VICKSBURG Chapter Sixty - Two

Less than an hour into Wednesday, 20 May, 1863, the city of Vicksburg was rocked by a stomach turning thud, originating from the river at its feet. Explained the post war diary of the 3^rd Louisiana regiment, “A huge iron-clad approached from below, and commenced a furious bombardment of the city, which was rapidly responded to by our heavy batteries...The hoarse bellowing of the mortars, the sharp report of rifled artillery, the scream and explosion of every variety of deadly missiles, intermingled with the incessant, sharp reports of small-arms...” And thus began the siege of Vicksburg.

As the sun finally rose that Wednesday, 48 year old Lieutenant General John Clifford Pemberton commanded just under 20,000 men, 72 heavy guns and 103 field cannon stretched in an 8 mile “D” around the city   The military adage that the defense multiplied defender forces by 3, meant that Pemberton's 20,000 men should withstand 60,000 attackers. And for the previous six months, the spade and the engineer's diligence had struggled to reinforce that adage.

The river batteries formed the backbone of the “D”, from South Fort rising above Stout's Bayou to the Hill Fort, frowning down upon the DeSoto bend of the Mississippi river – 

From south to north, there was The South Fort (above)...

and The Widow Blakely Battery (above), whose cannon was known as "Whistling Dick".  The Marine Hospital Battery, The Brooke Battery, The Railroad Battery, The Depot Battery and the Whig Office Battery,...

...then across the Glass Bayou to Wyman's Hill Battery (above)...

...and Batteries 4 through 7 to the Hill Fort (above). Together these contained 37 heavy guns and 13 field cannon, manned by some 3,500 men.

That left the 6 ½ mile long landward defensive line, with 1 infantryman for every 2 feet of trench. Their weapon was the rifled muskets, with a truly effective range of 150 yards and an effective rate of fire of 3 rounds per minute. Pemberton's artillery on the land side consisted of 35 heavy guns and 90 cannon in earthen redans (V-shaped forts) and redoubts (French for 'a place of retreat'), averaging one cannon for every 250 yards, with a safe rate of fire of 1 round per minute. But the design of these fortifications had been developed over a thousand years to concentrate the defenders and cannon at critical points.

All trees up to 300 yards beyond the defenses were clear cut to provide a an unimpeded field of fire. The wood was then used in the three medieval defensive lines. First a 10 foot deep ditch was excavated, in the north above The Military Road, running ¾ of a mile eastward from the Hill Fort. Any attacker would find themselves forced into this depression directly in front of the defending gunners. 

In the trenches interior wall,  abatis were half buried – a felled tree or bush with the branches facing the attacker, or man made constructions, a Cheval de Fris  (above),  to slow and disrupt an attacker.

Dirt scooped from the trench was used to raise the steep rampart walls of the second and primary defense positions - a broken line of lunettes and redans, on high ground above the terminations of the numerous gullies steams had carved through the Vicksburg loam. 

In architecture, a lunette (rights) – French for little noon – is the recessed arch above a doorway. In fortifications it is a similarly shaped defense position with an open rear. A redan (center)  is generally larger, some at Vicksburg had  20 foot thick earthen walls, and a single “V” rampart thrusting into the attack. The rear of all these positions are open except the 4 walled "Redoubt", French for place of retreat.

The objective is to force the attacker to either smash their strength against a single high point, or flow around the obstruction, dissipating their strength and offering their flanks at close range to the defending marksmen inside the fort. Should the enemy attack the undefended rear, he would then present their own rear to a counter attack from troops in the third line of trenches.

The top of the “D” was the Stockade Redan, at the eastern end of the northern line, so named because a Poplar stockade wall stood across the junction of the Military and the Graveyard Road. Defending the Stockade Redan was the 27^th Louisiana and 36^th Mississippi Infantry regiments, with three Missouri regiments in reserve, behind in a 7 foot deep trench line.

