EMPTY STOMACHS Late June 1836
Late June 1863

In the North, pressure mounted on Grant to finish the job. Vicksburg had been under siege for five long weeks—since May 18—and still had not surrendered. Trench warfare could go on endlessly. Grant and his army were needed to fight in other places, especially now, when Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s most powerful general, was invading the North.

Grant pushed harder. He had his men dig a tunnel under the Rebel lines and pack it with explosives. The blast that followed created a huge crater that allowed the Federals to rush through the tunnel, climb up and out of the crater, and emerge behind enemy lines. They thought they would quickly overpower their stunned opponents. Instead, the Rebels had heard the digging, guessed what the Yanks were up to—and were waiting for them. Bloody hand-to-hand combat ensued, until the Federals had to retreat. They lost 200 men and the Confederates lost 100.

Grant didn’t give up on tunnel warfare. He put his men to work digging more tunnels. He continued around-the-clock shelling of the Confederate lines and the city. Something would have to make these Southerners give up! Maybe it would finally be starvation. They couldn’t hold out forever—and it sure didn’t look like Joe Johnston planned to do anything about it.

Thirty-five Union soldiers who had been coal miners before the war dug a forty-five-foot-long tunnel under Rebel entrenchments. The explosion of 2,200 pounds of gunpowder in the tunnel created a crater that gave Union forces access behind enemy lines.

INSIDE VICKSBURG, townspeople worried about the suffering of the soldiers in the trenches but could barely take care of themselves. Night and day shells fell, exploding into a thousand dangerous fragments. Because people stayed in the caves, there were few deaths, but Willie said that “all lived in a state of terror.”

A woman who was busy cooking when a shell exploded nearby grabbed a hot pot off her stove and ran through the streets to her cave, not even aware that she was still holding the pot. Lucy reported that “one lady standing in a cave door had her arm taken off” by a minié ball whizzing by. When the writer Mark Twain later interviewed Vicksburg residents about this time, one told him, “Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no turning room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn’t have made a candle burn in it.”

AN INCIDENT OCCURRED on a narrow footpath up a steep hill from the Lord cave that revealed how slaves often regarded whites. According to Willie, a young black boy was guiding a white nun along the footpath from the hospital where she had assisted wounded soldiers. They met a Confederate corporal who saluted the Sister and stepped aside so she could pass, but, Willie wrote, “as she was about to do so a shell of the smaller kind, with a slowly burning fuse, fell in the pathway at his feet.” Realizing the danger, the soldier tumbled backward down the hill to safety. At that moment, “the black hero,” as Willie referred to the boy, grabbed the shell and pitched it away.

“‘Why did you not do that at once?’ asked the trembling Sister. ‘The moment you waited might have cost us all our lives.’”

The slave child carefully replied that he had “too much respect” for white folks to do a thing like that while the “gentleman” was standing there—meaning he didn’t dare reach in front of a white man to do what the white man should have done, for a slave could be whipped or sold for such an infraction.

A white soldier at Milliken’s Bend reported that the Union’s untested black recruits fought like tigers.

But slavery was coming to an end. Unless they lived on isolated plantations, blacks in the South during the Civil War knew about Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued in January 1863, giving freedom to slaves in states under Union control. Grant had 10,000 to 12,000 newly liberated slaves with his army at Vicksburg.

Blacks must have been jubilant to hear that former slaves who had joined the Union army had fought bravely in a battle against Confederate troops on June 7 at Milliken’s Bend, not far from Vicksburg. Though the black regiment had suffered heavy casualties, the men had held their own and beaten back their attackers. This event had changed the minds of many who felt blacks did not have the ability to fight. Frederick Douglass, the famous black abolitionist, had pleaded, “Give them a chance. I don’t say that they will fight better than other men. All I say is, give them a chance!” When they got the chance and proved their mettle, a Southern senator commented, “If slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”

Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana wrote, “The bravery of the blacks in the battle at Milliken’s Bend completely revolutionized the sentiment of the military.” Indeed, starting that summer of 1863, blacks wer increasingly recruited into the Union army, with nearly 200,000 eventually fighting for the North. Toward the end of the war, the South, which had some black soldiers all along, would recruit them as well.

Black soldiers, who quickly proved their worth and willingness to fight, were commanded by white officers, many of whom died in combat alongside their men.

But for now, in Vicksburg, many blacks were with their white masters in the caves, simply hoping to survive the siege. As much as he wanted his freedom, Rice remained loyal to Lucy’s family. Their fate was his fate. At night, when Lucy covered her ears and tried to bury her head in her pillow so she couldn’t hear the exploding shells, Rice was there, too.

After reading the newspaper printed on the back of wallpaper, some residents hung the patterned side on the walls of their caves as decoration.

ONCE A PROUD and beautiful community of grand homes and splendid gardens, Vicksburg was almost in ruins. Anyone pausing long enough to study the buildings around them saw that every glass pane in every house and building had shattered. Many windows had been boarded up.

