The Siege of Vicksburg, 1863: the Confederacy split in two

In the summer of 1863 the fate of the Mississippi, and perhaps of the Confederacy, hung on one city on a bluff. "Vicksburg is the key," Abraham Lincoln told a meeting, as Admiral David D. Porter later recalled in his memoirs; the war could never be brought to a close until that key was in Union pockets. Jefferson Davis called it the nailhead that held the South's two halves together. It took Ulysses S. Grant half a year of failure, one of the boldest marches of the war and 47 days of siege to pull that nail out.⁴

Part of The greatest battles of the Civil War · Before: The Battle of Gettysburg · Next: The Second Battle of Fort Wagner

The key to the Mississippi

The Mississippi was the great highway of the continent. When the Southern states seceded, Confederate guns closed it to Northern traffic, threatening to strangle the trade of the Midwest. Through 1862 the Union clawed most of it back: Fort Henry, Fort Donelson and Memphis fell in the north, New Orleans in the south. By 1863 Confederate control had shrunk to the stretch between Port Hudson in Louisiana and Vicksburg, a fortress city on high bluffs above a sharp bend of the river, roughly halfway between Memphis and New Orleans.⁵

That stretch mattered enormously. Across it flowed cattle, sugar, salt and other supplies from Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, as well as arms smuggled in through Mexico, to the rest of the Confederacy. Vicksburg's batteries on the bluffs could outgun any ship on the river, and swampy bayous protected the city from the north.⁶

Months of failure

For more than half a year Vicksburg defeated every approach. A naval expedition in the summer of 1862 failed to silence the batteries. In December William T. Sherman's attack from the north was bloodily repulsed. Over the winter Grant tried one scheme after another: digging a canal across the neck of land opposite the city to divert the river, and pushing boats through the flooded bayous at Lake Providence, Yazoo Pass and Steele's Bayou. None of them worked.⁷

Defending the city was John C. Pemberton, a Philadelphia-born officer who had sided with the South. He was caught between two masters. His superior, Joseph E. Johnston, cared little for holding Vicksburg and wanted Pemberton's army in the field; President Davis ordered him to hold the city at all costs. The Confederates had had more than a year to prepare, ringing the city with earthen forts and trenches that mounted more than 170 cannon.⁸

Running the batteries

In the spring Grant settled on a gamble. He would march his army down the west bank of the river, through Louisiana, and cross below Vicksburg to attack it from the dry ground to the east and south. For that he needed boats below the city, and they would have to pass its guns. On the moonless night of 16 April 1863, Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter led seven ironclads, a ram, three army transports and a tug downstream, their sides piled with bales of cotton and hay and coal barges lashed alongside.⁹

Confederate lookouts spotted them and lit bonfires on the bank to light up the river. According to the American Battlefield Trust, of 525 rounds fired that night only 68 struck the fleet, and only one transport was lost. A second run followed on 22 April. Grant now had the boats he needed.¹⁰

The march inland

On 29 April Porter's gunboats bombarded the Confederate batteries at Grand Gulf for five hours without silencing them, so Grant moved farther south. On 30 April his troops stepped ashore at Bruinsburg, about 30 miles below Vicksburg, the largest amphibious landing in American history until Normandy, in the American Battlefield Trust's judgment. On 1 May they won the Battle of Port Gibson.¹¹

Then Grant did something that alarmed his own superiors. Instead of marching straight on Vicksburg, he turned northeast toward the railroad that kept the city supplied, cutting loose from his own supply lines and feeding his men off the countryside. His corps won at Raymond on 12 May and took Jackson, the state capital, on 14 May, driving off Johnston's small relief force before it could join Pemberton.¹²

Champion Hill and the road to the trenches

Pemberton, trying to obey both Davis and Johnston, moved out of Vicksburg slowly and half-heartedly. On 16 May Grant's three columns caught his army strung out near Champion Hill, and after hours of bloody fighting for the hill the Confederates were driven off. The National Park Service calls it the most decisive battle of the campaign. The next day the Union broke the Confederate rearguard at the Big Black River bridge, and Pemberton's beaten army fell back into the Vicksburg trenches with Grant close behind.¹³

