For some Civil War buffs, anything that happened west of the Appalachians might as well have been a dispute between Belgium and Bulgaria. The same was true of some Civil War generals, to whom nothing could be more important than what was immediately in front of them: the bloody struggle between the capitals of the Union and the Confederacy.
But broader thinkers, including Abraham Lincoln, could see the whole map. They understood that the Mississippi Valley, not Richmond, was the most vital strategic objective of the war and that the key to controlling it was the city of Vicksburg, Miss., atop steep bluffs at a sharp turn where the Yazoo River flows into the Mississippi.
In his latest sortie into Civil War history, Winston Groom has brilliantly described the whole Mississippi Valley campaign, from late 1861 through the fall of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, the day after the great Northern victory at Gettysburg, Pa.
To tell such a long and looping story, Groom concentrates more on the decisions and rivalries among flag officers than on what individual soldiers and sailors set down in their letters and diaries.
A long roll of great characters is present — Farragut and Porter, Sherman and McPherson, Beauregard and Forrest, Johnston and Pemberton. But the central personal narrative is that of Ulysses S. Grant, who is occasionally drunk but whose determination and eagerness to fight eventually bring him to command all Union armies and win the war in the East.
What sets this campaign and this book apart from other chapters of the Civil War is the variety of strategy and tactics tried by the Union and parried by the Confederates until the final days.
There are few set-piece land battles; instead we have Federal ironclads pounding Confederate forts to take New Orleans, gunboats pushing into shallow creeks until they are trapped by vines and weeds, cavalry raids rampaging through three states, thousands of slaves and soldiers digging a canal in a vain effort to divert the Mississippi, and eventually Confederate troops and citizens eating their bony mules to survive in the days before the city surrenders.
Groom’s book is full of authentically rendered excitement. Until now, his best-known work has been the novel that became the blockbuster movie “Forrest Gump.” But with “Vicksburg 1863” he has fully arrived as a narrative historian, who proves again that facts skillfully woven can be more moving than the products of the busiest imagination.
Rarely has the story of such a lengthy and complicated campaign been told with such clarity and grace.
Nonfiction
Vicksburg, 1863 by Winston Groom, $30