Townspeople held on. Both Willie and Lucy read the one-sheet newspaper that was issued daily, though it had to be printed on the back of wallpaper once all the regular paper had been used up. It always offered assurance that “Old Joe” was going to come to the rescue and that together he and General Pemberton would defeat General Grant.

BY THE END OF JUNE, dwindling supplies of food and water grew critical. The city’s wells were almost dry, and drinking water was rationed to only one cup of water per day per person. Confederate soldiers dipped water out of mud holes and sometimes resorted to drinking dirty river water. A few residents had their own wells, and some of them sold water—Margaret Lord had to buy it for her family, paying for it by the bucket. Others with wells freely gave away the water until it was gone. It was the same with food: some who had it sold it on the black market for high prices, while others gave it to whoever needed it—proving, as always, that hard times could bring out the best, as well as the worst, in people.

After all the chickens, cows, horses, and mules had been used for food, dogs and cats and other family pets began to disappear. Soon there were no birds or squirrels to be seen. Mary Loughborough finally consented to her little daughter’s pet bird being made into soup for the child, who was ill and needed nourishment.

Lucy said of her family’s situation, “Our provisions were becoming scarce, and the Louisiana soldiers were eating rats as a delicacy… Mother would not eat mule meat, but we children ate some, and it tasted right good, having been cooked nicely. Wheat bread was a rarity, and sweet-potato coffee was relished by the adults.” Indeed, there were several variations on “Confederate coffee,” including concoctions made of corn, okra, or even rye flour, if it could be had.

The specter of hunger haunted both soldiers and civilians. Everyone’s stomach rumbled. Willie reported that his family was down to “a half-barrel of [corn] meal and about the same quantity of sugar, so that like everyone else, we began to look forward with anxiety to what might await us in the near future.”

Poor people in Vicksburg had even less to eat than the soldiers, and the threat of starvation was very real for them. Hardest hit were impoverished mothers whose husbands were at war or had died and who had hungry children to feed. They searched for tree buds, weeds, and cane shoots, mixing them with blackberries and half-ripe peaches to make a sort of stew. They pulled up the flooring in smokehouses in search of crystals of salt. Soldiers raided gardens, and townspeople, both rich and poor, had to guard what few vegetables they still had.

Soldiers’ daily rations were cut, and then cut again, shrinking to a couple of biscuits, a little bacon, and a handful of rice. By the end of June, army rations had been reduced to 14.5 ounces of food per day—just a little rice, and pea bread.

Pea bread. No one who survived the siege of Vicksburg would ever forget it. The one food item still plentiful, for some reason, was peas, and army cooks learned to make bread from pea meal. “It was awful,” one soldier recalled, “either rubbery or hard as rock, and in either case foul-tasting.” Another said it was like leather to digest. Townspeople and patients in the hospital also ate the terrible bread when there was nothing else to eat, and some got sick from it.

Even as the situation grew more desperate, few people talked about surrender. They still believed in Joe Johnston. Humor helped. A citizen distributed cards for the fictitious “Hotel de Vicksburg,” featuring a menu of Mule Tail Soup, Pea Meal Pudding, and Genuine Confederate Coffee.

Soldiers also managed an occasional laugh. Confederate pickets asked their Union counterparts one night what they had to eat. The Northerners, who had ample supplies, gave a long list: good coffee, beef, bread, and so forth. They then asked what the Southerners had, knowing that they were starving. But the Southerners replied with what could only have been a wish list, stating that they had butter and cake and biscuits, among other tasty items—to which a Yank added for them, “and pea meal.” The Southerner who told this story said, “Then we all roared.”

Though some Confederates deserted, going over to the Federals so they would be fed, most held fast. A Southern general said of his men, “I have rarely heard a murmur of complaint. The tone has always been, ‘This is pretty hard, but we can stand it.’”

But they could not do so forever.

By the first day of July, forty-five days into the siege, the men were so weak that General Pemberton feared they didn’t have the strength to withstand an all-out attack from the Federals, or to try to break out from their lines—even if Old Joe did arrive to help. Half the men were on the sick list or in the hospital. Many had swollen ankles, a symptom of scurvy, which was caused by vitamin deficiency. So many soldiers died that coffin builders could not keep up, and the dead were buried in trenches, covered by blankets. An officer wrote, “Graves are dug today for use tomorrow.”

Union troops continued digging tunnels, thirteen in all, and filled them with explosives. They would all be set off on July 6, the day that Grant planned a major attack on Confederate forces. It was time to end this.

General Sherman, still guarding the eastern front, was certain that any attempt to take Vicksburg would come with a price. One thing he knew by now was that Southerners, weak or not, would fight to the finish. He told his wife in a letter that he needed all his cunning and all his strength, for these Rebels, he said, fight like devils.