Question of the Week: What’s your favorite Vicksburg site to visit?
Grant’s Headquarters? USS Cairo? The gift shop? What is your favorite place to visit at the Vicksburg battlefield?
Grant’s Headquarters? USS Cairo? The gift shop? What is your favorite place to visit at the Vicksburg battlefield?
The Cairo by far! Magnificent!
USS Cairo !
The USS Cairo for many reasons, but also the gift shop which is located in the center of the current visitor center. My least favorite is the national park film in the Vicksburg visitor center which fails to even mention Port Hudson Louisiana which fell after Vicksburg.
The Cairo. Truely amazing to see.
Wisconsin Memorial,
The Illinois monument or memorial
The Illinois Memorial is pretty cool!
the Shirley House and the 3rd Louisiana Redan and of course the Illinois Memorial which is near the other 2
It’s been awhile since we have visited this famous battlefield, but I remember a part of the Federal Line where the troops there in an attempt to break the Rebel line had dug a tunnel shaft and filling it with explosives for the purpose of blowing up the Confederate position. When the explosives were detonated, a tremendous blast filled the air and one slave who was located at target zero was propelled into the boiling atmosphere and, if I remember correctly, lived to tell the story. Unfortunately, this episode didn’t have the attempted result of allowing the Federal Units to break through the gapping hole. I was struck at the time as to how the siege of Vicksburg paralleled the Petersburg/Richmond siege of the following year even to the point of mine shafts being used to break the Rebel entrenchments.
That was at the 3rd Louisiana Redan. The first mine explosions and attack led by the 45th Illinois failed to break through (for a detailed account see my book “The Lead Mine Men: The Enduring 45th Illinois Volunteer Infantry ” 😉). This was on June 25, 1863. They dug a 2nd mine and exploded it on July 1, but Grant didn’t order another attack given the horrendous losses suffered during the first attack. It was in the July 1 explosion that saw the slave, who was working with Confederate soldiers to collapse this mine, blown into Union lines just east of the sedan. The slaves became a paid worker for MG John Logan. Some accounts of the July 25 explosion wrongly have the slave landing in the Union lines.
Not at the NPS site itself, but the state has an excellent park down at Grand Gulf.
Tracing and walking the marked Union siege approaches to the Confederate works. The engineering aspects of the siege fascinate me. For an army largely bereft of an engineer contingent, the challenges in terrain that were overcome by the AOTT rank and file are remarkable.
There were engineers, but not necessarily any West Point trained engineers. Captain Hickenlooper was the engineer managing the construction of Logan’s Approach towards the 3rd Louisiana Redan.
Yes, there were a few engineers in the officers ranks, namely Captain Prime and Lieutenant Haines, who were the only two officers detached from the Corps of Engineers. Captains Jenney and Hickenlooper served as Corps engineers. Both had pre-war civil engineering experience but neither was schooled in the teachings of Mahan and Vauban at the Academy. And of course McPherson was an engineer though he seems to have had little involvement in the day to day engineering work during the siege, leaving it all to Hickenlooper. Unlike, other Union armies, there were no trained engineering battalions present during the siege. My point was the AOTT was largely deficient in engineers and yet it conducted a successful siege under very challenging circumstances.
I agree overall the army was sufficient. Grant’s handling of his army from April 1 through to July 4 was masterful, with this likely being the only significant critique.
Justin Solonick’s Engineering Victory work on the siege is excellent. If I recall correctly he had some criticisms of Hickenlooper on the charge used under the 3rd Louisiana Redan, noting that he was not a West Point trained engineer and that he dug the mine and laid the black powder with an overriding concern that it would blow an entrance into the fort.
The problem was either Hickenlooper could not see or did not take into account the second line of entrenchments that the Confederates built behind the redan. Had the mine build just 10 feet farther west with enough black powder laid that far west, HickenLooper’s mine may have enabled a Union breakthrough. Sadly, as I note in my book, the explosion of the mine only resulted in terrible losses in the 45th Illinois and the other regiments that fought in the crater.
The Stockade Redan. This where Sherman’s first assaults hit and were repulsed. Wild topography.
Rusty’s Riverfront Grille in downtown Vicksburg!
The USS Cairo. That was something. Also, knowing the Ed Bearss was a big part of the raising of this ship. We have a relative buried in the Union cemetery. All the monuments from the different states were very impressive. The Shirley House was great too. I only wish that the caves that residents were living in were preserved to really get the feel of the the whole experience of the siege.
Anywhere there are no fire ants.
And Stockade Redan. That place fascinates me.
Cairo is the most amazing Civil War artifact of all.