VICKSBURG Chapter Eighty-One

 

On the Wednesday afternoon of 24 June, 1863, Captain Ferdinand Osmin (Fred) Claiborne, commander of the Maryland 3^rd Light Artillery, received word that the Yankees appeared to be moving to attack  the rebel trench line, a quarter mile north of the Hall's Ferry road. 

The Maryland cannon were supporting Colonel Alexander Reynold's Tennessee brigade, which had seen little action so far, in part because the ground here was more broken, and in part because it was five miles from the Yankee supply base at Chickasaw Bayou, and a Yankee Supply road was still under construction. So it seemed unlikely the Yankees were serious in their movements. Still, anxious to be involved in the great siege, Fred borrowed a handheld telescope from his cousin, Colonel William Howard Claiborne, and hurried forward to see for himself.

Neither Captain Claiborne, nor most of the crewmen in his battery, were from Maryland. Fred himself had been born in Vicksburg, but had been raised, educated and joined the Confederate army in New Orleans. He had been transferred to the 3^rd Maryland while in Richmond, Virginia, at the behest of one of his many cousins.  Because of the continual "wastage" of war, most of the 100 men in the unit had been drafted from East Tennessee or Georgia. So far, they had done most of their fighting in Tennessee and Mississippi. Like an increasing number of Confederate units, after 3 years of war, the 3^rd Maryland Artillery, were orphans.

Since the core ideology of the Confederacy was state's rights,  state regiments were supplied by state governments,   And with no state politicians to protect them, the 6 guns of the 3^rd Maryland were repeatedly split up, the parts sent on distant duties.  Back in April, 3 guns had been assigned to the captured boat “Queen of the West”.  And when it had been sunk at Grand Lake, Louisiana,  all of those guns were lost, and 9 gunners drowned.

Just days earlier, Fred had noted the sad condition of his men. “Our rations are growing more scarce every day...We have a quantity of bacon yet on hand, but...the men receive only one-quarter rations... such as rice, pea meal and rice flour. The corn has given out long since. Rations of sugar, lard, molasses and tobacco are issued, but this does not make amends for the want of bread, and the men are growing weaker every day.” 

Today, seeing that the Yankees had pushed a battery forward, and were opening fire, Fred Claiborne gave the signal for his 3 remaining cannon to open fire as well. And as he did so, a Yankee shell burst nearby and a chunk of spinning shrapnel sliced off much of the Captain's face, killing him instantly. Just another young man sacrificed to defend Vicksburg.

Doctor Colonel Ashbel Smith (above), a Texan by choice and a reluctant rebel, watched the decline of his men in the Texas Lunette as only a doctor could.  He noted the rations issued to his men had been, “...reduced to little more than sufficient to sustain life. Five ounces of musty corn-meal and pea flour were nominally issued daily. In point of fact, this allowance did not exceed three ounces.” Educated at Yale and in Paris, the 57 year old Doctor Smith had intimately witnessed epidemics of cholera and Yellow Fever. Despite his own iron constitution, the doctor recognized the inevitable prognosis for Vicksburg. “...The health of the men did not seem to suffer immediately from want of rations, but all gradually emaciated and became weak...many were found with swollen ankles and symptoms of incipient scurvy.”

Weeks earlier, a “wag” within the city – unknown if they were civilian or military – had written out a bill of fare for an imagined “Hotel de Vicksburg”. The fantasy meal included “Mule Tail Soup, followed by Mule Rump Roast Stuffed with Rice. Or perhaps the discerning customers might prefer Mule Spare Ribs Plain with Mule Liver Hashed” But those had times had been given way when all but a hand full of the mules had been killed by federal artillery or slaughtered. The current bitter joke among Pemberton's hungry army was “Whatever became of Fido?” But in its turn, even that desperate jibe was losing its humor.

