American History Hit - Worst Siege of the Civil War: Vicksburg

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

The Siege of Vicksburg was a pivotal turning point in the Civil War. Should the Union capture the stronghold, the South's hold on the Mississippi would be broken forever... But what about the lives of those trapped inside the city? And what measures did they resort to to survive the bombardment?Our guest today is Dr. Lindsay Privette, Associate professor of history at Anderson University. She’s the author of The Surgeon’s Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War.Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's July, 1863, within the city of Vickspur, here on the banks of the Mississippi River. The ground shakes as yet another mortar shell crashes into the hillside.

Families hunker down in caves carved into the clay bluffs. They've dragged blankets, cooking pots, even pieces of furniture underground alongside their frightened children. On the outskirts of town, tens of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers crouch in trenches, exchanging fire beneath a merciless Mississippi sun. Meanwhile, inside the besieged city, casualties mount, and food supplies dwindle. Every morning, as citizens wake to another day in the grinding ordeal of war, it seems only a matter of time before Vicksburg, the Confederacy's great stronghold on the Mississippi River finally falls.

I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit. Our guest today is Dr. Lindsay Prevett, Associate Professor of History at Anderson University. She is the author of The Surgeons Battle, How Medicine won the Vicksburg campaign and changed the Civil War. Lindsay, hello, nice to see you. Thanks for joining us. Hi, thanks for having me on. Before we discuss the events of Vicksburg, I want to take note of the fact that you are a Vicksburg native, am I right? You are. I was born and raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi. So I know the town and it's battlefield well.

Our northern equivalent, I suppose, would be Gettysburg. Does life in Vicksbury, is it so defined by what happened in the Civil War as you're growing up and so forth? It really does. The town itself has changed dramatically over the years. And I think one of the biggest draws, one of the things that really kind of sustains the town is really that tourism. People coming through and stopping at the military park and seeing the houses. and all of the things that you would think of for a visit to Vicksburg would entail. It's long been on my Civil War bucket list.

I have yet to make it down there as a Yankee. At the point of Vicksburg, we're talking about 1863, summer of. Where is the war at this moment? Late spring, early summer. We're coming off the Battle of Chancellorsville, right? We're coming off the Battle of Chancellorsville. I think one of the useful things is to think about we're about two years into the war. So April of 1861, we're two years removed into this war that everyone assumed was going to be fairly short-lived.

And depending on where you focus, the war is not going particularly well, especially for the Union. If you're looking in the East, in Virginia, the Union Army has like a slate of defeats to Robert Lee and his Army of the Potomac. But things are going a little bit better in the West. The Union Army has made a lot of really good inroads into the state of Tennessee. They've made it as far south as Memphis. And they've also kind of managed to come down to the mouth of the Mississippi River and secure New Orleans, which is a very important port city. And they're kind of making their way up the river and capturing Natchez as well.

So we have kind of this polarization of what's happening in the east and the west. Sure. It's a duality. I mean, we talk about it a lot. The opposing realities for the union anyway of the west of the east. And back east, the Chancellor'sville, as we discussed on episode 381, really marked the end of that strategy just to sort of march to Richmond. It's become such a slog for them throughout those, those years, that what is happening out west, thanks probably to better leadership and bolder leadership anyway, especially under Grant, has been a much more effective strategy relating a lot to the Anaconda plan, right? This is the idea of the stranglehold that the union wants to put on the South using the Mississippi and the Gulf. Exactly, exactly. So their idea is to blockade all of the ports that would be along the Atlantic

seaboard, the Gulf of Mexico, create a very strong barrier across the top of the the Confederacy through Tennessee. And then I use that Mississippi River that's really going to sever the Confederacy in half, right? Because you have Arkansas, Louisiana, and the state of Texas that's going to be on the west side of the river. And everything else is on the east side of the river. And so once you sever it, you lose transportation lines. You lose the ability to move troops back and forth, manufactured goods, ammunition.

