Vicksburg National Military Park

Vicksburg was the key that unlocked the Confederacy. Perched on bluffs commanding a hairpin bend of the Mississippi, the 'Gibraltar of the Confederacy' controlled the river that was the South's lifeline. When Ulysses S. Grant took it after a grinding 47-day siege — on July 4, 1863, the day after Lee's defeat at Gettysburg — the Union split the Confederacy in two and gained the whole length of the Mississippi. Together with Gettysburg, it marked the great turning point of the Civil War.

Through the spring of 1863 Grant maneuvered his army across the Mississippi and drove inland, winning a string of battles that pinned Confederate Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton inside Vicksburg's formidable fortifications. On May 19 and again on May 22, Union troops hurled themselves at the works and were bloodily repulsed. Rather than bleed his army white, Grant settled in to starve the city out.

For 47 days Union guns and mortars pounded Vicksburg around the clock. Soldiers and civilians alike burrowed caves into the yellow bluffs to escape the shelling, and as food ran out the defenders ate mules, horses, and even rats. Sickness and hunger did what assaults could not. On July 4, 1863, Pemberton surrendered his army of roughly 29,000 men — one of the largest capitulations of the war.

With Vicksburg fallen and Port Hudson soon after, the Union controlled the entire Mississippi River. President Lincoln declared that 'the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.' The victory cemented Grant's reputation and helped carry him to overall Union command. In 1899 Congress established Vicksburg National Military Park, today marked by more than 1,300 monuments and the recovered ironclad gunboat USS Cairo.