VICKSBURG Chapter Ninety - One

 

The whistle on the approaching locomotive shrieked in desperation. Angry hands grabbed the big iron “harp switch”, (above, left) and forcefully slammed the flagged handle aside. With a ringing thud the lever shoved the twin iron rails 3 inches, opening the point.

A cheer rose from the men watching round the station. The 4 large drive wheels on the locomotive abruptly stopped turning, and white yellow sparks danced where the iron wheels now slid along the iron rails. One of the thin men shouted, “We are done walking, General!” The rabble cheered again. One of the rebel officers drew his Navy Colt revolver from his belt.

The trouble began after the Army of Mississippi reached the Southern Railroad 12 miles east of Jackson. They had been marching for a week, from Vicksburg to Edwards Depot, to Raymond, 3 more days to the Pearl River, 2 more days to be ferried across and to march north to Brandon. They had been promised that here they would board cars of the Southern Railroad for the 40 mile ride to Enterprise, and then a one day march south to new camps where they would be fed and rested while they waited to be exchanged for Yankee prisoners, and get back into this war.

These 30,000 sick, exhausted Confederate soldiers watched train after train disappear toward Enterprise, carrying everything from supplies to the Mississippi Governor and his state's records. Then, on Wednesday, 15 May the men were told there would be no trains for them. Discipline collapsed.

Private Epram McDowell Anderson, a 21 year old from the First Missouri Brigade, witnessed the riot of weary men. “Efforts were made,” he wrote a year after the war, “by moving the switch, to throw the trains...from the track...officers had to draw and threaten to use their side-arms before the mob could be subdued. (Later) One man got up in the plaza of Brandon and offered to...go and hang (General) Pemberton, the traitor.” And still the dispirited remnants of the Army of Mississippi had to complete their journey via “shank's mare” to the Chickasawhay River and Enterprise, 12 miles inside Alabama.

General “Old Joe” Johnston (above) had to stop the trains, to protect the locomotives. West of the still damaged Pearl River bridge some 90 steam engines had been or soon would be lost by the Confederacy. None of these could be replaced. 

And while the Confederacy did everything it could to keep the Yankees from learning of the Brandon riot, 32 year old William Nugent, one time lawyer and now Mississippi Inspector General admitted in a 28 July letter to his wife Eleanor that, “...after the fall of Vicksburg I entertained the most gloomy forebodings...The great demoralization produced in our army...was enough to make one dispirited.” He hoped, he said, that with time the officers could, “...reorganize and re-discipline our army...”. It was a desperate hope. But with the fall of Vicksburg, the Confederacy had little left but desperation.

Disaster followed upon disaster. On Thursday, 9 July the outpost of Port Hudson surrendered 6,500 men to General Nathaniel Banks. On Friday, 10 July Joseph 'Old Joe' Johnston and his Army of Relief retreated back inside the defenses of Jackson. 

But with the Pearl River Bridge still not repaired, his 28,000 men had no hope of defending the town against the 40,000 Yankees gathering outside its trenches. The weather was hot, General Sherman noted, adding that “...on the morning of July 17th the place was found evacuated. General Steele's division was sent in pursuit as far as Brandon...but General Johnston had carried his army safely off, and pursuit in that hot weather would have been fatal to my command.”

And with that anticlimax, the Vicksburg campaign came to an end. Confederate President Jefferson Davis (above) had no doubt who and what was to blame for the outcome. Vicksburg was lost, he insisted, because of a “want of provisions inside and a general outside who would not fight.” The latter, in Davis' opinion,  being the cranky and passive-aggressive Joe Johnston - whom Davis had appointed. 

But what about the general inside, the uninspired and uninspiring Lieutenant General John Clifford Pemberton (above)? He was also Davis' choice. And Davis had advised him not to follow Johnston's' advice. It seemed to be all of a piece, that and Davis' refusal to admit any personal culpability in the disaster, 

The Vicksburg Campaign began in December of 1862 and had lasted 7 months through July of 1863. It cost the Yankees 10,000 dead, wounded and missing, while the Confederacy suffered over 45,000 causalities. 

In just 7 months, Jefferson Davis' insistence on holding Vicksburg and Port Hudson, even after Grant had destroyed the Pearl River Bridge, had cost the Confederate government an entire field army, as well as all but a 12 mile eastern sliver of the state of Mississippi, some 48,500 square miles of sovereignty lost.

Jefferson Davis' culpability in this disastrous campaign proved a damning indictment of his military skills. The President of the Confederacy had no business telling any general where to place his men. But he kept right on doing it.

