VICKSBURG Chapter Fifty-Nine

As of 20 May, 1863, Lieutenant General John Clifford Pemberton (above)  estimated his 20,000 men could hold off the larger federal army for six months. His commissary stockpile held half a million pounds of salted pork and bacon, and similar quantities of salted beef, some 5,000 bushels of corn and 8,000 bushels of peas. But as it turned out, General Pemberton's estimates were full of beans. And badly cooked beans at that.

The specific legume in question was known as the common pea, was also known as the cow or goat pea, aka the black eyed pea. The Cherokee natives had served the first missionaries a bread baked from the little pale pomes, and the Christians raved about it.  They claimed it was the better than white bread.  But evidently the recipe was lost, perhaps when the native peoples were forcefully evicted. So the fall of the Gibraltar of the Confederacy came much sooner than 182 days, could be at least in part attributed to the revenge of the Cherokees. And maybe the slaves, too.

See, in the antebellum south, these tough little nuggets of fiber and protein were only fed to the live stock, animal and human. The reason was that the beans were encased in a hard shell of lectins – the chemical family which included the powerful poison riacin. While ungulates had no issue with most lectins, their presence in the human digestive tract produced powerful stomach cramps and a condition known as the bloody flux, the runs, the Tennessee trots, the Virginia quickstep, or just dysentery – defecating until you either wished you were dead, or you were dead.

During the civil war dysentery was the most common aliment in both armies, affecting 640 cases per year out of every 1,000 men. Only 20 of those 600 might become so dehydrated – losing 2.5 liters of fluid per hour - to cause death within three days. But the Tennessee trots directly and indirectly contributed to an estimated 88% of the 750,000 deaths during the war, mostly children and the old.  Of more immediate concern to the armies was the reduction in unit effectiveness. Those afflicted had to immediately begin treatment with opiates, which caused constipation. You could say dysentery was a constant drain on every unit, all the time.

The Confederate soldiers chocking down their ration of pea bread could have avoid that smelly fate by first covering the beans in water, bringing them to a boil and then rinsing them. That would remove the lectin shell. The beans are then simmered under a low heat until soft, and then ground into a mash. Add some starter yeast – aka fungus - and water, pound into a dough and then bake like any other bread.  However, being unfamiliar with the culinary practices of the people who worked on their farms and plantations, and who had to survive on black eye pea bread, that was not the approach the commissary officers in Pemberton's army took.

The commissary plan was to boil the beans for an hour. Then, without draining, they were ground into a mash. This toxic glutenous mass was then supplied to the regiments, where cooks tried mixing it with the more familiar corn meal. The final product was described as a “novel species of the hardest of ‘hard tack’, the novelty being that the bread was never “done”. The most persistent chiefs baked the loaves for up to 2 hours, but the result was always the same. The outside became hard enough “to knock down a full grown steer”, while the center was still raw pea meal. And eating that was an invitation to dance the Virginia Quickstep.

Civilians did not face this problem because the army  left them to their own devices.  A reasonable example was 44 year old Reverend William Wilberforce Lord (above)  and his family – his wife Margaret, son William junior and daughter Eliza, nicknamed Lydia. William was the Princeton trained minister of Vicksburg's towering Episcopal Church, padre to the 1^st Mississippi infantry and enough of a poet to have been “lightly praised by Wordsworth and “thumpingly” criticized by Edgar Allen Poe”. He sought safety for his family in the church's rectory. But that gave far too much credit to the gunner's ability to not hit what they were not aiming at.

According to Lydia (above), reality arrived when “...a bombshell burst into the very center of the dining room ... crushing the well-spread table like an eggshell, and making a great yawning hole in the floor, into which disappeared supper, china, furniture... and our stock of butter and eggs.” The Lords, along with the rest of Vicksburg, now disappeared underground.

The digging had started the year before when the city defied Farragut's ships. By the spring of 1863 the construction of caves had become standardized. Observed the wife of a Confederate officer, “Negroes who understood their business, hired themselves out to dig them, at from thirty to fifty dollars, according to the size.” Individual catacombs were let at $15.00 a month. 

Lydia Lord described the refuge she and her family called home. “The cave ran about twenty feet underground and communicated at right angles with a wing which opened on the front of the hill, giving us a free circulation of air. At the door was an arbor of branches, in which, on a pine table, we dined when shelling permitted. Near it were a dug-out fireplace and an open-air kitchen...”

A diarist who only identified herself as Mrs. “V” captured the the ethos of the city. “We are utterly cut off from the world,” she wrote, “surrounded by a circle of fire. Would it be wise like the scorpion to sting ourselves to death? The fiery shower of shells goes on day and night...” Mrs. V was obviously a woman of some means, as 2 men spent a week excavating the cave she and her husband occupied. “It is well made in the hill that slopes just in the rear of the house, and well propped with thick posts, as they all are.... The hills are so honeycombed with caves that the streets look like avenues in a cemetery. The hill called the Sky Parlor has become quite a fashionable resort for the few upper-circle families left here”

She lamented how her world had shrunk. “People do nothing but eat what they can get, sleep when they can, and dodge the shells.” She noted. “There are three intervals when the shelling stops, either for the guns to cool or for the gunner's meals, I suppose...In that time we have both to prepare and eat ours. Clothing cannot be washed or anything else done....” Looking down upon her fellow residents from the Sky Parlor, Mrs. V saw, “people were sitting, eating their poor suppers at the cave doors...As the first shell again flew they dived, and not a human being was visible. The sharp crackle of musketry-firing was a strong contrast to the scream of the bombs. I think all the dogs and cats must be killed, or starved, we don’t see any more pitiful animals prowling around.”

It took 3 days before commissary officers stopped trying to poison their own soldiers. As a solution, the cooks were encouraged to bake the corn and pea bread separately, but even the adventurous quickly decided the disastrous peas were not worth the effort to chew them. Within another week there was no escaping the miscalculation in the military larder. As 29 year old Brigadier General Stephen Dill Hill  (above) noted, “After the tenth day of the siege, the men lived on about half rations...”. One hundred eighty-two days had become ninety-one. Further recalculations for the army's survival would follow.

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