Free Under Siege! by Andrea Warren Page B

officers’ orders. They had to stand where the most soldiers could hear them—sometimes in the open—and because they passed along such important information, they were targeted by enemy sharpshooters.

    F INALLY G RANT HAD TO GIVE UP. His men were fighting heroically, but they were being mowed down and were accomplishing nothing. Grant called a halt. When it was all over, 3,200 Union soldiers were dead-more than had died in the five battles leading up to this day. The Confederates had fewer than 500 casualties. Grant realized he was not going to win Vicksburg either quickly or by storming the defenses. He would have to shell and starve Pemberton into submission. He would have to do it by siege.

    Young Orion Howe with a Union officer.
    That night, Union soldiers didn’t dare try to rescue their wounded or dead lying close to Confederate lines. It was Pemberton who solved the problem. He proposed to Grant a truce for several hours so the Yankees could attend to these men and bury their dead.
    Grant agreed, and during the truce on May 25, the soldiers from both sides met and mingled. A Union soldier wrote, “All the soldiers came out of their works and hiding places, and gave us a good opportunity to look at them. Many gibes and cuts were exchanged between the lines, in which theConfederates seemed to hold their own.” Another soldier reported that two Rebels and two Yankees played cards and swapped Southern tobacco for Northern coffee.
    When the truce was over, the men wished each other good luck. Then they went back to their fortifications, aimed their rifles, and got back to the work of killing each other.

INTO THE CAVES
Late May and Early June 1863
    A s happy as Willie and his sisters were to be back in Vicksburg with their beloved father, the little city was a dangerous place. Dr. Lord impressed on his son that this was not a story from
Ivanhoe
or one of his other treasured adventure novels: the family was in real danger. Since May 18, Grant’s army had formed a tight ring around Vicksburg, sealing it from the outside world. The city was under siege, and, as one soldier said, a cat could not slip out unnoticed.
    Grant wanted the siege to end quickly, before Joe Johnston showed up. To hasten Vicksburg’s surrender, he ordered his artillery units to shell it around the clock. The army aimed 220 cannon at military targets in the city and at the Confederate lines. Admiral Porter’s navy aimed another thirteen big guns from the river. Shells flew fast and furious, sometimes crisscrossing in the air as they rained down death and destruction on the city and the Rebel soldiers. Cannonballs weighing as much as 250 pounds crashed through walls, tore up streets and yards, and exploded in the Confederate trenches. Highly skilled Union sharpshooters loaded their rifles with minié balls—powerful and precise bullets that could travel long distances and kill or maim in an instant. Thunderous explosions and the
z-z-z-z-z-z-pt
sound of these deadly bullets whizzing through the air terrorized both humans and animals. Like their elders, children quickly learned that their best chance of survival was to try to dodge minié balls. They should never try to outrun cannonballs, but stop and let them fly on over.

    This house, behind Union lines and badly damaged by shells, belonged to the Shirley family, who were Union sympathizers. Soldiers who camped in the yard created dugouts for shelter.
    The Lord family soon found out that their home could not protect them. Willie’s sister Lida reported that while the family was eating dinner, “a bombshell burst into the very center of the dining room, blowing out the roof and one side, crushing the well-spread table like an eggshell, and making a great yawning hole in the floor, into which disappeared our supper, china, and furniture.”
    Margaret Lord did not want to live in a cave, but after this incident her husband insisted. The family moved into a large communal cave that had been dug