David Dixon Porter (above),  the 53 year old Admiral of the Yankee brown water navy, had been accused of never praising a superior. And he was never a close friend of Grant's. But he had nothing but praise for the Yankee Major General. 

“No ordinary general could have taken Vicksburg” said Porter. “Some men would have given it up....some would have demanded half the resources of the Union; but Grant never wavered in his determination, or in his hopes of success."

Most important of all to Midwest farmers, a war which had seemed a stalemate 7 months earlier, was now clearly on the path to victory. As Lincoln put it, “The father of waters now ran un-vexed to the sea.”  And that was the achievement of Major General Ulysses Grant.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Ninety

 

The tall, thin, dark haired woman with the lantern jaw raised a flat hand to shade her eyes from the setting sun. She watched the creaking sad wagon pulled slowly on wobbly wheels by the long shadow of a weary mare. Like so many beasts this summer, the filly's ribs showed through her dust covered hide.

Mary's heart rose and then fell when she recognized the familiar hulk of Father John O'Bannon (above)  holding the reins. Her husband had to be in the wagon.  The priest had brought John to her. In the back of an ambulance.

A commission of officers from both armies (above)  had drawn up and supervised the signing of paroles for every rebel soldier in Vicksburg. With that slip of paper soldiers could justify their absence from the battlefield, back home or in transient to home.  

Such a valued prize (above)  brought out the 31,000 who surrendered over the 18 to 20,000 'effectives' Pemberton had mustered to defend the city. That 'missing third' of Pemberton's army were the flotsam that collects around any army, particularly a losing one, particularly a badly run one, trapped in an urban area.

The 400 structures of Vicksburg (above) offered deserters and malingers 400 places to hide. It was relatively easy for men seeking to escape the constant shelling and sniping to find a quiet place to sleep, or even a meal away from the trenches. Considering the quality of the official rations, there was little advantage to staying with their units. Most did, but at least a third chose to fend for themselves. Once surrendered, the starving Army of Mississippi was kept alive by the Yankees, but as soon as they marched unarmed out of Vicksburg, they were consuming their own food again. And Grant's goal was to reclaim his supply lines for his own men only,  as quickly as possible.

Finally, at nine on the morning of Saturday, 11 July, 1863, 7 days after the surrender, the garrison of Vicksburg, “...waved a parting adieu to the scene of that terrible and bloody drama...”, or so remembered 21 year old private Epram McDowell Anderson.  There was the humiliation of spot searches as they left the city, to be certain they took no weapons with them. But after that brief reminder of their helplessness, the Army of Mississippi was sent on their way,  Private's Anderson's 1^st Missouri infantry were the lead regiment on the march, and he wrote, “Never was an army more grateful than ours on leaving Vicksburg. It was like a prisoner who has been unshackled in his cell and turned lose to breath again the pure air....rejoicing in a sense of freedom....” 

General Grant had offered rebel General John Stevens Bowen (above)  the option of staying in the city until he had fully recovered, but the southern gentleman insisted on accompanying his regiment in withdrawal, at least in part because, as private Anderson pointed out, “The first day's march brought us to Edwards.”

That winter Mary Lucrecia Preston Kennerly Bowen (above) was 28 years old and about to deliver her third child. With an infant mortality rate of 20% under favorable conditions, she had chosen to hole up on the plantation of “friends” 17 miles to the east of Vicksburg, outside of Edward's Depot, with the wives of 2 of John's subordinates – Colonel Pembroke S. Senteny and Major Eugene Erwin of the 2^nd Missouri regiment - as her midwives.

A native of St. Louis, Mary was an army brat and a fierce daughter of the south - her three brothers were fighting for the Confederacy. In the spring of 1862 Mary had left her children in her mother's care and rushed to Tennessee to nurse John after the general had been wounded at the Battle of Shiloh. John's recovery was confirmed when the couple conceived their 3^rd child. Mary then followed John to his new posting at Grand Gulf, Mississippi. She stayed there until March of 1863, when her “time came”. But on that July evening, Mary already knew that both of her midwives were now widows. And when reunited with her husband that Sunday evening, she came face to face with the  war so many of her generation had sought.

In Vicksburg, John Bowen (above) had consumed contaminated water or food touched by the contaminated hands of another. This had infected him with an alien bacteria, which had then killed most of the native bacteria which digested his food. After that, nothing he consumed reached his cells, but dehydration would kill him long before he starved to death. 

John's eyes were sunken. His mouth was dry, his lips cracked. He had a fever so high he kept passing in and out of conciseness. His belly was bloated. Most of the food and water he forced down was quickly vomited back up. He had little energy to even sit up. His gut kept cramping and he was plagued by the constant urge to defecate. When he did his stools were watery with blood and mucus. It was called the flux, or the bloody flux. In modern vernacular it was diarrhea, and it killed far more soldiers than did guns.

