Sykes Book Review: Vicksburg, 1863

Vicksburg, 1863, by Winston Groom, Knopf, 482 pgs., $30.

I am a voracious reader with a few—okay, a lot—of books covering the American Civil War. But for whatever reason, I have been an Eastern Theater snob when it comes to my Civil War books. In the West, large swaths of territory and entire states changed hands as the result of a single battle. Yet I have continued to focus on the East where the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac slogged it out from the spring of 1861 to the spring of 1865 and where the clearest victory by either side resulted in little when compared to those of the Western Theater.

Vicksburg, 1863, by Winston Groom, takes the Union’s campaign to cut the Confederacy in half head on. The tapestry Groom weaves in doing so is truly vibrant. First off, there are the characters. On the Union side, we have the conniving Henry Halleck, the scheming politico John McClernand, the irascible William T. Sherman, the feuding half-brothers Admirals David G. Farragut and David D. Porter, and the pugnacious Ulysses S. Grant. On the Confederate side, Groom introduces us to the ever petulant Braxton Bragg, an inscrutable Joe Johnston, the fiery wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest, and the doomed John C. Pemberton. Both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis play their usual roles—the Lincoln administration seeking a clear cut victory and that of Davis wreathed in victory in the East, yet on its heels in the West.

First and foremost, Groom’s book is an infinitely readable survey of the Union’s campaign to open the Mississippi River and sever the Confederacy from the Trans-Mississippi and its vital foodstuffs. Groom covers the rise of Grant from Belmont, to Forts Henry and Donelson, and the bloodbath at Shiloh. As a result, Grant does not actually begin his march towards Vicksburg and immortality until over halfway through the book. This does not mean the first half of Grooms book is not without merit. It is in this first half where Groom treats us to the Union’s quasi-comedic attempts to take Vicksburg—seven in all—via combined Army-Navy assaults up the Yazoo River and the bayous surrounding the city.

Groom paints the Vicksburg Campaign as the turning point of the Civil War. Gettysburg, though more famous, did not alter the course of the war strategically. If anything, Gettysburg did little more than end a large-scale raid. Vicksburg, on the other hand, cut the Confederacy in half, re-opened the Mississippi to trade, and dealt the rebel government a strategic blow from which it would never recover. More importantly, the period immediately following Vicksburg’s surrender offered Jefferson Davis’ last best chance to negotiate an end to the war on terms the least bit favorable to the South. The last two years of the war, Sherman’s March, and Radical Reconstruction destroyed Southern society and its economy for generations to come. With a negotiated settlement, Groom argues, the South “would have received a far better deal than what they got…” (pg. 431).

Vicksburg, 1863 is an intensely readable survey of the campaign which sealed the fate of the Southern Confederacy. I would recommend it to any one with even the slightest interest in the American Civil War as we approach the sesquicentennial. I would further recommend it to those Eastern Theater/Army of the Potomac snobs whose bookshelves afford little space to the “tangential” struggles west of the Allegheny Mountains.