Confederate Gibraltar: The Vicksburg Campaign from the Fall of New Orleans through the Battles in the Bayou (Emerging Civil War)

Disasters threatened Vicksburg on both ends of the Mississippi River early in the war.South of the mighty bastion, New Orleans-one of the Confederacy’s most important cities-fell in April 1862.Memphis to the north fell two months later. Vicksburg, Mississippi, stood defiantly between the captured cities atop 300-foot bluffs that dominated the wide mighty river.So long as “the Hill City” remained in Rebel hands, the Confederacy controlled river traffic and maintained a vital connection between the Trans-Mississippi states and those east of the river.Vicksburg was the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy.”Federal Maj.Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had learned how to use rivers as “water highways” to drive deep into the heartland of the Confederacy.His skillful utilization of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers helped capture Forts Henry and Donelson and Nashville and opened the state of Tennessee and northern Mississippi to United States forces.His next goal was on the Mississippi River, “the Father of