Vicksburg Military Park Included in 2011 America the Beautiful Program Coins

Vicksburg Military Park will be included in the second set of coins issued by the United State Mint's Beautiful Quarters Program. Other 2011 Beautiful Quarters will honor Gettysburg National Military Park, Glacier National Park, Olympic Nationalo Park, and Chickasaw National Recreation Area.

The coin depicts the U.S.S. Cairo on the Yazoo River as it would have been seen when it served the Union Navy during the Civil War. Inscriptions are VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI, 2011 and E PLURIBUS UNUM.

Forthcoming and Interesting----The Wicked Father Of Waters And The Siege of Vicksburg

Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, Lee Sandlin, Pantheon Pres, Hardcover, 304 pages, $26.95, October 19, 2010.

A riveting look at one of the most colorful, dangerous, and peculiar places in America’s historical landscape: the strange, wonderful, and mysterious Mississippi River of the nineteenth century.

Beginning in the early 1800s and climaxing with the siege of Vicksburg in 1863, Wicked River takes us back to a time before the Mississippi was dredged into a shipping channel, and before Mark Twain romanticized it into myth. Drawing on an array of suspenseful and bizarre firsthand accounts, Lee Sandlin brings to life a place where river pirates brushed elbows with future presidents and religious visionaries shared passage with thieves—a world unto itself where, every night, near the levees of the big river towns, hundreds of boats gathered to form dusk-todawn cities dedicated to music, drinking, and gambling. Here is a minute-by-minute account of Natchez being flattened by a tornado; the St. Louis harbor being crushed by a massive ice floe; hidden, nefarious celebrations of Mardi Gras; and the sinking of the Sultana, the worst naval disaster in American history. And here is the Mississippi itself: gorgeous, perilous, and unpredictable, lifeblood to the communities that rose and fell along its banks.

An exuberant work of Americana—at once history, culture, and geography—Wicked River is a grand epic that portrays a forgotten society on the edge of revolutionary change.

Garrison Keillor[creator of National Public Radio's Prairie Home Companion]says "A gripping book that plunges you into a rich dark stretch of visceral history. I read it in two sittings and got up shaken."

Text and Image Source: Wicked River

Looking Forward--- Ed Bearrs Tours Vicksburg and Gettysburg, May 2010

Receding Tide: Vicksburg and Gettysburg: The Campaigns That Changed the Civil War, Edwin Cole Bearss, National Geographic Publishing,400 pages, $30.00, May 2010.

It’s a poignant irony in American history that on Independence Day, 1863, not one but two pivotal battles ended in Union victory, marked the high tide of Confederate military fortune, and ultimately doomed the South’s effort at secession. But on July 4, 1863, after six months of siege, Ulysses Grant’s Union army finally took Vicksburg and the Confederate west.

On the very same day, Robert E. Lee was in Pennsylvania, parrying the threat to Vicksburg with a daring push north to Gettysburg. For two days the battle had raged; on the next, July 4, 1863, Pickett’s Charge was thrown back, a magnificently brave but fruitless assault, and the fate of the Confederacy was sealed, though nearly two more years of bitter fighting remained until the war came to an end.

In Receding Tide, Edwin Cole Bearss draws from his popular tours to chronicle these two widely separated but simultaneous clashes and their dramatic conclusion. As the recognized expert on both Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Bearss tells the fascinating story of this single momentous day in our country’s history, offering his readers narratives, maps, illustrations, characteristic wit, dramatic new insights and unerringly intimate knowledge of terrain, tactics, and the colorful personalities of America’s citizen soldiers, Northern and Southern alike.

Edwin Cole Bearss is America’s premier battlefield historian and the historian emeritus of the National Park Service. Author of 13 books, he has also served as a consultant on numerous documentaries and films, including Ken Burns’s The Civil War.

Text Source: Amazon.com

New---Vicksburg 1863, Forrest Gump, and Contingency

Vicksburg 1863, Winston Groom, Alfred A. Knopf Publishing, illustrations, 482pp., 2009. $30.00

Reviewed by Christopher R. Waldrep (San Francisco State Univ.), Published on H-CivWar (July, 2009)

"Why This Happen?"

