VICKSBURG Chapter Seven "A"

 

Ulysses Grant(above)  had tried to avoid the Mississippi River. In November of 1862 he made his first attempt to capture Vicksburg high and dry 200 miles inland from the Big Muddy. The Tennessee and the Cumberland rivers had solid ground on either bank, offering highways to out flank the rebels and support an advance all the way to Oxford, Mississippi. But then had come the raid at Holly Springs, forcing Grant to retreat 80 miles. And then in Memphis, Tennessee, the rival McClernand appeared. To control him Grant was forced to return to the river and solve the Gordian Knot of its meanders.

The first thousand miles of the Upper Mississippi River above Cairo, Illinois was the barely mature child of glaciers, still reasonably straight and clear in its intent. But the thousand miles of the Lower Mississippi, especially the delta,  was the Old Man River, "meandering through sub-tropical swamps and forests..." at the center of a 100 mile wide flood plain, scattered with the detritus of forgotten inundations and abandoned alluvial choices. About midway in that thousand mile corkscrews, where high bluffs touched the river's banks on both shores, was Vicksburg, Mississippi.

As if tying a shoestring, 460 miles above New Orleans, at the Eagle Loop, the river twisted north, coming to within 30 yards of cutting its own "Terrapin Neck". 

The Big Muddy came out of this constriction flowing south again, the faster currents carving a graceful 6 mile long arch of Millikin's bend on the western shore. Five miles south the river widened slightly, dropping sediments close to the Louisiana bank, forming the mile long Paw Paw Island, named after small fruit trees which grew in abundance there.  The river then made a slight right westward bend, opposite Duckport landing. Just south of Duckport, on the eastern shore, was the mouth of the Yazoo River. Then at the left hand Tucsumbia Bend the Mississippi gathered its strength for a tight 180 degree bend as it...

...squeezed between the encroaching 125 foot high limestone and shale bluffs of the start of the Walnut Hills on the east and the western 80 foot high pinnacle on the Desotto peninsula.

Staring down at the apex of that hairpin corner from 80 feet above the eastern river bank, where any Yankee  boats heading northward or south would have to slow to make the turn, was the first of Vicksburg's immediate defenses, the Water Battery - three 32 pound rifled cannons, a single smooth bore 32 pound cannon and one 10 inch cast iron Colombiad cannon. The latter could throw a 128 pound shell 4,000 yards, or a solid shot cannon ball 5,600 yards, making it particularly useful against even ironclad warships at this narrow range.

Behind the Water Battery and 25 feet higher, was Fort Hill. It offered an even more imposing view of the bend, and provided plunging fire from three 10 inch and one 8 inch Columbiads, a 32 pound rifled cannon, and two breach loading English built rifled cannons firing 12 pound shells, a 3 inch Armstrong and a 2.7 inch Whitworth. Rifled cannon were more accurate over a longer range, but the grooved barrels also slowed re-loading. 

Running for half a mile south from Fort Hill, along the Yazoo City Road, were 7 more river front batteries. By the winter of 1863 the city could boast a total of 37 heavy guns in 13 batteries, plus 13 mobile field artillery guns.  

At the northern border of the town itself, The Glass Bayou cut a 45 degree angled ravine through the yellow packed Loess soil, crimping Vicksburg's most infamous neighborhood...

... the cramped crowded six square blocks of rundown boarding houses, bordellos, disreputable bars and gambling parlors, called the Kangaroo district (above).  It had almost completely burned down in the 1830's, but its economic productivity defied morality and it was quickly rebuilt.

Along the waterfront were the long row of docks and commercial warehouses, divided 7 blocks south of the Glass Bayou by the Southern Railroad line's yard and depot. Vicksburg in 1860 was home to 4,500 souls in some 500 structures, drawn initially by the riverboat trade. It is difficult, 200 years later, to appreciate the value of steamboats to the Confederacy. 

