Vicksburg

I have long been interested in the Battle of Vicksburg.

On the one hand, the Vicksburg campaign is one of the most well-designed, well-executed campaigns of the Civil War. The details of the campaign were well known even at the time, and even cursory investigation of those details shows Grant to be an outstanding tactical and operational commander. He appropriately assesses the importance of the objective and pursues a variety of innovative techniques for bringing Vicksburg under siege. Most of these fail, but Grant is not daunted and does not allow his men or his senior lieutenants to lose faith. He responds to each failure with the dogged determination that there Must Be a Way, and then he finds that way. He accepts casualties but does not recklessly spend the lives of his men. His opposite numbers are competent if not excellent, yet he systematically manages to curtail their options. It tells you all you need to know about post-war historiography that pop military historians somehow managed to forget the Grant of the Vicksburg campaign in preference for the Butcher of the Overland Campaign, when really the contrast between the two should demonstrate Grant’s flexibility as a commander, as well as the very real tactical proficiency of the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia.

On the other hand, the strategic and political significance of Vicksburg is immense. The Mississippi River System is the most important geographic-socioeconomic fact of the North American continent. Full control of the system grants immense military latitude and immense economic benefit, to the extent that I’m still sometimes a bit surprised that both sides didn’t commit more resources to its capture and control. In an alternative reality where Gettysburg goes differently yet Vicksburg remains the same, the problem for the Confederacy is existential. The Trans-Mississippi Confederacy effectively becomes non-viable after the Union takes full control of the river; even if Lincoln was deterred from making another effort at Richmond, the western Confederate states were basically indefensible. Possibly worse, control of the Mississippi introduced an escape valve for the huge portion of the Confederacy’s population that was in servitude. The viable Confederacy shrinks to Alabama, Florida, Georgia, east Tennessee (not friendly to Richmond), the Carolinas, and Virginia, and most of those areas are under dire threat from Union naval forces.

Anyway, it’s a pretty interesting battle. This week I am free of parental and work responsibilities, so I hopped in the car and drove the nine hours to Vicksburg, inaugurating what I’m going to call the US Grant Victory Tour. Vicksburg is a charming little town in all of the ways you expect a small Mississippi town to be charming. This morning I hit the Vicksburg National Military Park at sunup (it will surprise no one to learn that it’s fucking hot in Mississippi in July), and I was not disappointed. Some pics:

I’ll pause briefly here to note that while I generally hate Confederate iconography, I have no problem whatsoever with Confederate monuments on Civil War battlefields. These spaces belong, in an important sense, to the men who fought and died on them and to the families that supported them. If Mississippi wants to erect a monument to those who died on her behalf at a place like Vicksburg, I have no objection.

This fucker, however, should have every statue expunged from history.

Unfortunately, Grant Circle is off limits because of weather damage, so I couldn’t get a pic of the statue of Grant.

I spent the rest of the morning hitting a couple museums in Vicksburg. The Old Courthouse Museum is perfectly adequate and exactly what you would expect of a Civil War museum in a small Southern town; among other bits of Confederate nostalgia there’s an exhibit dedicated to largely imaginary Black Confederates. However, in a room set aside for general Vicksburg history I found this unexpected sight:

The history here is fascinating; quoting Wikipedia because otherwise I’d just be paraphrasing Wikipedia:

When the town of Vicksburg was incorporated in 1825, with a population of 3,000, there were approximately twenty Jewish settlers, who had immigrated from Bavaria, Prussia, and Alsace–Lorraine.^[1][6] The early Jewish population of men and women were business owners, community leaders, physicians, lawyers, and teachers in the city of Vicksburg.^[1] In 1862, fifty Jewish families came together and formed the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Anshe Chesed in Vicksburg, and received a charter from the state.^[6]

In the 1866 Vicksburg city directory, ninety Jewish families owned thirty-five businesses.^[1] By 1905, there were 659 Jewish people in the city of Vicksburg, which was the peak population (4.44% of the city population).^[1] As of 2014, only some twenty Jewish people were left in Vicksburg; this loss of Jewish population was due to many factors^[1] and occurred statewide.

The history of Jews in the South is weird and the history of Ashkenazi Jews in the South is even weirder, but there you go.

I also hit the Vicksburg Civil War Museum where the experience was… unexpected. The proprietor is a middle-aged Black fella who looked me up and down when I said I wanted to enter and asked “Where you from? You know much about the Civil War?” After I paid my dues he instructed me to begin at the Wall of Secession Declarations, beginning with South Carolina. He had highlighted all of the parts of these declarations that mentioned slavery, which were of course substantial and absolutely damning of arguments that the war was about anything but slavery. I was then guided to a reconstructed slave cabin in which the voices of Black slaves were played on loop. The rest of the collection was absolutely fantastic and supported the general ideological thrust of the museum. As I left, dude was interrogating a bewildered family on whether or not they considered Robert E. Lee to be a traitor. Good times.

I am now in Savannah, TN. Tomorrow’s agenda is ambitious; Shiloh, then Fort Donelson, then Belmont. Planning to start things early.