PART FOUR
14
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR, the gentlemen and ladies of Vicksburg had a private refuge. It was a little park, reserved for the best people, on a grassy hilltop near the heart of town. They reached it by a wooden stairway snaking up from steet level. The stairway allowed the ladies to ascend with dignity, their hoop skirts unencumbered by tangles and their parasols still trim; the gentlemen were able to keep up their gallant banter without losing a step to a jutting tree root or an ill-placed ravine. Slaves followed behind, bearing the picnic baskets—in those days, none of the best people were ever seen in public doing anything so menial as carrying objects.
The hilltop was a small plot of mown grass, set with wrought-iron chairs and tables and a spyglass. In the evenings the tables would be swathed in white tablecloths, and the wineglasses would be brimming. Around the plot were poles drooping with clusters of Chinese lanterns. Sometimes the parties went on long past midnight. By then the lanterns had guttered, and the lights of the town below were out; with the embers of sunset faded, the sky became an ornate drapery of starlight. The view gave the hilltop its name: the Sky Parlor.
Vicksburg stood on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi about 250 miles northwest of New Orleans. The hilltop offered a commanding view of the town, the river, and the enclosing countryside. To the north and east of the Sky Parlor, past the last rooftops of the town, was a vista of a jumbled wilderness terrain: thickly forested hills and valleys and sloughs and ravines, romantically shrouded in mist, and as wildly lush and overgrown as a tropical jungle. To the south and southeast, the land was flatter and more passable: low hills and wide meadows and—more and more toward midcentury—the ruled fields and parceled-out expanses of the cotton plantations. To the west, across the Mississippi on the Louisiana shore, was a tangle of swampland. Cutting through the heart of the landscape, between the wilderness and the swamp, was a gigantic curve of the river. Vicksburg had been built on the outer bank of a hairpin turn: from the Sky Parlor you could see the river flowing northeast toward the town, and then bending sharply around a narrow tongue of swampland, and then flowing away again to the southwest, where it went on unfolding its slow, shining arabesques out to the horizon.
Vicksburg was a cosmopolitan town. It had always been rich, and in the years before the war, it was getting richer. Immense quantities of cotton from the plantations were passing out through the warehouses of Vicksburg Landing on their way to the delta, to the brokers in New York, and ultimately to the consignment markets of Europe. Coming back in were money and bulk goods and fine products from around the world. Vicksburg’s population was only around four thousand, and yet its commercial district was able to support jewelers, custom tailors, portrait photographers, deluxe specialty bakers and confectioners, a grocery store selling fancy tinned goods from Europe, a milliner carrying fabrics from Asia, a perfumery stocked with scents from the Middle East, and a bookstore called Clarke’s Literary Depot with the latest and raciest novels from New York, London, and Paris.
The coming of the war was not viewed in Vicksburg with much enthusiasm. There was no significant sentiment for abolition—but neither was there any for secession. That was in fact a common view among the river towns. They lived and died by the free passage of people and cargo up and down the Mississippi, from the northern forests to the Gulf, and whatever else the outbreak of the war meant, it was certain to start with river blockades. In New Orleans, after the state had voted for secession and even as the war began, there was a popular movement to declare neutrality and preserve its status as an open city.
The beginning of hostilities in April 1861 was anticlimactic. There was no great calamity in Vicksburg, not at first. The heaviest fighting was back east, far away from the frontier. The Mississippi blockades did duly appear, at Cairo, Illinois, at the north and at the river mouth in the Gulf, and many of the big steamboat lines did cease running. But the nearby tributaries remained open—most vitally, the Red River, which led west up through Louisiana into Texas—and each night a glittering boat city still assembled on the waters before Vicksburg Landing.
There were also the railroads. The trains from the western states ran to a depot on the Louisiana shore, where an armada of ferries was waiting to shuttle goods and people over the mile-wide water to town. In the east, another line ran through the wilderness country toward the heart of the Confederacy. Over the first months of the war, as more and more of the ocean and Gulf ports were blockaded, the railroad connection at Vicksburg became the main surviving link between the Deep South and the outside world. Jefferson Davis called Vicksburg “the nailhead holding the South’s two halves together.” Abraham Lincoln told his military commanders: “Vicksburg is the key. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.”
About a year after the war began, Confederate forces started arriving in large numbers to defend Vicksburg and keep its railroad lines open. Over the spring and summer of 1862, interminable lines of wagons and troops came winding in from the train depots and the river ferry, and by the autumn of that year, the observers at the Sky Parlor saw enormous earthworks being constructed around the town—mazes of trenches and revetments and redans and barricades. At the same time, Yankee forces were gradually occupying the wilderness areas beyond; at night their countless campfires were brighter than the stars. By the time the Vicksburg campaign was at its height, in the summer of 1863, there were more than 150,000 soldiers contending for the town, and from the Sky Parlor it looked as though there were nothing left in the world but the war.
The Federal campaign on the Mississippi began in earnest in April 1862. That was when a large Federal naval force entered the river mouth from the Gulf. They were greeted by a spectacular gesture of outrage at New Orleans: the citizens had emptied the warehouses and had piled the levee high with bales of cotton and other goods waiting for export, and as the ships of the expeditionary force approached, the mountains of goods were all set on fire. But after that there was little else in the way of overt violence. The Federal force took the city essentially unopposed. Nor did they meet much more resistance as they moved on upriver, to Baton Rouge and then Natchez: both towns surrendered without firing a shot. The river was open all the way to Vicksburg.
The convoy advanced slowly. From the shrouded swamps and bayous on either side there would occasionally be the white puff and the remote sharp report of a sniper’s fired rifle; otherwise there was silence. The wide waters of the river were deserted. Above Natchez, the Federal flagship detained two men poling downriver in a skiff. David Porter, a naval lieutenant, questioned the men closely. They claimed to be getting on with their business the way they always had. One of them said, “This is a highway, and I think we have a right to travel it.” Porter decided they had a point and let them go.
They passed the big plantations on either bank. Some of them had been abandoned by their owners; the slaves were all gathered at the levee to cheer the convoy on. Other plantations were being guarded by committees of vigilance, who were keeping the slaves confined to their quarters and were sullenly patrolling the docks. Some plantations were shrouded in black billows of choking smoke: their owners, still in residence, had been inspired by the defiance at New Orleans and were burning their cotton. Many of them piled the bales along the levees before setting them afire. As the convoy approached, they would then shove the bales out onto the water. The bales unraveled and scattered in brilliant drifts and shoals and archipelagoes, while sparkling tufts of burning cotton blew with the smoke in thin shreds across the river’s surface. The last of the fires would swirl and gutter in the wake of the convoy—harmless, David Porter remembered, but an impressive sight after sunset.
