Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy by Donald L. Miller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy by Donald L. Miller Stephen D. Engle Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy. By Donald L. Miller. (New York and other cities: Simon and Schuster, 2019. Pp. xx, 663. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4516-4137-0.) Approaching the Civil War's centennial, Bruce Catton wrote that as much as the northern people looked anxiously in early July 1863 toward Pennsylvania where the "threads of fate" pulled Robert E. Lee into the titanic three-day battle [End Page 921] at Gettysburg, "the real pull of fate was at Vicksburg. . . . down here by the great river" (Catton, U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition [Boston, 1954], p. 104). More than sixty-five years later, Donald L. Miller reminds us of that truth, even while scholars continue to write Gettysburg onto center stage. Although Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the most important strategic point in the Confederacy, the prosperous river city did not need a civil war to emphasize its importance. One needs only to look at a map to understand why. That scholars continue to chronicle the Union's victorious forty-seven-day siege confirms its centrality to understanding why the North won and why the Confederacy lost the Civil War. In Ulysses S. Grant's own words, "The fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell" (Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Vol. 1 [New York, 1885], p. 567). He was right to affirm that Vicksburg was the Civil War's transformative campaign, in that his army's conquest of the Mississippi River's Gibraltar opened the Father of Waters to Union commerce, split the Confederacy, and isolated the western slave states of Arkansas and Texas and part of Louisiana. More than that, the campaign showcased Grant's mastery of maneuver and adaptation in a hostile environment, while also handling the battles and raids on his way to the final assault. Miller argues that Grant's brilliance was more than just organizing an extraordinary amphibious assault on the Confederate citadel; it also gave evidence of a superior commander determining by thought, action, and deed the politics of war. Handling Abraham Lincoln's, Henry W. Halleck's, and the public's impatience, while managing troublesome political generals such as John A. McClernand, proved to be an equally significant accomplishment. If his unorthodox decisions went against his superior's accepted theories of war, Grant handled the complexities of leadership, strategy, administration, public affairs, logistics, and politics in ways that prepared for what was to come. The commander moved with great skill, and his long-range planning and persistence in a hostile environment not only won the battle of combatants but also transformed that environment by turning slave soil into free soil. His campaign's significance dwarfed anything undertaken in the eastern theater largely because it unleashed a social revolution that culminated in the liberation of nearly 100,000 slaves and brought some 26,000 slaves into the Union army. In the end, Grant's improvisational genius comes alive in this portrait because Miller illuminates the river warrior in ways that humanize the Union commander's strategic ebbs and flows in the heartland's hostile landscape. It is the story of not only the war's great military turning point, but also how America's greatest soldier evolved into an insightful commander and a military emancipator of the quarter million slaves living in the lower Mississippi River Valley. To be sure, several scholars have told this same story, but Miller has found a way to weave both military and emancipation history together that captures the drama and the essence of what it means to wage war while humanizing ordinary men doing extraordinary things. It takes such a book to remind us of why the war is always present. [End Page 922] Stephen D. Engle Florida Atlantic University Copyright © 2020 Southern Historical Association