Category: History Briefs

By Daniel J. Ursu, Roundtable Historian
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2020-2021, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was the history brief for the October 2020 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.

Please recall last month’s history brief where we left off with the end of Grant’s creative winter efforts of 1862-3 to bypass Vicksburg, which sputtered out in a haze of impracticability. From the engineering attempts for a proposed trench to reroute the Mississippi River along the neck of a peninsular bend near the fortress city, itself, and the push for a channel through marshy terrain to ultimately join with the Red River and its tributaries and thence to the Mississippi and finally a military effort to land troops just north of Vicksburg through the Yazoo River environs, all of these endeavors came to naught. But not for lack of effort; Grant recorded in his “Memoirs” that he was proud of the hard work his troops had undertaken, which had at least kept them productive outside the campaigning season. Now Grant huddled with Admiral Porter to devise a daring combined arms effort to achieve his goal of landing his troops on dry ground on the east side of the river below Vicksburg.

By Daniel J. Ursu, Roundtable Historian
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2020-2021, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was the history brief for the September 2020 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.

Please recall Grant’s campaign in the West to capture Vicksburg where we left off at the CCWRT December 2019 meeting with the “Battle of Chickasaw Bayou.” This was a defeat for General Grant, who commanded a two-pronged attack to vanquish the fortress. The first prong was his own movement through central Mississippi that would hopefully draw Confederate troops from Vicksburg to allow a direct thrust at the fortress. The second prong along the Mississippi River was under his friend and colleague, General Sherman. Grant’s drive was short-lived as his supply lines were disrupted by “that devil” General Nathan Bedford Forrest amongst others. Accordingly, Confederate General Pemberton maintained the majority of his troops in the Vicksburg defenses and decisively repulsed Sherman’s attack through the Chickasaw Bayou.

By Daniel J. Ursu, Roundtable Historian
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2019-2020, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was the history brief for the December 2019 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.

The “war was won in the West” – or so they say – and has been our monthly focus of these history briefs paralleling the same months in 1862. And so we come to December of 1862, which is widely known as the start of Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign.

By Daniel J. Ursu, Roundtable Historian
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2019-2020, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was the history brief for the November 2019 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.

We pick up from my September 11, 2019 history brief, with Confederate General Price maneuvering away from Iuka on September 19, 1862. His movement was in a wide southwestwardly arc. (Follow map.) He first went to Baldwyn, Mississippi, then northwest toward Ripley, where he was joined by Van Dorn, and together they headed due north to Pocahontas, Tennessee. Van Dorn assumed command of what was now known as the 22,000 man Confederate Army of Western Tennessee. Positioned thusly, he threatened both Corinth and the Mobile & Ohio Railroad providing a supply line to the Union troops to the south.

By Daniel J. Ursu, Roundtable Historian
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2019-2020, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was the history brief for the September 2019 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.

On September 11, 1862, it could be said that the North was doing well and certainly winning the war in the West. In the East, McClellan had repulsed Lee at Antietam, last year’s field trip at which our guide Steve Recker eloquently argued – whether you agreed with him or not – won the war because it paved the way for Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Coincidentally, it’s Lincoln’s hometown, Springfield, Illinois, that will be the destination of Ellen’s field trip at the end of this month. I tend to agree with Steve; the Emancipation Proclamation and the momentum it produced in so many ways, be it in the heart of the slaves who slowly learned of the document, or the morale boost that it gave many of the soldiers in the North and the resultant moral incentive to fight on to victory – and everything in between – that would overwhelm the South by 1865.