Engineering Victory

On May 25, 1863, after driving the Con­federate army into defensive lines sur­rounding Vicksburg, Mississippi, Union major general Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee laid siege to the fortress city. With no reinforcements and dwindling supplies, the Army of Vicksburg finally surrendered on July 4, yielding command of the Mississippi River to Union forces and effectively severing the Confederacy. In this illumi­nating volume, Justin S. Solonick offers the first detailed study of how Grant’s midwesterners serving in the Army of the Tennessee engineered the Siege of Vicksburg, placing the event within the broader context of U.S. and European military history and nineteenth-cen­tury applied science in trench warfare and field fortifications. In doing so, he shatters the Lost Cause myth that Vicks­burg’s Confederate garrison surren­dered due to lack of provisions. Instead of being starved out, Solonick explains, the Confederates were dug out.

Though Grant lacked suf ficient professional engineers to organize a traditional siege—an offensive tactic characterized by cutting the enemy’s communication lines and digging for­ward-moving approach trenches—the few engineers available, when possible, gave Union troops a crash course in mil­itary engineering. Ingenious midwest­ern soldiers, in turn, creatively applied engineering maxims to the situation at Vicksburg, demonstrating a remarkable ability to adapt in the face of adversity. When instruction and oversight was not possible, the common soldiers impro­vised. Solonick’s study of the Vicksburg siege focuses on how the American Civil War was a transitional war with its own distinct nature, not the last Napoleonic War or the herald of modern warfare. At Vicksburg, he reveals, a melding of traditional siege craft with the soldiers’ own inventiveness resulted in Union victory during the largest, most suc­cessful siege in American history.