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286

PEMBERTON SHUT UP IN VICKSBURG.

[1863.

river, some were drowned, and seventeen hundred and fifty were made prisoners. Eighteen guns were captured here. The National loss was two hundred and seventy-nine.

Sherman now came up with his corps, and Grant ordered the building of three bridges. One was a floating or raft bridge, one was made by felling trees on both sides of the stream and letting them fall so that their boughs would interlace over the channel, the trunks not being cut entirely through, and so hanging to the stumps. Planks laid crosswise on these trees made a good roadway. The third bridge was made by using cotton bales for pontoons. Sherman's troops made a fourth bridge farther up the stream; and that night he and Grant sat on a log and watched the long procession of blue-coated men with gleaming muskets marching across the swaying structure by the light of pitch-pine torches. All the bridges were finished by morning, and that day, the 18th, the entire army was west of the river.

Pemberton marched straight into Vicksburg, which had a long line of defences on the land side as well as on the water front, and shut himself up there. Grant, following closely, invested the place on the 19th. Sherman, holding the right of the line, was at Haines's Bluff, occupying the very ground beneath which his men had suffered defeat some months before. Here, on the Yazoo, Grant established a new base for supplies. McPherson's corps was next to Sherman's on the left, and McClernand's next, reaching to the river below

1863.1

AN UNSUCCESSFUL ASSAULT.

287

the city. Sharp skirmishing went on while the armies were getting into position, and an assault in the afternoon of the 19th gained the National troops some advantage in the advancement of the line to better ground. Grant's army had been living for three weeks on five days' rations, with what they could pick up in the country they passed through, which was not a little, and his first care was to construct roads in the rear of his line, so that supplies could be brought up from the Yazoo rapidly and regularly, He had now about thirty thousand men, the line of defences before him was eight miles long, and he expected an attack from Johnston in the rear. At ten o'clock on the 22d, therefore, he ordered a grand assault, hoping to carry the works by storm. But though the men at several points reached the breastworks and planted their battle-flags on them, it was found impossible to take them. McClernand falsely reported that he had carried two forts at his end of the line, and asked for reënforcements, which were sent to him, and a renewal of the assault was made to help him. This caused additional loss of life to no purpose, and shortly afterward that general was relieved of his command, which was given to General E. O. C. Ord.

After this assault, which had cost him nearly twenty-five hundred men, Grant settled down to a siege of Vicksburg by regular approaches. The work went on day by day, with the usual incidents of a siege. There was mining and counter-mining, and two large mines were exploded under angles

288

INCIDENTS OF THE SIEGE.

[1863.

of the Confederate works, but without any practical result. The great guns were booming night and day, throwing thousands of shells into the city, and more than one citizen picked up and threw into a heap hundreds of pounds of the iron fragments that fell into his yard. Caves were dug in the banks where the streets had been cut through the clayey hills, and in these the people found refuge from the shells. A newspaper was issued regularly even to the last day of the siege, but it was printed on the back of wall-paper. Provisions of course became scarce, and mule-meat was eaten. Somebody printed a humorous bill of fare, which consisted entirely of mule-meat in the various forms of soup, roast, stew, etc. All the while the besiegers were digging away, bringing their trenches closer to the defences, till the soldiers of the hostile lines bandied jests across the narrow intervening space. At the end of forty-seven days the works arrived at the point where a grand assault must be the next thing, and at the same time famine threatened and the National holiday was at hand. After some negotiation General Pemberton unconditionally surrendered the city and his army of thirty-one thousand six hundred men on the 4th of July, 1863, one day after Lee's defeat at Gettysburg.

Port Hudson, which Banks with twelve thousand men and Farragut with his fleet had besieged for weeks, was surrendered with its garrison of six thousand men five days after the fall of Vicksburg. The entire Confederate loss in Mississippi, from

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PEMBERTON'S SURRENDER.

289

the time Grant entered the State at Bruinsburg to the surrender, was about fifty thousand; Grant's was about nine thousand. But the great triumph was in the opening of the Mississippi River, which cut the Confederacy completely in two.

By Grant's orders there was no cheering, no firing of salutes, no expression of exultation at the surrender; because the triumph was over our own countrymen, and the object of it all was to establish a permanent Union.

In his correspondence with Pemberton, while demanding an unconditional surrender, Grant had written : "Men who have shown so much endurance and courage as those now in Vicksburg will always challenge the respect of an adversary, and I can assure you will be treated with all the respect due to prisoners of war. I do not favor the proposition of appointing commissioners to arrange the terms of capitulation, because I have no terms other than those indicated above." soon as the surrender was effected, the famished Confederate army was liberally supplied with food, Grant's men taking it out of their own haversacks. All the prisoners at Vicksburg and Port Hudson were immediately paroled and furnished with transportation and supplies, under the supposition that they would go to their homes and remain there till properly exchanged.

As

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE DRAFT RIOTS.

WHEN Lee's second attempt at invasion had ended at Gettysburg even more disastrously than his first, and he returned to Virginia at the head of hardly more than half of the army with which he had set out, and on the next day Vicksburg fell, the Mississippi was opened, and Pemberton's entire army stacked their muskets and became prisoners, the war should have ended; for the question on which the appeal to arms had been made was practically decided. Four great slave States- Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri-had never really joined the Confederacy, though some of them were represented in its Congress; and the territory that it actually held was steadily diminishing. The great blockade was daily growing more effective, the largest city in the South had been held by National troops for fifteen months, and the Federal authority was maintained somewhere in every State, with the sole exception of Alabama. The delusion that Southern soldiers would make a better army, man for man, than Northern, had long since been dispelled. The nation had suffered from incompetent commanders; but time and experience had weeded them out, and the really able ones were now coming to the front. The taboo

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