Across the lines, Grant could smell victory. A regular occupant of his headquarters, Charles Dana (above)  - the man sent by Secretary of War Stanton to keep an eye on Grant – caught the general's optimism. On Monday, 29 June, 1863, Dana notified Stanton that “Two separate parties of deserters from Vicksburg agree... rations have now been reduced lower than ever; that extreme dissatisfaction exists among the garrison, and that it is agreed on all hands that the city will be surrendered on Saturday, July 4, if, indeed, it can hold on so long as that.”

One week more. Inside the trench lines, the rebels had been hoping and praying for salvation, a salvation with a name – the persnickety and talented 56 year old Joseph Eggleston Johnston.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Eighty

 

Henry Foster apprenticed as a bricklayer in the Ohio River town of Jeffersonville, Indiana. The city of 4,000 was a prosperous place, just across the river from Louisville, Kentucky the two towns separated by the Falls of the Ohio River (above).  

They had been been building and launching steamboats at Jeffersonville since 1819. By 1860 there were 6 ship building firms along an 11 mile stretch downriver from Jeffersonville to New Albany, Such prosperity meant steady work for a bricklayer. 

Still, on 1 July, 1861, 23 year old Henry Foster signed up to defend the Union of the States for 3 years. Two weeks later in New Albany he was mustered in as a sergeant in Company “B”, of the 23^rd Indiana Volunteer infantry.  Approximately 15% of the 1,300,000 Hoosiers actually fought for the federal cause, most coming from the southern half of the state, which had been settled the longest. Henry remained a sergeant during drilling in Indianapolis and St. Louis. In 1862, after fighting at the battles of Forts Henry and Donaldson, he was promoted to Lieutenant.

Before the 1863 Vicksburg campaign the 23^rd Indiana was transferred to the 1^st Brigade of General Logan's division, of the XVII Corps under of Major General James Birdseye McPherson. They had their first major engagement of that campaign on Tuesday, 12 May at Raymond, Mississippi. At the very outset of the battle the 23^rd stumbled into a trap and suffered 127 causalities in the space of a few minutes – twice their losses at Shiloh.  As the Official Record put it, “The only thing that saved the 23^rd...(was) that the Confederates had never been issued bayonets.” 

Four days later the 23^rd was on the right flank at Champion Hill, where the regiment lost another 19 officers and men. The Hoosiers were also heavily involved in the attack on the Louisiana redan of 22 May, and suffered another 40 dead and wounded in the mine operation of 25 June. The surviving members of the regiment had become what could be termed “hardened veterans”.

As evidence of their hardness, Lieutenant Henry Foster had begun his own private war on the 3^rd Louisiana regiment. The bricklayer had earned a reputation as a marksman, and had taken to wearing a coonskin cap, like a later day Daniel Boone or Davy Crocket. Except instead of killing animals for food, Henry Foster was killing human beings and doing it with a swagger. During the first month of the siege of Vicksburg, Henry would gather provisions and, at night, crawl closer to the rebel lines and secret himself in a shell hole or “holler”. During the day, he would snip at any rebels who raised their heads above the redan's wall. It seems likely that Confederate William McGuinness lost his eye to 25 year old Lieutenant Foster's aim.

After the new forward position was constructed on 26^th June, Lieutenant Foster spent nights, assembling cross ties from the Vicksburg and Jackson railroad into what he called the “Coonskin Tower” (above).  His elevated spy post allowed Henry to look down upon the the Louisiana redan. The cross ties were thick enough to absorb most musket shots, and the rebel artillery could no longer spare the ammunition to obliterate the tower. Foster spent hours during daylight in its narrow confines, gunning down confederate soldiers.

The tower became infamous, and Henry and his mates from company “B” began selling 15 minute “tours” of the tower for 25 cents apiece. Legend has it that even General Grant paid a visit. And that while he was watching the rebels, one yelled for the “damn old man” to keep his head down. Where upon a Confederate officer chastised the rebel soldier's use of foul language. Then realizing who the “damn old man” was, shouted that the soldier should quickly shoot him. But by then, Grant had climbed back down. Or so the story went.

