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 8to 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,but mottled with dim figures of frantic women and children scurrying from home and bed toward the cave dungeons--encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery,who shout 'Rats,to your holes!'and laugh.
The cannon-thunder rages,shells scream and crash overhead,the iron rain pours down,one hour,two hours,three,possibly six,then stops;silence follows,but the streets are still empty;the silence continues;by-and-bye a head projects from a cave here and there and yonder,and reconnoitres,cautiously;the silence still continuing,bodies follow heads,and jaded,half smothered creatures group themselves about,stretch their cramped limbs,draw in deep draughts of the grateful fresh air,gossip with the neighbors from the next cave;maybe straggle off home presently,or take a lounge through the town,if the stillness continues;and will scurry to the holes again,by-and-bye,when the war-tempest breaks forth once more.
There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers--merely the population of a village--would they not come to know each other,after a week or two,and familiarly;insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate experiences of one would be of interest to all?
Those are the materials furnished by history.From them might not almost anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg?
Could you,who did not experience it,come nearer to reproducing it to the imagination of another non-participant than could a Vicksburger who did experience it?It seems impossible;and yet there are reasons why it might not really be.When one makes his first voyage in a ship,it is an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties;novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person's former experiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his imagination and memory.By tongue or pen he can make a landsman live that strange and stirring voyage over with him;make him see it all and feel it all.
But if he wait?If he make ten voyages in succession--what then?
Why,the thing has lost color,snap,surprise;and has become commonplace.
The man would have nothing to tell that would quicken a landsman's pulse.
Years ago,I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants--a man and his wife.Left to tell their story in their own way,those people told it without fire,almost without interest.
A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues eloquent for ever perhaps;but they had six weeks of it,and that wore the novelty all out;they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and into the ground;the matter became commonplace.After that,the possibility of their ever being startlingly interesting in their talks about it was gone.
What the man said was to this effect:--
'It got to be Sunday all the time.Seven Sundays in the week--to us,anyway.
We hadn't anything to do,and time hung heavy.Seven Sundays,and all of them broken up at one time or another,in the day or in the night,by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron.At first we used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did afterwards.
The first time,I forgot the children,and Maria fetched them both along.