Frederick Grant attended West Point and spent much of his career in the military, where he rose to the rank of general. He served as his father’s secretary while Grant was president, was later the ambassador to Austria-Hungary, and for two years was police commissioner of New York City. In his memoirs, Grant wrote of Fred at Vicksburg, “My son accompanied me throughout the campaign and siege, and caused no anxiety either to me or to his mother, who was at home. He looked out for himself and was in every battle of the campaign. His age … enabled him to take in all he saw, and to retain a recollection of it that would not be possible in more mature years.”
Ulysses S. Grant became a national hero when Vicksburg fell. He assumed command of all Union forces, and it was he who accepted Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, ending the war. He was president of the United States from 1868 to 1876.
William Tecumseh Sherman’s wife, two daughters, and two sons joined him in Vicksburg during the first months of the occupation. His older son, Willy, was eleven. Like Fred Grant, he had his own Federal uniform and wanted to be a soldier. Months later the boy was dead from yellow fever. A grieving Sherman would write of this loss, “I could not leave my post, and sent for the family to come to me in that fatal climate and in that sickly period of the year, and behold the result!”
Sherman is most often remembered for his brutal march through the South and the capture of Atlanta, events that laid waste to the South and helped end the war. He succeeded Grant as commander of the army.
John Pemberton, as he himself predicted, was blamed by many for the loss of Vicksburg. Once he surrendered the city, he accepted a reduction in rank and continued to serve in the war as a colonel. For a while he was on Robert E. Lee’s staff. Lee always addressed him as “General” and sought his opinion on important matters. When the war was over, Pemberton wanted a court of inquiry into his role at Vicksburg but was never given one. He and Johnston continued pointing fingers of blame at each other for decades.
Joe Johnston retained his command in the Confederacy, in spite of his refusal to come to Vicksburg’s aid. He was often reviled for his recurring pattern of refusing to fight. He and Sherman became friends after the war, and Johnston served as an honorary pallbearer at Sherman’s funeral.
Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, was held responsible for the war and imprisoned in solitary confinement for two and a half years. He lived to be eighty and published a two-volume history of the Civil War written from a Southern perspective. It became a bestseller in the South. After his death, his wife lived in New York City and became friends with another widow, Julia Grant. When Mrs. Davis died, Fred Grant arranged for a United States Army band to play Southern songs and accompany her casket to the train station. She was taken to Richmond, Virginia, and buried next to her husband.
Old Abe, the American bald eagle who was the mascot for the 8th Wisconsin Infantry, was at Vicksburg during the entire campaign. After the war he was named an honorary citizen of Wisconsin and gave his name to the 101st Airborne Division, United States Army, known as the Screaming Eagles. He lived out his life in a special room in the Wisconsin state capitol. The top of the Wisconsin monument at the Vicksburg National Military Park features a six-foot statute of Old Abe.
Orion Howe, the fourteen-year-old Union drummer boy from Illinois who bravely ran through deadly fire to get more ammunition for his regiment, recovered from his serious wound. He was later awarded the Medal of Honor for his service at Vicksburg—one of the youngest soldiers ever to receive it.
Mary Loughborough’s husband survived prison, and the family settled in Little Rock, Arkansas. After the war, Mary published her journal, titling it My Cave Life in Vicksburg. It was popular with Northern readers. She later founded a women’s magazine called Southern Ladies’ Journal. Her husband died shortly after their fourth child was born. Mary’s health was adversely affected by her time living in a cave during the siege, and she died in 1887 at age fifty.
Emma Balfour also died in 1887. She had already outlived her husband by a decade. She never left Vicksburg. In her will she remembered her favorite house slave, Margaret Ann, whose wedding she had hosted in her home.
Vicksburg is now a city of 26,000 residents, both black and white. Several elegant homes that survived the siege are either bed and breakfast inns or are open for tours. In addition to Lucy’s home, visitors can see Christ Episcopal Church, where Dr. Lord preached daily during the siege. But the rectory next to the church, where the Lord family lived, was torn down because of extensive damage. The courthouse is now the Old Courthouse Museum and is considered one of the best Confederate museums in the South. It has many exhibits on the siege, and hanging in a place of honor is an oil painting of General Pemberton.
Congress kept the South under military rule for more than a decade following the war. Federal troops were present in Vicksburg a full thirteen years—longer than the United States occupation of Germany after World War II.
For eighty-four years following Vicksburg’s surrender, proud citizens resisted any organized celebration of the Fourth of July. Only in 1947, when General Dwight D. Eisenhower of World War II fame came to visit, did the city put on a celebration worthy of the great American war hero. Since then, while they have not forgotten their history and readily share it with visitors, Vicksburg residents have celebrated Independence Day with the rest of the country.
Sky Parlor Hill ceased to exist in the years following the war when it was graded down to make way for new construction.