In another version, a private in the 4^th Minnesota infantry saw an older soldier in a rumbled uniform standing on an observation tower near the front lines. He shouted at the old man, “Say! You old bastard, you better keep down from there or you will be shot!” The old man paid no attention. When the north star boy started to shout again, an officer grabbed him and explained, “That's General Grant.” It was the kind of story soldiers often told at the expense of commanders who held the power of life and death over them. The tales were related with a kind of cold affection. But as far as I can tell, they never told those kind of stories about Confederate Lieutenant General John Clifford Pemberton.

Two Irish born brothers named Christie, Thomas and William, were servicing guns of the First Minnesota Light Artillery behind the 23^rd Indiana.  On 23 June William Gilchrist Christie had written home to his father that, “Spades are trumps here, and are likely to be for a long time yet.....There are a few deaths from 'secesh' bullets every week, and occasionally one from the premature bursting of a shell from our own guns...one of the 11^th Illinois infantry was, I fear, mortally wounded yesterday by a...shell from the first Missouri's Battery...his bowels were torn and both of his lungs visible.”  It should not be surprising that William then immediately added, “We have been amusing ourselves for the two past evenings in throwing shells over into the enemies' lines...” The boys from Minnesota had not been ordered to play this game. But idle hands had become the devil's plaything.

On 28 June, William's older brother, Thomas Davidson Christie, wrote a more circumspect note to their sister. “I do not very well know what to write you,” Thomas began, “for although there is plenty of what you might consider interesting (events) occurring around me, of the blood and gunpowder style, yet I see so much of it that I do not care to write about it....You will probably see some account of the blowing up of the fort...We are within 400 yards...and saw the whole performance, and opened on the rear of the work to cut up the rebel reinforcements as they hurried them up. Some other time I may give you a description of the assault.” This from the same man who was throwing random bombs into the enemy's trenches every night.

On the “enemy” side of the trench line was 32 year old civilian Henry Ginder. When the war broke out Henry had been an engineer working for the firm of Thomas, Griswold and Company, a weapons manufacturer, at the corner of Canal and Royal Streets in New Orleans. When that city had been captured, he had fled east with his family.  He left his wife in Alabama, and then continued to Mississippi, where Henry had joined the Confederate army as a private. Eventually his unit was assigned to Port Hudson, where his skills as an engineer made him valuable. In the summer of 1863 he had been ordered to Vicksburg, to prepare the fortifications there. During the siege Henry was constantly moving along the line, looking to repair the damage done by the Federal artillery.

In a letter to his wife he told a harrowing story. “Last night I was on foot returning from the scene of my labors, and I heard a 13 inch shell coming but couldn’t see it; it came nearer and nearer until I thought it would light on my head, when SPLOSH! It went into the earth a few feet to my left, throwing the dirt into my face with such force as to sting me for some time afterwards. The Lord kept it from exploding … Otherwise it would have singed the hair off my head and blown me to pieces into the bargain.”

The federal army was not aiming to injure civilians, not because of a moral aversion to doing so, but because their weapons simply did not have the excess power to waste on non-military targets. But to the civilians sheltering in the 500 of so caves of Vicksburg whether they were victims of the gunner's intent or incompetence made little difference. 

Lucy McRae was the daughter of wealthy merchant and Warren County Sheriff William McRae and Virginia born Indiana.  Lucy was 11 years old in June of 1863.  Her family could afford the safety of a cave.  But the choice almost cost her life.  “A shell came down on the top of the hill, buried itself about six feet in the earth, and exploded. This caused a large mass of earth to slide...in a solid piece, catching me under it…As soon as the men could get to me they pulled me from under the mass of earth. The blood was gushing from my nose, eyes, ears, and mouth.” 

One of the men who helped dig Lucy out from under the loam was the Reverend William Lord, who had been wounded by the explosion.  He noted that same night a baby boy was born in another part of the shared cave.

Above ground, still sheltering in her home, Dora Miller continued to send her slave Martha out every day with 5 dollars, looking to buy food.  Martha told her that “...rats are hanging dressed in the market for sale with mule meat - there is nothing else...It was said that when the rats were properly fried, they tasted like squirrel.”

