Champion Hill: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg

Arguably one of the first joint operations in U.S. military history, the campaign to capture Vicksburg in July 1863 became the key to defeating the Confederacy. The campaign displayed the tenacity of U.S. General Ulysses S. Grant in accomplishing his military objective. Beginning in the fall of 1862, Grant moved South from Memphis with the intention of attacking Vicksburg by land from the North. When his supply base was captured by the enemy, Grant turned to possibility of ferrying his army south along the Mississippi river, with, again, the intent to attack and take the city on land from the North. Grant spent the entire winter of 1862-63 trying to get his forces into position to attack, but on 1 May 1863, Grant, Sherman and Admiral David Porter rode horseback to survey Haines Bluff north of Vicksburg. At that point it became obvious that a land attack would fail against well-positioned Confederate defenses. Grant then turned to Porter, who was not under Grant's command, but who had become a respected friend and asked if the Navy could run the battery gauntlet in front of Vicksburg and deliver his troops to the south where they could disembark and attack by land. Porter agreed and the fall of Vicksburg on 4 July 1863 is the historical turning point in the War Between the States. This paper uses only the original national archive records to reconstruct the campaign and finds false Grant's later claim, made in his memoirs, that his actions with this forces north of Vicksburg during the winter months were simply to 'keep the troops occupied." But rather than detracting from the brilliance of Grant's, his actions foretold the tenacity that would take him, a year later to end the war in front of Richmond.

Civil War Book Review, 2021

Siege warfare must necessarily produce radically different experiences for those besieging a city and those trapped within its walls. Such distinctly dissimilar impressions from the siege of Vicksburg are recorded in two small diaries contained in the LSU Libraries Special Collections. The Aaron P. Record Diary (Mss. 4869), kept by a private of the 8 th Iowa Infantry Regiment, contains accounts of the quick-moving action of the wider Vicksburg campaign in vast strides from the first steamboat landing at Duckport, a trek down the west bank of the Mississippi River to the crossing at Grand Gulf, a mad dash to Jackson, to crisscrossing the road between Jackson and Vicksburg to force their capitulations. The Lewis Guion Diary (Mss. 826) conversely records the static, confined experiences of an officer of the 26 th Louisiana Infantry Regiment inside the besieged city with its harassing incoming cannon fire, diminishing rations, and rumors that never cease in both their frequency and absurdity.

The Annals of Iowa, 2006

Historian, 2013

The federal defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run has spurred study and debate ever since Sunday, July 21, 1861. The Union plan to dispense with the Southern rebellion in an afternoon was proceeding brilliantly until the army’s advance stalled and collapsed on Henry Hill. Observers pointed to the Confederate capture of two cannon from Captain Charles Griffin’s battery as the precise moment of reversal. The circumstances surrounding the seizure of Griffin’s guns -- specifically the claim that the cannon were lost after Griffin’s crew hesitated to fire on Confederate troops mistakenly identified as fellow federals -- became the subject of dispute and integral to the battle’s lore. This essay examines the circumstances surrounding the capture of Griffin’s guns, questions the evidence, briefly surveys the historiography, and weighs whether blame can, or even should, be assigned.

2006

Nothing Ought to Astonish Us Confederate Civilians in the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign N ancy Emerson lived in Staunton, Virginia, and kept a diary intermittently throughout the Civil War. Emerson was raised in Massachusetts and moved south with her brother, a Lutheran minister, in the late 1850s. They became Confederates, transplanting themselves and driving deep roots into the new soil around them. Emerson intended her diary to be read by her "northern friends, should any of them have the curiosity to read [it] ." She felt increasingly sick with what she thought might be typhoid fever, so she directed that the journal "be forwarded to" her northern friends "at some future time." She wondered what her friends in the North thought about the war and the South, and what they thought about the destruction of civilian property in Staunton and farther up the Valley in Lexington in June 1864. She wondered whether any of her friends in the North had even heard of the pillaging in the Valley and whether they favored '?his unjust &abominable war." She decided that she could not guess what they thought anymore-their distance ofmind and spirit were too great. "Such strange things happen these days," she concluded, "that nothing ought to astonish us."' Confederate civilians in the Shenandoah Valley might have thought they knew what to expect of the war by 1864, but they soon found themselves taken aback by Union successes and Union aggressiveness, determination, and competence. They admitted to themselves that while nothing ought to astonish them, nearly everything in the summer and fall of 1864 did. The war changed from something largely distant and contained to something unpredictable and invasive. Union armies in the Valley were better led, more determined, and more hardened than before. Confederate armies in the Valley were less well led, less determined, and at times less courageous than in the past. Confeder

Civil War Book Review, 2019

The Annals of Iowa, 2011

2011

is best-known for two interpretations: his critical evaluation of Sherman and the conduct of the Atlanta campaign, and his revisionist assessment of Vicksburg, which other historians commonly label a turning point. While Victors in Blue is critical of U.S. generalship, its value lies much more in its presentation of the principal military operations of the war in a single volume. As one often fears when reading "how so and so did amazing things and saved western civilization" titles, there turns out to be less explicit analysis than one might hope for. On the other hand, How the North Won, by Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, is twice as long (with much more explicit analysis); Russell Weigley's A Great Civil War is deeply flawed in numerous ways; and most other competitors are far too summary. Castel's writing sparkles; despite limited attention to the Confederates, or to operations in the east in 1862, Victors in Blue is probably the most balanced single-volume treatment of U.S. military operations over the course of the war.