Under Siege! Read online

  This photograph, taken in 1862, shows five generations of one Southern black family.

  Apart from these few exceptions, slavery was a fact of life in the agricultural South, and children like Lucy who grew up with slavery usually did not question it. Most slaves lived on plantations and worked in the fields. Those lucky enough to be house servants enjoyed a higher status. They worked as cooks, maids, butlers, and drivers, and as mammies who cared for their white owners’ children. Lucy’s family owned Rice and also owned a slave named Mary Ann. Rice and Mary Ann had separate shacks behind the McRae home that were nicer than most slave cabins on plantations, and they had better food and clothing. But they were still slaves, and as their owners, Lucy’s parents could punish them or sell them if they wished.

  Lucy knew how much Rice, especially, wanted his freedom. For him, the arrival of the Yankees could signal a whole new life.

  IN JUNE 1862, six weeks after their first attack, the Yankees returned. This time they came not only with more boats but also with more powerful guns. As the fleet steamed into view, hundreds of people hurried to Sky Parlor Hill. They watched in shock and horror as the ironclads opened fire.

  Lucy’s mother had wanted to leave Vicksburg when the gunboats had appeared the first time, but Mr. McRae had firmly refused. When the gunboats came back in June, Lucy was at home when she heard the first explosion. As an adult she recalled, “One bright afternoon men, women and children could be seen seeking the hilltops with spyglasses, as from the heights could be seen a black object slowly approaching along the river. Suddenly a shell came rattling over as if to say, ‘Here I am!’

  “My mother was much alarmed, but still faithful to womanly curiosity, stood on the upper porch of our house to see the gunboat, if possible. Another shell, and still another, and the hills began to be deserted.

  “The gunboat, seeing that her shells were falling short, ventured a little closer, and sent a few shells into the town. People sought their homes, but sleep visited few, as the shelling continued until late that night.

  “The next morning the shelling began very early, and the women and children were to be seen running by every road that led out of the town.”

  Lucy and her family stayed put. For two long days the Union fleet hurled shells at Vicksburg. Loud, thunderous booms, one after another, rattled windows and numbed eardrums. Shells knocked holes through the walls of houses, damaged the Methodist church, tore up sidewalks, and blasted craters in yards. Lucy’s home was not damaged, but she grieved with townspeople over the death of a woman well known in the community who was killed by a shell as she ran for safety.

  Finally, guns blazing, the Federal ships managed to fight their way past the Vicksburg batteries, but their crews suffered casualties, and what had been gained? Any ships that tried to do the same would face the same. The Federal commander felt Vicksburg could only be taken by attack from both land and river. As for the bombardment of the city, he felt it had served no purpose. The guns of Vicksburg were still in place.

  That had been six months ago. Now it was December, and as Lucy looked through her spyglass from Sky Parlor Hill, her warm coat buttoned to her chin, all was quiet below her. The Confederacy still controlled the river.

  These sailors onboard the USS Mendota, a steam-driven gunboat, saw action in the battle for Richmond. While fewer sailors than soldiers lost their lives in the war, naval service was demanding and full of peril. Most naval battles were fought within sight of land-either along the coast, in bays, or in Southern rivers like the Mississippi.

  Eggnog parties were popular in the South during the Christmas season.

  THE CHRISTMAS EVE BALL

  December 24, 1862

  Vicksburg dressed up for Christmas. The Yankees might not be far away, but this beloved holiday would go on as always. Garlands, wreaths, and holly decorated the classic black iron grillwork and stately white columns of the town’s most prominent homes. Just as they had for generations, families planned to celebrate the holiday by attending special church services, hosting eggnog parties, singing Christmas carols, decorating Christmas trees, and lighting the Yule log. Holiday dinners would include turkey, ham, oysters, plenty of side dishes, and gingerbread, custard pies, sponge cake, and plum pudding. Vicksburg gentlemen would still have their fine Southern cigars and Southern bourbon to finish off a splendid meal.

