This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [139]
Shortly after the capture of New Orleans old Admiral Farragut had taken his salt-water ships up the river to bombard Vicksburg, on the off-chance that the city would cave in as quickly as New Orleans had done. It was a vain hope, and before long Farragut went steaming back down the river, better informed about the strength of this fortress on the bluffs. But a modest detachment of troops had gone upstream at the time, to camp across the river from Vicksburg, and it had occurred to the authorities that it might be possible to by-pass Vicksburg entirely by having these troops dig a canal.
Vicksburg lay near the northern end of a sharp loop in the river, and the land just across the river was actually a long, flat, narrow peninsula. If a suitable ditch could be cut across the neck of this peninsula, it was thought, the river’s powerful current would scour it out, the river would presently shift its channel and flow through this expanding ditch, and Vicksburg would be left high and dry, an inland city without military importance. The ditch had been begun, and although the project had lapsed the idea still looked good — especially to President Lincoln, who had all of a frontiersman’s interest in tinkering, particularly when a river which he himself had once navigated was involved. Grant was under orders to do all he could to finish the job.
Grant and his engineers had little use for the plan. The half-completed canal had been planned wrong. Its upstream end led out of a backwater, where the current was unlikely to make itself felt, and the downstream end would hit the river at a spot the Confederates could easily reach with the guns at Vicksburg. To make matters ever so much worse, the river was very high just now, and the land that would be crossed by canal was half under water — too wet for diggers but not wet enough for steamboats. But orders were orders, and after the engineers had redrawn the plans so that the canal, if completed, might have a better chance to work as it was supposed to work, thousands upon thousands of soldiers were given picks and shovels and told to get busy.
There was another construction project on the agenda, for that matter. Fifty miles above Vicksburg a lost crescent of a slough known as Lake Providence lay in the flat land a few miles west of the Mississippi. A series of connecting streams led out of Lake Providence and flowed ultimately into the Red River. If a channel could be cut from the Mississippi into Lake Providence, and if the tortuous waterway leading from the lake to the Red River could be made passable for steamboats, it might be possible for Grant’s army and Porter’s navy to go steaming triumphantly down, enter the Mississippi a little way above Port Hudson, and then steam back to approach Vicksburg from the south, with a moderately secure supply line behind them.
Like the plan for a canal at Young’s Point, this idea looked a good deal better than it really was. The route would be fantastically roundabout — Grant estimated that it would involve a detour of something like 470 miles before it could get him to Vicksburg — and there was something unreal about the thought that a steady stream of transports, freighters, and other craft could ply such a waterway, deep in enemy territory, without interference. Besides, when the engineers got to work they found that many miles of the projected waterway were full of trees. These could be cut down in time, but to do it so that loaded steamboats could safely float over the stumps would call for specially designed underwater saws, to say nothing of many man-hours of labor.
Lake Providence, in short, was no better than