South of this stood Green's Redan defended by the 37^th Mississippi Infantry, with the 26^th Louisiana Infantry in reserve. A quarter mile further south was the 3^rd Louisiana Redan, and then The Great Redoubt, so called because it was the largest fort in the Confederate , with four rectangular earthen walls.

South of the Great Redoubt the ground in front of the line was too broken support an attack, so there was only the a mile long ditch with abatis and manned trenches behind.  But then came the 2^nd Texas Lunette and the Railroad Redan (above), named because the South Railroad ran through the gully, along with Potter's Chapel Road.

A quarter mile south west, as the “D” began to angle back toward its base, was The Square Fort, later named Fort Garrott after its namesake, 36 year old Colonel Isham Warren Garrott from the 20^th Alabama regiment. Garrott was cut down by a sniper's bullet during the siege. A half mile further southwest, guarding the ravine where Hall's Ferry Road left Vicksburg, was the Salient Redan. The steep ravine carved by Stout's Bayou, as well as broken ground and lack of roads over the next 1 and ¾ miles made this section unsuitable for either an attack or defense. But the Vicksburg defenses were tied down with the powerful South Fort, guarding the Warrenton Road.

With the arrival of dawn, Grant's artillery joined the bombardment. According to the 3^rd Louisiana diary, “The place was a perfect pandemonium...The hoarse bellowing of the mortars, the sharp report of rifled artillery, the scream and explosion of every variety of deadly missiles, intermingled with the incessant, sharp reports of small-arms, made up a combination of sounds not such as described by the poet as being a " sweet concord."

There was much more to come.  And much worse.

- 30 -

FEET OF CLAY

I think it might be the most important two feet of clay in the entire world, 14 inches of clinging, grasping wet sticky ooze that made Teddy Roosevelt a two term President, inspired the effort that created the American century, and offers a lesson in the history of the world we live in - that we all have feet of clay.

The two feet had to be clay because clay holds water, and this particular clay was created over thousands of years by limestone being eroded by the dark acidic waters of a lake surrounded by a dense forest, such as in today’s Wisconsin Dells (above). This particular ancient dell has been called  "Lake Chicago", and if the clay it produced had been less than two feet high, then the clay would not have mattered.

If it had been thicker, then in 1674 Lois Jolliet (above) would have returned from his exploration of the Mississippi by a different route. Two feet was just thick enough to be difficult to overcome, but it could be over come. And although Ms Jolliet was the first European to see the clay, he did not really see it. He wrote to his superiors back in France that there was a simple way to connect the great lake now called Michigan with the Mississippi River  "We could go with facility to Florida in a bark (canoe), and by very easy navigation, " wrote Jolliet.. "It would only be necessary to make a canal by cutting through but half a league of prairie."  But Jolliet had arrived at the edge of the ancient "Lake Chicago" when most of the clay was hidden from view by the spring runoff. So the obstacle and the advantage of the clay would have to wait over a century to be revealed.

In the summer of 1818 fur trader Gurdon Hubbard, retracing Jolliet's route for the American Fur Company, made his first trip up the south fork of the ‘Shikaakwa’ (or skunk weed) River from the village of “Chicago” on the western shore of Lake Michigan (above) . Hubbard followed the river upstream until the open water gave out. From there, unlike Jolliet,  Hubbard was forced to  portaged for seven miles. Because Hubbard was traveling in the summer, when the water was low.

“Our empty boats were pulled up the channel," wrote Hubbard, "...until the Mud Lake (above)  was reached, where we found mud thick and deep, but only at rare intervals was there water….”

Fighting off schools of leeches and clouds of mosquitoes, it took Hubbard three days to cross the 7 miles of clay and mud before reaching the clear flowing water of the Des Plaines River.  But as Jolliet had said, the Des Plaines River ran into the Illinois River, which joined the Mississippi River, which carried Hubbard and his bateau’s 12 tons of trade goods into the very hinterland of the continent. And perhaps this might be a good point to pause and explain why this was where the clay surfaced.