 A wagon drawn by a 2 horse team might pull a ton over the appalling roads of Mississippi at a speed of perhaps 2 miles an hour or less, for maybe 20 miles on a good day. The latest technology, the steam locomotive, could pull up to 150 tons at 10 to 25 miles an hour, depending on the quality of the iron rails. But a side or stern paddle wheel steamboat could carry up to 1,700 tons of cotton or wheat, can goods or cattle at 4 miles an hour against the river's current. 

The combination of these two steam technologies, rail and ship, was the reason for Vicksburg's value to the defenders of slavery.

There were 2 iron foundries in Vicksburg, making and repairing boilers and machinery, boat construction ways, lumber mills, a canning factory and a molasses refinery. Moving inland from the business districts were the residential neighborhoods, with each block away from the river climbing another step up the bluffs. 

At the peak, 8 blocks and 80 feet above the river, were St. Paul's Catholic Church and the Warren County Courthouse (above). This "Gibraltar of the Confederacy", the most heavily defended town in the rebel south, had cast most of its votes in the 1860 Presidential election for the pro-slavery unionist Democrat, 39 year old Kentuckian John Cabell Breckinridge. 

But whatever its resident's ambivalence toward the war, after 2 years of bloodshed they would suffer or triumph as rebels.

Three blocks south of the mouth of The Glass Bayou was an artillery battery near the Vicksburg Whig newspaper office - a 10 inch Columbiad and three 32 pound rifles. Near the railroad depot was a single 10 inch Columbiad (above). 

And where the rail line turned inland was a third city battery, called, obviously enough, the Railroad Battery - a single 18 pound gun nicknamed "Whistling Dick" (above). 

A quarter mile beyond the southern edge of the city, 2 miles south of Fort Hill, atop another high bluff and next to a charity hospital built for river sailors was the Marine Hospital Battery - Three smooth bore cannon throwing 42 pound shots, two 32 pound cannon and two 32 pound rifles.

Due west of the Vicksburg docks, across the 900 foot wide, 140 foot deep Mississippi River, was the ferry port on De Soto Point, (above)  where the Louisiana and Texas railroad met the river from the west. The current midstream here was just one and one-half miles an hour.

The current was so slow because although the river still had 400 miles to go before it reached the Gulf of Mexico, it had just 47 feet of altitude to lose - one foot fall for every 9 1/2 miles south. This was the Old Man River, changing his mind as often as the weather. And although it was true that , "He don't say nothin'", it was also true, "He must know somethin'", and he would share that knowledge for a heavy price.

You may remember that in mid-May of 1862 Admiral Farragut's deep draft blue water fleet had steamed up the river to Vicksburg, and demanded it's surrender. But the Confederates had scoffed at the navy's big guns, confident the Yankees dare not stay for fear the ebbing river would strand their ships on its snags and sandbars. But Farragut was a sailor and he knew about tides and river fluctuations. And he had dispatched soldiers under a regular army general to simply force the river to submit to the Federal Government.

The Old Man River's new student was General Thomas R. Williams, a 39 year old Michigander - his father had been the first American Mayor of Detroit, At the end of June 1862, under direct orders from President Abraham Lincoln,   Williams set 3,000 soldiers and half again as many freed slaves to digging a canal across the base of the Desoto Peninsula. 

It seemed logical. The river wanted to get to the Gulf by the quickest route possible. A canal would bypass that hairpin turn, isolate Vicksburg, make irrelevant its great guns, and cut the River's path to the Gulf by a couple of miles. Once the breach was open, the current would carve the rest. But nothing to do with the Mississippi was ever that easy,.

William's men began by cutting a 3 mile long corridor through the trees, then digging out the stumps and pulling out the stubborn roots, and then finally, moving the heavy wet soil aside a spade full at a time. All of this was done under clouds of mosquitoes, surrounded by poisonous snakes and snapping turtles, who did not like being disturbed, and all endeavored in the stifling heat and humidity of a Mississippi July. One or two men seeking relief in the water, were even attacked by alligators. But the great killers were malaria, yellow fever, and diphtheria. Men also died of sun stroke and exhaustion. And there was always diarrhea - which killed far more men during the war than bullets. The work crews were decimated.

