Under Siege! (21 page)
Authors: Andrea Warren
Officially only a dozen civilians had been killed and about fifty injured in the siege, but in the next few years many more died, some of them from lung problems related to the dampness in the caves, or exposure to the caustic powder in the shells that had exploded around them for forty-seven days. When Mark Twain interviewed survivors a few years later, one of them said about his friends, “Hunger and misery and sickness and fright and sorrow, and I don’t know what all, got so loaded into them that none of them were ever rightly their old selves after the siege. They all died but three of us within a couple of years.”
In the weeks and months following the siege, Vicksburg trudged a slow road to recovery. Townspeople cleaned up the debris and filled in the caves or boarded them up. They repaired their homes and businesses. After the war, faced with high property taxes, many lost their homes when they
could not pay them. Some homes were eventually torn down because of neglect, and the city never recovered its pre-war glory.
F
RED
G
RANT ATTENDED
a private school in New Jersey the year following the siege. During one of his breaks he went to visit his father, then stationed in Virginia, where the war was still being fought. Dressed in his gray and black school uniform, he was duck hunting in a small boat on the James River when he passed a Union gunboat. It fired on him and ordered him to surrender. He was brought aboard, and, according to his mother, “had some trouble in convincing his captors that he was not an enemy though he wore the gray, but the son of their General Grant.”
Lucy McRae also returned to school, but in Vicksburg at the all-girls academy she had previously attended. Vicksburg became a busy Union port and Yankee soldiers were everywhere, including Sky Parlor Hill, where off-duty soldiers liked to watch the barges, steamboats, and ironclads coming and going on the river.
Lucy watched, too, but from the safety of the upper porch of her home. Her brother John had survived the siege of Vicksburg. It was not until many months later, when he finally returned to them, that she and her family knew that her oldest brother, Allen, was also safe. He had been stationed a thousand miles away, assigned to help protect Jefferson Davis. Lucy wrote that Allen “was the last man who stood guard at President Davis’ tent, and when discharged by him, was given a letter, a horse and a $20 gold piece. My brother rode from Virginia on that horse, carrying the gold piece in the bottom of his boot.”
Shortly after the siege ended, the Lords decided to leave Vicksburg. They could have gone to St. Louis to stay with Dr. Lord’s brother, a prominent judge. Indeed, General Grant, who knew the judge, offered Dr. Lord written permission to cross through Federal lines. But the Reverend was still committed to the Southern cause. He asked instead for passage by
riverboat deeper into the South so he could continue his work as a Confederate army chaplain. Willie reported that General Grant agreed, for he “admired courageous persistence in the fulfillment of duty.”
The Lords dug up the family silver they had buried in the churchyard before the start of the siege and converted the rest of their belongings into Confederate money (which soon became worthless). Willie wrote of their emotional departure from Vicksburg, “As we stepped aboard the boat which was to bear us on toward the unknown experiences that awaited us during the death struggles of the Confederacy, a group of our loving friends and my father’s devoted parishioners waved us a sad farewell … and we became … refugees adrift upon the hopeless current of a losing Cause.”
W
HEN THE CIVIL
W
AR
officially ended in April 1865, much of the South lay in ruins. In describing the desolation of towns burned and
plantations deserted, a woman spoke of having no future and no hope. Southerners, she said, were exiles in their own land. Returning soldiers found their homes destroyed and their families displaced. Some soldiers were emotionally traumatized by the horrors they’d witnessed and would never be the same. Many more were suffering from disease or injuries—in Mississippi alone in the year following the war, twenty percent of the state budget went to the purchase of artificial arms and legs for veterans.
By the end of the war, Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, had been largely destroyed.
Most Southern boys and men who had signed up to fight weren’t trying to defend slavery. They’d grown up in a culture that believed blacks to be inferior, but only ten percent of them came from slave-owning families. Instead, they marched off to war because they supported states’ rights, or because they were determined to defend their homeland. Some went because they were loyal to the South, others because they would be accused of being cowardly if they didn’t. They became soldiers because they were drafted or needed a steady paycheck or wanted the adventure.
