"In May 1863, after months of hard and bitter combat, Union troops under the command of Major General Ulysses S. Grant at long last successfully cross the Mississippi River. They force the remnants of Confederate Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton's army to retreat to Vicksburg, burning the bridges over the Big Black River in its path. But after sustaining heavy casualties in two failed assaults against the rebels, Union soldiers are losing confidence...

It's a poignant irony in American history that on Independence Day, 1863, not one but two pivotal Civil War battles ended in Union victory, marked the high tide of Confederate military fortune, and ultimately doomed the South's effort at secession. But on July 4, 1863, after six months of siege, Ulysses Grant's Union army finally took Vicksburg and the Confederate west.

On the very same day, Robert E. Lee was in Pennsylvania, parrying the

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"The astonishing story of the longest and most decisive military campaign of the Civil War in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which opened the Mississippi River, split the Confederacy, freed tens of thousands of slaves, and made Ulysses S. Grant the most important general of the war. Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the last stronghold of the Confederacy on the Mississippi River. It prevented the Union from using the river for shipping between the Union-controlled...

"Here Earl J. Hess offers an in-depth military history of a critical phase of the long federal campaign to capture Vicksburg, Mississippi during the Civil War. Hess focuses on the period from May 18-23, 1863, comprising the end of Ulysses S. Grant's overland march to the rear of the city and the beginning of his siege. These five days were a watershed in the development of Grant's eight months-long campaign to capture the Gibraltar of the Confederacy....