Chapter 35

Chapter 35
Vicksburg During the Trouble

WE used to plow past the lofty hill-city, Vicksburg, down-stream;
but we cannot do that now. A cut-off has made a country town of it,
like Osceola, St. Genevieve, and several others. There is
currentless water--also a big island--in front of Vicksburg now.
You come down the river the other side of the island,
then turn and come up to the town; that is, in high water:
in low water you can't come up, but must land some distance below it.

Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg's
tremendous war experiences; earthworks, trees crippled by
the cannon balls, cave-refuges in the clay precipices, etc.
The caves did good service during the six weeks'
bombardment of the city--May 8 to July 4, 1863. They were
used by the non-combatants--mainly by the women and children;
not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion.
They were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicular
clay bank, then branched Y shape, within the hill.
Life in Vicksburg, during the six weeks was perhaps--but wait;
here are some materials out of which to reproduce it:--

Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three
thousand non-combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world--
walled solidly in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers
and batteries; hence, no buying and selling with the outside;
no passing to and fro; no God-speeding a parting guest,
no welcoming a coming one; no printed acres of world-wide news
to be read at breakfast, mornings--a tedious dull absence of
such matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see steamboats
smoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing toward
the town--for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed;
no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no struggling
over bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen--
all quiet there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty,
corn ten dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound,
rum a hundred dollars a gallon; other things in proportion:
consequently, no roar and racket of drays and carriages tearing
along the streets; nothing for them to do, among that handful
of non-combatants of exhausted means; at three o'clock in
the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured tramp
of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of
hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute:
all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery,
the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming
from soaring bomb-shells, and a rain of iron fragments
descends upon the city; descends upon the empty streets:
streets which are not empty a moment later,