Vicksburg 1863 is the skillfully crafted work of an experienced writer. In 1978, Winston Groom published his first book, Better Times Than These, based on his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam. Other books have followed, and Groom most forcefully established his credentials in 1986 with a comic novel on his Vietnam experience that became a hugely successful movie: Forrest Gump. In Vicksburg 1863, Groom exhibits not only his storytelling prowess but also a delightful talent for mischievous observation. Henry Halleck is “the nervous bug-eyed military whiz” (p. 56). William Tecumseh Sherman had “zany” adventures in California before the war (p. 85). The USS Benton came into battle “like a bear beset by hornets” (p. 121). Groom’s descriptions are clearly the work of a talented novelist: “The night was villainously dark” (p. 276). “Vicksburg twinkled along the great bluffs like a miniature galaxy” (p. 277). Such vivid characterizations and crisp sentences are the most obvious reasons to read Groom’s history writing. Reviewers have generally praised Groom, one calling him “first-rate.”[1]

Groom does not intend to appeal to academics or even history buffs. In a 2005 book on a different war, Groom warned readers that some of his information might be “old hat” to “those who devour every scrap of detail about the Second World War.” Groom explained that he did not consider such aficionados to be his audience: “it is not for them that I write but to the average American reader.” He frankly stated that he hoped readers would “take renewed pride in what our forefathers dealt with and determined to accomplish.”[2] Groom has no patience for “the new liberal fad of ‘moral relativism’ or ‘moral equivalency.’” He believes, in fact, that there are good guys and bad guys, and dismisses “the fetish of self-hatred that has become so pervasive in the mainstream media and the halls of academia.”[3] For its part, the “mainstream media” has called Groom’s faith in moral progress “endearing but inherently ridiculous.”[4]

In short, this well-written and entertaining book has no scholarly pretensions. There are no footnotes--even though the narrative is laced with juicy quotations and his earlier history books do have notes. Groom appends a three-page bibliographic essay entitled “Acknowledgements and Source Notes” that will allow curious readers to chart the limits of his bibliographic explorations but not trace the sources for specific facts and quotations. The introduction, a place where academic readers will go looking for a thesis statement, curiously only summarizes the author’s genealogical connections to Vicksburg. His great-grandfather, it turns out, joined the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry which raced to the aid of Vicksburg’s beleaguered defenders. Armed with that not obviously helpful knowledge, the reader plunges into a 464-page narrative. A brief argumentative passage at the end makes the case that Vicksburg was the most important battle of the war, forty times more important than Gettysburg. But that argument does not animate this narrative which aims more for detailed description than analysis. One event follows another--at one point Groom suggests that the Confederates might have marched up and captured Chicago, “not that they would have,” he adds (p. 71). In this way, and perhaps only in this one way, Groom echoes the thinking of a leading academic historian of the Civil War. Unlike Groom, Edward L. Ayers eschews turning points, but like Groom, Ayers “focuses on deep contingency.”[5] To that, Groom might say “Amen.” The author of Forrest Gump knows a thing or two about contingency.

Readers will find in Vicksburg 1863 the contingency that Ayers recognizes, but joined with the kind of national affirmation Ayers rejects. In searching for an explanation for this apparent contradiction, the Vietnam War is an obvious place to go. One critic has observed that “two landscapes loom large in the work of Winston Groom”: Vietnam and the American South. These “twin towers” prop up Groom’s fiction, he writes.[6] Groom has said that there will always be an important connection between Forrest Gump and all his other books. There is, he explains, “a little bit of Vietnam” in many of his books. Returning from Vietnam, Groom knew his service had been honorable. Confronted by the antiwar movement, “I just kept my mouth shut.”[7]

These two landscapes shape Groom’s Civil War narrative just as surely, if more subtly, as they do his novels. Groom has no trouble recognizing that slavery animated southerners’ march to war. He makes that clear in the first chapter of Vicksburg 1863. He also knows that slavery and racism were and are evils; in Forrest Gump, he names his main character after Nathan Bedford Forrest, nevertheless observing that “startin up that Klan thing was not a good idea--any idiot could tell you that.”[8] Into that single sentence Groom incorporates both his recognition of the South’s racialist past and his condemnation of it. In Forrest Gump, one unlikely event follows another until one soldier dying on a Vietnam battlefield pleads, “Why this happen?” and another character explains that “it is all part of a scheme of some sort.”[9] No dying Confederate asks exactly that question in Vicksburg 1863. If one had, Groom would presumably have had to point to slavery. Slavery was “paramount” on the “list of contentions” between North and South, he writes (p. 29). Increasingly militant abolitionists bedeviled the South. John Brown--“aging and unbalanced”--infuriated white southerners (p. 30). Those white southerners mistook Lincoln for a “die-hard abolitionist” (p. 33). The “national rift over slavery” ran so deep that it split religions (p. 34). All this agitation over slavery lit the fuse leading to war. In Vietnam, Groom writes, “we was tryin to do the right thing, I guess.”[10] Groom cannot say that about the South in the Civil War. In Vicksburg 1863, he finds no Confederate soldier asking the Vietnam question, “Why this happen?” but he comes close. A young boy asks his grandmother, the daughter of a Civil War soldier, “why did they do it, Bamaw? Why did they die?” About Vietnam Groom can have his character answer the same question, “it was a bunch of shit.”[11] He cannot bring himself to say that about Vicksburg. For that battle Bamaw answers, “I don’t know, son. I supposed they’d all be dead now anyhow” (p. 458). To Vietnam, Groom can bring a brutal truth, to the Civil War, comic evasion.

