This Great Struggle by Steven Woodworth

Author:Steven Woodworth [Woodworth, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4422-1087-5
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

One interesting plan was based on the fact that Vicksburg lay on the outside edge of a bend in the Mississippi. The plan involved digging a canal across the tongue of land called DeSoto Point, located on the Louisiana shore on the inside of the bend. In theory this would allow access to the lower reaches of the Mississippi without running the gauntlet of the Vicksburg batteries. Lincoln, who in his youth had taken a flatboat full of midwestern crops down the Mississippi to New Orleans, was intrigued by the idea and followed its progress eagerly. The scheme called for digging a ditch of reasonable size across the bend and then for the river itself to take over and scour the ditch into a new and shorter channel, as it was wont to do even without any human assistance. Unfortunately, the upper end of the canal entered the river in an area of slack water, where erosion was unlikely. Ultimately, the river proved as perverse as ever, refusing to use the new channel offered by thousands of man-hours of Grant’s soldiers’ work.

Another plan involved opening the Mississippi River levy at Lake Providence, Louisiana, fifty miles upstream from Vicksburg. In theory this would make accessible a chain of interconnected swamps and streams, swollen by seasonal high water to just enough depth for the shallow-draft riverboats, so as to allow access to the Red River. The boats would then have easy steaming down the Red River to its mouth, about 130 miles below Vicksburg. Like the canal scheme, the Lake Providence undertaking promised access to the Mississippi, where it lapped the base of the state’s interior plateau without exposing the boats to the guns of Vicksburg. Grant assigned one of his army’s three corps to encamp at Lake Providence and work on clearing the cypress trees that clogged the proposed waterway, but after weeks of work, it became apparent that the boats would never be able to get through by that route.

Yet another plan called for cutting the Mississippi River levy on the Mississippi side at a place called Yazoo Pass, almost opposite the town of Helena, Arkansas, about 175 miles upstream from Vicksburg. This would allow the gunboats to pass into Moon Lake, thence into the Coldwater River, which would lead to the Tallahatchie, which at last would join with the Yalobusha to form the Yazoo. The fleet, followed by the transports, would thus have access to the Yazoo far above Vicksburg and could easily insert Grant’s army onto the interior plateau of Mississippi.

It sounded simple enough, but the waterways were so narrow that details of sailors had to stand on deck with poles and push on the banks to get the sluggish gunboats to turn sharply enough to follow their winding courses. The gunboats’ smokestacks brushed and banged against overhanging trees, sustaining damage while knocking loose a rain of snakes, lizards, opossums, and other arboreal creatures that fell to the decks and had to be swept over the side with brooms by other details of sailors.

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