Three times over the last 300,000 years glaciers have ground southward across North America, successively plowing the landscape bare and then recreating it on their retreat. When the penultimate of the glaciers paused here 25,000 years ago, they bulldozed a 10 foot high north-south ridge of clay (above, foreground) from the bed of the  ancient Lake Chicago into the “Valparaiso Terminal Moraine”. 

Chicago writer Libby Hill has noted this moraine is not a mountain range, but  "a very slight rise of maybe about 10 feet that...in times of low water... would be a subcontinental divide"(above).   The  24 inch high clay was the cap on the moraine ridge which kept the present Lake Michigan from draining to the west and south down the Des Paines River into the center of the continent.  Instead the waters of Lake Michigan were forced to find a another path to the ocean , eastward,  toward the Saint Laurence River, and giving birth 12,000 years ago, to Niagara Falls.  But from the moment Hubbard clawed his way through the sucking, engulfing clay, Americans were anxious to dig through it. 

The dream of breaching that moraine was first achieved by the 96 mile long "Illinois and Michigan Canal", begun 1836, discontinued in the panic of 1837,  and not completed until 1848. It drained the Mud Lake and provided locks (above) to lift the narrow canal boats and their 100 ton loads 35 feet up to the level of the Des Plaines River at Jolliet.  From there another series of locks provided an easy journey so Michigan apples could be sold in St. Louis and New Orleans. That first canal established Chicago as a transportation hub.

But the growth of Chicago presented its own challenges. By 1867, the 300,000 citizens of Chicago had so fouled their Lake Michigan shoreline that to reach clean drinking water they were required to tunnel two miles out under the lake. 

The success of such "big government projects", like the water tunnels and the "Illinois  and Michigan" canal encouraged the locals to dream of breaching the moraine in a more grand fashion,  and of converting Chicago from a mere lake port into a seaport. 

To sell the plan to conservative voters, politicians  also pitched the idea of reversing the flow of the Chicago River, to carry Chicago’s waste away from the lake, which was the source of the cities’ drinking water. Pumps would draw lake water into the Chicago River, and then send it up and over the "Valparaiso Moraine" before sending it down the new "Sanitary and Ship Canal". 

So on Saturday, 3 September, 1892,  Frank Wenter, President of the new Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago, turned the first ceremonial shovel of earth in the village of Lemont, Illinois, which was to be the central point of the Sanitary and Ship Canal, because it was the highest elevation between the rivers and a good source of stone, for lining the canal.

The new canal, built in the name of progress and “clean water”, would excavate 44 million cubic yards of clay and stone...

...to create a passage 28 miles long, 202 feet wide and 24 feet deep, which would terminate, for the time being, in a dam and lock at a new town named Lockport, Illinois. Here the lock could take ships and barges up to 600 feet long and 110 feet wide. It would take eight years to finish the initial work and the final cost would prove to be $45 million.

The New York World newspaper examined the social changes this ‘progress’ brought to the sleepy village of Lemont (below). Out of the town's 9,000 residents, wrote the paper,  “…4,000 are gamblers, thieves, murderers or disorderly women. There are 100 saloons, 40 gambling houses, 20 dance houses and three theaters…Everything is running wide open and licensed...Within three months 30 dead bodies have been found…and no one has been punished…"

The paper then added, "Every Sunday excursions of the worst classes go to Lemont from Chicago.”

The Mississippi River town of St. Louis had already lost the race to become the rail center of the nation to Chicago, and now the new canal would allow Chicago grain and livestock markets to set prices for Missouri farmers. When the Missouri business interests finally awoke to the threat,  they realized a purely monetary argument against the canal lacked a sense of urgency.  So, as the Sanitary and Ship Canal got ready for an official opening in the spring of 1900,  Missouri threatened a lawsuit, claiming, to quote the Missouri Attorney General  “The action of the Chicago authorities in turning their sewage into the Mississippi River for the people of St. Louis to drink is criminal, and Chicago knows it.”

