50 Fun Facts About Siege of Vicksburg

Old Douglas, the 43rd Mississippi Infantry's mascot killed by Union sharpshooters at Vicksburg, was what kind of animal?

A camel carried the regimental band's instruments, and his comrades were so angry at his death that an officer sent six of his best snipers after the man who shot him.

Which soft drink was bottled for the very first time by Vicksburg candy merchant Joseph Biedenharn in the 1890s?

Coca-Cola was sold only at soda fountains until then. By coincidence its inventor, John S. Pemberton, shared a surname with the general who surrendered Vicksburg.

With newsprint gone during the siege, Vicksburg's Daily Citizen newspaper was printed on what household material?

Wallpaper editions were still set in type when the city fell, so Union soldiers added a note about the end of the siege and ran off an edition of their own.

Vicksburg's Confederate garrison surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant on which holiday, hoping the date would soften terms?

Independence Day gave rise to a folk tradition that Vicksburg then refused to celebrate the holiday until World War II, though large celebrations were in fact held there by 1907.

Because residents dug hundreds of caves to escape shelling, Union soldiers gave besieged Vicksburg which nickname?

Prairie Dog Village had more than 500 caves, many fitted out with rugs, furniture and pictures, and fewer than a dozen townspeople are known to have been killed.

The Union navy's fake ironclad, sent downriver in the Vicksburg campaign, used what small building as its pilothouse?

An outhouse sat on a barge with log cannons and barrel smokestacks. The dummy cost under $9 and scared Confederate salvagers into blowing up a captured gunboat.

Vicksburg fell a day after Robert E. Lee lost which battle, a pair often called the war's turning point?

Gettysburg was George Meade's victory in the East, and Grant's success on the river a day later meant the North celebrated two great wins almost at once.

Old Abe, the 8th Wisconsin Infantry mascot whose statue tops the Wisconsin memorial at Vicksburg, was what animal?

A bald eagle bought for $2.50, Old Abe rode into battle on a special perch and later inspired the screaming eagle insignia of the Army's 101st Airborne Division.

Which American writer later interviewed a Vicksburg citizen about sheltering in caves during the siege?

Mark Twain, a former Mississippi riverboat pilot, was told that twenty or more people sometimes packed into a single cave, with air so foul that a candle would not stay lit.

Abraham Lincoln said the war could never end until Vicksburg, which he called by what name, was in his pocket?

The key was Lincoln's word because guns on the bluffs closed the river to Union shipping while horses, cattle and reinforcements kept crossing to the Confederacy from the west.

Who called Vicksburg the nail head that held the South's two halves together?

Jefferson Davis later blamed the loss on a want of provisions inside the city and a general outside it who wouldn't fight.

Vicksburg's bluff-top defenses earned the city a nickname as which famous fortress "of the Confederacy"?

Gibraltar suited a town ringed by more than six miles of forts, trenches and redoubts on steep slopes that any attacker had to climb under fire.

Before turning west toward Vicksburg, Ulysses S. Grant's army captured which Mississippi city in May 1863?

Jackson, the state capital, fell on May 14, forcing Pemberton to withdraw westward, and William T. Sherman had to capture the city a second time that July once the siege was over.

Rather than ship 30,000 Confederates to prison camps, what did Ulysses S. Grant do with Vicksburg's garrison?

Paroled them, expecting the starving men to carry the stigma of defeat home to the rest of the Confederacy. Instead many were exchanged and fighting again within months.

Ulysses S. Grant first demanded unconditional surrender at Vicksburg, as he had the year before at which stronghold?

Fort Donelson's blunt terms had earned him the nickname Unconditional Surrender Grant, but at Vicksburg the demand was rebuffed and he had to offer something gentler.

Which Union ironclad, sunk by a mine north of Vicksburg in 1862, is now displayed at Vicksburg National Military Park?

USS Cairo sank in 12 minutes after volunteers hidden behind the riverbank set off the mine, and the gunboat stayed on the bottom until it was raised in 1964.

Benjamin Grierson, whose long cavalry raid through Mississippi distracted Vicksburg's defenders, had what peacetime job?

