Vicksburg: The Gibraltar That Fell on the Fourth of July
Mississippi
The city of Vicksburg sits high on bluffs above the Mississippi River, in a position that gave Confederate artillery commanding views of the water below. From here, the South could control traffic on the continent's greatest river, block Union supply lines, and keep the eastern and western halves of the Confederacy connected. It was, as Confederate President Jefferson Davis called it, the nail that held the two halves together. Union General Henry Halleck had a simpler name for it: the key.
Grant's campaign to take Vicksburg was the longest sustained military operation of the Civil War. It stretched from March twenty-ninth through July fourth, eighteen sixty-three, and included battles at Port Gibson, Raymond, Jackson, Champion Hill, and Big Black River before Union forces arrived at the city's outer works on May eighteenth. Grant tried two direct assaults and failed. He settled in for a siege.
For forty-seven days, Union gunboats shelled Vicksburg from the river while the army dug fifteen miles of trenches on land, enclosing twenty-nine thousand Confederate defenders. Inside the city, civilians dug caves into the hillsides to escape the constant bombardment. Food ran out. Soldiers ate mule meat and ground peas. Disease spread through the Confederate lines faster than Union artillery. One Confederate officer described watching his men, who had not eaten properly in weeks, literally crumble from scurvy.
On the morning of July fourth, eighteen sixty-three, Independence Day, Confederate General John Pemberton surrendered the garrison and the city. Word soon followed of the Union victory at Gettysburg. Within five days, Port Hudson, Louisiana, the last Confederate stronghold on the river, also fell. The Mississippi ran free from Minnesota to the Gulf. The Confederacy had been cut in two.
Vicksburg is said to have shunned the Fourth of July for generations, though historians dispute how long. Vicksburg National Military Park, established by Congress in eighteen ninety-nine, preserves the siege lines on one of the most moving Civil War landscapes in America.
