VICKSBURG, MS 8-30-2017

96% humidity.  Rob opened the doors to the veranda this morning and everything was immediately wet.  Rob’s glasses clouded over.  I was going to take a picture of him with his opaque glasses but my camera lens was also opaque, wet and steamed up.  And if you venture outdoors, you run between squalls wearing steamed up glasses!  Or you can navigate by phone if you can see through the fog on the screen.  People live here on purpose.

The mighty Mississippi River has a mind all its own.  It meanders where it feels like it, creates new channels on a whim, eats the shoreline or builds up sandbars.  Despite this, humans have in large part come to control this beast with locks, levees and walls.  Several of the places we have visited have constructed thick walls to fend off rising waters and they have been effective in saving the cities.  Flood levels are marked on the walls, one read ~65 feet.  Artists have been engaged to paint murals on the panels.  The one that stood out today was a depiction of (President) Teddy Roosevelt on horseback escorted by his official entourage.  He had come to Vicksburg to go bear hunting.  In an ass-kissing gesture, a bear was tied to a tree and Teddy was urged to shoot it.  Shoot a bear tied to a tree?  Teddy refused.  The story took on a life of its own and before long, “Teddy Bears” came to be.

Statue of General Ulysses S. Grant on
the battlefield grounds at Vicksburg

Vicksburg was deeply involved in the Civil War.  Abraham Lincoln instructed his generals to take Vicksburg at all costs.  Vicksburg, he said, is the key and until that key is in our pocket, we cannot win this war.  The city was the pulse of the economy of the South, central to all shipping and their last stronghold.  

Lincoln and Grant reasoned that, if they could conquer Vicksburg and split the South in half, victory for the North would be guaranteed.  The South understood this, too, and held onto Vicksburg like a pit bull with a sock.  The battles were bloody and long and pitted brother against brother:  at one point on the tour, we viewed the Michigan monument.  Here on the tour it was explained that half the Michigan soldiers were Union, half were Confederate and many of them knew each other and some were brothers.  They would get together in the evenings and drink and play cards and party together.  The next morning, they would take up arms and shoot at each other.  At last, exhausted and suffering from battle weariness, dysentery, yellow fever, typhoid fever, malaria, pneumonia and starvation, the Confederacy surrendered at Vicksburg.  Gen. Pemberton surrendered to Gen. Grant on July 4^th, 1863.  Vicksburg did not celebrate the 4^th of July again until 1945.  There is a Union burial ground at Vicksburg where 17,000 Union soldiers are buried.  Thirteen thousand are unidentified.  (Dog tags were devised much later, in 1911.)

Union Cemetery at Vicksburg Memorial Park

In 1861, the government commissioned James Eads and Company to build 7 ironclads (ships) for the war effort.  Their mission was to steam up the river and destroy Confederate batteries.  On Dec. 12, 1862, one of these, the Cairo, was sunk by enemy torpedoes (mines) on the Yazoo River near the battlefields at Vicksburg.  The ship sank in 12 minutes but none of the 251 crew perished. 

Hull of the SS Cairo

In 1964, 102 years later, the sunken ship was found at the bottom of the Mississippi River, it was brought up and reassembled.  What is left of the SS Cairo may be walked through and viewed under canopy at the Vicksburg National Military Park.  Rob and I walked through the Cairo and it was fascinating for us to note that the engineering in those days is similar to what we see on our paddle wheeler.  Unlike the American Queen, the paddle wheel on the Cairo was enclosed and protected, but the boilers and steam tubes that conducted power to the piston drives were surprisingly recognizable to us after we had studied the power houses on our ship.

Starboard piston, paddle wheel and boilers - SS Cairo

Animals often play a part in war.  “Old Abe,” an eagle, was the mascot of the Union troops from Wisconsin.  He would spread his wings and scream during the gunfights at many battlefields.  He survived the Civil War and was a pampered pet at the capitol building in Wisconsin until a fire broke out.  Old Abe screeched and gave warning of the fire but soon died of smoke inhalation.  It is said that the logo of the 101^st Airborne was fashioned after Old Abe as is their nickname, “Screamin’ Eagles.”

Old Abe atop the
WI monument at Vicksburg
Memorial Park 

“Familiarity breeds contempt… and children.”  - Mark Twain