None of them could have known what they were getting into. When it was over, almost all would have agreed with the Vicksburg resident who declared, “I never want to live through another war, never, never.”
Left: Young Southern recruits in Virginia, before the war started.
Right: Seasoned Union soldiers at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863.
AFTERWORDPostscripts
The Lord family
left Vicksburg for Mobile, Alabama, and then moved to Charleston, South Carolina. They fled Charleston when General Sherman and his army arrived. After the war they returned to Vicksburg and lived there a number of years before moving to New York, where they were originally from. Dr. Lord led a congregation in Cooperstown. Willie is buried in a local cemetery near his parents. Unfortunately, while one photo of Dr. Lord exists and is in this book, there are no known photos of Willie and the entire Lord family.
Lucy McRae
continued to live in Vicksburg. When she married, she moved to Lewisburg, West Virginia, and mothered one daughter, also named Lucy. She died in 1930 and is buried in Lewisburg.
The McRaes’ country home at Bolton’s Depot, where Lucy and her family stayed before the siege started, was in the direct path of Union troops and was destroyed by them. But Lucy’s wartime home still stands in Vicksburg today, and one can imagine her as a child on the upper porch, looking out at the river.
Rice and Mary Ann,
the McRaes’ two house slaves, gained their freedom. There are no records of what became of either of them after they left the McRae family. Some freed slaves moved to the North to look for work. Others went west to become homesteaders or even moved to other countries. Some blacks joined the military and served out West in the campaigns against Native Americans. But like whites, most blacks stayed and tried to rebuild their lives. Some continued to work for the families they had served—but for pay.
Frederick Grant
attended West Point and spent much of his career in the military, where he rose to the rank of general. He served as his father’s secretary while Grant was president, was later the ambassador to Austria-Hungary, and for two years was police commissioner of New York City. In his memoirs, Grant wrote of Fred at Vicksburg, “My son accompanied me throughout the campaign and siege, and caused no anxiety either to me or to his mother, who was at home. He looked out for himself and was in every battle of the campaign. His age … enabled him to take in all he saw, and to retain a recollection of it that would not be possible in more mature years.”
Ulysses S. Grant
became a national hero when Vicksburg fell. He assumed command of all Union forces, and it was he who accepted Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, ending the war. He was president of the United States from 1868 to 1876.
William Tecumseh Sherman’s
wife, two daughters, and two sons joined him in Vicksburg during the first months of the occupation. His older son, Willy, was eleven. Like Fred Grant, he had his own Federal uniform and wanted to be a soldier. Months later the boy was dead from yellow fever. A grieving Sherman would write of this loss, “I could not leave my post, and sent for the family to come to me in that fatal climate and in that sickly period of the year, and behold the result!”
Sherman is most often remembered for his brutal march through the South and the capture of Atlanta, events that laid waste to the South and helped end the war. He succeeded Grant as commander of the army.
John Pemberton,
as he himself predicted, was blamed by many for the loss of Vicksburg. Once he surrendered the city, he accepted a reduction in rank and continued to serve in the war as a colonel. For a while he was on Robert E. Lee’s staff. Lee always addressed him as “General” and sought his opinion on important matters. When the war was over, Pemberton wanted a court of inquiry into his role at Vicksburg but was never given one. He and Johnston continued pointing fingers of blame at each other for decades.
Joe Johnston
retained his command in the Confederacy, in spite of his refusal to come to Vicksburg’s aid. He was often reviled for his recurring pattern of refusing to fight. He and Sherman became friends after the war, and Johnston served as an honorary pallbearer at Sherman’s funeral.
