Vicksburg, MS- Thursday, July 7, 2011

Even after having breakfast, we still arrived at the Vicksburg National Battlefield before the Visitor’s Center was open. We were trying to get as early of a start as possible in order to beat the heat. It was 77 degrees when we started. By the afternoon it would be 97. When they opened, the girls got their Junior Ranger books to complete, we watched the movie (a much more up-to-date production then the one at Shiloh), watched the electric map program, got our CD tour from the gift shop, and headed out to explore the park.

The movie claimed that the Vicksburg Campaign was the largest and most complex campaign of the Civil War. Lincoln called Vicksburg, “the key to the Confederacy,” because the city was the last stronghold of the Confederates on the Mississippi River. If Vicksburg could be taken, then the North would control all of the Mississippi River, and would effectively cut the Confederacy in two. Vicksburg was as much of a turning point for the Civil War as Gettysburg was.

The battlefield tour road is 16 miles long, and the CD runs for about an hour if you play it straight through. It took us more than three hours to complete because we stopped and got out a lot, and backtracked once or twice for some things that we missed. There are a large number of monuments on this battlefield, both state monuments and regimental monuments. We got pictures of many of the state monuments. The monuments ran the gamut, from the huge and epically impressive like the Pantheon-styled temple for Illinois, to the quirky and small like the odd metal sculpture for Kansas which we initially didn’t even recognize as a monument. There is a relatively new monument to African Americans from Mississippi who fought against slavery in the Union Army. Scott got his picture taken by the New York State monument as well as the equestrian statue of Grant, among others. Julie felt sorry for General Pemberton, who commanded the Confederate Army, so we got her picture by his monument.

Many of the earth works that the soldiers dug and threw up are still quite visible in the park. At one point, we were able to go through a tunnel that had initially been dug by the Union troops. Emma spotted a frog in the tunnel and Anna picked it up like she had picked up the skink at Shiloh.

One of the highlights of the tour for all of us was the remnants of the ironclad Union gunboat, U.S.S. Cairo (pronounced Kay-row). It had been sunk during the war by a primitive version of what we would later call a torpedo. The Cairo rested at the bottom of the Yazoo River until it was raised in the 1960s. The remnants of much of the iron plating, the boilers, the wheel, and the guns, are on display along the park tour route. It was quite an experience to be able to walk through the remnants of the boat itself. The girls and Dad listed it as one of the highs for the day. An adjacent museum shows a surprising number of artifacts that were recovered from the wreck.

Throughout the tour, Anna and Emma were looking for answers to the questions in their Junior Ranger books. They turned them in at the end of the tour and were sworn in as Junior Rangers for the Vicksburg National Battlefield Park, even though the rangers were out of badges and will have to mail them.

One of the last monuments we saw was an upturned cannon marking where Grant and Pemberton met to discuss surrender terms. That meeting took place at 3:00, July 3, 1863. It was hard to believe the inscription as we read it. That’s roughly the time that Pickett’s Charge was happening at Gettysburg (if you excuse a little leeway for differences in local times). Gettysburg and Vicksburg ended at nearly the same time, and it was a true turning point in the Civil War. Nearly two years of hard fighting remained, but the twin victories set the Union on the path to ultimately defeat the rebels.

We finished the battlefield tour in time for a late lunch. We had Southern cooking at Cracker Barrel. Emma liked playing the IQ game, but couldn’t get past “just plain dumb” with three pegs left. We went into downtown Vicksburg to see the Old Court House which is seen so prominently in wartime photographs. We drove down to the river and saw where the Mississippi had flooded this spring. We saw the building that they kept showing on the national news and saw the high water lines on it.

After a few more views of the Mississippi River, we continued south. We crossed into Louisiana, which is a first time for all four of us. We saw the landscape flatten right out and the swamps on both sides of the road, which was really an enormously long bridge. Little houses had boat docks and fishing piers off their front doors. We drove by/over Lake Pontchartrain while listening to the song about it and drove on to our hotel near the Louis Armstrong International Airport, just outside of New Orleans. We’ll be here for three nights so we can settle in for a while. It’s been a week since we left home, and we’ll have to do laundry tonight. Julie says she’d rather do it tonight then have to do it on her birthday tomorrow. The girls went swimming again. The pools have been getting progressively warmer and today’s is like bathwater.