Vicksburg

The Battle of Vicksburg was an American Civil War siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on a well-fortified west-facing cliff on the Mississippi River. The siege lasted from May 18 to July 4, 1863.

The siege was initiated by the Union army under General Ulysses S. Grant with the aim of gaining control of the Mississippi River by capturing this Confederate riverfront stronghold. Shortly after it fell (one day after the fall of Gettysburg), the entire Mississipi Valley belonged to the Union.

All slaves were of course freed.

This was the second of a one-two punch to the Confederacy. July 3 saw the final collapse of the Confederate attempt to invade Pennsylvania at Battle of Gettysburg. July 4 saw the fall of Vickburg, the Stars and Stripes rising over Vicksburg on Independence Day.

To the Confederates, surrendering on Independence Day was a bitter defeat. Union troops behaved well, mixing with Confederates and giving rations to starving soldiers who days before would have been glad to kill them. Speculators who had been hording food for higher prices saw their stores broke open and the contents thrown on the streets for the starving rebels. Several brothers and any number of cousins on opposite sides met.

Confederate casualties were 2,872; Union were 4,910. Grant had captured his second Confederate army in its entirety (see Fort Donelson). One rebel officer and 708 men of a total of 2,166 officers, 27,230 men, and 115 civilian workers chose to go to Union prison camps to fight no more. The Union also bagged 172 cannon, much ammunition, and close to 60,000 rifles and muskets, many of the small arms superior to the Union's.

But the big prize was the soon-to-be entire Mississippi Valley.

Grant ordered Sherman and 50,000 troops after Johnston's 31,000, and Johnston tried to lure Sherman into a frontal assault, but Sherman had seen the results of such at Vicksburg. He demurred, and began surrounding the city. Johnston escaped with his army, which was more than Pemberton had done, but all of central Mississippi was now given to the controversial commander Sherman, who would wreak much havoc indeed upon the south, at Meridian, Mississippi, later in Georgia, where his troops burned one-third of Atlanta, and in South Carolina, where they would destroy everything in their path in the waning days of the war, burning two-thirds of Columbia, South Carolina. And the Confederacy was now a divided nation -- picture the United States with Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico in enemy hands.

As usual, the Western theater received less attention than the east. Robert E. Lee had just won his most magnificent victory at the expensive Battle of Chancellorsville against Joseph Hooker, followed by his worst defeat against George Meade at Gettysburg, one day before Vicksburg fell.

Chancellorsville had been the Confederacy's highest point, when they seemed invincible, and Fortune's Wheel now came crashing down after Gettysburg - Vicksburg.

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