Vicksburg National Military Park was created by an act of Congress in 1899. It is the final resting place for 17,000 Union soldiers. Of that number, 13,000 are in unmarked graves since Civil War soldiers did not carry identifying information like the dog tags that today’s soldiers wear. There are no Confederate graves in the park; since the Rebels were not considered United States citizens when they died, by law they could not be buried on federal property. Even without them, the park is one of the largest Civil War cemeteries in the country.
Visitors to the park can see miles of reconstructed trenches, a Union tunnel, and a collection of cannon and other weapons. When Civil War reenactors are present, they help visitors imagine what the siege was like.
On display is the Union ironclad gunboat Cairo, which was sunk by the Confederates in December 1862 and later salvaged. Also of interest are the 1,248 monuments erected by both Union and Confederate troops who served at Vicksburg. These monuments honor soldiers from twenty-eight states who sent troops to fight at Vicksburg (there were thirty-four states at the time). Each is unique and each is made of the state’s native stone.
Illinois had the most soldiers at Vicksburg—over 36,000—and has the largest monument. It has forty-seven steps, one for each day of the siege. Missouri has the only monument dedicated to soldiers on both sides, commemorating its native sons who fought against each other at Vicksburg.
Facts About the War
Forty thousand Confederate and Union soldiers are estimated to have perished from wounds or illness during the entire Vicksburg campaign. The siege itself claimed almost 3,000 Confederate soldiers and 4,900 Federal soldiers.
The American population at the time of the war was 30 million. The Union army had between 2.5 and 2.75 million men in uniform, while the less populated South had 750,000 to 1.23 million. The figure usually given for the number of soldiers who died in the Civil War is 620,000 (more than the combined deaths of all other American wars). But if you count the number of men who subsequently died of injuries or illness inflicted during the Civil War, the figure might be as high as 1.5 million. Because regiments were made up of soldiers from the same area, in one battle some small towns lost most or even all of their men and boys between the ages of fifteen and fifty. Many of these solders were buried in unmarked graves, far from home and lost to their families forever.
The Union awarded 128 Medals of Honor to Union soldiers who fought at Vicksburg.
Vicksburg had the
most elaborate trench system ever devised prior to World War I.
The typical Civil War soldier was twenty-six years old; stood five feet, eight inches tall; and weighed 135 pounds.
Few regular soldiers in either the North or the South had military experience prior to the war, and they received little more than basic training before seeing actual combat. Most volunteer soldiers were farmers and small business owners, and it’s possible that as many as 400,000 were boys under the age of eighteen. Though post-traumatic stress disorder was not a known diagnosis at the time, many soldiers who returned home from the war suffered from depression and nightmares and could not resume normal lives.
During the war, it was not unusual for officers to bring their wives and children with them or at least to have visits from them. Some soldiers also had their families with them, living alongside the army wherever it went.
The Union armies were named for rivers, and the Rebel armies for states. Thus, Grant’s Army of the Tennessee was so named because the men were on the Tennessee River when it was organized, while one of the Southern armies was the Army of Northern Virginia because that’s where it was organized.
In spite of primitive living conditions, families sometimes accompanied soldiers to war.
Children Orphaned by the War
Tens of thousands of children lost their fathers in the Civil War. If they subsequently lost their mothers and did not have relatives to take over, they faced great difficulty. Responses to this problem varied from place to place. The state of Pennsylvania lost 50,000 soldiers in the war and established orphanages and schools for its fatherless children. The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum opened in 1868 for Jewish children who were orphaned by the war. The Kentucky Female Orphan School in Midway cared for forty-six girls in 1858. By 1871, that number had doubled because of war orphans. Churches and other religious groups set up homes and orphanages across the country in the post-war years, and some orphaned or half-orphaned children—many of whom lost their fathers in the Civil War—rode orphan trains from one place to another in search of new families.
Women and the War
Jennie Hodgers (right) disguised herself as a man and fought at Vicksburg.
When men went off to war, many women had to take over their roles at home. To help with the war effort, women all over the country pitched in to do what they could. They knitted socks, made clothing and quilts, and gathered and shipped supplies like blankets and towels, soap, rifle cartridges, writing paper, Bibles, and food. They held fund-raisers and often donated personal possessions, or sold them and donated the money. They visited army camps and prisons. They wrote letters to lonely soldiers or helped wounded soldiers write to loved ones.
Religious Sisters left their convents to help nurse the ill and wounded, often traveling long distances. Some died on battle-fields. Many were overworked and hungry. In Vicksburg, the Sisters of Mercy moved about the city even though they were in direct danger from the shelling. Because of this, their bishop asked that they travel separately, concerned that they could all be killed in a single explosion.
While 2,000 women are thought to have been nurses in both the North and South during the war, countless others volunteered in hospitals and military camps and took the sick and injured into their own homes. Both Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton, who helped nurse wounded soldiers, led efforts to organize their care.
