VICKSBURG Chapter Sixty - Two

 

The artillery crescendo gave the game away. As the hands on thousands of watches clicked over to 10:00 am on Thursday, 22 May, 1863 - another of those heavy humid Mississippi mornings – dozens of gunners along the 3 mile long battle line waited for that final tick to pull their lanyards one last time. It was natural, to want to deliver one last blow against the enemy before the defenseless infantry came came out into the open. 

But after hours of shot and shell, the hiccup in the rhythm of the bombardment, followed by the thunder of so many cannon in unison, betrayed the attacker's intent. Without bidding, the men of the 36^th Mississippi occupied the firing step of the redoubt and half cocked their muskets. Again it would be their courage and iron and powder against a forlorn hope.

Ulysses Grant (above)  had decided even before the second failure of 19 May that he would try again, but a harder blow this time. On Tuesday Grant had been able to bring 15,000 men against the rebel lines. Now he could more than double that strength -  40,000 men -  and the entire artillery reserves of the Army of the Tennessee.  With an hour long bombardment to prepare the way, Grant meant to capture Vicksburg on 21 May, before the rebels in his rear, under General Joe Johnston, had time to assemble a new army.

That plan changed after Grant was recognized by the reserves and wounded of Sherman's XV Corps. As he rode through their ranks after the failed assault the men chanted, “Hard tack, hard tack, hard tack, hard tack”. The veterans were not showing affection for the ubiquitous barely palatable biscuit, also known as “molar breakers” and “worm castles”. 

Instead, the chanting troops were advising their general that after two weeks of more marching and foraging than fighting, they were willing to storm this rebel city, but they would need full bellies and a full ration of ammunition. It was the genius of Grant that he heard his soldiers, took their advice, and delayed his second assault until 22 May.

The wagons which now trundled up the new road from the Johnson Plantation on Chickasaw Bayou, were loaded with food – for every soldier 20 ounces of pork or beef, 16 ounces of hard tack, and 1 ounce of desiccated mixed vegetables or potatoes. 

And for every 100 men, 8 quarts of beans or peas, 10 pounds of hominy, 8 pounds of roasted coffee beans, 10 lbs of sugar and 1 quart of vinegar. Not until every regiment had received three day's rations, was the emphases shifted back to ammunition.

Major General Sherman decided to use the extra day to prepare his corps for the renewed assault on the Stockade Redoubt (above).  It stood astride the Graveyard Road, the primary northern route into Vicksburg. Now the men knew what they faced – the 8 food deep and 8 feet wide ditch filled with abatis, and then the 17 foot slope before they could even come to gripes with the enemy. And being innovative men, they invented a way of avoiding the ditch.

That Wednesday morning, each of the 15 regiments in General Sherman's Corp was asked to provided 10 volunteers. The response spoke well for the spirit of the Army. Even knowing the risk they were being asked to take, double the number needed stepped forward. It allowed Sherman (above) to eliminate married men from the mission. But Sherman expressed his true feelings when he labeled the storming parties as “The Forlorn Hope”.

Preparations continued during the afternoon of 21 May, drilling nail holes and driving metal handles into the backs of 25 fresh cut 9 to 10 foot logs. After nightfall, the men dragged the logs out into the 500 yards of open ground in front of the rebel redoubt. After covering them with dirt and debris, they were left.

Come 10:00 a.m., 50 men with their rifles slung across their backs, would break out of cover and run like hell to the logs. Two men to each log, the volunteers would grab the handles and carry the burdens forward before throwing them across the trench. They would be followed by another 50 volunteers, who would be carrying boards pierced with nails. That afternoon it had been determined there only one ready source of planks, and that was the house in which General Grant was sleeping. So the general would drink his morning coffee on Thursday, 22 May while watching the house around him being dismantled.

The second wave of volunteers would run to the ditch, and jam the nails of the boards into the pre-drilled holes in the logs, thus forming foot bridges. The final 50 volunteers would be carrying scaling ladders. They would race across the bridges and lay the ladders against the redoubts' slope. The following assault troops would then cross the bridges, climb the ladders and capture the redoubt. Or so went the plan.

A mile to the south, 34 year old Major General James Birdseye McPherson's XVII Corp would be making a similar assault on the Great Redout. And about a mile further south of that the XIII Corps under 51 year old politician Major General John Alexander McClaerend would be attacking the Railroad Redoubt. It was hoped that if the rebel line was pressed in unison, it would break somewhere. Anywhere.

Wednesday evening, Grant informed Admiral Porter of the pending assault, and asked if the ironclads along the river could help by shelling the enemy water batteries from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. Porter assigned the ships Benton, Tuscumbria, Carondelet and Mound City to pound the river batteries.

