Vicksburg National Military Park

Vicksburg was the key Lincoln wanted in his pocket. 'See what a lot of land these fellows hold, of which Vicksburg is the key,' he told his generals — the Gibraltar of the Confederacy on the Mississippi bluffs, closing the river to the North and holding the South's halves together. Grant spent eighteen months maneuvering for it; when the May assaults failed, he settled into the siege — forty-seven days of trenches, mines, and starvation rations while the city ate mule meat and lived in caves dug into the bluffs.

The siege was the war's engineering marvel — thirteen Union approaches digging toward the Confederate works, the June 25 mine under the Third Louisiana Redan blowing a crater the infantry fought over for twenty-six hours with clubbed muskets. At Milliken's Bend, untested United States Colored Troops held the supply depot against the Confederate attempt to break the siege — the battle that proved what the Army had argued about Black soldiers.

It ended on July 4, 1863 — Pemberton surrendering under the stunted oak, the garrison paroled, the river open 'unvexed to the sea' as Lincoln put it. Paired with Gettysburg the same week, it was the turn of the war. The park preserves the whole anatomy — the Confederate lines and Union approaches facing each other across the ravines, the Cairo ironclad raised from the Yazoo, the national cemetery holding 17,000 Union dead.

Vicksburg is the archive's siege file — the 47-day encirclement that took the Gibraltar of the Confederacy on July 4, 1863, splitting the South and turning the war, on the best-preserved siege landscape in America.