In Vicksburg 1863, Groom recounts a string of events chaotic and even (at times) “zany,” albeit with less reflection than he brought to Forrest Gump. Groom’s determined rejection of the moral relativism that Vietnam encouraged in others may be an artifact from a different era stranded on a landscape remolded by the civil rights revolution. In his Civil War book, Ayers rejects “works of national affirmation” and “national redemption.”[12] When writing about Andrew Jackson or World War II, Groom redeems and affirms national values, though finding those qualities in Vicksburg 1863 challenges his imagination. Groom at least twice accuses Sherman of pyromania, as if some personal mental failing led him into wanton destruction. Black soldiers’ service at Milliken’s Bend gets brief mention, starting out with a claim that the battle “did not reflect much credit on anyone concerned” (p. 387). Black soldiers ran for their lives before triumphant Texans, he writes, saved only by the timely intervention of Union ironclads. This is one version of what happened--the version that most shortchanges black heroism on that battlefield. Other narrators have been more generous, and even Groom concedes at the end of this passage that black soldiers proved they would fight at Milliken’s Bend. He also repeats the old canard, made famous by Ken Burns, that Vicksburg did not celebrate the Fourth of July for eighty-five years after the war. Groom trips over that perennial bugaboo for white southerners: Reconstruction. Reconstruction is clearly not a topic of great interest for this author, but he mentions it at the end, complaining that by early 1867, “the Radical Republicans had begun to enact severe Reconstruction measures designed to divest many southerners of their property” (p. 440). There are few professional historians working today still deluded by the old idea that “Radicals” ever controlled Congress or any part of Reconstruction or that Reconstruction was ever “severe.”

Groom concludes with a patriotic salute to all Civil War soldiers: “They were not Gods, nor were they saints, but in their time they were giants who ruled the earth, and they feared not. No army as yet assembled could have matched them” (p. 458). Here we have moral positivism, not relativism--the kind of thinking that insists on clearly defined bad guys and good guys, combined with a recognition that southern soldiers (those fearless giants) fought for slavery.

Text Source: H-Net
Top Image Source: USHistory Files
Bottom Image Source: Garden and Gun

News---Grant's Canal and Connecticut Remembered at Vicksburg

Connecticut Gets A 'Fitting Memorial', Pamela Hitchins, The Vicksburg Post, October 15, 2008

With songs from a troubadour, flags fluttering in the breeze and smiles for “a fine day,” officials, guests and Vicksburg National Military Park staffers celebrated the official dedication of the Connecticut state monument Tuesday — newest in the inventory of the 109-year-old park. It is in a noncontiguous section of park land, just west of the river bridges.

Many of them sported shamrock stickers in honor of the 9th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers, the “Irish Regiment” that labored in June and July 1862, attempting to dig a canal across DeSoto Point near Delta, La. The monument is near the only visible remnant of the attempt commissioned by Union Gen. U.S. Grant to entice the Mississippi River to bypass Vicksburg. Had the canal succeeded, a battle to conquer Vicksburg would have been less crucial, as Confederate cannon would not have been able to fire on passing Union boats.

“This is a fine day for the park to add a state monument to the otherwise grand collection of monuments that we already have,” said Monika Mayr, VNMP superintendent. “It really enhances the site and adds to our ability to tell the story of the canal here.” A six-man Knights of Columbus honorary color guard, decked out in white, green, purple and red, stood at attention — three on one side of the monument, three on the other — during the ceremony. The first Supreme Knight, James T. Mullen, was a sergeant in Company C of the 9th Regiment at Vicksburg.

