Under Siege! (4 page)

S
OMEWHERE UPRIVER
, 30,000 Union soldiers in regulation blue were packed onto eighty ships. Those on deck huddled together miserably, pelted by cold rain, as the ships navigated through the rough black waters of the Mississippi River. Any holiday celebration for these bluecoats existed only in their memories of home and family. On this Christmas Eve, they were part of an army with a mission: they were going to take Vicksburg.

Their leader, General William Sherman, was following a plan he had hatched with General Grant. The Confederate commander of Vicksburg, General John Pemberton, had hurried his troops to northern Mississippi to pursue Grant. The plan was that while Grant engaged Pemberton, Sherman would take his troops downriver and quickly conquer Vicksburg, for without Pemberton and his army, the city had little defense.

But after beginning their river journey to Vicksburg, Sherman had no way of knowing that the Rebels had destroyed the Union’s supply base at Holly Springs, as the telegraph wires had been cut. Grant had had to
retreat to Memphis instead of fighting Pemberton. And now, Pemberton was on his way back to Vicksburg.

The ironclads-ships covered with protective metal—were a new innovation at the time of the Civil War.

On Christmas Eve, as dancers twirled merrily in the Balfours’ ballroom, Sherman’s flotilla was suddenly spotted by Confederates monitoring the river. They quickly sent a message through a private telegraph line to Phillip Hall, the telegraph operator on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River, directly across from Vicksburg. It read, “Great God, Phil, eighty-one gunboats and transports have passed here tonight.”

Hall knew what he had to do. Even though it was a stormy night and the river was dangerous, he risked his life to row a tiny boat to the Vicksburg wharf. Soaked to the skin and out of breath, he ran past the saloons and sagging hotels along the waterfront, past the downtown shops and stores, and then up the hilly streets to where Vicksburg’s most privileged lived.

Almost ready to collapse when he finally arrived at the Balfour home just after midnight, he ignored the surprised protests of the house slaves and burst into the ballroom. As he pushed his way through the happy throng of dancers, the music stopped and startled guests stared at the dripping wet man who was asking to speak to the officer in charge. Brigadier General Martin Luther Smith, second in command to Pemberton, stepped forward to confer with him. Then Smith’s face grew pale. He shouted to the crowd, “The party is at an end. The enemy is coming down the river!”

Amid the shrieks and cries of the guests, Smith advised people to flee the city. Every soldier of every rank was immediately put on alert and told to report for duty. The ball was over. It might be Christmas, but Vicksburg was at war.

G
ENERAL
P
EMBERTON
was halfway back to Vicksburg when he learned that Sherman was also headed there. To be sure he arrived before the enemy, Pemberton raced his troops back to defend the city. He was just in time. Sherman’s army had moved more slowly than anticipated and on Christmas Eve was still twenty miles north of Vicksburg. Over the next several days, the Union general eased his 30,000 men southward by boat, hoping to hear from Grant and trying to figure out a good place to put his troops ashore. Instead of solid land, he found mostly bogs and swamps. Finally he selected Chickasaw Bayou, three miles north of Vicksburg, where the land looked fairly stable. He still had not heard from Grant, and now he knew that Pemberton and his troops were back, for as soon as the Union bluecoats landed, soldiers in gray started lining up opposite them on the bayou’s waterlogged ground.

When the fighting started on the morning of December 28, Sherman quickly saw that even though he had twice as many men as Pemberton, the Rebels had the advantage. They knew how to fight in swampy terrain. When Union troops tried to move forward, they lost their footing, sinking
into the marsh. Unused to such dense vegetation, they could not see what was ahead of them or around them. The spooky sounds of swamp birds and animals they didn’t recognize kept them on edge. Trees were everywhere, growing right through the water and making it nearly impossible for the men to load and aim their guns. As a result, much of the fighting was brutal hand-to-hand combat.

Union troops depicted here struggled to get through unfamiliar swamps near Vicksburg.

To their surprise, Union soldiers discovered that a sharpshooter giving them trouble was a black man. A reporter for the
New York Herald
who was with the Union troops wrote: “He mounts a breastwork regardless of all danger, and getting sight of a Federal soldier, draws up his musket at arm’s length and fires, never failing of hitting his mark … It is certain that Negroes are fighting here, though probably only as sharpshooters.” This was unsettling to Northerners who assumed that all blacks supported the Union.

At the end of the first day, the Yankees had suffered almost 2,000
casualties, while the Rebels had lost only 187 men. That night both sides waited out the darkness. Fearful of revealing their positions, neither could light fires. The fog was thick. A cold, hard rain fell, and Yankees and Rebels alike suffered. Sherman assessed the situation. The river was rising and, with the threat of flooding, he knew his troops were in danger of drowning. If he tried another assault on Rebel lines, his men were sure to take heavy losses. With regret, he ordered his troops to withdraw.

He did not try to excuse what happened, writing later of his defeat at Chickasaw Bayou, “I reached Vicksburg at the time appointed, landed, assaulted, and failed.” He said that the city was “the strongest place I ever saw … No place on earth is favored by nature with natural defenses as is Vicksburg.”

The city’s newspapers gave ecstatic accounts of the Rebel victory. Lucy joined the hoopla and celebration. The Rebs had won! They had
won!
Surely now the Yankees would go home.

Instead, townspeople soon realized that the Union army planned to spend the winter in Mississippi. Everyone knew that eventually they would try another assault.

It was more important than ever to keep an eye on the river. On Sky Parlor Hill, bundled against the cold, Lucy did her part.

THE GENERAL’S BOY GOES TO WAR
Spring 1863

A
t age twelve, Frederick Grant knew that he was lucky. Most military children rarely saw their fathers in wartime, but Ulysses Grant was a devoted family man and he wanted his wife and four children with him as often as possible—even if that brought them directly into the theater of war.

Some wives wanted nothing to do with the inferior housing and food that were part of military life—especially during a war—but Julia Grant didn’t mind. “Whenever she could, Mother got as near to Father as possible,” Fred recalled as an adult, noting that she willingly endured camp life and that she felt the experience was good for her children. During the summer of 1861, when Fred was ten, he had left the family home in Ohio to spend three months with his father in Illinois, where Grant was helping to train Union troops for war. Fred had begged to go along, and his father had consented. “I, being the eldest, was treated by him always as if I were already a man, and was permitted to do many things that would have been considered too dangerous for the other children,” Fred said.

His mother supported Fred going. “I considered it a pleasant summer outing for both of them,” Julia Grant wrote in her memoir. But when the
war began in earnest and Grant received orders sending him to Missouri, he refused to take his son. “We may have some fighting to do, and he is too young to have the exposure of camp life,” Grant wrote to Julia. She immediately wrote back, “Do not send him home; Alexander was no older when he accompanied Philip. Do keep him with you.” Her letter, with its reference to the young Alexander the Great and his father, arrived too late, for Fred was already on his way back.

Fred is standing to the left of his mother in this formal portrait of the Grant family. The other children include, from left, Nellie, Jesse, and Ulysses, Jr.

Now, a year and a half later in this spring of 1863, Fred was with his father once again. He had been thrilled when his parents allowed him to leave school and join the army at his father’s headquarters on the Mississippi River fifty miles north of Vicksburg. This time Fred was determined not to be sent home. His goal was to be there when the guns of Vicksburg were finally silenced and the Mississippi River was totally in Union hands.
At the moment of surrender, Fred would be at his father’s side, sharing sweet victory.