John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[216] the hostile batteries, but the silence was illusory. When the vessels got abreast of the town they were discovered by the Confederate outlook, and almost at once every gun in position opened upon them. Instantly the scene was lighted by the bursting shells and the glare of burning buildings, which had been fired to illuminate the channel along which the boats were floating. Dana counted over five hundred and twenty-five shots, but few of which took effect. Only one steamboat was destroyed and one disabled. All the gun-boats and the rest of the transports and barges got by in good condition, and were used in ferrying the army to the landing at Bruinsburg below Grand Gulf shortly afterwards.

With this movement of the gun-boats and transports the successful advance of the army became assured, and this raised the spirits of both men and officers. Dana had already ridden several times over the various routes between Milliken's Bend and New Carthage, and had come to see how impossible it was to use the narrow canals and the tortuous bayous, because of the overhanging trees, and how simple it was for the troops to make their way indefinitely along the levees, or through the plantations which were not yet flooded, till a crossing-place could be found. Grand Gulf, just below the mouth of the Big Black River, the second commanding bluff, was found, like Vicksburg, to be too strongly fortified for a direct assault; but, profiting by their recent experience, the gun-boats and transports went by them in the night, and made their first successful landing at De Shroon's plantation, facing Bruinsburg, about sixty miles down the river, where the entire army was safely ferried to the east bank within a dry, short, and easy march of the highlands.

Dana tells us in personal letters that he got his first real insight into the aristocracy and hatefulness of slavery on the splendid plantations which lay in the route of the