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{49} chapter two Broken Country Union Campaigns at and around Vicksburg, 1863 as winter gave way to spring in 1863, renewed energy infused the Union forces just as it did the verdant Louisiana countryside. The men were eager to leave their camps at Milliken’s Bend and De Soto Point and distance themselves from the places they associated with floods, illness, and seemingly futile hard labor. Sherman lamented that after four months of being within sight of the city, they still had not “got at Vicksburg. We have not got on Shore.” Sherman reasoned that “no man can wade the Mississipi or the deep sloughs and marshes that surround it.” He noted at the time that in order to take Vicksburg, the Union forces would “have to overcome not only an equal number of determined men, however wrongfully engaged, but the natural obstacles of a most difficult Country.” Instead of taking control of the eastern Louisiana landscape, Union efforts to improve that “most difficult Country” transformed it into a deadly environment . Compounding this, by late March the weather had already become quite warm, with at least one soldier complaining in a letter home that as he wrote “the sweat just drops off me.” Another soldier reported home from camp at Milliken’s Bend that he and his friends were “all well at present, but it is very, very sickly about here.” The heat enervated the men, led to dehydration , and further facilitated the spread of fatal illnesses. The floodwaters of the Mississippi, near their peak in March that year, contributed to the sickly conditions and created other logistical problems. When the Mississippi was in flood, the tangled, forested backswamps filled with water and became navigable only by pirogues, the small canoes locals used. For an individual this was not such a problem, but for an army with horses, wagons, and artillery, the swamps and bayous posed an almost insurmountable obstacle. Grant’s best option was to utilize the narrow roads that ran atop the interconnected levee system—the only consistently dry land in the region. One of these roads snaked its way south from the Union camps at Milliken’s Bend and {50} chapter two De Soto Point, following the contours of the natural levees along the Roundaway Bayou between Richmond and New Carthage, Louisiana. There it joined another levee road along Bayou Vidal and Lake St. Joseph that led through Hard Times, Louisiana, to Disharoon Plantation, where Grant planned to cross the river and finally enter Mississippi. Though Hard Times was less than thirty miles south of De Soto Point as the crow flies, it was a more than seventy-five-mile circuitous march. The route potentially left the army vulnerable to a Confederate attack from the west and stretched the Union supply lines treacherously thin, but there was no viable alternative. As long as the river remained in flood, however, Louisiana’s geography for once would support Union actions. This was clear to Grant after an early reconnaissance mission revealed that the land surrounding the road “was so low and wet that it would not have been practicable to march an army across [it].” The levee, on the other hand, “afforded a good road to march upon.” The road followed the dry, cultivated natural levees, with the flooded and forested backswamps on one side for protection and the bayous on the other. The rains that had plagued Grant’s army over the winter proved, in at least this instance, a blessing rather than a curse, pushing the Mississippi’s level ever higher and creating a nearly impassable barrier between Grant’s marching troops and the Confederate forces under Gen. Kirby Smith in western Louisiana. Despite its potential benefits, the ubiquitous precipitation continued to be a source of discontent for Grant’s army. On March 28, 1863, 3rd Sgt. Taylor Peirce of the Twenty-Second Iowa penned the following to his wife: “This is a nice country here but I would not like to live here on account of the water. The land is flat and low. And at this time if it were not for the levees thrown up along the river it would all be under water the surface of the river being higher than the surrounding country.” A week later he wrote again to his wife, complaining once more of an excess of water. “We are lying on the levee on the Missi[ssippi] with a mile of water on each...

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