A Youth's History of the Great Civil War
Van Evrie, Horton & Co., ©1866
Revised edition, ©2006 www.ronie-mooney-encs.us
The views expressed in the following document do not necessarily represent the views of www.ronie-mooney-encs.us. This document, originally published in 1866, has been provided to the public based solely on its potential value as a historical document.
CHAPTER XXXVI, THE SIEGE OF VICKSBURG
WE must now return to the West. The cry of opening the Mississippi River had been second only to the demand of taking Richmond. The Confederates, after the loss of their fortifications further up the river, had fortified the city of Vicksburg in the most substantial manner. The town is built upon high bluffs, and is well adapted for defence. General William. T. Sherman had attacked it in December, 1862, but had been so badly repulsed that he was glad to abandon the job.
As this General Sherman loomed up very largely afterwards, it may be proper to say that he was an officer of the old army in the Mexican war, and when this one broke out, was President of the Military Academy of Louisiana. He came North, however, and joined Mr. Lincoln's army, and has made a name which will be forever associated with cruelty and barbarism.
After he was repulsed at Vicksburg, he took some vessels of Admiral Porter's fleet, and steaming up the Arkansas River, took a Confederate fort at Arkansas Post, and many guns and prisoners.
After General Sherman's failure to take Vicksburg, General Grant was placed in command of the forces for its reduction. To take it in front the forces for its reduction. To take it in front was impossible. So General Grant spent three months or more in making experiments to flank it. His first plan was to cut a canal on the west side of the river, to cut it off, but the waters came near drowning his own men, without harming the Confederates in the least. Then the abolition papers came out with the terrible announcement that General Grant was going to cut a new channel for the Mississippi, from Lake Providence to the Gulf of Mexico! But General Grant also failed in this. He then tried to cut a canal from the Yazoo River to a point south of Vicksburg. But in all these efforts to change the face of nature General Grant was unsuccessful.
However, during this time Admiral Porter kept up the excitement by the operations of his fleet. Waiting for a night dark enough to suit his purposes, he took five iron-clads, the Benton, Pittsburg, Carondelet, Lafayette, and Louisville, and several transports, and resolved to run by the Confederate batteries. The whole fleet was so managed that it made not so much noise as a ripple of a single oar. Thus noiselessly, breathlessly, they dropped along down the river, until, when directly opposite the city, bomb! went the signal gun on the heights of Vicksburg, and in an instant all the batteries opened upon them. The scene was terrific. The blackness of the heavens was illuminated with the lurid flames vomited from the mouths of the cannon in the numerous batteries along the shore.
But the instant Admiral Porter saw that he was discovered, he gave command to put on the steam and run the gauntlet-a feat which was accomplished with the loss of the transport Forest Queen, and with more or less damage to the whole fleet.
After the guns of Vicksburg were passed, there were no other Confederate works on the Mississippi, until they reached Grand Gulf, twenty-five miles south of Vicksburg. There were no Confederate soldiers stationed in the space between Vicksburg and Grand Gulf at the time of Porter's running past Vicksburg, and yet, for two weeks, he amused himself by sailing up and down the river, and throwing shells into the houses which were occupied almost exclusively by women and children. This was not only a needless cruelty, but it was a violation of the laws of civilized warfare. It was simply the murder of women and children.
Grand Gulf was an important point, and Admiral Porter made up his mind to take it, if possible. One morning he gave an early order to move upon it, but was answered by the captains, that their men had not yet had breakfast. To which Porter replied-"O never mind about breakfast; we will take the place in half an hour, and breakfast afterwards."
The Benton led the attack, then followed the Carondelet, the Pittsburg, the Louisville, the Tuscumbia, and Lafayette. The line of battle was so formed as to pour a cross fire upon the Confederate works. For five hours the battle raged without a moment's cessation, and without producing the least visible impression upon the Confederate batteries. But the Tuscumbia was destroyed, the Benton terribly riddled, and indeed the whole fleet wore a most ragged and ruined aspect. The thing that Porter promised should only be half an hour's job before breakfast, proved to be not only an all day's job, but even an impossible task.
The passage of Admiral Porter's fleet of gunboats down the river in safety now emboldened General Grant to transfer his armies south of Vicksburg, and march to the attack of Vicksburg in the rear. On the 30th of April, his army, having gone down on the west side of the river, crossed and landed at Port Gibson, and commenced its march to Vicksburg. The Confederates were overpowered, and forced to fall back, and were defeated in several severe engagements. One Federal column took possession of Jackson, the capital of the State of Mississippi, and burned and pillaged the town in a most shameful manner. They gutted the stores, and destroyed what they could not carry off. Burned the Roman Catholic Church, the principal hotel, and many other buildings.
Seeing the danger in which Vicksburg now stood, General Jos. E. Johnston tried to organize an army for its relief, but he was not successful. General Pemberton, the commander of the Confederate forces in Vicksburg, was now compelled to fall back to his defences, and await General Grant's siege. In the mean time, Grant drew his lines tighter and tighter around the fated city. He made an effort to carry it by storm, but was beaten back with terrible loss.
The condition of the city, however, was becoming every day more fearful. Food was becoming scarcer and scarcer. Women and children were compelled to live in caves to escape being killed by the bombshells that were continually bursting about them. This could not last always. General Johnston could not raise an army strong enough to attack General Grant in the rear, so that there was but one thing for General Pemberton to do. He must surrender. It was a terrible ordeal, but there was no escape. So on the 3d of July, General Pemberton proposed an armistice, and on the following day, surrendered his army as prisoners of war, to be allowed to go to their homes, but not to serve again, unless regularly exchanged. The officers were allowed to retain their side-arms and their servants.
