| Vicksburg
Campaign, Mississippi
Mississippians don't know, and refuse
to learn, how to surrender.
Colonel James L. Autry, 1862
Neither the municipal authorities nor the
citizens will ever consent to a surrender of the
city.
Laz Lindsay, Mayor of Vicksburg, 1862
Chapter 1: Setting
the Scene
Halfway between New Orleans and Memphis, the half-mile-wide
Mississippi River loops into a hairpin turn that forms
a peninsula jutting essentially north. It was excellent
farming country; the rich soil of the Delta region
had attracted numerous planters, including the family
of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. But
it was also the most difficult sort of country for
armies to traverse: it was wet and mucky with bayous
and swamps wending their way through forests.
The New York Herald
printed this map of Vicksburg July 8, 1863.
Vicksburg lay across the river from that swampy
peninsula, on the east bank of the Mississippi. By
the 1860s it was the second largest town in the state
of Mississippi and had become one of the region's
most important commercial centers with steamboats
connecting the north with the south and two railroads
connecting the east with the west. It was a beautiful
city, built on clay bluffs 200 feet high and commanding
a wide view of the river. The buildings climbed bluffs
so steep that the streets required stone crosswalks
to give footing to the horses and the walkers; one
nickname of this town of 5,000 was the City of Terraces.
Another nickname for the Confederate city of Vicksburg
was "Gibraltar of the West." Those bluffs made it
a superb fortress, difficult to assault from the river
and, surrounded as it was by the bayous, nearly as
difficult to attack from the land.
The Union command recognized that whoever controlled
the 2,300-mile-long Mississippi River would ultimately
win the war. They embarked on a pincer movement to
take the river, moving gunboats south along the river
from Cairo, Illinois and north from the Gulf of Mexico.
By 1862, the Federals controlled all but a 240-mile
portion of the river between Vicksburg, Mississippi
and Port Hudson, Louisiana. That portion was crucial
to the Confederacy. Through it crossed the abundant
supplies of food, armaments, and men of the western
Confederate states. If the Federals controlled that
last segment, those vital supplies would be, for all
intents and purposes, cut off from the Confederate
military that so needed them. The key was Vicksburg.
Click on one of
the chapters below to continue the account of Vicksburg's
surrender. |
