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.