Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Chapter 7
Along the Mississippi River
1863–1865
On 4 July 1863, the Confederate garrison of Vicksburg laid down its arms.
Some thirty-three thousand Confederates, including those in the hospital, surrendered
to a federal army that numbered twice as many men. Half of the Union
force, under the eye of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, encircled the town while the
other half, commanded by Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, held the country to the
east and kept a Confederate relief force at bay. The 2,574 members of the African
Brigade remained across the river, camped at Milliken’s Bend and Goodrich’s
Landing on the Louisiana shore. No one bothered to calculate the total number
of black civilians employed by Union engineers, quartermasters, and other staff
officers during the course of the siege (see Map 4). 1
When Port Hudson surrendered four days later, Northern vessels could
navigate the nation’s great central highway from Cairo, Illinois, to the mouth
of the Mississippi for the first time in more than two years. Being open to
navigation did not render the river safe or secure, though. Steamboats on the
Mississippi and other waterways were exposed to rifle fire and occasional cannon
fire from shore. Even while Grant’s army laid siege to Vicksburg in the late
spring of 1863, regular and irregular Confederate raiders struck the plantations
that lined the banks of the Mississippi, terrorizing black residents and Northern
lessees alike. Confederate Maj. Gen. John G. Walker claimed afterward to have
“broken up the plantations engaged in raising cotton under federal leases from
Milliken’s Bend to Lake Providence [more than forty miles of crooked river],
capturing some 2,000 negroes, who have been restored to their masters.” In
July, 1st Lt. John L. Mathews of the 8th Louisiana Infantry (African Descent
[AD]) wrote home from Milliken’s Bend: “The secesh made another dash on a
plantation a few nights since and carried off about one hundred negroes mostly
women and children,” besides kidnapping the lessee, Lewis Dent, a brother-in-
1 The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate
Armies, 70 vols. in 128 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), ser. 1, vol. 24,
pt. 2, p. 325, and pt. 3, pp. 452–53 (hereafter cited as OR).