Winner of the Civil War Round Table of New York’s Fletcher Pratt Literary Award Winner of the Austin Civil War Round Table’s Daniel M. & Marilyn W. Laney Book Prize Winner of an Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award
“A superb account” (The Wall Street Journal) of the longest and most decisive military campaign of the Civil War in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which opened the Mississippi River, split the Confederacy, freed tens of thousands of slaves, and made Ulysses S. Grant the most important general of the war.
Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the last stronghold of the Confederacy on the Mississippi River. It prevented the Union from using the river for shipping between the Union-controlled Midwest and New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The Union navy tried to take Vicksburg, which sat on a high bluff overlooking the river, but couldn’t do it. It took Grant’s army and Admiral David Porter’s navy to successfully invade Mississippi and lay siege to Vicksburg, forcing the city to surrender.
In this “elegant...enlightening...well-researched and well-told” (Publishers Weekly) work, Donald L. Miller tells the full story of this year-long campaign to win the city “with probing intelligence and irresistible passion” (Booklist). He brings to life all the drama, characters, and significance of Vicksburg, a historic moment that rivals any war story in history. In the course of the campaign, tens of thousands of slaves fled to the Union lines, where more than twenty thousand became soldiers, while others seized the plantations they had been forced to work on, destroying the economy of a large part of Mississippi and creating a social revolution. With Vicksburg “Miller has produced a model work that ties together military and social history” (Civil War Times).
Vicksburg solidified Grant’s reputation as the Union’s most capable general. Today no general would ever be permitted to fail as often as Grant did, but ultimately he succeeded in what he himself called the most important battle of the war—the one that all but sealed the fate of the Confederacy.
Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History Emeritus at Lafayette College and author of ten books, including Vicksburg, and Masters of the Air, currently being made into a television series by Tom Hanks. He has hosted, coproduced, or served as historical consultant for more than thirty television documentaries and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications.
Read an Excerpt
Prologue PROLOGUE “The war history of Vicksburg has more about it to interest the general reader than that of any other of the river towns.... Vicksburg... saw warfare in all its phases, both land and water—the siege, the mine, the assault, the repulse, the bombardment, sickness, captivity, famine.”1
—Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
“Will it not be the unquestioned sentiment of history that the liberty which Mr. Lincoln declared with his pen General Grant made effective with his sword.”2
—Frederick Douglass, “U.S. Grant and the Colored People”
In January 1863, Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the most important strategic point in the Confederacy. A fortified town on commanding bluffs above the Mississippi River, it was the last obstacle facing Union forces struggling to regain control of the great river of America and split the Confederacy in two, separating Arkansas, Texas, and much of Louisiana from secessionist states east of the Mississippi. A smaller Confederate river bastion, Port Hudson, in Louisiana, was one hundred and thirty miles downriver from Vicksburg. It was an integral part of Vicksburg’s river defense system and could not survive on its own if Vicksburg fell.
Employing steam-driven riverine warfare, Federal amphibious forces had retaken the Mississippi from Cairo, a Union naval base at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in southern Illinois, to the Yazoo River, which emptied into the Mississippi a few miles north of Vicksburg. The saltwater fleet of Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut controlled the river south of Port Hudson to the Gulf of Mexico. In April 1862, Farragut had steamed upriver from the Gulf, seized New Orleans, the South’s largest city and leading cotton port, and captured Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Natchez, Mississippi, without a fight. Farragut stalled in front of lightly defended Vicksburg, however, when hardened secessionists defiantly refused to surrender. The fleet’s three-masted sloops-of-war, steam-driven wooden ships built for battles at sea, were unable to elevate their guns to bombard the city effectively. Fearing his big vessels would go aground when water levels dropped rapidly in late spring, Farragut headed back to New Orleans.
