Under Siege! (20 page)

Missouri was split in its support of the war and had troops fighting on both sides at Vicksburg. A Union captain from Hannibal, Missouri, recalled one particular incident that day in Vicksburg that he would never forget. One of his young soldiers had a brother in the Rebel army at Vicksburg. In town, the brothers spotted each other and fell out of ranks. Wrapping their arms around each other’s waists, they walked together, one strong, in a fresh blue uniform, the other thin and weak, dressed in gray rags.

Union doctors set to work helping Confederate doctors with the sick and injured. Grant ordered that flour, coffee, sugar, tea, bacon, and other rations be distributed to townspeople, which drew them out of their homes and caves, in spite of their despair over what had happened. Then Grant
went to the docks to personally greet Admiral Porter, who was bringing in all of his gunboats, rams, and transports to share the day’s triumph. The two men grinned and firmly shook hands as they congratulated each other.

Over a year after Union officers first demanded the surrender of Vicksburg, the guns overlooking the Mississippi River were finally silent.

THE UNFINISHED WAR
July 1863 and Beyond

N
ewspapers in the North triumphantly reported the capture of Vicksburg, but the story was quickly overshadowed by the news out of Pennsylvania. The three-day battle of Gettysburg, which took over 50,000 lives, ended on July 3, 1863, the same day Pemberton and Grant negotiated the surrender of Vicksburg. Together the Confederacy’s losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg ensured that the North would win the war—though it would take another twenty-one months to stop the fighting.

F
OUR DAYS AFTER THE SURRENDER,
Joe Johnston was on the run with Sherman’s army in pursuit. Ultimately Sherman pulled back, for his troops were needed elsewhere. Some time later, because Johnston was his superior officer, Pemberton had to report to him. According to stories of that meeting, Johnston rose to greet him warmly as a friend, but Pemberton saluted stiffly, turned, and walked away. The two men would never meet again.

Some historians regard Grant’s victory at Vicksburg at least in part as a result of Johnston’s failure. Grant had his own view. He wrote, “Johnston evidently took in the situation and wisely, I think, abstained from making an assault on us because it would simply have inflicted loss on both sides without accomplishing any result.”

S
HORTLY AFTER THE FALL OF
V
ICKSBURG
, Grant put Fred aboard a steamboat to St. Louis. He was worried about his son’s health and wanted his wife to look after him. Though Fred’s leg was at last healing and there was no longer a danger that it would have to be amputated, he was still sick with typhoid fever and dysentery—illnesses that had killed many soldiers. Julia Grant found expert medical care for him, and when Fred recovered, he accompanied his father to Washington, D.C. There he met Abraham Lincoln and saw his father receive a gold medal from Congress for his conquest of Vicksburg. Fred glowed with pride as people clamored to meet the famous general, cheering him wherever he went, but he saw how uncomfortable this attention made his father. The modest Grant told his wife, “Really, it was very embarrassing. I heartily wished myself back in camp.”

Union general James McPherson (seated second from right) is shown with his staff outside the Balfour home where he headquartered during the occupation.

Grant returned to Vicksburg to oversee the occupation of the city and the orderly processing of the surrendered Confederates. Julia, Fred, and the three other children joined him, and they lived for a while in an elegant mansion high in the Vicksburg hills that had sustained little damage during the siege. Other Union generals also selected private homes for
their personal use, sometimes ejecting the owners. Emma Balfour and her family had to share their home with General James Birdseye McPherson and his family. To regain the citizenship they lost when the South seceded from the United States, men in the community were required to sign a loyalty oath to the United States government. (Women were exempted from this since they did not have the right to vote.) Dr. Balfour refused to sign the hated oath, and as a result he was under constant surveillance and subjected to military harassment. More than once he was ordered to give money to Union sympathizers.

About 700 of Pemberton’s men also refused to take the oath, a requirement for parole, so they went to prison. A nineteen-year-old Confederate soldier who was leaving for a prison camp in the North wrote: “I stopped and looked back at the crestfallen city of Vicksburg … and thought of how many months we had nobly held the place against all the efforts of the Yankee nation, and bore privations and hardships of all kinds. Tears rose to my eyes and my very heart swelled with emotion. Being a prisoner did not in the least affect me, but the loss of the place, which was such a great downfall to the Confederacy … caused me much pain.”

Mary Loughborough’s husband also chose prison, and Mary moved to St. Louis to be closer to him. Boarding a steamboat with her small daughter, she knew she would miss the city she was leaving behind. “Vicksburg, with her terraced hills, with her pleasant homes and sad memories, passed from my view in the gathering twilight,” she wrote, “passed, but the river flowed on the same.”

G
RANT WANTED TO RESTORE ORDER
to the community as quickly as possible. He imposed martial law and a strict curfew. Freedom of speech was curtailed, and people were readily arrested and jailed for minor offenses. Only citizens who signed the loyalty oath could hold jobs and operate
businesses. Those who refused to sign had to obtain a pass to go anywhere outside town. They could even be banished from the city for a year if they made threats against the United States government or insulted Federal officers. In one incident, five women were banished after walking out of a church service rather than participate in a prayer for President Lincoln.

The Union occupation army of 7,500 soldiers was kept busy. According to Willie Lord, Grant was “a popular conquering general. He suppressed with an iron hand looting, violence and vandalism.” Townspeople appreciated that, but some were concerned about black soldiers helping to patrol the city. They worried that these former slaves might retaliate against whites for the injustices of slavery. They soon realized, however, that white soldiers caused as many problems as blacks. Willie’s mother, for one, had no use for any Yankee. She had a run-in one day with several Union soldiers who, for sport, had turned over her filled laundry basket when she was hanging clothes on the line. She confronted them angrily: “I should think soldiers would have too much feeling in this hour of our distress to intrude even to the privacy of a lady’s home.”

They pointed to the badly damaged church rectory and sneered, “Do you call this a lady’s home? You ought to keep it in better order.” Margaret
Lord was livid. “It is all you have left to us for a home,” she declared, “and I will tell you now that I have lived for months in the midst of thirty-thousand Confederate soldiers and this is the first insult I have ever received.”

When Vicksburg surrendered, the Union put confiscated cannon and artillery into service against the South.

After years of war, few Southerners had enough money to pay wages to their former slaves in exchange for their help, so, like Margaret Lord, they now did their own work. Some plantation and farm wives, whose husbands had not yet returned from the war or were dead, had to learn how to grow crops. Many mothers and their children were plunged into poverty, and women did whatever they could to earn money, from taking in sewing to teaching school or selling eggs. Some of them turned their homes into boardinghouses. Others competed with former slaves for any menial tasks that would pay a little something. Vicksburg overflowed with homeless people. The Union army had so wasted the countryside that after the siege, hunger forced an estimated 25,000 people, including freed slaves and camp followers, into the city so they could receive Union army rations. Housing was almost nonexistent, so people set up makeshift camps. In the unrelenting summer heat, the air so thick with humidity that it was hard to breathe, disease was rampant and many died.