Grant's Canal

Across the river from Vicksburg, on the Louisiana side, the land forms a long narrow peninsula called De Soto Point. It was here that the Union Army attempted one of the most ambitious engineering failures of the Civil War: a canal that would let the entire Union fleet bypass Vicksburg's guns without ever coming within range of them.

The idea was simple on paper. The Mississippi River, in its perpetual wandering, had almost cut through the neck of De Soto Point already, leaving only a narrow strip of land. If engineers could dig through that strip, they could divert the river into a new channel, and Union gunboats could sail past Vicksburg without ever entering the killing zone directly below the Confederate batteries on the bluff.

The first attempt began in June of eighteen sixty-two, ordered by General Benjamin Butler and assigned to Brigadier General Thomas Williams. Three thousand two hundred men and a large number of enslaved people pressed into labor dug through the Louisiana summer heat. Disease tore through the workforce. Then the river dropped, and a canal designed for high water became useless. Work stopped in July.

In January of eighteen sixty-three, with the entire Vicksburg campaign stalling, Grant ordered the project restarted. William Tecumseh Sherman's corps took up the shovels. The new plan called for a canal sixty feet wide, a mile and a half long, deep enough to float the heaviest gunboats. Thousands of men shoveled through the winter mud.

On March seventh, the upper dam gave way. Floodwaters poured over the peninsula and swamped the work. The canal was abandoned for good.

Grant eventually found a different way, running the fleet past the batteries at night. A small remnant of the canal survives inside Vicksburg National Military Park today, a modest scar in the Louisiana bank marking what might have been one of the war's great engineering triumphs.