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. The Vicksburg city defenses were elaborate and extensive.
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. The daily ration was a healthy ¼
pound of bacon, ½ pound of beef, and 5/8 quart of corn or pea meal.
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, as Vicksburg was reputed to be,
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 including 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.
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 the 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. 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, while struggling to hold onto normality. 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 1st
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 would follow.
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