The convoy reached Vicksburg on May 18. By then the first of the Confederate reinforcements were already in place; new artillery batteries bristled from the shoreline and from the town on the high bluff. The expedition’s commander, Admiral David Farragut, normally a vigorous and headlong attacker, quailed at the sight of them—much to the contempt of his junior officers. David Porter thought that the Confederate forces were probably still in disarray and that Vicksburg would be as easy a conquest as New Orleans had been. To the end of his life, Porter remained outraged at Farragut’s timidity; he believed that if they’d stormed Vicksburg that day, they might have captured the town and put an end to the Confederacy then and there.
Instead they began digging in for a long campaign. Farragut believed that the major strategic problem he faced was to find a way to move his forces up and down the river out of range of Vicksburg’s guns. His solution was to excavate a canal across the narrow tongue of swampland inside the hairpin turn of the river. This project occupied the Federal forces the rest of that spring and into the summer. The work crews spent weeks hacking through the overgrown tangle of cypresses and scrub pines and the thick, treacherous walls of grasses and cattails and reeds; then they had to shovel out the oozing, root-woven mud. The air was punishingly hot and muggy, and the swamps swarmed with battalions of mosquitoes and flies. The work progressed by inches, and the Yankees began falling sick. Mostly they suffered from dysentery and malaria, but there were also outbreaks of measles, and by the summer Old Yellow Jack was everywhere. Their pace slowed from a crawl to a snail’s creep.
The Federal command then brought in a new army of workers: slaves from the abandoned plantations. The legal status of the slaves was just then at a point of maximum confusion; it was never altogether clear whether the slaves were conscripts, paid labor, or volunteers. But around a thousand of them set to work on the canal, and a few hundred women and children came in with them to cook their meals, take care of their camp, and run messages. The progress on the canal immediately picked up. By early summer there was a complete trench dug from bank to bank. But the work proved to be in vain: the river defeated them. Strong eddies were flowing away from the shore along the hairpin turn, which kept the main force of the current out of the canal trench. No matter how deep the canal was dug, it simply would not draw enough water to allow boats to pass. Then, in late June, the river rose. It was a big rise that year; the hairpin turn and most of the surrounding swampland were flooded out. The walls of the trench collapsed and avalanches of mud overfilled the entire excavation. When the water receded several days later, the canal had been erased and the work crews had to start over from scratch.
But by then several more waves of disease had swept through the Yankee camp and their strength had worn down to almost nothing. Even though they had taken only a handful of casualties in their occasional low-level skirmishing with the Confederates, fewer than half the troops were fit for combat. In late July Admiral Farragut decided to withdraw back to New Orleans.
“The Yankees have called off their gunboats and quit the river in disgust,” wrote one local girl, Kate Stone, who lived on a plantation just outside of Vicksburg. “Sometimes now we can get the papers.”
The Yankees returned in force at the end of August. A large fleet descended the Mississippi from Cairo, while another, smaller fleet came up from New Orleans. The Yankee naval forces had a new commander: David Porter, who had been promoted to acting admiral. He had none of Farragut’s caution. He quickly bonded with his counterpart in the Federal army, General William Tecumseh Sherman, and he hugely admired Sherman’s superior, Ulysses S. Grant: both men, he felt, had come to Vicksburg to fight. Grant, wrote Porter, “saw from the first that there was no use in sitting down before Vicksburg and simply looking at it, or bombarding it to bring about a surrender; we would have lost time, and deposited our shell in the hills, increasing their weight in iron, without getting nearer to our object.”
But even Porter realized that storming the town was no longer a real option. While the Federal troops had been building their useless canal, the Confederates had so heavily reinforced the town that a direct attack would have been suicidal. Instead the Federal forces were driven to attempt a new strategy: cutting through the wilderness country north of the town in order to encircle it from the rear.
The wilderness proved to be a mysterious place. The hills were steep and impassably overgrown, and they were cut randomly by countless deep ravines. The Federal troops were disoriented by the ceaselessly infolding tangles of trackless underbrush; their supply trains routinely got lost, sometimes for days, just out of sight of their destination. Encounters with Confederate patrols rapidly deteriorated into confused and desperate fire-fights, with troops on both sides so bewildered by the labyrinths of foliage that they were charging randomly and firing wildly in all directions. They were even more baffled by the strange acoustic properties of the terrain. Sometimes vital reinforcements failed to arrive because they had inadvertently hidden themselves in the sound shadow of a steep ravine and couldn’t hear the roar of a battle a hundred yards away. Then the autumn rains came, and the marshy ground turned to soup; wounded men were often swallowed up without a trace in the mud before medics could reach them. The autumn and then the winter passed in inconclusive and deadly skirmishing. Porter one day found Sherman despondent because several hundred men had been wounded or killed in a useless attempt to take a ridge heavily defended by Confederate cannon. Porter told Sherman to cheer up because it was going to cost them ten times that or more before Vicksburg finally surrendered.
Porter himself led one of the most ambitious campaigns of that autumn. The Mississippi always rose again after the low waters of late summer, but that season its rise was so high that its waters were washing back up into its tributaries and flooding the surrounding countryside. It gave Porter an audacious idea. He and Sherman would take a convoy with a large contingent of troops up to the Sunflower River north of Vicksburg. Then the convoy would cross out of the river and try to ride the floodwaters over the drowned bayou country to the south and east, until they reached the Yazoo River. From there they could descend upon Vicksburg from the rear.
The first part of the plan went just as he’d envisioned it. Federal work crews forced a breach in a levee on the Sunflower, and Porter’s convoy glided across it, out from the river and into the flooded woodlands. But their progress after that was excruciatingly slow. After four days, they’d barely made forty miles. The forests closed in impenetrably around them. Each day seemed to bring them no closer to the goal. As the boats crept through the endless corridors of half-submerged trees, the crews saw nothing on either side, mile after mile, but hushed glades lit by a few passing shafts of dim sunlight. The leaf canopies were a solid mass overhead, and the thorny bristles of ancient treetops hung down low; the boats were increasingly battered by clanging, crashing, splintering collisions with the heavy, moss-draped branches. By the time they’d cut their way through to the Yazoo, Porter wrote, “most of the light vessels were perfect wrecks in their upper works.”
