Short stops: Vicksburg National Military Park

Illinois Memorial, Vicksburg National Military Park

Driving into Mississippi, the high ground on the Mississippi’s eastern bank is impossible to ignore. Even with its channel reduced from drought and barges navigating exposed sand bars, one must look up at Vicksburg. 

Entry arch

The crossing from Louisiana to Mississippi heralds the most important western Civil War battle site. West is relative, but during the Civil War, the Mississippi River cut through the Confederacy, and Confederate control of the river's southern reaches blunted trade for Union states that used the river to get their goods to international markets. 

The siege of Vicksburg ended in a Union victory, a move that both sides knew could turn the tide of the war. Other battles proved important, but Vickburg firmly shifted the fight back to the east as the Union split the Confederacy. 

Vicksburg lived under Union control through the end of the war, into the next decade when Reconstruction ended, and Jim Crow laws enacted many new restrictions on the newly free Black slaves in Mississippi. 

The siege at Vicksburg marked the Union’s efforts to divide the Confederacy in two, which took a siege and a significant battle to finally take Vicksburg and effectively control the Mississippi River. Just as Gettysburg marked the northernmost incursion of the Confederate Army, the 47-day siege of Vicksburg drastically reduced the scope of the war by blocking resources from the western Confederacy and giving the Union control of its two key rivers (the Mississippi and the Tennessee). 

Shirley House

A massive stone arch allows entry to the battlefield site. Despite the low elevation of Mississippi (highest natural point 800 feet and in the state’s northeast corner), the battle sites occupy a series of rolling, wooded hills not far from the town site and the Mississippi River. 

 Then the one-way road starts winding where Union and Confederate infantry traded musket fire more than 150 years ago. Even for a Civil War battlefield, Vicksburg feels heavy on monuments. The state battalions have multiple monuments commemorating troop movements and skirmishes within the battle. Then come the plaques and busts of individual soldiers who fought and died here. 

In 16 miles, the park road passes 1,400 monuments, making it feel like one never stops passing key battle points. The monuments across Gettysburg, Shiloh or Chickamauga seemed sparse by comparison. Every Civil War sight seems littered with them, but one monument always wins out as the monument visitors recall, like Chickamauga’s Wilder Brigade Monument, which resembles a giant rook from a chessboard. 

So many monuments. 

The Illinois Memorial sits on a hilltop adjacent to the Shirley House, the only antebellum structure on the battlefield still standing. The domed Illinois monument is the signature monument of Vicksburg, the domed structure built by the victors. 

With more than 36,000 soldiers, Illinois troops represented more than 20 percent of Grant’s Army, hence the monument which emulates the shape of the Pantheon in Rome. Along with a bronze bald eagle atop the dome, 47 steps lead to the memorial entrance one step for each day of the siege. It isn’t a structure one soon forgets, even on a battlefield where the next monument is never out of view.

Vicksburg requires much more time for a full experience. The site includes the Vicksburg Courthouse and the U.S.S. Cairo, a Union ironclad vessel sunk by a Confederate mine. All hands escaped, but the Cairo sat in the river mud for a century before it was raised, restored and joined the military park in Vicksburg. 

The park also includes the remnants of Grant’s Canal, a failed attempt by Union soldiers and freed slaves to build a Mississippi bypass that would get Union ships around Vicksburg.

I grew weary of monuments pretty quickly. Every officer who fell on the battlefield seemed to earn a plaque or bust, and I couldn't keep up. With the stops at the Illinois Memorial and the Shirley House checked off, I returned to the highway. The Cairo would have made a nice visit, but there's too much history jammed into Vicksburg for a short stop. 

That said, the compact hills around Vicksburg remain an essential Civil War stop, a place where all the Union monuments belie a town where the Confederacy remains more alive than almost anywhere else.