APRIL FOOL'S DAY

I don’t approve of practical jokes. I seen nothing humorous in having your shoes set afire while you are wearing them. And dribble glasses are not only not practical they are also not funny - especially on “April Fools Day”, when every glass is a dribble glass and every shoe is a potential combustion chamber. 

And it turns out that this celebration of sociopathic behavior was invented by the French, a nation without humorous inclinations since Moliere slipped on a banana peel in 1673. But the story of April Fool’s Day began over a century before that comedic-tragic event, when in 1564 King Charles IX (above)  decided to follow Pope Gregory’s suggestion and begin the calendar on January rather than April. I know why the French originally celebrated New Years Day on April First, but I'm not going to tell you.

Now, in the 16th century, France had only one road. It came out of Paris, turned left, looped all the way around the city and re-entered on the other side of town. This tragic design error,(the world’s first Traffic Circle) made communication with the majority of the nation difficult (and introduced the phrase “Out-of-the-Loop”), and when combined with the French telephone system - which was in no better shape in the 16th century than it is today - meant that a lot of peasants never got the King’s memo concerning the calendar adjustment.

So as they had every year, thousands of these ill-informed peasants journeyed to Paris during the last week of March and on what they thought was New Year’s Eve, gathered in Bastille Square to say bonjour to 1565 and watch the guillotine drop on 1566. In unison they gleefully chanted, “Cing, quartre, trios, deux, un” and…No guillotine. No satisfying plop of a head into the basket. No Campaign corks popping. No le Anderson Cooper.

 Instead of cheers and shouts of glee, mass ennui broke out among the masses. Now anyone who has experienced the Parisian version of “good manners” can imagine what came next; the locals mocked the bewildered peasants and made them feel like complete Americans,…ah, I mean, fools. But the way they did it makes the word “odd” seem inadequate.

For reasons beyond understanding the Parisians snuck up behind their confused country cousins, surreptitiously stuck a paper fish to the bumpkin’s backs and then shouted in a loud voice, “Poisson d’Avril!”, which translates as “April Fish!”, and then collapsed in raucous laughter and shouts of “tres bien.”

Why would they shout “April Fish!”? I have no idea. But, perhaps the first Parisian to label his victim an "April Fool” immediately received a mouth full of fist, while calling the victim an "April Fish” confused him just long enough so that the prankster could escape.

I have long thought that this uncharacteristic outbreak of French “humor” was actually inspired by Charles’ Italian Queen, Catherine de Medici, who was already famous throughout Europe for her gastronomical gags,  such as her duck a la cyanide with a hemlock sauce. Only a Medici could see the humor in humiliating the people who handled your food.

But however it started, the Parisians knew a good time when they saw it and they sent peasants on “fool’s errands”, and tricked peasants with “fool’s tales”, until every April 1st, France reverberated with gales of laughter and shouts of “Poisson d’Avril!” Good times. 

But eventually the Parisian bullies grew bored with taunting the unresponsive peasants and in 1572 they shifted their attentions to the Huguenots. But by then the tradition of humiliating people for your own amusement on the first day of April had become popular. And like Disco music and Special Federal Prosecutors, once invented some institutions have proven impossible to stop.

This holiday for the humor-impaired spread around the globe with the new calendar like a fungus, infecting and evolving a little in each afflicted nation. The Germans added the “Kick Me” sign, and a second day which they call “Taily Day”, to further enjoy the frivolity of bruised buttocks. Ahh, funny  Germans.

In Portugal, today’s innocent victim is hit with flour, sometimes while it is still in the bag - the flour, not the victim. In Scotland the target is humiliatingly referred to as an “April Gawk” (?!), in England as a “Noodle” and in Canada as an “American.” I would have expected mental health professionals to call for a stop to this public insanity but evidently they are too busy setting their patients’ shoes on fire.

Not even a world war could snap the world out of this cruel insanity. In what may have been the first time a practical joke qualified as a war crime, when, on April 1, 1915.  a French pilot buzzed the German trenches and dropped a huge bomb, which bounced.  It was a rubber bomb.

