Quotes About Vicksburg

In two days, Lincoln wrote two completely different letters to the commanders who had won victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The letters reflected his quite different views of the two generals. Meade had fought well in a defensive posture in a battle he had not sought, but had failed to follow up that victory.

Vicksburg is the nail head that holds the South's two halves together.

The Delta region of Mississippi is an expansive alluvial plain, shaped like the leaf of a pecan tree hanging lazily over the rest of the state. Stretching some 220 miles from Vicksburg to Memphis, it is bounded on the west by the Mississippi River, and extends eastward for an average of 65 miles, terminating in hill country, with its poorer soil and different ways of life, and the Yazoo River, which eventually joins the Mississippi at Vicksburg. For blues fans, this is the Delta...

The Mississippi was now in our possession from its source to its mouth, except in the immediate front of Vicksburg and of Port Hudson.

The enemy had been much demoralized by his defeats at Champion's Hill and the Big Black, and I believed he would not make much effort to hold Vicksburg.

I must have entered a time warp or I've fallen into the Twilight Zone. Which is it? Neither. You're at the harbor in San Felipe, and you're looking at your home for the next two weeks. Good lord, an honest-to-God steamboat with a walking beam engine and side paddlewheels. I must admit it does have an air of Mark Twain about it. What do you want to bet it ferried Grant's troops across the Mississippi to Vicksburg?

Behind the smokehouse that summer, Ringo and I had a living map. Although Vicksburg was just a handful of chips from the woodpile and the River a trench scraped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe, it (river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even in miniature that ponderable though massive recalcitrance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of the moment.