Inside the Stockade Redout, the confident veterans of the 36^th Mississippi knew something was coming. But the only element of their defense which caused them worry was their commander, 30 year old Colonel William Wallace Witherspoon. There could be no doubt that he was a southern patriot. When the war broke out, William had just begun his career as a lawyer in the little town of Napoleon, where the Arkansas river joined the Mississippi. Still, he immediately enlisted in the 1^st Arkansas mounted infantry, as a private.

Less than a month after the battle of Bull Run, in August of 1861, a 12,000 man rebel army was camped along Wilson's Creek, preparing to fall on the 6,000 isolated Union troops in Springfield, Missouri. The Union commander, Brigadier General Nathanial Lyon, decided to strike first, and on 10 August, caught the rebels still in their tents. After a bloody morning, the Yankees were forced to retreat, but the attack, which cost Lyon his life (above), so damaged the rebels there were unable to follow up their victory, which saved Missouri for the Federal Union. One of the 1,300 rebel casualties was private William Witherspoon.

William (above)  was wounded so severely, he was discharged. But in March of 1862 he re-enlisted as a Lieutenant in the 36^th Mississippi Infantry. Over the next year he earned a reputation as so “harsh, overbearing and tyrannical” that his men stuck him with the vulgar sexual nickname “Pewter Spoon” Then at Iuka, Corinth and Chickasaw Bayou, he showed himself to also be a brave and “brilliant” combat commander. Whether he was drinking for self medication or addiction, did not matter much to his men, or his commanders, and he was twice charged with being drunk on duty.

That Thursday, promptly at 10:00 a.m., Colonel Witherspoon steadied his men as the last of the Yankee shells landed harmlessly on the face of the Redoubt. Then with a cheer, the forlorn hope appeared, running out from the shelter of the trees. 

The Mississippi boys did not wait for orders, but opened up at once. Sergeant George Powell Clarke, company “C” of the 36^th, said, “A withering fire of musketry, grape, canister and shells greeted them as they came in sight, and men fell like grass before the reaper…Here, now, the eye witness could have seen war in all its awful sublimity and grandeur.”

- 30 -

VICKSBURG Chapter Sixty - One

 

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.

- 30 -

VICKSBURG Chapter Sixty

 

The shattering crash of yet another volley of musket fire forced Charley's face into the dirt. A half breath later he heard the cloud of mini'e balls rip the air inches over his head. Only then did he dare to look to the fate of the color-bearer. As the afternoon breeze sluggishly tugged at the acidic smoke, the Captain saw the bloody blue body on the precipitous slope of the rampart. The precious flag lay crumpled in the dirt at his side.

Charley could sense that in a moment the men behind him might break and turn their backs to the enemy. If they did, they would be slaughtered.  And the only way 28 year old Captain Charles “Charley” Ewing could save their lives was by risking his own. Charley took a deep breath and pulled himself up, dug his heels into the loam and started up the slope of the Stockade Redan. It was about 2:15 p.m. on Tuesday, 19 May, 1863.

Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant explained his thinking in his memoirs. “The enemy had been much demoralized by his defeats at Champion’s Hill and at the Big Black, and I believed would not make much effort to hold Vicksburg. Accordingly at 2 o’clock I ordered an assault.” So it was the vision of the rebel army collapsing, and capturing 1,700 prisoners just 2 days earlier which told Grant he might be able to carry the city in a rush.  He was wrong.  But he was not wrong for trying.

It was the Prussian General Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz (above)  who noted that all actions in a war are wrapped in a “...fog of greater or lessor uncertainty.” The Napoleonic Wars were the consuming event of this military philosopher's life.   In 1792, at 12 years of age, Carl was inducted into the Prussian army as a Lance-Corporal, and fought in war after war for the next 20 years, while achieving the rank of Major-General before his death at 51 years age in the Second Great Cholera Pandemic of 1831.  Although never wounded, Clausewitz saw more of war than most people, and understood it better than just about anyone else.

“War”, said Clausewitz in his book  was“...a fascinating trinity—composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason." Historian Christopher Bassford has shortened Clausewitz's Trinity to "Violent Emotion and Chance and Rational Calculation." Although Grant did his best to rationally calculate the impact of “Chance”, he never allowed it to prevent applying his reasoning to war, as he did now.

The nearest troops at hand were also the freshest - Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's XV Corps. They had last seen combat 5 days previously, on Thursday, 14 May, at Jackson. This was no accident. Throughout the campaign, Grant's obsession with never retracing his steps was shared with his staff, ensuring every possible enemy reaction was considered before any marching orders were issued.