By Tuesday, 30 June 1863, half of the Confederate soldiers in the Vicksburg lines were on excused duties or even hospitalized because of illness or wounds. And the most common illness was dysentery.  In the Washington Hotel (above), the Reverend William Lovelace Foster was nursing to those men. He noted that the structure, which had already been  hit once, was still, “...comparatively secure from those troublesome mortar shells...All the rooms were soon crowded with the sick and dying – Some in bunks and some upon the floor.   Everything was conducted as well as possible. But, Oh the horrors of a hospital!”

Doctor Foster had recorded those horrors back in May. “There lay a man... his face blackened - burned to a crisp with powder. His mother could not recognize him - Every feature was distorted - his eyes were closed - water running from his scalded mouth. His groans are pitiful - low – plaintive...a youth, not more than seventeen, lying on his back-with (his) eye entering his jaw - lodging there in the bone, which could not be removed... Here are several with their arms cut - There is one with his whole under jaw torn off - his shoulder mutilated with a shell.  Here is one with his arms (and_legs both amputated...There is one who had a pair of screw drivers driven into his jaw (and) temple. He floods his bed with blood...The weather is excessively hot. The flies swarm around the wounded...” .

And now, after the first mine had wiped out 50 men in the 3^rd Louisiana redan, Dr. Foster wrote, “The sixth week (of the siege) had now closed...Our fate seems to stare us in the face. Still we hear rumors...Can't our government send us relief?...Will all the blood shed be spilled in vain? For the first time dark doubts would cross my mind.”

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VICKSBURG Chapter Seventy-Nine

Sergeant William Henry Tunard,  of the 3^rd Louisiana infantry, remembered the moment the 2,200 pounds of black powder was ignited in the tunnel beneath the eastward point of the redan. “Suddenly the earth under our feet gave a convulsive shudder and with a muffled roar a mighty column of earth, men, poles, spades and guns arose many feet in the air. About fifty lives were blotted out in that instant.”

There was no crater, but rather a 35 to 40 foot wide jumble of wood and flesh and yellow clay. It was an abrupt void in the rebel fort. And before the dirt had settled, about 500 Yankees from Illinois began rushing into the wounded fort.

They were the 45^th Illinois Volunteer regiment, also known as the “Washburn Lead Mine Regiment.” They mostly came from around the northwestern town of Galena. In 1845 the dozens of mines in Jo Davis County had shipped some 27,000 tons of the ore down the Mississippi River. 

So many miners went up the Galena River every spring to dig for placer deposits of lead, they reminded a farmer of a local fish, because like White Suckers, “they go up the river to spawn and return down ag'in in the fall.”  But when the thin veins called “rakes” curved below the water table, the lead fell out of reach. And after 1849 most of the miners left to chase California gold.

The region had been represented since 1852 in the U.S. Congress by Elihu Benjamin Washburne (above).  He was one of the founders of the Republican Party,  and an ally of both Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses Grant. 

But in 1861, there were still enough lead mines around Galena, Illinois (above),   that the regiment could supply miners to undermine the Louisiana redan. At about 3:35 p.m. on that Friday, 25 June, 1863, the “Suckers” from Illinois stormed four abreast into the fort.

The charge was led by 22 year old Color Sergeant Henry Harrison Taylor, who planted the regimental flag on the lip of the collapsed inner wall.  Riflemen spread out beside him, trying to answer the desperate fire from the angry 3^rd Louisiana men behind that wall.  

Leading the Yankee troops was Swiss born Lieutenant Colonel Melancthon Smith. He had replaced the original commander, his brother, John Eugene Smith, who had been made a General after the battle of Shiloh. But Colonel Smith was shot in the head entering the fort. Command of the 45^th then passed to Leander B. Fisk, who had been a Major for only a little over a month, But he was killed shortly after taking command.

The responsibility now fell upon 26 year old Major Jasper (Bob) Adalmorn Maltby (above).  There were some who had little respect for Bob, including General Smith who opinioned that, “Maltby, I do not think, would let out a fart without first asserting if there were someone ready to smell it.” 

