May, 1863. |
 |
| Grant's Headquarters at Vicksburg.1 |
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[616]
of recent reverses, the task would be comparatively easy, Grant resolved to attempt it. His troops were impatient to possess the object of their toils for months, and he was satisfied that, if an immediate assault should end in failure, they would work better in the trenches while prosecuting a regular siege, than they would do if denied an opportunity to capture the post by direct assault.
Grant therefore prepared to storm the Confederate works on the day after the arrival of his troops before them, which had occurred on the anniversary of Farragut's advent there the year before.
He made his Headquarters in his tent, pitched in a canebrake near an immense tree, in the edge of a wood on the farm of E. B. Willis, about three miles northeast from Vicksburg, and there he issued his orders for assault.
Grant ordered the attack to be commenced at two o'clock in the afternoon of the 19th.
It was begun by Sherman's corps, which was nearest the works on the northeastern side of the city, which lay on both sides of the old Jackson road, the one on the right, in approaching the town, known as Fort Hill, and the one on the left as Fort Beauregard.
The attack was directed upon the former.
Blair's division took the lead, followed by Tuttle's as a support.
As it moved, it occupied both side of the road.
The ground was very rough, and was cleft by deep chasms, in which were trees standing and trees felled; and along the entire front of the Confederate works was such a tangle of hills and obstacles that the approach was excessively difficult and perilous.
There had been artillery skirmishing and sharp-shooting all the morning: now there was to be close work.
Both parties were nerved for the task.
Steadily Blair's regiments moved on, and their first blow was given to General Schoup's Louisiana brigade, which struck back powerfully and manfully.
After a slight recoil, Blair's troops moved on across the ditch to the exterior slope of the works, where the Thirteenth Regulars, of General Giles Smith's brigade, planted the flag of the Republic, but at the cost of seventy-seven of its two hundred and fifty men, its leader, Captain Washington, being among the fatally wounded.
The Eighty-third Indiana and One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Illinois also gallantly gained the slope, but all were unable
1 this is a view of the place of Grant's Headquarters, as it appeared when the writer sketched it, on the 19th of April, 1866. he was accompanied to the spot by Captain White, of General T. J. Wood's staff, who was on the staff of General Legget during the siege, and was very often at Headquarters. There they found the insulator of Grant's telegraph, seen in the picture on the sapling between the large tree and the tent. The position and form of Grant's tent and its veranda., composed of a rude frame-work covered with cane-leaves, were given to the writer by Captain White, and a delineation of it, which he pronounced correct, was added to the sketch, and so restores the appearance of the Headquarters at the time of the siege.
Scanned printed text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.