Vicksburg National Military Park

• 1. Introduction

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  Vicksburg National Military Park preserves the ground where one of the most decisive sieges of the American Civil War played out over 47 days in 1863. Stand at the edge of the park today and you walk among 1,325 historic monuments and markers, 144 cannons still aimed at the same ridgelines, and nearly 20 miles of trenches dug by men who were terrified, exhausted, and often dying. The questions the park raises are not just military ones. How did a city hold out for 47 days under relentless bombardment? Why did President Abraham Lincoln personally champion a canal project that almost nobody believed would work? And how did the fall of Vicksburg, combined with the fall of Port Hudson farther south in Louisiana, transform the entire course of the war? Those answers are written into the soil here, and into a cemetery that holds more than 18,000 men, most of them unidentified.

• 2. The Siege and Its Scars

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  From March 29 to the 4th of July 1863, Union and Confederate forces faced each other across a landscape that still shows the marks of that confrontation. The 47-day siege ended in the surrender of Vicksburg, and the park preserves reconstructed forts and trenches that trace the exact lines where men dug in. A 16-mile tour road threads through the battlefield, and a 12.5-mile walking trail lets visitors cover the ground on foot. Two antebellum homes still stand inside the park boundaries, silent witnesses to a city that became a target. The Illinois Memorial was built with exactly 47 steps, one for each day of the siege, a counting of time that turns architecture into a kind of grief. Victory at Vicksburg, joined with the Union's capture of Port Hudson in Louisiana, gave Union forces full control of the Mississippi River, splitting the Confederacy in two.

• 3. The Hardluck Ironclad

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  On the 12th of December, 1862, a Union gunboat called the USS Cairo sank in the Yazoo River, struck by a Confederate torpedo. That single event made the Cairo the first United States ship in history ever destroyed by a torpedo. The vessel sat submerged for over a century until it was recovered from the Yazoo River in 1964. Today the restored gunboat rests inside the park, and its nickname, the "Hardluck Ironclad", traces the long arc from its sinking to its recovery. The Cairo had been operating in support of the broader Vicksburg campaign, part of the Union's grinding effort to tighten control over the river. Its recovery after more than a hundred years underwater makes the gunboat one of the most tangible physical links visitors have to the campaign that surrounded the siege.

• 4. Lincoln's Canal

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  In June 1862, Union Army Major General Benjamin Butler began digging a canal across from Vicksburg near what is now Delta, Louisiana, with President Abraham Lincoln's personal approval. The plan was audacious: redirect the Mississippi River itself so that Union ships could bypass the Confederate artillery batteries positioned to guard Vicksburg. The work was assigned to Brigadier General Thomas Williams, and the laborers included soldiers and formerly enslaved people doing the hardest physical work. By July 1862, the project had collapsed. Massive disease and sickness swept through the workforce, and falling water levels on the river made the engineering impossible. In January 1863, Major General Ulysses S. Grant ordered the project restarted as part of his Vicksburg Campaign, this time under Brigadier General William T. Sherman. Neither Grant nor Sherman believed the canal would succeed. Grant kept the project alive primarily to keep his troops occupied during the slow maneuvering needed to set up the battle. The remnants of Grant's Canal survive today as a detached section of the military park, located across the river from Vicksburg near Delta, Louisiana.

• 5. A Cemetery's Silence

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  The Vicksburg National Cemetery covers 116.28 acres inside the park and holds 18,244 interments. Of those, 12,954 are unidentified. Civil War burials took place here from 1866 to 1874, and the cemetery is no longer open for new interments. Adjacent to the Beulah Cemetery, it holds one Commonwealth war grave, that of a Royal Australian Air Force airman buried during World War II, a detail that reaches well beyond the Civil War context of the surrounding park. In 2000, the Mississippi House of Representatives approved funding for a monument to recognize African-American soldiers who served in the Civil War, an acknowledgment that their role in the conflict had gone unrecognized inside the park for more than a century.

• 6. The Park's Long History

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  Vicksburg National Military Park was formally established on the 21st of February, 1899, with the stated purpose of commemorating the siege and defense of Vicksburg. For more than three decades it was administered by the War Department. On the 10th of August, 1933, the park and cemetery were transferred to the National Park Service. In the late 1950s, a portion of park land was transferred to the city of Vicksburg for use as a local park, in exchange for closing local roads that had been cutting through the remaining park grounds. That transfer also made possible the construction of Interstate 20. Monuments on the land transferred to the city are still maintained by the National Park Service. The park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on the 15th of October, 1966. Over half a million visitors arrive each year, walking among those 1,325 monuments and the 144 cannons that have stood silent watch over the Mississippi River since the 19th century.