On the night of April 16, 1863, twelve Union gunboats and transports slipped down the Mississippi toward the Confederate batteries at Vicksburg. The crews had wrapped their vessels in cotton bales and draped chains over the sides to deflect cannon fire. Every light had been smothered. The river was dark, the current moving south at roughly three miles an hour, and the plan was to drift past the guns quietly enough that the Confederate gunners on the bluffs two hundred feet above would not notice until the ships were already gone.
They noticed. Confederate soldiers lit bonfires along the Louisiana bank to illuminate the river, and the guns opened up with everything they had. For nearly two and a half hours, the fleet ran a gauntlet of artillery fire from some of the highest ground along the entire Mississippi. Shells tore through hulls.
One transport sank. By morning, eleven of the twelve vessels had made it through, battered and some badly damaged, but through. Waiting on the Louisiana bank was Ulysses S. Grant with an army of 45,000 men, ready to cross the river and open the campaign that would end with Vicksburg in Union hands and the Confederacy cut permanently in half.
What Grant was about to attempt had been called reckless by his own generals and impossible by nearly everyone who examined it on paper. He intended to march his army down the west bank of the Mississippi, cross below Vicksburg, move through the interior of Mississippi to get behind the city, and then besiege a fortress the Confederate government had spent two years fortifying because it believed the position was unassailable. His commanding general in Washington had told him not to do it. William Sherman, the man who would later burn Atlanta and march to the sea, wrote Grant a formal letter of protest arguing that the plan was strategically unsound.
Grant read the letter and gave the order anyway. The city sat on bluffs overlooking a sharp bend in the river, and that geography was the source of everything. Any vessel moving downriver had to slow for the bend, and while it was slow and exposed, Confederate artillery on the heights could tear it apart at leisure. Any vessel moving up from the south faced the same problem in reverse.
Vicksburg controlled the river not simply because of the guns on the bluffs, but because of what the bluffs did to the river: they turned a moving highway into a shooting gallery at the worst possible place. Jefferson Davis called Vicksburg the nail that held the Confederate States together. Lose Vicksburg, and the Confederacy was effectively cut in two, with Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas isolated from everything east of the river. Grant had been trying to take the city since the previous December.
He had tried an overland approach through central Mississippi in the autumn of 1862, pushing south from Memphis toward Jackson, but Confederate cavalry under Earl Van Dorn raided his supply depot at Holly Springs and destroyed a million and a half dollars in Union war material, collapsing the campaign. He had sent Sherman’s corps down the Mississippi to assault the Chickasaw Bluffs in late December; the men went up the bluffs and were shot back down, with nearly 2,000 Union casualties in a single day and nothing gained. Through the winter and into the spring, Grant ran four more operations against Vicksburg. Engineers attempted to cut a canal across the DeSoto Peninsula to divert river traffic away from the guns; the river refused to flow through it.
They explored a route through Lake Providence and the Red River; the bayous were too shallow and too tangled. They tried pushing through the Yazoo Delta country north of Vicksburg; the Confederates blocked the passage at Fort Pemberton with a sunken vessel and artillery. Northern newspapers were beginning to call for Grant’s removal. Lincoln was under pressure to replace him and declined, a decision that required genuine political nerve.
When aides suggested Grant drank too much and that the drinking explained the failures, Lincoln reportedly asked what brand of whiskey Grant preferred, so he could send it to his other generals. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, but it captured something real about Lincoln’s reading of the situation. Grant was the one who built new plans when the old ones collapsed instead of requesting permission to try something safer. What Grant settled on in late March 1863 was a plan that required everything to work at once.
He would march his army down the Louisiana bank, through swamp and bayou and plantation land, until he was south of Vicksburg and below the main gun positions. Porter’s gunboats and transports would then run the batteries and rendezvous with the army, and the army would cross the river behind the city and come at it from the direction it was least prepared to defend. The march down the Louisiana bank was miserable by any standard. The army moved through flooded ground, across improvised bridges, through mud that swallowed artillery wheels.
Engineers built bridges over streams that had no bridges, cut roads through swamp forest that had no roads, and somehow moved 45,000 men and their equipment sixty miles south through conditions a pessimist would have described as impassable. It took nearly two weeks, but it worked. What also worked was the diversion. Colonel Benjamin Grierson took 1,700 Union cavalry on a raid south through the length of Mississippi, tearing up railroad tracks, burning supplies, and creating havoc across a three-hundred-mile corridor while Grant’s main army moved quietly through the Louisiana swamps.
Grierson kept Confederate commanders guessing for two solid weeks and destroyed infrastructure the Confederacy spent months trying to repair. The river crossing happened on April 30 at a place called Bruinsburg. Porter’s transports brought the army across in waves, and by the end of the day Grant had roughly 20,000 men on the Mississippi bank south and east of Vicksburg, with more crossing continuously. He was behind the city, with no Confederate force positioned to stop him.
The Confederates had been looking north and west, waiting for an attack coming from the wrong direction. Then Grant made the decision Sherman had objected to in writing and military doctrine said could not be done. He cut his supply line. He told his army there was no supply line, that they would live off the land, requisition from Mississippi farms, and move fast enough that the Confederates could not mass a force to stop them.
