Recently, I had occasion to spend some time at Vicksburg National Military Park in Mississippi. I visited mostly in the early mornings and evenings, to escape the press of sight-seers and the worst of the summer heat. In those quiet and (slightly) cooler hours, I tracked the park’s concrete roadways through the loess hills above the city, past the set-pieces of public history: information-dense metal plaques, red for Confederate and blue for Union; a thick scatter of chiseled stone monuments and bronze statues; and the obligatory cannon and Parrott rifles. There were massive obelisks, magnificent domes, heroic generals on horseback, infantrymen cradling muskets, bronzed female symbols of peace and liberty. If there were names attached to the statues and other monuments, they were those of officers or their units. As individuals, the enlisted men had disappeared, buried in mostly unmarked graves or remembered only by their contribution to summary casualty figures: 66 dead, 339 wounded, 37 missing – on and on and on, those depressing numbers. Mostly I visited the park to run or watch birds, or walk with a friend, but the history of the place was never entirely muted. What occurred at Vicksburg 156 years ago has settled over the land like layers of gauze. Sometimes the layers are thick, at other times thin — but they are always there, reminding me of the ways in which a battle and siege that produced 20,000 casualties trails through time, from the Civil War to Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and our current state of bitter discontent. As Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It’s a curious thing, though. Given how the dead and wounded of Vicksburg — not to mention the entire skein of history that unraveled over four years, from Fort Sumter to Appomattox — continue to manifest themselves (Charlottesville; the rising fight over reparations; Trayvon Martin; Black Lives Matter; in-your-face Confederate battle flags flapping from front porches and pickup trucks; even POTUS himself), the battlefield remains a topography of the shadow-lands. Its contours and historical reality have been softened by time, manicured lawns, fields of luxuriant grass and dense forests, and by how we commemorate the conflict. The Civil War lives on, but at Vicksburg it does so in a sanitized landscape, one that verges on the pastoral. There are the memorials to the officers and units that served at Vicksburg — in many cases, monuments to carnage — but in the summer mockingbirds, yellow-breasted chats, and indigo buntings sing from nearby thickets, while deer emerge at twilight to feed in empty fields, among the spirits of the dead. Surprisingly, it can be difficult to hear well in that quiet peace. And so what I came to struggle with, as I ran through the park or raised my binoculars to the brilliant flash of a summer tanager, or talked with my friend, were two things. The first was how the voices of dead, and the history of Vicksburg and its consequences, were mostly muffled. But the second thing that I became aware of, and which seems to partially refute what I have just written, was a growing sense of discomfort when I was behind the Confederate lines. I was unable to dismiss what the Confederates (be they wealthy plantation owners and their wealthy sons, or poor dirt farmers and their poor sons) were fighting for, whether consciously or unconsciously: the right of one human being to own another. And in this, I was unsettled. This sense of dislocation and discomfort — of history stifled and dulled — and the question of how to best acknowledge the people who fought at Vicksburg, pursued me one day, as I climbed on to Railroad Redoubt — one of the strongholds that anchored the southern part of the Confederate line. From the redoubt I gazed east over empty fields and ravines, toward the Union positions. Behind me was the Texas Memorial, with its bronze statue of a resolute Confederate soldier, musket at the ready. The air was hot and viscous, thick with humidity and the rasp of cicadas. Here, on May 22, 1863, Union soldiers of the 22nd Iowa Volunteer Infantry Regiment, with close support by regiments from Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, attacked the Confederate lines. The redoubt was defended by the 46th and 48th Alabama regiments, with Waul’s Texas Legion in reserve. The initial advance occurred over broken but mostly open ground, across a killing field raked by concentrated musket fire and grapeshot. About forty yards from the redoubt, the surviving attackers encountered a thick tangle of felled trees; beyond this obstacle was a deep ditch. Only fifteen to twenty men of the 22nd Iowa crossed the ditch and entered Railroad Redoubt, although members of other regiments reached the edge of the Confederate positions. Volunteers from Waul’s Texas Legion counterattacked and in vicious hand-to-hand fighting drove the Union soldiers from the redoubt. Of the Iowans who entered Railroad Redoubt, two lived. And of the 200 men in the 22nd Iowa who took part in the assault, forty-two were killed or died of their wounds, 128 were wounded, and nineteen were captured — a casualty rate of 85%. Other Union regiments suffered slightly lower but still horrific losses. Waul’s unit lost 245 men killed, wounded, or missing over the course of the battle and siege. It is difficult to countenance these numbers, to fully appreciate what Railroad Redoubt would have looked, felt, and smelled like during the attack. But when I stood at the edge of the parapet and looked down its twenty- to thirty-degree slope, in the direction of the Union advance, I knew that I was standing at the edge of death. There were ghosts in the grass and ghosts in the air, and they spoke in the language of unconscionable pain and suffering. Men defended and stormed Railroad Redoubt, killing one another with Minié balls, canon balls, canister shot, grapeshot, bayonets, knives, and their bare hands. Soldiers were instantaneously obliterated by artillery fire or a musket-shot shot to the head. Others—gut-shot or bayoneted — would have died slowly and horribly, with a maddening thirst, beneath a brutal May sun. What exactly in all of this should I – we — remember, and in doing so, honor? Courage, and the terrible beauty of combat, if that is the right phrase? Duty in the face of death? “Heritage,” be it Union or Confederate? And should Railroad Redoubt (and the entire Vicksburg battlefield) be a place that presents history only in a “this-happened-to-them-here” manner, an approach guaranteed to offend few people, or should the displays directly confront slavery and the forces that generated the Civil War and led men to kill one another, here? I have no ready answers. There is something important to acknowledge about what occurred at Railroad Redoubt on the 22nd of May 1863, although I am uncertain as to what that actually is. And I understand why some people, particularly the descendants of those who fought for the Confederacy, might hope to embrace a “heritage, not hate” or “Lost Cause” narrative, while ignoring the bitter truths about slavery and what their ancestors actually fought for — as exemplified by displays at the Old Warren County Court House Museum in Vicksburg. But whatever we choose to remember about Railroad Redoubt, the Vicksburg Campaign, and the Civil War, it must include an honest reckoning with slavery and its consequences. This is something our country has never done — yet it must, if we are ever to achieve any kind of racial justice and peace. On one of the last evenings of my visit, as my friend and I were walking on an empty road in the park, a sound of singing drifted down upon us. The sound carried through the hot and humid air, which lay like a fog over the land, and its notes were faintly mysterious, almost ethereal. Soon the source became apparent — three adolescent boys, Civil War reenactors, fresh-faced and dressed in Confederate gray, two of them bare-footed. I did not recognize their words, but I took the song for one that would have been popular with Confederate soldiers. And there was something about that moment — the quiet park and silent cannon, those bits of song drifting through time, the uniforms worn by boys no younger than some who fought and died at Vicksburg — that captured the essence of my discomfort, and my question: what is it about Vicksburg that we should remember, and through that remembrance, learn from? The humanity and history carried by those three boys, with their sweet, insouciant voices? The repression and sorrow represented by their Confederate uniforms — fundamentally, the “right” of one human being to own another? Or should it be some complex combination of the ideas and emotions that arise at the intersection between these conflicting views?
In the gathering night, beset by questions about remembrance and history, and as the notes from an old Confederate song died away, I recalled some dialog from the final scene in Terrence Malick’s A Thin Red Line, a movie about another battle in another war: “Darkness and light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind, the features of the same face? Oh my soul. Let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made — all things shining.” Sometimes, though, it is hard to know what should shine, and what should not.
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AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
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