It really can do some damage. And we're deep into the middle of steam now. So you've got these steamships that move very quickly up and down the Mississippi, as opposed to old days. I mean, this is a super highway for these times. Most definitely, yeah. And so coming down the Mississippi River, you've had these dominant port cities. Under union control, a town that we wouldn't talk about much would be Kea Cook, Iowa,

and Cairo, Illinois. But then most people would be familiar with St. Louis, Missouri, Memphis, Tennessee. Vicksburg would be the next one down from that, and then you would have the cities of Natchez, Mississippi, and then New Orleans. And so those are your big transportation hubs. Where does Vicksburg sit in the midst of this, and how does it figure into the union strategy? Right. So Vicksburg, Mississippi is really significant because it is situated there between Memphis and New Orleans geographically. And Vicksburg is a connector not just north to south as an important port city on the Mississippi River, but it's also an important connector east to west because this is one of the ways that the railroad actually crosses,

one of the points that the railroad crosses the Mississippi River. And even today, if you were to visit Vicksburg, Interstate 20 goes across right there. So if you're going straight to Dallas or straight to Atlanta, you've got to go through Vicksburg. it's still one of one of your amazing crossing points. So by the time we get to really the fall, winter of 1862, Vicksburg is really the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River. Memphis is under Union control, New Orleans is under Union control, and it really is just Vicksburg now.

And one of the things that's so challenging about it is Vicksburg, unlike those other two cities, sits on these really tall bluffs that are about 200 feet over the river. And it sits on a hairpin curve in the river. So any river traffic has to kind of come up and make this curve and drop down. And these batteries, these Confederate held batteries, have prime position to do damage of this river traffic. So it's really kind of a risky thing to try to run the batteries. and it's not a really sustainable long-term solution.

So that's why they need Vicksburg. They called it the Gibraltar of the Confederacy. It was that well defended, that dug in. I think as you're talking about the geography, it's interesting. It's similar to where West Point is on the Hudson River, you know, up north, where there's a bend in the river. And as a result of that, everybody's got to slow down and take their time getting around this, resetting sales in the old days, but it still takes a while.

and that makes that traffic especially vulnerable. So that's really what's unique about the geography and the topography of this particular location. Both sides understood, you know, the stakes here, the strategic advantage of this place. Confederate President Jefferson Davis said that Vicksburg was the nailhead that holds the South's two halves together. I mean, that's how important this is. Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, Vicksburg is the key.

The war can never be brought to a close under until that key is in the pocket. That's a, those two, that kind of sums it up, doesn't it? It couldn't get more important than Vicksburg as far as the South was concerned. Where does Grant come into this story? He's been marching down through the West, distinguishing himself, unlike most Union generals at this time in the war. Has he had Vicksburg in his crosshairs the whole time? Grant is slowly making a name for himself in the West, as you kind of said.

We have the major battles in the spring of 1862 at Shiloh, at Corinth, and he's beginning to shift his attention to Vicksburg. He's not the first to do it. The summer of 1862, the Navy actually tries to take the city by bombardment before Grant kind of really begins his posturing to try to figure out how to acquire Vicksburg. And I think one of the really important things to remember is that Grant isn't the grant. that we think of yet, right? He's not the Union General Grant. In fact, it's really going to be what he manages to do at Vicksburg that's really going to put him on Lincoln's radar and pull him to the east where he does kind of take that, that looming figurehead position that we think of today when we think of U.S. Grant. We're talking about the Mississippi River. This is a big river.

This is a lot of water. This is almost like a naval expedition, as you said before. This is the first time they tried it was to come up from New Orleans and take it that way. But it's a boots on the ground situation, isn't it? It's got to come from both angles. But there's a lot to manage in terms of being a military leader like Grant at this point. This all sort of begins in April 1863, right? That's the general flow of things at this point. I'm just curious what has happened right before that that sets this up. So what we typically think of as the campaign in siege is actually Grant's third attempt to take Ficksburg and actually the overall fourth attempt. So you have that failed naval bombardment. In December of 62, Grant actually tries to take the city, orchestrate the taking of the city

by foot across the bayous from the north. And then in January, he kind of returns to a project from the previous summer where he even kind of tries to just shift the course of the river. So you don't actually have to take the city. They bring you. out these dredging units and they tried to dig a canal across that hairpin turn and try to just shift the river west a little bit so that a lot of the river traffic would be out of range. It's one of, I think, one of the more impressive feats of engineering if it had in fact worked the way they had wanted it to. So when we get to April, Grant has two attempts under his belt. He's bound and determined that a successful taking of the city is going to have to come from the