After four weeks of back breaking soul draining effort they had created a ditch, 13 feet deep and 18 feet wide, clear across the base of the peninsula. Only earthen plugs at both ends needed to be breached to open the canal. Except...Old Man River was now running 15 feet lower than it was a month earlier. The would-be canal was nothing more than a ditch to nowhere. Before August , General Williams and what was left of his men would be retreating down the river along with Farragut's ships. That month General Williams and more of his men would die defending the Federal outpost at Baton Rouge, the failed canal their only monument at Vicksburg.

Four months later, General Ulysses Grant faced with the same problem as General Williams, and not surprisingly initially chose the same solution. He set his men to work to deepen the canal William's men had started. But the truth was the Mississippi could not be defeated so easily.

Thirty years earlier, an entrepreneur had attempted to cut off the Eagle Loop with a canal across the Terrapin Neck. Heat, disease and bankruptcy had defeated that effort as well. 

And forty years after the war, Scientific American Magazine would explain why success might have been worse than defeat, at least as far as canal shortcuts were concerned, pointing out that "...the cutoffs that have occurred from time to time...have been defeated by the creation of rapids, which form an obstacle to navigation greater than the former loops." If Williams had been successful, or worse, if Grant had, he might have blocked the river for a generation.

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Vicksburg, Chapter Seven

 

It was not the horrors of battle that transformed John Alexander Ritter (above) from a naive patriotic volunteer into a cynical veteran, but a place - Young's Point, Louisiana, 10 miles up river from Vicksburg.  The 44 year old Republican doctor was one of 32,000 members of Grant's Army of Tennessee who arrived at Mr. Young's abandoned plantation on 20 January, 1863.  John had left a growing medical practice, a thousand acres of land, a wife and 7 children, to enlist as a private soldier to put down the rebellion. Only later had he been promoted to captain and appointed regimental Surgeon of the 49th Indiana Volunteers. 

Two weeks after his arrival at Young's Point -  on Monday, 9 February -  Dr. Ritter wrote to his eldest son that "We have quite a pleasant camp but....The river is very high and still raising." Because of the damp conditions, all of the Federals made camp atop the large levee Mr. Young had built to defend his property -  his cotton and his human slaves -  from the ravages of the mighty Mississippi River.

Three cold, rainy days later Dr. Ritter wrote ominously, "We have considerable sickness in the regiment..."  Just a months later, an Ohio Democrat, a corporal in the same camp, complained, "It is alarming to see the deaths that occur daily."  He suggested, "Any man that would volunteer or go drafted now ought to be shot the very day he goes." As March of 1863 ended, a depressed Doctor Ritter wrote his wife, Margaret, "...It rained, it hailed...My tent blew down...I had a cold damp place to sleep that night .." These were, as Tom Paine said four score and a few odd years earlier, "The times that try men's souls". And not just the souls of Captains and Corporals. It was also a bad, really horrible time for Major Generals as well.

The bad times began on Wednesday, 3 December, 1862 when Confederate Major General Thomas Carmichael Hindman (above) and his 11,000 man Legion crossed the upper Arkansas River at Fort Smith, on the border with the Indian territory.

Hindman's Legion intended to make a lightening 100 mile forced march through a corner of the Boston Mountains, visa the 30 mile long Cove Creek canyon, in order to pick off an isolated Federal Division of 5,000 men near the village of Cane Hill. But then things went wrong.

First, the federal commander, Brigadier General James Gilpatrick Blunt, sensed what was coming and a second Federal division of 5,000 men under General Francis Herron was dispatched on a 110 mile forced march to his support. Second and worse, on the night of Thursday, 4 December, the clouds burst over the Ozarks and the usually placid Cove Creek (above) became a rampaging Amazon. During that Friday, 5 December, the drenched rebel Legion had to cross and re-cross the swollen Cove Creek 37 times. They finally escaped the mountains 24 hours later, late, soaked to the skin and exhausted.

