Why was Vicksburg so important?

wausaubob

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1. When Vicksburg and Port Hudson were under United States control, the Confederacy no longer was geographically contiguous. The risk of foreign intervention disappeared. Lincoln could cut off the purchases of cotton from Confederate territory. Britain was not going to intervene no matter what happened to the cotton mills. Some cotton could be shipped from areas under United States control.
2. Of the approximately 15,000,000 beef cattle in the United States in 1860, about 2.7 million were in Texas.
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1860/agriculture/1860b-09.pdf
Without Texas, without Tennessee, without trade with the Midwest, the prospect of starvation loomed over the entire Confederacy.
 
just curious as a sidenote, were there ever blockade runners running within the Confederacy? Like shuttling back and forth between Mobile and a Texas port to specifically run cattle, beef or jerky?
 
Coastal shipping was very important back then, and cutting it off was a significant impact of the blockade. This thread has some good discussion and statistics:

https://civilwartalk.com/threads/the-blockade-waste-or-war-winner.74051/page-4#post-690306

Don't know specifically about a "beef run", but it would probably be difficult to move a useful amount of beef that way. if they were going to try it, it might make sense to salt or jerk the beef in Texas rather than loading live cattle onto ships.

One thing I had not realized until some of the discussions here is how many blockade runners were sailing craft.
 
just curious as a sidenote, were there ever blockade runners running within the Confederacy? Like shuttling back and forth between Mobile and a Texas port to specifically run cattle, beef or jerky?
Some Texas cattle still crossed the Mississippi after Vicksburg changed hands, and some of them were captured in Mississippi and Tennessee.
 
Coastal shipping was very important back then, and cutting it off was a significant impact of the blockade. This thread has some good discussion and statistics:

https://civilwartalk.com/threads/the-blockade-waste-or-war-winner.74051/page-4#post-690306

Don't know specifically about a "beef run", but it would probably be difficult to move a useful amount of beef that way. if they were going to try it, it might make sense to salt or jerk the beef in Texas rather than loading live cattle onto ships.

One thing I had not realized until some of the discussions here is how many blockade runners were sailing craft.
Yeah I forgot there were small sailing schooners that could run basically inside the blockade on the coastal waterways being very low draft, but they were also severely limited as far as capacity, I wondered if there were any bigger runners devoted to a food run or something similar.
 
The quality of pork being run in from Nassau through Wilmington became notorious in the Army of Virginia.
 
Not to mention all the Confederate troops that got bottled up in Vicksburg,starved into submission,then captured in a critical year of the war when the Confederacy could use every man in the field that it could get. After they were paroled and exchanged and showed up in the Confederate ranks during the Chattanooga Campaign,that was the last straw for the parole/exchange system for Grant. The first prisoners at Rock Island were captured at Lookout Mountain. Some of them had been captured and paroled at Vicksburg and later exchanged.
 
Not to mention all the Confederate troops that got bottled up in Vicksburg,starved into submission,then captured in a critical year of the war when the Confederacy could use every man in the field that it could get. After they were paroled and exchanged and showed up in the Confederate ranks during the Chattanooga Campaign,that was the last straw for the parole/exchange system for Grant. The first prisoners at Rock Island were captured at Lookout Mountain. Some of them had been captured and paroled at Vicksburg and later exchanged.
I suspect, but cannot prove, that after Vicksburg, a lot of western Confederates either wanted to get out of the war or have Grant hurry up and get it over with.
 
Not to mention all the Confederate troops that got bottled up in Vicksburg,starved into submission,then captured in a critical year of the war when the Confederacy could use every man in the field that it could get. After they were paroled and exchanged and showed up in the Confederate ranks during the Chattanooga Campaign,that was the last straw for the parole/exchange system for Grant. The first prisoners at Rock Island were captured at Lookout Mountain. Some of them had been captured and paroled at Vicksburg and later exchanged.

If prisoners were exchanged, it was legitimate for them to go back into combat, was it not? The issue was troops who had been paroled but not yet exchanged showing up in the field.
 
I've expressed my opinion several times that the investment and capture of Vicksburg was the single most significant battle of the war.
 
In addition to the excellent reasons stated already, the fall of Vicksburg and the Vicksburg campaign represented Grant's most brilliant and successful strategic development of the CW. The campaign was a text book operation that among other things, combined amphibious operations, flanking maneuvers, and cutting loose from lines of communication.
 
If prisoners were exchanged, it was legitimate for them to go back into combat, was it not?
Of course it was but the Union had a bottomless well of replacement troops. The Confederacy couldn't easily replace troops.
 
I found a wonderful thread that touched on the reason Vicksburg was so important in the only 'one on one moderated formal debate' I have found on cwt. The debate question was "a Union victory at Vicksburg was more important to the outcome of the war than the one at Gettysburg". Fallen member Brass Napoleon took the affirmative while @Scotsman took the opposing view. @jgoodguy moderated.

You can find it (here) - its a fantastic 'formal' debate between two scholarly members and incredibly fact filled.
 
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