After the bloody two-day battle of Shiloh in April of '62, Grant had made up his mind that no swift, decisive victory would ever win this war. Only the hard hand of a war of conquest, he was convinced, would suppress the rebellion. To that end, he ordered Sherman to remain in Jackson until he "destroyed that place as a railroad center and manufacturing city of military supplies." Sherman turned to this work with a willful energy that would make him infamous throughout the South before the war was over. One witness remembered "foundries, machine shops, warehouses, factories, arsenals, and public stores... fired as fast as the flames could be kindled." Assisting in the work of despoiling Jackson, let it be said, were many willing hands, soldier and civilian, black and white. Now assured that the Confederate defense of Mississippi would not be reinforced by rail–at least not through Jackson–Grant turned once more to the business of Vicksburg.
        Responsible for the defense of that city, Joe Johnston no doubt felt an even sharper animus for Jefferson Davis, the old foe who had sent him west into this predicament. Johnston had reached Jackson barely in time to be driven out of it. He had but 6,000 men in two brigades to confront two-thirds of Grant's army–25,000 men in two corps. Johnston did what he could for the moment and withdrew northward to Tugaloo, seven miles up the railroad. If he were to make a fight of it at all, of course, he must find a way to unite his forces with Pemberton's now on a good line four miles east of the Big Black River (just halfway between Vicksburg and Jackson). With the entire Federal army between the two commands, doing so was going to be a challenge. Johnston, expecting–or at least hoping for–reinforcements from the East, wanted Pemberton to join him and concentrate somewhere in the neighborhood of Jackson. In the meantime, Pemberton might come up and strike a blow at Grant's rear. "Can he supply himself from the Mississippi?" Johnston wanted to know. "Can you not cut him off from it, and above all, should he be compelled to fall back for want of supplies, beat him?" Though Johnston didn't know it at the time, there were of course two critical problems in such a plan: first, the line from Grand Gulf to Jackson was not really Grant's line of supply as long as he was living on the wealth of the heart of Mississippi, and second, with McClernand on his way to Bolton in preparation for a thrust toward Vicksburg, Grant's rear was now his front. Pemberton's dilemma can hardly have been more vexing. A Pennsylvanian who had won the confidence of Southerners, he had with him but three divisions, a force of about 17,500 men. The rest of his command were garrison troops back at Vicksburg, Warrenton, and Haines Bluffs. Now Johnston wanted him to march on Clinton, a long way from his own base. Jefferson Davis, however, had told Pemberton that he wanted Vicksburg held at all costs. That resolve seemed to Pemberton to argue against marching three irreplaceable divisions forty miles from the city. Pemberton's own instinct was probably a good one: he wanted Johnston to join him, on good ground four miles east of the Big Black, and together fight Grant on the defensive.
        In the end, Joe Johnston made up his mind for him. "The only mode by which we can unite," he ordered Pemberton, "is by your moving directly to Clinton," where he would join him. Reluctantly, then, Pemberton got his divisions on the road, swinging northeast toward Brownsville in order to avoid the increasing number of Yankees gathering at Bolton. To Johnston he wrote explaining his route of march, and adding "Heavy skirmishing is now going on on my front." At about the same time Pemberton received Johnston's order, so did U. S. Grant. For safety's sake Johnston had sent three couriers with that urgent order. One of them was a Union man who had been blithely and deceitfully talking secession among his neighbors for several months now. Pemberton's order went directly to McPherson who sent it directly to Grant. Back in Maryland in '62, a generous fate had handed George McClellan Robert E. Lee's general orders, but Little Mac had done nothing but think for eighteen invaluable hours. Now Grant was likewise a child of fortune. But, unlike McClellan, Grant acted at once. Sherman would stay behind to complete the business of turning Jackson into Chimneyville. Now, disregarding Johnston's brigades north of the city, Grant would turn with the rest of his army to fall with a shock on Pemberton, whose route of march he held in his hand. He ordered McPherson westward to join McClernand: "Turn all your forces toward Bolton Station, and make all dispatch in getting there. Move troops by the most direct road from wherever they may be on the receipt of this order." By first light on May 15 McPherson's three divisions were tramping west toward Bolton Station and a meeting with McClernand's corps beyond. McClernand's five divisions (the fifth was Frank Blair's, on loan from Sherman) were in the lead and marching north to Bolton. For good measure, Grant ordered Sherman to "put one division with an ammunition train on the road at once, with directions to its commander to march with all possible speed until he comes up in our rear."