Yea, maybe they did. But in response, in December of 1899, the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago released their own "scientific study" which "proved" all sewage had been cleansed by the river by the time the Chicago waters reached Peoria, even before it joined the Mississippi.  And besides, the Chicago lawyers argued, St. Louis drew most of its drinking water from the Missouri River, not the Mississippi. And besides that, the city of St Louis even had their own a sewage draining into the Mississippi River, above their own water intake on the Mississippi.  If anybody was forcing the citizens of St. Louis to drink sewage, it was St. Louis, not Chicago! 

In an attempt to present the United States Supreme Court with a faite accomplie on this issue, on 2 January 1900,  Chicago opened the new northern locks connecting Lake Michigan with the canal.  Not to be deterred,  on Wednesday, 17 January, 1900, Missouri filed a request for an immediate  injunction from the Supreme Court to stop the canal from being opened at the southern end. And suddenly the Chicago lawyers and politicians did not feel so certain about their case. 

To forestall the Supreme Court, on Sunday, 21 January, 1900, the directors of the Sanitary District tried to quietly produce another fait accompli (above). The Chicago Tribune explained why that did not prove a simple thing to achieve.

“…B.A. Eckhart was the first to reach the narrow watershed at Kedzie Avenue and Thirty-filth Street...a dredge was already hard at work throwing up the clay from the cut…. Less than eight feet (of ice and frozen clay) separated the waters of the lakes from the waters of the Mississippi…It was exceedingly slow work, for the clay was (frozen) like a rock…Four large charges of dynamite were placed in the ridge…A few fugitive pieces of clay did fly into the air. But as a grand opening it was a failure…."

"Then the ambitious trustees, armed with their shovels, descended into the cut and began to push away the pieces of clay and ice which held back the lakes…With the regularity of a pendulum the arm of the dredge swung back and forth….The ice from the river rolled in and blocked the channel…"Push the ice...away with the arm." shouted the foreman…The (dredge) arm dropped behind the ice gorge and then with resistless motion swept the whole of it into the Mississippi Valley. .... "It is open! It is open!" went up from scores of throats as the water at last (flowed)…Like school boys on a vacation, the drainage officials waved their arms and shouted.”

It was done.  On 2 May, 1900 Admiral George Dewey, hero of the battle of Manila, dedicated the official opening. But it would not be until 1907 that a lock and power plant would be built (above) to control the 36 foot climb from the southern canal level at Lemont to the level of the Des Plaines  River to the north, and complete the dream of ocean going ships reaching the Mississippi via Chicago.

Within a decade after the canal opened the construction techniques for the locks used to raise and lower ships over the Valparaiso Moraine (above)....

...would be used by many of the same engineers in the construction of the Panama Canal (above). It was that endeavor, championed by Teddy Roosevelt, which ushered in the American Century. The lesson here is that no infrastructure construction, be it the creation of the Sanitary and Ship Canal, or manned space flight, or the creation of the interstate highway system, or a national Internet access system, is ever a wasted effort. It is the lesson learned from the endeavor that make the future possible. 

And the Chicago canal proved something else as well. As recorded by William C. Alden in the 1902 “Chicago Folio” for the U.S. Geological Survey Atlas of the United States (volume #81), excavations for the canal and its locks unearthed the history of the entire continent.Beneath the clay and beneath the limestone was the bedrock of Chicago; “Potsdam Sand Stones”. The bedrock of  Chicago is petrified beach sands, the bottom of an ancient shallow sea. We know it was shallow because above the sandy bottoms corals grew, and left their lime rich skeletons (above) hundreds of feet thick embedded in the sand stones. Over millions of years that sea had been replaced with a freshwater lake, surrounded by trees,  whose leaves fell into the waters, turning the waters acidic, and converting the top layer of the limestone into clay.And then the glaciers had come, and scrapped across the clay, piling it up in a terminal moraine, which prevented the glacial melt waters from finding their way to the Mississippi river, until humans arrived and stood upon their own two feet of clay and thought, "I can do this. I shall do this". And it was done.  It was not done without a paying a price, but there is a price required to doing anything. Even nothing.