The only chance the plan had of succeeding was through secrecy and surprise. But the passage through the flooded forests had been so slow, and had kicked up such a racket, the Confederates must have known about it almost from the beginning. Porter later wrote: “I am quite satisfied in my own mind that, while we were steaming along and performing naval evolutions in the woods, the President of the Southern Confederacy was reading something like the following dispatch to his Cabinet: ‘Sherman and Porter pirouetting through the woods in steamers and ironclads. Are keeping a lookout on them. Hope to bag them all before to-morrow.’ ”
But at last they emerged onto the Yazoo and began their descent. They quickly found that their worst expectations had been correct: the river was held in force against them. The Confederates had had time to sink a line of boats to form a barricade across the river and had even thrown up a new fort with a battery of cannon trained on the spot upstream where the Yankees were most likely to appear. Porter recognized at once that the situation was hopeless and that he was obliged to order an immediate retreat. That meant executing another, even more awkward pirouette and steaming backward around a river bend before they could figure out a safe plan of escape across the flood lands toward the Sunflower and the Mississippi.
It had been a complete waste of time, like just about everything the Yankees tried that fall and winter. But Porter, looking back, found that he couldn’t entirely regret it. At least, he never did shake the memory of that surreal forest passage. It looked, he wrote, “as though the world had suddenly got topsy-turvy, or that there was a great camp-meeting in the woods on board ironclads and transports.”
“Today we actually had cake,” Kate Stone wrote at the end of September, “a most rare occurrence, due to Mrs. Hardison’s sending us a little homemade flour.” That was the sort of deprivation that Vicksburg was suffering—not much, and partly voluntary. They could have had flour whenever they wanted it; all through that autumn, there were trading boats from the North, laden with essential supplies and luxuries, passing the blockades with the permission of the Yankee military command. They sold their goods at what Stone noted were “ridiculously low prices.” But, she declared stoutly, “of course no patriot could think of buying from them.”
Stone even found some things about the situation cheering. She liked how the makeshift informalities of wartime life had cleared away the stuffiness that Vicksburg’s aristocrats had cultivated for so many generations. “We have been a race of haughty, indolent, and waited-on people,” she observed. “A year ago a gentleman never thought of carrying a bundle, even a small one, through the streets.” But now, she wrote, “one gentleman I saw walking down the street in Jackson, and a splendid-looking fellow he was, had a piece of fish in one hand, a cavalry saddle on his back, bridle, blankets, newspapers, and a small parcel in the other hand; and over his shoulder swung an immense pair of cavalry boots. And nobody thought he looked odd.”
(The mood was not so sanguine among the Southerners who’d fled their plantations and left their slaves behind. In St. Louis, the writer Galusha Anderson observed, many of the refugees from the lower valley proved to be spoiled, petulant, and literally incapable of getting into and out of their clothes without slaves to help them.)
The town bore up well even when the increasingly desperate Federal forces closed the blockades completely and began training their heaviest guns on the bluff. Every day that winter, mortars were fired from the Yankee gunboats anchored in the river. The shells came floating up lazily: most fell short; a few reached the town and punched through roofs or sent geysers of dirt up from the streets. But they did little to dampen morale, and strategically they accomplished nothing. After several weeks of incessant shelling, fewer than ten people in Vicksburg had been killed and only thirty or forty injured. From the Sky Parlor, the attacks had a certain beauty. “There was a strange fascination,” one observer wrote, “in watching these huge missiles at night, as they described their graceful curves through the darkness, exploding with a sudden glare, followed by the strange sounds of their descending fragments.”
By the beginning of the spring of 1863, people were growing hopeful that the campaign would soon be over. It had been going on for almost a year, and the Yankees had gotten nowhere at all. Even in the midst of the bombardments, Vicksburg was still lively and crowded. The Confederate command had issued a proclamation that “earnestly recommended” all noncombatants evacuate, but few had obeyed: instead they dug makeshift bomb shelters for themselves in the steep sides of the hills to ride out the mortar attacks. And the long-range strategic position of the town remained strong. There had been one bad loss over the winter—the Yankees had captured the depot on the Louisiana shore and had put a stop to the train shipments from the west. But the Red River was still in Confederate hands and some supply boats continued to come in. While the prices in the stores were getting astronomically high, at least the shelves weren’t bare: the groceries and clothiers and dry-goods stores in the commercial district were still open for business. People began saying publicly, with something like confidence, that when the summer came in and brought along Old Yellow Jack with it, the Yankees were bound to give up and go away for good.
The first weeks of April were unusually beautiful. There was music at the Sky Parlor and there were midnight hunting parties in the woods. The nights were cloudless; in the moonlight, the river and the wilderness looked almost as pristine as they had before the war. While the gunboats of the Yankees were still squatting in the water out of range of the Vicksburg batteries, there was little sign of movement on the banks. The thought didn’t occur to anyone in town—or, in fact, in the Confederate command—that the Yankees might be waiting for the new moon.
The Union command had concluded that their attempts to take the town were accomplishing nothing and that there was no other strategy open to them but one of sheer desperation: they would have to take the main strength of their forces downriver, below the town, where they would then try to encircle it from the open country from the south. This meant that they would have to run the gantlet of Confederate batteries massed on the shore and the bluff; it also meant that if the Confederates managed to mount a counterattack and regain control of the river, the Yankee force would be cut off in the middle of hostile territory. The Union command proceeded with extreme caution. They moved their troops slowly and surreptitiously through the swamps on the west bank of the river, out of sight of the Confederate spotters. Meanwhile, they massed their supplies in large transport ships, which they were going to send downriver once the nights were dark enough to give them some cover.
They did not go completely unobserved. All through those weeks, the Confederate scouts below Vicksburg were sending in reports of odd Yankee troop movements on the Louisiana shore. Eventually the commander of the Confederate forces there ordered a detachment across the river to reconnoiter. This proved to be an almost impossible task. The land was a trackless swamp at the best of times, and that year the river was rising early: the Confederate troops had to wade and thrash through mile after mile of icy water and mud. They gave up before they could complete their reconnaissance—but they had seen enough to terrify them. They returned to camp with an urgent warning: very large numbers of Yankee troops were moving south through the swamps. An enormous Yankee force was being secretly built up on the western banks, positioned for a major incursion across the river.