East. Vicksburg, of course, is bordered on the west by the river. The question then is how to get his army to the east. And this is what we think of as the campaign. So he leaves out of his supply base of operations. It's a place on the Louisiana side of the river, just north of Bigsburg called Milliken's Bend. And his men march down the west bank of the Mississippi River. It's full of byuse and swamps. They're marching on levees. They're building roads and bridges as they go. It is, takes about a solid month to get to the place that they're going to cross the river. It is. You can read about it in his memoirs. He goes into quite a bit of detail. Grant's memoirs go into detail about this campaign. And it is just awful. You can just tell. I mean, that time a year down there,

oh, you name it. Not the least of which is malaria going on. I mean, there's all kinds of things happening. Yeah, yeah, there's a ton of different components that he has going on here. One of the things that I do think that is interesting, though, is how he's positioning the time of year. So he's seen this effort fail over the summer months because, as you said, sickness, malaria, the mosquitoes are hatching and they're all over the place. He has tried operations over the winter months where it's the wet season and it's flooded. So he really is kind of priming this campaign to hit through Mississippi in this April and May. So the spring months before the mosquitoes come out, but after the wet season has ended, all of your fresh vegetation is blooming. The state is kind of beautiful and green.

The press of heat hasn't kind of come in yet. And one of the things to remember is that Grant had not planned on the siege, right? When he leaves Louisiana, when they crossed into Mississippi, the idea is still that they will be able to storm the city and take the city in one decisive victory. So ideally, Vicksburg is theirs by the end of May. Right. I mean, he's continuing the momentum that he's had throughout that, you know, Tennessee and Shiloh, all the, where just the force of overwhelming force will succeed. This is going to be different with Vicksburg because of. of the defensive topography that's available to the confederers there.

And they are dug in. The idea generally, as you're describing it, is that he wants to sort of bypass all those defenses, right? By landing, is it south of the city? He's trying to get around on the West Bank and come in a different way through a huge amphibious landing. Not unlike a World War II type of thing, right? Yeah. And in fact, this cooperation between the Army and the Navy, the amphibious. landing of moving troops across the river is the largest amphibious landing in U.S. military history

until we get to World War II. Wow. This is a massive scale operation that's a joint effort between both the Union and the Navy in a way that we haven't quite seen them unite in quite the same way. And I think you could probably argue that we won't see them unite quite the same way until we get into much later engagements in terms of U.S. military history. Yeah. So much of the Civil War, Napoleon.

All these big wars are so much about moving men and equipment around in preparation for the action. Vicksburg is on another level altogether. That's the problem here for Grant. He's looking at these huge bluffs and the dug-in defenses that the Confederates have. And his idea is to bypass this, come around from the other side, land his men. And with ironclads coming down the river, the whole thing is happening. In just 17 days, Grant's army has marched 180 miles. And one along the way, five distinct battles.

By May 19th, he has pinned Confederate, Lieutenant General, John Pemberton's forces, and the inhabitants inside Vicksburg. And this becomes what is our real subject today, which is the siege of Vicksburg. Something he hadn't planned to do, right? Exactly. When he arrives on the outskirts of the city, May 19th, he actually kind of rushes an attack because he thinks he has so much momentum that he can just break through and get in and is ultimately repelled. And then he waits a couple more days and then launches another attack, which is arguably more kind of ferocious than it's fighting on May 22nd. And it's really being repelled on the 22nd that makes him back up and realize, all right, we got to be, we're going to have to do this a different way, which is really kind of the story of the entire campaign.

And they are dug in for a siege of 47 days, which is a living hell in Vicksburg. So when we come back, we'll talk about what life was like during this time for the average citizen and the soldiers. Welcome back. I am speaking to Lindsay Prevet, Associate Professor at Anderson University. about the siege of Vicksburg. Lindsay, we are going to talk about something that when you read the accounts, it is chilling, it is relentless, and it is deadly. And this is what this city never knew was coming and what the North had no plans in doing. It's kind of an ironic circumstance that everybody's in, isn't it?

It really is. And the thing about being a civilian in Vicksburg, I think, is they're well aware of the city's important. And there's been so much activity around the city that to an extent there feels like an inevitability that they would end up in the Union Army's crosshairs the way that they do. The question is where, how, when, and it all kind of comes to head here in the spring and summer of 63. Before Vicksburg fell under the siege completely, both civilians and enslaved people had attempted to flee. What prevented them from getting out? There's a handful of different things.

