Under Siege! (17 page)

Thirty-five Union soldiers who had been coal miners before the war dug a forty-five-foot-long tunnel under Rebel entrenchments. The explosion of 2,200 pounds of gunpowder in the tunnel created a crater that gave Union forces access behind enemy lines.

I
NSIDE
V
ICKSBURG,
townspeople worried about the suffering of the soldiers in the trenches but could barely take care of themselves. Night and day shells fell, exploding into a thousand dangerous fragments. Because people stayed in the caves, there were few deaths, but Willie said that “all lived in a state of terror.”

A woman who was busy cooking when a shell exploded nearby grabbed a hot pot off her stove and ran through the streets to her cave, not even aware that she was still holding the pot. Lucy reported that “one lady standing in a cave door had her arm taken off” by a minié ball whizzing by. When the writer Mark Twain later interviewed Vicksburg residents about this time, one told him, “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 made a candle burn in it.”

A
N INCIDENT OCCURRED
on a narrow footpath up a steep hill from the Lord cave that revealed how slaves often regarded whites. According to Willie, a young black boy was guiding a white nun along the footpath from the hospital where she had assisted wounded soldiers. They met a Confederate corporal who saluted the Sister and stepped aside so she could pass, but, Willie wrote, “as she was about to do so a shell of the smaller kind, with a slowly burning fuse, fell in the pathway at his feet.” Realizing the danger, the soldier tumbled backward down the hill to safety. At that moment, “the black hero,” as Willie referred to the boy, grabbed the shell and pitched it away.

“‘Why did you not do that at once?’ asked the trembling Sister. ‘The moment you waited might have cost us all our lives.’”

The slave child carefully replied that he had “too much respect” for white folks to do a thing like that while the “gentleman” was standing there—meaning he didn’t dare reach in front of a white man to do what the white man should have done, for a slave could be whipped or sold for such an infraction.

A white soldier at Milliken’s Bend reported that the Union’s untested black recruits fought like tigers.

But slavery was coming to an end. Unless they lived on isolated plantations, blacks in the South during the Civil War knew about Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued in January 1863, giving freedom to slaves in states under Union control. Grant had 10,000 to 12,000 newly liberated slaves with his army at Vicksburg.

Blacks must have been jubilant to hear that former slaves who had joined the Union army had fought bravely in a battle against Confederate troops on June 7 at Milliken’s Bend, not far from Vicksburg. Though the black regiment had suffered heavy casualties, the men had held their own and beaten back their attackers. This event had changed the minds of many who felt blacks did not have the ability to fight. Frederick Douglass, the famous black abolitionist, had pleaded, “Give them a chance. I don’t say that they will fight better than other men. All I say is, give them a chance!” When they got the chance and proved their mettle, a Southern senator commented, “If slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”

Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana wrote, “The bravery of the blacks in the battle at Milliken’s Bend completely revolutionized the sentiment of the military.” Indeed, starting that summer of 1863, blacks wer
increasingly recruited into the Union army, with nearly 200,000 eventually fighting for the North. Toward the end of the war, the South, which had some black soldiers all along, would recruit them as well.

Black soldiers, who quickly proved their worth and willingness to fight, were commanded by white officers, many of whom died in combat alongside their men.

But for now, in Vicksburg, many blacks were with their white masters in the caves, simply hoping to survive the siege. As much as he wanted his freedom, Rice remained loyal to Lucy’s family. Their fate was his fate. At night, when Lucy covered her ears and tried to bury her head in her pillow so she couldn’t hear the exploding shells, Rice was there, too.

After reading the newspaper printed on the back of wallpaper, some residents hung the patterned side on the walls of their caves as decoration.

O
NCE A PROUD
and beautiful community of grand homes and splendid gardens, Vicksburg was almost in ruins. Anyone pausing long enough to study the buildings around them saw that every glass pane in every house and building had shattered. Many windows had been boarded up.

Townspeople held on. Both Willie and Lucy read the one-sheet newspaper that was issued daily, though it had to be printed on the back of wallpaper once all the regular paper had been used up. It always offered assurance that “Old Joe” was going to come to the rescue and that together he and General Pemberton would defeat General Grant.

B
Y THE END OF
J
UNE
, dwindling supplies of food and water grew critical. The city’s wells were almost dry, and drinking water was rationed to only one cup of water per day per person. Confederate soldiers dipped water out of mud holes and sometimes resorted to drinking dirty river water. A few residents had their own wells, and some of them sold water—Margaret Lord had to buy it for her family, paying for it by the bucket. Others with wells freely gave away the water until it was gone. It was the same with food: some who had it sold it on the black market for
high prices, while others gave it to whoever needed it—proving, as always, that hard times could bring out the best, as well as the worst, in people.

After all the chickens, cows, horses, and mules had been used for food, dogs and cats and other family pets began to disappear. Soon there were no birds or squirrels to be seen. Mary Loughborough finally consented to her little daughter’s pet bird being made into soup for the child, who was ill and needed nourishment.

Lucy said of her family’s situation, “Our provisions were becoming scarce, and the Louisiana soldiers were eating rats as a delicacy… Mother would not eat mule meat, but we children ate some, and it tasted right good, having been cooked nicely. Wheat bread was a rarity, and sweet-potato coffee was relished by the adults.” Indeed, there were several variations on “Confederate coffee,” including concoctions made of corn, okra, or even rye flour, if it could be had.