The report was duly sent up the line of the Confederate command, until it reached General John Pemberton, the man in charge of Vicksburg’s defenses. Pemberton had already convinced himself that the Yankees were on the brink of withdrawing from Vicksburg and moving on to a new campaign to the east, based in the recently recaptured city of Memphis. He greeted the report of a secret massing of Yankee troops in the swampland with contempt. His only response was: Much doubt it. Those three words, it was later said, cost the Confederacy the war.
April 16 was another lovely day. The afternoon was cloudless and the sunset was serene. Mary Loughborough, the wife of a Confederate officer serving on Pemberton’s staff, later recalled in her memoirs the beauty of the evening. She and a few friends went on a carriage ride through town and came home early; they took their ease at her rented house, which had a spectacular view of the river. The air was warm and pleasant. They could hear a band playing at a nearby park, and in the ruby glow of twilight, the huge Federal transports out on the water were black silhouettes with a few twinkling lamps.
After dark there was a ball at one of the town’s grandest mansions. There young ladies danced with gallant officers from the Confederate headquarters. The girls wore their finest frocks—corn silk with black lace, white silk with blue point, grass-green with white lace. The officers were all in full dress uniform. The party spilled out onto the grounds of the estate, lit up by clusters of paper lanterns beneath a starry sky. It was the night of the new moon. The darkness of the countryside around Vicksburg was flecked here and there by the golden campfires.
On the river, near the Federal transports, a flotilla of small boats had gathered, around thirty in all. They were crowded with Yankee officers, newspaper correspondents, and an assortment of Northern civilians, both men and women, who’d come down with the Federal troops as observers. General Grant was there; so were his wife and children—they’d just arrived from Illinois for a visit. The atmosphere was festive. It often was before a big battle; the custom was for parties of civilians to position themselves out of the line of fire and watch the fighting unfold as though they were attending a sporting event. That night the correspondent for The New York Times reported laughter, singing, flirting, and “a running fusillade of champagne corks.”
The night deepened; the lights of the town winked out. Everyone in the flotilla waited. Around ten o’clock they fell silent: a huge black shape was gliding past them in the water. It was Admiral Porter’s flagship—the first of ten ironclads and large transports that were carrying the supplies to provision the expeditionary force below Vicksburg.
The convoy was seen first by the scattering of Confederate spotters who were perpetually darting around the river in canoes and small boats. They quickly crossed to Vicksburg Landing, where they alerted the sentries patrolling the riverbank. The sentries fired the signal cannon. The alarm rapidly became general. Then the convoy began its passage of the river before the town. That was when, to the amazement of the Yankees, the darkness was suddenly broken. A line of dazzling lights began springing up onshore. The Confederates had prepared for an assault on the riverfront by positioning along the full length of the levee rows of barrels of tar and pitch, interspersed with huge stacks of cotton bales soaked in oil. They had even commandeered all the abandoned waterfront sheds and barns and warehouses and had stacked them with kindling. As soon as the convoy approached and the alarm was sounded, Confederate troops carrying torches raced around the levee and set everything on fire.
The wall of flames towered over the river and lit up the surface of the water for a mile offshore. The slow, lumbering convoy was caught in the glare. It was immediately targeted by the Confederate batteries. The ironclads of the convoy returned fire. The brilliance of the flames along the levee was rapidly intensified by the spangled, crisscrossing fireworks of the cannonades. It was a “terrible” scene, General Grant said in his memoirs, but he conceded that it was also “magnificent.”
The river had turned into a panorama of vast visual confusion. The roils of flame, the billows of smoke, and the dazzling lines of the soaring shells so baffled the spectators that some of them began to see strange things in the light. Several of the Northerners watching from the flotilla became convinced that a gigantic illuminated tower was looming above the town. It was most likely just Sky Parlor Hill underlit by the fires on the levee, but reports were solemnly printed in Northern newspapers for weeks afterward that the Confederates had secretly constructed some kind of infernal machine, a beacon tower that normally was hidden underground but could be raised up to a commanding and terrifying height whenever danger threatened.
By then everybody in Vicksburg was awake and was watching the battle unfold. Mary Loughborough remembered being roused by the booming of the signal cannon and going back out to her veranda, where her friends had already gathered. They could see on the blazing surface of the river the black line of the Federal convoy gliding downstream, firing off artillery as it neared the wall of fire on the levee, and they could feel the concussions as the shells landed on the streets around them. Meanwhile, Confederate couriers on horseback were hurtling frantically through the streets, the soldiers on the levee were shouting and running, and the sound of the falling shells was getting closer. Loughborough kept putting off the decision to take shelter. She waited until the flashes of light from the portholes in the Federal ships seemed to be directly facing her. “While I hesitated,” she later wrote, “fearing to remain, yet wishing still to witness the termination of the engagement, a shell exploded near the side of the house. Fear instantly decided me.”
Elsewhere in town, the fancy ball was still in full swing. Many of the guests drifted up to the Sky Parlor to watch the battle unfold. But as the firefight grew more furious, and shells started falling all over town, the partygoers began to succumb to panic. One of the girls was dancing with a brigadier general, and she asked him desperately, “Where shall we go?” He answered, “To the country for safety.” He was joking—there was no time for them to go anywhere at all. But she and a group of her friends immediately started running down a road that led out of town into the forest. One of the gentlemen at the party noticed their departure and ran after them. “As a shell would be heard coming,” a witness recalled later, “he would cry, ‘Fall!’ and down they would drop in the dust, party dresses and all, lying until the explosion took place; then up, with wild eyes and fiercely beating hearts, flying with all speed onward.” Their energy and their initiative quickly ran out. They took shelter at the first house they passed, and they remained there until their friends and families sent carriages after them.
Around midnight, Mary Loughborough returned to the veranda, at a friend’s urging, “that we might witness a beautiful sight.” She found that the river had grown dark again; the convoy had departed, the fires along the levee had all gone out, and there were only long wisps of smoke floating up and vanishing from the shore into the night air above the town. But just off the levee was the “beautiful sight”: one of the big Federal transports. Set afire by the shelling and abandoned, it was now drifting aimlessly in the shadows along the bank as it burned down to the waterline. But the sight did nothing to enliven the mood on the veranda. Loughborough’s neighbors, she writes, were all “astonished and chagrined” by the events of the evening. They couldn’t stop talking about the daring run of the Yankees and speculating on why it had worked. The abandoned transport had been the only one fatally struck; the others had glided through the gantlet and were now safely downriver. How could this have happened? As the guests went on talking late into the night, few were willing to believe that they had simply been outmaneuvered by the Yankees and that their great river defenses were worthless. (They wouldn’t start seriously discussing the possibility until a week later, when the Yankees ran another, larger convoy past them and didn’t lose a single boat.) Instead they fell back on their favorite explanation for everything that had gone wrong in the war: the confusion and incompetence of the Confederate military command. “Very few of the Confederate guns,” Loughborough reported people saying, “had been discharged at all. Several reasons had been assigned; the real one was supposed to have been the quality of the fuses that were recently sent from Richmond, and had not been tried since their arrival. This night of all others they were found to be defective.”