        Thus, Pemberton, trying to march northeast to join Joe Johnston, ran into McClernand and McPherson instead on May 16. The heavy skirmishing he had mentioned to Johnston gave Pemberton enough warning to prepare a line, and he picked a good one. He got his three divisions on Champion Hill, a seventy-foot height with a big loop of Baker's Creek in its rear. The crest ran north and south and fronted the three roads by which the Yankees were approaching. Early that morning–about 7:30–McClernand's corps came up to confront Confederates on the south end of Champion Hill. McClernand had been ordered not to bring on an engagement unless he felt sure of success, and he was content for the moment to reconnoiter this stretch of the Rebel line and await events. One of his divisions, however, had come up on the northernmost of the three roads out of immediate reach of McClernand's control for the time being. This was Alvin Hovey's division, and they began to exchange fire with the Confederates on the slopes, taking rather more punishment than they gave as the gunners near the crest found their range. When Grant came up to appraise the situation on this end of the field about mid-morning, he sent the division forward up the steep slopes of Champion Hill held by the left-most of Pemberton's three divisions, Carter Stevenson's. They reached the crest in a rush, and even seized eleven guns that had dealt them such punishment earlier. A fierce Rebel counterattack, however, drove them back to the base of the hill, a position they could manage to hold only with help from Colonel George Boomer's brigade, which had just reached the field.
        About the same time that Hovey's attack was going forward, John Logan's division–of McPherson's corps–came up, and Grant sent them around to Hovey's right to feel for any weak spot on the Confederate left. The weak spot was there to be sure, discovered by an enlisted man who had wandered around the north end of the hill and had nonchalantly reported to Black Jack Logan that Stevenson's left was in the air. With Stevenson engaged so hotly on his front, Logan had a straight shot to his rear and a chance to cut him off from the single bridge over Baker' Creek. Doing so would mean rout and destruction for Pemberton's whole force. Before he could take advantage of this great tactical opportunity, however, Grant was forced to call him back to support Hovey, a third of whose men were already casualties. This failure to destroy Pemberton utterly Grant later blamed on McClernand. In truth, Grant had something of Bragg's habit of blaming failures on subordinates, but here he had a good case. McClernand had by now four divisions up and facing the southern end of the hill, but they had not yet pitched in while Hovey was having the fight of his life to the north. Pemberton, who managed his affairs this day about as well as they could be managed under the circumstances, could see his left buckling but no action on his center and right. Accordingly, he called first on Bowen's division in the center. These were the men whose counterattack had sent Hovey's initial success flying back down the slopes. Then as Logan's division came up and increased the pressure on Stevenson, he called again, this time to William Loring's division on the right, and here Pemberton's luck ran out. In fairness to Loring, it should be said that he could see four full Federal divisions on his front. That sight seemed to paralyze him just as McClernand seemed paralyzed opposite him. Late in the afternoon–about four o'clock–Loring finally, after repeated calls from Pemberton, did start his men to the north.
        They were just in time to see the Confederate left collapse in front of Hovey and Logan. Stevenson's men, who had been driving or being driven all day long, now broke and fled rearward toward Baker's Creek. In an effort to stave off disaster, Bowen's division in the center actually made a swift and savage counterattack, piercing the Federal front so far that it was nearly surrounded. For its pains, it had to fight its way back out. This division now formed a rear-guard line at the bridge over Baker's Creek, holding the door open for Loring. Two hours after dark and still–mysteriously–no sign of Loring, Bowen's men crossed to the west bank and burned the bridge behind them. (Loring, it was later discovered, had slipped away to the southwest around McClernand's flank.) Champion Hill had been, as one Union officer put it, a "most sanguinary struggle." Grant lost 2,400 men, most of them of course Hovey's. As a good reflection of what McClernand did not do this day, the rest of his corps–four divisions including Blair's–lost just 17 dead and 141 wounded. Pemberton's three divisions lost 3,600, among the dead Lloyd Tilghman, killed by a cannonball in a rear-guard skirmish. Grant saw quite clearly what he had achieved at Champion Hill: "We were now assured of our position between Johnston and Pemberton," he later wrote, "without a possibility of a junction of their forces." As it happened, this was not quite true, for the mysteriously disappeared Loring did eventually reappear to join Johnston at Canton, a day's march north of Jackson. More important for Grant, though, he had taken one more step toward Vicksburg.
