Vicksburg: Forty-Seven Days to Break the Confederacy in Half

Vicksburg sat on the bluffs above the Mississippi River like a fortified hinge. Whoever held it controlled the river, and whoever controlled the river controlled the movement of men, guns, and food across the entire Confederacy. Ulysses Grant understood this, and on May eighteenth, eighteen sixty-three, he began a siege.

It lasted forty-seven days. The Confederate garrison under Lieutenant General John Pemberton ran out of food within weeks. Vicksburg's white civilian population, which had refused to evacuate, dug cave shelters into the yellow bluffs and lived in them for the duration, sleeping underground while Union artillery worked the city from across the river. First-person accounts from that period describe the civilian diet narrowing to mule meat, and then to rats, and then to whatever could be scraped from what remained.

The enslaved people of Vicksburg experienced the siege differently. Some used the chaos to escape. Others were pressed by Confederate forces into fortification labor, digging the trenches and rifle pits that held the Union at bay. Their labor extended the siege; the records of the people who performed it are fragmentary.

When Pemberton surrendered on July fourth, eighteen sixty-three, the entire length of the Mississippi River came under Union control. Combined with the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg the day before, the fall of Vicksburg marked a strategic turn from which the Confederacy never recovered. Lincoln called the Mississippi the Father of Waters going unvexed to the sea.

The Vicksburg National Military Park preserves the siege lines in one of the most physically complete Civil War landscapes in the country. The positions of both armies are still readable in the ground.