacy than if he transported them to prison camps.

Parole was a risky policy and so controversial that a delegation of Washington officials called on Lincoln to demand Grant’s dismissal for dereliction of duty. They believed the terms were too generous and the South would violate the parole terms by reconstituting Pemberton’s army and putting it back in the field. (In fact, the Confederacy would soon issue a call to the paroled men to return to their units, in violation of the agreement.)

But Lincoln defended his general and offered as a counterargument a country story about a dog. His audience listened, baffled, as Lincoln meandered through the tale of a man he once knew named Sykes, who had a yellow dog. Sykes set great store by the dog, but it was intensely disliked by the other local boys. They despised the beast so much, in fact, that they connived a way to kill it: they wrapped an explosive cartridge in a piece of meat and attached a long fuse to it. They whistled for the dog, and it dutifully wolfed down the meat and cartridge, at which point they touched off the fuse, blowing the dog up. When Sykes saw the remains of the animal, he picked up the tail and said, “Well, I guess he’ll never be much account again—as a dog.” At that point Lincoln paused in his telling of the story and then delivered his own punch line. “I guess Pemberton’s forces will never be much account again, as an army,” he said.

The parolees of Vicksburg would act as explosive cartridges in the stomach of the Confederacy. As Grant predicted, scores of men simply walked away. They tired of sitting in the hot sun or standing in long lines for the tedious paperwork of parole, which was slowed by the fact that many men couldn’t read or write. Newton’s cousin Ben Knight, who served in Company B of the 7th Mississippi Battalion, received his official parole on July 10, as did Jesse Davis
Knight’s son John Melton Knight, a corporal who was wounded and in a field hospital. Others didn’t wait for papers.

Several hundred Southerners refused to sign their paroles at all, saying they preferred to go north as prisoners rather than be sent back to fight again. Others hid or “kept out of the way,” according to Grant, to avoid being counted. Pemberton twice asked Grant for arms, to guard his own men to prevent them from deserting. Grant refused. Deserting, he wrote, “was precisely what I expected and hoped that they would do.”

Newton and the other men began breaking ranks, even though Pemberton ordered them to remain with their companies. Almost to a man, the rank and file blamed Pemberton for starving them, and many of them vowed never again to serve under him. Men in tattered dun uniforms melted into the ravines and headed home, never to return to the ranks, despite repeated Confederate orders.

Among them was Newton. On his next muster roll, for the period of June 30 to October 31, 1863, he was listed as “absent without leave.” He was just one among thousands. A total of thirty-nine men from Company F alone—more than half—would go AWOL. Not all of them were disloyal; just because a man walked away didn’t mean he was sympathetic to Grant’s army. Desertion did not necessarily make a man Unionist or mean that he identified with the United States of America and its new slave emancipation policies. Even some of the most loyal men went AWOL in the post-Vicksburg chaos: the secessionist John M. Baylis, for instance, temporarily lost his will to fight after his brother Wyatt, an officer with Company B of the 7th Battalion, died of wounds at Vicksburg. Baylis was absent from July until the following November, when he finally returned to uniform.

But the woods also swarmed with men like Newton, who had turned their backs once and for all on the Cause. Newton would not fight for the Confederacy again; instead, he would only fight against it. A measure of his Unionism was a ballad of the Civil War (not a very good one) he composed that ended with Grant as the hero and
victor: “General Van Dorn was a warrior too. / He was superiored by General Lee. / Gen. Van Dorn and Gen. Price too / Both lost their ranks when they met of Gen. Grant.”

From Vicksburg onward, Newton clearly considered himself an ally of Grant and the Union army. It was as if he had decided, like Lincoln, “Grant is my man, and I am his the rest of the war.”

September 1863, Countryside Surrounding Vicksburg

W
ar destroyed all that was familiar
to Mississippians; it collapsed the old certainties like bricks and boards and altered the physical profiles of things into narcotic-seeming visions. In a clearing outside of Vicksburg, an elegant bedstead sat on a fine carpet on the grass, accompanied by a table and chairs. The eerie outdoor room was the work of a Yankee officer, who dragged the furnishings from a deserted plantation. “I have a magnificent parlor here in the woods,” he wrote in his diary, as if it were an everyday occurrence to sleep on a feather mattress in a swamp.

The capital of Jackson was a barely recognizable heap of ruins nicknamed “Chimneyville” by its residents for the rows of burned-out lots where nothing was left standing but chimneys. Newly elected governor Charles Clark, a planter who had lost the use of a leg at Shiloh, advocated mass suicide over defeat as if it were a reasonable proposition. Better to drown in the cobalt waters of the Gulf than surrender to Yankees and let Negroes invert society, suggested Clark, eminent in his gray broadcloth.

“Humbly submit yourselves to our hated foes, and they will offer you a reconstructed Constitution providing for the confiscation of your property, the immediate emancipation of your slaves and the elevation of the black race to a position of equality, aye, of superiority, that will make them your masters and rulers,” Clark threatened. “Rather than such base submission, such ruin and dishonor, let the last of our young men die upon the field of battle, and when none are left to wield a blade or uphold our banner, then let our old men, our women and children, like the remnant of the heroic Pascagoulas, when their braves were slain, join hands together, march into the sea and perish beneath its waters.”

But such suicidal grandiosity hardly helped those Mississippians such as Newton who wished to survive, nor did it help Clark cope with the more tedious and inglorious emergencies he faced as governor in the fall of 1863. Federal flags now flew over Corinth, Natchez, and Vicksburg, from which the Yankees could ravage the state’s interior. Clark and the legislature were continually forced to flee for safety, from Meridian, to Columbus, to Enterprise, to Macon.

The cotton speculator and future governor James Lusk Alcorn described what one raid did to his region. The Yankees “made sad havoc on their march; burnt old man Shelby’s gun house also Hulls—and Hatchez—burnt all Hull’s fence, killed most of his stock, took all that they had left, clothes, bedding, burnt all his doors, broke out his window sash, and burnt two of his cabins … they broke all that fine furniture and threw it in the yard, searched the house and robbed it of ten thousand dollars in money … They took off about twenty of Hill’s negros, and killed a great amount of the stock.”