A Day with Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of Vicksburg, 1863
The Time Travel Series
The Time Travel Series - Daily Episode Guide: using AI to relive past events.
In the spring of 1863, Major General Ulysses S. Grant executed what many military historians consider the most brilliant campaign of the U.S. Civil War. After months of failed attempts to take the Confederate fortress city of Vicksburg — the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy” — perched on 200-foot bluffs commanding the Mississippi River — Grant devised a “crazy” plan that defied military doctrine.
He would march his army down the Louisiana side of the river, run gunboats and transports past Vicksburg’s 200-gun batteries under cover of darkness, cross the Mississippi below the city at Bruinsburg, and then swing east into the interior of Mississippi before turning back toward Vicksburg from its lightly defended landward side. All while cutting himself off from his supply base and living off the land.
Between April 30 and May 17, Grant’s Army of the Tennessee won 5 battles in 19 days (Port Gibson, Raymond, Jackson, Champion Hill, and Big Black River Bridge), marched over 180 miles on the worst roads in the Confederacy, defeated two separate Confederate armies, captured the Mississippi state capital, and drove a 30,000-man garrison back into Vicksburg’s landward approaches. A hasty assault on May 19 was repulsed with moderate losses. Grant then planned a deliberate, coordinated three-corps assault along the entire line for May 22, 1863 — the critical day that would determine whether Vicksburg would fall by storm or by siege, and that would cost more American blood than any other day between the rivers.
25 year-old Lieutenant Colonel James Harrison Wilson — a West Point-trained topographical engineer from Shawneetown, Illinois — served on Grant’s personal staff during the Vicksburg Campaign. On May 22, he would ride the length of the Union line under fire, witness the full scope of the bloodiest day of the siege, and play a pivotal personal role in exposing the fraudulent claims of a Major General that sent hundreds to their deaths.
May 22, 1863 — 4:15 A.M.
Grant’s Field Headquarters, Near the Shirley House, Vicksburg, Mississippi
Pre-dawn blackness split by the amber glow of campfires strung along three miles of Union siege lines. Wilson wakes on a damp bedroll laid over bare dirt beneath a canvas shelter half, forty yards behind the elegant white-columned Shirley House that serves as Grant’s headquarters. He has slept perhaps three hours. The air is thick, humid, eighty degrees even before dawn — heavy with the smell of open latrine sinks, wood smoke, and the sour unwashed reek of forty-five thousand men bivouacked in the Mississippi heat for four days. Mosquitoes drone ceaselessly. A staff orderly brings a tin cup of bitter chicory coffee — real coffee having run out two days earlier. In the half-light, Wilson reads yesterday’s dispatches by a tallow candle, his face drawn, running a hand through matted hair. Today every available man in three corps will storm the Confederate fortifications. Everyone knows it. The knowledge sits in the gut like a swallowed stone.
May 22, 1863 — 5:30 A.M.
The Shirley House Parlor — Grant’s Headquarters, Union Center