Learning of the approaching Federal reinforcements, Hindman decided to defeat Herron's road weary command first. If his own men had been fresh, it might have worked, but they were drained and exhausted and wet, and after bypassing Blunt's 5,000 men, the best HIndeman could do was to block Herron's division at the little village of Prairie Grove, Arkansas. 

On Sunday, 7 December, 1862, the numerically superior rebels drove the Yankees back. But just when it looked like a southern victory, Blunt's men threw themselves on the rebel flank, and the day ended with 1,400 Confederate casualties to 1,200 Federal dead, wounded and missing. Major General Hindman had no choice but to retreat back to Fort Smith. having accomplished nothing of value.  His mood was not improved two weeks later when his namesake fort on the lower Arkansas River was captured and destroyed by a Federal Army under Major General McClernand.  Such was the winter of 1862-63 for the rebels in the Trans-Mississippi. But the Yankee soldiers had it little better.

Back in July of 1862 the Desoto Canal (above) had been abandoned because of low water. Now in January of 1863, after almost a month of rains, Federal Colonel of Engineer Josiah Bissell, thought he could turn the flooding Mississippi to his advantage. 

Major General Ulysses Grant explained the plan to his boss, "Old Brains" 58 year old General-in-Chief Henry Wagner Halleck (above) , " I propose running a canal", wrote Grant, "...(which) will debauch below the bluffs on the opposite side of the river..". And a second work crew would weaken the shore of the peninsula, and force the river to redirect the currents to widen the cut-through, thus bypassing Vicksburg entirely

Colonel Bissell divided the work into 160 foot sections and 1,000 man work crews, who returned each night to their camp, atop the levee at Young's Point. McClernand's three divisions, and slaves drafted from the abandoned plantations around Desoto, would widen the old canal by 9 feet and deepen it to 10 feet. 

At the same time, 500 feet down stream from the proposed canal's entrance, Sherman's 3 divisions and drafted (and paid) slave labor were digging a second channel into the peninsula, throwing the excavated earth into the stream to direct the river back toward the canal, where it was hoped the current would turn the Desoto high ground into an island.

On 22 January, 52 year old Major General John Alexander McClernand,, informed his boss, General Grant, "The water of the Mississippi River...is in the upper end of the canal and must run through in a few hours..."Two days later he added, "The waters...are now running through the canal a foot deep." Two days after that he informed Grant "The water flows three feet deep in the canal, but gives no evidence of diverting the channel of the river...."

He was complaining about the lack of success of 43 year old Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose men were supposed to be diverting the Mississippi.  Sherman restricted his complaints to his private letters home, where he bemoaned “Rain, rain — water above, below and all around." The locals had their own word for the viscus mud of the bottom land that weighed down the shovels of the Union soldiers. They called it "gumbo"  And Grant's infantry spent 12 hours a day knee deep in the gumbo, struggling with spades to move the mud a few feet. Each night they would form up and march the 2 to 3 miles upstream to their miserable camps atop the Young's Point Levee. While they slept the rain would wash most of their work back into the canal.

The entire command was exhausted, wet and discouraged. During that winter and spring, they were losing 19 men a day to disease - pneumonia , malaria and dysentery. At least two men were also reported killed by alligators, and an unknown number by poisonous snakes. Since the only ground dry enough dig graves in was the Young's Point levee , one soldier wrote home that “The troops were thus hemmed in by the burial-places of their comrades.”

The Sanitary Commission was appalled by the Young's Point levee camps, "For miles, the inside of the levee was sown with graves... In places the levee was broken or washed out by the waters, and the decaying dead were partially disinterred.” The observer added that The River was so far over its banks, that it was, "...shore-less in some places, and stretched its dull, turbid waste of waters as far as the eye could reach...”.

Remembered one Illinois soldier, "The swamps became lakes, and camps and roads were sloughs of black mire. If one put his foot squarely down anywhere...it brought with it a pound or two of unctuous earth..."  On the high ground, at Memphis, that February, the river was recorded 34 and a half feet above flood stage.  At Vicksburg it reached 51 feet, and further south at Natchez, 42 feet. 