Setting out before dawn on Saturday, 16 May, Sherman's XV corps had covered the 60 miles from Jackson to Vicksburg in 3 day's march. The lead element,  after crossing the Big Black River,  was the 2^nd Division, under 42 year old Missouri lawyer, Major General Francis “Frank” Preston Blair Junior (above) . His father, Francis Blair senior, was a wealthy St. Louis newspaper editor.  The eldest son, Montgomery, was Lincoln's Post Master General. As Lincoln put it, “Their family is a close corporation. And Frank is their hope and pride.”

The 2^nd Division had been the last of Sherman's 3 divisions to land at Grand Gulf, and had escorted the final supply wagons, joining  Grant's  Army of the Tennessee in the vicinity of Raymond on 13 May.  So the 2^nd Division's 3 brigades were in the lead as they approached Vicksburg on Monday, 18 May.   Grant made the decision not to wait for  McClearnand or McPherson's Corps to come up, but to press ahead with just 2 divisions - about 7,000 men against some 20,000 rebels inside Vicksburg.  He intended to test the possibility that the rebels were teetering on the edge of despair.  And he was right. They were.

The commander of the 2^nd division's 1^st Brigade was a 33 year old hotel operator named Colonel Giles Alexander Smith.  He was a combat veteran, serving in the Army of the Tennessee River since Fort Donaldson, in February of 1862.  Eighteen months later, his troops were the 113^th and 116^th Illinois Volunteer regiments, the 6^th and 8^th Missouri Volunteers – Smith's old command. But the spearhead of this particular assault would be the 13^th United States Regular Infantry regiment, under Captain Edward Crawford Washington, grand nephew of father of the nation, President and General George Washington.

With Brigadier General James Madison Tuttle's 3^rd Division held in reserve, direct support for the attack would be the 5 regiments of Colonel Thomas Kirby's 2^nd Brigade and the 4 regiments of the 3rd Brigade under Brigadier General Hugh Boyle Ewing – older brother to Captain Charles Ewing, second in command of the 13^th U.S. Regulars.  Artillery support would be provided by the XV Corps' 3 batteries of Illinois artillery and one from Ohio. The infantry of Blair's division were fresh troops. They had not seen combat since the Yazoo Pass Expedition in March. But they would see their share today when they attacked straight up the Graveyard Road at the Stockade Redan.

The packed earthen walls of the redan were 17 feet high and 16 feet thick, their exterior face dropping below ground level into a 6 foot deep trench. Any attacker would be forced to clamber up 23 feet before coming to grips with the defenders. Atop the rampart was a single 12 pound howitzer. In addition there was a lunette south of the Graveyard Road, which could lay down flanking fire on any attack on the Redan. Five feet below the lip of the Redan's interior wall was a firing step, defended by some 400 men of the 36^th Mississippi regiment, supported by survivors of the 27^th Louisiana regiment.

The 36^th Mississippi had been formed in March of 1862, after the first patriotic rush, and from companies organized across the state. They were under 43 year old Louisiana Brigadier General Louis Hébert's command. 

The 36^th had been bloodied in the Corinth campaign – 12 dead and 71 wounded – before being transferred to Vicksburg that winter. The 36^th had helped defeat Sherman's Corps at Chickasaw Bayou, and spent the next six months guarding the guns at Snyder's Bluff. In fact it was the 36^th which had been withdrawn so precipitously on 17 May, just before the arrival of the Iowa cavalrymen. They were a full strength veteran regiment and well rested.

A sergeant in the 36^th, George Powell Clarke, remembered that morning, well. "At 10:00 A.M ,” he wrote, “ the firing ceased and the Federals advanced in two lines of battle... We could plainly hear when the order was given to advance....and soon the long, glittering line of bayonets came in sight... they gave a prolonged yell, and broke into a double quick towards our lines…our batteries opened on them with with grape, canister, and shrapnel shells, which told fearfully on their crowded ranks. When they had reached within fifty yards of our lines we opened upon them with musketry...with murderous effect…”

Captain Washington (above), leading the 13^th U.S. Infantry, was cut down by the first volley, as he struggled through the obstructions in the ditch at the base of the redoubt.  Hit twice, he tumbled into the thick loam.. Later, the rebel Sergeant Clarke gave credit to the men he was killing, writing, “...they were brave men and did not falter, though hundreds were falling all around them, until within a few feet of us. They then wavered, rallied once, but finally gave way and retreated to their own position.” In the confusion, they left the bleeding Captain Washington behind.

Grant decided to bring up more artillery, to soften up the Redan before giving it another try. XV Corp gunners blasted the Redan for four more hours.  Rebel gunners returned fire as best they could, but their guns were too spread out to provide effective counter battery fire. And not all Federal the shots were effective, either.  One shell from a 20 pound Parrott gun burrowed right through the 16 foot thick loam of the Redan walls, and sailed out the other side, before finally exploding in the air, over the Glass Bayou a quarter mile to the rear.