Four years later the citizens of Venice awoke on April 1, to discover their sidewalks littered with cow manure, the "gag" of a visiting Englishman, Horace de Vere Cole, with too much time on his hands and too much money in his pockets. But then what can you expect from a man who would honeymoon on April Fool's day? 

Bad humor moved into the electronic age in 1957 when BBC Television News broadcast a report about the successful and bountiful Swiss harvest of spaghetti.  

On April Fool's Day in 1992, National Public Radio in the United States, broadcast the announcement that Richard Nixon was coming out of retirement to run again for President, under the slogan, "I didn't do anything wrong and I won't do it again."

In 1975  the Australian Broadcasting Company carried a report that the nation was about to switch to "Metric Time".  The next morning would begin at midnight but each minute would be made up of 100 mili-days and each day would consist of 20 deca-days.  It is alleged that the following morning nobody in Australia showed up for work on time, but it is unclear if that was because of the April Fool's joke or merely because, being Australia, they were all still hung over, mate.

Admit it; there is no defense against April Fool tomfoolery, except a preemptive strike. So button up your top button, zip up your pants, tie your shoes and look out for that cat. Load up your water gun, inflate your fart cushion and repeat after me; “Poison d’Avril, sucker!”

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VICKSBURG Chapter Twenty - Four

The four ugly dark ships came steaming around Caffees' Point about 7:30am, Wednesday, 29 April, 1863, with the 512 ton, 175 foot long USS Pittsburg, leading the way. Twenty minutes later her big guns - two 9" and three 8" cannon, and six big rifles - opened fire on Grand Gulf's upper battery , 50 feet above the river. 

But as they approached the head on confluence of the Big Black River and the Mississippi (above, top right), the whirlpool which gave Grand Gulf its name twisted the ships around, complicating their aim, until finally they drew so close their guns could not elevate high enough to hit the battery. As they continued their attack on the lower battery south of the town, at about 8:25am, a second squadron of 3 more gunboats appeared, anchored just below the whirlpool, and continued the assault on the upper battery. Once again the Yankees were learning that the river controlled everything that happened along it.

There is an underlying order to the geography of the great flat floodplain of the Mississippi Delta which reveals itself in repetition. In example; the Yazoo river is forced to join the Mississippi just above Vicksburg because it is blocked by the high bluffs the town sits upon. And forty miles to the south, the return of those same high bluffs channel the head of the Big Black River into the main stream bellow the 175 foot high Point of the Rocks, just above the community of Grand Gulf.  The only difference is that unlike at Vicksburg, where the Louisiana shore is the high ground of the De Soto peninsular,  the western shore opposite Grand Gulf is flat and swampy. 

After four hours 52 year old Admiral David Dixon Porter's brown water navy silenced the lower battery. But two more hours of bombardment by all 7 Federal gunboats failed to seriously damage the upper battery. And one Federal ironclad - the 930 ton casemate sternwheel USS Tuscumbia - suffered damage to her engine room, and drifted powerless downstream to beach on the Louisiana shore. The rest of Federal ships withdrew about 1:00pm to Hard Times Landing.

As the dark ships retreated back upstream, the commander at Grand Gulf , 32 year old General John Stevens Bowen had no doubt they would be back. While the attack was still in progress he telegraphed his boss, General Stevenson, in Vicksburg. Detailing the assault, he added, "Six transports in sight, loaded with troops, but stationary. "

Stevenson was at last galvanized into action. He telegraphed his boss, Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton in Jackson that, " The line to Grand Gulf is broken. Heavy firing in that direction..." He also ordered 29 year old Georgia lawyer Brigadier General Edward Dorr Tracy Jr and 35 year old Columbus, Mississippi bookstore owner Brigadier General William Edwin Baldwin to move their brigades to Grand Gulf as quickly as possible.

Across the river, Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant was on the move as well, riding toward the 500 acre plantation owned by 47 year old Doctor Jeremiah Yellott Hollingsworth, and his wife Francis, which they called "Hard Times".  

This cotton plantation was the end of a 75 mile long corduroy road from Milliken's Bend, built over April by Major General John A. McClernand's XIII Corps. The troops on the 6 transports spotted by General Bowen had been the lead elements of that corps, the 10,000 men of 40 year old Brigadier General Peter Joseph Osterhouse's 9th division and 33 year old Brigadier General Eugene Asa Carr's 14th division. But following McClernand's corps down that same road were also the troops of the XVII Corps, under 34 year old Major General James Birdseye McPherson.

