The valiant little country that was founded on July 4th, 1776 had, by 1863, more than doubled in size and was in the midst of a civil war that threatened its very existence. This is a story about July 4th, 1863, and what was happening in two cities, one in Pennsylvania, the other in Mississippi.
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was hardly big enough to be called a town, let alone a city. Its significance in Civil War history can hardly be exaggerated, though, for it marked, simultaneously, the northernmost advance of Confederate armies and the battle at which the Confederacy lost the war.
It began on July 1st, when, ironically, a Confederate unit, seeking shoes rumored to be cached at Gettysburg and approaching from north of town, ran headlong into a Union patrol coming up from the south. For two days, it seemed that Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia would prevail over Union troops under the command of George G. Meade. On the third day, however, Lee would make the dreadful miscalculation that cost his army a division it could not afford to lose; in the infamy known now as Pickett’s Charge, he ordered troops under the direct command of George Pickett to attack a Union position on Seminary Ridge across an open field. The Confederates died by the hundreds; when ordered by his immediate superior, James Longstreet, to reform and attempt a second charge, Pickett grimly replied, “General, I have no division.”
In three days of fighting, the two sides combined suffered over fifty thousand casualties. Lee began an agonizing retreat back across Maryland to the relative safety of Virginia on the morning of July 4th, leaving his dead and wounded behind. Meade had a chance—to follow and deliver the coup de grace to the Confederacy—but he did not; his army was as badly mauled as Lee’s. The civilians of Gettysburg were left to tend to the wounded and bury the dead in an eerie silence after the roar of battle.
The other, on the western front, was indeed a city: the major port at Vicksburg, Mississippi. Its capture had been the object of a campaign that had begun in December 1862, as Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman’s Union troops gradually surrounded and isolated troops under John C. Pemberton—ironically, himself a Pennsylvanian by birth—eventually, in mid-May 1863, settling into a siege that would last until July 4th. Confederate troops and Vicksburg civilians were reduced to living in caves dug out of hillsides, enduring daily bombardments and eating such rats and birds as they were able to catch. Pemberton, however, had a rationale for holding out until July 4th. He told his staff, “I know my people. . I know their peculiar weaknesses and their national vanity; I know we can get better terms from them on the Fourth of July than on any other day of the year.” As it was, a Confederate chaplain observed, “The {Union troops} did not seem to exult much over our fall. . .for they knew that we surrendered to famine, not to them.” (Both cited in the companion volume to Ken Burns’s PBS series THE CIVIL WAR, page 241.)
Gettysburg buried the dead, and in November 1863 the cemetery there was dedicated by President Abraham Lincoln with his brilliant Gettysburg Address. Today it remains, with the possible exception of Arlington, the most revered of our military cemeteries—and the town itself one of our most haunted.
In Vicksburg, the survivors came out of their caves to find that, although there was not a pane of glass left in any of the houses, the city was relatively intact. At least one Union quartermaster, horrified by the starving Confederate troops he encountered, began distributing rations, telling his own griping men that “the wagons had broken down and the Johnny Rebs had stolen all the grub.” (See Shelby Foote, THE CIVIL WAR, A NARRATIVE: FREDERICKSBURG TO MERIDIAN {1963}, page 612.)
The Union troops moved on to attack the forces of Joseph Johnston to the east, and perhaps more significantly, the only port remaining in Confederate hands on the great river. Port Hudson fell some ten days after Vicksburg, allowing, as Lincoln observed upon receiving the news, “the Father of Waters to flow unvexed to the sea” again and splitting the Confederate states west of the river—Arkansas and Texas—from the rest.
Southerners have long memories, though, and in Vicksburg, July 4th would not be celebrated again until 1944.
Have a safe and happy Fourth, everybody. And until next time, fair thee well.
