Champion Hill: The Battle That Doomed Vicksburg

Twenty miles east of Vicksburg, on a rolling wooded ridge owned by a family named Champion, the largest and bloodiest battle of the Vicksburg campaign was fought on May sixteenth, eighteen sixty-three. What happened here in a single afternoon sealed the fate of the Confederacy's most important river fortress.

Grant had spent months trying to get his army into position south of Vicksburg. By mid-May he had crossed the Mississippi below the city and was driving north and east, living off the land, cutting his supply lines. It was a bold gamble that military historians still study. Confederate commander John C. Pemberton marched out of Vicksburg to intercept him, and the two armies collided at Champion Hill.

Grant had thirty-two thousand men. Pemberton had twenty-three thousand. The fighting seesawed through the morning and afternoon as Champion Hill changed hands three times. Confederate Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman was killed by an artillery shell fragment while covering Pemberton's line. At the crisis of the battle, a Union division found a gap in the Confederate left and poured through it, collapsing the Southern position. Pemberton's army broke and fled west toward the Big Black River.

Union casualties were two thousand four hundred fifty-seven. Confederate casualties were nearly thirty-eight hundred, including more than two thousand four hundred men captured or missing, soldiers Pemberton could not replace. The defeat left him with no choice but to retreat into Vicksburg's fortifications and hope for relief that would never come.

Grant's biographers mark Champion Hill as the moment his genius for campaign warfare became undeniable. The victory propelled him toward command of all Union armies. For the Confederacy, Champion Hill was the beginning of the end on the Mississippi. Pemberton's army would surrender forty-seven days later.