This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [172]
Grant began by restating the old “unconditional surrender” theme. He did not really mean it, however, and in the end Pemberton was given terms so lenient that Halleck, back in Washington, rapped Grant’s knuckles for not being sterner. In effect the Confederates were allowed to come out of the citadel, lay down their arms, and then go to their homes under parole. Grant believed that it would take half of the summer, and be infernally expensive as well, to ship the whole lot all the way north to a prison camp; besides, he felt that Pemberton’s men were so discouraged that very few of them would ever return to the army even if they were finally exchanged. (Several hundred of the men refused to sign their paroles, preferring to be sent north as prisoners of war so that they could not under any possibility be forced back into the army; Federals who mingled with the prisoners heard many say that they had “done their last fighting for the South.”)12
In any case, the Confederate flag came down on July 4, and Grant found himself in possession of thirty-one thousand prisoners, one hundred and seventy-two cannon, and more than sixty thousand small arms, many of which were better weapons than his own men were carrying. A number of Federal regiments rearmed themselves with captured rifles after Vicksburg. It was noted that the victorious Unionists did no cheering when the Confederates laid down their arms — except that one division raised a cheer for “the gallant defenders of Vicksburg.” As soon as the ceremonies were over the men of the two armies were mingling on friendly terms, and Confederates who had been eating mule meat got Yankee hardtack and bacon for supper. One Union sharpshooter, seeing a Confederate officer on a distinctive white horse, called out to him: “Mister — you man on the little white horse! Danged if you ain’t the hardest feller to hit I ever saw; I’ve shot at you more’n a hundred times!”13
That night, for the first time in a month and a half, no guns fired anywhere along the Vicksburg front. Federal soldiers found it impossible to get to sleep; the unfamiliar quiet was somehow oppressive and disturbing.14
Far downstream, at Port Hudson, Banks had at last brought up the army that did not come up in time to meet Grant, and Port Hudson had been under siege since May 23. The business was a small-scale replica of Vicksburg — seven thousand Confederates in the trenches, fourteen thousand Federals outside trying to get in, capture by assault impossible, escape for the beleaguered garrison impossible also. After the fall of Vicksburg a broadside announcing the event was tossed over inside the Port Hudson lines. It brought a defiant shout: “That’s another damned Yankee lie!” — but when all the Federals began to cheer and their bands started giving patriotic concerte up and down the lines, the defiance began to fade, and by July 9 Port Hudson was surrendered, lock, stock, and barrel. There were no longer any Confederate troops or fortifications anywhere along the Mississippi River. From St. Paul to the Gulf, the stream was open.
What had been accomplished required no elaboration. The event spoke for itself. It was the logical conclusion of all that had been done in the West since the war began. The strong hand in Missouri, the slow advance up the Tennessee and the Cumberland, the fights at Fort Donelson and Shiloh, at New Madrid and Island No. Ten, at Corinth and Perryville and Stone’s River, the long months of sickness and discontent in the muddy swamps and bayous — all of these made a coherent pattern, and no one needed to wait for a presidential speech to explain it. It was all going just about as Winfield Scott had thought it might, in the dim days before Bull Run, although the dropsical old general himself was rusticating at West Point, knowing of the war only by the echoes that came up the Hudson. The Confederacy was broken now, and the break would be permanent; would be followed, inevitably, by others. Mr. Lincoln would use great phrases