Happy Birthday America! I honestly wasn’t sure what I was going to write here, and was leaning towards some Freedom Eagle and ‘Merica, F**k Yeah! pics, but Sarge over at The Chant put up a post on Tuesday commemorating the start of the Battle of Gettysburg which made me think a bit more than I should have on a short work week.
So we’re going to skip forward a couple of days in the vacation series and cover the time we spent at Vicksburg National Military Park. Why Vickburg? Because along with Gettysburg, these were the two battles which essentially turned the course of The Civil War, and both of them ended on the same day, roughly a thousand miles apart from each other, one hundred and fifty-six years ago today. If July 4th, 1776 was America’s birthday, then July 4th, 1863 may well have been the day that ensured she’d live to see a new century.
The thing to understand about Vickburg is that unlike Gettysburg, which was a bloody three-day affair, the battles and siege of Vickburg went on for months. The civilians inside the city suffered nearly as much as the soldiers, both from the privations of the Union supply blockade, and the consequences of stray marksmanship by Union gunners. By the summer of 1863, most of the population of Vickburg was sleeping underground in hollowed-out cave structures to avoid the constant threat of shelling from Union positions.
And make no mistake, those Union cannons were close! One of the first points on the driving tour of the battlefield is a Union artillery position. From there, a Mississippi’s memorial is easily visible, and happens to be representative of a position within the Vickburg. It’s also roughly half the maximum effective range of the Union artillery pieces.
A little farther along is one of the Confederate positions which Union forces attempted to breach by tunneling underneath the hill, and setting off a massive explosion. Men in blue then rushed into the crater, only to become locked in hand-to-hand fighting for a full day before being forced to retreat.
All around the massive battlefield are signs showing different Union and Confederate positions, monuments showing the main positions of various units, and memorials contributed by each state. All told, there are over 1,400 different plaques, markers, and monuments on the site. That’s not counting Vickburg National Cemetary, which lies within the boundaries of the park, where over 17,000 troops are buried, 13,000 of whose names are lost to history.
It’s a humbling place. Standing on a hill where a Confederate gun battery once sat, sweat dripping down your back in the Mississippi June heat, you can almost hear the booming roar of cannon drowning out the screams of the wounded and dying, and feel the shades of the dead pass you by when a wisp of a breeze slaps your sweat-soaked shirt to send a momentary chill down your spine.
In the Illinois monument, we found a single, familiar last name. A distant relation perhaps? I don’t know that much about my family history on that side.
It should be pointed out that the majority of the monuments in the park were created between 1903 and 1917. The park itself was established in 1899, well within the living memory of veterans on both sides of the conflict.
Kentucky and Missouri have memorials commemorating fighters on both sides of the battle lines. Mississippi has two monuments, one for their Confederate units, and a second, later memorial dedicated to the African-American soldiers who fought for the Union during the siege efforts.
There’s a small visitor’s center to help contextualize the entire battle, and an excellent second museum showcasing the remains of the U.S.S. Cairo. The Cairo is the last example of her type, a Union ironclad gunboat which escorted supply ships up and down the Mississippi River and battled it out with fixed gun batteries along the way.
We were at the park for about four hours. I could easily have been there for two days, had time permitted.