        Pemberton, pushed off Champion Hill, now fell back in the darkness to the west; he had in fact anticipated the necessity of doing so and had already prepared a line on the Big Black River. Pemberton had been a respected old army engineer, and this line was a credit to his competence. It was square across the railroad to Vicksburg on a bend of the Big Black. On the steep west bank he posted his artillery with good fields of fire. On the east bank ran a mile-long stretch of rifle pits. With a muddy bayou on the north end of the field and a tangle of cypress to the south, any Yankee attack would be channelled toward the open ground in front. Even without Loring's division–which Pemberton was still expecting–he thought he could make a fight of it here. When Grant came up early on the morning of the 17th, he thought so, too. Rather than storm so sturdy a line, he would hold this front with McPherson and McClernand and send Sherman's three divisions five miles up the Big Black to Bridgeport to cross and come down on Pemberton's left flank.
        Then ego and events took a turn. McClernand, for whatever reason, had certainly won no glory the day before. Today he would take the initiative. He sent two divisions forward–Eugene Carr's north of the railroad and Peter Osterhaus' south. On the far right was a little copse of trees, about the only cover on that whole field, and it was occupied by one of Carr's brigades. These Westerners were commanded by one Brigadier General Michael Lawler, a beefy, combative Irishman whose motto was: "If you see a head, hit it." Three hundred yards away across that muddy bayou were heads in grey kepis, and off went Lawler on his own hook to hit them. Slogging chest-deep through the muck, his four regiments took nearly two hundred casualties in the first minutes of the attack, but when they reached the rifle-pits, most of the Rebels had already fled toward the railroad bridge and another 1,200 were giving themselves up prisoners. (Those fleeing found to their dismay that the bridge had been set afire to stop the Yankee pursuit.) The other blue brigades, seeing the success on the right, pitched in now all along the line. The Confederates, perhaps intimidated, perhaps demoralized, perhaps simply exhausted by campaigning against a stronger foe, turned and ran for the west bank. Left behind were 1,750 killed, wounded, and captured, and 18 guns. Grant's losses were just 275 casualties, most of those Lawler's men in the first three minutes of the fight. Seeing so strong a line dissolve so quickly and so completely, Pemberton's spirits sank. At Champion Hill and the Big Black, he had lost a third of his army in just two days. Now with a victorious enemy on his front and Sherman across the river on his flank, there was nothing to be done but to hike for the last post: the trenches of Vicksburg twelve miles down the road.
        Late in the day on May 17 Pemberton's beaten command reached Vicksburg. "I shall never forget the woeful sight," a Vicksburg woman wrote. "Wan, hollow-eyed, ragged, foot-sore, bloody, the men limped along unarmed... humanity in the last throes of endurance." Before them, in anticipation of the siege to come, they drove such sheep, cattle, and hogs as they could gather up along the way. When Joe Johnston, now just northeast of Brownsville, learned of the rout on the Big Black and the subsequent withdrawal from Haines Bluff, he thought the fate of Vicksburg was fixed. Even as Pemberton's exhausted men were filing into the city, he wrote to their commander: "If Haines Bluff is untenable, Vicksburg is of no value and cannot be held. If, therefore, you are invested at Vicksburg, you must immediately surrender. Under such circumstances, instead of losing both troops and place, we must, if possible, save the troops. If it is not too late, evacuate Vicksburg... and march them to the northeast." Not surprisingly, the commander-in-chief did not see it Joe Johnston's way. To Jefferson Davis Vicksburg was, as he put it, the nail-head that held together the halves of the Confederacy, and Pemberton remained under orders to defend it at all costs. In the end, what Joe Johnston or Jeff Davis wanted was irrelevant. While Pemberton was considering, Grant's guns began to shell the half-circle of works east of the city and three blue columns were moving down the roads to Vicksburg at the route step.
        By May 19 Grant's army completed its investment of Vicksburg, Sherman on the right, McPherson in the center, McClernand on the left. Grant's men were as high-spirited as Pemberton's were downcast, as well they should have been. Since crossing to the east bank of the river at Bruinsburg on April 30, they had marched 180 miles, prevailed in five battles, captured the capital of Mississippi, crippled Pemberton's army, and driven its survivors to their last post. Grant had shown energy, intelligence, inventiveness, and above all an implacable resolve throughout the campaign. Now he and his men were in position to bring the campaign to completion by storming the citadel itself. Grant ordered an assault all along the ring of the Vicksburg works, three corps to step off at once and fall with a massive shock on the demoralized defenders. At two o'clock on May 19 the Yankee guns let loose three volleys, and then the assault waves went forward with a cheer. As soon as they stepped into the open, however, the Yanks discovered that Pemberton's 30,000 men were not as demoralized as Grant believed. They had suffered a good deal of punishment since their first encounter with Grant back at Port Gibson on May Day; now they were on excellent ground to even some scores. From rifle pits and trenches came a murderous musketry. Behind strong redoubts Rebel gunners poured canister into the blue waves.
