"When the working parties carried the saps to the base of the works, the besieged used to light the fuses of six-pound shells and toss them over the parapet. They would roll down among the working parties and explode, sometimes doing serious damage. A young soldier of the Twentieth Ohio, named Friend, devised wooden mortars. A very small charge of powder in one of these would just lift a shell over the enemy's parapet and drop it within. After the surrender there was much inquiry from the garrison how they were contrived."
Concerning this tossing of the shells, one who had been a private in Grant's army said to the writer: "I was in the trenches one evening when a shell came over without noise, as if thrown by hand. Fortunately it did not explode, or it would have injured a good many of us. This greatly surprised me, and when in a few minutes another came, I was on the watch and noted the point from which it seemed to start. By strange luck this also failed to explode. I then laid my rifle across the breastwork, cocked it, and put my eye to the sight, with the muzzle facing the point from which the shell had come. Presently I saw a man rise in the enemy's trench with a third shell in his hand—but he never threw it."
| SIEGE OF VICKSBURG—SHOWING SOME OF THE FEDERAL INTRENCHMENTS. |
When the siege began, General Pemberton issued an order that all non-combatants leave the city; but many of them refused to go—some because they had no other home, or means to sustain themselves elsewhere—and a few women and children were among those who remained. One lady, wife of an officer in Pemberton's army, published the next year an account of her life in the city during the siege, which is especially interesting for its picturesque and suggestive details, many of which are not to be found elsewhere. A few passages are here reproduced:
"The cave [of a friend] was an excavation in the earth the size of a large room, high enough for the tallest person to stand perfectly erect, provided with comfortable seats, and altogether quite a large and habitable abode (compared with some of the caves in the city), were it not for the dampness and the constant contact with the soft earthy walls.
"Two negroes were coming with a small trunk between them, and a carpet-bag or two, evidently trying to show others of the profession how careless of danger they were, and how foolish 'niggars' were to run 'dat sort o' way.' A shell came through the air and fell a few yards beyond the braves, when, lo! the trunk was sent tumbling, and landed bottom upward; the carpet-bag followed—one grand somerset; and amid the cloud of dust that arose, I discovered one porter doubled up by the side of the trunk, and the other crouching close by a pile of plank. A shout from the negroes on the cars, and much laughter, brought them on their feet, brushing their knees and giggling, yet looking quite foolish, feeling their former prestige gone. The excitement was intense in the city. Groups of people stood on every available position where a view could be obtained of the distant hills, where the jets of white smoke constantly passed out from among the trees.
"The caves were plainly becoming a necessity, as some persons had been killed on the street by fragments of shells. The room that I had so lately slept in had been struck by a fragment of a shell during the first night, and a large hole made in the ceiling. Terror-stricken, we remained crouched in the cave, while shell after shell followed each other in quick succession. I endeavored by constant prayer to prepare myself for the sudden death I was almost certain awaited me. My heart stood still as we would hear the reports from the guns, and the rushing and fearful sound of the shell as it came toward us. As it neared, the noise became more deafening; the air was full of the rushing sound; pains darted through my temples; my ears were full of the confusing noise; and, as it exploded, the report flashed through my head like an electric shock, leaving me in a quiet state of terror the most painful that I can imagine, cowering in a corner, holding my child to my heart—the only feeling of my life being the choking throbs of my heart, that rendered me almost breathless. I saw one fall in the road without the mouth of the cave, like a flame of fire, making the earth tremble, and, with a low, singing sound, the fragments sped on in their work of death.
"So constantly dropped the shells around the city that the inhabitants all made preparations to live under ground during the siege. M—— sent over and had a cave made in a hill near by. We seized the opportunity one evening, when the gunners were probably at their supper, for we had a few moments of quiet, to go over and take possession.
"Some families had light bread made in large quantities, and subsisted on it with milk (provided their cows were not killed from one milking time to another), without any more cooking, until called on to replenish. Though most of us lived on corn bread and bacon, served three times a day, the only luxury of the meal consisting in its warmth, I had some flour, and frequently had some hard, tough biscuit made from it, there being no soda or yeast to be procured. At this time we could also procure beef. A gentleman friend was kind enough to offer me his camp-bed; another had his tent-fly stretched over the mouth of our residence to shield us from the sun. And so I went regularly to work keeping house under ground. Our new habitation was an excavation made in the earth, and branching six feet from the entrance, forming a cave in the shape of a T. In one of the wings my bed fitted; the other I used as a kind of dressing-room. In this the earth had been cut down a foot or two below the floor of the main cave; I could stand erect here; and when tired of sitting in other portions of my residence I bowed myself into it, and stood impassively resting at full height—one of the variations in the still shell-expectant life.
"We were safe at least from fragments of shell, and they were flying in all directions. We had our roof arched and braced, the supports of the bracing taking up much room in our confined quarters. The earth was about five feet thick above, and seemed hard and compact.