We Of The South Remember: Vicksburg, Mississippi
"May the memory of the Confederate soldier be eternal."
A great piece from the Elder of Vicksburg - DD
On July 4, 1863, the Confederate Army of Mississippi, commanded by Lieutenant-General John Pemberton, surrendered to the U.S. Army of the Tennessee, commanded by Major-General U.S. Grant, after a 47-day siege. It was the conclusion of a campaign that began in October of the previous year and included a failed landing by Major-General William T. Sherman at Chickasaw Bayou (“I reached Vicksburg at the time appointed, landed, assaulted, and failed"), an effort to divert the Mississippi River by digging a canal across DeSoto Point an expedition down the Yazoo River in which U.S. gunboats found themselves hopelessly entangled in foliage. Grant himself sailed up the Yazoo in June of 1863, but maybe doesn’t remember as he was on a drunk, as attested by journalist Sylvanus Cadawaller and other. Like Charles Dana, a journalist appointed assistant secretary of war who was bobbing around at the time: Grant, he said, was “as stupidly drunk as the immortal nature of man would allow.”
Some find inspiration at the bottom of a bottle; perhaps it was in such a moment of distilled enthusiasm that Grant Eureka’d and hit on the idea of chemical warfare: he ordered dead horses flung into the Vicksburg water supply. Nevertheless, Grant did “win,” America is about winning; America loves a winner because it’s the winningness nation ever. All the winning! The bookstore at the National Park Center celebrates U.S. Grant as an incandescent military genius. Well, he is, but not the way they think. Grant is the very figure of a modern American general: skilled at cultivating the right sorts of friends in…