Battle of Port Gibson: Grant's First Foothold

On the last day of April, eighteen sixty-three, twenty-two thousand Union soldiers slipped across the Mississippi River at a spot called Bruinsburg and stepped onto Mississippi soil without firing a shot. They had been trying for months to crack Vicksburg from the north and from the water, and they had failed every time. This was a different plan. General Ulysses Grant had marched his men down the Louisiana side of the river, run his gunboats past the Vicksburg batteries at night, and crossed fifty miles downstream, far south of where the Confederates expected him. Now he was inland, and there was no going back.

The first obstacle was Port Gibson, about ten miles east of the landing, a prosperous antebellum town commanding the local road network. Confederate General John Bowen had roughly eight thousand men to hold it. Grant had nearly twenty-three thousand. Bowen fought with everything he had, his troops establishing one defensive line after another along the ravines and ridges south of town, buying time and ground as they fell back. The fighting lasted through May first, and when it was over, Bowen's force had suffered nearly eight hundred casualties and was retreating north.

Grant's losses were comparable, but he held the field, and the field was the door into Mississippi. From Port Gibson the Union army drove northeast, cutting the Confederates' supply lines, winning four more battles in eighteen days, and laying siege to Vicksburg itself by mid-May. The city surrendered on July fourth, splitting the Confederacy in two and opening the entire Mississippi River to Union control.

Port Gibson survived the war largely intact, and residents still credit a remark Grant is said to have made as he rode through its tree-shaded streets: that the town was too beautiful to burn. Whether he said it or not, the phrase is carved into the sign at the city limits, a caption for a war that left this corner of Mississippi standing when so much else fell.