Boone-Duden Confederates of the 2nd Missouri at Vicksburg
by Bob Brail 

            One of the Civil War’s most important sites is Vicksburg, Mississippi.  It was there, over a six week period, that the Union forces of Ulysses Grant lay siege to the Confederate army of John Pemberton until the surrender of the Confederates on July 4, 1863.  Today thousands of Americans visit the battlefield each year, many of them driving the self-guided auto tour.  Tour Stop 10 on Confederate Avenue near Old Graveyard Road is of special relevance to Missourians, for it is there that two small markers stand about fifty feet apart.  These markers pay tribute to the men of the 2nd Missouri Infantry, Confederate States of America, for their involvement in the repulse of Union attacks on May 19 and 22, 1863.  Several men from the Boone-Duden area served with this regiment at Vicksburg. 
 
            The 2nd Missouri Infantry was part of the Missouri Brigade, one of the best known regiments of the Confederate Army.  In fact, Ed Bearss, famous Civil War historian, believes the Missouri Brigade was the best infantry brigade in the Civil War.  General John Pemberton, whose Confederate army at Vicksburg included just this one brigade from Missouri, would write after the war, “If I had ten thousand more Missourians I would have won . . . the war.”  This unit would see action in several major battles, including Pea Ridge, Corinth, Atlanta, and Franklin, before surrendering on May 4, 1865.  The Missouri Brigade’s commanding officer at Vicksburg was Colonel Francis Cockrell. 

            At least nine men from the Boone-Duden area enlisted in the 2nd Missouri during the first months of the war.  Three of these men would already be casualties by the time the Siege of Vicksburg started.  Ed Hunter of Naylor’s Store was killed at Corinth on October 4, 1862, and John   John Clowers, a tobacconist from New Melle, had been captured at Port Gibson, Mississippi, in early May, 1863.  H. Ball of Missouriton died at the Battle of Elkhorn on March 7, 1862.

           Five of the remaining six were members of the 2nd Missouri at Vicksburg.  John S. McClure, a twenty year old laborer, and William P. Abington, the son of a farmer, were from Pauldingville.    Dennis Muschany farmed near Naylor’s Store.  John Price was from Hamburg, the son of a farmer.  The oldest of the six men was thirty-five year old Thomas Jackson, a farm laborer from Missouriton.  All of these men, except Jackson, belonged to the same company, Company C.  (The sixth man was Charles Kruger, also from Missouriton, who was an ambulance driver for the 1st Missouri Infantry.)  None of the men were married.

            The men of the 2nd Missouri, along with the rest of the Missouri Brigade, arrived in Vicksburg on May 17, after their retreat from Champion Hill, and bivouacked in the rear of the entrenchments.  By this time the defensive works at Vicksburg were nearly nine miles long, consisting of earthen walls up to twenty feet thick and ditches up to eight feet deep and fourteen feet wide.  There were nine forts on the walls, along with several rifle pits.  The Confederates had about 130 cannon at their disposal.  General Ulysses S. Grant wasted no time in attacking the fortifications.

            On the morning of May 19, the entire Missouri Brigade, including the 2nd Missouri, was re-armed with new Enfield rifles; then the troops were placed in line of battle, with the 2nd Missouri in reserve near the Stockade Redan.  In the early afternoon, the Union army attempted to “soften” the Confederate trenches with a prolonged artillery barrage before attacking with infantry.  The barrage was ferocious; one soldier later wrote, “Head-logs were knocked to pieces by explosions, which hurled chunks of timber that knocked defenders unconscious and broke limbs.”  Finally the Union infantry began a massive assault directed at the Stockade Redan.   Soon half of the 2nd Missouri was sent to 27th Louisianna Redan at the left of the Stockade. Ephraim Anderson, a corporal in the 2nd Missouri, later wrote that the Union “pour[ed] in a heavy fire from forty to one hundred yards off . . . for two hours and a half.”  Included in this Union attack were several regiments from Missouri, so in many places in the vicinity of the Stockade Redan, Missourians fought against Missourians.  In spite of their superior numbers, the Union soldiers were driven back “with dreadful slaughter.”  The next day, General William T. Sherman wrote in a letter, “The heads of the columns have been swept away as chaff thrown from the hand on a windy day.”

