The final phase included Grant’s hard-hitting overland campaign into central Mississippi and his siege operations at Vicksburg. Grant then launched his spring 1863 campaign of diversions that eventually allowed him to get his army across the river south of Vicksburg.
Sherman’s Mississippi River expedition to a point just north of Vicksburg called Chickasaw Bayou. Grant’s fall campaign, which involved the invasion of north Mississippi and an attempt to flank the Confederates with General William T. First came the spring 1862 upriver attack by Union gunboats. The Vicksburg campaign can best be understood when divided into four phases. The effort of United States troops to capture Vicksburg took over a year, from the spring of 1862 to the summer of 1863, and it involved thousands of soldiers and caused much bloodshed. Lincoln looked at a map of the Mississippi River and saw that its hairpin turn in front of Vicksburg, which sat high on bluffs above the river, made boats traveling in both directions vulnerable to artillery fire from the Confederate batteries on the shore line and on the high bluffs. President Abraham Lincoln termed it, to the Union gaining control of the river. The portion of Louisiana west of the river plus Texas and Arkansas formed the Transmississippi which held manpower and materiel that the rest of the southern military machine needed.
The farmers, along with politicians and merchants, did not like the idea of the river being closed because of Confederate artillery looming along the banks where the “Father of Waters” flowed through the Confederacy.įor the Confederacy, control of the lower Mississippi River was vital to the union of its states. For many years, the river had served as a vital waterway for midwestern farmers shipping their goods to the eastern states by way of the Gulf of Mexico. When Vicksburg fell to Union troops on July 4, 1863, the Confederacy lost its last chance to control the Mississippi River.Ĭontrol of the Mississippi River during the American Civil War was an economic and psychological factor for both the North and the South.
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