An estimated 600 women dressed in uniform and passed as men to fight alongside their male comrades. A woman named Jennie Irene Hodgers gave herself the name of Albert Cashier and fought with the Union army at Vicksburg. Disguised as a man, she was considered a brave and dependable soldier. When her identity as a woman was discovered many years after the war ended, her fellow soldiers convinced the United States Pension Bureau to drop charges that she had defrauded the government—an action that allowed her to continue receiving a military pension.
Reconstruction
Both before and after the war, the South’s economy was based on agriculture. After the war ended, large landowners could not afford to hire all the workers they needed to replace their former slaves, and those former slaves and returning small farmers could not afford to buy land. This led to the system known as sharecropping, where poor farmers “leased” land from plantation owners in return for a share of their crops. This worked well for landowners, but because of unfair business practices, many sharecroppers became the poorest of the poor. Freed blacks likened sharecropping to slavery, for even though they could not be whipped or sold, they were enslaved by debt. Many sharecroppers, both black and white, lived on their “leased” land for generations, remaining poor and uneducated.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlawed slavery in 1865. This and other new laws were meant to ensure that blacks became full citizens. They could now go to school, and black males could vote. Some whites blamed blacks for the poverty and violence that plagued Southern society. Whites who supported black advancement found themselves in conflict with whites who refused to accept blacks as equals.
Some Southern states passed what became known as the Black Laws in the early years after the war, followed two decades later by the Jim Crow Laws, all of which were meant to make blacks second-class citizens without the right to vote. A policy of “separate but equal” was used to institute widespread segregation in education and in society. Segregation did indeed separate the races, but it did not make things equal. Blacks had to use their own drinking fountains, rest rooms, and swimming pools. They were told to sit at the back of public buses and in special cars on trains, and they were denied service in many restaurants and hotels. Segregation was also widespread in some Northern states.
Terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan sprang up to keep both blacks and whites too frightened to challenge segregation laws and racial codes. Blacks who asserted their rights risked being the targets of violence. While there were pockets of progress—Vicksburg briefly had a black mayor and a black sheriff, and the state of Mississippi sent the first black senator to the United States Senate—these advancements did not last.
Not until the civil rights movement of the 1960s did the nation finally begin to successfully reverse racism. Today, full racial justice is still not a reality in America.
FOR MORE ABOUT THE CIVIL WAR
Books
The Boys’ War by Jim Murphy (New York: Clarion Books, 1990) gives voice to the experiences of the as many as 400,000 youths sixteen and younger who may have served in the Civil War. Civil War A-Z by Norman Bolotin (New York: Dutton Children’s Books, 2002) presents an overview of the war and its most important places, events, and people. Fields of Fury: The American Civil War by James M. McPherson (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2002) is a well-written history of the war, rich with illustration. Life Goes On: The Civil War at Home 1861-1865 by James R. Arnold and Roberta Wiener (Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 2002) considers how the war affected everyone, with emphasis on the burden placed on women. In Life in the South During the Civil War (San Diego, California: Lucent Books, 1997), James P. Reger considers the day-to-day lives of everyone from slaves to middle-class farmers to wealthy planters. Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War: 1831-1861 by Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier (New York: Benchmark Books, 2000) offers a look inside the institution of slavery and what it was like for the people who lived it.
Documentary Film
The Civil War, from Ken Burns, is an ambitious eleven-hour undertaking, rich with the voices of those who were there, illustrated with black-and-white photographs, and accompanied by period music.
Websites
www.nps.gov/vick is part of the website for the National Parks Service and offers information about the Vicksburg Military Park and the history of the siege.
www.vicksburgcvb.org shows glimpses of the city and some of its historic buildings.
www.oldcourthouse.org features Civil War-era photographs of Vicksburg.
www.AmericanCivilWar.com is a useful website offering ex
tensive information about the history of the Civil War, including maps and photographs.
www.historyplace.com offers an overview of the war and information about specific battles.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Both Willie Lord and Lucy McRae wrote of their childhood experiences for Harper’s Magazine, Willie in December 1908 and Lucy in June 1912. Their articles were reprinted in Yankee Bullets, Rebel Rations by Gordon A. Cotton (Vicksburg, Mississippi: The Print Shop, 2003). Frederick Grant was interviewed by or wrote several times for publications about his experiences at Vicksburg. This material is part of the archives of the Ulysses S. Grant Association, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois.
Arnold, James R. Grant Wins the War: Decision at Vicksburg. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
Balfour, Emma. Vicksburg: A City Under Siege; The Diary of Emma Balfour. Compiled by Phillip C. Weinberger, 1983 (no additional publication information).
Confederate Women. Edited by Mauriel Phillips Joslyn. Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., 1996.
Cotton, Gordon A. Vicksburg: Southern Stories of the Siege. Vicksburg, Mississippi: The Print Shop, 1988.
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