As Connecticut state troubadour emeritus Tom Callinan stood with his guitar, a breeze caught the Connecticut and regimental flags, and they waved broadly behind him as he sang “of Connecticut’s 9th, me boys,...young men fighting for freedom in a land where they hadn’t been born.” Master of ceremonies for the dedication was Robert Larkin of Cheshire, Conn. “Some 16 years ago my youngest daughter and sister visited this park where our ancestor, Pvt. John Marlow of Company C, died on July 24th during the first assault on Vicksburg in 1862,” he told the crowd of about 75 people. “They found no mention of him or the 9th and no monument to the state of Connecticut.”

Larkin worked for nearly 10 years to change that, becoming chairman of the Connecticut monument committee, fundraising, contacting descendants of the 9th and helping with historical and design efforts. “Our heartfelt thanks go out to all who supported us,” Larkin said. “We are honored to present this monument and give Connecticut a fitting memorial here at the Vicksburg National Military Park.” Karen Senich, executive director of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, presented the monument to the park on behalf of the state. “This is a monument that is a work of art,” Senich said. “We are very proud that a Connecticut artist, Stacy Mathieu, did the work you see here today.” Mathieu in turn thanked composite artist and designer Kerry Sheldon. “She did an amazing amount of work on the portraits, and worked with Bob (Larkin) to put the proper uniforms on the men, enhance the resolution of their faces, improve the composition and make sure they were historically accurate. She spent countless hours on the project.” Mathieu’s work hand etching all images on the center panel extended over five months. “This is the first time I’ve seen it upright,” she said. “It’s such a great culmination of all the efforts people have put into it over the years. Just seeing it assembled on the concrete pad, with the benches — it’s a nice unified whole.”

The black and green granite monument stands about 10 feet high and 10 feet long, and consists of a base, two side panels, the etched centerpiece and two benches. The pieces weigh 13,597 pounds. In his remarks, VNMP historian Terrence Winschel thanked Larkin for his vision and persistence in spearheading the effort to see the memorial realized. “Looking back on it, it has been a remarkable achievement,” Winschel said. Carol Brown, of Branford, Conn., made the trip to honor two of her ancestors, both of whom survived the canal effort and are memorialized with portraits on the monument — her great-grandfather, Lt. William O’Keefe and Capt. Lawrence O’Brien, whose sister married O’Keefe after the war. Brown was there with her two daughters, Alison Brown and Kristin Fary, both of Atlanta, and Fary’s three children, Grace, 15, Paige, 14 and Jack, 6.

“We heard lots of stories from our grandmother about her Uncle Larry,” Alison Brown said. “Even in the heat they had to wear their full woolen uniforms. They had to march in dress parade, wearing their packs and carrying their arms at the end of the day. They weren’t even allowed to bury the men after they collapsed and died.” Winschel remarked after the ceremony that the monument can only add to the park’s reputation as the “art park of the world,” a moniker given to it by a Civil War veteran. “It adds to the significance of the site,” he said, nodding toward what remains of the canal nearby.

The Irish Regiment, 845-men strong when mustered-in in New Haven, Conn. in the fall of 1861, saw action in Pass Christian and occupied New Orleans before venturing up the river to Vicksburg in June 1862. Though the site memorializing their efforts is called Grant’s Canal, the work of the ninth was known as Williams Canal, as Union Gen. Thomas Williams commanded the effort. The canal across the neck of a peninsula was to be long and deep enough to accommodate Union boats, Winschel said. In the high heat and humidity, “with only the muddy water of the Mississippi to drink,” 153 men of the 9th died in the effort, from heat stroke, malaria, dysentery and other diseases — “ a ghastly toll in human life,” Winschel said.

In 1863, Union forces moved down the west side of the Mississippi, crossed the river at Bruinsburg and then moved up through Port Gibson, Raymond and Jackson before turning back toward the river. After direct assaults failed, a siege began and Vicksburg was surrendered on July 4. The park, created by Congress in 1899, preserves much of the terrain and battlements from the war on the city’s perimeter. In addition to the noncontiguous site in Louisiana, the National Park Service also owns two overlooks on Washington Street and the headquarters of Confederate commander Gen. John Pemberton on Crawford Street.

Text Source: Vicksburg Post

Photograph Source: Meredith Spencer, The Vicksburg Post