  Because of the blockade, society women could not order new gowns from Paris to wear to the annual Christmas Eve Ball, but in spite of this, everyone was in a festive mood. The Yankees didn’t seem like much of a threat at the moment. Their leader, General Ulysses Grant, who had defeated the Confederates at Shiloh, had set up a huge supply base at Holly Springs, Mississippi, near the Tennessee border, and no doubt thought he could attack Vicksburg from there. But in a daring raid just days earlier, the Rebels had destroyed the base, forcing Grant to retreat to Memphis.

  The ball was a wonderful way to celebrate this victory, and on Christmas Eve, the elite of the city bundled up against the cold and blustery weather and climbed into their carriages. They made their way along the steep streets to the stately mansion of Dr. and Mrs. William Balfour, where they were greeted by their hosts. The mansion’s ballroom was festooned with fragrant, fresh-cut greenery. The lavish refreshment table, lighted by massive candelabra, groaned under the weight of meats, cakes, pies, and other sweets. Guests were served punch from Mrs. Balfour’s elaborate silver punch bowl, and they sipped champagne and wine poured from exquisite cut-glass decanters.

  Amid hoop skirts and dashing military uniforms, as the orchestra played merrily, guests were swept up in music, laughter, and dancing. At least for this one evening, they could quite easily believe that there was no war.

  SOMEWHERE UPRIVER, 30,000 Union soldiers in regulation blue were packed onto eighty ships. Those on deck huddled together miserably, pelted by cold rain, as the ships navigated through the rough black waters of the Mississippi River. Any holiday celebration for these bluecoats existed only in their memories of home and family. On this Christmas Eve, they were part of an army with a mission: they were going to take Vicksburg.

  Their leader, General William Sherman, was following a plan he had hatched with General Grant. The Confederate commander of Vicksburg, General John Pemberton, had hurried his troops to northern Mississippi to pursue Grant. The plan was that while Grant engaged Pemberton, Sherman would take his troops downriver and quickly conquer Vicksburg, for without Pemberton and his army, the city had little defense.

  But after beginning their river journey to Vicksburg, Sherman had no way of knowing that the Rebels had destroyed the Union’s supply base at Holly Springs, as the telegraph wires had been cut. Grant had had to retreat to Memphis instead of fighting Pemberton. And now, Pemberton was on his way back to Vicksburg.

  The ironclads-ships covered with protective metal—were a new innovation at the time of the Civil War.

  On Christmas Eve, as dancers twirled merrily in the Balfours’ ballroom, Sherman’s flotilla was suddenly spotted by Confederates monitoring the river. They quickly sent a message through a private telegraph line to Phillip Hall, the telegraph operator on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River, directly across from Vicksburg. It read, “Great God, Phil, eighty-one gunboats and transports have passed here tonight.”

  Hall knew what he had to do. Even though it was a stormy night and the river was dangerous, he risked his life to row a tiny boat to the Vicksburg wharf. Soaked to the skin and out of breath, he ran past the saloons and sagging hotels along the waterfront, past the downtown shops and stores, and then up the hilly streets to where Vicksburg’s most privileged lived.

  Almost ready to collapse when he finally arrived at the Balfour home just after midnight, he ignored the surprised protests of the house slaves and burst into the ballroom. As he pushed his way through the happy throng of dancers, the music stopped and startled guests stared at the dripping wet man who was asking to speak to the officer in charge. Brigadier General Martin Lu
ther Smith, second in command to Pemberton, stepped forward to confer with him. Then Smith’s face grew pale. He shouted to the crowd, “The party is at an end. The enemy is coming down the river!”

  Amid the shrieks and cries of the guests, Smith advised people to flee the city. Every soldier of every rank was immediately put on alert and told to report for duty. The ball was over. It might be Christmas, but Vicksburg was at war.

