Vicksburg

Last week I spent a night in Mobile AL.  The downtown is an interesting mix of old and new architecture.  Some of it looks like New Orleans, while a neo-Chrysler building rises in the background.

I moved on to Vicksburg, where I stayed in a fine B&B.  This is the interior of my room, officially Aunt Pittypat's Suite.

The suite was in the carriage house of the Cedar Grove mansion.  It was verrry pleasant to sit on the veranda with a drink and listen to the birds put on a symphony all day.  Weather was perfect...80 degrees and low humidity.  Elegant.

Here the Lizards are getting accustomed to the genteel Southern lifestyle.

Now I'm on the Vicksburg National Battlefield.  The Union victory in the siege of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863 cut the Confederacy in two, secured the entire Mississippi River for Union shipping, and was one of the turning points of the war along with the battle of Gettysburg, which occurred in the same week.  By the early 1900s a move to make the battlefield a memorial was underway and states began building memorials to their soldiers who had fought at Vicksburg. Illinois built the biggest structure and modeled it after the Pantheon in Rome, right down to the oculus in the ceiling.

This is the remnant of one of many trenches built in the hills outside Vicksburg during the siege.  The Union shelled Vicksburg from these heights.

General Grant, the victor at Vicksburg.  After a couple attempts to break the southern lines failed in May, Grant chose to fight a war of attrition and basically starved the city into surrender by July.

One of several Ohio memorials at the battlefield.  It's in the form of a minie ball, a strange choice, since this type of bullet was responsible for thousands and thousands of deaths on both sides during the Civil War.

The USS Cairo.  This union ironclad was launched in 1862.  Its job was to clear mines in the waters around Vicksburg.  It sank late in that year after...hitting a mine.  Whoops!  The boat rested in the mud for a century until it was raised in 1964.

The Missouri memorial.  There are thousands of plaques and memorials on the battlefield, most of them commemorating one division from a state that fought at the spot of the memorial.  Driving around, it becomes obvious that Missouri sent many men to fight on both sides.  Missouri was a border state where slavery was legal, but it didn't secede and join the Confederacy.  Missourians joined both the Union and Confederate forces in large numbers.  Brothers fought against each other.  A lot of men died.

Down by the Vicksburg waterfront there are a lot of cool murals.  This one commemorates a largely forgotten maritime tragedy.  At the end of the Civil War thousands of Union prisoners were released by the defeated Confederacy and were loaded onto the steamboat Sultana, which would then sail up the Mississippi River and transport the men toward home.  The boat was legally authorized to carry 376 passengers; 2400 crowded aboard.  A faulty boiler was only patched, not replaced...to save time and money.  On April 26, 1865 the boiler exploded, the ship sank, and over 1800 people died. By the way, the Mississippi River only touches the southern end of Vicksburg now.  In the 1860s it ran right by the port area, but the river changed course in 1876 and now only a canal of the Yazoo River runs by downtown Vicksburg.

Another mural depicts Theodore Roosevelt visiting Vicksburg as president in 1902.  The locals knew TR was an avid hunter, and they had a guy catch a bear and tie it to a tree so Roosevelt could shoot it.  TR refused, saying correctly that such a setup was not sporting, and the bear was spared.  The media picked up the story, and the bruin became the first, but not last, Teddy Bear.

Cedar Grove mansion, built in the 1840s.  I loved my stay here.

The mansion is on a bluff overlooking the river, and Union gunboats sailed by during the siege, shelling the city.  One of the cannonballs lodged in the wall of this parlor; it's visible to the right of the piano.