Real importance and effect? Debate?

"The real battle for the Mississippi took place one year earlier, Gallagher said, when the U.S naval flotilla, led by David Farragut, secured the port of New Orleans. Gallagher said that the river was only of value if New Orleans remained open."

Of value to whom?

Gallagher apparently didn't read Morton's letter to Lincoln that I quoted in #23. New Orleans is of no use to the Union if you can't get there. You couldn't, until Grant took Vicksburg (this news compelled the 5,000-man garrison at Port Hudson to finally surrender that place to Banks' 30,000, so let's be careful about awarding credit).

Except that you're mischaracterizing the letter.

He was talking about what would happen if the Union lost the war and the Rebels retained control of the Mississippi.

http://books.google.com/books?id=SF... trade and commerce of the North-West&f=false
 
He doesn't. He's saying that if the Mississippi can't be opened (to New Orleans), his state and perhaps his neighbors, will secede. That's powerful political pressure, don't you think?
My attention is split, so I might be missing something you aren't, but he says "if the war is lost" in there. That seems to imply that if operations against Vicksburg are postponed, that in and of itself isn't going to trouble him - only if the resolution of the issue sees the river in nonUnion hands.
 
"And I give it here as my deliberate judgment, that should the misfortune of arms, or other causes, compel us to the abandonment of this War and the concession of the independence of the Rebel States, that Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois can only be prevented, if at all, from a new act of secession ... by a bloody and desolating Civil War."

The letter from Morton has no bearing on what Gallagher is talking about.
 
I think he makes several errors.

1. He focuses on the importance of New Orleans because “April of 1862 is when the Mississippi was really gone as a Confederate river.” But this places the importance on when it was a Confederate river; what made Vicksburg and Port Hudson important is because they kept it from being a Union river.

Is a Union victory dependent on it being a Union river? Isn't preventing it from being a confederate river more important than it being a Union river?

2. By focusing on the river navigation/port aspect, he dismisses the linkage between the Trans-Mississippi and the rest of the C0nfederacy

With the Union gunboats patrolling the vast majority of the Mississippi, how linked is the Trans-Mississippi with the rest of the confederacy?


3. He asks"did it make a substantive difference in how the Confederacy waged its war going forward" and answers 'no'. But I think the answer is Yes. For almost two years -- Columbus KY, to Island No 1o, to Vicksburg -- control of the Mississippi had been a major focus of the Confederacy. After July 1863, that changed.

It had been a major focus, but did they control the Mississippi?

4. He concludes that "the ultimate success of the Union was due to Lincoln’s foresight in naming Grant general in chief", which seems fair yet it is Vicksburg that makes this decision possible -- one of the most important effects of the capture of Vicksburg is the elevation of Grant.

Wasn't he elevated to army command prior to Vicksburg?

Gallagher doesn't say Vicksburg wasn't important. He says it was important. However, he says it wasn't decisive. It wasn't. As he points out, neither a Union victory nor ultimate emancipation was a sure thing even after Vicksburg.
 

Again, the quote function is new. Read the whole letter, Morton to Lincoln, October 27, 1862. That a "new secession would be probable" is a political threat, like it or not, from a Northern governor, if Lincoln couldn't protect the navigation of the Mississippi river.
 
This new quote system is not working for me. Oh, well. Elennsar, if you don't see the threat in Morton's letter than I guess you don't want to.
 
Again, the quote function is new. Read the whole letter, Morton to Lincoln, October 27, 1862. That a "new secession would be probable" is a political threat, like it or not, from a Northern governor, if Lincoln couldn't protect the navigation of the Mississippi river.

Read the letter yourself. He's saying only if the war ended with rebel independence.
 
This new quote system is not working for me. Oh, well. Elennsar, if you don't see the threat in Morton's letter than I guess you don't want to.
I see Morton threatening secession if the war ends with Union defeat.

I don't see him saying that "if the river is not taken ASAP, then regardless of the outcome of the war . . ." or words to that effect.
 
With the Union gunboats patrolling the vast majority of the Mississippi, how linked is the Trans-Mississippi with the rest of the confederacy?

Until the fall of Vicksburg, gunboat patrols were very limited between Vicksburg and Port Hudson.


Wasn't he elevated to army command prior to Vicksburg?
Again, Gallagher says "the ultimate success of the Union was due to Lincoln’s foresight in naming Grant general in chief" -- this is not about army command, this is about higher than army command. Prior to the success at Vicksburg, Grant was one of a number of army commanders, and his position was tenuous -- there was talk throughout the campaign of replacing or superseding him with someone else. But after the surrender of Vicksburg, he was the chosen one.
 