Transportation could be one easy way of maneuvering in and out of the city. Where Grant is kind of positioning himself, he's really kind of blocking Vicksburg. If you're looking at the railroad line that goes east to Jackson, like that's the line that he's actually marching in on. So you're looking at wagons that are trying to take. people mostly out to like surrounding farm ceds. But you also have this element, right? The city has been under attack so many different times that many civilians kind of had a lot of faith in their Confederate garrison that the Union Army would be repelled. They had a lot of faith that this wasn't necessarily going to be the be all end all that it kind of turns into. So I think a lot of people

probably just didn't take it as seriously as it ended up being. What kind of population are we talking about? How many people are there? Yeah. So for the city of Vicksburg, I believe the 1860 census has about 5,000 residents. Oh, wow. So when we, so it's a pretty good size town in terms of 1860 standards. There's a lot happening in the city. It's actually also a really big cultural hub. But when you look at things like food and water supply, the city set up for 5,000. And then when the Confederate Army shows up, they're adding 33,000 people on top of that. One of the big strategies or issues ends up being the city water supply.

There's about a year before, the board of police recommends that the city update its water supply to be able to sustain water for more people in case there is something like a siege. And they never do that. So the city water supply can sustain reliably 5,000 people. I want to understand the arrangement here. I assume that they are surrounded. I mean, otherwise, they'd get out of here. So the siege either blocks them in or is the union encircling them completely? Yeah, the Union armies pretty securely.

So you have the city center, which is pushed up against the Mississippi River, around the outside of that, you have Confederate trench lines and fortifications. So you have fortifications that are connected with rifle pits. And then the Union Army creates their own set of trench lines on the outside of that. And part of this process, and I think it's one of the things that makes it such an effective siege, is that Grant actually makes a policy decision or strategic decision. decision to not let civilians out. So as civilians come and try to plead their case, you know, can I cross siege lines? The answer is no. So part of the strategy is that whoever was in this city when the siege lines closed was going to remain in this city until Vicksburg fell.

That is brutal. Where is Grant going to be firing from as far as the shelling that's going to take place. The city's going to get it from both sides. So our union trench lines that are skirting around the eastern side of the city are going to shell into the city at various times. But we also have a union naval flotilla that is bordering the west bank of the city on the river. And they're also going to be indiscriminately firing into the city.

Right. So you have soldiers in the trench lines that are under danger, but you also. have residents who are in their homes, who are sustaining shelling, and they're learning how to do things like try to figure out where the canaanating is and try to move out of the way and position themselves in a place that they can be as safe as possible. It's an unfolding drama. And early on, there's, there are many records of this. Emma Balfour is a diarist in Vicksburg, and she wrote this extract early in the siege. I'll quote her, what is to become of all living things in this place when the boats commence shelling? God only knows. Shut up as in a trap, no ingress or egress.

Are thousands of women and children who have all fled here for safety? This is a fish in the barrel situation, isn't it? It definitely is. And by the time the Confederate Army kind of comes retreating back in. into the city. They're discouraged and I think that's beginning to be when civilians begin to think about what a serious situation that they're in. And then as this siege kind of progresses, things kind of just deteriorate from there. There are caves. There's a whole system of caves within this area that they're going to take refuge in, right? Yeah. So one of the unique

geographical features about Vicksburg is that it has a very unique soil composition. It sits on top of a type of salt called L-O-E-S-S. And one of the dominant properties is that you can make a vertical cut in this soil and it is impervious to erosion. And so this actually allows them to dig into the cliffs and the ravines. and the ridges in order to create a system of caves to kind of protect them during the shelling. Wow. There's all sorts of different types. I think it's Emma Balfour that actually says that the business of cave digging kind of springs up overnight. And so it's really big to contract out to have someone come and dig you a cave. And these caves get pretty complex. Yeah, and they're filled with furniture and household wares.

I mean, they have, they make homes. I mean, how much of the city took, took refuge here, like percentage-wise? Yeah. So there are different types of caves, but one type we would find would be kind of like a community shelter cave, if you would think about community shelters for like tornadoes or something along those lines. So those would just be large, big rooms where people who don't have access to a private cave could go during, during the shelling. But for women like Emma Balfour, who is a very prominent physician in the city, there's another woman named Mary Loughborough who has followed her husband to Vicksburg. These caves are pretty intricate. They have kind of openings. They have multiple rooms. As you said, they move

their furniture into these cities. So the likelihood, if you were a resident inside Vicksburg proper, that you would have access to be able to utilize these caves. Now, whether you chose to utilize the caves could be a very different story. I imagine this is like London Blitz kind of thing. There must be some sort of system that they're aware of where they can kind of take shelter when they know it's coming. They hear the blasts, I suppose, and everybody runs for these things. But was it different than I'm expected, that I'm described? Was it kind of day and night and relentless?

