You come down the river the other side of the island,then turn and come up to the town; that is, in high water:
in low water you can't come up, but must land some distance below it.
Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg'stremendous war experiences; earthworks, trees crippled bythe cannon balls, cave-refuges in the clay precipices, etc.
The caves did good service during the six weeks'
bombardment of the city--May 8 to July 4, 1863. They wereused by the non-combatants--mainly by the women and children;not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion.
They were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicularclay bank, then branched Y shape, within the hill.
Life in Vicksburg, during the six weeks was perhaps--but wait;here are some materials out of which to reproduce it:--Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and threethousand non-combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world--walled solidly in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiersand batteries; hence, no buying and selling with the outside;no passing to and fro; no God-speeding a parting guest,no welcoming a coming one; no printed acres of world-wide newsto be read at breakfast, mornings--a tedious dull absence ofsuch matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see steamboatssmoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing towardthe town--for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed;no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no strugglingover bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen--all quiet there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty,corn ten dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound,rum a hundred dollars a gallon; other things in proportion:
consequently, no roar and racket of drays and carriages tearingalong the streets; nothing for them to do, among that handfulof non-combatants of exhausted means; at three o'clock inthe morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured trampof a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out ofhearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute:
all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery,the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streamingfrom soaring bomb-shells, and a rain of iron fragmentsdescends upon the city; descends upon the empty streets:
streets which are not empty a moment later, but mottled with dimfigures of frantic women and children scurrying from home and bedtoward the cave dungeons--encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery,who shout 'Rats, to your holes!' and laugh.
The cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the ironrain pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops;silence follows, but the streets are still empty; the silence continues;by-and-bye a head projects from a cave here and there and yonder,and reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence still continuing,bodies follow heads, and jaded, half smothered creatures groupthemselves about, stretch their cramped limbs, draw in deep draughtsof the grateful fresh air, gossip with the neighbors from the next cave;maybe straggle off home presently, or take a lounge through the town,if the stillness continues; and will scurry to the holes again,by-and-bye, when the war-tempest breaks forth once more.
There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers--merely the population of a village--would they not cometo know each other, after a week or two, and familiarly;insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate experiences of onewould be of interest to all?
Those are the materials furnished by history. From them might not almostanybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg?
Could you, who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing itto the imagination of another non-participant than could a Vicksburgerwho did experience it? It seems impossible; and yet there are reasonswhy it might not really be. When one makes his first voyage in a ship,it is an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties;novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person's formerexperiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his imaginationand memory. By tongue or pen he can make a landsman live that strangeand stirring voyage over with him; make him see it all and feel it all.
But if he wait? If he make ten voyages in succession--what then?
Why, the thing has lost color, snap, surprise; and has become commonplace.
The man would have nothing to tell that would quicken a landsman's pulse.
Years ago, I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants--a man and his wife. Left to tell their story in their own way,those people told it without fire, almost without interest.
A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues eloquentfor ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore the noveltyall out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and into the ground;the matter became commonplace. After that, the possibility of theirever being startlingly interesting in their talks about it was gone.
What the man said was to this effect:--'It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week--to us, anyway.
We hadn't anything to do, and time hung heavy. Seven Sundays, and allof them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the night,by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron. At firstwe used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did afterwards.
The first time, I forgot the children, and Maria fetched them both along.
When she was all safe in the cave she fainted. Two or three weeks afterwards,when she was running for the holes, one morning, through a shell-shower, a bigshell burst near her, and covered her all over with dirt, and a piece ofthe iron carried away her game-bag of false hair from the back of her head.
Well, she stopped to get that game-bag before she shoved along again!
Was getting used to things already, you see. We all got so that we couldtell a good deal about shells; and after that we didn't always go undershelter if it was a light shower. Us men would loaf around and talk;and a man would say, 'There she goes!' and name the kind of shell it was fromthe sound of it, and go on talking--if there wasn't any danger from it.
If a shell was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood still;--uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn't safe to move. When it let go, we wenton talking again, if nobody hurt--maybe saying, 'That was a ripper!'
or some such commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe, we wouldsee a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead. In that case,every fellow just whipped out a sudden, 'See you again, gents!' and shoved.
Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading the streets, looking ascheerful as you please, and keeping an eye canted up watching the shells;and I've seen them stop still when they were uncertain about what ashell was going to do, and wait and make certain; and after that theysa'ntered along again, or lit out for shelter, according to the verdict.
Streets in some towns have a litter of pieces of paper, and odds and endsof one sort or another lying around. Ours hadn't; they had IRON litter.
Sometimes a man would gather up all the iron fragments and unburstedshells in his neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monumentin his front yard--a ton of it, sometimes. No glass left;glass couldn't stand such a bombardment; it was all shivered out.
Windows of the houses vacant--looked like eye-holes in a skull.
WHOLE panes were as scarce as news.
'We had church Sundays. Not many there, along at first; but by-and-byepretty good turnouts. I've seen service stop a minute, and everybodysit quiet--no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then--and all the moreso on account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead;and pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again.
Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerfulqueer combination--along at first. Coming out of church, one morning,we had an accident--the only one that happened around me on a Sunday.
