Confederates in the Attic (30 page)

Gerache often shared his collection with school groups, and also performed mock amputations at reenactments. Mostly, though, he displayed his wares for his own personal pleasure. “I have my collectibles at the store because I’m here twice as much as I’m at home. So why not have them to look at?”

Gerache had also confirmed his parents’ fears. For years he’d heard rumors about a huge Confederate gun buried on the edge of town. “I got to thinking, bullets and pistols are nice. But maybe I ought to have
a cannon.” He’d found what looked like the edge of a cannon barrel poking from an old woman’s flower garden. The woman didn’t want her yard torn up, so Gerache purchased the land, still unsure what lay beneath. “I bought a pig in a poke,” he said.

The pig turned out to be a 9,000-pound Parrott Gun, one of the Confederacy’s huge riverside cannons. Gerache pointed out the store window at a traffic circle across the street. In the middle squatted the Parrott, its ten-foot barrel pointing toward the water. The cannon was worth at least $60,000 to collectors, but Gerache didn’t worry about security. “Nobody will move that, unless they’ve got a construction crane,” he said. “It’s been hit by cars a few times but that’s it.”

Someone rapped on the pharmacy door. Gerache looked up as if to wish them away. “Come by my house after work,” he said, “and I’ll show you a few more of my favorite things.”

R
ETREATING DOWN THE HILL
to the air-conditioned casino, I sat at the bar and scanned the tourist literature Lenore had given me, as well as newspaper clips I’d collected on Vicksburg. “If all that comes to mind when you think of our town is Civil War battle scenes, you’re not even getting half the picture,” the promotional literature began. “Don’t get us wrong. Vicksburg’s place in history is permanent. But Vicksburg today is much, much more. It’s a place where old and new blend in delightful combination like nowhere else in America.”

Actually, old and new weren’t blending too well, and history was proving anything but permanent. Frenzied construction along the waterfront had changed drainage patterns and cut into the loose, silty soil of Vicksburg’s fragile bluffs, hastening their erosion. The Park Service had recently been forced to close a blufftop gun battery because it had buckled following construction of a casino access road at the base of the hill. The massive cannon, which had once helped repel the Union fleet, now pointed impotently at a casino parking lot into which the gun battery now threatened to slide.

Another casino, ignoring the warnings of the Park Service and local historians, had bulldozed near a nineteenth-century black graveyard
that held the remains of U.S. Colored Troops. Construction at the site halted when the dozers turned up bones. “I just want to get my deceased out of there,” the graveyard’s overseer told the local paper, sounding like a general requesting a ceasefire to collect his casualties.

Vicksburg’s battlefield, or the portion of it preserved by the Park Service, formed a crescent arcing across hills and ravines a mile or so behind the waterfront. Touring it by foot and car, I found the battle much harder to grasp than Shiloh. For starters, Vicksburg wasn’t a single, momentous clash between armies meeting on a defined patch of ground. Instead, Vicksburg became a months-long campaign embracing several mini-battles and the forty-seven-day siege. Much of the fighting occurred far from Vicksburg, as Grant drove inland to encircle the city.

Vicksburg differed from Shiloh in other essential ways. By mid-1863, generals had overcome their earlier disdain for digging in. Shovels proved as crucial as guns, with the two sides gouging 60,000 feet of zigzag trenches. Also, civilians suffered alongside soldiers, enduring heavy bombardment and near-starvation during the siege. Vicksburg, in sum, offered a preview of the sort of grinding, total warfare that Grant and Sherman would later wage in the East—and that European armies would pursue with even greater savagery in the twentieth century.

The battlefield park’s most conspicuous feature was its “monument overload,” as one ranger put it. The plaques and memorials totaled 1,323, and that was after a significant subtraction; during a 1942 metal drive, half the cast-iron tablets were donated to the World War II effort. One monument stood out. Modeled on the Pantheon in Rome, it was inscribed with the names of 36,000 Illinois soldiers, including an extraordinary private named Albert D. J. Cashire.