In fact, the whole story appears to have been wishful thinking. The Confederate batteries had sent a storm of shells down on the convoy. The real reason the Yankees had succeeded was Admiral Porter’s characteristic bravado and willingness to gamble. He had noticed in previous skirmishes that the Confederate batteries had been relatively ineffectual whenever the action got near shore. There were only two likely explanations: either the Confederate gunners were poor shots (which he didn’t believe), or else the big guns could not be repositioned so as to fire accurately at close range. He’d therefore ordered the convoy to run as near to the levee as possible. His gamble paid off: while the shells did batter his boats unmercifully, not one took a hit below the waterline, and among his crews, all taking shelter belowdecks, only six were injured and none killed.
But the truth about the Confederate failure probably wouldn’t have made much difference in the postmortem taking place on Loughborough’s veranda. Everybody was aware that, whatever the reason, the Yankees had scored a tremendous victory. From their new position, and with such a huge convoy of supplies to draw on, they could now cross the river, occupy the open and relatively passable countryside south of Vicksburg, and encircle the town at their leisure. Loughborough listened to the talk with increasing despondency and growing desperation. “The lurid glare from the burning boat fell in red and amber light upon the house, the veranda, and the animated faces turned toward the river,” she wrote. “Fair and beautiful, but false, the crimson, wavering light.”
The hills and bluffs of Vicksburg were made up primarily of loess, a fine-grained clay soil easy to excavate. In the weeks after the Yankees ran the gantlet downriver, the shelling of the town intensified, and the townspeople grew more and more skilled at digging out deep shelters in the loess slopes behind their houses or along backstreets and alleys. “Caves became the fashion—the rage,” one Vicksburg woman remembered. Mary Loughborough had, or thought she had, one of the better shelters: it was around the size of a large drawing room, had several sturdy and comfortable chairs, and was high enough for anyone to stand upright. But her husband thought she deserved better, and paid to have a more elaborate cave dug. This one had a main room about six feet deep that led to two branches—one was her bedroom and the other her drawing room. It seemed luxurious to her, but by the rapidly rising standards of the town, it was still fairly primitive. The cave belonging to the town minister, William Lord, was an enormous excavation with five separate entrances from the alleys and backyards, and a hatchway up to the slope serving as both a ventilation shaft and an emergency exit. A long central gallery that could hold more than sixty people was flanked by galleries that served as dormitories, kitchens, and slave quarters. Most nights it was packed with crying children, squabbling parents, and people coughing from the smoke that poured out of the kitchens. But Lord’s son remembered it as “the Arabian Nights made real.” He wrote: “The sound of a guitar here, a hymn there, and a negro melody somewhere else, all coming to us from among swaying Oriental draperies, sent me off at night to fairyland.”
At first people hid out in the caves only in dire emergencies, when the bombardment was particularly heavy and their own neighborhood seemed to be the target. But as the Yankees gradually encircled Vicksburg in April and May and their guns moved inexorably closer, the shells started coming down everywhere, unpredictably, at all hours of the day and night. That was when people abandoned their houses and began staying in and around their caves full-time. They took great care to preserve a feeling of normality. Neighbors in adjoining caves paid each other formal visits frequently throughout the day, to trade supplies and to exchange the latest rumors. The slaves did the cooking and washing just outside the cave entrances, under the overhang of the bluff, and ducked into the shelter only when the bombardment was particularly fierce. Gradually the cave came to seem like an ordinary home. When Loughborough came to write her memoirs, she titled them My Cave Life in Vicksburg.
“The hill called the Sky Parlor,” an anonymous diarist wrote that April, “has become quite a fashionable resort for the few upper-circle families left here.” The ladies and the idle gentlemen would spend hours each day surveying the occupied landscape through the spyglass. The Federal forces no longer felt any need for secrecy and their movements of men and matériel took place in the open, in broad daylight. Across the river in the swamplands, long lines of wagons bearing supplies were trundling down newly cut trails, and there was a continual flurry of couriers riding up and down the western bank. Tugboats and rowboats shuttled back and forth among the Union fleet, obviously carrying orders—Mary Loughborough noticed that every time a tugboat visited one of the gunboats, the gunboat would shortly afterward shift position. “Altogether,” she wrote, “the Federal encampment and movements were far more stirring and interesting than the quiet fortified life of Vicksburg.”
The mood among the watchers at Sky Parlor was somber. Day after day, there was nothing but bad news. The Yankees now held both banks of the river above its confluence with the Red, and that meant that, upriver and down, the Mississippi was now wholly closed to Confederate traffic: no more supplies were coming in by boat. News soon came that they had captured the eastern rail depot. With both rail lines and the river lost, Vicksburg was now entirely cut off from the outside world. To keep up morale, the Confederate military command had spread the word that there were at least sixty days of provisions stockpiled. That was more than enough to last until a promised relief expedition arrived. But at the Sky Parlor one afternoon in the middle of May, Loughborough saw something that made her realize she and the other townspeople were being lied to. Two large rafts crowded with men pushed off from Vicksburg Landing and crossed to the Federal encampment on the Louisiana shore. The men were Yankee prisoners, and they were being released because the Confederates couldn’t feed them. “The idea made me serious,” Loughborough wrote. “We might look forward truly now to perhaps real suffering.”
The encirclement of the town was complete by mid-May. Soon the field hospitals in the countryside were overwhelmed, and after each day’s skirmishing along the siege lines, the wagons came rolling into Vicksburg bearing the sick and the wounded. New field hospitals were set up anywhere room could be found. Rows of white tents popped up in the public parks, on estate grounds, down residential streets, in cemeteries; in some of the cemeteries they laid the wounded men out in mausoleums and used gravestones as operating tables. The hospitals were segregated by the patients’ condition. By far the majority of the field hospitals were for those with infectious diseases. The Confederate garrison was being devastated by wave after wave of yellow jack, malaria, dysentery, and measles; according to one estimate, by late May more than a third of the soldiers had fallen sick. The remainder of the hospitals were for the wounded.