The men of the XVII corps had spent February and March digging the canal at Lake Providence, Louisiana.  But in early April they had moved to Milliken's Bend, and began to march down the corduroy road, repairing it as they came on. The work slowed their progress, but as yet Grant was not certain exactly where these men were marching to.  

Typical was the experience of the 20th Ohio Volunteer Regiment, of the 2nd Brigade, 37 year old Major General John Alexander Logan's 3rd Division in McPherson's Corps. The Buckeyes were covering an average of just 6 miles a day.  Their Major, 39 year old Cincinnati lawyer Manning Ferguson Force, remembered the "6 days of plodding" down a road which was "strewn with wrecks of wagons and their loads, and half buried guns. At a halt of some hours the men stood deep in mud, for want of any means of sitting."

Major Force, "A spare grave man with an eye that penetrated to the spine of a culprit..." also remembered the humidity, and the bugs. "When the sun set, the leaves of the forest seemed to exude smoke," he wrote after the war, " and the air became a saturated solution of gnats....They swarmed upon our necks, seeming to encircle them with bands of hot iron. Tortured and blinded, we could neither eat nor see.” But they kept slowly marching south, and Grant, with his pathological aversion to retracing his steps, was going to have to quickly figure out some where to put 40,000 soldiers.

After arriving in the Hollingsworth Plantation house at about 2:30pm that Wednesday, 29 April, Grant was immediately confronted by Admiral Porter, with news of his failure to overcome the upper battery at Grand Gulf.  Grant's response was quick and quiet. "Unload the infantry. The men will march another 3 miles south of Grand Gulf over the Coffee Peninsula, and after dark I shall run every transport I have below the batteries and not one shall be injured." Porter accepted the idea at once, and issued the orders to the transports and barges waiting offshore.

The two divisions, Osterhouse's and Carr's disembarked, formed up on the levee, and set off on the five mile march to the home owned by Passmore Hoopes and his wife Eliza, bearing the romantic French name of Disharoon. By dark both divisions were encamped, waiting for the ships to join them. With a flash and bang of covering fire from Porter's ironclads, the six federal transports with barges and flatboats in tow made the run past Grand Gulf. And as Grant had said, they made it without a single loss of boats or lives.

Grant's plan that afternoon was to re-board his men on the steamboats the next morning, and carry them 12 miles south to the Mississippi shore at the old French river port of Petit Gouffre - "Little Gulf" as opposed to Grand Gulf.  The village's name had been changed in 1828, adopting the nomen of the first Chief Justice of Mississippi Territory - from 1803 to 1811 - Thomas Rodney, originally from Delaware. His older brother, Caesar, had been a member of the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. To confirm his plan, Grant sent a scouting party down river to Rodney, to confirm there was a road which would lead back to Grand Gulf.  But when they returned later that night they brought with them a runaway slave. And as so often happened in this war for union, a black man changed everyone's plans.

This man told Grant there was no need to travel 12 miles to find a good landing spot on the Mississippi shore. Just 3 miles south from the dock at Disharoon, a few hundred yards south of a little stream called Bayou Pierre (above), was a solid earthen bank and plenty of room for several steamboats to tie up and unload. Just inland above the river was the almost abandoned village of Bruinsburg, with a small Bethel Church. 

From there the man assured Grant, two good roads climbed the bluffs north toward Port Gibson (above), and which,  once captured,  would outflank Grand Gulf.

By all accounts, Grant expressed no second thoughts. He ordered the transports to load troops in the morning, of Thursday, 30 April, 1863, at Disharoon Landing, Louisiana and unload them again at Bruinsburg, Mississippi.  It would be the largest amphibious operation in the history of the United States, until the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Twenty-Three

 

The six Mississippi River steamboats cast off from Young's Point as soon as the moon set - about 11:30pm, on Wednesday, 22 April, 1863; The Tigress, the Anglo Saxon, the J.W. Cheeseman, the Enterprise City, the Moderator and the Horizon. Each ship had barges lashed to their thin wooden starboard sides for desperately needed protection, and cotton bale armor stacked around their boilers and engines to absorb the anticipated torrent of abuse. Sacks of oats, corn and barley were piled chest high on their upper decks to soften the plunging fire from Confederate howitzers. 

