That the battlefield is so well preserved is due in part to man and in part to Nature. Many of the hills of Warren County, in which Vicksburg is situated, are composed of a curious soft limy clay, called marl, which, normally, has not the solidity of soft chalk. Marse Harris Dickson, who knows more about Vicksburg—and also about negroes, common law, floods, funny stories, geology, and rivers—than any other man in Mississippi, tells me that this marl was deposited by the river, in the form of silt, centuries ago, and that it was later thrown up into hills by volcanic action. He did not live in Vicksburg when this took place, but deduces his facts from the discovery of the remains of shellfish in the soil of the hills.
Whatever its geological origin, this soil has some very strange characteristics. In composition it is neither stone nor sand, but a cross between the two—brown and brittle. One can easily crush it to dust in one's hand, in which form it has about the consistency of talcum powder, and it may be added that when this brown powder is seized by the winds and whirled about, Vicksburg becomes one of the most mercilessly dusty cities on this earth.
On exposed slopes the marl washes very badly, forming great caving gullies, but, curiously enough, where it is exposed perpendicularly it does not wash, but slicks over on the outside, and stands almost as well as soft sandstone, although you can readily dig into it with your fingers.
Many of the highways leading in and out of the city pass between tall walls of this peculiar soil, through deep cuts which a visitor might naturally take for the result of careful grading by the road builders; but Marse Harris Dickson tells me that the cuts are entirely the result of erosion wrought by a hundred years of wheeled traffic.
So far as I know there is but one man who has witnessed this phenomenon without being impressed. That man is Samuel Merwin. Merwin went down and visited Marse Harris in Vicksburg, and saw all the sights. He was polite about the battlefield, and the river, and the negro stories, and everything else, until Marse Harris showed him how the highways had eroded through the hills. That did not seem to impress him at all. Moreover, instead of being tactful, he started telling about his trip to China. In China, he said, there were similar formations, but, as the civilization of China was much older than that of Vicksburg (fancy his having said a thing like that!) the gorges over there had eroded to a much greater extent. He said he had seen them three hundred feet deep.
The more Marse Harris tried to get him to say something a little bit complimentary about the Vicksburg erosions, the more Merwin boasted about China. He declared that the Vicksburg erosions didn't amount to a hill of beans compared with what he could show Marse Harris if Marse Harris would go with him to a certain point on the banks of the Wa Choo, in the province of Lang Pang Si.
Evidently he harped on this until he touched not only his host's local pride, but his pride of discovery. Before that, Marse Harris had been content to stick around in Mississippi, with perhaps a little run down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, or up to Dogtail to see a break in the levee, but after Merwin's talk about China he began to grow restless, and it is generally said in Vicksburg that it was purely in order to have something to tell Merwin about, the next time he saw him, that he made his celebrated trip to the source of the Nile. As for Merwin, he has never been invited back to Vicksburg, and it is to be observed that, even to this day, Marse Harris, by nature of a sunny disposition, shows signs of erosion of the spirit when China is mentioned.
It is apropos the battlefield that I mention the peculiarities of the soil. Had the bare ground been exposed to the rains of a few years, the details of redoubts, trenches, gun positions, saps, and all other military works would have melted away. Fortunately, however, there is a kind of tough, strong-rooted grass, called Bermuda grass, indigenous to that part of the country, and this grass quickly covered the battlefield, holding the soil together so effectually that all outlines are practically embalmed. So, although those in charge of the park have contributed not a little to its preservation—putting old guns in their former places, perpetuating saps with concrete work, and placing white markers on the hillsides, to show how far up those hillsides the assaulting Union troops made their way in various historic charges—it is due most of all to Nature that the Vicksburg battlefield so well explains itself.
Could Grant and Pemberton look to-day upon the hills and valleys where surged their six weeks' struggle for possession of the city, I doubt that they would find any important landmark wanting, and it is certain that they could not say, as Wellington did when he revisited Waterloo: "They have spoiled my battlefield!"
Besides the old guns and the markers, the field is dotted over with observation towers and all manner of memorials. Of the latter, the marble pantheon erected by the State of Illinois, and the beautiful marble and bronze memorial structure of the State of Iowa, are probably the finest. The marble column erected by Wisconsin carries at its summit a great bronze effigy of "Old Abe," the famous eagle, mascot of the Wisconsin troops. Guides to the battlefield are prone to relate to visitors—especially, I suspect, those whose accents betray a Northern origin—how "Old Abe," the bird of battle, went home and disgraced himself, after the war, by his ungentlemanly action in laying a setting of eggs.