Grand Design by Stoker Donald;

Author:Stoker, Donald;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2010-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

IN THE WAKE OF GRANT’S VICTORY, Lincoln wrote the general a congratulatory note. Its last line included a phrase that Davis never could have penned and which demonstrated one of the advantages Union leadership possessed. After outlining where his and Grant’s thinking differed and why he had worried that the general was making a mistake by not going directly at Vicksburg rather than through the area around it, Lincoln wrote, “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.”76

But just how important was the Union victory at Vicksburg? The effects were certainly dramatic: Pemberton’s army gone, tracts of Mississippi devastated, Confederate morale damaged, Union morale buoyed. The subsequent opening of the Mississippi gave the Union the base Sherman wanted, one it soon used. Grant certainly thought the fall of the so-called Confederate Gibraltar significant, writing, “The fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell.”77 But this was not the case. Fighting to clear the Mississippi and take Vicksburg, which seemed to make so much sense at the time and to most observers afterward, was not the critical theater. The South did not collapse, despite the twin blows of Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Southern power was reduced and its strategic position injured, but the will remained unbroken and the power to resist still formidable. Indeed, the Union would come very close to losing the war in 1864. In the end, Grant had conducted a brilliant campaign against a secondary objective. He did remove Pemberton’s army from the game (though many of these men would be back), which was of great benefit to the Union cause, but Tennessee was where he should have been fighting. His superiors would figure this out shortly. From then on, it would be Grant’s war.

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