The Vicksburg National Military Park commemorates the campaign, siege and defense of Vicksburg in 1863 and includes over 1,300 monuments, a 16 mile tour road, a restored Union gunboat and a national cemetery. A 20-minute film recounts this Civil War battle. From the start of the Civil War control of the Mississippi River south of Cairo, IL was vitally important to the federal government. Vicksburg, MS was set atop a high bluff overlooking a river bend. The city was protected by riverfront artillery batteries, a maze of swamps and bayous, and a ring of fortifications with 172 guns guarding all land approaches.
Major General Ulysses S. Grant was ordered to clear the Mississippi of Confederate resistance. Several attempts to take Vicksburg failed. The final siege lasted 46 days with Vicksburg being blasted by gunboats from the river and artillery hammering the Confederate fortifications from the land side.
Vicksburg's citizens lived in an occupied city from July 1863 through Reconstruction. Civil liberties were suspended and 5,000 United States Colored Troops patrolled the streets. Loyalty oaths were required of the townspeople, or they could be arrested or banished. Mississippi was readmitted to the Union in February 1870, but Federal troops occupied the city of Vicksburg until President Rutherford B. Hayes removed them in 1877.
The remnants of the Union ironclad gunboat, Cairo, the first one ever built, was on display. It was the first vessel ever sunk by an electrically detonated torpedo (today called a mine). Preserved like a time-capsule were information on naval construction, naval stores, armament and the crew's personal gear. Artifacts recovered from the Cairo (pronounced Care-o) before and after its salvage in the 1960s, and the boat's remains give new insights into Civil War naval life.
The Vicksburg National Cemetery is the 2nd largest national cemetery inside the Vicksburg National Military Park. It holds the remains of 17,000 Civil War Union soldiers, a number unmatched by any other national cemetery.
Vicksburg was also a prisoner-of-war exchange point. On April 24, 1865, over 2,300 Union soldiers from prisons at Andersonville, GA and Cahaba, AL left Vicksburg on the steamer Sultana headed upriver for home. Three nights later, near Memphis, the overloaded boat exploded and over 1,800 died. It is American history's biggest maritime disaster, but with the surrender of the Confederate armies and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, the incident made little news and it remains a little known tragedy of the Civil War years.
All that history made us hungry so we found The Walnut Hills restaurant where southern plantation cuisine is served the atmosphere of an 1880's home. Their fried chicken is a world famous speciality.
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