The procession of wounds was appalling. “Every part of the body is pierced,” the minister William Foster wrote after his first visit to the tents. “All conceivable wounds are inflicted. The heart sickens.” Foster saw a man with his hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes blasted off and his face burned to a crisp. A thick river of drool was perpetually cascading from his scalded and charred mouth. Another man had been shot through the jaw. His tongue had been tied back so he wouldn’t choke on it. Another man had his jaw torn off; another had a pair of screwdrivers driven into his jaw and temples. “He floods the bed with his blood,” Foster wrote. The care the wounded were receiving was minimal at best, and the conditions in the tents were dire—especially as the summer heat deepened and the insects came swarming. Wounds teemed with so many maggots that the delirious victims kept clawing their bandages off to try to get momentary relief from the torment. The flies on one wounded man, Foster wrote, were “like bees in a hive.”
Most of the workers in the hospital tents quickly grew inured to such sights. But no matter how jaded they became, there was one place they had a hard time nerving themselves to enter: the surgery tent. Most of the surgeons at Vicksburg had received their training before the advent of chloroform—many were in fact opposed to its use on religious grounds, because the suffering of the wounded had been sent by God. The driving principle of their surgical training had been to get the operation over with as fast as possible before the patient died. This meant that most procedures more complicated than amputation were ruled out from the start (and would have been fatal anyway, without antisepsis), and amputation itself was seen as a move of desperation. William Foster estimated that more than half of the wounded who passed through the surgery tents died.
The procedure was simple. A patient with a wounded limb was given chloroform, as long as chloroform was still available. He was laid out on the surgeon’s table and a tight cord was wrapped around the limb. The surgeon took a stiff jolt of brandy to fortify himself; then he quickly cut through the flesh with his knife and pulled back the flap of skin and muscle to reveal the bone. He took up a saw and used it to cut through the bone with one stroke. He looped a cord around the open artery, which was by then gushing out a torrent of blood, tied it off, pulled the flap of skin around the stump, and stitched it shut. The patient was carried to another tent, the amputated part was pushed off the edge of the table, and the next patient was brought in.
Beside the surgeon’s table, amputated arms and legs, hands and feet, piled up over the course of the day. In the heat of summer they soon putrefied. The Confederate command issued orders that the limbs be disposed of in some sort of respectful manner. But one slave assigned the duty later admitted that they were simply loaded up on a cart and dumped into an abandoned well.
By late May, the townspeople and the troops had come to blame their desperate position on the Confederate military—particularly on General Pemberton. “Our troops,” wrote Foster, “have no confidence in either the head or the heart of our commanding general.” Everyone viewed Pemberton—not without justice—as a weakling, as a vacillating and uncertain officer unable to exert authority over his subordinates. What was worse, he was a Yankee: he’d only joined the Confederate cause in the first place because he’d married into a Southern family. As the siege worsened, more and more people in town were saying openly that he was a traitor secretly working with the other side.
Pemberton was acutely aware of the decline in his reputation. As the Yankee lines closed in around the town, the word began to spread that the Confederate troops were going to rise in mutiny. Pemberton issued a public denial of all the rumors:
You have heard that I was incompetent, and a traitor, and that it was my intention to sell Vicksburg. Follow me, and you will see the cost at which I will sell Vicksburg. When the last pound of beef, bacon, and flour, the last grain of corn, the last cow and hog and horse and dog shall have been consumed, and the last man shall have perished in the trenches, then, and only then will I sell Vicksburg.
It did little to quell the unhappiness about him, but it did go to show, as things ultimately turned out, that he was a man of his word.
The townspeople came to trust instead in rumors of victory elsewhere. For a while these were centered back east. There was a brief period of wild excitement when a story spread, which someone had supposedly read in “a Northern newspaper,” that General Lee, having destroyed General Meade’s army, had advanced out of Virginia and now surrounded and was shelling the city of Washington. Union surrender was expected momentarily. Then it was expected within a few days. And then not at all.
Bitterly disappointed, people began to hope for salvation from closer at hand. These hopes coalesced around the figure of Pemberton’s superior, General Joseph Johnston. Johnston was based in the town of Jackson in central Mississippi, and he was said to be gathering troops for a relief expedition to Vicksburg. Johnston was everything Pemberton was not: gallant, impetuous, authoritative, and purely Southern. He was a brilliant military leader—and he was also the sort of chivalrous gentleman for whom honor was everything and defeat was inconceivable.
Johnston’s dispatches to Pemberton concerning the relief expedition were supposed to be secret, but Pemberton’s staff officers, who accepted them at face value, continually leaked them. Partly this was to keep morale up, but it was also intended to undermine the ineffectual Pemberton by contrasting him with a bustlingly energetic hero. The word went out after each new dispatch that Johnston was getting closer, that he had almost arrived, that he was expected hourly. One townswoman, Dora Miller, heard that “expert swimmers are crossing the Mississippi at night to bring and carry news to Johnston.” People gathered on the hillsides and ascended to the Sky Parlor and kept watch for telltale signs of movement in the eastern forests that would mean Johnston was approaching. By June the local newspaper had run out of newsprint and switched to rolls of wallpaper: the first issue in the new format contained the breaking story that Johnston was now expected within three days.
The shells falling on Vicksburg were not as destructive as modern artillery shells. They would detonate with a ferocious bang that would puncture the roof and shatter the windows and turn rooms into avalanches of plaster, but the building would typically remain standing, and people were rarely killed except by a direct hit. The main effect of the shelling was psychological. The bombardments went on remorselessly, all day and all night. There were a few lulls, chiefly to allow the cannon muzzles to cool, around sunrise, noon, and dusk; then the deafening barrage would resume again. One soldier stationed in Vicksburg, Willie Tunnard, recalled the distinct sounds each weapon gave off: “The hoarse bellowing of the mortars, the sharp report of rifled artillery, the scream and explosion of every variety of deadly missiles, intermingled with the incessant, sharp reports of small-arms.” It was so loud that the endless low throbbing like thunder could be heard a hundred miles away.