And Morton is looking to the issue of the conclusion of the war to determine that, or not?


Very true, IMO. Morton was an Ardent Unionist, who professed that he did not want to survive the success of Secession. His prediction was logical and probably true enough, as a prediction. But, to me, he was using it as a political argument, to the political leaders in Washington, as to how important that the Mississippi flowing unvexed to the Sea, really was, i.e., the message was to buttress the President and/or his administration, from any backsliding on the issue of taking Vicksburg; and that sooner, rather than later.
 
1. The delta area of Mississippi is one of the places in which slaves were concentrated. It was also the area in which Joseph Davis, brother of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, ran plantations. If the Confederacy could not protect slavery there, how could it protect slavery anywhere? The concentration of slaves on both sides of the river created the potential to test whether slaves would fight. Everything that happened in the war was political. Here in 1863 was a test of what effect the Emancipation Proclamation would have on the war. Lorenzo Thomas was tracking whether Grant could make the EP work.
2. The election process was continual throughout the war and the big election was going to happen in November 1864. Whether Governor Morton was referring to the end of the war does not matter. He was correctly reminding President Lincoln that control of the Mississippi was a critical political objective in Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, as well as Indiana and Ohio. Grant's success swung those states towards the Republican base.
3. The cost of war went down when the Mississippi became a United States river. Sherman was immediately able to return to Jackson, MS and finish his work there. Within a few months John Schofield was able to occupy a third Confederate state capital. The freedom of movement the fall of Vicksburg permitted was demonstrated in October and November of 1863 when Grant was assigned to Chattanooga and Sherman was directed to get there with reinforcements. Sherman did get there and Bragg successfully countered that move, though at a cost of allowing Lookout Mountain to fall to Hooker which gave visible proof to all who were present that the risk that the United States army would starve was over.
4. The news cycle to London took about 6 weeks for news to reach London and be confirmed. About 10 weeks after Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the British took decisive action to intercept the blockade breaking Laird rams, which would have required extensive US naval counter action.
 
Vicksburg was decisive. Chattanooga and Atlanta follow because the United States has a secure position on the Mississippi.
 
I believe Vicksburg/Port Hudson was very important. It was an important symbolic victory to open the Mississippi in addition to it's strategic value. Strategically, I wonder if the capture of the city was important as the capture of an entire army?
 
I believe Vicksburg/Port Hudson was very important. It was an important symbolic victory to open the Mississippi in addition to it's strategic value. Strategically, I wonder if the capture of the city was important as the capture of an entire army?
I would speculate that with some of the Vicksburg parolees in the Confederate army at Chattanooga, and with winter coming on, and the United States having lined an over powering force to break the siege, some of the Confederates were unwilling to do more than discharge their arms before taking personal responsibility for making sure they were not sent north during cold weather.
In addition the outcome of the Chattanooga battle was influenced by the fact that food was hard to come by in the Confederate army, because sugar, molasses and beef could no longer get across the Mississippi, while the United States army got fresh bread and beef.
 
http://dsl.richmond.edu/historicalatlas/142/c/
https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/1860_slave_distribution.pdf

Politically, Mississippi looked like an unimportant area.
But with respect to cotton and slavery, it was central.
And by 1863 Lincoln was hoping to strike a blow against slavery.

Don Stoker wrote a few comments about Vicksburg being inconsequential, also.

Vicksburg was not going to end the war, but the United States probably was not going to end the war without controlling the Mississippi.
So necessary, but not sufficient.

The winning experience may have been as important as the win itself, followed by Schofield's success in Arkansas.
Grant, Sherman, McPherson for the time remaining to him, Logan, Osterhaus, Ord, all people who were important in 1864.
Schofield got his chance when Halleck allowed in operation in Arkansas and turned out to have ability.
 
There are plenty of reasons Vicksburg was important: Western beef, salt, and sugar. The rich farmlands along the Mississippi River. Nitrates was a huge one, the richest guano mines were in Texas. By the end of the war, Confederate held portions of the Tennessee Smoky Mountains were consuming the man power of an entire brigade worth of men just to extract nitrates for gunpowder. It also vaulted Grant into prominence as the man who would eventually take command of the armies, resolving the longstanding issue of who could possibly determine a winning strategy for a micro-managing commander-in-chief who distrusted the whole concept of strategy.

But if you want to see the biggest impact of the Vicksburg Campaign, just pull up the slave census map of 1860. Free navigation of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and Memphis gave the federal army recruiting access to hundreds of thousands of new recruits. Increasingly after 1863, the federal army would lean on new garrison forces to hold territory, freeing up the majority of the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Cumberland to converge on Johnston and overwhelm him by sheer force of numbers.
census.jpg
 
Back
Top