            The Missouri Brigade had eight men killed during the assault and over sixty wounded.  One of those wounded was probably the 2nd Missouri’s Thomas Jackson from Missouriton.  His service record lists his date of death as May 21, so it is likely he was shot in the assault of May 19.   Abington, Price, Muschany, and McClure must have at least momentarily reflected on the horrors of war as yet another former neighbor from southern St. Charles County died in the conflict. 

            Grant was not finished yet.  Only three days later, he tried another assault.  All night on May 21, fifty gunboats in the Mississippi River fired into Vicksburg.  At dawn on May 22 more than one hundred cannon started shooting.  By 10:30 Grant began the infantry assault, this time at three locations along the fortifications, including once again the Stockade Redan, where the 2nd Missouri was still located with the rest of the Missouri Brigade.  This attack proved to be no more successful than the previous one.  James Bradley, a member of the Missouri Brigade, recalled the “the advancing column seemed almost to melt away” as “the savage roll of guns . . . mingled with the yells of the victor and the groans of the dying.”  By 11 AM it was clear the attack had failed, but Grant renewed the assault at 2 PM and again at 3:15 PM.  By day’s end, Union casualties exceeded 3000, while Confederate casualties were less than 500.

            After the dust cleared from these massive Union assaults, the Missouri Brigade camped until the end of June in a wooded ravine which gradually descended to Glass Bayou to the southwest of Stockade Redan.  While this location may sound relatively safe, it proved to be otherwise because of the regular bombardments of the 250 Union guns.  In fact, by the beginning of June, “most Missourians had already suffered some type of wound or injury.”  The citizens of Vicksburg were also subjected to the Union artillery, as they endured constant shells “rising steadily and shiningly in great parabolic curves, descending with ever-increasing swiftness and falling with deafening shrieks and explosions.”  Many families resorted to living in caves.    

            As the siege lengthened, the miseries of Abington, Price, Muschany, McClure, and the other Confederate soldiers, and the citizens of Vicksburg, increased dramatically.  Pneumonia, malaria, scurvy, and dysentery were prevalent among the soldiers.  Measles became epidemic.  Extreme heat and lack of water compounded the ravages of disease, as thirsty soldiers drank from mud holes.  Many artillery horses were killed by the shelling, and their rotting carcasses polluted water supplies.  Men lived for weeks without bathing or changing clothes.  One Vicksburg resident later remembered the soldiers as “half-starved, shaking with ague, and many of them afflicted with low fevers and dysenteric complaints.”  Hospitals were hit by shells, killing many patients.  Medical personnel were lacking, albeit heroic: on June 10, the surgeon of the Missouri Brigade, John Britts, was wounded when City Hospital was shelled.  Britts’ leg was amputated, but he continued his duties.  By late June, nearly 6000 soldiers were in hospitals and, at the July 4th surrender, half of the Confederate army was on the sick list.  Those still “healthy” enough to be in the trenches were exhausted by the physical and mental strain.

            Food was quickly rationed; then the rations were cut again and again.  By mid-June, the men of the 2nd Missouri were on half-rations, and soon after quarter-rations.  Mule meat was eaten when the beef and pork supplies were depleted.  Eventually there was no flour to make bread, so raw peas, used locally to feed livestock, were ground and a “pea bread” was concocted.  The loaves were extremely hard on the outside but full of raw pea meal.  Ephraim Anderson wrote that “one might have knocked down a full-grown steer with a chunk of it.”  The “pea bread” experiment was abandoned after three days.  By June 28, the daily rations for each Confederate amounted to “one biscuit and a small bit of bacon.”

            Soon after his two May assaults failed, Grant’s soldiers began mining operations.  Two tunnels were dug, both under the 3rd Louisianna Redan.  The first was filled with over one ton of explosives was detonated on June 25.  The ensuing Union infantry attack was easily repulsed, but the 2nd Missouri did not participate.  Only a few days later, however, Abington, Price, Muschany, and McClure, along with the rest of the 2nd Missouri would be in the thick of the fighting as the second tunnel, filled with nearly a ton of gunpowder, was exploded.