Suffering in the heat behind the ridge in front of the Redan, a member of an Ohio regiment remembered the men had “perspiration oozing out at every pore.” Then, at 2:00 p.m. the cannon went silent and the Yankee infantry came on again, right up the Graveyard Road. A staff officer in Blair's division watched while, “The very chips and sticks scattered over the ground were jumping under the hot shower of rebel bullets.”

With the absence of Captain Washington, command of the 13^th Regular Infantry had now devolved upon Captain Charles Ewing (above). And as he lead his men head on into that maelstrom of fire, it must have crossed his mind that he had the political connections to be anywhere else he wanted. Charley was the son of Lincoln's Secretary of the Interior, Thomas Ewing.  His sister, Ellen, was the wife of General William Tecumseh Sherman.  And yet at this moment, a few minutes after 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 19 May, he was here, once again stumbling into the ditch, and struggling through the abatis obstructions. 

The Rebels were firing into the blue clad men from above, appearing on the crest long enough throw

shells with lit fuses into the ranks where the shrapnel splintered bodies and separated minds from souls. The regimental color bearer had already been shot down, his body rolling to the bottom of the ditch.  A second soldier had taken up the flag, and struggled up the slope with it as a rallying point.  Clumps of men were drawn to follow. 

But when the second bearer fell, a shell exploding in his faced, almost decapitating him, the regiment deflated, and fell to the earth and turned their heads from the horrible sight. It seemed to Charley as if the regiment had sighed, their spirit escaping like a lost breath under water.

Charley saw that the moment had come. A small band of men could determine the battle in a few moments. But if no one acted, the attack would die right here on the slopes of the Stockade Redoubt. 

So Charley clawed himself to his feet, and pausing to pick up the flag as he climbed, he powered to within 100 yards of the crest of the Redoubt. 

It was not as operatic as the artists of a later generation would see it (above). Charley was alone. And he was 100 yards from the nearest rebel soldier. But it was as dramatic a moment as any in the four bloody years of war.  

Seeing a company of rebels preparing to fire, Charley  jammed the staff into the ground, and bending on one knee to hold the flag steady,  he turned to call the regiment to rally to him. He could see the men begin to move, a leg lifting, and rifle swinging upward. Then abruptly a volley of muskets snapped above the din of battle.  A wave of minie' balls tore at the banner, whipped the cloth las if in a gale, sand slicing the thick wooden staff in two, and tearing off one of Charley's fingers.

The pain was immediate. He grasped his left hand in his right, the sight of his own gushing blood sending him into shock. Charley involuntarily ducked his head and closed his eyes as tight as he could.  So he did not see the men who dragged him back down the slope, nor the man who rescued the regimental colors from the dirt. The attack was broken.  

The 13th regiment hung on to the Mississippi soil at the bottom of the trench, for the rest of the long afternoon, exchanging snipping with the rebels, dodging the random shells with burning fuses sent rolling down the slope, or sailing into the air over their heads. Said the Regimental history, “The ditch literally filled with the dead bodies of our cherished comrades and the glaciers blue with the victims of war.”

When darkness finally covered the 13th regiment's withdrawal, it had sacrificed 43% of their men in their two assaults on the Stockade Redoubt.  That night, rebel soldiers brought Captain Washington into the Redoubt and tried to bind his wounds. He died before morning. 

The rescued 13th's regimental flag had been hit 56 times, the nation flag 18. Total losses for the entire 1^st Brigade were 157 killed - including 17 color bearers - and 777 wounded. Rebel losses were 8 killed and 62 wounded.

That night Major General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote his wife, telling her that “Charley was very conspicuous in the 1st assault, and brought off the colors of the battalion which are now in front of my tent, the Staff 1/4 cut away by a ball that took with it a part of his finger.” Later, Captain Charles Ewing would be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions in planting that first flag on the battlements of Vicksburg. The 13th Regiment would henceforth be entitled to call itself, "First At Vicksburg."  

Sherman continued his letter to Ellen, “We must work smartly as Joe Johnston is collecting the shattered forces...and may get reinforcements from Bragg … Grant’s movement was the most hazardous, but thus far the most successful of the war. He is entitled to all the credit,  for I would not have advised it.” As an after thought, Sherman added, “McPherson is a noble fellow, but McClernand a dirty dog.”

And across the way, in Vicksburg, a young woman noted how the repulse of the Yankee attack had lifted the spirits of the defenders.  Before they had sounded beaten. But after today they spoke optimistically of holding until relieved by “Old” Joe Johnston.”

- 30 -