RICHMOND, Va. — A glass vial plugged with a cork during the Civil War has been opened, revealing a coded message to the desperate Confederate commander in Vicksburg on the day that the Mississippi city fell to Union forces 147 years ago.
The dispatch offered no hope to doomed Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton: Reinforcements are not on the way.
The encrypted, six-line message was dated July 4, 1863, the date of Pemberton’s surrender to Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, ending a siege of Vicksburg in what historians say was a turning point midway into the Civil War.
The message is from a Confederate commander on the west side of the Mississippi River across from Pemberton.
“He’s saying, ‘I can’t help you. I have no troops, I have no supplies, I have no way to get over there,’ ” Museum of the Confederacy collections manager Catherine Wright said of the author of the dispiriting message. “It was just another punctuation mark to just how desperate and dire everything was.”
The bottle, less than 2 inches in length, had sat undisturbed at the museum since 1896.
A retired CIA code breaker, David Gaddy, cracked the code in several weeks after the bottle was delicately opened.
