Vicksburg, Mississippi

• 1. Introduction

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  Vicksburg, Mississippi sits on a high bluff above the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, and on the 4th of July, 1863, that bluff made history. Confederate General John C. Pemberton surrendered the city to Ulysses S. Grant after a 47-day siege. The very next day, Robert E. Lee's army was repulsed at Gettysburg. Together, those two defeats marked the moment the Civil War tilted decisively toward the Union. What does a city do with a surrender like that? For more than 80 years, parts of Vicksburg refused to celebrate Independence Day at all. One local paper called the 4th of July "the day we don't celebrate". That act of defiance threads through a longer story: of a river that abandoned its city, of massacres that went unpunished, and of a first bottled Coca-Cola that happened almost by accident in a candy shop. Vicksburg is not simply the site of a famous battle. It is a place where geology, commerce, race, and memory have collided across three centuries.

• 2. Before the French Arrived

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  Long before Fort Saint Pierre rose on the bluffs in 1719, the Natchez people occupied this stretch of the Mississippi. Their language was a true isolate, unrelated to the Muskogean tongues spoken by the region's other major tribes. Before the Natchez, other indigenous cultures had lived on this elevated ground for thousands of years, drawn by the same strategic advantages that would later attract European colonists. When French settlers established Fort Saint Pierre on the high bluffs overlooking the Yazoo River, they launched into the fur trade and plantation agriculture alongside the Natchez. The relationship collapsed on the 29th of November 1729, when the Natchez attacked the fort and surrounding plantations near present-day Natchez, killing several hundred settlers. Among the dead was Jesuit missionary Paul Du Poisson. The attack proved devastating for French Louisiana; the colonial population of the Natchez District never recovered. With assistance from the Choctaw, who were traditional enemies of the Natchez, the French eventually defeated the Natchez and their Yazoo allies. The Choctaw then held the area by right of conquest for several decades, until the Treaty of Fort Adams in 1801 required them to cede nearly two million acres to the United States.

• 3. From Fort Nogales to Vicksburg

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  Spain built its own military outpost on the site in 1790, naming it Fort Nogales, a reference to the walnut trees growing there. When the Americans took possession in 1798 following a treaty with Spain, they renamed the settlement Walnut Hills. Incorporation came in 1825, when the small village took the name Vicksburg in honor of Newitt Vick, a Methodist minister who had established a Protestant mission on the site. At that point the town held about 3,000 residents, among them roughly twenty Jewish immigrants who had come from Bavaria, Prussia, and Alsace-Lorraine. Ten years later, in 1835, a violent episode the source calls the Murrell Excitement saw a mob seize and hang five gamblers who had shot and killed a local doctor. Historian Joshua D. Rothman called it "the deadliest outbreak of extralegal violence in the slave states between the Southampton Insurrection and the Civil War." By 1862, fifty Jewish families had organized the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Anshe Chesed, which received a state charter that year. Two years later the congregation established the Anshe Chesed Cemetery, the city's second Jewish burial ground. Jefferson Davis, who would become president of the Confederacy, maintained his family plantation at Brierfield, just south of the city.

• 4. The Siege and Its Shadow

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  The 47-day siege of 1863 was designed to starve Vicksburg into submission. The city's position on the bluff made a direct military assault impractical, so Grant chose hunger as his weapon. Pemberton surrendered on the 4th of July. The date became a wound. The Vicksburg Evening Post, writing on the 4th of July, 1883, called it "the day we don't celebrate." Another paper, the Daily Commercial Appeal, expressed hope in 1888 that a political victory might produce an enthusiastic celebration the following year. In 1902, the holiday drew only, as one account noted, "a parade of colored draymen." The Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported in 1947 that the city had not celebrated Independence Day again until 1945, and even then it was marked as Confederate Carnival Day. At least one recent scholar disputes that reading, pointing to a large parade in 1890 and sizable celebrations by 1907. The disagreement itself captures something about how Vicksburg held its defeat close, well into the 20th century.

