We Of The South Remember: Vicksburg, Mississippi

​On July 4, 1863, the Confederate Army of Mississippi, commanded by Lieutenant-General John Pemberton, surrendered to the U.S. Army of the Tennessee, commanded by Major-General U.S. Grant, after a 47-day siege. It was the conclusion of a campaign that began in October of the previous year and included a failed landing by Major-General William T. Sherman at Chickasaw Bayou (“I reached Vicksburg at the time appointed, landed, assaulted, and failed"), an effort to divert the Mississippi River by digging a canal across DeSoto Point an expedition down the Yazoo River in which U.S. gunboats found themselves hopelessly entangled in foliage. Grant himself sailed up the Yazoo in June of 1863, but maybe doesn’t remember as he was on a drunk, as attested by journalist Sylvanus Cadawaller and other. Like Charles Dana, a journalist appointed assistant secretary of war who was bobbing around at the time: Grant, he said, was “as stupidly drunk as the immortal nature of man would allow.”

Vicksburg, 1860. Court House in center of picture

Some find inspiration at the bottom of a bottle; perhaps it was in such a moment of distilled enthusiasm that Grant Eureka’d and hit on the idea of chemical warfare: he ordered dead horses flung into the Vicksburg water supply. Nevertheless, Grant did “win,” America is about winning; America loves a winner because it’s the winningness nation ever. All the winning! The bookstore at the National Park Center celebrates U.S. Grant as an incandescent military genius. Well, he is, but not the way they think. Grant is the very figure of a modern American general: skilled at cultivating the right sorts of friends in politics and the media (Dana and Cadawaller, as above); a skilled practitioner of bureaucratic infighting (eg, his shivving of McClernand during the Vicksburg campaign and maligning of General Rosecrans, who may well have been the most talented U.S. commander). His over-lauded memoirs are an exercise in historical falsification. Military genius? Debatable, but I maintain that Napoleon Bonaparte would have taken Vicksburg in a week. Read up on his Italian campaign of 1796-1797, where at Lodi and Arcola he displayed the genius for the “indirect approach” that makes him the greatest military commander of all time. Big Serge sums it brilliantly here.


U.S., we’re told, came to mean “Unconditional Surrender,” because the Quiet Little Man from Galena, Illinois – with the aw shucks salt-of-the-earth plainspoken modesty of a true huwhite Midwesterner, unlike that mean racist white supremacist General Robert E. Lee. Okay, but in the case of Vicksburg, it isn’t true.


This is the “Surrender Oak,” where Pemberton and Grant met. Pemberton came dressed in full regalia; Grant in his usual slob-ware. The generals agree that Grant presented Pemberton with his trademarked demand for Unconditional Surrender which so thrilled Northerners after Fort Donelson. From there the accounts diverge.


Grant claims in his memoirs that a stiff and nervous Pemberton stood and said snappishly: “If this is all you have to offer, the conference might as well end.” Pemberton, for his part, recalls standing and stating: “I can assure you, sir, that you will bury many more of your men before you enter Vicksburg.”


Grant, as is known, was rather freewheeling with the truth in his memoirs, knocked together in a hurry and published with the help of Samuel Clemens; dying of cancer, dead broke and deep in debt, he sought to raise money to provide for his family. He tells a story that assures Americans they acted from the best of intentions, they meant well, it was all about muh fucking eternal Union. I’d recommend General Grant and the Verdict of History, by Frank Varney or Grant Under Fire: An Expose of Character and Leadership in the Civil War, by Joseph Rose.


Whatever the case (personally I think Grant, or whoever ghosted his memoirs, was lying through his teeth) Grant “reconsidered” his demand for Unconditional Surrender. He didn’t want to feed nearly 30,000 prisoners and muck about with prison camps, we’re told. Okay. But the Confederate Army of Mississippi was paroled in its entirety and allowed to march out of the city with full military honors.


U.S. Major General John Logan claimed it was all 5D chess by the wily Grant: “God damn them, we wanted to demoralize them the whole lot; let them get full of good bread, coffee ham, sugar &c, and when they again come down to pea meal coffee, mile beed and black bread, every one of them will desert and go home.”
But that’s not what happened, is it, General Logan? Because they weren’t mercenaries, like the flood of the New Americans ol Abe summoned to drown us. The soldiers of the Confederate armies were not fighting to earn “citizenship” in a monstrous Leviathan; they weren’t fighting for plunder or power or to repair the world by imposing on it a bullshit inhuman ideology tarted up with Enlightenment abstractions. They fought for the land they loved and they fought their people and its right to live as their fathers had and to be left alone.


They fought to be left alone by you, Major General Logan, and the wretched empire you represent. They fought against the United States, and their cause has been completely and utterly vindicated.


Most didn’t desert. Some sought out General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Even more marched in their regiments to the Army of Tennessee, where arrived in time for the hollow victory of Chickamauga and the long tragedy of the Western Confederacy from Atlanta to the bloodbath of Franklin and the final surrender in North Carolina. That’s what mine did. Of the five ancestors I identified who served at Vicksburg, one died and is buried in Soldiers’ Rest. The rest went to the Army of Tennessee. One was wounded at Adairsville on the Atlanta campaign. One died in the charge at Franklin.


Looks like they preferred death to your “good bread,” General Logan. They preferred death to being forced back into your union at the point of bayonet wielded by an immigrant.


There is a national cemetery, where the invading army and occupation forces buried their dead. It’s maintained at taxpayer expense, as well it should be. They “saved the Union,” after all.

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We laid ours to rest in the old Cedar Hill Cemetery, a section known as Soldiers Hill. They were buried by J.Q. Arnold, a local undertaker, as they fell. Arnold kept detailed records, which were lost after the war, but partially rediscovered in the 1960s. 1600 of the dead have been identified, but 3500 remain unknown. The United Daughters of Confederacy raised the money and placed the monument

As for the military park: over 1800 monuments, tablets, plaques and memorials in the Vicksburg military park. The Northern monuments, supported by taxpayer funds, came first. Ours took decades of bake sales and penny drives. Come for a visit and the U.S. Park Service will hand you a map illustrated with Grant and his is doughty Midwesterners and New Americans cheering the crushing of the traitors.



But Vicksburg is a Southern city. Vicksburg’s ghosts are Southern ghosts. A Southern Rivendell, one might say: a place that preserves and defends the memory of all that was fair.

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Those memories are ours, just as Vicksburg is ours. Grant and the Americans are gone. Their squalid empire, an enemy of peace and humanity, is in ruins.. The Americans are gone, but we remain, and the flag of the South flies over the Old Court House, from whose cupola the Confederate commanders observed the U.S. gunboats steaming down the Mississippi River. The gunboats are gone too, but the Southern banner and its memory of defiance, will fly forever.

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My people served in regiments from these states:

​May the memory of the Confederate soldier be eternal.

This piece was published at A Memoir of the Occupation on July 4, 2025.