A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [277]
Ill.42 Rebels marching out of Vicksburg and stacking arms.
Helpless until the ammunition arrived, the Union soldiers fortified their positions with heavy bales of cotton brought in from the surrounding countryside by heavily guarded wagon trains. Undaunted by the capture of the previous wagon train, Ebenezer Wells set off with his, despite having an escort that was only half strength. “I was about six miles out, riding along in front of my teams,” he wrote, when “I was startled by a shot passing close to me.” It seemed to be coming from a nearby cornfield. One of the guards became frightened and jumped into a wagon. As he landed, his gun went off, firing a bullet into Wells’s best friend. Torn between saving the wounded officer and protecting the supply train, Wells shouted for the wagons to keep moving without him and carried his friend to the edge of the road. “I knelt beside him while he told me his last message home,” he recorded. The officer begged him to send his watch and Bible home to his family. “Then, asking me to take his hand but not to move it for the pain, he told me to go as I was in danger.” Wells reluctantly galloped off after his wagons. Traveling down the same road on the return journey, he was horrified to see a large red stain where his friend had lain. “By great favour the general allowed me to have a funeral,” wrote Wells. The ammunition had arrived and the guns were firing when the burial took place, the priest’s words drowned out by the roar of the artillery.9
The next day, July 17, 1863, a lone black civilian was spotted walking away from the city carrying a white flag.10 Johnston had led his army out during the night, leaving Jackson silent and empty but for a few hundred frightened citizens. The Federals marched in and captured some Confederate stragglers, among them an Englishman named Captain Frederick Hampson of the 13th Louisiana Regiment. Two years later, after he had escaped to England, Captain Hampson still shuddered at his treatment:
Ill.43 The surrender of Vicksburg—view of the city from the riverbank showing part of the river batteries.
When captured by the enemy I was stripped of my clothes, even my shoes then robbed of my money, watch and rings. [I] was then marched a distance of 45 miles to Vicksburg barefoot, and on the route was grossly insulted by the privates and some officers of the Federal Army: I experienced fearful suffering from hunger, exposure and thirst, not being allowed to leave the ranks, and when we bivouacked [we had] no tents or covering to protect us from the weather; it raining almost all the time.… I remained in their hands until about the middle of August, when I succeeded with two more brother officers in effecting my escape from Vicksburg, thence to New Orleans, and from there made the best of my way (via New York by water) to England.11
Ebenezer Wells had fallen victim to “Mississippi fever” and was too ill to celebrate the Federal capture of Jackson, becoming another of the delirious, groaning soldiers whom Dr. Mayo tried to keep alive long enough to be transported to the North. Mayo had more than five hundred patients in his field hospital, ninety of them under his personal care. He was no longer living in a tent, but on a steamboat next to the hospital ships. Lord Lyons’s reply to his letter reached him there. Though disappointed by the minister’s refusal to pass his resignation on, Mayo was gracious in his response, apologizing for placing him in an uncomfortable position: “Of course I had no right to expect any other reply than that which I have just received,” he replied to Lyons in late July. “Two