left to the enlisted men of both sides, we would soon go home.”
EMPTY STOMACHS Late June 1836
Late June 1863
I n the North, pressure mounted on Grant to finish the job. Vicksburg had been under siege for five long weeks—since May 18—and still had not surrendered. Trench warfare could go on endlessly. Grant and his army were needed to fight in other places, especially now, when Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s most powerful general, was invading the North.
Grant pushed harder. He had his men dig a tunnel under the Rebel lines and pack it with explosives. The blast that followed created a huge crater that allowed the Federals to rush through the tunnel, climb up and out of the crater, and emerge behind enemy lines. They thought they would quickly overpower their stunned opponents. Instead, the Rebels had heard the digging, guessed what the Yanks were up to—and were waiting for them. Bloody hand-to-hand combat ensued, until the Federals had to retreat. They lost 200 men and the Confederates lost 100.
Grant didn’t give up on tunnel warfare. He put his men to work digging more tunnels. He continued around-the-clock shelling of the Confederate lines and the city. Something would have to make these Southerners give up! Maybe it would finally be starvation. They couldn’t hold out forever—and it sure didn’t look like Joe Johnston planned to do anything about it.
Thirty-five Union soldiers who had been coal miners before the war dug a forty-five-foot-long tunnel under Rebel entrenchments. The explosion of 2,200 pounds of gunpowder in the tunnel created a crater that gave Union forces access behind enemy lines.
I NSIDE V ICKSBURG, townspeople worried about the suffering of the soldiers in the trenches but could barely take care of themselves. Night and day shells fell, exploding into a thousand dangerous fragments. Because people stayed in the caves, there were few deaths, but Willie said that “all lived in a state of terror.”
A woman who was busy cooking when a shell exploded nearby grabbed a hot pot off her stove and ran through the streets to her cave, not even aware that she was still holding the pot. Lucy reported that “one lady standing in a cave door had her arm taken off” by a minié ball whizzing by. When the writer Mark Twain later interviewed Vicksburg residents about this time, one told him, “Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no turning room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn’t have made a candle burn in it.”
A N INCIDENT OCCURRED on a narrow footpath up a steep hill from the Lord cave that revealed how slaves often regarded whites. According to Willie, a young black boy was guiding a white nun along the footpath from the hospital where she had assisted wounded soldiers. They met a Confederate corporal who saluted the Sister and stepped aside so she could pass, but, Willie wrote, “as she was about to do so a shell of the smaller kind, with a slowly burning fuse, fell in the pathway at his feet.” Realizing the danger, the soldier tumbled backward down the hill to safety. At that moment, “the black hero,” as Willie referred to the boy, grabbed the shell and pitched it away.
“‘Why did you not do that at once?’ asked the trembling Sister. ‘The moment you waited might have cost us all our lives.’”
The slave child carefully replied that he had “too much respect” for white folks to do a thing like that while the “gentleman” was standing there—meaning he didn’t dare reach in front of a white man to do what the white man should have done, for a slave could be whipped or sold for such an infraction.
A white soldier at Milliken’s Bend reported that the Union’s untested black recruits fought like tigers.
But slavery was coming to an end. Unless they lived on isolated plantations, blacks in the South during the Civil War knew about Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued in January 1863, giving
EMPTY STOMACHS Late June 1836
Late June 1863
I n the North, pressure mounted on Grant to finish the job. Vicksburg had been under siege for five long weeks—since May 18—and still had not surrendered. Trench warfare could go on endlessly. Grant and his army were needed to fight in other places, especially now, when Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s most powerful general, was invading the North.
Grant pushed harder. He had his men dig a tunnel under the Rebel lines and pack it with explosives. The blast that followed created a huge crater that allowed the Federals to rush through the tunnel, climb up and out of the crater, and emerge behind enemy lines. They thought they would quickly overpower their stunned opponents. Instead, the Rebels had heard the digging, guessed what the Yanks were up to—and were waiting for them. Bloody hand-to-hand combat ensued, until the Federals had to retreat. They lost 200 men and the Confederates lost 100.
Grant didn’t give up on tunnel warfare. He put his men to work digging more tunnels. He continued around-the-clock shelling of the Confederate lines and the city. Something would have to make these Southerners give up! Maybe it would finally be starvation. They couldn’t hold out forever—and it sure didn’t look like Joe Johnston planned to do anything about it.
Thirty-five Union soldiers who had been coal miners before the war dug a forty-five-foot-long tunnel under Rebel entrenchments. The explosion of 2,200 pounds of gunpowder in the tunnel created a crater that gave Union forces access behind enemy lines.
I NSIDE V ICKSBURG, townspeople worried about the suffering of the soldiers in the trenches but could barely take care of themselves. Night and day shells fell, exploding into a thousand dangerous fragments. Because people stayed in the caves, there were few deaths, but Willie said that “all lived in a state of terror.”
A woman who was busy cooking when a shell exploded nearby grabbed a hot pot off her stove and ran through the streets to her cave, not even aware that she was still holding the pot. Lucy reported that “one lady standing in a cave door had her arm taken off” by a minié ball whizzing by. When the writer Mark Twain later interviewed Vicksburg residents about this time, one told him, “Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no turning room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn’t have made a candle burn in it.”
A N INCIDENT OCCURRED on a narrow footpath up a steep hill from the Lord cave that revealed how slaves often regarded whites. According to Willie, a young black boy was guiding a white nun along the footpath from the hospital where she had assisted wounded soldiers. They met a Confederate corporal who saluted the Sister and stepped aside so she could pass, but, Willie wrote, “as she was about to do so a shell of the smaller kind, with a slowly burning fuse, fell in the pathway at his feet.” Realizing the danger, the soldier tumbled backward down the hill to safety. At that moment, “the black hero,” as Willie referred to the boy, grabbed the shell and pitched it away.
“‘Why did you not do that at once?’ asked the trembling Sister. ‘The moment you waited might have cost us all our lives.’”
The slave child carefully replied that he had “too much respect” for white folks to do a thing like that while the “gentleman” was standing there—meaning he didn’t dare reach in front of a white man to do what the white man should have done, for a slave could be whipped or sold for such an infraction.
A white soldier at Milliken’s Bend reported that the Union’s untested black recruits fought like tigers.
But slavery was coming to an end. Unless they lived on isolated plantations, blacks in the South during the Civil War knew about Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued in January 1863, giving
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