So the shelling does seem to come in waves. Most of the people, most of the civilians inside the city choose not to live in their caves full time, despite the fact that they've kind of made these creature comforts full of home. And at least some of the reasons is because these caves are pretty miserable. It's Mississippi. It is June. They're hot and they're sweltering. There's no air ventilator.

but also they're beginning to complain of mosquitoes and flies, and especially if you're in caves that are small and overcrowded. You can think of what having multiple bodies in a cave would kind of do. Emma Balfour all but refuses. I mean, she hates the caves. And there are some instances she actually talks about just trying to take shelter in her own house and instead of running out to them. So they are a solution for safety, and they do a pretty good job.

There are not very many civilian deaths due to shelling during the siege, but they're not at all, they don't at all kind of ease the discomfort of siege life. There is another entry. Lucy McRae is a child during the siege, and she was buried in dirt when an explosion hit her cave. She later writes about a large mass of earth to slide from the side of the archway in a solid piece catching me under it. Mother had cried and in distressing tones for help. So as soon as the men could get to me, they pulled me out from the mass of earth. The blood was gushing from my nose, eyes, ears, and mouth.

A physician who was then in the cave was called and said there were no bones broken, but he could not tell what my internal injuries are. I mean, we have seen this in recent years of sieges even today. Gaza comes to mind, you know, where you see civilian populations really suffering under bombardment. This is Vicksburg. This is the kind of intensity we're talking about here. What happened to the enslaved people in the city?

I would imagine they were left out of these caves, right? I think it largely depended. Mary Loughborough, for example, who also later writes a memoir for my cave, life in Vicksburg. She actually has two or three enslaved people with her in the city, and they actually go to the caves with her, especially as they're enduring long stretches because they're continuing to perform all of the responsibilities for Loughborough that they would have in the city if she were in her residence. But in terms of somebody who's just generally taking shelter. That in and of itself would not necessarily be a luxury afforded to the

enslaved population. Yeah. Yeah. Luxury in quotation marks. But they are still sent out to gather food and other necessary things that are needed to happen, of course. But food becomes quickly scarce. Livestock begins to die. Inhabitants have to resort to alternative sources of nourishment. Rats, mules, anything to start eating. This is how. desperate things become. And while the civilians are huddled inside Vicksburg, what's happening with the Confederate forces? Are they able to move more freely, I suppose?

If you're reading Emma Balfour and some of the civilians inside the city, there seems to be at least some movement back and forth between the trench line, at least with commanding officers as they kind of are moving into the city and looking for food. so they'll kind of come and look for food and then head back to the trench lines. But for the most part, for your common private enlisted Confederate soldier, they are trapped in these rifle pits. And again, we can think Mississippi, it is getting hotter and hotter. We have moved into the dry season. So there's not a lot of rain.

There's not a lot of cloud coverage. And these rifle pits aren't really shaded. So they're in and they're also very low. So men are kind of laying. out. They don't have the ability in a lot of places to stand and stretch. So their bodies kind of are beginning to deteriorate from exposure to the elements. And then you add on top of that nutritional deficiencies. And so they're beginning to develop things like scurvy and other kind of issues as well. Yeah, it's a laboratory of misery. There are 33,000, I want to remind people,

