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Two months later, the storm of war did break over Vicksburg. Landing his troops at a point below Vicksburg and on the same side of the Mississippi River, General Grant fought a brilliant series of battles against Confederate Lt. General John C. Pemberton, who was responsible for defending the town. Badly beaten, Pemberton’s army was forced into the...

It didn’t take long for the shortages of basic necessities to be felt. Dora Miller was soon lamenting in her diary, “I think all the dogs and cats must be killed, or starved, we don’t see any more pitiful animals prowling around.” The reality was more stark than she imagined. Many of those former pets eventually showed up, not under the dinner tabl...

The stockpiles stored up for the army proved to be entirely inadequate for a long siege, and the soldiers, too, were pushed to the brink of starvation. Rather than the military supplying the civilians, it often worked the other way around. To Dora Miller the starving soldiers were “like hungry animals seeking something to devour.” She goes on, Ulti...

But there was another, more immediate danger that made the siege of Vicksburg a time of dread for soldiers and civilians alike. In their determination to force the surrender of the town, General Grant’s forces subjected Vicksburg to constant bombardment every day during the seven weeks of the siege. And the shells couldn’t distinguish between soldi...

At first the advent of the Union army on land, and especially the gunboats on the river, was seen as something of a spectacle. But that changed quickly when the firing started. Lucy McRae, the young daughter of a Vicksburg merchant, described some residents’ reaction to the first shells lobbed into the city: Still, residents professed that they wou...