Vicksburg, 1863

A riveting history of the battle that permanently turned the tide of the Civil War.

While Gettysburg is better known, Winston Groom makes clear in this engrossing narrative that Vicksburg was the more important battle from a strategic point of view. Re-creating the epic campaign that culminated at Vicksburg, Groom details the arduous struggle by the Union to gain control of the Mississippi River valley and to divide the Confederacy in two. He takes us back to 1861, when Lincoln chooses Ulysses S. Grant—seen at the time as a mediocre general with a drinking problem—to lead the Union army south from Illinois.

We follow Grant and his troops as they fight one campaign after another, including the famous engagements at Forts Henry and Donelson and the bloodbath at Shiloh, until, after almost a year, they close in on Vicksburg. We witness Grants seven long months of battle against the determined Confederate army, and the many failed Union attempts to take Vicksburg, during which thousands of soldiers on both sides would be buried and, ultimately, the fate of the Confederacy would be sealed. As Groom recounts this landmark confrontation, he brings the participants to life. We see Grant in all his grim determination, the feistiness of William Tecumseh Sherman, and the pride and intransigence of Confederate leaders from Jefferson Davis and General Joseph E. Johnston to General John C. Pemberton, the Philadelphia-born Rebel who commanded at Vicksburg and took the blame for losing.

A first-rate work of military history and an essential contribution to our understanding of the Civil War.

For some Civil War buffs in this part of the country, anything that happened west of the Appalachians might as well have been a dispute between Belgium and Bulgaria. The same was true of some Civil War generals, to whom nothing could be more important than what was immediately in front of them: the bloody struggle between the capitals of the Union and the Confederacy. But broader thinkers, including... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Abraham Lincoln, could see the whole map. They understood that the Mississippi Valley, not Richmond, was the most vital strategic objective of the war and that the key to controlling it was the city of Vicksburg, atop steep bluffs at a sharp turn where the Yazoo River flows into the Mississippi.

Early on, Lincoln told his generals and admirals, "The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket. ... As valuable as New Orleans will be to us, Vicksburg will be more so. We may take all the northern parts of the Confederacy, and they can still defy us from Vicksburg. It means hog and hominy without limit, fresh troops from all the States of the far South, and a cotton country where they can raise the staple without interference." But understanding that was the bare beginning. Getting there was a matter of many frustrating months for the Union Army and Navy: covering more than 500 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to the Illinois border, fighting battles along rivers, slogging through swamps, storming rebel fortifications, finally starving the besieged city into submission.

In his latest sortie into Civil War history, Winston Groom has brilliantly described the whole Mississippi Valley campaign, from late 1861 through the fall of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, the day after the great Northern victory at Gettysburg. To tell such a long and looping story, he concentrates more on the decisions and rivalries among flag officers than on what individual soldiers and sailors set down in their letters and diaries. A long roll of great characters is present — Farragut and Porter, Sherman and McPherson, Beauregard and Forrest, Johnston and Pemberton. But the central personal narrative is that of Ulysses S. Grant, who is occasionally drunk but whose determination and eagerness to fight eventually bring him to command all Union armies and win the war in the East.

What sets this campaign and this book apart from other chapters of the Civil War is the variety of strategy and tactics tried by the Union and parried by the Confederates until the final days. There are few set-piece land battles; instead we have Federal ironclads pounding Confederate forts to take New Orleans, gunboats pushing into shallow creeks until they are trapped by vines and weeds, cavalry raids rampaging through three states, thousands of slaves and soldiers digging a canal in a vain effort to divert the Mississippi, and eventually Confederate troops and citizens eating their bony mules to survive in the days before the city surrenders.

Groom narrates in a genial, almost conversational way, making all the twists and turns completely understandable. When he narrows the focus, the action comes alive, as when he describes the brief but remarkable saga of Confederate naval Lt. Isaac Brown, who fitted up the derelict remains of the ironclad Arkansas and took her out against a fleet of Yankee dreadnoughts in the Yazoo River.

The ship rammed and blasted through them: "Inside the Rebel ship the din was nearly unimaginable as hundreds of 'sledge-hammer blows were delivered to (her) armor plate.'" Cannonballs fired at close range crashed completely through the Arkansas; her decks were slippery with blood. Brown was wounded twice. He fought his way to Vicksburg, where a crowd rushed down to celebrate his victory but recoiled at seeing the gore and wreckage, leaving the crew to tend its own casualties. But sheer courage could not prevail for long against overwhelming odds; the battered Arkansas sought further action downriver, but the engines failed and the ship had to be scuttled. In only 23 days, she had driven two powerful Union fleets away from the prize city of Vicksburg and almost captured Baton Rouge in cooperation with the Confederate Army.

Groom's book is full of such authentically rendered excitement. Until now, his best-known work has been the novel that became the blockbuster movie "Forrest Gump." But with "Vicksburg 1863" he has fully arrived as a narrative historian, who proves again that facts skillfully woven can be more moving than the products of the busiest imagination. Rarely has the story of such a lengthy and complicated campaign been told with such clarity and grace.

Ernest B. Furgurson's latest book is "Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War."

Reviewed by Ernest B. Furgurson, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Winston Groom is the author of fourteen previous books, including Patriotic Fire, Shrouds of Glory, Forrest Gump, and Conversations with the Enemy (with Duncan Spencer), which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He lives with his wife and daughter in Point Clear, Alabama.