33,000 Confederate troops defending the city, 77,000 Union troops outside the city, with freedom of movement and a river to supply them. Emma Balfour wrote of what she saw among the Confederate soldiers retreating back into the city, May 17, 1863. I hope never to witness again such a scene as the return of our routed army. From 12 o'clock until late in the night, the streets and roads were jammed with wagons, cannons, cannons, horses,

men, mules, stock, sheep, everything you can imagine that appertains to an army being brought hurriedly within the entrenchment. This was, I mean, it's a sizable town, as we've mentioned, 5,000 people were living there. It's still not room for 33,000 people to move in. And so that is the factor that I had not really calculated in terms of understanding the intensity and kind of bizarreness of the situation. It's just people on top of people, isn't it? It is. It is. Now, one thing that we can also kind of remember is that there is a little bit of space between city center and these in these siege lines. So not all of them are in downtown Vicksburg, but in terms of resources, in terms of space, like I said, access to food, water, basic medical supplies, it is people on top of people. And as Confederate soldiers get sick, their commanders and their physicians want to pull them. out of the trenches, and there's no place for them to go except far into the city. And so riding

through the city after the surrender, one of the union surgeons actually makes note in his diary that Vicksburg has turned into a veritable hospital city. Every shelter, every house, the back gardens, the yards are all kind of being employed to house sick Confederate soldiers. Easily made sick because they're so malnourished, you know, as the weeks go on from both the soldiers and the civilians. A last quote to read here. June 28th, Lieutenant General Pemberton receives an anonymous letter signed by, quote, many soldiers. Here's an extract. Our rations have been cut down to one biscuit and a small bit of bacon per day, not enough scarcely to keep soul and body together, much less stand the hardships.

we are called upon to stand. If you can't feed us, you had better surrender us. Horrible as that idea is, the army is now ripe to mutiny unless it is fed. Wow. You know, this is the beginning of what becomes Sherman's march, a whole intensity of union campaigning that sort of pays no notice to the human misery that is being caused, even among the civilian population. It all goes to a different scale based on.

Vicksburg, doesn't it? It does. I think this is one of the big takeaways that both Grant and then Sherman, William Ticomacy Sherman is one of the Corps commanders. And William Ticomacy Sherman famously when Grant goes east ends up in control of the Army of the Tennessee and is going to do his famous march to the sea. And so I think that there is a lot of learning that happens in Vicksburg in terms of how to take this army and utilize the land and the resources in order to make the fighting really, really effective. And it ends up being quite brutal. At what point does surrender become, you know, offered? I mean, become a conversation.

Yeah. So it's right there at the end of June, beginning of July. You noted the letter written by anonymous soldiers threatening mutiny. And there's often conversation. Is that actually Confederates? or is it actually union spies that have circulated it to try to put some pressure on Pemberton? Pemberton, by the beginning of July, actually, he starts to send notice to his core commanders. Do we have the strength to fight our way out of the city?

This entire time, Pemberton was hoping that Joseph Johnston was going to be coming to his aid. This is one of the big reasons why Pemberton's like, Joe Johnson's coming. and then if we can get Grant's army between these two, like we'll be relieved. And he's coming to the realization that Johnston's not coming. He asks his Corps commanders if he thinks their men can fight their way out of the city. And the result is a resounding note. One of them says that he doesn't think his men would make a mile

if they could get out of the trench lines. So Pemberton's kind of beginning to realize that there isn't really an option but to surrender. By the time we get to the beginning of July 1, The Confederate Army still has some food in its storehouses. And I think that's the thing that surprises a lot of people. They're not completely out of food. Pemberton wants to do almost a ceremonial. The reason that he asks for the surrender when he does is he thinks that maybe Grant will be more lenient on his conditions if Grant can take the city on July 4th.

And so July 4th kind of becomes this big ceremonial, you know, if you can take Vicksburg, right, Grant can march his men into the city and say that he claims Vicksburg on the July 4th holiday. And that's really kind of what motivates Pemberton to surrender the city at the time that he ends up doing it. So they meet a little bit on July 2nd, July 3rd. They're trying to hammer out some specifics. Grant chooses to go back to his line, to defer to his, to talk with his core commanders. I think at one point he says that it's the closest he ever comes to having a council of war. You know, what exactly should surrender conditions look like? And then they hammer, they hammer out surrender conditions.

And Pemberton surrenders the city on the fourth. I'm surprised, given the importance of Vicksburg, that there wasn't, a plan to come down. I mean, they had a month and a half, basically, 47 days to react to this. You would have thought that the confettors would have sent this. But for the fact that at this moment, what's happening on the East Coast? It's Lee marching into Gettysburg. This huge movement up north is what's happening back for the Army of Northern Virginia. So in between, I guess the resources are slim. Yeah, and I think when we talk about Vicksburg, we often talk about all the ways the Union Army is successful.

