The Memories of Fifty Years: Containing Brief Biographical Notices of Distinguished Americans, and Anecdotes of Remarkable Men; Interspersed with Scenes and Incidents Occurring during a Long Life of Observation Chiefly Spent in the SouthwestSparks, W. H. (William Henry)
History
The Memories of Fifty Years: Containing Brief Biographical Notices of Distinguished Americans, and Anecdotes of Remarkable Men; Interspersed with Scenes and Incidents Occurring during a Long Life of Observation Chiefly Spent in the Southwest
Sparks, W. H. (William Henry)
Georgia -- History -- 1775-1865; Southwest, Old -- History; United States -- Biography
This spot has become classic ground. It was here Aaron Burr was first
arrested by Cowles Mead, then acting as Governor of the Territory of
Mississippi, and from whom he made his escape, and it was at this point
that Grant crossed his army when advancing against Vicksburg. It is a
beautiful plateau of land, of some two thousand acres, immediately
below the mouth of the Bayou Pierre, and bordered by very high and
abrupt cliffs, which belong to the same range of hills that approach
the river's margin at Vicksburg, Grand Gulf, Rodney, Natchez, and Bayou
Sara. At this point they attain the height of three hundred feet, and
are almost perpendicular. The summit is attained by a circuitous road
cut through the cliffs, and this is the summit level of the surrounding
country.
This plateau of land, where once stood the little village of
Bruinsburgh, has long been a cotton plantation, and a most valuable one
it was before the late war. A deep, and, to an army, impassable swamp
borders it below, and the same is the case above the Bayou Pierre. To
land an army at such a place, when its only means of marching upon the
country was through this narrow cut, of about one hundred feet in
width, with high, precipitous sides, forming a complete defile for half
a mile, and where five thousand men could have made its defence good
against fifty thousand, is certainly as little evidence of military
genius as was the permission of them to pass through it without an
effort to prevent it.
To a military eye, the blunders of Grant and Pemberton are apparent in
their every movement--and the history of the siege and capture of
Vicksburg, if ever correctly written, will demonstrate to the world
that folly opposed to folly marked its inception, progress, and
finality.
The friends formed in this section of country by Jackson were devoted
to him through life, and when in after life he sent (for it is not true
that he brought) his future wife to Mississippi, it was to the house of
Thomas M. Green, then residing near the mouth of Cowles Creek, and only
a few miles from Bruinsburgh.
Whatever the circumstances of the separation, or the cause for it,
between Mrs. Jackson and her first husband, I am ignorant; I know that
Jackson vas much censured in the neighborhood of his home. At the time
of her coming to Green's, the civil authority was a disputed one; most
of the people acknowledging the Spanish. A suit was instituted for a
divorce, and awarded by a Spanish tribunal. There was probably little
ceremony or strictness of legal proceeding in the matter, as all
government and law was equivocal, and of but little force just at that
time in the country. It was after this that Jackson came and married
her, in the house of Thomas M. Green.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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