A Thousand Words a Battle: Vicksburg

Siege of Vicksburg
May 18 –July 4, 1863

Following the victories at Champion Hill and Big Black River, Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee surrounded Vicksburg on May 18. Grant attacked on May 19 and 22, but Vicksburg held. However, Confederate general John C. Pemberton failed to escape with his Confederate army. In spite of the failed assaults, everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the city fell.

William Lovelace Foster, a Baptist preacher serving in the 35th Mississippi Infantry, noted the deprivations of the siege. Among them was a hospital under fire, where a woman came each day to nurse an unknown wounded Louisiana officer.

She attended him to the hospital & for several days did not leave him day nor night. Then she made arrangements to stay in town at night & return early every morning. No matter how severe the shelling was, she came as regular as the rising of the sun, always bringing some good nourishment for her friend. The wounded man improved under this kind treatment. Often have I noticed this brave woman make her visits at the peril of her life. She would go when the shells were falling all around—when the roads to town was literally torn up by them—when even brave men would shrink from the danger. Thus week after week, with untiring diligence would she nurse & feed this young man. Now her cheek becomes pale from constant labor & her strength evidently begins to fail.[1]

While the siege was hardly pleasant for the Union army, they were well provisioned. Among those bringing supplies was Sarah “Annie” Wittenmyer of the Iowa State Sanitary Commission and later first president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She exposed herself to fire to help the wounded.

At one point I went down under the guns of the fort at one of the most exposed places, with a carriage-load of supplies for the little fort hospital under the bluff, just behind the heavy guns. I found when I reached there that the position was so dangerous that it would be madness, so the officers said, to try to get out of there till I could go under the cover of darkness. But the afternoon was well spent in making lemonade and ministering to the men who had been stricken down with fever and hardships.

The ceaseless roar of artillery, and scream of shot and shell; the sharp whiz and whirr of small shot just over our heads; the June sun blazing down upon us with torrid heat, and no shelter for the sick but the white canvas tents, perched on the sides of the bluffs in places excavated for them, the bank cutting off the circulation of air, —were almost unbearable. How the poor fever-racked heads and fainting hearts ached amid the ceaseless din and the dust and heat of these little camp hospitals! One poor fellow, with parched lips and cheeks red with the fever that was burning through every vein, said, “I got a little sleep a while ago, and I dreamed that I was at the old spring ; but just as I was taking a good cool drink I waked up.”

I partially met his cravings for a drink from the well at the old home by giving him generous draughts of lemonade, but when night came on I had to leave him. Poor boy, I never knew whether he got back to the old spring and home or not.[2]

By July 1863, conditions in Vicksburg were worsening. Pemberton opted to surrender on July 4 and get better terms. Foster became worried that it was over, and wrote, “How glad would I have been to have heard once more the booming of the canon—A sound once so annoying, yet now how welcome—For it would have told the glad news that our devoted city had not yet been surrendered. But a painful silence, foreboding evil, reigns over the doomed city.”[3] The Union entered the city and ran up the American flag, Wittenmyer wrote:

The Confederate flag had floated over the Court House tower through all these months of conflict, but the Stars and Stripes was now to take its place. Soon a little glinting of our loved flag came into view. But what could be the matter .? Surely a tangle in the ropes could be adjusted in a few minutes. All stood in breathless anxiety. Such a delay at such a time was startling, and every moment seemed an hour to those who were watching from a distance. At last with rapid sweep the Stars and Stripes was run up to the top of the staff, and a heaven-sent breeze unfurled it to our delighted eyes.

What a burst of enthusiasm greeted it. We waved our handkerchiefs, while men who had faced the cannon’s mouth for the flag sobbed in their wild joy, and flung their caps into the air.  But the Confederate soldiers, as far as we could see, stood with folded arms, silent, motionless. And yet with all our gladness that the guns had ceased to belch forth their murderous fire, there was a deep, fathomless undertone of sorrow over the cruel, bloody work of red-handed war, that the glad acclaim of triumph and victory could not drown.[4]

Foster, meanwhile, wandered down to the river and thought:

And, thou great Father of Waters, upon whose lovely banks I have stood as sentinel in the silent watches of the night., [look]ing with covert eyes across thy dim & dark waters for the approach of the enemies boats, No more shall I guard thy rolling waves nor walk up & down thy friendly banks. Thy proud waves, unguarded by Southerners, shall now roll on to the mighty ocean, upon no friendly errand for us, but bearing upon thy placid bosom the power & wrath of our deadly foes.[5]

— Sean Michael Chick

Part of a series.

[1] William Lovelace Foster, Vicksburg: Southern City Under Siege,  Ed Kenneth Trist Urquhart (New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1980), 48-49.

[2] Annie Wittenmyer, Under the Guns: Woman’s Reminiscences of the Civil War. (Boston: E.B. Stillings, 1895), 125-126.

[3] Foster, 57, 59.

[4] Wittenmyer, 150-151.

[5] Foster, 61.