Mississippi Civil War Monuments: An Illustrated Field Guide

By Timothy S. Sedore

“From Vicksburg to Oxford, readers will find a rich examination of how and why Confederate and Union monuments sprang up across the state.” —Caroline E. Janney, Director, John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History, University of Virginia

Soaring obelisks, graceful arches, and soldiers standing tall atop pedestals recall the memory of the Civil War in Mississippi, a former Confederate state that boasts more Civil War monuments than any other.In Mississippi Civil War Monuments: An Illustrated Field Guide, Timothy S. Sedore combs through the Mississippi landscape, exploring monuments commemorating important military figures and battles and remembering common soldiers, from rugged veterans to mournful youths.

Sedore’s insightful commentary captures a character portrait of Mississippi, a state that was ensnared between Northern and Southern ideologies and that paid a high price for seceding from the Union. Sedore’s close examinations of these monuments broadens the narrative of Mississippi’s heritage and helps illuminate the impacts of the Civil War.

With intriguing details and vivid descriptions, Mississippi Civil War Monuments offers a comprehensive guide to the monuments that make up Mississippi’s physical and historical landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780253045584

Book preview

1

VICKSBURG

NATIONAL MILITARY PARK

FROM A MILITARY STANDPOINT, the bluffs and ravines overlooking the Mississippi River near Vicksburg formed a natural fortress governing passage on the waterway. These features led to the appointment of Confederate Major Samuel Lockett, chief engineer of the Department of Mississippi and East Louisiana, to design and oversee the construction of a defense line around the city beginning in June 1862. Prodigious work was done. Ultimately, there were nine forts, redoubts, or strong points connected by trenches or rifle pits stretching for nine miles in a semicircle around Vicksburg.

Given the strength of its fortifications and the importance of the Mississippi as a means of communication, transportation, and offensive movement by Union forces, Vicksburg came to be regarded as the Gibraltar of the Confederacy. Vicksburg is the key! President Abraham Lincoln famously declared, early in the war. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.… We can take all the northern ports of the Confederacy, and they can defy us from Vicksburg.

After a prolonged campaign of maneuvers and repeated setbacks, the city came under siege by a combined force of Union troops commanded by Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and naval units—the Brown Water Navy—led by Admiral David Dixon Porter, some seventy-seven thousand men. Defending Vicksburg was an army of thirty-three thousand Confederate soldiers commanded by Lt. Gen. John Pemberton. An Army of Relief, commanded by General Joseph E. Johnston, was poised near Jackson. The Southerners repulsed several direct assaults on the siege lines by Federal forces, but after a forty-seven-day stand, it became clear to Pemberton and members of his command that no relief was forthcoming and that starvation loomed for the Army of Vicksburg and the civilian populace. Pemberton surrendered the city and his army on July 4, 1863.

The Vicksburg siege was the culmination of the longest single campaign of the Civil War. It left nineteen thousand casualties on both sides. It was also the greatest defeat of Confederate forces during the war and ranks—with Gettysburg, the battle of Tenochtitlan in 1521 in Mexico, and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Canada in 1759—among the decisive battles in the history of North America. Historian Terrence Winschel notes that as a result of the fall of Vicksburg the vast Trans-Mississippi (that portion of the Confederacy west of the river) was severed from the Cis-Mississippi (the heartland of the Southern nation east of the river). He continues: This cut major Confederate supply and communications lines that helped support Southern armies in other theaters as well as a civilian population in growing want of sustenance. Trapped in the coils of the giant anaconda, Confederate Colonel Josiah Gorgas, chief of the Ordnance Department, lamented that ‘The Confederacy totters to its destruction.’

The surrendered Confederate army was quickly disarmed and disbanded, and its soldiers and sailors were paroled. Most of the Union forces were freed to move on to other campaigns. It is notable, however, that some Federal troops remained to occupy and garrison the city and that an active Federal presence has never departed from Vicksburg. The city retains the features of an 1863 battlefield, but it is also the place where the North won and established a permanent Federal presence in a Deep South city, as historian Christopher Waldrep observes. Noting that the war shifted the balance of power between the states and the national authority, Waldrep concludes that the "Vicksburg park memorializes many things, but it marks that shift of power