This was a terrible blow to the Confederates. They lost over 20,000 prisoners, guns, military supplies, &c besides the control of the Mississippi River. General Pemberton was greatly blamed for his alleged bad management.
There was, indeed, one place further South, Port Hudson, under General Frank Gardner, which still held out. In March, as I have stated, Admiral Farragut had attacked it, but was repulsed with the loss of the Mississippi, one of the largest vessels in the Federal Navy. General Banks, who now commanded at New Orleans in place of General Butler, had also attacked it twice; but as large portions of his troops were negroes, the Confederates had easy work in whipping them. The abolitionists tried to make the world believe that the negro troops fought bravely at Port Hudson, but it is not so. They were forced into a bad position,where they were mowed down mercilessly.
Of course, after the fall of Vicksburg,General Gardner saw that all attempt to hold out longer would be fruitless. So he surrendered to General Banks.
The Mississippi River was now open from its source to its mouth. Its loss to the Confederates was mainly swing to the fact that it cut them off from Texas, whence they received many supplies, and opened a large extent of country to the vandalism and plundering of the abolitionists.
These outrages upon private property are the great stigma upon the Northern army,or rather upon the Northern generals; for soldiers are not expected to understand the rules of war. A lady, writing of her treatment by Grant's army, says: "They loaded themselves with our clothing, broke my dishes, stole my knives and forks, broke open my trunks, closets, and, finally, burned our ginhouse and press, with one hundred and twenty-five bales of cotton, six hundred bushels of corn, six stacks of fodder, a fine spinning machine, and five hundred dollars worth of thread, &c ,&c" Such recitals really make the heart sick, and yet this is only one out of a thousand such instances.
I will give one more; for this is a case in which the parties were personally known to the writer.
A few miles back of Vicksburg lived a rich planter, whose accomplished wife was a daughter of one of the wealthiest and most respectable citizens of the State of Connecticut. This family had remained quiet upon the plantation during the war, and although naturally and justly sympathizing with the South in its wrongs, had taken no active part in the strife. The planter was a man of great wealth, and was very happy in the society of a refined and happy family.
A few days after the fall of Vicksburg, one of Grant's regiments, while on a plundering tour, came across this peaceful and unoffending planter and his family. The soldiers at once entered the house and commenced to steal every article of value which they could lay their hands upon. They tore the lady's watch from her bosom, and the rings from her fingers. There was not a work-box, nor a bureau drawer in the house that was not rifled. Every article of wardrobe belonging to the lady and her little girls was stolen. Even the shoes and stockings were taken from her own and her children's feet. Family miniatures were taken, for their gold settings. Not so much as a silver teaspoon escaped the vigilance of these abolition thieves.
Every article of food, even to the last pound of pork in the house, was also stolen. In vain the lady entreated the wretches to leave her some food for her children. The only answer she received was the most brutal oaths, with threats that they would "bayonet the brats unless she held her tongue." After they had swept the house of every article of value, they went to the barn and stole several horses, and all the cows; and there being several hogs, which, as they could not drive them off, they stuck their bayonets through, and left them dead in the yard!
They drove off all the negroes, except two old females who were too feeble to travel. So unwilling were some of these negroes to leave the plantation that they had to tie them together, and threaten to bayonet them, and thus forced them away under kicks and blows. A short time after the pillage of this plantation the estimable lady died of a fever brought on by the fright and hardship to which she had been exposed; and in a few days more her youngest child, an infant, followed her to the grave. Her surviving daughters are now with their grand-parents in Connecticut. They will grow up to hate the name of an abolitionist, as they will that of a fiend. So, in hundreds of thousands of broken hearts all over the land, the name of abolitionism will be coupled with thief, robber and murderer as long as time shall last.
The driving off negroes from the plantations was no uncommon occurrence throughout the South. The negro is naturally very much attached to his home, and when the abolition officers came among them and told them they were free to leave their masters and they did not do so, they often became very angry with them, and compelled them to enjoy what they called "the blessings of freedom." These "blessings," it has been proved, consisted mainly of "disease and death."
The Hon. Mr.Doolittle of Wisconsin, an abolition Senator in Congress, has stated that good judges estimate that one million of negroes have perished since the war began, and appalled by those facts, Mr.Doolittle, like an honorable and humane man, is disposed to pause and reflect before he endorses further inhumanity towards these innocent and suffering people.
Return to History of the Great Civil War
RELATED ARTICLES
General Braxton Bragg - Confederate Civil War General
A biographical sketch of General Braxton Bragg and his participation in the American Civil War.
The Battle of Vicksburg
Ulysses S. Grant made several attempts to take Vicksburg. Following failures in the first attempts, the Battle of Chickasaw Bluffs, the Yazoo Pass ...
David Dixon Porter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Publications
Admiral Porter wrote a number of books:. Memoir of Commodore David Porter, of the United States Navy (published in 1875, about his father) ...
David Farragut - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Admiral Farragut's last active service was in command of the European Squadron, ... Farragut Parkway in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Admiral Farragut ...
General John PembertonYou Found It!
Extensive resources on General John Pemberton, the Confederate General.