“In handling a musket in battle,” a comrade recalled, “he was the equal of any in the company.” Cashire also “seemed specially adept at those tasks so despised by the infantryman,” such as sewing and washing clothes. Cashire fought in forty skirmishes and battles and became active in veterans’ affairs, marching in parades for decades after the War.

Then, in 1911, while working as a handyman in Illinois, Cashire was hit by an automobile and taken to the hospital with a leg broken close to the hip. The doctor who examined Cashire discovered what the Illinois veteran had so long concealed; Cashire was a woman, an Irish immigrant née Jennie Hodgers. Hodgers was eventually sent to an insane asylum and forced to wear women’s clothing until her death in 1915.

“I left Cashier the fearless boy of twenty-two at the end of the Vicksburg campaign,” one former comrade wrote after visiting her at the asylum. “I found a frail woman of seventy, broken, because on discovery she was compelled to put on skirts. They told me she was as awkward as could be in them. One day she tripped and fell, hurting her hip. She never recovered.”

A former sergeant said that Hodgers told him, “The country needed me, and I wanted excitement.” Money may have tempted her as well; for a poor Irish immigrant, the soldier’s pay of $13 a month represented a stable if modest income. Vicksburg’s battlefield museum displayed a picture of Hodgers in uniform, a mannish figure with short hair who stood conspicuously shorter than her comrades (she was barely five feet tall). The museum also told of 400 other women who went to war disguised as men. One, Sarah Emma Edmonds, chose to reveal her sex in 1884, when she appeared for a reunion of the 2nd Michigan Infantry as a woman.

Hodgers’s secret, at least, lived after her, with her assumed name etched on the Illinois monument at Vicksburg, and on a veterans’ headstone the War Department placed by her grave. Decades later, another stone was added that read:

The Vicksburg siege produced other oddities. The Confederacy experimented with camels, and one colonel used a dromedary to
carry his personal baggage—until a Union sharpshooter killed the animal. There were also Vicksburg’s famed caves, dug by civilians as protection against the Union bombardment. Some of these burrows became elaborate affairs, furnished with carpets and beds and serviced by slaves. But most were crude, crowded dugouts that one resident described as “rat-holes.” Like the soldiers, civilians also saw food supplies dwindle to a meager daily ration. When beef ran out, they ate mule meat, frogs and rats. Flour was replaced by a blend of corn-meal and ground peas. “It made a nauseous composition, as the corn-meal cooked in half the time the pea-meal did, so this stuff was half raw,” one Southerner wrote. “It had the properties of india-rubber and was worse than leather to digest.”

By early July, both soldiers and civilians were on the brink of starvation, and surrender became inevitable. The Confederate commander, an émigré from Pennsylvania named John Pemberton, told his officers: “I know their peculiar weaknesses and their national vanity. I know we can get better terms from them on the Fourth of July than on any other day of the year.” He was right. Grant generously agreed to parole the 30,000 Confederate troops within the Vicksburg defenses.

Even so, the fierce and protracted fighting in Vicksburg left the community deeply embittered. Though the city and its surrounding county had been one of only two in Mississippi to vote against secession (Natchez was the other), post-War Vicksburg hallowed the Cause and disdained the national battlefield as a “Yankee park.” Mississippians initially refused to erect a state monument there, and never put up a memorial to Pemberton, the Northern-born rebel commander. As late as the 1950s, Joe Gerache had told me, “folks didn’t talk about the surrender here. It was a ‘cessation of hostilities.’ The people of Vicksburg never gave up, it was only that Yankee general Pemberton who lost the city.”

As elsewhere, a great deal of myth underlay this romance. Just before the surrender, Confederates petitioned Pemberton in a letter signed “Many Soldiers,” telling him: “If you can’t feed us, you had better surrender, horrible as the idea is, than suffer this noble army to disgrace themselves by desertion.” Nor were cruel modern tactics
limited to the Northern side. The Confederates placed Union prisoners in Vicksburg’s courthouse as a human shield to deter Northern gunners from firing on the building.