  GENERAL PEMBERTON was halfway back to Vicksburg when he learned that Sherman was also headed there. To be sure he arrived before the enemy, Pemberton raced his troops back to defend the city. He was just in time. Sherman’s army had moved more slowly than anticipated and on Christmas Eve was still twenty miles north of Vicksburg. Over the next several days, the Union general eased his 30,000 men southward by boat, hoping to hear from Grant and trying to figure out a good place to put his troops ashore. Instead of solid land, he found mostly bogs and swamps. Finally he selected Chickasaw Bayou, three miles north of Vicksburg, where the land looked fairly stable. He still had not heard from Grant, and now he knew that Pemberton and his troops were back, for as soon as the Union bluecoats landed, soldiers in gray started lining up opposite them on the bayou’s waterlogged ground.

  When the fighting started on the morning of December 28, Sherman quickly saw that even though he had twice as many men as Pemberton, the Rebels had the advantage. They knew how to fight in swampy terrain. When Union troops tried to move forward, they lost their footing, sinking into the marsh. Unused to such dense vegetation, they could not see what was ahead of them or around them. The spooky sounds of swamp birds and animals they didn’t recognize kept them on edge. Trees were everywhere, growing right through the water and making it nearly impossible for the men to load and aim their guns. As a result, much of the fighting was brutal hand-to-hand combat.

  Union troops depicted here struggled to get through unfamiliar swamps near Vicksburg.

  To their surprise, Union soldiers discovered that a sharpshooter giving them trouble was a black man. A reporter for the New York Herald who was with the Union troops wrote: “He mounts a breastwork regardless of all danger, and getting sight of a Federal soldier, draws up his musket at arm’s length and fires, never failing of hitting his mark … It is certain that Negroes are fighting here, though probably only as sharpshooters.” This was unsettling to Northerners who assumed that all blacks supported the Union.

  At the end of the first day, the Yankees had suffered almost 2,000 casualties, while the Rebels had lost only 187 men. That night both sides waited out the darkness. Fearful of revealing their positions, neither could light fires. The fog was thick. A cold, hard rain fell, and Yankees and Rebels alike suffered. Sherman assessed the situation. The river was rising and, with the threat of flooding, he knew his troops were in danger of drowning. If he tried another assault on Rebel lines, his men were sure to take heavy losses. With regret, he ordered his troops to withdraw.

  He did not try to excuse what happened, writing later of his defeat at Chickasaw Bayou, “I reached Vicksburg at the time appointed, landed, assaulted, and failed.” He said that the city was “the strongest place I ever saw … No place on earth is favored by nature with natural defenses as is Vicksburg.”

  The city’s newspapers gave ecstatic accounts of the Rebel victory. Lucy joined the hoopla and celebration. The Rebs had won! They had won! Surely now the Yankees would go home.

  Instead, townspeople soon realized that the Union army planned to spend the winter in Mississippi. Everyone knew that eventually they would try another assault.

  It was more important than ever to keep an eye on the river. On Sky Parlor Hill, bundled against the cold, Lucy did her part.

  THE GENERAL’S BOY GOES TO WAR

  Spring 1863

  At age twelve, Frederick Grant knew that he was lucky. Most military children rarely saw their fathers in wartime, but Ulysses Grant was a devoted family man and he wanted his wife and four children with him as often as possible—even if that brought them directly into the theater of war.

  Some wives wanted nothing to do with the inferior housing and food that were part of military life—especially during a war—but Julia Grant didn’t mind. “Whenever she could, Mother got as near to Father as possible,” Fred recalled as an adult, noting that she willingly endured camp life and that she felt the experience was good for her children. During the summer of 1861, when Fred was ten, he had left the family home in Ohio to spend three months with his father in Illinois, where Grant was helping to train Union troops for war. Fred had begged to go along, and his father had consented. “I, being the eldest, was treated by him always as if I were already a man, and was permitted to do many things that would have been considered too dangerous for the other children,” Fred said.

