[full text of the book review]
The first week in July 1863 was disastrous for the Confederacy. The Battle of Gettysburg, ending July 3, was, as we know, a great Union victory. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was forced to retreat from Pennsylvania and would never again be on the offensive. The Eastern theater would soon turn into a slow, bloody war of attrition, one that the South, with inferior resources, couldn't hope to win militarily. The taking of Vicksburg, Miss, on July 4, 1863, by Ulysses S Grant's Army of the Tennessee, was a smaller campaign, if measured by the number of troops involved and the number of casualties. But it was equally momentous, and it had greater immediate effects.
Roughly 200 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico, the City of Vicksburg sits high on a bluff on the east side of the Mississippi, dominating the river. It had been in Confederate hands since the outbreak of hostilities, restricting the river-borne movement of Northern troops and supplies and the transport of Midwestern produce to world markets. By holding Vicksburg, the Confederacy could move its own troops and supplies into the Deep South from the trans-Mississippi states of Texas, Arkansas and Louisianan. By taking Vicksburg, the North could, at a stroke, lop off the resources of almost one half of Confederate territory.
As Donald Miller makes clear in "Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy," a superb account of both military leadership and soldierly warfare, the obvious benefits of seizing Vicksburg in no way diminished the difficulty of the task. It was a long campaign, and its final stages alone would involve seven battles and a siege. Mr Miller, a professor emeritus at Lafayette College and a prolific author, begins his tale with Grant commanding an army in the west in early 1862 after the North's fighting in that theater had stalled. Grant moved south from Cairo, Ill, and the battles of Fort Henry, Fort Donaldson [sic; should be Donelson] and Shiloh would make him a household name.
Vicksburg was far more than a land campaign. The United States was rapidly building the world's largest "brown-water navy" to operate on the Mississippi and its tributaries. In late April 1862, Adm David Farragut had taken New Orleans, opening the lower Mississippi to federal forces. But his attempt to take Vicksburg in early summer by naval bombardment failed because he was unable to elevate his guns sufficiently. Grant's first attempt, in the fall, also failed, and vast amounts of supplies were captured by the badly under-supplied Confederates. When William Tecumseh Sherman, a few months later, tried to take Vicksburg by storming it via Chickasaw Bayou, northeast of the city, he was bloodily repulsed, suffering 1,776 casualties to the Confederates' mere 206.
Mr Miller notes that this was the first time in the war that dug-in defenders dominated the battlefield: Confederate soldiers, facing Sherman's rushing lines, fought from trenches they had constructed. It was a harbinger of future Civil War battles and, more broadly, of future warfare. Mr Mille quotes James Arnold, a fellow historian, saying that "the path to Cold Harbor, Kennesaw Mountain, and Verdun could be seen in the footsteps of the doomed Midwestern boys who charged at Chickasaw Bayou."
The campaign of December 1862 had to be abandoned, to be resumed in the spring of 1863, when the weather improved. To keep his men busy, Grant tried to bypass Vicksburg by digging a canal that would allow ships to travel beyond the range of Vicksburg's guns. But his multiple attempts at canal-digging failed: The engineering challenges were too great.
Mr Miller has done a prodigious amount of research (the back matter runs to nearly 150 pages), and among the book's many strengths are the quotations he provides from diaries and letters. "The Yankees . . . are worse than the Goth and Vandals of the middle ages," wrote one Confederate soldier to his wife, noting the depredations of Union raiding parties. He tells her to "expect reverses" and "nerve yourself for every emergency." A Union soldier, grasping a lighted shell that is tumbling toward him, hurls it into a Rebel fort. "I heard yells of pain," he says, though the ditch where he stands is itself "a scene of carnage that no mortal tongue can describe."
Many Northern soldiers had an image of the Old South as a place of genteel grandeur. They were in for a rude awakening. "Boys from well-tended farms in Iowa and Indiana," Mr Miller writes, "were disgusted by the slovenly appearance of the plantations they encountered. Unlike back home, houses and barns were ill kept, and agricultural machinery was primitive and often rusting in the field." For soldiers on both sides, as Mr Miller vividly shows, campaign life was often miserable, with rain, mosquitoes and dysentery abounding.
The campaign's military leaders are no less vividly delineated in Mr. Miller's narrative: the flamboyant Adm David Dixon Porter, who commanded the Union's naval forces;the imperturbable but dogged Grant; the high-strung Sherman; and the incompetent (and Northern-born) Gen. John C.Pemberton, who led the Confederate forces at Vicksburg.
The final thrust began in March 1863, and Grant soon made one of the bravest decisions of the war -- to abandon his tenuous supply line and live off the land once he crossed the Mississippi to besiege Vicksburg. Gen Joseph Johnston, in overall command of Confederate forces in the West, advised Pemberton to abandon the city and save his army of more than 20,000 men. But Pemberton was determined to defend Vicksburg and stayed in place. By July his forces were near starvation, and he had no alternative but to surrender. Grant, the hero of the West, would soon be brought east to take on Robert E Lee.
It is an epic story in itself but of course one part of the grand epic of the Civil War. Books like "Vicksburg" are exactly what Thomas Hardy had in mind when he wrote that "war makes rattling good history."
Mr Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power."
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发表于 10-30-2019 15:26:35
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