Remembering the Civil War by Michael Barton

Author:Michael Barton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2019-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Source: Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York: Charles L. Webster & Company, 1885; Project Gutenberg, 2004), vol. 1, pt. 3, chap. 37, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5862.

FALL OF A SHELL AT THE CORNER OF MY CAVE

JUNE 1863

MARY ANN LOUGHBOROUGH, CSA

There is irony in the fact that Mary Ann Webster Loughborough provides the finest firsthand account of the harrowing conditions within Vicksburg, because this nominal southern belle was actually born in New York. Her husband was a Southern-leaning Kentuckian, and together they lived in St. Louis before the war, where their Confederate sympathies became firm. Husband James Loughborough served as a CSA major, while Mary Ann followed him, attempting to reside close to wherever he served. Her daughter in tow, she arrived in Vicksburg on April 15, 1863, just in time to experience the results of Grant’s masterful campaign. The Union trap snapped shut. Her diary formed the basis for her later memoir, which gripped readers North and South. Here, she remembers how direly civilians trapped in the city suffered alongside its gray-clad defenders. The deprivations of the siege—hunger, fear, danger, death—did not discriminate between civilian and combatant.

I was sitting near the entrance, about five o’clock, thinking of the pleasant change—oh, bless me!—that to-morrow would bring, when the bombardment commenced more furiously than usual, the shells falling thickly around us, causing vast columns of earth to fly upward, mingled with smoke. As usual, I was uncertain whether to remain within or run out. As the rocking and trembling of the earth was very distinctly felt, and the explosions alarmingly near, I stood within the mouth of the cave ready to make my escape, should one chance to fall above our domicile. In my anxiety I was startled by the shouts of the servants and a most fearful jar and rocking of the earth, followed by a deafening explosion, such as I had never heard before. The cave filled instantly with powder smoke and dust. I stood with a tingling, prickling sensation in my head, hands, and feet, and with a confused brain. Yet alive!—was the first glad thought that came to me;—child, servants, all here, and saved!—from some great danger, I felt. I stepped out, to find a group of persons before my cave, looking anxiously for me; and lying all around, freshly torn, rose bushes, arbor-vitæ trees, large clods of earth, splinters, pieces of plank, wood, &c. A mortar shell had struck the corner of the cave, fortunately so near the brow of the hill, that it had gone obliquely into the earth, exploding as it went, breaking large masses from the side of the hill—tearing away the fence, the shrubbery and flowers—sweeping all, like an avalanche, down near the entrance of my good refuge.

I stood dismayed, and surveyed the havoc that had been made around me, while our little family under it all had been mercifully preserved. Though many of the neighboring servants had been standing near at the time, not one had been injured in the slightest degree; yet, pieces of plank, fragments of earth, and splinters had fallen in all directions.

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