Vicksburg had a breathing spell.

Three weeks later, when the army was resting at Napoleon, Arkansas, a self-contained man, with a brown beard arrived from Memphis, and took command.  This way General U. S. Grant.  He smoked incessantly in his cabin.  He listened.  He spoke but seldom.  He had look in his face that boded ill to any that might oppose him.  Time and labor be counted as nothing, compared with the accomplishment of an object.  Back to Vicksburg paddled the fleet and transports.  Across the river from the city, on the pasty mud behind the levee’s bank were dumped Sherman’s regiments, condemned to week of ditch-digging, that the gunboats might arrive at the bend of the Mississippi below by a canal, out of reach of the batteries.  Day in and day out they labored, officer and men.  Sawing off stumps under the water, knocking poisonous snakes by scores from the branches, while the river rose and rose and rose, and the rain crept by inches under their tent flies, and the enemy walked the parapet of Vicksburg and laughed.  Two gunboats accomplished the feat of running the batteries, that their smiles might be sobered.

To the young officers who were soiling their uniform with the grease of saws, whose only fighting was against fever and water snakes, the news of an expedition into the Vicksburg side of the river was hailed with caps in the air.  To be sure, the saw and axe, and likewise the levee and the snakes, were to be there, too.  But there was likely to be a little fighting.  The rest of the corps that was to stay watched grimly as the detachment put off in the little ‘Diligence’ and ‘Silver Wave’.

All the night the smoke-pipes were batting against the boughs of oak and cottonwood, and snapping the trailing vines.  Some other regiments went by another route.  The ironclads, followed in hot haste by General Sherman in a navy tug, had gone ahead, and were even then shoving with their noses great trunks of trees in their eagerness to get behind the Rebels.  The Missouri regiment spread out along the waters, and were soon waist deep, hewing a path for the heavier transports to come.  Presently the General came back to a plantation half under water, where Black Bayou joins Deer Creek, to hurry the work in cleaning out that Bayou.  The light transports meanwhile were bringing up more troops from a second detachment.  All through the Friday the navy great guns were heard booming in the distance, growing quicker and quicker, until the quivering air shook the hanging things in that vast jungle.  Saws stopped, and axes were poised over shoulders, and many times that day the General lifted his head anxiously.  As he sat down in the evening in a slave cabin redolent with corn pone and bacon, the sound still hovered among the trees and rolled along the still waters.

The General slept lightly.  It was three o’clock Saturday morning when the sharp challenge of a sentry broke the silence.  A negro, white eyed, bedraggled, and muddy, stood in the candle light under the charge of a young lieutenant.  The officer saluted, and handed the General a roll of tobacco.