A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [248]
It then dawned on Grant that all he had to do was be patient and starve out the inhabitants. Inside the town, no one believed such a calamity would come to pass. General Pemberton and his men were waiting for General Johnston to lead his army to their rescue. But the cantankerous Johnston had warned Pemberton not to retreat to Vicksburg, and now that it had happened he wrote off the town and the army as lost. Nothing, not even the urgent telegrams from President Davis and Secretary of War Seddon, could make Johnston change his mind and risk his small force of 24,000 men against a Federal army three times the size. His one concession was to send out a request for volunteers to sneak supplies through the Federal lines into Vicksburg. Vizetelly accompanied some of the missions. These forays were exceedingly dangerous. The scouts had to crawl on their hands and knees in the dark for miles, “avoiding every gleam of moonlight, and prepared at any moment to use the revolver or the knife.” Many previous attempts, Vizetelly informed his readers, had ended with the volunteers being either captured or shot. During one particular mission, the intrepid band scrambled along gorges and through pathless woods until they were twelve miles from Vicksburg. There they left Vizetelly and disappeared into a ravine. “As I lay on the ground in the calm, quiet night I could distinctly hear sounds of musketry between the loud booming of mortars,” he wrote. Whether that meant success or failure he could not tell and would not know until the next day.19
Shells continually rained down on Vicksburg, shaking nerves and buildings alike. Parishioners of St. Paul’s Catholic church attended mass even though the church was dangerously situated on one of the highest points of the town. On one occasion a shell crashed through a window and exploded above the altar. Stunned but unhurt, Father John Bannon calmed his screaming congregation and continued with the service.20 The townspeople retreated to their cellars and to caves dug deep into the hillside, but there was no respite from the thunderous noise. Afterward, witnesses wrote in wonder at the little touches of comfort people added to their caves. As the siege went on, rugs, chairs, even beds were dragged underground. But bravado, enterprise, and fortitude ultimately gave way to hunger, fear, and despair.
The barrage was not all one way. As long as they had shells, the gunners in Vicksburg had their choice of sitting targets outside. Each time he led his wagon trains out to forage, Ebenezer Wells, the English wagon master of the 79th New York, bade farewell to his friends. On several occasions he returned to camp with bullets lodged in his saddle and blanket. “Our over-tasked mule-teams,” wrote an officer, “were obliged to drag all the supplies under a broiling sun from the reeking banks of the Yazoo, or over the long road that wound through the hilly and desolate region.”21 Sometimes Wells’s teams made it back to the camp but not the sorely needed supplies, which had to be left behind along with the wounded or dying mules.
Among the Federal soldiers who held their breath as cannonballs whizzed over their heads was the British doctor Charles Mayo. He was furious to be at Vicksburg. One of his former patients, Major General George Hartsuff, had invited him to join his headquarters at Louisville, Kentucky. Mayo received permission for the transfer and was set to leave when he discovered that a clerk had written down the wrong department on his orders, sending him to General Grant instead of