• 5. When the River Left

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  Vicksburg built its antebellum prosperity on cotton and steamboats. River commerce from the surrounding counties made it a major trading hub in West Central Mississippi. Then, in 1876, a flood cut through the De Soto Point meander and rerouted the Mississippi away from the city entirely. Vicksburg was left fronting an oxbow lake, cut off from the main channel. The loss of a functioning riverfront hit the economy hard. The city would not be a river town again for more than a quarter-century, until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed the Yazoo Diversion Canal in 1903. By then, though, freight and passenger traffic had largely shifted to railroads, and the restored waterfront could not recover what had been lost. A combination railroad-highway bridge was not completed until 1929, and Interstate 20 did not bridge the river until 1973. Today Vicksburg holds the only Mississippi River crossing between Greenville and Natchez, and the only interstate crossing between Baton Rouge and Memphis.

• 6. Massacre and Its Aftermath

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  In August 1874, a black man named Peter Crosby was elected sheriff of Vicksburg. Letters written by a white planter named Batchelor documented white residents acquiring the newest Winchester guns in preparation for what he described as a "race war." On the 7th of December 1874, white men disrupted a black Republican gathering celebrating Crosby's victory and forced him out of town. He urged rural black residents to return home; some were attacked along the way by armed whites. In the days that followed, white mobs moved through black neighborhoods and fields, killing men where they found them. Contemporary accounts put the death toll at 29-50 Black residents and 2 white residents. Twenty-first-century historian Emilye Crosby estimated that 300 Black people died in the city and in the surrounding area of Claiborne County. President Ulysses S. Grant sent federal troops to Vicksburg in January 1875 at the request of Republican Governor Adelbert Ames. A congressional committee investigated and took testimony from both Black and white residents, as reported by the New York Times, but no one was ever prosecuted. White Democrats went on to regain control of a majority of seats in the state legislature after the 1875 elections. A symposium held on the 6th and the 7th of December 2014 marked the 140th anniversary of those events, gathering scholars at the Vicksburg National Military Park in collaboration with the Jacqueline House African American Museum.

• 7. A Candy Store and a Coca-Cola

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  On the 12th of March 1894, a local confectioner named Joseph A. Biedenharn became the first person to bottle Coca-Cola commercially, doing so in Vicksburg. Biedenharn's soda bottles from the 19th century are now sought by collectors of Coca-Cola memorabilia. His original candy store has since been renovated and operates as the Biedenharn Coca-Cola Museum. Biedenharn was born in 1866 and died in 1952, and his act of filling those early bottles made Vicksburg a footnote in the history of one of the world's most recognized products. The 1903 restoration of the riverfront brought steamboats back but not the old dominance; by then railroads had taken over freight and passengers. What endured were federal institutions. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 submerged hundreds of thousands of acres and made Vicksburg the primary refuge for displaced residents across the Delta. The flood's scale pushed the Army Corps of Engineers to establish the Waterways Experiment Station there, now expanded into the Engineer Research and Development Center, which applies hydraulic, environmental, and geotechnical engineering to flood control and river navigation. In 2017, a writer for The Atlantic noted that the Army Corps of Engineers sustains the town economically, with 12.3 percent of the local workforce employed by the federal government.

• 8. Memory on the Floodwall

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  In 2001, a group of Vicksburg residents traveled to Paducah, Kentucky, to study a mural project there and consider what it might offer their own city. The following year, Louisiana artist Robert Dafford and his team began painting the Vicksburg Riverfront Murals on the floodwall along the downtown waterfront. The subjects came from local history: President Theodore Roosevelt's bear hunt, the steamboats Sultana and Sprague, the Siege of Vicksburg, the Kings Crossing site, blues musician Willie Dixon, the 1927 flood, the 1953 tornado that killed 38 people and destroyed nearly 1,000 buildings, Rosa A. Temple High School, and the Vicksburg National Military Park. The project concluded in 2009 with the completion of the Jitney Jungle/Glass Kitchen mural. In the fall of 2010, former Dafford muralists Benny Graeff and Herb Roe added a new 55-foot mural on Grove Hill, depicting the annual "Run thru History" race held in the military park. Since 1936, the Vicksburg Theatre Guild has hosted a show called Gold in the Hills every summer, a run that earned a Guinness World Record for longest-running show, and the tradition continues.