The historian Stephen Oates tells the following story about a remarkable Ulysses S. Grant and his dramatic campaign to capture the impregnable fortress of Vicksburg, Mississippi.
Rebel guns 300 feet above a perilous hair-pin turn in the Mississippi prevented Yankee shipping from use of The Father of Waters. By this point in the war Rebel fortifications both up- and down-stream were all in Union hands – all except Vicksburg.
“A cryptic telegram arrived from Grant. On May 11, 1863 he left Port Gibson – ‘you may not hear from me for several days,’ the dispatch read, and then he stormed northeast toward Vicksburg and Jackson, subsisting entirely off hostile country.
"For two weeks nobody in Washington knew for sure what was happening. Then on May 25 – a day to circle on the calendar – came a glorious report from Grant’s chief of staff. The general had won five straight battles in Mississippi, captured the state capital of Jackson, split the rebel forces, and driven to the very trenches of Vicksburg itself.”
After a horrendous siege of the defiant defenders inside Vicksburg, the town, and the Rebel guns, fell to the Yankees on the same day – July 4, 1863 – that Lee was to retreat from Gettysburg.
The Confederacy was to fight on for another 22 months, but their chances for ultimate success were doomed.
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