Music teacher Grierson was kicked and nearly killed by a horse at the age of eight and feared the animals, yet he volunteered for the cavalry and rose to major general.

The Union strategy that Vicksburg's fall helped complete, a blockade plus river control, was nicknamed for which snake?

Anaconda began as a jibe: generals who wanted a faster war mocked Winfield Scott's patient blockade as the coils of a snake slowly suffocating its victim.

Which Louisiana river stronghold surrendered five days after Vicksburg, giving the Union the whole Mississippi?

Port Hudson gave up only after its commander learned that Vicksburg had fallen. Its 48-day siege was the longest in American military history up to that point.

Confederate general John C. Pemberton, who defended Vicksburg against Ulysses S. Grant, was born in which Northern city?

Philadelphia was home to a family that pleaded with him to stay loyal. He sided with the South under the influence of his Virginia-born wife, while two younger brothers fought for the Union.

Which state's Vicksburg memorial pairs statues of the Civil War's two rival presidents, both of them born there?

Kentucky sent sons to both armies, so its memorial, dedicated in 2001, stands on an avenue that runs between the old Union and Confederate lines.

Vicksburg's Illinois Memorial, with one step for each day of the siege, was modeled on which ancient building?

The Pantheon in Rome inspired the design, and 60 bronze tablets inside name all 36,325 Illinois soldiers who took part in the campaign.

Orion Howe, 14, earned the Medal of Honor at Vicksburg while serving the 55th Illinois Infantry in which role?

Drummer boy Howe, already badly wounded, stayed on the field under heavy fire until he had told General Sherman that his regiment needed cartridges.

Which Western star led the cast of The Horse Soldiers, a film inspired by Grierson's Raid in the Vicksburg campaign?

John Wayne played a cavalry commander, a railroad engineer by trade, who is sent behind the lines to wreck the Confederate supply depot for Vicksburg at Newton Station.

At Milliken's Bend during the Vicksburg siege, which newly recruited Union soldiers fought off a brigade of Texans?

African Americans in a newly raised brigade held on through close-quarters fighting until a Union gunboat halted the attack, one of the first actions in which Black soldiers fought.

Which relative of Ulysses S. Grant rode with the army toward Vicksburg and was shot in the leg by a sharpshooter?

His son Fred, then 12, kept putting himself in harm's way and was hit while following retreating Confederates after the fight at Big Black River Bridge.

Which Confederate general, expected to march to Vicksburg's rescue with a second army, never broke the siege?

Joseph E. Johnston had urged Pemberton to abandon the city and save his troops. He finally reached the Big Black River on July 1, then fell back once the garrison gave up.

Which Union admiral slipped gunboats and transports past Vicksburg's guns on a moonless April night in 1863?

David D. Porter sent seven gunboats and three transports downriver with noise and lights kept to a minimum, giving Grant the boats to ferry his army across below the city.

Union troops spent months digging what across the peninsula facing Vicksburg, hoping ships could avoid the city's guns?

A canal was meant to shift the river itself. Neither Grant nor Sherman had any faith in it, but the scheme was a favorite of Lincoln's and it kept idle soldiers busy.

After the Mississippi shifted away from Vicksburg in 1876, engineers diverted which waterway to restore the waterfront?

The Yazoo has run past the city since 1903, ending a spell of more than two decades in which the old steamboat town had no working harbor.

Souvenir hunters carried off every piece of which landmark where Grant and Pemberton met over Vicksburg's surrender?

An old oak shaded the meeting, and Grant joked in his memoirs that it had since supplied as many cords of wood, in the shape of trophies, as the True Cross.

Before the May 22 assault at Vicksburg, Union soldiers chanted the name of which ration as Ulysses S. Grant rode past?

Hardtack was duly served that night with beans and coffee, after one soldier's remark as the general passed turned into a chant taken up all along the line.

Vicksburg takes its name from Newitt Vick, who founded a Protestant mission in the area and held which calling?

Methodist minister Vick's village was incorporated under his name in 1825, on river bluffs where two European powers had already built forts.

