.
some day.
These excursions after food that I have described must have been the forerunners of Sherman's great forage parties later, on his "march to the sea." It was easy enough to feed an army that way, if men could be found to take the risk. Sherman's later forage parties were so strong that the risk was reduced to fun.
I copy from my diary here (1862):
"Now the enemy is in front of us. He is on our flank and all around us. It is dangerous to venture a mile from camp alone. In fact, orders are strict for every man and every officer to stay close to his regiment day or night.
"On all the plantations along our way in this campaign there are signs of war. The cotton gins, the fences, the barns, are all gone—burned by raiders of both armies, who have scouted through this same country time and again. The weather is often gloomy; the fenceless fields are brown and naked; the big houses left standing on the plantations look lone and desolate. There is no song of birds. The army wagons, in long trains, and the soldiers in great strung-out columns of blue, go over the soft ground across the fields, along what once was lanes and country roads, almost in silence. Here and there a skirmish of musketry at some creek crossing or at some wood is the only noise heard. This state of Mississippi, like the whole South, sees the desolation of war. But the big, white, lone houses on the deserted lawns, with their low verandas about them, are not wholly unoccupied. Though the arms-bearing men of the country are every one in the army fighting us, the women and the children and the slaves are still at home. These slaves desert their mistresses and come into the Union camps at night by hundreds, bearing their bundles on their heads and their pickaninnies under their arms.
"As Rebel cavalry bands are rioting all around us, the strictest orders are given about leaving camp. But those who slipped away without leave the oftenest were themselves officers. Numbers of these went off almost nightly, to pay their devoirs to ladies whom they happened to admire at neighboring plantations. These women, glad enough of the compliments of the Federal officers, let it be very clearly understood that they were nevertheless true-blue Rebels. Things as to the war were simply glossed over in conversation, and both the lady and the officer sometimes had a delightful evening, even if the delight on the officer's part was in violation of duty. Sometimes these visits led to ridiculous terminations. War is not all tragedy."
Again I copy from the journal of that December:
"The other night three of the officers of our brigade, Captain H—— and Lieutenants D—— and O—— got themselves into a pretty mess by leaving camp to visit at a plantation. The laughable facts are these: We had stopped two or three days, to mend bridges over the Yocona River. General Grant had asked our brigade commander to report the names of three officers for promotion. Captain H—— and two lieutenants were selected. Among the private soldiers these men were not regarded as deserving honor. On the contrary, they were looked upon as common braggarts. Some politician at home, probably, had moved the wires for their promotion. As it happened, these three officers were the worst offenders of all, as to leaving camp without orders for the purpose of visiting Rebel ladies at neighboring plantations. Some of the staff heard of this and determined to unmask them. Some Rebel uniforms were secured from prisoners in our hands, and one dark night when the captain and his friends were away from camp at the home of a Mrs. S——, visiting, a dozen of us in disguise were sent to surround the house. Instantly there was a cry among the women of "guerrillas!" "Confederates!" "Confederates!" "Friends!" and a bonny blue Rebel flag was waved in the doorway. We were indeed a desperate-looking lot, but the women met the supposed Rebel guerrillas almost with embraces. The captain and his two lieutenants we pulled from under the bed by their heels, and threatened them with instant death. The women begged us only not to kill them in the house. The officers, on their knees, pleaded for their lives. It was agreed that they should simply give up their swords, be paroled, and allowed to return to camp. At headquarters the next morning, in explanation of the loss of their swords, they told a wonderful and Falstaffian tale of being overwhelmed by Van Dorn's guerrillas the night before, and of their miraculous escape to camp. That moment they were confronted with their surrendered swords and their signatures to their paroles. There was a fine collapse at headquarters that morning. The names of the three gentlemen were sent to General Grant the same day, I understand. But not for promotion."
I had a little taste of life in the hospital that December. My eyes got worse. For a little time I was in a fine private home in Holly Springs, for the town, after its burning by Van Dorn, had been retaken by us. Every room in the house had its floors filled with the sick and the dying of both armies. Long years after that, while on shipboard returning from Europe, I made by chance the acquaintance of Mrs. Kate Sherwood Bonner, the authoress, who as a girl had lived in Holly Springs. We talked of the war times, and it transpired that the mansion where I had witnessed such distressful scenes among the dead and dying was her father's home.
I saw General Grant's father and mother there in Holly Springs daily. At the capture of the town they had been taken as stated, and released, the father on parole.
I was now sent to Memphis, as I was still in hospital. The hospital here was in the old Overton Hotel, which was crowded with hundreds of wounded. The room used as a dead house was filled every night. It was across the court and below my own room. I could see the corpses distinctly, as the window was left open. It was my habit, a strange one, when I awoke in the morning, to look over and count the corpses of men who had been carried in there while I had been sleeping. It seems now a ghastly business enough.
CHAPTER V
The laughable campaign of the war—An army floating among the tree tops of the Yazoo Pass.
In a little time, February, 1863, Grant's army was again off to try for Vicksburg. This time it was to go on that campaign, so laughable now, but romantic always, called the "Yazoo Pass expedition." We were to go down the Mississippi River in big steamers to Helena, and there transfer ourselves on to a fleet of little steamers, cut the levee into the overflooded country, and try floating a whole army a hundred miles across the plantations and swamps of Mississippi.
My eyes were well again, and I was happy to join our regiment and be one of the aquatic throng. Just as we were getting on to the boat at Memphis two of my company managed to get shot by the provost guard. They had been full of liquor, and refused to go to the steamer. They had been heroes at Iuka. How unlucky now to get crippled for life in a drunken brawl!
On the 22d of March, near Helena, my regiment went aboard the pretty little schooner called the Armada. Shortly, dozens of these small boats, crowded with regiments, accompanied by gunboats, were floating about, awaiting the order to sail through a big cut that our engineers had made in the river levee and get down the pass into Moon Lake. The Mississippi was high and raging. All the low-lying country for half a hundred miles was flooded till it looked like a vast sea, with forests of trees standing in its midst. Here and there, too, a plantation, higher than the surrounding country, was noticeable. The first pass into Moon Lake was but a mile long. But through that pass swirled and roared the waters of the Mississippi, so suddenly let loose by the break in the levee.
At just four in the evening our little steamer got the order to turn out of the river and into the rushing waters of the pass. We would not have been more excited at being told to start over Niagara Falls. Our engines are working backward and we enter the crevasse slowly, but in five minutes the fearful, eddying current seized us, and our boat was whirled round and round like a toy skiff in a washtub. We all held our breath as the steamer was hurled among floating logs and against overhanging trees. In ten minutes the rushing torrent had carried us, backward, down into the little lake. Not a soul of the five hundred on board the boat in this crazy ride was lost. Once in the lake we stopped, and with amazement watched other boats, crowded with soldiers, also drift into the whirl and be swept down the pass. It was luck, not management, that half the little army was not drowned.
Now for days and days our little fleet coursed its way toward Vicksburg among the plantations, swamps, woods, bayous, cane-brakes, creeks, and rivers of that inland sea. Wherever