We Of The South Remember: Vicksburg, Mississippi
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.”