But the lawyer's son seems to have been a born fighter. He had been wounded while serving as a private in the Mexican War of 1847-48, and afterward, while struggling to overturn a dishonorable discharge, in 1850 he had moved to Galena and opened a successful gunsmith and sporting goods store at 184 Main street.  In 1852 Congress overturned the court martial and gave Bob Maltby a clean record.

Despite having the most successful gun store in Galena, and a wife and 2 children to support, Jasper Maltby did not hesitate to enlist after First Bull Run.  His fellow volunteers elected him lieutenant. His courage on the second day at Shiloh, wounded and yet leading his company to sweep the rebels from the field,  earned his promotion to captain.  He had survived the 22 May assault, and was promoted to Major because of vacancies that blood bath created.  And now, on 25 June, Major Maltby, sudden commander of the 45^th, and wounded twice that day already, remained in the pit, helping to erect a wooden barricade, to hold the just captured devastated ground.

The engineer, Captain Hickenlooper,  never intended his mine to blow a hole in the rebel lines, straight through to Vicksburg.  Rather he saw it as an extension of the siege.  Proof of this was he sent no storming parties into the redan. He did not send a regiment with bayonets fixed. He sent work crews, with pillars and buttresses, not logs cut to form ladders, but posts and boards to build a bulwark. And other than the few marksmen to distract the rebels, every other man in the 45^th was engaged in erecting a new fortification within the redan, including Major Bob Maltby.

To quote from his wife's epitaph, in lauding her husbands achievements, “ Beams were passed into the pit, and these were put into position as a protection...The joists were placed lengthwise and dirt was quickly piled about them....(Major) Maltby helped in the lodging of the beams...put his shoulder under a great piece of timber...pushed it up and forward into place....(then a rebel cannon)....solid, shot struck the beam... and split it into kindling. Great sharp pieces of the wood were driven into....(Major Maltby, who) was literally hurled to the bottom of the black pit” The 45^th Illinois was soon replaced by the 20^th Illinois, and  Bob Maltby was carried to the rear.  Doctors deemed his wounds too numerous to be counted, the most serious being were head and leg injuries.

Just like work shifts in the mine, the 20^th Illinois was soon replaced by the 31^st Illinois, who were replaced in their turn by the the 23^rd Indiana Volunteers.  Next it was the turn of the 17^th Iowa regiment, and then at 2:00 a.m by a return of the 31^st Illinois. At daylight on Saturday, 26 June, 1863, the 45^th moved back into the position. 

By now the walls and barricades were strong enough that the regiment's turn at the work could be extended until 10:00 a.m., when the 124^th Illinois Volunteers went in to finish the job. And even as the rebels of the 3rd Louisiana poured fire down upon the Yankees, the rising barricades offered increasing protection.  

 By 5:00 p.m. that Saturday, the new position was secure and fighting was reduced again to the deadly background of sniping and bomb throwing.

The cost of the new strategy was high, but not as devastating as the failures of 22 May had been. On 25 June, the 45^th Illinois had suffered 8 killed, and 62 wounded, including Major Maltby, who would survive and be promoted to Colonel. 

The 20^th Illinois suffered 2 dead and 7 wounded – the 31^st Illinois 7 dead and 27 wounded - the 124^th Illinois had 6 killed and 49 wounded – the 23^rd Indiana 8 dead and 31 wounded – the 17^th Iowa Volunteer regiment had 3 killed and 34 wounded – and the 56^th Illinois 4 dead and 13 wounded. 

In total, to advance the line a few yards into the 3^rd Louisiana redan cost the Federal army 38 dead and 223 wounded. It was a high cost but shared between 7 regiments. And in an army built upon regiments, that meant each could remain effective and in the siege line. And their opponents, the 3^rd Louisiana, suffered 58 killed and 96 wounded.

And after night fell,  on the evening of 26 June, 1863,  with the new defense lines firmly in place, the miners began digging a new tunnel to plant a new mine underneath what was left of the Louisiana redan.

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