But Vicksburg is also lost because of bad decisions that are made for the Confederacy. And part of that is a major disagreement within leadership. You actually mentioned on the East Coast, after Chancellor'sville, Grant is making moves out west in Mississippi. Everyone knows it. Jefferson Davis actually tries to get Robert E. Lee to send a detachment of men to Mississippi in order to help Pemberton. And Lee doesn't want to do it. Lee essentially says that whatever operations grant has going on, if they make it to June, the environment, the diseases will take care of the army on its own. And so Lee pushes back against Davis and actively makes the decision

to take all of his men into Pennsylvania with him. And then the same thing, Joe Johnston's stance is that Pemberton should abandon Vicksburg, and then they can always come back and reclaim Vicksburg. So there's considerable disagreement between these high leaders as to what should actually be done, and Pemberton ends up kind of being left to just fend for himself. It's a remarkable thing that I have learned covering this for this series. How much the strategy for the Confederates at that point was based on the success back east, as Lee is driving towards this idea of pin them down and then we can negotiate our way out of this thing.

That seems to have been in the mid-1863 period what was going on for them. And it was a good idea, given the success that they had one after another, in the Virginia campaign there. And so not paying attention to the West at that point had to have had something to do with that mindset. And I think that, you know, it was understandable given where they how much success they had had. Little do they know on July 4th, two things would happen. There would be the surrender of Vicksburg and there would be the surrender at Gettysburg. When we come back, we'll talk about how all this works in the aftermath. Welcome back. We're talking about the siege of Vicksburg nearing its end. 47 days of awful battle has happened. You have to say for both sides in

these kinds of conditions in the heat of summer now, we're in July. The union is very close to capturing this strategically vital position. What are the final steps in this campaign, Lindsay? So as we begin to move from June into July, Pemberton is beginning to look at food storage. He's beginning to look at the health, the physical ability of his soldiers to actually sustain. And then we also have this mental question, right? This question of mutiny that an army functions on its stomach. So when you start to have starving soldiers, how much longer are they going to be willing to be in that position? So Pemberton kind of begins to eye that July 4th date.

and the symbolism that he has a pretty strong feeling that Grant would enjoy having Vicksburg on the 4th of July, the anniversary of the nation's independence. And he kind of offers the city up. When Pemberton first meets Grant, Grant's notorious for having an unconditional surrender, if you will. So Grant wants to initially take everyone prisoner of war, right? 33,000 prisoners of war. And Pemberton proposes that they be paroled and allowed to leave with clothes and a sidearm. And they can't quite come to an agreement there.

Grant breaks negotiations, says that he will write back his answer the next day. And he goes and confers with his corps commanders. and David Dixon Porter, who's the Admiral on the River. And the resounding feedback that he kind of gets is transporting 33,000 soldiers outside of Vicksburg would just be too much. It's going to bog down the transportation lines. You can imagine what a prisoner of war camps in the north would be like. And so that's ultimately where the idea of paroling everybody came from. So when he meets with Pemberton and they decide to surrender the city, essentially what they do is they keep everyone together in camp.

The Union Army immediately begins to feed the soldiers off of their stores. In fact, Union soldiers walking through talk about pulling bread and food stuff out of their haversax as they're moving into the city and giving it to Confederate soldiers, giving it to civilians. and then they make out parole papers. Enlisted men are allowed to keep their clothes, whatever clothes they have, everything else they surrender. Commanding officers are allowed to keep a horse. They're allowed to keep a small sidearm as they're paroled and then dispatched. In many cases, east, they're going to head toward east Mississippi, Alabama. That's the direction that they're going to take.

was it ever tracked how many of those those soldiers returned to battle? I mean, it seems counterproductive to me that you would, that you would do this because they're going to go right back into the fighting. Yeah, and I think that's a really fair question. I imagine quite a few. I haven't seen numbers where someone has, like, tracked every single person. You're going to have a question of whether they're physically fit. So they're going to have time to have to get up their energy. and to recover from whatever diseases or ailments they were having.