        The attack fell apart nearly as soon as it went forward. "The heads of the columns," Sherman wrote, "have been swept away as chaff thrown from the hand on a windy day." Nearly a thousand bluecoats were casualties against just 200 Rebels. Grant, however, hadn't gotten this far by being unwilling to strike blows. He ordered another assault for May 22, this to be preceded by a more careful study of the Vicksburg works and an artillery bombardment. At dawn two hundred guns east of the city opened up, and at 9:30 a hundred on the river began pounding the city from the west. At 10:00 all three corps went forward again against the Rebel line and into ferocious fire. (Pemberton's men had been busy since the May 19 attack in strengthening their works.) The Federals kept up the unequal contest for several hours, gaining temporary lodgements here and there, but ultimately being thrown back in a bloody repulse. On the left McClernand's men reached and held some Rebel works, persuading McClernand that a breakthrough there was at hand. He told Grant that he had "part possession of two forts, and the stars and stripes are floating over them." If McPherson and Sherman would renew their attacks in support, he believed he could crack the Rebel line. Grant, who nursed a deep mistrust of McClernand, admitted that he didn't believe a word of the general's report, but went ahead with the attacks despite his better judgment. All the attacks achieved was to add to this day's butcher's bill and sharpen Grant's grudge against McClernand. The Yankees left five stands of colors on the Rebel works and suffered 3,200 casualties. Still, Grant was sure that the city was doomed (as Joe Johnston had said himself). But he was also sure now that it could not be taken by storm. The two attacks on the Vicksburg works cost his army nearly as many casualties as the previous five battles together. Still, he did not regret them, believing that his men would not work as patiently in the trenches of a long siege had they not been allowed to try to take them by assault. Now, Grant resolved, he would "outcamp" the enemy. "The fall of Vicksburg," he believed, "can only be a question of time."
        In truth, unless Joe Johnston, now somewhere off to the northeast, could break into the city from the rear, or Pemberton break out, the fortress must fall. Seeing that siege lifted was of course Jeff Davis' most earnest desire, but, intensely to his chief's annoyance, Johnston didn't believe it could be achieved with the troops he had. Such reinforcements as could be had had already been sent–two divisions from Bragg's army and three brigades up from Louisiana under General Richard Taylor (son of "Old Rough and Ready" Zachary Taylor). Robert E. Lee, after his triumph at Chancellors-ville, was preparing his second invasion of the North and could not spare a trooper. Johnston reported 30,000 men, but in fact many of these were poorly armed and absolutely raw–not much of a match for Grant's confident, battle-hardened veterans. Grant himself said he hoped that Johnston would come: "If Johnston tries to cut his way in, we will let him do it, and then see that he don't get out.... That will give us 30,000 more prisoners than we now have." Grant called for reinforcements of his own down from Memphis, increasing his force to more than 70,000. He detached seven divisions under Sherman to guard the rear and settled into a siege of the city. He would not only outcamp the enemy, he would outdig, outmine, and outblast him.
        The next six weeks of siege would mean increasing and finally unendurable suffering for the 30,000 soldiers and 3,000 citizens of Vicksburg. The 100 guns of Porter's fleet and the 200 field guns to the east kept up their daily battering. "The fiery shower of shells goes on, day and night," a Vicksburg woman wrote. "People do nothing but eat what they can get, sleep when they can, and dodge the shells." At the mercy of such relentless shell-fire, the people dug so many caves into the clay hillsides that the Yankees started calling Vicksburg "prairie dog village." It was "living like plant roots," a woman thought. Hunger, however, was a more bitter blow than shell-fire. People ate mules and horses, dogs and cats, even the very rats of Vicksburg. A Rebel non-com described the city toward the end: "Houses dilapidated and in ruins, rent and torn by shot and shell... fences torn down and houses pulled to pieces.... Lice and filth covered the bodies of the soldiers.... Delicate women and little children... peered at the passer-by with wistful eyes from the caves in the hillside." On the lines the Federals each day ditched, tunneled, and mined their way closer, boring, one remembered, "like gophers and beavers, with a spade in one hand and a gun in the other."
