The best-protected plantations are those which are completely surrounded by independent levees. “If my neighbor’s levee breaks, my land is still defended,” said a planter to me, describing his estate. “Inside of the levee is a ditch by which the water that soaks in can all be drained to one place and thrown over the embankment by a steam-pump.”
I learned something of the planter’s anxiety of mind during the great floods. “Many is the time I’ve sat up all night just like these mates, looking after the levee on my plantation. Come a wind from the right direction, I’d catch up a lantern, and go out, and maybe find the water within three or four inches of the top. In some places a little more would send it over and make a break. My heart would be nigh about to melt, as I watched it. Sometimes I waited, all night long, to see whether the water would go an inch higher. If it didn’t, I was safe; if it did, I was a ruined man.”
On some of the levees negroes were at work making the necessary repairs; but I was told that many plantations would remain unprotected and uncultivated until another year.
I had heard much about the anticipated negro insurrections at Christmas time. But the only act of violence that came to my knowledge, committed on that day, was a little affair that occurred at Skipwith’s Landing, on the Mississippi shore, a few miles below the Arkansas and Louisiana line. Four mounted guerillas, wearing the Confederate uniform, and carrying Spencer rifles, rode into the place, robbed a store kept by a Northern man, robbed and murdered a negro, and rode off again, unmolested. Very little was said of this trifling operation. If such a deed, however, had been perpetrated by freedmen, the whole South would have rung with it, and the cry of “Kill the niggers!” would have been heard from the Rio Grande to the Atlantic.
CHAPTER L.
IN AND ABOUT VICKSBURG.
On the afternoon of the third day we came in sight of Vicksburg,—four hundred miles from Memphis by water, although not more than half that distance in a straight line, so voluminous are the coils of the Great River.
The town, seen across the intervening tongue of land as we approached it,—situated on a high bluff, with the sunlight on its hills and roofs and fortifications,—was a fine sight. It diverted my attention, so that I looked in vain for the famous canal cut across the tongue of land, which pushes out from the Louisiana shore, and about which the river makes an extensive curve.
“You couldn’t have found it without looking mighty close,” said a native of the country. “It’s a little small concern. The Yankees made just a big ditch to let the water through, thinking it would wash out, and make a cut-off. If it had, Farragut’s fleet could have got through, and Vicksburg would have been flanked, high and dry. But, in the first place, they did not begin the ditch where the current strikes the shore; in the next place the water fell before the ditch was completed, and never run through it at all.”
On the opposite shore, overlooking this peninsula and the winding river, stands Vicksburg, on the brow of a line of bluffs which sweep down from the north, here first striking the Mississippi. In this ridge the town is set,—to compare gross things with fine,—like a diamond in the back of a ring. It slopes up rapidly from the landing, and is built of brick and wood, not beautiful on a nearer view.
The hills are cut through, and their sides sliced off, by the deeply indented streets of the upper portion of the city. Here and there are crests completely cut around, isolated, and left standing like yellowish square sugar-loaves with irregular tops. These excavations afforded the inhabitants fine facilities for burrowing during the siege. The base of the hills and the cliff-like banks of the dug streets present a most curious appearance, being completely honey-combed with caves, which still remain, a source of astonishment to the stranger, who half fancies that a colony of large-sized bank-swallows has been industriously at work there.