January 7, 2005 - Vicksburg National Battlefield, Mississippi

Our goal for the day was to visit the Civil War battlefield in Vicksburg, Mississippi, about 50 miles west of Jackson on Interstate 20. The sky was covered with dark gray clouds from horizon to horizon, and occasionally one of the clouds would spit some rain, so the weather was definitely a bit on the dreary side. Still it was as they say a "warm rain" and certainly much preferable to icy roads in the Midwest or 6 inches of snow where Judson and Sarah lived in New York. And I optimistically hoped that while we drove over in our nice warm truck the clouds would miraculously clear off (which of course they didn't).

The battlefield turned out to be a fairly large National Park, but Monika's pass gained us free entry. The Visitor Center had a short but informative movie about Grant's campaign against Jackson and Vicksburg plus a small museum that featured 5 or 6 exhibits about life in the trenches and the town of Vicksburg during the siege. Lloyd bought a narration tape for the automobile tour and we spent about 3 hours doing that. Let me hasten to add that the tape was just the basic 1 hour narration, although a longer version was available. It took us 3 hours because we persisted in stopping at many of the historical sites and wandering over the remains of the fortifications.

General Grant, after trying and failing in a frontal assault against the fortifications surrounding Vicksburg, settled in for a siege and steady bombardment that lasted 6 weeks. Grant's army dug a complete ring of trenches around the fortified Confederate defenses and then ran branch trenches almost up to the Confederate lines. They even dug tunnels underneath the outer parapets and blew up big mines to collapse the walls, but these assaults were driven back by the rebel defenders at great cost.

However, the situation inside Vicksburg at the end of the siege was dire. Although the town population had dug underground bomb shelters for protection that worked quite well, their food was running out and water getting scarce. When General Pemberton's division commanders told him that the troops were sufficiently weak that a Union assault could take the city, he negotiated a surrender with Grant that guaranteed the parole of the soldiers. That was a more important concession than it sounds to us modern folks because the prisoner of war camps on both sides of the Civil War were uniformly awful places designed to break the body and spirit of prisoners so that they could never again be effective soldiers even if released. So Grant took the city and ultimately went on to defeat Lee and take Richmond to end the war.

But along our trail we stumbled upon the Cairo, a resurrected Union ironclad gunboat that together with its sister ships had cleared the Mississippi of Confederate ships, thus allowing Grant to cross the river into Mississippi unmolested and start his campaign. These gunboats also ensured that the city could not be re-supplied by water and cut off any possible avenues of escape in that direction.

The gunboat was essentially an ironclad river steamboat strengthened to accommodate 3 guns in front and gun batteries on each side. The steam engine powered a stern paddle wheel, but in this case it was kind of encased by a superstructure all around it, which I supposed helped protect it from damage. Nevertheless, the top part of the ship except for the pilot house was not armored and the vessels were quite vulnerable to a vertical plunging fire in the middle of the superstructure.

The particular gunboat we saw was the remains of the Cairo. It had been sunk on the Yazoo River during the Vicksburg campaign by a Confederate mine and buried in the mud for 100 years. Found by some Civil War buffs using a compass in 1962, excavations revealed a wealth of artifacts from the wreck that had been carefully preserved. Many of the artifacts were on display at the adjacent museum, and we spent almost an hour looking at things there. I discussed some of the steam boiler operation with Lloyd, the design of which reminded me very much of a steam locomotive boiler of that period. Lloyd works with steam heating systems and was interested in exactly how the system worked, so we went through rather slowly.

The rest of the automobile tour went by more quickly, not because we weren't motivated to walk around and see the sites but rather because the rain started coming down in buckets. That plus the occasional thunder and lightning persuaded us to stay in the truck and just listen to the narration as we drove around the last part of the loop road. Still, it was after 3 o'clock when we finished and drove out of the park to look for a very late lunch. Fortunately we chanced on a Ryan's Buffet and the food was so good and so plentiful that none of us even thought about having dinner later.

Unfortunately the rain continued to pour down as we drove back to Jackson, occasionally being heavy enough to slow traffic on the interstate. The huge pools of standing water tended to cause hydroplaning, so I kept the speed of the truck down like everyone else and we all went along quite well if sedately. Our final stop of the evening was a Wal Mart were Lloyd and Sandy found some more things for their RV, essentially going through the same kind of equipping process that we had done in the first weeks with our trailer. We also had forgotten to bring small bathroom towels and a washcloth, so we picked those up and then we chucked the stuff in the back of the pickup and drove back to camp for the night. Monika updated our financial expenditures on Daddy and I updated the journal on Baby for a while and then we turned in for the night.