- 30 -

PARCEL POST

I hate to tell you this, but, contrary to common knowledge, we are the ones living in a “simpler time”, not our parents or even our great-great grandparents. We have E-mail, and I-phones and Twitter and FaceBook and every other pseudonymous instantaneous electronic communication device which, with apologies to Socrates, proves that a life under punctuated is a life not worth being self-obsessed about.   Sharing every naval-infatuated idea has become de rigueur for the post millennial generation. There is no longer room for confusion or miss-interpretation, only for over-interpretation. And that makes the world much simpler.

For the first two million years of human evolution the only limit on communication was the sum of the speed of sound divided by the speed of walking, divided by the number, width and depth of rivers and oceans, and the height of mountains and width of deserts separating you from the person you wished to speak to. Those kinds of obstacles and those kinds of delays made the world a very complicated place. When the Battle of New Orleans was fought on 8 January, 1815, the War of 1812 had been over since the Treaty of Ghent had been signed on 24 December, 1814. That was three years you needed to refer to, when referring to just one battle, because of the delays in communications. How much more complicated can you get than that?

Mail was the first invention in long distance communications. Cyrus the Great of Persia invented pony express riders to carry “words” to bind his empire together.  According to the first great historian, Herodotus,  these civil service riders were so dedicated that “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” - which is not the official motto of the U.S. Postal Service. The U.S. Postal service has no official motto.

The next major technical advance in communication didn’t come along until 1792, when Claude Chappe invented a ‘semaphone’ network in France.  In his sales brochures he called it a “telegraph” (Greek for “far writing”).  It required a series of towers spaced 20 miles apart, upon each of which were erected two movable arms connected by a longer movable arm. A Chappe telegraph operator repeated the 174 different combinations of arm positions to relay up to two words a minute. Although this was such a dependable system that the Swedes kept theirs running until 1880, Chappe never saw it turn a profit, for two reasons. First he threw himself down a well in 1805. And second, it never turned a profit. Worse yet, for Chappe’s family, he copyrighted every thing about his brilliant invention except the name.

In 1837 a failed Calvinist minister, a proslavery Federalist, a pedantic anti-catholic and anti-Semitic conspiracy freak named Samuel Fineley Breese Morse co-opted the name for his “electronic telegraph” which he copyrighted from top to bottom, including the name. The first recorded “Mores Code” telegraphed was “A patient waiter is no loser”, in 1838. It was the dot and dash equivalent of “The quick brown fox”, etcetera.  The more famous message, “What hath God Wrought”, was telegraphed as a publicity stunt in 1844 and was suggested by Anne Ellsworth from my home town of Lafayette, Indiana. She was married at the time to Mr. Roswell, who gave his name to the New Mexico town where, in 1947, space aliens attempted to communicate with humans. Their message appears to have been the alien equivalent of “Mayday, mayday, mayday.” But, so far nobody has answered that message. 

The perfect expression of this more complicated communication is the traditional or “snail” mail service.  The complexities involved stagger the imagination. You write a letter, usually by hand. You take the letter to a collection point, a post office or mail box. A representative of the United States Postal Service (your stand in) then physically carries the actual letter to your friend’s home. There, your friend or business partner reads your words from the very paper you once held. It sounds fraught with opportunity for delays and errors, and it is.  And yet it has worked in America for two centuries. And what is most amazing is that we expected it to work, and complained when it didn't.