  His mother supported Fred going. “I considered it a pleasant summer outing for both of them,” Julia Grant wrote in her memoir. But when the war began in earnest and Grant received orders sending him to Missouri, he refused to take his son. “We may have some fighting to do, and he is too young to have the exposure of camp life,” Grant wrote to Julia. She immediately wrote back, “Do not send him home; Alexander was no older when he accompanied Philip. Do keep him with you.” Her letter, with its reference to the young Alexander the Great and his father, arrived too late, for Fred was already on his way back.

  Fred is standing to the left of his mother in this formal portrait of the Grant family. The other children include, from left, Nellie, Jesse, and Ulysses, Jr.

  Now, a year and a half later in this spring of 1863, Fred was with his father once again. He had been thrilled when his parents allowed him to leave school and join the army at his father’s headquarters on the Mississippi River fifty miles north of Vicksburg. This time Fred was determined not to be sent home. His goal was to be there when the guns of Vicksburg were finally silenced and the Mississippi River was totally in Union hands. At the moment of surrender, Fred would be at his father’s side, sharing sweet victory.

  When he arrived onboard the ship that served as Grant’s headquarters, his father greeted him warmly. He showed Fred the cabin they would share belowdecks. Grant’s officers fussed over the boy. One gave him a personal tour of one of the ironclads—the most powerful fighting machines in the Union navy, with metal hulls that offered protection against gunfire. Another officer presented him with a pony. He even received a regulation army uniform that had been specially made for him. Fred was a handsome boy with his father’s strong spirit. Dressed smartly in his uniform and sitting proudly on his pony, he accompanied the general on daily troop inspections.

  Since his infancy Fred had been around soldiers, and he enjoyed their company. He quickly settled into life on the ship. Instead of dining with the officers, he ate most of his meals with the enlisted men. Many nights he left his father’s cabin belowdecks to sleep up top where it was cool, soldiers stretched out all around him.

  As happy as Fred was to be with the army, he was aware of the pressure on his father to finish the job he had come to do. Grant’s inability to take control of the river was a topic of both speculation and derision throughout the North. Grant and his army of 33,000 men had joined Sherman and his nearly 30,000 men in January 1863, a few weeks after Sherman’s defeat at Chickasaw Bayou. In the months since, Grant had sought a way to get his troops close enough to Vicksburg to attack. But each time he tried, either the Confederates or the Mississippi River sabotaged his plan. One plan had been to dig a canal that would create a new channel in the river, allowing ships to bypass Vicksburg and its guns. The men dug and dug, but the force of the river always destroyed their efforts, and finally Grant gave up.

  He also tried to find an alternate water route to Vicksburg through the bayous and swamps that threaded off the river north of the city, but Union boats became trapped by trees that grew up through the murky, alligator-infested water. If a boat struck a tree—and it was impossible not to—lizards, raccoons, cockroaches, rats, and poisonous snakes fell out of the br
anches, sometimes landing on the boat’s deck. Nervous sailors had to stand by with brooms to hastily brush them away. Even a few wildcats landed on boat decks and had to be shot. Confederate snipers onshore were yet another problem, for they dogged the boats, forcing sailors to stay belowdecks whenever possible.

  When Fred arrived in Mississippi in early April, the weather was already hot. He saw for himself the toll the constant rain and slogging around in mud and muggy bayous had taken on the men. Young soldiers from states like Pennsylvania, Indiana, and New York were falling victim to pneumonia, malaria, and smallpox. Food was poor, the arrival of mail from home and paychecks from the government was undependable, and tempers grew thin.

  The USS Cairo, sunk by a Confederate mine, had thirteen heavy cannon and was covered with twelve inches of metal.

  The navy ironclads had their share of trouble, too. Confederates sank the Union Cairo-the first ship in naval history to be the victim of an electrically detonated mine. After that, Union boats were more careful to sweep for mines before passing along the river.