Sunday morning the Confederate army resumed their march, forced south to avoid fouling Sherman's supply lines as he advanced again on Jackson.  After 2 miles the road dropped off the high ground and forked, with the right passage leading another 14 miles to Raymond. But Father O'Bannon realized his patient could go no further. He sought assistance at the Morrison plantation along the Raymond Road, but was informed by the overseer that all the slaves had been marched off to Alabama, leaving no one to help the General. The man suggested they should take the south fork, down the Mount Moriah Road, another 2 miles to home of John Walton.

The single story house was called Valley Farm (above), and had been occupied by John Walton Jr. and his wife Margaret since at least 1850. After they carried the general into the house, Father O'Bannon wrote in his notebook, “July 12, General Bowen was too sick to move any further.” It would be an ugly night. Every hour John became weaker.

By midday on Monday, 13 July, 1863, Major General John Stevens Bowen was dead. Neighbor Robert Dickson supplied a coffin of rough wood. And one of the best hopes the Confederacy had for a second generation of military leaders was buried in Mr. Walton's garden, while Mary sobbed quietly at the graveside.

Monday morning, 13 July, the rebel army continued their march east, fading away a little bit more with every man who, hearing the gun fire from Jackson, and clutching his parole (above),  fell out of the line and started for home. Many would return when they were exchanged for captured Yankees. But many would not. On Wednesday, 16 July, the Army of Mississippi reached the Pearl River 10 miles below Jackson, and crossed into Alabama, back into Confederate held territory.

Mary Kennerly Bowen stayed on in Raymond, to remain close to John. Come the cooler months, she saw that John's body was moved to consecrated ground in the nearby Bethesda Presbyterian Church Cemetery (above).  Then, Mary followed the rebel army, this time to Atlanta. She served as a nurse during that campaign, and was even wounded in the Battle of Altoona. 

In September of 1864, when Atlanta was captured by General Sherman, the red headed Yankee offered an escort to see Mrs. Bowen back to her children in St. Louis. But the unrequited rebel proudly refused.  And so her children remained partners in her war.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Eighty - Nine

 

A woman of Vicksburg awoke in her cave on Saturday morning, 4 July, 1863 to an unusual sound. Silence. Returning to her home, later that morning, in her kitchen,  she met a soldier looking for scraps. He told her that “...the men in Vicksburg will never forgive Pemberton...A child would have known better than to shut men up in this cursed trap to starve to death...Haven’t I seen my friends carted out three or four in a box, that had died of starvation... because we had a fool for a general.”

At about 10 a.m., white flags began to appear along the rebel fortifications. Painfully thin Confederate regiments (above)  " “staggered like drunken men from emaciation, and...wept like children..." and formed pale skinned ranks on the ridge line. They stacked their rifles, handguns, shotguns, swords and bayonets and furled their battle flags. Then they glumly waited.

John Benjamin Sanborn (above) was a 36 year old widowed lawyer from St. Paul, Minnesota, who had fought in every major engagement of the campaign since the Battle of Port Gibson.  Now a full bird Colonel, he and his old regiment, the 4^th Minnesota infantry, were General Logan's choice to lead the 3^rd division into Vicksburg. The evening before Sanborn's brigade had been issued new uniforms. The soldiers had shined the brass on their muskets and buttons until it shown like new as they formed up along the Jackson Road behind their band.

With General Grant and his staff in the lead, followed by General John Alexander Logan and his 3^rd division staff, the Yankees marched through the remnants of the Louisiana redoubt and down into the heart of Vicksburg. The 3^rd division band was playing “Hail Columbia”, the defacto national anthem since 1800, as well as “The Star Spangled Banner”, which would not be the official anthem until 1931.

Carried in an ambulance at the head of the 45^th Illinois, second regiment in the column, was the wounded Colonel Jasper Adalmorn Maltby. His head bandages still seeped blood from the 22 June battle in the crater of the Louisiana redan,  but the 36 year old gunsmith from Galena was determined to celebrate with his regiment, both crippled in the victory. He would shortly be promoted to Brigadier General, but would struggle to recover from his injuries.

As the column passed into the city itself, the victorious Yankee cannon outside slowly fired a 31 gun salute – one shot for each state in the union, including those in rebellion. By limiting the salute in this way, Grant disguised the number of cannon already moved to Sherman's front 20 miles to the east, which was now preparing to advance against Joe Johnston's Army of Relief. At the junction with Cherry Street the regiment reached the Warren County Courthouse (above) , where they formed around the base of the building. 

