The Vicksburg siege went on as June 1863 rolled by. Grant's lines ran for 15 miles and one Confederate complained that a cat could not get past them without being seen. Pemberton had sometime like 35,000 men in his army but disease and malnutrition afflicted them and many were physically unfit for duty. The army's supply of food and munitions were limited and there was no way to get any more. Unless by some miracle Joe Johnson could break through, Pemberton could do nothing but watch helplessly as the Union army pulled in closer and closer with each passing week. The defenders became demoralized; although Pemberton had plenty of artillery, he rarely used it. Union engineers reported afterward that although Grant's guns had disabled some of the Confederate artillery, it could have still caused some disruption to the Union lines if properly used. Instead, troops building new trenches found themselves only harrassed with small arms fire.
One evening Union troops who were bringing two approach trenches forward at an angle realized that the place where the two new trenches were supposed to join was inside the Rebel picket line. The opposing armies held an informal meeting that ended in the Confederate pickets being pulled back so the trench construction could go forward. Once a Northerner proposed that the approaches be redesigned so the Confederate guards wouldn't be disturbed and one replied "Oh that don't make any difference. You Yanks will soon have the place anyway." At one point rival officers met between the lines to discuss picket lines and on the whole it was increasingly clear that the Confederates were giving up.
Not that any of Grant's troops would have agreed that the siege was a Sunday picnic. Infantry firing usually stopped after dark as the two armies had an informal agreement not to fire at night unless ordered to, but Union artillery could and did fire at any time of day or night and the fuses were so inaccurate that shells were liable to explode over the heads of friendly troops. Some soldiers swore that these bombardments caused more casualties than the enemy did. The big siege guns were usually fired at sunrise each day and there was near-continuous rifle fire all day as long as it was light enough to see anything. It was hardly unusual for soldiers to fire up to 100 rounds a day. After dark the Confederates would taunt their foes by asking how they liked the Southern weather and pointing to a pile of rifles captured in the failed May 22 attack, while inquiring if the Yankees had any spare Enfield rifles they wanted to part with.
The heat and the constant labor of trench building were rough and men were filthy and caked in dirt and sweat, unable to wash or change clothes. One soldier wrote to his sister that it had been a week since a Rebel cannon was last fired, but in the last ten minutes about 50 rifle shots flew over his head. Many men were wounded simply because they got complacent and needlessly exposed themselves.
if this was McClellan he would believe Pemberton had 70,000 men and Johnson another 60,000 and he couldn't do anything unless he got another 20 divisions
McClellan overestimating the enemy's strength is entirely due to Pinkerton being a moronic homosexual. McClellan was aggressive if and when he downplayed Pinkertard's insane overestimates of Lee's strength. his performance in Maryland in 1862 is an example of this
iirc Pemberton's only line of retreat from Champion Hill was to Vicksburg itself. he was fricked the moment battle was joined there.
it didn't help that he was receiving differing orders from Davis & Johnston (as another anon mentioned). that's basically a death sentence as a general. you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. whose orders do you follow? the higher-ranking of the two, 1500 miles away, or your immediate superior who is far closer and has a better idea of what's going on? you may end up court martialed either way.
interestingly, Davis' interference probably doomed Pemberton's army, but Johnston sucked anyway. yet his obedience to Davis' orders, and his own friendship to him, is what saved him after the parole. his career as a general was over, but he served at Petersburg as a colonel of artillery; a position he wouldn't have had had he not been as close to Davis as he was
Grant himself was often out on the front lines and the soldiers complained about his habit of exposing himself to enemy fire. Once he climbed an observation tower that often came under fire and a Minnesota private yelled "You old sonofabitch, you'd better get down from there or you'll be shot!" He became ashen-faced when someone else told him who the man in the tower was. Another time Grant was riding a mule along an exposed section of the line and someone shouted from the trenches "See here, you damned old fool. If you don't get off that mule you'll get shot!" When reminded who he was speaking to, the soldier replied "I don't care who he is, what's he fooling around here for anyway? We're shot at enough without taking any chances with him."
One day a newspaper reporter was visiting the trenches when he saw two men walking towards a gun emplacement while Rebel bullets kicked up dust below their feet and he yelled to them "Stoop down, down, damn you, down!" The pedestrians walked in among the guns and the reporter realized that it was Grant and Brig. Gen Alvin Hovey. Grant stood on the parapet and surveyed the Rebel lines with a pair of field glasses, motioning for Hovey to get into cover. Hovey instead argued that Grant should be the one doing that. "I'm merely a general of a division, sir, and I'm easy to replace but with you it's different."
By now Grant was getting more and more reinforcements until he finally had almost 70,000 men under his command. Stephen Hurlbut at Memphis sent down some garrison troops, an entire division arrived from Missouri, and two divisions of the IX Corps arrived from Kentucky. Admiral Porter with his gunboats guarded the Mississippi and sealed off the western approaches. Frank Blair brought a division on an expedition up the Yazoo to clear out lurking Confederates and to loot supplies from the rich countryside, and Sherman took 30,000 men to hold the open country between the Yazoo and the Big Black, the territory through which Joe Johnson would have to march if he was to break the siege.
Grant rightfully felt almost invincible at this point. When a staff officer expressed his concern that Johnson would try to break the siege, he remarked "No, the only people trying to get into [Vicksburg] are us. The enemy inside the city is trying to get out and the enemy outside the city is trying to get away from it. If Johnson tries to cut his way in then we'll see to it that he doesn't get out again. You say he has 30,000 men with him? All that means is an additional 30,000 prisoners for us. Grant often sat down with enlisted men at their camps in the evening and assured them he had everything in the bag and it was only a matter of time. He remarked that Pemberton was a Northerner who'd gotten into a bad situation and that they could hold this position even if the Confederates attacked with 50,000 men.
