As part of our vacation last summer we spent a couple of nights in Vicksburg, Mississippi which of course is the site of the Siege of Vicksburg during the Civil War. I didn’t really know anything about Vicksburg or the siege or why it was important or really anything at all.
There is all sorts of great information on the Siege of Vicksburg on the web. Vicksburg was important militarily because of its natural forts overlooking the Mississippi River. The Union wanted free mobility up and down the river. So in 1863 General Ulysses S. Grant ringed the city with 75,000 Union troops and hundreds of cannon. The Union Navy had their mortar barges on the river and for 47 days rained hell on the Confederate troops and civilians in Vicksburg.
The Confederates of course defended themselves the best they could but finally surrendered the city on July 4, 1863. Vicksburg did not celebrate July 4 until the 1940’s.
The Vicksburg National Military Park takes up the heart of Vicksburg and even now Vicksburg has the air of an occupied town. The Battlefield is wonderful but there were not that many people there in the heart of the summer.
It’s a very solemn place. During the battle the soldiers were buried here, there, and everywhere and it wasn’t until after the war that they were dug up and re-interred in cemeteries. I’m sure that they missed quite a few.
I had been trying to figure out how to post about Vicksburg. There is too much stuff there for just one post so I am going to several.
These photos show local high school and and college students demonstrating, under the direction of a Park Ranger (above right), the teamwork needed to fire a cannon. It was very interesting. He let us get up close until it came time to fire the cannon and we had to back.
At just a half charge of powder, firing blank, it set the burglar alarms off in the cars in the nearby parking lot and made a ton of smoke. I cannot imagine what dozens of cannons firing together, full charges, would sound like.
