Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The siege of Vicksburg (May 18 – July 4, 1863) was the final major military action in the Vicksburg campaign of the American Civil War.In a series of maneuvers, Union Major General Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi River and drove the Confederate Army of Mississippi, led by Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, into the defensive lines surrounding the ...
After two unsuccessful and costly assaults on Vicksburg, Grant settled in for a 40-day siege. Pemberton, unable to combine forces with the army of Joseph E. Johnston, which was hovering in central Mississippi, finally surrendered Vicksburg on July 4, 1863. [17] The capture of Vicksburg was a turning point for the Union war
Vicksburg was strategically vital to the Confederates. Jefferson Davis said, "Vicksburg is the nail head that holds the South's two halves together." [4] While in their hands, it blocked Union navigation down the Mississippi; together with control of the mouth of the Red River and of Port Hudson to the south, it allowed communication with the states west of the river, upon which the ...
Grant's plan to capture Vicksburg by a joint-venture with Sherman's Army was thwarted by two Confederate raids. On December 10, 1862, breaking from Confederate General Braxton Bragg's Army, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest began a series of raids that disrupted Union positions. [7]
Grant's Operations against Vicksburg. In the early months of 1863, Grant pursued various futile operations seeking to capture Vicksburg from the north, causing one newspaper to complain that the "army was being ruined in mud-turtle expeditions, under the leadership of a drunkard [Grant], whose confidential adviser [Sherman] was a lunatic."
[91] [92] Union attempts to take the city by direct assault on May 19 and 22 failed, and Grant placed Vicksburg under siege. Supplies within the city eventually ran low, and with no hope of escape Pemberton surrendered the city and his army to Grant on July 4, ending the siege of Vicksburg. The capture of Vicksburg was a critical point in the ...
Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg to Grant on July 4, 1863. [169] Vicksburg's fall gave Union forces control of the Mississippi River and split the Confederacy. By that time, Grant's political sympathies fully coincided with the Radical Republicans' aggressive prosecution of the war and emancipation of the slaves. [170]
Several attempts to capture Vicksburg overland from Tennessee in December 1862 and by attacking the city from the impassable bayous across the river in Louisiana in early 1863 failed. [13] [14] Grant then devised a plan for a second campaign [15] to capture the city by crossing the Mississippi south of Vicksburg and approaching the city from ...