The assaults of 19 and 22 May

Hoping to strike before the defenders recovered, Grant attacked at once. On 19 May Sherman's men charged the Stockade Redan on the Graveyard Road; the 13th U.S. Infantry planted its colors on the works but could go no farther. On 22 May, after a four-hour bombardment, all three Union corps attacked along a three-mile front. On the left John McClernand's men broke into the Railroad Redoubt and planted their colors on the parapet, but Grant was slow to send help and the Confederates drove them out. Grant lost more than 4,000 men in the May assaults, the Confederates fewer than 600.¹⁴

The siege

Convinced that the city could not be stormed, Grant settled down to starve it. From 26 May his men dug thirteen approach trenches zigzagging toward the Confederate works, while his army grew with reinforcements and Sherman built an outer line facing east against any relief force. Porter's gunboats added their fire from the river; the American Battlefield Trust counts some 22,000 shells fired by the navy during the siege.¹⁵

On 25 June Union miners exploded 2,200 pounds of black powder under the 3rd Louisiana Redan on the Jackson Road. John Logan's infantry charged into the crater, but the Confederates held a new parapet above it and rolled lit shells down into the packed Union troops. After at least twenty hours of hand-to-hand fighting the attackers withdrew. A second mine went off on 1 July.¹⁶

The siege also reached across the river. On 7 June a Texas brigade attacked the Union supply post at Milliken's Bend in Louisiana, hoping to relieve the city. It was held largely by newly raised regiments of formerly enslaved Black soldiers, poorly trained and armed, who fought hand to hand on the levee until Union gunboats drove the Texans off. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton later cited Milliken's Bend as proof that Black men would make good soldiers.¹⁷

Life in the caves

Inside the lines, soldiers and civilians suffered together. Rations were cut again and again, sickness spread, and shells fell on the city day and night. Many residents dug rooms into the yellow clay hillsides and lived underground; Grant later described caves that were carpeted and furnished. According to the American Battlefield Trust, as food ran out people ate mules and even cats, and the local newspaper, the Daily Citizen, ran out of newsprint and was printed on the back of wallpaper.¹⁸

Johnston gathered a relief army of some 30,000 men at Jackson and Canton but did not march until 1 July, and by the time it neared the Big Black River it was too late. On the evening of 3 July Pemberton called a council of war, and his generals agreed that the starving garrison could not break out.¹⁹

Surrender on the Fourth of July

On the hot afternoon of 3 July, white flags rose over the Confederate works and Pemberton rode out to meet Grant. The two men sat under a stunted oak tree between the lines, not far from the 3rd Louisiana Redan. Grant, who had earned the nickname "Unconditional Surrender" at Fort Donelson, again demanded it, and Pemberton refused. That night Grant changed his terms and offered to parole the garrison rather than send it to Northern prison camps, and Pemberton accepted.²⁰

At 10 a.m. on 4 July, Independence Day, some 29,000 Confederate soldiers marched out of their trenches, stacked their rifles and furled their flags, and the Union army entered the city. According to the American Battlefield Trust, Vicksburg did not celebrate the Fourth of July again for 81 years. The figure of some 29,000 is the Trust's; Grant's memoirs say that 31,600 prisoners were surrendered at Vicksburg.²¹

Why Vicksburg mattered

Port Hudson, the last Confederate stronghold on the river, surrendered five days later. "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea," Lincoln wrote. Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas were now cut off from the rest of the Confederacy, along with their men, food and the trade route through Mexico. Together with the defeat of Lee at Gettysburg on 3 July, the fall of Vicksburg is widely seen as the turning point of the war.²² › Battle of Gettysburg, 1863

For Grant, Vicksburg was the making of his reputation. Britannica sees in the campaign proof of his military genius, and it led to his command in Tennessee and, in 1864, his appointment as general-in-chief of all the Union armies. The partnership between Grant, Sherman and Porter set the standard for joint army and navy operations in the West.²³ › Ulysses S. Grant

Visiting Vicksburg today

Vicksburg National Military Park was established in 1899 under the supervision of the Confederate veteran Stephen D. Lee and passed to the National Park Service in 1933. A tour road follows the siege lines, and the site of the surrender interview is one of its most popular stops; the park still holds more than 1,350 monuments, markers and tablets, and 31 states have memorials to their soldiers of the campaign. The ironclad USS Cairo, sunk by a Confederate mine in the Yazoo River in December 1862, was raised in 1964 and is displayed in the park, which also includes the Vicksburg National Cemetery. The site of Milliken's Bend now lies beneath the Mississippi, which has changed its course since the war.²⁴