In front of the east portico, Grant dismounted and (above) was greeted by his defeated foe - Lieutenant General Pemberton. This set the Yankee soldiers to cheering.

A resident of the United States for just 5 years, Norwegian born 22 year old Private Knud Helling, wrote his best friend, “ We marched into the city in good order with (band) playing and the flags flying...The Rebel soldiers and the inhabitants stood in groups on the street corners and stared at us while we passed them...The inhabitants....looked very pale and wretched...The city is somewhat damaged by the horrible bombardment, and many of the houses have marks from our cannon balls....” John Thurston, also with the 4^th Minnesota, recalled it as “...the most glorious 4^th of July I ever spent.”

The cheering, happy blue coats drove the weary Confederates to evacuate the court house. With them gone, Yankee staff officers clambered up the iron staircase to the cupola, for an unimpeded view of their victory. One of them, who had imbibed of spirits, noticed the staircase had been forged in Cincinnati, and promptly cursed “...the impudence of the people who thought they could whip the United States when they couldn't even make their own staircases.”

Confederate Captain John Henry Jones was so reduced by hunger that he approached a Union lieutenant and requested permission to buy food. The lieutenant responded that request had to go through military channels, to which Jones replied it must be obvious from his appearance, “I would be dead some days before its return”.  

Laughing at the shared frustration with military bureaucracy, the Yankee remembered he had some “trash” in his haversack. The 32 year old Jones wrote that, “The “trash” consisted of "...about two pounds of gingersnaps and butter crackers; luxuries I had not seen for three years. I was struck dumb with amazement....I fell upon that “trash” like a hungry wolf....the memory of that sumptuous feast still lingers, and my heart yet warms with gratitude towards that good officer for the blessing he bestowed.”

Viewing from her nearby home, Dora Miller with her husband watched the American flag unfurled atop the Warren County Courthouse. They shared northern sympathies and he . “...drew a long breath of contentment. Dora herself wrote, “Now I feel once more at home in mine own country.” In an hour more a grand rush of civilians set out for the river. With the riverfront batteries silent, the Federal fleet of transports now swarmed to the empty docks (above), carrying “coffee and flour.” First come, first served,’ you know,” the couple were told. Within hours crowds were dashing “...through the streets with their arms full, canned goods predominating.”

Grant wrote in his memoirs, “Our soldiers were no sooner inside the lines than the two armies began to fraternize...I myself saw our men taking bread from their haversacks and giving it to the enemy they had so recently been engaged in starving out. It was accepted with avidity and with thanks.” Not every southerner was willing to be gracious. Margaret Lord, wife of the Reverend Lord and mother to Lida, turned down a Yankee offer of food.

From the docks, Grant dispatched a staff officer to Cairo, the nearest secure telegraph station, with the following message for Washington: “The enemy surrendered this morning. The only terms allowed is their parole as prisoners of war. This I regard as a great advantage to us at this moment. It saves, probably, several days in the capture, and leaves (our) troops and transports ready for immediate service...

"....Sherman, with a large force, moves immediately on Johnston, to drive him from the State. I will send troops to the relief of Banks, and return the 9th army corps to Burnside.” The dispatch boat arrived in Cairo about noon on Tuesday, 7 July, 1863. And then the entire world knew.

Grant meanwhile returned to his headquarters, where he ordered all but a few units to prepare to join the march on the Big Black River.   About 5:00 that evening, Logan's men began to spread out into the town. Noted the woman of Vicksburg, “What a contrast to the suffering creatures we had seen so long were these stalwart, well-fed men...Sleek horses, polished arms, bright plumes, - this was the pride and panoply of war. Civilization, discipline, and order seemed to enter with the measured tramp of those marching columns; and the heart turned with throbs of added pity to the worn men in gray, who were being blindly dashed against this embodiment of modern power. And now this “silence that is golden...” 

It would be a another week before the 31,000 rebel soldiers, including sick and wounded, would receive their parole papers, and set out for their homes or other bases to await exchange. The Confederates also surrendered 50 smooth bore field cannons, 31 rifled field guns, 22 howitzers, 46 smooth bore siege guns, 21 rifled siege guns, 1 siege howitzer, and a 10-inch mortar - 172 artillery pieces in total. 

The Yankees also removed from Confederate control 38,000 artillery shells, 58,000 pounds of black powder, 4,800 artillery cartridges and 60,000 muskets.

Editor John Shannon had dismissed a Yankee boast that one day Grant would eat dinner in Vicksburg, by advising the recipe for cooking rabbit was “First, Ketch your rabbit”. The honorable Mr. Shannon now admitted in the last edition of his publication, printed on the back of wallpaper, that Grant had indeed caught his rabbit.

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