            The July 1 explosion killed several men and created a crater thirty feet in diameter.  Union artillery immediately began pouring shells into the breach.  Theodore Fisher of the 2nd Missouri remembered “[m]en buried alive in the heap of ruins that lay scattered around. . . . [T]he artillery fire kept up the most terrific fire that ever grated upon the human ear. . . . [Artillery] fired unceasingly into the works.”

            Into this chaos charged the men of the 2nd Missouri.  Their brigade commander, Colonel Cockrell, had been knocked several feet by the explosion, but he jumped to his feet and, seeing the 2nd Missouri nearby, shouted, “Forward, my brave old Second Missouri, and prepare to die!”  The 2nd Missouri then advanced to a position on the rear of the crater, according to Ephraim Anderson, “amidst this scene of woe and death,” as “the enemy’s balls and shells whizzed and flashed in wild riot and fatal destruction.”  The explosions caused by the Union shelling nearly covered the men with dirt, but they fought on.  Anderson wrote, “They stood devotedly to their places, and, through the smoke of the battle, upon every countenance was depicted the determination to hold the parapet or die in its defense.”  Toward evening, Lieutenant-Colonel Pembroke Senteny, temporarily in charge of the 2nd Missouri that day, was shot in the head and killed.  The 2nd Missouri would suffer thirty-eight casualties that day, many of whom would later die of their wounds.
           
            At 10:30 AM on July 4, the 2nd Missouri, along with the rest of the Confederate forces, marched out of their trenches and stacked their arms.  According to one Union soldier, many of the Confederates “staggered like drunken men from emaciation, and from emotion, and wept like children that all their long sacrifice was unavailing.”  Nearly all of the Confederates, apparently including all the men from the Boone-Duden area, then signed parole papers, promising not to fight again until they had been officially exchanged for paroled Union troops.  On July 11, the surrendered soldiers left Vicksburg to go to parole camps in Mississippi to await exchange, but even before then Confederates had begun to desert and return home.  During the last part of July, desertions from the paroled soldiers occurred by the hundreds.  For example, the 2nd Missouri’s John Price of Hamburg deserted while awaiting exchange at Enterprise, Mississippi, on July 23, 1863, and never returned to the war.
           
          The 2nd Missouri Infantry suffered 106 casualties (killed, wounded, or captured) during the Siege of Vicksburg, including Thomas Jackson of Missouriton.  However, the tragedies of the Boone-Duden men were not over.  Dennis Muschany was exchanged and returned to the war several weeks later, but he would never return home to his farm.  Muschany was killed at Altoona on October 5, 1864. 

            Famous military units are always made up of someone’s family, friends, and neighbors, and the 2nd Missouri Infantry of the famous Missouri Brigade was no exception.  Five of our Boone-Duden neighbors, some of whom perhaps were ancestors of someone reading this article, fought with the 2nd Missouri at Vicksburg.  It is good to remember them.

Sources: The Civil War: Fredericksburg to Meridian (Shelby Foote); Civil War Records: Missouri Confederate Infantry (Kenneth E. Weant); Civil War Veterans of St. Charles County, Missouri (St. Charles County Geneological Society); Echoes of Glory: Illustrated Atlas of the Civil War (Time-Life Books); Federal Census Records; Gone But Not Forgotten (Mary J. McElhiney); In Deadly Earnest: The History of the Missouri Brigade (Phil Gottschalk); Missouri Digital Heritage (sos.mo.gov/archives/soldiers); The Official Military Atlas of the Civil War; Soldiers and Sailors Database (nps.gov/civilwar); The South’s Finest: The First Missouri Brigade from Pea Ridge to Vicksburg (Phillip Thomas Tucker); Voices of the Civil War: Vicksburg (Time-Life Books); 1st Missouri Brigade (home.comcast.net/~ajpem/Scripts/1st_Missouri.htm).