[396] thousand men, with three Major-Generals, and nine Brigadiers, upwards of ninety pieces of artillery, and about forty thousand small-arms. Weakness from fatigue, short rations, and heat, had left thousands of the troops decrepit. Six thousand of them were in the hospitals, and many of them were crawling about in what should be convalescent camps. Four thousand citizens and negroes, besides Pemberton's army, included all the souls within the walls of Vicksburg. When we consider that these people had for a month and a half been in daily terrour of their lives, never being able to sleep a night in their homes, but crawling into caves, unable to move except in the few peaceful intervals in the heat of the day, we may appreciate what a life of horrour was theirs. The first result of the surrender of Vicksburg, was the fall of Port Hudson, and the consequent supremacy of the Federal arms along the entire length of the Mississippi. Gen. Banks had invested this place; he had made two assaults on the 27th May and on the 14th June; and he had been repulsed by Gen. Gardner, who held the place with about five thousand men. When the news was communicated to Gardner that Vicksburg had surrendered, knowing that all hope of relief was at an end, he determined that it was useless to prolong resistance, and on the 9th July surrendered himself and the garrison as prisoners of war. These events on the Mississippi constituted a reverse, which the resources of the Confederacy, neither in men nor means, could endure without great strain. Across the river the train of disaster appears to have extended. The fall of the strongholds of the Mississippi resulted in the retreat of our army from Little Rock, and the surrender to the enemy of the important valley in which it was situated; while a campaign auspiciously begun in Lower Louisiana was abandoned in consequence of the release of Banks' forces from the siege of Port Hudson. To these events we must now take the reader so as to gather up the several threads of the narrative of the war in the West.
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[396] thousand men, with three Major-Generals, and nine Brigadiers, upwards of ninety pieces of artillery, and about forty thousand small-arms. Weakness from fatigue, short rations, and heat, had left thousands of the troops decrepit. Six thousand of them were in the hospitals, and many of them were crawling about in what should be convalescent camps. Four thousand citizens and negroes, besides Pemberton's army, included all the souls within the walls of Vicksburg. When we consider that these people had for a month and a half been in daily terrour of their lives, never being able to sleep a night in their homes, but crawling into caves, unable to move except in the few peaceful intervals in the heat of the day, we may appreciate what a life of horrour was theirs. The first result of the surrender of Vicksburg, was the fall of Port Hudson, and the consequent supremacy of the Federal arms along the entire length of the Mississippi. Gen. Banks had invested this place; he had made two assaults on the 27th May and on the 14th June; and he had been repulsed by Gen. Gardner, who held the place with about five thousand men. When the news was communicated to Gardner that Vicksburg had surrendered, knowing that all hope of relief was at an end, he determined that it was useless to prolong resistance, and on the 9th July surrendered himself and the garrison as prisoners of war. These events on the Mississippi constituted a reverse, which the resources of the Confederacy, neither in men nor means, could endure without great strain. Across the river the train of disaster appears to have extended. The fall of the strongholds of the Mississippi resulted in the retreat of our army from Little Rock, and the surrender to the enemy of the important valley in which it was situated; while a campaign auspiciously begun in Lower Louisiana was abandoned in consequence of the release of Banks' forces from the siege of Port Hudson. To these events we must now take the reader so as to gather up the several threads of the narrative of the war in the West.
1866.
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