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To-day a general charge upon the enemy's works was
ordered and made, though I cannot yet learn that at any point
the works were completely carried. The singularly rough nature
of the ground makes it almost impossible to tell what we have
to encounter, and rapidly fatigues the men. But we advance in
this way steadily, and at each charge our sharpshooters obtain
a better position for their operations. Our artillery hastens
to get better position, small intrenchments
being thrown up to protect it; and thus we have the curious spectacle
of hostile redoubts already frowning upon each other, at a distance
of but a few hundred yards.
The guns of the rebels reply to our shelling but
seldom. They are evidently husbanding their ammunition, for they
can now get no further supply. Their redoubts are constructed
for field guns, and within the last three weeks Grant has captured
about seventy of these.
In the meantime we have a new base of supplies from
the Yazoo, through which reinforcements, provisions, ammunition
and heavy guns can be sent as rapidly as we please.
The rebel force within Vicksburg cannot now be more
than twenty thousand. Before the fight at Jackson, they may have
had forty-five thousand, but part of that number we forced up
northward toward Canton – say ten thousand. At the battle of
Midway Hills, (or Champion Hills,) on the 16th instant, their
effective force was perhaps thirty-five thousand men. Of these
at least ten thousand were killed, wounded or captured, or driven
to escape northward or southward, in such a way as to prevent
them from returning to Vicksburg. At the fight on Big Black,
on the 17th, we captured nearly three thousand, and scattered
many more in such a way that they are more likely to have straggled
home through the woods than to have reported for duty.
LATER.
I have arrived at the Yazoo, near Chickasaw Bayou,
after riding from the extreme left of our army. Of course rumors
are plenty of the operations of to-day. One is that our mortars
and gunboats have silenced two of the upper water batteries, and
that vessels now pass Vicksburg without being fired on. Another
is that in the attempted charge of to-day the Thirty-First Illinois
got up to the enemy's works, and there found a stockade so high
that they could not scale it, and so they stopped and lay down
under it, unable to go further, yet protected from the enemy's
fire. At this moment a rebel redoubt on the left tried to get
a raking fire on them, when our artillery, concentrating its shots
upon the redoubt, suddenly battered it to silence, knocking one
of its guns some thirty feet into the air.
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