This Day in Civil War History (Grant Takes Vicksburg)

July 4, 1863—Much to Southern chagrin, Union forces got to celebrate the Fourth of July in Vicksburg, the key to the Mississippi River, when Confederate forces under John C. Pemberton surrendered the citadel after a 47-day siege by Union General Ulysses S. Grant.

In the East on the same day, General Robert E. Lee saw the South’s dream of independence slipping away as he assessed the awful results of Pickett’s Charge from 24 hours before. In the West, his future opponent, Grant, reaped the rewards of a masterful campaign of maneuver, feints, improvisation and perseverance. The two events, happening virtually simultaneously, not only almost neatly divided the war in half chronologically, but also psychologically, with Confederate hopes never rising so high again.

The length of the two engagements—the first, a three-day epic, with fearful casualties on both sides and the outcome in doubt until the end; the second, the culmination of a nearly nine-month campaign, with losses decidedly more on one side than the other—might account for the preponderance of attention given Gettysburg over its Western counterpart. But a strong case can be—and, increasingly, has been—made, that Vicksburg was the more important of the two, both for its immediate impact and its influence on future operations.

It was Grant’s misfortune to have his Civil War service as general almost neatly bracketed between two spectacularly bloody operations: Shiloh in 1862 and the drive toward Richmond in 1864. Yet his reputation as a butcher with his men’s lives was vastly inflated and actually compares favorably with Lee’s.

The Restless Intelligence of Grant

What was the primary characteristic of Grant’s military leadership? One phrase, I think, sums it up: restless intelligence.

Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President, a 1997 biography by Geoffrey Perret, is blissfully contrarian, even excusing much of Grant’s inglorious Presidency. But it illuminates Grant’s personality and military victories with unusual insight.

Perret points out that Grant craved movement above all else. Deprived of an outlet for his energy, he became morose and turned to alcohol—as happened in 1854, when ennui on a Western outpost led to binge drinking, and in 1862, when he was unfairly sidelined by his nemesis,

General Henry Halleck, for his close call at Shiloh. In both instances, Grant was without his beloved wife Julia to curb his loneliness.

The fortunes of Grant—and the U.S.—improved markedly in the second half of 1862 when Halleck was called East to be commander in chief (and, later, chief of staff). Minus his tormentor (who now had a job he was better suited for than commanding in the field—administration), Grant quickly calculated that the linchpin of the Confederacy was Vicksburg, a fortress on a 250-foot-high bluff that was as strategically important to the Confederate as West Point was to the Continental Army in the American Revolution.

In this campaign, he would develop, almost on the fly, his evolving practice of the wide envelopment, the most mobile form of offensive action, involving attacks upon an enemy’s flanks. When executed properly, it worked like a dream, as later happened when General Norman Schwarzkopf used it to crumple it Saddam Hussein’s forces in the first Persian Gulf War; when not coordinated well, it could be disastrous.

As long as the Confederate possessed this stronghold, they could pour fire from their artillery batteries on Union ships while continuing to move soldiers and supplies unmolested from Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana and the Mississippi Yazoo Delta region to points east.

Grant’s recognition of Vicksburg’s importance harked back to the thinking of his old Mexican War superior, General Winfield Scott, who at the start of the war had been nudged to the sidelines because of his advanced age—and had been forced to watch as his brilliant conception for squeezing the life out of the Confederacy through simultaneously pressed Eastern and Western military operations and a military blockade (nicknamed the “Anaconda plan” by a stupidly sarcastic press) had fallen by the wayside.

Grant and the Military Art of “Audibling”

In a conversation with P.J. O’Rourke in The Atlantic, Colin Powell employed the football term “audibling” to describe the process of trial and error in war. “You know, no plan—no military plan—survives first contact with a real enemy,” he noted. Adjustments have to be made when the facts on the ground don’t match your pristine conception.

Few generals were better at “audibling” than Grant. Nearly every time he encountered the enemy at Vicksburg, he ran up against a fresh difficulty, calling forth unconventional thinking and involving enough risk to end his own career—and, perhaps, any Northern hope of bringing the bloody, drawn-out war to a successful close:

1) At the start of the campaign, he confronted a foe with almost as many troops as he possessed—an unfavorable force ratio for any commander launching an offensive.

2) Two initial attempts to take Vicksburg by bypassing to the south failed. One creative idea—canal building—didn’t work when the levees gave way and the North discovered it lacked the requisite engineering equipment.

3) Two crossings of the Yazoo Delta to the North were blocked when the Confederates clogged the waterways with cut trees.