I was just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn't seen fora while, and saying, 'drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment;we've got hold of a pint of prime wh--.' Whiskey, I was going to say,you know, but a shell interrupted. A chunk of it cut the man's arm off,and left it dangling in my hand. And do you know the thing that isgoing to stick the longest in my memory, and outlast everything else,little and big, I reckon, is the mean thought I had then? It was 'thewhiskey IS SAVED.' And yet, don't you know, it was kind of excusable;because it was as scarce as diamonds, and we had only just that little;never had another taste during the siege.
'Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and close.
Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it;no turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn't have madea candle burn in it. A child was born in one of those caves one night,Think of that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk.
'Twice we had sixteen people in our cave; and a number of times wehad a dozen. Pretty suffocating in there. We always had eight;eight belonged there. Hunger and misery and sickness and frightand sorrow, and I don't know what all, got so loaded into them thatnone of them were ever rightly their old selves after the siege.
They all died but three of us within a couple of years.
One night a shell burst in front of the hole and caved it in andstopped it up. It was lively times, for a while, digging out.
Some of us came near smothering. After that we made two openings--ought to have thought of it at first.
'Mule meat. No, we only got down to that the last day or two.
Of course it was good; anything is good when you are starving.
This man had kept a diary during--six weeks? No, only the first six days.
The first day, eight close pages; the second, five; the third, one--loosely written; the fourth, three or four lines; a line or two the fifthand sixth days; seventh day, diary abandoned; life in terrific Vicksburghaving now become commonplace and matter of course.
The war history of Vicksburg has more about it to interest the generalreader than that of any other of the river-towns. It is full of variety,full of incident, full of the picturesque. Vicksburg held out longerthan any other important river-town, and saw warfare in all its phases,both land and water--the siege, the mine, the assault, the repulse,the bombardment, sickness, captivity, famine.
The most beautiful of all the national cemeteries is here.
Over the great gateway is this inscription:--"HERE REST IN PEACE 16,600 WHO DIED FOR THEIRCOUNTRY IN THE YEARS 1861 TO 1865"The grounds are nobly situated; being very high and commanding a wideprospect of land and river. They are tastefully laid out in broad terraces,with winding roads and paths; and there is profuse adornment in the wayof semi-tropical shrubs and flowers,' and in one part is a piece of nativewild-wood, left just as it grew, and, therefore, perfect in its charm.
Everything about this cemetery suggests the hand of the national Government.
The Government's work is always conspicuous for excellence, solidity,thoroughness, neatness. The Government does its work well in the first place,and then takes care of it.
By winding-roads--which were often cut to so great a depth betweenperpendicular walls that they were mere roofless tunnels--we droveout a mile or two and visited the monument which stands upon the sceneof the surrender of Vicksburg to General Grant by General Pemberton.
Its metal will preserve it from the hackings and chippings whichso defaced its predecessor, which was of marble; but the brickfoundations are crumbling, and it will tumble down by-and-bye. Itoverlooks a picturesque region of wooded hills and ravines; and isnot unpicturesque itself, being well smothered in flowering weeds.
The battered remnant of the marble monument has been removed tothe National Cemetery.
On the road, a quarter of a mile townward, an aged colored man showed us,with pride, an unexploded bomb-shell which has lain in his yard since the dayit fell there during the siege.
'I was a-stannin' heah, an' de dog was a-stannin' heah; de doghe went for de shell, gwine to pick a fuss wid it; but I didn't;I says, "Jes' make you'seff at home heah; lay still whah you is,or bust up de place, jes' as you's a mind to, but I's got businessout in de woods, I has!"'
Vicksburg is a town of substantial business streets and pleasant residences;it commands the commerce of the Yazoo and Sunflower Rivers; is pushingrailways in several directions, through rich agricultural regions,and has a promising future of prosperity and importance.
Apparently, nearly all the river towns, big and little, have madeup their minds that they must look mainly to railroads for wealthand upbuilding, henceforth. They are acting upon this idea.
The signs are, that the next twenty years will bring about somenoteworthy changes in the Valley, in the direction of increasedpopulation and wealth, and in the intellectual advancementand the liberalizing of opinion which go naturally with these.
And yet, if one may judge by the past, the river towns will manage to findand use a chance, here and there, to cripple and retard their progress.
They kept themselves back in the days of steamboating supremacy,by a system of wharfage-dues so stupidly graded as to prohibitwhat may be called small RETAIL traffic in freights and passengers.
Boats were charged such heavy wharfage that they could not affordto land for one or two passengers or a light lot of freight.
Instead of encouraging the bringing of trade to their doors, the townsdiligently and effectively discouraged it. They could have had manyboats and low rates; but their policy rendered few boats and highrates compulsory. It was a policy which extended--and extends--from New Orleans to St. Paul.
We had a strong desire to make a trip up the Yazoo and the Sunflower--an interesting region at any time, but additionally interesting at this time,because up there the great inundation was still to be seen in force--but we were nearly sure to have to wait a day or more for a New Orleans boaton our return; so we were obliged to give up the project.
Here is a story which I picked up on board the boat that night.
I insert it in this place merely because it is a good story,not because it belongs here--for it doesn't. It was told by a passenger--a college professor--and was called to the surface in the courseof a general conversation which began with talk about horses,drifted into talk about astronomy, then into talk about the lynchingof the gamblers in Vicksburg half a century ago, then into talkabout dreams and superstitions; and ended, after midnight,in a dispute over free trade and protection.
Vicksburg During the Trouble
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