The brown water Navy of Admiral Porter was not asked, and did not offer an opinion of this lunacy. It was an army operation, from start to finish. Just a week before, Admiral Porter had made a similar run past the Vicksburg batteries, with few causalities and the loss of just one ship. But Porter's fleet were mostly ironclad gunboats, able to distract the rebel gunners by shooting back at them. And the only ship sunk that night had been, like these six, an unarmed riverboat. But this floating "forlorn Hope" was strictly an army operation, under the orders of Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant, and Grant's orders were to be obeyed. 

The officer who volunteered to lead this ad hoc flotilla was Lieutenant-Colonel William S. Oliver. All 6 steamships under his command were crewed by 25 army volunteers, because none of the experienced civilian boatmen were stupid enough to risk their lives on this harebrained scheme, and not even a general was willing to order men to sail unarmed and unarmored ships past the Vicksburg guns. Colonel Oliver had strategically placed buckets of sand about the ships, and had fire hoses unrolled, ready to extinguish the dozens of infernos certain to burst forth on each boat. After an afternoon shakedown cruise up the river, to familiarize themselves with their new environments, the men were as ready as they could be.     

To be blunt, they got the hell kicked out of them. Two miles south from their starting point, as the first ship drew abreast of the Vicksburg court house at 12:20am Thursday, 23 April, "a shower of missiles of all shapes and kinds, from Minie balls to 200-pound shot and shell” fell upon the wooden sacrificial lambs "It seemed as though Heaven and Hell had turned everything loose to destroy us", remembered Colonel Oliver "The Anglo-Saxon" took one shell into her engine, followed by a second that blew apart her pilot house. Powerless and with no one at the helm, since there was no longer a helm, she drifted down river with the 4 knot current. 

The steam ship Cheeseman breached on a sandbar, but managed to back off, and continued downstream. There she came to the rescue of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver and the crew of the Tigress, which sank with 30 holes in her hull, including a 4 foot gaping vacuum in her stern. When a rebel shell shattered one of the Enterprise City's smokestacks, a piece of shrapnel went spinning into the pilot house killing the pilot. The ship spun out of line and ran aground right under the Vicksburg guns. Colonel Oliver directed the Cheeseman to sail between the injured boat and the guns, throw her helpless crew a line and tow them back into the river.

By the time it was all over - about 3:00am, 23 April - the Vicksburg gunners had matched their effort from the previous week, firing about 500 rounds. This time the results were more impressive. Of the 6 ships, The Tigress was sunk, the Horizon had turned back, the Enterprise City and the Anglo Saxon were barely afloat. By dawn, only the Cheeseman and the Moderator were able to get up steam to meet Porter's fleet at Hard Times Landing.  But added to the 2 transports which had survived the run on 16 April, that gave Grant 4 operational transports to bridge the Mississippi river below Vicksburg. Barely enough, but enough to start.      

In direct command of the 12,000 men in Vicksburg, 45 year old Virginian, Major General Carter Littlepage Stevenson, Jr., tried to warn his boss, 49 year old Lieutenant General John Clifford Pemberton (above), that the the Yankees were moving against the Confederate line, stretching from Jackson on the right to Vicksburg on the left. Stevenson was convinced the Federals were going to move toward the center, where he was, in Vicksburg.   But the bureaucrat Pemberton seemed to be suffering from a case of tunnel vision.

Historian Bruce Catton explained,  in his beautiful centennial record of the war, rebel President Jeff Davis was facing an insurmountable problem.  "Unless help could be brought in from outside the Department, the game was going to be lost.  But all of the troops that might conceivably be brought in...could not be summoned without inviting disaster (some place else.). To accept this argument was in effect to admit that the Confederacy was being tried beyond its strength."  And few in the service of the slave states in 1863, were willing to admit that.

