Monday, February 24, 2020

Review: The Vicksburg Assaults, May 19-22, 1863


Edited by Steven E. Woodworth & Charles D. Grear

With “The Vicksburg Assaults: May 19-22” Southern Illinois University Press has added another volume to its “Civil War Campaigns in the West” series. It is the second volume in the series to cover Major-General Ulysses. S. Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign.  Picking up where the previous volume “The Vicksburg Campaign: March 29-May 18, 1863” left off,  it covers the four days between May 19 and May 22, 1863 during which Grant made two suicidal, uphill frontal assaults on the Confederate earthworks surrounding the heavily fortified city.

This small book, only 136 pages, is a treasure trove of information and firsthand accounts of the fighting which demonstrated to Grant that Vicksburg, “The Gibraltar of the West,” couldn’t be taken as easily as Mississippi’s State Capital, Jackson.

In the book’s Introduction Charles D. Grear gives a brief sketch of the last few days of the Vicksburg Campaign and brings readers up to May 19, 1863.

J. Parker Hills follows up with two essays covering both assaults “Haste and Underestimation: May 19” and “Failure and Scapegoat: May 22”

“The Assault on the Railroad Redoubt” by Stephen E. Woodworth analyzes the fight for the Railroad Redoubt, the site of bloodiest fighting from the viewpoint of the Union men who fought there while Brandon Franke conversely examines it from the point of view of it’s Confederate defenders in his essay “Texans in the Breach: Waul’s Legion at Vicksburg.”

The title of the final essay of the book by Charles D. Grear speaks for itself, “The North-West is Determined with the Sword”; Midwesterners’ Reactions to the Vicksburg Assaults.”

The assaults against the outer works of Vicksburg are rarely given treatment of their own by authors.  They are usually folded into the final few pages of books about the Vicksburg Campaign, in the first few pages of books about the Siege of Vicksburg, or sandwiched between the two in books covering both the campaign and the siege.

Each essay is well researched and well written by its author.  There are end notes following each essay. Taken independently of the others each essay is a slim slice that doesn’t fail to deliver upon its topic, but together the four days between May 19 & May 22, 1863, are completely covered.  “The Vicksburg Assaults: May 19-22, 1863” rightly deserves to take its place on the shelf among many other scholarly works of the Vicksburg Campaign and Siege.

ISBN 978-0809337194, Southern Illinois University Press, © 2019, Hardcover, 136 pages, Photographs, Maps, End Notes at the end of each essay & Index. $29.50.  To purchase this book click HERE.

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