Gibraltar of the Confederacy

Home > Gibraltar of the Confederacy

Related Guides

Popular Cities in Mississippi

Online Favorites

Travel Resources

ShoulderSeason

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Screensavers

From Primedia Publications

Page:

Gibraltar of the Confederacy
The North and South both believed that controlling
Vicksburg was vital to the war effort. Visitors to the
city today can see why.

By Darlene Copp

"Look carefully at that mound of dirt," says battlefield guide Mary Lyerly Duval. "That's where the whole history of the country was changed. Vicksburg turned the Civil War."

She's referring to the spot, midway between their opposing lines, where Generals Ulysses S. Grant and John C. Pemberton met on July 3, 1863, to discuss the terms for surrendering the city that President Abraham Lincoln considered a key to winning the war.

Two of his three corps, around 23,000 men, crossed on April 30 and May 1, at that time the largest amphibious operation in American history.

When I visit, Duval, 83, is one of 16 active guides at Vicksburg National Military Park. Established in 1899, the park covers 1,800 rolling acres of land that was once hotly contested by North and South. It includes restored earthworks, 128 artillery pieces, and more than 1,300 markers, monuments, and state memorials. Duval knows the territory well. Since becoming a licensed guied in 1953, she has given more than 6,000 tours of the park's 16-mile driving route, bringing to life the wartime drama that shook her native Vicksburg to its core in the summer of 1863.

Take in the river panorama from Fort Hill and you can understand why both sides in the Civil War thought the city was so crucial. Vicksburg's position on bluffs rising abruptly above a horseshoe bend in the Mississippi River made it the "Gibraltar of the Confederacy." With its batteries trained on river traffic, Vicksburg could halt all commerce between markets in the midwest and ports in the Gulf.

The South used Vicksburg, then a city of 4,500, to channel vital supplies from its Trans-Mississippi Department to Rebel forces in the east. Confederate President Jefferson Davis described the city as "the nailhead that held the South's two halves together." President Lincoln also understood its importance to the Confederacy. "Valuable as New Orleans will be to us, Vicksburg will be even more so," he said. "It means hog and hominy without limit. Fresh troops from all the states of the far South and a cotton country where they can raise the staple without interference. Let us get Vicksburg and all that country is ours."

Ulysses S. Grant took over the Department of the Tennessee in October 1862. He was a general who had proven his perseverance and willingness to fight at the battles of Fort Donelson and Shiloh, and he knew that capturing Vicksburg was "a matter of the first importance." He initially tried to take the city in December 1862, but an assault commanded by General William T. Sherman along the Chickasaw Bayou north of Vicksburg failed disastrously. "I reached Vicksburg at the time appointed, landed, assaulted and failed," Sherman reported laconically.

In January Grant assembled 45,000 troops on the west side of the Mississippi and considered how to reach the Hill City from the north, where it was protected by the Delta, then a mostly swampy bottom land laced with obstructed streams and hazardous bayous. Undaunted, Grant planned three amphibious expeditions. He also attempted to dig a canal across a peninsula below Vicksburg and divert the river, thus bypassing the city’s batteries. Everything failed.

Grant then decided on a daring plan. He would march his troops south through Louisiana down the west side of the Mississippi, cross the river below Vicksburg, and attack the city from the east. To carry it off, Grant's troops first faced the backbreaking work of corduroying (building log roads) through the flooded Louisiana lowlands. Next, naval gunboats and transports under the command of Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter had to run a four-mile gauntlet down the river past Vicksburg in order to ferry the army across. The armada made the run on the nights of April 16 and 22 and suffered minimal losses despite a fierce barrage.

The army was now ready to cross the river. Confederate shore batteries fiercely resisted at Grand Gulf, the first choice for a landing site, so Grant marched his army farther south and crossed the river at Bruinsburg. Two of his three corps, around 23,000 men, crossed on April 30 and May 1, at that time the largest amphibious operation in American history. Within hours of landing, the Federals engaged in the first of five battles they would fight on the way to Vicksburg. The day-long Battle of Port Gibson forced the outnumbered John S. Bowen, Pemberton’s best combat general, to retreat.

Grant's strategy was to keep Pemberton guessing and his Rebel forces scattered. Sherman and his corps kept the Confederates occupied to the north, while Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson and his 1,700 cavalrymen performed a spectacular diversion by raiding Confederate communication and supply lines across the heart of Mississippi between April 17 and May 2. By boldly marching inland, towards the Southern Railroad that connected Vicksburg with the state capital of Jackson to the east, Grant planned to conceal his real objective. After clashing with a small Confederate force at Raymond on May 12, Grant realized that he would have to take the capital to keep Confederate forces under General Joseph E. Johnston from using it as a base to threaten him. But when Johnston, Pemberton's superior officer, arrived in Jackson May 13, he concluded it was too late to defend the city and started evacuating, almost giving Grant the capital on May 14.

Johnston never thought Vicksburg "that important," according to Duval, and he told Pemberton to "turn it loose." He always believed that Pemberton should unite his forces to defeat the Union army and had even wired Pemberton those instructions after Grant crossed the Mississippi. Although Pemberton's widely scattered army actually outnumbered the bluecoats prior to the siege of Vicksburg, the Confederate general remained on the defensive. "Pemberton was never able to concentrate his troops to do battle with Grant," says park historian Terry Winschel.

Related Articles
	• Gibraltar of the Confederacy Trip Planner • Beyond Gettysburg • The Death and Life of Stonewall Jackson • Fredericksburg • The High Ground • A Meeting at Shiloh • On the Track of Assassin John Wilkes Booth • With Lee to Appomattox

Page:

Darlene Copp, a southernized Yankee, lives and writes in Mississippi. A former high school and college speech teacher, she appreciates a good guide when she meets one.