The majority of the caves were mere “gopher-holes,” as the soldiers call them. Others were quite spacious and aristocratic. The entrance was usually large enough to admit a person stooping slightly; but within, the roofs of the best caves were hollowed sufficiently to permit a man to stand upright. The passage by which you entered commonly branched to the right and left, forming with its two arms a sort of letter Y, or letter T.
Every family had its cave. But only a few of the more extensive ones were permanently occupied. “Ours” (said a lady resident) “was very large and quite comfortable. There was first the entrance, under a pointed arch; then a long cross-gallery. Boards were laid down the whole length and covered with carpets. Berths were put up at the sides, where we slept very well. At first we did not take off our dresses when we lay down; but in a little while we grew accustomed to undressing and retiring regularly. In the morning we found our clothes quite wet from the natural dampness of the cave. Over the entrance there was built a little arbor, where our cooking was done, and where we sat and talked with our neighbors in the daytime, when there were no shells dropping. In the night the cave was lighted up. We lived this sort of life six weeks.”
But few buildings were destroyed by the shells. Those that were partially injured had generally been patched up. After the twenty-sixth of May, when the bombardment became almost incessant, being continued night and day, it was estimated that six thousand shells were thrown into the city by the mortars on the river-side every twenty-four hours. Grant’s siege guns, in the rear of the bluffs, dropped daily four thousand more along the Rebel lines. The little damage done by so great a bombardment is a matter of surprise. The soldiers had also their “gopher-holes,” and laughed at the projectiles. Of the women and children in the town, only three were killed and twelve injured.
Both citizens and troops suffered more from the scarcity of provisions than from the abundance of shells. On both the river and land sides the city was completely cut off from supplies. The garrison was put upon fourteen-and-a-half-ounce rations; and in the town, mule-meat, and even dog-meat, became luxuries.
The day after my arrival I joined a small equestrian party, got up by Lieutenant E—— for my benefit, and rode out to visit the fortifications behind the city. We first came to the line of works thrown up by our troops after the capitulation. Exterior to these, zigzagging along the eastern brow of the bluffs, from the Mississippi, below Vicksburg, to the Yazoo River on the North, a distance of near fifteen miles, were the original Rebel defences, too extensive to be manned by less than a large army.
Three miles northeast of the city we passed Fort Hill, in the “crater” of which, after the Rebel bastions had been successfully mined and blown up, occurred one of the most desperate fights that marked the siege. Pushed up dangerously near to the Rebel position, is the advanced Federal line. Between the two, a little way down the slope from Fort Hill, is the spot rendered historic by the interview which terminated the long struggle for the key to the Mississippi. There, in full view of the confronting armies, the two commanding generals met under an oak-tree, and had their little talk.
Every vestige of the tree, root and branch, had long since disappeared,—cut up, broken up, dug up, and scattered over the country in the form of relics; and we found on the spot a monument, which bids fair to have a similar fate.
This was originally a neat granite shaft, erected by a private subscription among officers and soldiers of the national army, and dedicated on July 4th, 1864, the first anniversary of the surrender of the city. It bears the following inscription:—
SITE OF
INTERVIEW BETWEEN