NEAR VICKSBURG; June
29, 1863 — 9 a.m.,
VIA MEMPHIS, July 1 — 10 p.m.
(Received July 4 — 8 p.m.)
Two separate parties of deserters from Vicksburg agree in
the statement that the provisions of the place are near the point of total
exhaustion; that rations have now been reduced lower than ever; that extreme
dissatisfaction exists among the garrison, and that it is agreed on all hands
that the city will be surrendered on Saturday, July 4, if, indeed, it can hold
on so long as that. Col. C. R. Woods, who holds our extreme right on the
Mississippi, has got out five of the thirteen guns of the sunken gunboat
Cincinnati, and this morning opens three of them from batteries on the bluff.
The others, including those still in the vessel, he will place as rapidly as
possible in a battery he has constructed on the river half a mile in the rear
of his lines. Though this battery has no guns on it, yet the enemy has been
firing its heaviest ordnance at it for several days past, and has done to the
embrasures some little damage, easily repairable. It commands the whole face of
the town. On McPherson's front a new mine is now nearly completed, and will at
furthest be ready to spring at daylight to morrow. It is intended to destroy
internal rifle-pits with which the rebels still hold the fort whose bastion was
overthrown by McPherson's former mine. If successful, it will give us complete
possession of that fort, as the narrowness of the ridge on which it stands and
the abruptness of the ravine behind it made it impossible that it should be
defended by any third line in the rear of that now being undermined. The new
line in Sherman's front will probably not be ready so soon, but the engineer's
morning report has not been made. No news from Joe Johnston.
C. A. DANA.
Hon. E. M. STANTON,
Secretary of War.
SOURCE: The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of
the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume
24, Part 1 (Serial No. 36), p. 112
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