The courthouse survived with only one hit, and now housed Vicksburg’s city museum. It was the most eccentric—and politically incorrect—collection I’d yet visited in the South. In the “Confederate Room,” alongside a piece of orginal hardtack and a copy of the
Vicksburg Citizen
printed on wallpaper because newsprint ran out, I found a pair of Confederate trousers “made by a plantation mammy” and a photograph of a Southern matron with “her slaves who refused to accept freedom.” An exhibit on Jefferson Davis, who delivered his first public speech on the courthouse grounds, stated: “There was a very special relationship between Jefferson Davis and his slaves. He was not only their master but also their friend.” Another display pointed out: “Ironically, Gen. U.S. Grant was a slave owner while Gen. Robert E. Lee freed his slaves.”

This last was a hoary bit of Southern propaganda. Grant’s in-laws were Missourians who owned slaves before the War; Grant acquired one from them and set him free a year later. As for Lee, the slaves in question were those his wife inherited in October 1857, with the stipulation that Lee, as executor, emancipate them within five years. Lee missed the deadline and didn’t free the slaves until December 29, 1863.

In another room, I found a Ku Klux Klan hood with eye holes and a red tassel. “The Klan’s purpose was to rid the South of the carpetbag-scalawag-black governments, which were often corrupt,” the accompanying text said. “Atrocities were sometimes attributed to the Klan by unscrupulous individuals.”

But the most striking exhibit of all was titled “The Minié Ball Pregnancy.” It featured a Civil War bullet and a picture of a Vicksburg doctor whose medical feat was described as follows:

I realized with a start that I’d heard a bowdlerized version of this tale on my elementary school playground. Was it possible that this proto-urban legend had some basis in fact?

I found the museum’s curator, Gordon Cotton, sifting papers in a backroom. Cotton was a striking Shelby Foote look-and-sound-alike, a kinship partly explained by the two men having grown up in the same part of the Mississippi Delta. “I heard someone laughing out loud and knew you must be reading about the Minié Ball Pregnancy,” he said.

I asked if he thought the story could possibly be true.

“The girl’s mother believed it, and nothing else matters,” he replied. “I guess you could say that baby was the original son-of-a-gun.”

Part of the story was indeed factual. Dr. Le Grand Capers was the real name of a Confederate surgeon who wrote about the minié ball pregnancy in the
American Medical Weekly
in 1874, under the headline: “Attention Gynaecologists! Notes from the Diary of a Field and Hospital Surgeon CSA.” However, Capers intended the article as a spoof of the wildly inflated stories of medical prowess reported by other doctors in the War. Not everyone got the joke and Capers’s medical reputation never recovered.

“I decided to just present the story as Capers did,” Cotton said with a shrug. “History shouldn’t be dull.” The same attitude extended to the other exhibits, which Cotton himself had arranged with what he freely admitted was a strong Southern bias. “This is Vicksburg’s attic,” he said. “Our story is the story of Vicksburg, not somewhere in Pennsylvania. People might say, ‘that’s a Southern view,’ but this is a Southern town.”

Most of the items came from local households. The Klan hood had literally come from an attic, stowed in a trunk by a relative of Cotton’s. The outfit originally belonged to Cotton’s great-grandfather, a Confederate private. “The Klan’s part of our history, good or bad,” he said. “People often ask me if my great-grandfather hated blacks.
No, I tell them. He hated Yankees. Anyway, if it hadn’t been for the Yankee occupation, we wouldn’t have any good stories to tell.”

Cotton lived in the same 1840s farmhouse where he, his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been born. One of Cotton’s cousins still slept in a bed riddled by bullets when Yankees killed her great-great-grandmother during a plantation raid. “Her killers were tried upstairs in this courthouse,” Cotton said. “So you see, we’re never far from our history. I’m not going to go through this museum rewriting the past just to please someone in the present.”

Anyway, the present wasn’t very pleasing to Cotton, particularly the casinos. “I’m still of that old Protestant work ethic, you work for what you get. I don’t believe in ill-gotten gains and games of chance.” Not that he was a prude. “We had a wonderful whorehouse district,” he said. “It’s gone.” He acknowledged, too, that the casinos had created thousands of jobs and pumped millions of dollars in tax revenues into a state that had long been the poorest in the nation.