At this time 160 years ago, Americans in the Northern states were celebrating two signal victories in the Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg remains widely known, mainly because President Abraham Lincoln enshrined it with perhaps the most eloquent and profound 270-word speech ever given by an American leader.
But the other battle — for the riverside town of Vicksburg, Miss. — actually did much more to win the war and is recognized today as perhaps the greatest single military campaign ever to take place on American soil.
How did it happen? With persistence, ingenuity and almost superhuman patience.
While Gettysburg was fought at a strategically unimportant location in rural Pennsylvania, Vicksburg occupied a critically important spot. The stronghold town of 4,000 residents was perched on steep bluffs overlooking a hairpin turn in the Father of Waters, the Mississippi River. This location allowed Rebel batteries to fire with impunity on any ship making its way — necessarily slowly — through the twist in the river, while their ship-borne guns and cannons could not fire back at a high enough angle to hit enemy entrenchments and batteries. All river traffic was sitting ducks before Vicksburg’s batteries.
Furthermore, swamps and bayous north of the town kept armies — afoot or aboard — from readily approaching. Endowments of nature had gifted the Rebels with the perfect defensive location.
Holding Vicksburg was vital to the Confederacy’s survival because the South’s breadbasket and beef supply came from the vast cattle-and-corn-producing region west of the river, namely Louisiana and Texas. While sparsely populated, those states produced necessary sustenance for food-needy cotton states of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and the Carolinas, which were starving by degrees due to successful Union blockades of their ports. More important than controlling the north-south traffic on the mighty Mississippi, holding Vicksburg allowed the South to ferry massive amounts of food eastward to support its armies and citizens.
Taking Vicksburg would enable the Union to starve rebellious states into submission. So Lincoln said, “… Vicksburg is the key! The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket. We can take all the northern ports of the Confederacy, and they can defy us from Vicksburg.”
From the outset of hostilities, ambitious Union generals and admirals had tried but failed to capture her. Then, a humble up-and-comer named Ulysses S. Grant put his mind to it.
Grant had risen from recent obscurity due to prominent military victories, including at Shiloh. But his future — and character — were still in question, so new was he to the national scene. The most patient and resilient of actors in this war, Grant and his colleagues (William Tecumseh Sherman and Admiral David Porter, centrally) pondered one idea after another for taking Vicksburg.
Seven attempts failed miserably.
An overland approach via northern Mississippi stretched supply lines too far, and they were attacked and severed by Rebel raiders.
A direct assault by Sherman’s troops was soundly repulsed, at great loss.
Roundabout approaches via smaller rivers and miles of swamps and bayous only led Union soldiers into a kind of Cajun Hades where overhanging trees dumped rats, raccoons and creatures of various kinds on decks, while Rebel snipers fired upon the ships, felled trees into narrow waterways, and set bales of cotton ablaze on the banks, bubbling the ships’ paint and singeing the hair of the crewmen.
Grant even set soldiers to digging a canal that would have cut across the hairpin turn in hopes the great river would comply with redirection. It did not. By that time, northern newspapers were scorning Grant for his serial failures. The eventual wonder of the Battle of Vicksburg is that Grant stuck with it at all.
Grant simply never gave up. He helped the Union win the war and preserve a nation indivisible.
After five months, with his men camped on the narrow, boggy western bank of the river and becoming ever sicker with malaria, Grant closeted himself in a room in a steamer and took counsel of his endless cigars and maps. He emerged with a conclusion few but he believed in: troops and supply ships must steam past Vicksburg by night, land below, and attack from the south, separated from all supply lines. It was daring. Possibly foolhardy. Would the ships even survive the trip down water past the fearsome bluffs? Sherman and Lincoln were among the doubters.
Even if they made it, they would be cut off from all sources of food. And how would they find their way through the maze of bayous? (The answer to that was a helpful local slave.)
Hugging the western shore, Grant’s troop transports and supply barges ran the gauntlet while Confederates lit the night ablaze with flaming rafts (to illuminate their targets) and a fireworks show of artillery. But Union forces made it below, found a landing spot and debarked. Grant later wrote of this moment:
“… I felt a degree of relief scarcely ever equaled since. Vicksburg was not yet taken, it is true, nor were its defenders demoralized by any of our previous moves. I was now in the enemy’s country, with a vast river and the stronghold of Vicksburg between me and my base of supplies. But I was on dry ground on the same side of the river with the enemy. All the campaigns, labors, hardships and exposures from the month of December previous to this time that had been made and endured, were for the accomplishment of this one object.”
The Battle of Vicksburg is, strictly speaking, a misnomer, for the important fighting took place all around it. Upon landing his troops, Grant made a series of stunning and decisive moves to vanquish the armies stationed around the city. Instead of attacking Vicksburg directly, he dashed to neighboring Jackson to smash a supporting encampment of Rebels lest they come upon his rear. He then turned and clawed his way toward Vicksburg, finally forcing Rebel troops to flee into the well-defended city for protection.
After a month-long siege, Rebel soldiers and citizens alike had withered away to almost nothing, eating the flesh of donkeys and digging entire rooms into the dirt hillsides to avoid the terrifying missiles sent in regularly by Union cannoneers. First-person accounts are harrowing.
Finally, facing mutiny, General Pemberton surrendered on July 3 (to deprive the Union of the satisfaction of a victory on July 4), the same day as Gettysburg’s climactic finish. No battle was fought in Vicksburg itself, and 27,000 Rebel soldiers gave themselves up peacefully.
Union victory not only cut the Confederacy’s most vital supply line but established U.S. Grant as a singular military genius. Having doubted the wisdom of this eighth and ultimately successful plan, Lincoln sent a poignant note of congratulations, which concluded:
“When you got below, and took Port-Gibson, Grand Gulf, and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join Gen. Banks; and when you turned Northward East of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.
“Yours very truly
“A. Lincoln”
Perhaps the most praiseworthy fact about the battle for Vicksburg is that Grant simply never gave up. Without the campaign, Grant may never have become president, for Vicksburg demonstrated not just his tactical and strategic genius but a rare tenacity and blindness to discouragement or defeat. With these characteristics, he helped the Union win the war and preserve a nation indivisible.