But the soldiers were not digging the canal on high ground. Captain Lewis Harris, of Richmond, Indiana, told his wife that month, "Our Company F has lost six men...four died from sickness. Five are sick in the hospital and six in the quarters..." He also mentioned desertions and at least one attempted suicide in his company.  

The ultimate insult to morale was that many of the soldiers were experienced enough to know the eddy just below the canal's entrance meant the current was not going to shift to the canal. And the irregular bombardment of the work crews from the Vicksburg batteries, just 900 yards across the river, meant the rebels were still on guard,. Grant's men became convinced their sacrifice was useless. And Grant quietly and quickly agreed the canal would never work,  And yet he kept the men digging. Some nameless enlisted sages composed a prayer to mock themselves as they climbed inside their wet bunks atop the Young's Point levee every night. "Now I lay me down to sleep, in mud that’s many fathoms deep. If I’m not here when you awake, just hunt me up with an oyster rake."

Why did Grant keep the men digging? Perhaps because every day, Halleck informed Grant, President Lincoln asked how the work was progressing.  On 9 February, with the river still rising 2.5 inches every 24 hours, Engineer Captain Fredrick Prime explained to General Grant, "A dam has been erected at each point where the canal crosses the levee." But, because of a layer of clay a few feet below the surface, "The water seeps in so that...the new entrance cannot be pushed deeper than about 4 feet."  So, even as the river rose, and the flooding got worse, the water actually in the canal was not deep enough for gun boats or loaded transports.  Finally, on Friday, 6 March, 1863,  Grant telegraphed the War Department and Lincoln that the canal was almost complete. The very next day, the river burst through the coffer dam and flooded the works, but only with 4 feet of muddy water  All work had to be halted while the damn was rebuilt . The entire process was so discouraging that a lesser man then Grant or Lincoln, might have given up.

In far off Virginia, on Tuesday, 20 January, 1863 - the same day that Major General Grant issued orders for work to begin on the Desoto Canal - 39 year old Major General Ambrose Everett Burnside (above) ordered a new offensive he believed would revive the Army of the Potomac and his own career.  He would feint toward Fredericksburg. At the same time his engineers would establish a bridgehead upstream. Artillery would then be rushed across the Rappahannock River, and dug in on the road to Richmond.  Then Lee would have to throw his Army of Northern Virginia against an impregnable defense, just as in December Burnside had thrown his Army of the Potomac against Marye's Heights outside of Fredericksburg. But then, as in Arkansas and Louisiana, it began to rain.

It began raining on northern Virginia that Tuesday night, and continued the next morning while Federal engineers pushed 5 pontoon bridges across the river. Lee's army did not move an inch, and that evening in looked as if Burnside had stolen a march on his enemy. Delighted, he ordered up his artillery and infantry. But on Wednesday, it kept raining. The columns of guns and wagons churned the mud into deepening, grasping paste. The march first slowed and then, by Thursday, with it still raining, regiments struggled all day to traverse a mile or two.

That Thursday, Burnside issued the dumbest order in the sorry sad bloody history of the Army of the Potomac. In a desperate attempt to improve moral, he issued the full whiskey ration to his wet, miserable soldiers. Suddenly the roads were not only clogged with wagons and soldiers stuck in the mud, but drunken soldiers, and wagons driven by drunken teamsters stuck in a rapidly freezing mud. Enough fights broke out that the army stopped moving entirely. Burnside realized his secret move had been discovered when rebels solders across the river erected signs that read, "Burnside's Army Stuck in the Mud!"

The only good thing that came from "The Mud March" was that the incompetent Major General Burnside was relieved. before he completely destroyed the Army of the Potomac. And many critics, both inside and outside the government, wondered if the same fate would have to be meted out to Major General Grant (below), to save his poor Army of Tennessee, which was still no closer to capturing Vicksburg.

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