Vicksburg, Mississippi

The city you're approaching sits on one of the most dramatic natural positions on the entire Mississippi River, a two-hundred-foot bluff at a hairpin bend where the river swings hard to the west before looping back south. That geography made Vicksburg a fortress and a fortune.

A Methodist minister named Newitt Vick acquired the land in eighteen eleven, intending to build a mission community. He died of yellow fever before he could do much with it, but his heirs platted a town, and when steamboat traffic on the Mississippi began to boom in the eighteen twenties and thirties, the bluff location made Vicksburg an almost inevitable city. Goods flowing down from the Ohio Valley and cotton flowing out of the Mississippi delta converged here. By eighteen thirty-five the town had grown by three hundred percent.

In the antebellum years Vicksburg was genuinely glamorous, riverboats from New Orleans and Louisville docked below the bluff, their passengers climbing the hill to luxurious hotels, gambling halls, and some of the finest homes in the Deep South. The cotton trade made fortunes that went into Greek Revival mansions that still stand along the ridge today.

That prosperity rested entirely on enslaved labor. The surrounding county was one of the most intensive cotton-plantation counties in the country. The city's prosperity and its suffering were inseparable.

The Civil War siege of eighteen sixty-three changed Vicksburg's character permanently. By local tradition, the city did not celebrate Independence Day again until nineteen forty-five, the sting of surrendering on July fourth cut too deep, though some historians dispute how complete the boycott was. The city's economy never fully recovered its antebellum scale, but what it has today is something rarer: a national military park, a living downtown of Victorian and antebellum architecture, and a place where the full arc of American history from river commerce to slavery to war is written in brick and bluff and river.