“I hear a boat coming,” an excited little black girl told the two Confederate officers who sat in their shanty on Christmas Eve 1862, playing cards. “Marse Ainhart, you and Marse Daniel better come out here.”

“Come now,” replied Maj. E.P. Earnhart, “you are dreaming, Artie.”

“No sah! I hears it say choo choo, pat, pat, pat,” the excited child replied, illustrating the chug of the steam engines and the slapping of the paddle wheel against the water.

Earnhart and Maj. Lee L. Daniels walked to the porch of their little building, which was located on Horace Tibbots’ plantation about 11 miles south of Lake Providence, La., and listened intently. The sounds Arty had described were barely audible, and the two men headed for the riverbank an eighth of a mile away where they waited perhaps 30 minutes.

They could hear the sound getting closer and closer and eventually, “a monster turned the bend, two miles above us, and came slowly as if feeling the way,” Daniels wrote in 1904 in an account to Gen. Stephen Dill Lee. Then Earnhart whispered, “Here comes another.”

Some sparks flew out of Maj. Earnhart’s pipe and Daniels grabbed the pipe and put out the fire, warning that those boats would fire a volley at the crack of a match. Soon, the “large black devil was abreast of us, in easy gun shot from our double barrels, but suicide to fire. We counted, counted, counted in all seven gunboats, fifty-nine transports loaded with blue coats,” Daniels continued.

The night was cloudy, cold and drizzly, so the two men waited until they were sure no more boats were in the flotilla, and then Daniels, who had been a telegraph operator in Vicksburg before the war began, jumped onto his little bay filly and practically flew to the telegraph offices, some three miles back in the woods, where he sent a message to the other end of the line.

Daniels was frantic; he knew that if he didn’t get the message through that unsuspecting Vicksburg would fall to the enemy. It was a little past midnight, and it only took 27 seconds to transmit the words, although to Daniels it seemed that his friend on the other end of the line would never answer.

Col Philip H. Fall, also from Vicksburg, was on duty at the little telegraph office on DeSoto Point, across the river from Vicksburg, when the message came through.

“Golly, old fellow, what’s up?” Fall answered when he got the first signal.

Almost half a century later Daniels recalled this message, which he said was indelible in his brain after all those years: “Great god, Phil where have you been? I have been calling, (I am afraid I said half an hour instead of half a minute) and the river is lined with boats, almost a hundred have passed my lookout. Seven gunboats and fifty-nine transports chock full of men. God speed you, rush across and give the alarm.”

Philip Fall tapped a reply: “God bless you, Lee, bye, bye, we may never meet again.”

Almost immediately Col. Fall was in a small skiff, headed across the Mississippi to Vicksburg. It was a tempestuous night, and at times it appeared the waves on the river would extinguish the colonel’s red lantern, which signaled the men at the batteries along the bluffs that he was a friend, not foe. Had the light gone out, Fall might have been annihilated. Despite the possibility of death, he was determined to make the crossing, for the city was in peril. Had the message not been sent when it was, the city probably would have been taken, for only a short time later the telegraph wires were cut by the enemy.

Within half an hour after he had received the message, Col. Philip H. Fall was at the Balfour House on Crawford Street where Dr. and Mrs. William T. Balfour were entertaining the officers and their ladies at a Christmas ball. The house was ablaze with lights, and the sounds of music filled the cold night air.

Suddenly the door burst open, and a gray-clad courier, muddy and disheveled, made his way through the dancers, (who gave him a wide berth) and stopped in front of Gen. M.L. Smith, Confederate commander of Vicksburg. Gen. Smith scanned the courier critically and, frowning, asked, “Well, sir, what do you want?”

Col. Fall replied that a flotilla of gunboats and transports had passed Lake Providence, headed down river. Gen. Smith turned pale, and in a loud voice exclaimed, “This ball is at an end: the enemy is coming downriver, all noncombatants must leave the city.” Then the shocked general turned to Col. Fall and thanked him for the message and apologized for his harsh manner.

Immediately, men reported to their stations: by the end of the week the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou where 6,000 Confederates soundly whipped Gen. Sherman’s 32,000 Union troops, was history.

The story might have ended differently had not an idle slave girl first sounded the alarm that broke up the Balfour Ball.

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.