4) Grant broached the idea of a naval force moving under the bluffs of Vicksburg with

Admiral David Porter, over whom he had no authority. Fortunately, Porter loved the idea. But it meant his six ironclads would be evading the Confederate batteries, which had been known to wreak awful damage on other ironclads. Moreover, by necessity, Porter’s boats could make no return trip—while they could achieve a 10-knot speed with the help of favorable currents, they could only manage two knots going in the other direction. The upshot was that on April 16, under cover of darkness, with his ships loaded with cotton bales to absorb enemy fire and with anything potentially flammable jettisoned, Porter ran the Confederate batteries. A week later, a flotilla of Union steamers pulled the same trick. Porter could now ferry Grant east across the Mississippi, in the greatest amphibious operation in American history up to that time.

5) Deep in enemy territory, Grant dispatched one of his units—

Colonel Benjamin Grierson’s 1,700 cavalrymen—for a diversionary raid on the Confederate rear. The South was so nonplussed by this that they lost sight of what Grant was pulling off under their noses.

6) In his campaign, Grant was not only hampered by a strong Confederate position but by one of his generals,

John McClernand, who, after wanting the command for himself, subsequently proved a hindrance in cooperating with Grant’s subordinates. Eventually, Grant had to sack him.

7) On May 10, Grant decided to violate one of the most sacred laws of war by cutting himself off from his supply line. Even the faithful

William Tecumseh Sherman was certain this was potentially catastrophic. But Grant’s order that his men live off the land proved inspired—his men found more than enough provisions in the countryside and they had gained precious days to attack and dilute the enemy’s forces before reinforcements could arrive. The example of this element of the campaign was one that Sherman would employ, to even more devastating and famous effect, in his “March to the Sea” the following year from Atlanta to Savannah.

8) As his army overwhelmed Pemberton’s at Champion Hill, Grant received a letter from Halleck, tormenting him again, with an order to link up with General Nathaniel Banks in an operation against Port Hudson, then go back with their combined forces to Vicksburg. Grant told the officer that, with fighting already begun, it was too late. When the Banks staffer insisted that he needed to obey the order, Grant blithely ignored the comment, jumped on his horse and rode away.

9) Two more attempts to roll up the Confederates following Champion Hill failed. Now Grant decided that the time for conventional warfare was over, and he would wait the foe out. With 70,000 men, he had all the time in the world, but his enemy, with 30,000, didn’t.

I’m surprised that the resulting siege of Vicksburg isn’t written about more, at least because of the privations endured on the Southern side. The garrison, with short rations for only a month, now faced daily bombardment and cannonade, day and night, from Porter. To escape the shelling, the citizens of Vicksburg dug caves in the clay hills, living there 24 hours a day, with children even being born in them. They began to grow hungry. Outside, Grant began to mine under the Confederate works, planning to blow them up and wreak more havoc.

At last, Pemberton could endure no more. On the morning of July 3, while Lee and Longstreet were readying final preparations for Pickett’s Charge, Pemberton raised the white flag, then met with Grant in the afternoon to negotiate terms. He held out for better terms—no doubt, the Union commander surmised, in an attempt to avoid surrendering on the Fourth of July—but could not postpone the inevitable.

Vicksburg and a New Birth of Freedom

In his

Personal Memoirs—pretty widely held to be the greatest autobiography by an American President—Grant recalled the friendly bantering between common soldiers on both sides during the campaign. “Well, Yank, when are you coming into town?” went the invariable Confederate question. One of the Yankee replies—jocular and boastful but highly prophetic—was, “We propose to celebrate the Fourth there.”

On Independence Day the Confederates marched out of their Vicksburg garrison and stacked arms. The whole Union Army watched the event without cheering. They and their commander knew the importance of their achievement—severing the artery of the Confederacy, capturing 37,000 prisoners (not to mention the 10,000 of the foe killed and wounded), and ensuring the survival of the Union while they extended liberty to the slave.

Yes, the surrender of Vicksburg related to freedom in more ways than simply occurring on the Fourth of July. A crucial point in the campaign occurred on April 29, when Union forces were ferried across the Mississippi by Porter. They were planning to march to Rodney, about nine miles away, when an escaped slave came into Grant’s headquarters. A good landing, he informed them, could be made at Bruinsburg that would lead them directly to Port Hudson, where he could attack the enemy.

The intelligence proved correct—and was typical of the kind of services provided by escaped slaves in the war. It was undoubtedly just one of the many instances that further convinced Grant of the certainty of his cause. In 1878, he noted: "As soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle."

Now, with Grant’s help—and that escaped slave’s—that “stain to the Union” would be removed.