Fifty thousand men marching without a fixed supply base through enemy territory in May heat. It worked because Grant moved faster than anyone expected and understood that speed was the substitute for the supplies he was not carrying. In the seventeen days between April 30 and May 17, the Army of the Tennessee fought and won five separate engagements: Port Gibson, Raymond, Jackson, Champion Hill, and the Big Black River Bridge. They covered nearly two hundred miles of Mississippi.
They destroyed the Confederate force at Jackson, the state capital, effectively ending any possibility that Mississippi forces could reinforce Vicksburg. They met the main Confederate field army under John Pemberton at Champion Hill on May 16 and destroyed it as a fighting force in a single afternoon, killing, wounding, or capturing nearly 4,000 Confederates and driving the survivors back toward Vicksburg. Pemberton had roughly 22,000 men and the high ground at the Champion Plantation. Grant had roughly 29,000 engaged.
The fighting lasted seven hours and went back and forth across the ridge in a way that at several points looked as though it might go the wrong way. But Grant’s commanders pressed every advantage, and Pemberton’s command coordination broke down in the afternoon when a division under William Loring became separated from the main force. Pemberton got his army back inside the Vicksburg fortifications, but he had left thousands of men behind and lost control of the roads that were his best chance to escape. Grant followed immediately, pressing the retreating Confederates before they could reorganize.
On May 19 he ordered an assault on the Confederate lines; his men were stopped cold by defenders firing from fortifications they had spent eighteen months building. He tried again on May 22, a full-scale coordinated attack along the entire line, which failed with 2,300 Union casualties and no ground gained. Grant looked at the earthworks, looked at what the two assaults had cost, and made the decision that would define the next six weeks. He was not going to spend his army trying to break through those walls.
He was going to sit down in front of them and wait. The siege of Vicksburg began on May 25, 1863. Grant’s army extended its lines around the city from the Mississippi River on the north to the Mississippi River on the south, sealing every road and every possible avenue of relief. Inside, 30,000 Confederate soldiers and approximately 3,000 civilians began the slow arithmetic of starvation.
The Confederate plan for relief rested on Joseph Johnston, who was assembling a force east of Jackson. Johnston and Pemberton exchanged messages throughout June attempting to coordinate a breakout, but the messages grew increasingly desperate and vague. Johnston’s force was never large enough, and Johnston was not a general who attacked when he thought the odds were poor. He assessed the odds as poor throughout the siege and ultimately concluded that attacking Grant’s entrenched lines would simply add more men to the casualty list without saving Pemberton.
He did not attack. Inside Vicksburg, the experience of the siege compressed itself into daily life. Union artillery shelled the city continuously, and civilians dug caves into the hillsides, sometimes elaborate structures with wooden floors and furniture, sometimes holes barely large enough to lie down in. Whole families lived in these caves for weeks.
Children born during the siege were sometimes called cave babies. Food deteriorated in stages: rations were cut first by a third, then by half. Commissary officers began slaughtering mules in late June when the feed ran out. Soldiers and civilians both ate it.
By early July the garrison was on approximately one-third of its normal ration, the men were visibly weakening, and Pemberton’s officers were telling him in writing that the army could not hold much longer. Grant, meanwhile, was digging his own lines closer to the Confederate fortifications, running approach trenches in a zigzag pattern that minimized exposure, the same slow engineering approach used in European sieges for two centuries. By late June, Union miners had tunneled beneath one of the major Confederate bastions and packed it with gunpowder. On June 25 they detonated it.
The explosion destroyed the position and blew a crater large enough to swallow a small house. The Union assault that followed was stopped at the edge of the crater, but the mine demonstrated clearly that the walls would not hold indefinitely. Pemberton called his generals together on July 1 and asked in writing whether the army could cut its way out. The responses came back negative.
The men were too weak, the horses were gone, artillery ammunition was nearly exhausted, no relief force was coming. On July 3 Pemberton sent a message to Grant requesting terms. Grant responded with his standard answer: unconditional surrender. Pemberton pushed back, and Grant, calculating that paroling 30,000 prisoners was more practical than transporting them north, offered to parole the garrison on their promise not to fight again until formally exchanged.
Pemberton accepted. The surrender was made official on July 4, 1863, the eighty-seventh anniversary of American independence. Parts of Vicksburg declined to officially celebrate the Fourth of July for more than eighty years afterward. The strategic consequences were immediate and enormous.
The Mississippi River was entirely in Union hands from its source to the Gulf, and the Confederacy was cut in two. Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas were severed from the eastern Confederate states, unable to provide the beef, horses, and raw material that had moved across the river for two years. Lincoln wrote that the war in the west was essentially resolved. Gettysburg had turned back Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania three days earlier.
Grant himself was transformed by Vicksburg. Lincoln, who had resisted pressure to remove him through the winter and spring, now had the clearest possible evidence his confidence had been justified. The campaign had been military improvisation on a scale the war had not previously produced on the Union side. It had required Grant to make decisions under uncertainty, to move faster than his enemy expected, to accept risks his peers had advised against, and to trust that his army could accomplish things no manual said it could.
When Lincoln began looking for someone to command all Union armies in the spring of 1864, there was not much debate about who it had to be. What Vicksburg revealed about Grant was not genius in any conventional sense. It was something more specific and more necessary: a tolerance for operational uncertainty that the circumstances demanded and that most senior commanders of his generation demonstrably lacked. He had been failed by his plans and had simply built new ones.
He had been advised by people he respected that what he was attempting could not be done, and he had treated those objections as information rather than instructions.