Vicksburg National Military Park, Mississippi

by William C. Everhart

“Johnny Reb.” A volunteer soldier of the Confederacy. Courtesy Confederate Museum, Richmond.

The great objective on your line now is the opening of the Mississippi River, and everything else must tend to that purpose. The eyes and hopes of the whole country are now directed to your army. In my opinion, the opening of the Mississippi River will be to us of more advantage than the capture of forty Richmonds.

To protect this vital lifeline, the Confederacy had erected a series of fortifications at readily defensible locations along the river from which the Union advance could be checked. Pushing southward from Illinois by land and water, and northward from the Gulf of Mexico by river, Union army and naval units attacked the Confederate strongpoints from both ends of the line. They captured post by post and city by city until, after the first year of the war, Vicksburg alone barred complete Union possession of the Mississippi River. From the city ran the only railroad west of the river between Memphis and New Orleans. Through the city most of the supplies from the trans-Mississippi were shipped to Confederate armies in the East. The city’s batteries on the bluffs, commanding a 5-mile stretch of the river, effectively prevented Union control of the Mississippi. Vicksburg was indeed the key, declared Lincoln, and the war could not be brought to a successful conclusion “until that key is in our pocket.”

“Billy Yank.” A volunteer soldier of the Union. Courtesy Library of Congress.

THE FIRST MOVES AGAINST VICKSBURG.

David Farragut, first admiral of the United States Navy, early in May 1862, headed his Western Gulf Squadron of oceangoing vessels up the Mississippi. In a spectacular engagement he passed the forts protecting New Orleans and captured the South’s largest port city. Proceeding 400 miles up river, Farragut received the surrenders of Baton Rouge, capital of Louisiana, and Natchez, Miss., arriving before Vicksburg on May 18, just 1 year before Grant’s army invested the city from the rear. At the same time, Flag Officer C. H. Davis was moving down the Mississippi River from the north, commanding a flotilla whose striking power was largely provided by a ram fleet under Col. Charles Ellet, Jr., and the seven “Pook Turtles”—ironclad gunboats, built on the Northern rivers, which mounted 13 guns in an armored casemate resting on a flat-bottomed hull.

After capturing Memphis in June 1862 and completely destroying the Confederate fleet of converted river steamboats, Davis pushed southward and on July 1 dropped anchor beside Farragut’s fleet just north of Vicksburg. All of the Mississippi River was now in Union possession, except for a section at and below Vicksburg.

The batteries of Vicksburg had been passed for the first time on June 28. On that day Farragut blasted the city and its defenses with broadsides from his ships and a devastating fire from Comdr. David Dixon Porter’s mortar boats in an unsuccessful attempt to reduce the city by naval attack. It was clearly evident from this experience that a powerful land force would be required to capture fortress Vicksburg. Only 3,000 troops under Brig. Gen. Thomas Williams had accompanied the expedition, and they were put to work with pick and shovel to dig a cut off which might permit river traffic to bypass the Vicksburg batteries. As the fleets idled above Vicksburg, the sweltering monotony was spectacularly interrupted by the short but battle-filled career of the Confederate ironclad ram Arkansas, which performed at Vicksburg one of the great feats of arms on the Western waters.

The energy and skill of Lt. Isaac N. Brown, who commanded the Arkansas, had enabled the ram to be readied for action despite almost impossible handicaps in securing materials. Routing the Union vessels sent to apprehend her, the venturesome man-of-war stood for the two Federal fleets lying at anchor just above Vicksburg and, with guns blazing, passed entirely through the massed flotillas to safety under the Vicksburg batteries. Here the Arkansas withstood all attempts to destroy her and presented a formidable threat to Farragut’s wooden ships.