Off to the rear, Sherman kept an eye on the Big Black crossings. At one crossing, where Rebel cavalry patrolled, Sherman detected a security leak. A plantation house on his side of the river was full of women; the wives and daughters of Confederate soldiers and they were in nonstop communication with the cavalrymen on the other side of the river. "So," said Sherman, "I moved them all by force, leaving a fine house filled with elegant furniture and costly paintings to the chances of war."
Sherman then expressed his concern that Grant might not approve of such hasty actions and he sent a note to John Rawlings, his chief of staff, to say that he felt confident that Grant would understand the necessity of the thing. He was right; Grant wrote back saying that he didn't feel any sympathy for the evicted women and that he thought it rather advisable to clear out from his lines every living being not directly connected to the army.
If you look at Ft. Donaldson, you see exactly what happens when the Confederates try to defend these outposts. Without supplies, people starve and run out of ammunition. N.B. Forrest was there, and urged the Confederate leadership to abandon the fort because it wasn’t defensible. Forrest left and fought another day. The rest surrendered.
Pemberton was fricked the moment he decided to retreat into the Vicksburg lines instead of escaping and letting his army survive to fight another day. He was also completely confused because Jefferson Davis wanted him to hold the city while Joe Johnson wanted him to abandon it and join up with his army. So he followed the former's advice and in doing so sealed his fate.
He was never entirely trusted by his officers and enlisted men as a Northerner; he owed his command mainly to his personal friendship with Jefferson Davis.
Pemberton was fricked as soon as Grant got his men ashore below Vicksburg, and his indecision and half measures just made it worse. Maybe an aggressive commander, a Jackson or Hood capable of rapid decisive movement, could have combined forces and crushed Grant far from his river bases but both Pemberton and Johnston were cautious slowpokes. If they evacuate Vicksburg, the rest of the Mississippi including Port Hudson is untenable so the Union achieves their strategic goal.
The CSA had similar indecision at Port Hudson. Gardner was ordered to evacuate but found himself trapped, though he put up a better fight than Pemberton, surrendering only after Vicksburg fell. Nathaniel Banks outranked Grant and had delusions of a quick mop-up at Port Hudson, marching north to take command, then riding his Hero of Vicksburg status into the White House.
Tbf it’s not that reasonable to shackle Pemberton with a lot of blame for the fall of Vicksburg. Yeah he fricked up badly but he had literally no business leading anything larger than a division. He was just put there and didn’t say no.
D.H. Hill was a very capable general who should have gotten this job instead of being relegated to an unimportant command in North Carolina for the whole first half of 1863 but he was a hothead nobody liked and Pemberton was also a Davis butt buddy.
what a silly painting to depict the South as looking like the woods of Minnesota
Fort Donelson was in February 1862 during a severe cold snap where troops on both sides suffered miserably in the cold.
I went to Vicksburg a couple of times as a kid and for a Civil War sperg it was like an all inclusive pass to Disneyworld. Most of the siege lines have been preserved and it’s still a sleepy small city, unlike many battlefields in the east covered by sprawl. There’s the salvaged ironclad USS Cairo on display and other battle sites from the campaign in easy driving distance.
the river shifted over time so it's no longer right next to the city but a bit more to the west nowadays. the city of Vicksburg also did not celebrate the 4th of July for many decades afterward as it was seen as a day of mourning there and only began celebrating it during WWII as a patriotic display.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Terror_(ship)
The Vicksburg campaign produced the greatest prank of the entire war, a fake ironclad that tricked the Rebs into scuttling a real Yankee ironclad they had csptured. ACW inland naval warfare was crazy cool, nothing like it before or since.
Grant also didn't like that Rosecrans spent months idling after Stones River since he thought the Army of the Cumberland could have been helpful during the Vicksburg campaign by exerting additional pressure on the enemy.
The Army of the Tennessee was low on the War Department's food chain for supplies and weaponry; they fought most of this campaign using shitty smoothbore muskets and castoff European weapons while many of Pemberton's men had Enfield rifles. This was while Rosecrans was whining that he couldn't resume active campaigning until his army got fully updated weapons. Grant also had very little cavalry, was unable to get any more, and just learned to work with what he had instead of whining like Rosecrans or McClellan that he needed this and that before he could do anything.
Grant made good use of what cavalry he had. Grierson’s raid from one end of Mississippi to the other was one of the most effective cavalry actions in the war and set in motion the campaign that led to Vicksburg’s surrender. It left him depleted of cavalry during the rest of the campaign, as Grierson’s force stayed in Louisiana, which makes his march through enemy territory even more impressive.
I would say the Vicksburg campaign was a testing ground for Sherman's rampage through the south
Sherman saw that you could just carry enough coffee and ammunition and cut loose from a base without wasting endless troops guarding a supply line. Hood’s attacks on the railroad north of Atlanta convinced him that he might as well just march to the sea. In 1862, Grant was methodically moving from Memphis to Vicksburg when Earl Van Dorn wrecked his supply base at Holly Springs, and that influenced his 1863 strategy of cutting loose and living off the land.
Grierson's raid became possible because most of Pemberton's cavalry got sent off to Tennessee to reinforce Bragg and he had hardly any troopers left.