Before it was Vicksburg, Spain's Fort Nogales and the American settlement that followed were both named for which trees?

Walnuts gave the Spanish outpost of 1790 its name, nogales, and the new owners who took possession in 1798 kept the idea in English for their own settlement.

Which Vicksburg-born bluesman wrote Hoochie Coochie Man and Little Red Rooster for the stars of Chess Records?

Willie Dixon stood 6 feet 3 and won the Illinois Golden Gloves novice heavyweight title in 1937 before the bass and songwriting took over his life.

Which steamboat left Vicksburg in April 1865 crammed with freed Union prisoners and exploded near Memphis days later?

Sultana was built for 376 passengers but carried more than 2,000 when her boilers burst, in what remains the deadliest maritime disaster in American history.

Which battle of May 16, 1863, fought on the road to Vicksburg, is regarded as the pivotal clash of Grant's campaign?

Champion Hill cost the Confederates General Lloyd Tilghman, killed by a shell, and sent Pemberton's beaten army back toward the trenches where it would be trapped.

Why did Ulysses S. Grant sack corps commander John McClernand midway through the siege of Vicksburg?

Publishing a boastful order that praised his own corps and ran down the others broke a rule against printing official papers, the slip Grant had spent months waiting for.

What grim name was given to the 150 volunteers who led the May 22 assault on Vicksburg with ladders and planks?

The forlorn hope is an old soldiers' term borrowed from Dutch for the first men into a breach, volunteers lured by the promise of reward or promotion if they survived.

Union miners blew a crater under a Vicksburg fort over a year before a far more famous one at which Virginia siege?

Petersburg has the famous Crater, but at Vicksburg 2,200 pounds of gunpowder went off under the 3rd Louisiana Redan and the attackers who charged in were pinned down in the pit.

Which New Deal agency planted the trees that now cover Vicksburg's battlefield, almost bare of them during the siege?

Civilian Conservation Corps crews planted them in the 1930s to stop erosion. In 1863 the ridgetops had been cleared for farming, roads and the building of the defenses.

Ulysses S. Grant's army that besieged Vicksburg and forced its surrender took its name from which river?

The Tennessee gave its name to the army that brought five corps to the siege, some 77,000 men once the last reinforcements had arrived.

Which European power's colonists built a fort in 1719 that was the first European settlement in the Vicksburg area?

France's colonists built Fort Saint Pierre, traded furs and started plantations on the bluffs, seven decades before Spain raised a fort of its own nearby.

Which Native American people, namesakes of another Mississippi river city, long occupied the site of Vicksburg?

The Natchez spoke a language isolate unrelated to the Muskogean languages of the other major tribes around them, and held this stretch of the river as part of their territory.

Vicksburg-born Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of a murdered civil rights leader, later chaired which organization?

The NAACP chose her as chairwoman decades after she was born in her grandmother's house in Vicksburg, and she also wrote several books about her husband's legacy.

On Christmas Eve 1862, a mud-covered telegraph operator burst into Vicksburg's Balfour House to halt what event?

A grand ball for Confederate officers ended on the spot when the general present heard that the enemy was coming down the river, two days before the opening battle of the Vicksburg campaign.

After losing Vicksburg, John C. Pemberton resigned as a general and accepted which lower rank for the rest of the war?

Lieutenant colonel of artillery was the commission the Confederate president offered three days after the resignation, and the fallen commander took it.

Vicksburg defender John S. Bowen had known Ulysses S. Grant before the war, when Grant delivered what near his home?

Firewood made them acquaintances, and during the siege it was Bowen, already ill with dysentery, who helped ease the talks that ended in surrender.

William Le Baron Jenney, a Union engineer who designed Vicksburg's Illinois Memorial, is best known for pioneering what?

The skyscraper traces back to his ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, and a bronze relief on the battlefield's Graveyard Road honors his wartime service.

Which Confederate ironclad steamed straight through a Union fleet to reach the guns of Vicksburg in July 1862?

CSS Arkansas lasted only weeks longer: her engines broke down, her own crew set her on fire, and her remains now lie under a levee above Baton Rouge.