Gradually it frayed and unraveled the will of the townspeople. Mary Loughborough wrote:
I shall never forget my extreme fear during the night, and my utter hopelessness of ever seeing the morning light.… My heart stood still as we would hear the reports from the guns, and the rushing and fearful sound of the shell as it came toward us. As it neared, the noise became more deafening; the air was full of the rushing sound; pains darted through my temples; my ears were full of the confusing noise; and, as it exploded, the report flashed through my head like an electric shock, leaving me in a quiet state of terror the most painful that I can imagine—cowering in a corner, holding my child to my heart—the only feeling of my life being the choking throbs of my heart, that rendered me almost breathless.
Dora Miller fiercely resisted hiding out in the caves and defiantly insisted that she and her family carry on their ordinary life in their house—until the day she was blindsided by a terror she’d never felt before. She called that day “the most horrible yet to me, because I’ve lost my nerve.” A shell came through the roof of the house and exploded in an upper bedroom; debris and dust scattered and ricocheted all the way down to the cellar. A neighbor had her thigh crushed by debris flying out across the yard; a slave girl lost an arm. Afterward Miller discovered that for the first time she was terrified, and she could not force herself to calm down again. “I do not think people who are physically brave deserve much credit for it,” she wrote. “I am constitutionally brave, and seldom think of danger till it is over; and death has not the terrors for me it has for some others. Every night I had lain down expecting death, and every morning rose to the same prospect, without being unnerved.” But there was one particular fear that hadn’t occurred to her until she heard about the slave girl losing her arm: that she might be crippled and not killed. That was all it took to cast her into despair. “Life, without all one’s powers and limbs,” she wrote, “was a thought that broke down my courage.”
By June the daily ration of food in the Confederate garrison had dwindled to one cup of rice and one cup of peas. These were called cowpeas—not true peas but a variety of hard and tasteless bean normally fed to cattle. Cowpeas and corn flour were ground together and baked into bread, which the soldiers called cush-cush. It was impossible to bake evenly; either the peas or the flour came out raw or rock hard. “It presented a black, dirty appearance,” William Foster wrote, “and was most unwholesome—as heavy as lead and most indigestible.”
Variety in their diet came only through the hazards of war. A mule or a horse killed in battle meant a little meat for the troops. There was a very odd animal at Vicksburg: a camel—one of the last survivors of an experiment the military had conducted in importing camels from Africa to use as beasts of burden. He was considered “a quiet, peaceable fellow” and his death in a shelling was widely mourned—but that did not stop the soldiers from immediately cutting up his corpse for food.
In Vicksburg itself there weren’t many bulk provisions left. Soldiers in town would sometimes spend all their pay on the only delicacy still available: sugar. It was ruinously expensive, but they would simply buy fistfuls of it and lick it out of their hands on the spot. Most store shelves were empty, and the few items on sale tended toward the mysterious. GINGER BEER and SWEET CIDER were two signs that Willie Tunnard recalled seeing sticking out from barrels, but “it would have puzzled a scientific druggist,” he observed, to determine what the barrels really held.
Beef and pork were unobtainable. They were replaced in butcher shops by mule meat—which several memoirists later claimed wasn’t as bad as they’d thought it would be. One jokester printed up a mock menu for a local hotel restaurant offering Mule Tail Soup, Mule Head Stuffed à la Mode, Mule Brains Omlette, and Mule Foot Jelly. Desserts included acorns, nuts, Pea Meal Pudding, and—what may have been the bitterest joke of all—Genuine Confederate Coffee.
There was a near-universal belief that people around town were hoarding. Suspicion fell first on the local plantation owners. They had become notorious for their lack of patriotism—they openly disdained the Confederate government just as much as they had once loathed the Yankees. They wanted the war over on almost any terms (short of abolition) so that they could get their cotton to market again—in fact they were known, or at least were heavily suspected, to have secretly stockpiled their cotton harvest and burned only a token amount of it for show. They also refused to contribute to the defense of the town; they said they couldn’t send in their slaves as work crews because it was too dangerous. Everybody took for granted that they were major hoarders of food. By late spring it was remarked that the plantation slaves looked better fed than the townspeople.
As the siege deepened, the rage turned instead on the grocers and other shopkeepers in the commercial district. They were accused of holding back essential supplies so they could price-gouge at will. One night in early June the town was awakened by the sound of alarms and the frantic rattle of the fire wagons: an entire block in the commercial district was burning, and several groceries and dry-goods stores were destroyed. Suspicion naturally fell on what the local newspaper called “spies and emissaries of the enemy in the city”—in particular, on a mysterious man in a Yankee uniform reported to have been wandering around town a few days earlier, asking many questions and being evasive about answering any himself. But for some reason no one had thought to detain this spectral personage, and by the time the military authorities had been alerted, he had disappeared. And anyway the real cause of the fire had already become known. It had been set by some of Vicksburg’s own citizens as payback for the price-gouging of the downtown merchants. This would be the single most destructive occurrence in the siege—more damage was done in that one night than in the months of Yankee shelling put together.
The last of the food was running out by the end of June. People were so desperate for salt that they were tearing apart the butchers’ smokehouses so they could scrape out the salt from the ancient fat drippings that had soaked into the floorboards. At night, one witness recalled, “an army of rats, seeking food, would scamper around your very feet, and across the streets, and over the pavements.” There were constant jokes about how all the local pets were disappearing—by the beginning of July it was no longer clear that they were jokes. The mule meat was gone from the butchers’ windows; several memoirs claimed that it was replaced by neatly skinned rat carcasses. Mary Loughborough, who was by then almost helpless with “the languid feeling of utter prostration,” recalled that a soldier brought to her cave a jaybird he had caught, and offered it as a pet to Loughborough’s daughter, who was sick with fever. But instead, inside of an hour, the girl was presented with “a cup of soup, and a little plate, on which lay the white meat of the poor little bird.”
The town had become a shambles. There were barricades at all the intersections—but most of them had been abandoned because so few soldiers were fit for duty. Many soldiers were wandering the streets asking the citizens for food. Here and there, Willie Tunnard wrote, you saw “hunger-pinched, starving and wounded soldiers, or guards lying on the banquettes, indifferent to the screaming and exploding shells.” Bombed houses went unrepaired, and many of them had been looted; fences and sheds all over town had been torn down for firewood. The rows of dark and silent houses on every street made the town look like a cemetery—particularly because all their former inhabitants were now underground.