From where Pemberton sat in Jackson, Vicksburg, like Charleston before it, was not vital to the survival of the Confederacy. If lost it could be retaken. Whereas the Vicksburg, Jackson and Meridian railroad - the Southern Railroad - was vital. Break that line - as would be done that very day, at Newton Station - and the cattle and cereal from Texas, the salt and sugar from Louisiana, the hogs and hominy from Arkansas would not reach the beating heart of the Confederacy - General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia. And then the entire game would be up. 

Closer to home, which was Jackson, Mississippi,  Pemberton and his staff were struggling to shift infantry to block the fleet footed Yankee cavalry of Colonel Grierison. To defend Jackson itself, Pemberton sent 3 regiments to Morton, Mississippi.  He dispatched General Loring to Meridian where that independent minded officer kidnapped an infantry brigade in route to Vicksburg, and held them for the duration of the crises. Pemberton also dispatched militia on forced marches to Okolona, Canton and Carthage, Mississippi.

By telegraph he begged fellow Lieutenant General Braxton Bragg for the return of some cavalry transferred to Tennessee under orders from General Joseph Johnston. In response, a unit from Mobile, Alabama began the long ride north and west.  They could not arrive for a week or more. Meanwhile, in his desperate search for cavalry Pemberton even stole 7 companies from his own command, at Grand Gulf, Mississippi (above), over the protests of the commander of that outpost, Major General John Bowen.  

Once Porter's gunboats had run the Vicksburg batteries on Thursday, 17 April, Bowen (above) ordered 28 year old Colonel Francis Marion Cockerell to pull his two Missouri regiments on the west bank of the big river back to Grand Gulf.  Cockerell still maintained a few hundred men on the western shore, and he pushed pickets south on the Mississippi side to look out for Yankees scouting for crossing points.  By Wednesday, 23 April, Pemberton had managed to bring Bowen's command at Grand Gulf back to 5,000 men. But, like everybody else in Pemberton's command.  Bowen was convinced he needed more men. 

On Sunday, 27 April General Bowen telegraphed General Stevenson, in Vicksburg, "All the movements of the enemy...seem to indicate an intention... to march their army still lower down in Louisiana, perhaps to Saint Joseph, and then to run their steamers by me and cross to Rodney... I would recommend the sending of a regiment and section of artillery to Rodney, which would materially delay their crossing and advance."  The problem was, like everybody else, Stevenson was convinced the threat was a lot closer to himself,

Since early April, well north of Vicksburg,  a federal division under Major General Fredrick Steeele had been marching southwest out of the Mississippi River town of Greenville, pushing into the delta all the way to headwaters of Deer Creek.  An Iowa private named Jacob Ritter wrote home about the operation referred to by the Yankee soldiers as "The "Greenville Wallow" ,  He wrote, "We nearly laid the country waste along the road - burned most of the cotton gins, and a large amount of cotton, corn, bacon...We brought in a large drove of fat cattle, besides what we got all the chickens, geese, ducks and turkeys we could eat…and we got more Negroes and mules than you could shake a stick at.” The threat from Steele convinced Stevenson to order the evacuation of Fort Pemberton at the head of the Yazoo River. Those men were ordered to reinforce his own command at Vicksburg.

And then on Tuesday, 29 April, 8 federal gunboats - the Tyler, Choctaw, DeKalb, Signal, Romeo, Linden, Petrel, and Black Hawk - followed by 10 transports loaded with infantry, came steaming up the Yazoo River. They dropped anchor that afternoon at the mouth of the Chickashaw Bayou, scene of Sherman's failed attack in December. The next morning - Friday, 30 April - the ships moved further upstream a mile to Drumgould's Bluff.  The gunboats started blasting at the rebel guns on the heights, getting so close to the Confederate artillery positions that the USS Choctaw took fifty hits, although with no casualties. Then just about 6:00pm, Federal troops began disembarking.  

Stevenson (above) reasoned this was a far larger operation than anything happening around Grand Gulf, or even around Jackson. That must mean Grant's main thrust was a coup de main,  aimed right at Vicksburg.  The attack on Newton Station, and running gunboats past the Vicksburg batteries must be mere diversions. Stevenson remained certain of that conviction, even when the Federal ironclads which had run past Vicksburg, began bombarding the forts at Grand Gulf. 

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