Book Review: Decisions of the Vicksburg Campaign: The Eighteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Operation
Decisions of the Vicksburg Campaign: The Eighteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Operation. By Larry Peterson. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2024. Paperback, 215 pp. $29.99.
Reviewed by Sam Flowers
As someone who does not possess an expert level of knowledge about the Western Theater, but who still has a deep interest in military history, Decisions of the Vicksburg Campaign stands to be a great companion for future reference. Author Larry Peterson, who is not a new face to the Command Choices in America’s Civil War series, recently published Decisions of the Vicksburg Campaign, a widely anticipated volume covering the military preparations, initial assaults, and siege of the key Mississippi River city. Like other volumes from the series, Peterson’s chapters examine the crucial choices of the campaign, the options that the commanding generals had to work with, and the ultimate final decisions they made with an explanation as to why.
Some of the most interesting selections in Peterson’s study were decisions that were not on-the-ground military maneuvers, but rather the choices to promote and reassign generals that predated the actual campaign. Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s appointment of John C. Pemberton as the head of the Department of Mississippi and Eastern Louisiana was the first decision detailed in the initial chapter. Davis’s other candidates, Joseph E. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard, are two choices that I personally did not consider when thinking about the Vicksburg Campaign. Peterson examines the ultimate decision after laying out all the options and ends it with paragraphs about the results, impacts, and potential alternate scenarios for readers to contemplate. Vicksburg’s commanding generals, Pemberton and Ulysses S. Grant, have become so fixed in the minds of Civil War students. Therefore, considering different potential options and thinking about how other leaders may have performed during the campaign was an intriguing brain exercise.
The rest of the book’s chapters mostly focus on the various decisions about maneuvers that Grant and his army choose and made as they marched and fought their way through central Mississippi, culminating in the assaults and siege of Vicksburg. Additionally, the last chapter delved into the important decisions that Grant had to consider about the terms of surrender, as well as how he was going to deal with the thousands of Confederate prisoners he would soon inherit.
Decisions of the Vicksburg Campaign’s best section was Appendix I, which is a driving tour that guides the reader through all of the critical decisions that Peterson covers so thoroughly. The appendix offers primary sources that mostly consist of official reports and memoirs from the generals on both sides of the fortifications. The sources and the maps that Peterson provides throughout the book helps readers better understand why these decisions were arguably so critical in the first place.
As a North Carolinian with more knowledge about the military campaigns in the Tar Heel State and in the Eastern Theatre, I found it interesting that Peterson considered Vicksburg the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy.” Fort Fisher, near Wilmington, is also often referred to by that moniker. Perhaps it is possible for each key location to share the same recognition given their importance to both side’s military strategy in 1863 and 1864-65 respectively.
Overall, Peterson’s volume is an easy read and a great beginner’s guide to understanding the military ins and outs of the extremely significant Vicksburg Campaign.
Sam Flowers is an assistant professor and teaches history at Louisburg College. He received his B.A. from UNC-Charlotte and graduated with his M.A from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington under the guidance of Angela Zombek, PhD. His thesis looked at the importance of the Overland Campaign from the lenses of military significance, common soldier experience, and memory and memorialization. He is currently researching multiple topics, including the Third North Carolina Infantry as its war service transitioned perpetuating Confederate myth and memory. He also is in the process of collaborating with Gene Schmiel in the hopes to create a revised version of his book, The Civil War in Statuary Hall.