The Yankees had hoped all along for a quick, decisive victory on the battlefield that would force Pemberton and the Confederate forces to accept the inevitable. But it became clear—especially after the Yankees did get exactly the battlefield victory they wanted in mid-May—that the Confederates would not surrender no matter how many battles they lost. So instead the Yankees gradually evolved a new strategy. They kept hearing from the ever-increasing number of Confederate deserters about the labyrinthine cave system under the town, and when they tried their own excavations, they were startled by how easy the loess of the hills was to dig. A Yankee military engineer, Brigadier Andrew Hickenlooper, described the loess as “a reddish clay of remarkable tenacity, easily cut and requiring but little bracing.” So in late May they began digging tunnels from beneath their positions toward the Confederate lines.
It was slow, exhausting, dangerous work. “Every man in the investing line,” one soldier later recalled, “became an army engineer day and night.” They came in at slants and zigzags to provide cover from the Confederate sharpshooters. “The soldiers got so they bored like gophers and beavers,” another recalled, “with a spade in one hand and a gun in the other.” At each turning they excavated further entrenchments and rifle pits, and cut deeper entrenchments at odder angles around those. Gradually, inexorably, they approached the Confederate lines.
From behind their barricades, the Confederates watched this flurry of new activity with alarm. They couldn’t fathom at first what the Yankees were up to, and the alarm only increased when the truth began to sink in. The Yankees were excavating tunnels all along the line, and if they weren’t stopped somehow, they’d eventually be burrowing directly underneath the Confederate defenses. The Confederates frantically began sinking countermines to try to puncture their way into the Yankee tunnels. But they could never quite manage to hit any of them. Sometimes the sappers at the bottom of the mineshaft reported hearing the continual muffled thumps of pickaxes and shovels, and sometimes ghostly conversations and laughter, from the Yankee tunnel crews somewhere nearby.
The first of the Yankee tunnels reached beneath the Confederate defensive works in late June. The Yankees stuffed the end of the tunnel with explosives and gunpowder, and then they lit a long fuse. But they had slightly miscalculated their position: the resulting blast took out only a sparsely guarded section of the exterior defenses and didn’t cause anywhere near as much damage or as many casualties as they had hoped. They tried again in a different tunnel a few days later. This blast went off directly beneath a Confederate redan. There was a geyser of dirt, of splintered and charred wood, of bodies and body parts and blood, and then a desperate mêlée as the Yankees attempted to force their way into the breach and the Confederates beat them back. The fighting had been so close that many of the Confederate wounded who came streaming into the town had skulls shattered by rifle butts or intestines spilling out from bayonet wounds.
The Confederates technically won that battle. But they knew that the victory was worth nothing: their strategic position had at last become untenable. The Yankees were already digging new tunnels. At least twelve tunnels were currently in progress, and the Yankees obviously had the capacity to excavate as many more as were necessary. If they weren’t stopped, they would keep going until they could reach under the bluff and set off enough blasts to send the whole of Vicksburg tumbling into the Mississippi.
———
By the beginning of July, General Pemberton had given up on Johnston’s relief expedition. It was inescapable that the Army of Relief, as it was called, was not going to arrive. In fact, it had never gotten under way in the first place. Johnston had been ordered months earlier to relieve Vicksburg, but he’d never had any intention of obeying. He wasn’t about to risk his honor or his reputation on a venture that he considered hopeless. All his dispatches to Pemberton—orders to rendezvous at positions that Johnston himself had already abandoned, to rely on reinforcements that Johnston had never sent, to coordinate plans for a major counterattack that was patently never going to materialize—had simply been an attempt to create a paper trail that would prove to his superiors afterward that he’d done everything he could, when all along he’d simply been stalling until Vicksburg fell.
The effect of Johnston’s prevarications was to deepen an agony in the town that was already unsupportable. Pemberton was finally left with no options. He smuggled out a message to Johnston saying that if the Army of Relief wasn’t coming forthwith, he would have to surrender; the message came back that surrender would be on Pemberton’s head. And so, after “the last pound of beef, bacon, and flour, the last grain of corn, the last cow and hog and horse and dog” had been consumed, Pemberton capitulated to the Yankees.
In the first week of July the guns fell silent. One Yankee soldier, Lieutenant Richard L. Howard, later wrote about how startling that silence was after months of continual thunder: “It was leaden. We could not bear it; it settled down so close; it hugged us with its hollow, unseen arms until we could scarcely breathe.” The Yankee forces “did not seem to exult much over our fall,” William Foster wrote, “for they knew that we surrendered to famine, not to them.” As the first Yankees streamed into the commercial district, they broke into the shuttered stores, and they found that the worst suspicions of the townspeople had been correct: there were stacks of barrels and bags and cans hoarded in the basements. The Yankees immediately gave their finds away to the malnourished Confederate soldiers. That afternoon, Foster wrote: “Sugar, whiskey, fresh fruit in air-tight cans are enjoyed in great abundance.” The Yankees as they ransacked the stores also found scads of Confederate paper currency, which they considered worthless; they left it strewn behind them in the street.
The day was July 4, 1863. This procession of Yankee soldiers, heedlessly scattering food and money in its wake, was the only thing passing for an Independence Day parade in Vicksburg that year. And it would prove to be the last parade on that date for decades to come. The Fourth became a day of mourning in Vicksburg: a tradition that would endure until the last survivors of the siege were gone. Vicksburg didn’t rejoin the rest of the nation in celebrating Independence Day until after the Second World War.
“At the close of the day,” William Foster wrote on the Fourth, “I visit once more the Sky-Parlor. How changed now the scene.” The landscape around the town was alive with movement. Line after line of Yankee soldiers, company after company, regiment after regiment, reserve after reserve, emerged from behind the siege lines and marched up the bluff—looking, one watcher at the Sky Parlor said, “like huge blue snakes coiling around the city.” At twilight they were still surging through the streets and passing back out into the country again while countless crews of Yankee sappers, working by torchlight and by bonfire, were disassembling the fierce tangles of Confederate barricades.
There was movement on the river, too. The gunboats of the Yankee navy, which had for so many months been lurking like toads out in the shallows, came huffing up to the levee. As they passed the silenced batteries of the Confederacy, they fired off the national salute. Behind them, more boats were approaching. The fall of Vicksburg meant that the Mississippi was now in Union hands from its headwaters to the delta (“The Father of Waters,” Abraham Lincoln declared when he got the news, “flows unvexed to the sea”); the Yankees were ending the blockades and the free flow of traffic was resuming. Around the bend in the twilight the first steamboats were already coming downriver: a line of glittering jewels, gliding up to Vicksburg Landing in a whirl of whistles and clanging bells, loaded with food for the starving town.