But I imagine that quite a few of them picked up their arms and returned to the fighting before the war was out. Yeah. It only makes sense. I mean, the psychological factor is that Grant, I suppose, hoping that this whole surrender just wears on the Confederate morale. I mean, in general, beyond Vicksburg, as they see these guys return. from this battle and telling the stories. Nonetheless, the surrender of Vicksburg is finalized on Independence Day, July 4th, 1863. At that point, the West is won, as far as the Union's concerned. They have the whole river, and that's a big deal. I want to mention the casualty numbers

here. Just under 5,000 for the Union over this month and a half. 8606 of them are dead. Confederate casualties, you know, we really haven't talked about, and nor do we have time to, but there's so many skirmishes. There's so many different kind of battles going on within the siege. It's not purely, you know, bombard, bomb, bomb, bar, but that's the big story, but there's a lot of other kind of fighting. Confederate casualties are 32,000, you know, versus 5,000 for the Union, 32,000 for Confederates. The vast majority of those are the surrendered with 805 killed.

We've made this story more about the civilians, and I want to finish with that. How does the population react when the siege is lifted? I mean, massive relief. So you have massive relief, but you do have that, the horror, right? Because Vicksburg's now an occupied city. The Union Army will not leave Vicksburg from here on out. In the immediate months afterward, I would argue that Vicksburg kind of becomes a humanitarian crisis city. The emancipation proclamation has been,

has gone into effect in January. So Vicksburg now is your closest city under union control that enslaved people will flock to to seek their freedom. And the city is all but destroyed. So we have rebuilding efforts. We have questions about what's going to happen in terms of public health with stagnant pools of water and malaria, dead animals in the streets. And then we have really a lot of social tensions. So what they ultimately end up deciding to do with Vicksburg is take USCT units. United States color troops are outfits of soldiers, black soldiers. And in different areas, they'll either be freedmen, but they can also be enslaved men who kind of ran for union lines, sought their freedom, and sought enlistmen in the Union Army. And it's, and they

It's those USCT soldiers that are actually going to be the occupying army. Many of those men were enslaved men on the surrounding plantations. So we have a complete social inversion in the city of Vicksburg coming out at the siege. And that's going to really also alter, I think, the bitterness that a lot of the white civilians in particular are kind of grappling with moving forward as they live under union. in control. Yeah. One of the impact of Vicksburg, as we've talked about, has been the change of tone in this war.

You know, I suppose it wasn't as exacting as that at the time, but as we look back on it, that's really the tipping point that happens. The anaconic plan is a success, as I say, we own the West. An unforeseen coincidence is the dual surrender, or at least victory for the union at Both Gettysburg and Vicksburg, big press up north, I mean, major morale booster. We are on our way at this point. The war has tipped wildly at this point because of Lee's failure in the north. But it's really the duality of these two battles happening that really seals the fate when you look back on it.

Of course, there's years to go. There's a gigantic march by Sherman going down to the sea. All of these events are going to follow. but it's all in the spirit of having really gutted the whole pretense that the Confederates had any kind of defense for this Union Army coming in on them. When this story is told by your people, you know, you grew up there, is there bitterness? Is there an understanding of it? Tell me how this unfolds when you learn about it as a youngster. Yeah.

Well, I think that that answer has changed tremendously over the years. there's stories that long-time Vicksburg natives tell about, you know, the city not celebrating the Fourth of July for decades and decades. It does seem that at least by the time we get to the turn of the century, the 1880s to 1910, that they are, you know, they're, they are observing the Fourth of July. And then I think that that might ebb and flow through the decades as they kind of different remember, remember different stories. But as, as we've kind of progressed in time, there's, I think, a lot of, I don't want to say pride for the city, but the Vicksburgers are really,

it really do kind of embrace this element of their history, the significance that their city kind of had within the Civil War. Now, one of the undercurrents, I will say that I'll often find really interesting in how it compares to Gettysburg, though, is that Gettysburg is a battle in a union town where the North won, and Vicksburg is a battle in a southern town where the Confederacy lost, right? So there's this, there's kind of an embracing of the battle, but there is still a little bit of the element in which if you visited the two cities, the tone is just slightly different around residents. And it's more of a feeling than something that anybody kind of would express to you. Dr. Lindsay Prevet is an associate professor of history at Anderson University. She is the

author of the book, The Surgeons Battle, How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Change the Civil War. How cool. Lindsay, where can people find out more about your work, a website or such? Excellent. Well, my book is available with kind of all of the big platforms, Amazon. It was published by UNC Press, Amazon and UNC Press. There you go. Incredible story you can learn more about by reading this book. Thank you so much, Lindsay. Nice to meet you. Thanks so much. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies, to powerful political movements, to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.

Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.