VICK SBURG
NATIONAL MILITARY PARK
Story and photography by Judy Crowell
ISituated in mid-Mississippi, a day’s drive from St. Louis is Vicksburg National Military Park. 1,550 acres of rolling hills, magnificent trees and over 1,300 scattered monuments commemorating the Siege of Vicksburg, a critical
turning point for Union forces, ensuring control of the Mississippi River and
helping to achieve survival of the Union.
Over 17,000 Union soldiers are buried
here, some 13,000 unknown, making it
the largest number of Union interments
of any national cemetery in the U.S. One
of the world’s most accurately marked
battlefields, it is a park everyone should
experience.
For 47 hellish days, in one of the largest, bloodiest, most significant actions of
the Civil War, Union troops led by General Ulysses S. Grant bombarded Vicksburg, finally forcing
General John C. Pemberton to surrender the Confederate
troops on July 4, 1863. Grant’s own words perhaps provide
Missouri Memorial
the key to their unyielding victory, “In every battle there
comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten,
then he who continues the attack wins.” A relieved Presi-
dent Abraham Lincoln announced, “The
Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the
sea.” For 78 years afterwards, Vicksburg
refused to celebrate the 4th of July, until
1941 when the U.S. Congress declared
Independence Day a federal paid holiday.
Celebrating its history are life-like mu-
rals gracing the waterfront, in view of the
riverboat Casino. Murals depicting among
other events, the 1906 dedication of the Il-
linois Monument modeled after the Roman
Pantheon and Jefferson Davis at his home
in Brierfield, being informed that he had
been elected president of the Confederate
States of America.
One of the National Military Parks most interest-
ing sites is the USS Cairo, the Union’s ironclad gunboat
struck by an electronically detonated mine in the Yazoo