        Vicksburg was desperate and only desperate measures remained to it. On June 7 in an effort to break Grant's line of supply across the river, one of Richard Taylor's brigades attacked the Union garrison at Milliken's Point. The Point happened to be held by two regiments of so-called "contrabands," black slaves who had in effect freed themselves by fleeing to Union lines. The Federal government, after long reflection, had decided to make soldiers of them, and many in the army had doubts about their fighting abilities. Though these particular regiments were untrained and poorly armed, they fought fiercely when the attack came, and with the help of two of Porter's gunboats turned Taylor's brigade back. Fifty black soldiers were captured in the fight, and it may be that some of these were murdered by Rebels enraged by seeing former slaves under arms. The rest were sold back into slavery. Assistant Secretary of War Richard Henry Dana, with Grant's army at the time, thought that the "bravery of the blacks completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops. I heard prominent officers who formerly in private had sneered at the idea of negroes fighting express themselves after that as heartily in favor of it." A black man in the uniform of the United States Army became a fitting symbol of the Civil War as a revolutionary struggle.
        The struggle for Vicksburg, though, was nearing its end. Richmond called incessantly on Joe Johnston to attack the Federal rear and lift the siege, something he had said all along he was incapable of doing. Johnston thought Pemberton ought to try to save himself, either cutting his way out or escaping over the river (though how he supposed that Pemberton could get 30,000 men over a river with a hundred Yankee guns on it was not at all clear). On June 25 and July 1 Yankee engineers exploded mines that breached the Confederate works, and it was all Pemberton's men could do to restore the line. By this time they were living on a biscuit and a bit of bacon a day and clearly on their last legs. The men themselves sent Pemberton this message: "If you can't feed us, you'd better surrender us, horrible as the idea is, than suffer this noble army to disgrace themselves by desertion.... The army is now ripe for mutiny, unless it can be fed." It was signed "Many Soldiers." On July 3, 1863, the same day that Picket and Pettigrew's men were beaten back from the stone wall at Gettysburg, Pemberton wrote Grant asking for terms. "I know my people, the Pennsylvania native said. "I know their weaknesses and their national vanity; I know we can get better terms from them on the Fourth of July than any other day of the year." On the Fourth with the stars and stripes flying over the Vicksburg courthouse, Pemberton's 30,000 gaunt and ragged men stacked arms and surrendered. It had been six long hard months of campaigning since Sherman's attack on Chickasaw Bluffs back in December. Now at last Vicksburg, the key to the Mississippi, was in Mr. Lincoln's pocket. As for the vanquished, Grant had at first proposed unconditional surrender, but reflecting on the problem of shipping so many thousands of prisoners north, he agreed to parole them. The men in the ranks were likewise generous victors. There was no exulting over their starved-out foe, and they were quick to share their rations with the men they'd been shooting at for so long. Still, if it was a glorious Fourth for the Yankees, it was a bitter day in Vicksburg. Vicksburg would not officially celebrate another Fourth of July until 1945.

        Perhaps no Southerner was more bitter than Jefferson Davis who blamed this disastrous loss on a "want of provisions inside and a General outside who wouldn't fight." In Washington, Lincoln, who had so recently drunk from a bitter cup himself after Joe Hooker's defeat at Chancellorsville in May, felt an immense relief. Even as Lee's long wagon train of Gettysburg wounded was headed back across the Potomac, Vicksburg was now a Union fortress. As for Grant, he was not yet finished with business in Mississippi. First, there was the matter of Joe Johnston, the general outside who wouldn't fight, now posted at Jackson. Sherman with 50,000 men went after him with orders to "inflict all the punishment you can." Johnston, however, did not want to fight at Jackson against what he believed long odds. As Sherman was preparing to surround the city, Johnston slipped across the Pearl River in the dark of July 16 and withdrew into Alabama. Finally, there remained only the Confederate stronghold at Port Hudson, 250 miles downriver from Vicksburg, that Nathaniel Banks and Admiral David Farragut had been besieging since the last week of May. Like the people of Vicksburg, the tiny garrison there, sick and starving, had been hoping and praying for deliverance by Johnston. Now with Vicksburg gone, Port Hudson on July 9 also surrendered. The whole long reach of the Mississippi River from St. Louis to New Orleans was now in Union hands. "The Father of Waters," said Lincoln, "again goes unvexed to the sea."

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