As of 2009 the 656,000 employees of the USPS (as it likes to refer to itself) processed 667 million pieces of mail every day (7,700 every second). They generated $75 billion in fees and charges, which left them with a $2.8 billion loss.  Still nobody (well, a few libertarian lunatics) are suggesting that snail mail delivery should cease. What a bunch of "Big Government" people these pro-mail people are.

The ultimate complication of this ultimate complicated communication system was/is Parcel Post, in which individuals were encouraged to send not only words from one end of the nation to another, but goods as well. The service was started in 1912 as an attempt to encourage economic development in rural America - a goal we have for some reason given up on.

The first flaw in the plan became visible when Postal authorities deemed it permissible to mail live chicks (in special containers) for 53 cents apiece. Now, farmers could order chicks from breeders and they would be delivered, cheaply and reliably, right to the farmer's front door. It was a great boon to the egg industry nationwide. But problems arose when some of the little cheeps in every shipment died in their boxes en route, and the customers sought reimbursement from the Post Office. The rules denied the customer’s appeals, but they appealed anyway. What was not noticed at the time, was a  flaw in the logic of “live” parcel post.

The path to Parcel Post ad nausea was first made visible on the morning of 19 February, 1914, when Mrs. John E. Pierstroff of Grangeville, Idaho, loaded her four year old daughter, May Pierstroff (above), into the mail car of a train bound for Lewiston, Idaho, 55 miles away. A few moments later Harry Morris, the conductor, stumbled upon the little girl sitting quietly atop a pile of mail bags. Morris checked the 56 cents postage on the tag tied to May’s coat, and since the mother was no where to be seen, allowed the girl to ride in the mail car to Lewiston. There, mail clerk Leonard Mochel delivered May to her destination, the home of Mrs. Vennigerholz,  the girl’s grandmother.

It was the beginning of a disturbing trend. Later that same year postal workers in Stillwell, Indiana accepted a parcel post box marked, “live infant”. They delivered the box to South Bend where the “package” was accepted and opened by the infant’s divorced father. Cost for the trip was 17 cents. The infant arrived safely. The next year a Pensacola, Florida probation officer shipped six year old Edna Neff to her father in Christiansburg, Virginia. The postage was 15 cents.

The public was unsettled by this mailing of children, since the percentage of child molesters among the population in 1914 was about the same as it is today. The negative publicity probably prevented another child mailing until 1919, when it appears a press agent for the Aluminum Company of America arraigned for the mailing of five year old Marmi Hood and four year old Evan Hedge to their respective fathers, who were locked down inside in the company’s plant in Alco, Tennessee, surrounded by union picket lines. After a two hour tearful visit, heavily documented by the company publicity department, the children were “mailed Special Delivery” back to the Alco, Tennessee Post Office, where their mothers were anxiously waiting for them. Postage for the stunt both ways was $2.26 cents. 

On 13 June, 1920 The US Post Office issued new rules, announcing that children would no longer be accepted as a parcel post. The coda to this regulation, and perhaps a comment on the continued poverty in rural America even during the “Roaring Twenties”, was the C.O.D. package mailed to an undertaker in Albany, New York. It arrived on 20 November, 1922, and carried no “return address”. In the box was the body of a child who seemed to have had died of natural causes. She was buried “...through the kindness of individuals” under the name of “Parcella Post.” How could you call such a world as that, "simpler" than ours? 

As you would expect from people living in such complicated times, the denizens of that ancient confusion were able to predict the problems and solutions faced by our current, “simpler", electronic age.  It turns out the philosophical antithesis to twitter was written in 1854, not long after the Mores telegraph hinted at the self obsessed simplicity which was to follow. 

It was written by that old fogey, Henry David Thoreau. “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys”, wrote Henry David, “which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end…We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” And, what with a recent  Texas Governor advocating the re-secession of Texas from the union of states, it would appear that our modern politicians are leading the way by getting simpler and simpler all the time. 

- 30 -