Siege of Vicksburg

You are passing near one of the most consequential turning points of the Civil War. Just to your right, the bluffs above the Mississippi River mark the ground where, in the spring and summer of eighteen sixty-three, the Confederacy's grip on the great river finally broke.

Vicksburg sat on a two-hundred-foot bluff commanding a sharp bend in the Mississippi. Confederate President Jefferson Davis called it the nailhead that holds the South's two halves together. Control Vicksburg, control the river. Lose Vicksburg, and the Confederacy was cut in two.

Ulysses Grant had been maneuvering toward Vicksburg since late eighteen sixty-two, trying canal bypasses and swamp routes before he finally marched his army down the Louisiana side of the river, slipped Admiral David Porter's fleet past the Confederate guns on a moonless April night, and crossed below the city. Within three weeks he had won five battles, isolated the garrison, and penned Lieutenant General John Pemberton's thirty thousand men inside the city's defenses.

On May eighteenth, eighteen sixty-three, Grant's forces began a formal siege. They dug fifteen miles of trenches, parallel lines that crept closer day by day. Union engineers burrowed tunnels under Confederate forts and packed them with powder. The resulting explosions were heard miles away.

Inside the city, soldiers and civilians were reduced to eating mules, horses, and rats. Families dug caves into the hillsides to escape the relentless artillery bombardment. By early July, men were too weak from hunger and disease to hold the rifle pits.

On July fourth, eighteen sixty-three, Independence Day, Pemberton surrendered. Twenty-nine thousand Confederate soldiers stacked their rifles and laid down their flags. President Abraham Lincoln, receiving the news in Washington, wrote that the Mississippi River now, quote, again goes unvexed to the sea, end quote.

Word arrived almost at the same time that the Confederates had been defeated at Gettysburg the day before. Two crushing blows in forty-eight hours. The war would drag on nearly two more years, but after Vicksburg the outcome was no longer in doubt. The river was Union from its source to its mouth, and the western Confederacy, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, was severed from the eastern states forever.