Jefferson Davis,
president of the Confederate States, was held responsible for the war and imprisoned in solitary confinement for two and a half years. He lived to be eighty and published a two-volume history of the Civil War written from a Southern perspective. It became a bestseller in the South. After his death, his wife lived in New York City and became friends with another widow, Julia Grant. When Mrs. Davis died, Fred Grant arranged for a United States Army band to play Southern songs and accompany her casket to the train station. She was taken to Richmond, Virginia, and buried next to her husband.
Old Abe,
the American bald eagle who was the mascot for the 8th Wisconsin Infantry, was at Vicksburg during the entire campaign. After the war he was named an honorary citizen of Wisconsin and gave his name to the 101st Airborne Division, United States Army, known as the Screaming Eagles. He lived out his life in a special room in the Wisconsin state capitol. The top of the Wisconsin monument at the Vicksburg National Military Park features a six-foot statute of Old Abe.
Orion Howe,
the fourteen-year-old Union drummer boy from Illinois who bravely ran through deadly fire to get more ammunition for his regiment, recovered from his serious wound. He was later awarded the Medal
of Honor for his service at Vicksburg—one of the youngest soldiers ever to receive it.
Mary Loughborough’s
husband survived prison, and the family settled in Little Rock, Arkansas. After the war, Mary published her journal, titling it
My Cave Life in Vicksburg.
It was popular with Northern readers. She later founded a women’s magazine called
Southern Ladies’ Journal.
Her husband died shortly after their fourth child was born. Mary’s health was adversely affected by her time living in a cave during the siege, and she died in 1887 at age fifty.
Emma Balfour
also died in 1887. She had already outlived her husband by a decade. She never left Vicksburg. In her will she remembered her favorite house slave, Margaret Ann, whose wedding she had hosted in her home.
Vicksburg
is now a city of 26,000 residents, both black and white. Several elegant homes that survived the siege are either bed and breakfast inns or are open for tours. In addition to Lucy’s home, visitors can see Christ Episcopal Church, where Dr. Lord preached daily during the siege. But the rectory next to the church, where the Lord family lived, was torn down because of extensive damage. The courthouse is now the Old Courthouse Museum and is considered one of the best Confederate museums in the South. It has many exhibits on the siege, and hanging in a place of honor is an oil painting of General Pemberton.
Congress kept the South under military rule for more than a decade following the war. Federal troops were present in Vicksburg a full thirteen years—longer than the United States occupation of Germany after World War II.
For eighty-four years following Vicksburg’s surrender, proud citizens resisted any organized celebration of the Fourth of July. Only in 1947, when General Dwight D. Eisenhower of World War II fame came to visit, did the city put on a celebration worthy of the great American war hero. Since then, while they have not forgotten their history and readily share it with visitors, Vicksburg residents have celebrated Independence Day with the rest of the country.
Sky Parlor Hill
ceased to exist in the years following the war when it was graded down to make way for new construction.
Vicksburg National Military Park
was created by an act of Congress in 1899. It is the final resting place for 17,000 Union soldiers. Of that number, 13,000 are in unmarked graves since Civil War soldiers did not carry identifying information like the dog tags that today’s soldiers wear. There are no Confederate graves in the park; since the Rebels were not considered United States citizens when they died, by law they could not be buried on federal property. Even without them, the park is one of the largest Civil War cemeteries in the country.
Visitors to the park can see miles of reconstructed trenches, a Union tunnel, and a collection of cannon and other weapons. When Civil War reenactors are present, they help visitors imagine what the siege was like.
On display is the Union ironclad gunboat
Cairo,
which was sunk by the Confederates in December 1862 and later salvaged. Also of interest are the 1,248 monuments erected by both Union and Confederate troops who served at Vicksburg. These monuments honor soldiers from twenty-eight states who sent troops to fight at Vicksburg (there were thirty-four states at the time). Each is unique and each is made of the state’s native stone.
Illinois had the most soldiers at Vicksburg—over 36,000—and has the largest monument. It has forty-seven steps, one for each day of the siege. Missouri has the only monument dedicated to soldiers on both sides, commemorating its native sons who fought against each other at Vicksburg.