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 The Siege of Vicksburg
As you may know by now, I'm a closet historian (yes, I study the history of closets). I'm also a big Civil War buff and never take a trip back east without visiting as many Civil War battlefields as I can. In fact, sometimes my trips around the east resemble mad scrambles from one Civil War park to another in a crazy "connect-the-dots" manner. One place that I had never been to, though, was Vicksburg, Mississippi, the site of one of the most important conflicts of the war.
During the early years of the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union troops in the west (i.e., the Mississippi River valley), tried to cut the Confederacy in half by securing the entire river. He was making good progress, working his way south from Illinois, until the spring of 1863, when he reached Vicksburg, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River.
By April of 1863, he had been trying for a month to figure out a way to dislodge the tenacious Rebel defenders here. He finally landed his Union troops several miles south of town, then circled back and besieged the city and its inhabitants for 47 days before it fell. The Confederate troops surrendered on July 3, 1863, the same day, ironically, that the Confederates also lost at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a thousand miles away. Those two losses essentially sealed the fate of the Confederacy, although the war would drag on for two more years.
While I was driving north on the Natchez Trace Parkway, I looked on a map and realized that Vicksburg was only an hour away, so I hopped off the Parkway and headed west on the Interstate. I drove into Vicksburg and stopped at the National Park Service's impressive Visitor Center, where I spent a half-hour learning about the siege. After that, I spent an hour driving along the 16-mile long tour road while passing countless Union and Confederate fortifications and entrenchments. The Battle of Vicksburg was one of the greatest sieges in American history, and the citizens here had to endure incredible hardships. When General Grant won here in 1863, he was a hero to the Union cause and was soon tapped by Abraham Lincoln to lead the entire Union Army. In April 1865, Grant defeated General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox in Virginia, ending the Civil War.
As I discovered, the city of Vicksburg today is a little frayed around the edges, something like Natchez. It had definitely seen better times. However, the National Military Park, which is run by the National Park Service, was fascinating and I could've easily spent all day here, reading what seemed like about a million plaques and monuments (it honestly does seem like a million, even to this diehard Civil War buff). More information about the Battle of Vicksburg is available on the National Park Service's Vicksburg website.
Above left: Union trenches at Vicksburg. Unfortunately, the vegetation has grown so much at this battlefield that it's hard to imagine what it looked like during the siege, when much of this hard-fought area was barren ground. But if you like reading plaques, Vicksburg is your place. There are 1,325 military monuments here – and I must have read every one of them. Above right: The massive Union gunboat Cairo (pronounced "Kay-row") was sunk in the the nearby Yazoo River during the siege in 1863. It was extracted from the mud about 40 years ago and is now being restored.
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