Vicksburg, 1863
By Winston Groom
Knopf, 2009

The siege of Vicksburg is the American Civil War writ small. All the key elements that characterized the four years of conflict are concentrated in the three months during which Federal forces under General Grant alternately pummeled and strangled the key Mississippi stronghold commanded by General Pemberton into submission. There is the overwhelming superiority of the North in men and material; there is the seemingly endless succession of bloody, pointless sorties on both sides; there is the expected gallery of larger-than-life figures, swanning and pirouetting as though they knew this was the last time war would give anybody the chance to do so; there is the doomed but canny valor of the Confederate commander (Pemberton is a cool character who has never received his due), offset by the usual muddled and contradictory instructions issuing from both Richmond and military high command; there is the absolutely vital role of water-power (be it the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Mighty Miss) in shaping the land-actions; and most of all, there is the allure of the might-have-been.

It’s an impossible story to resist, and popular novelist Winston Groom, in Vicksburg 1863

, has dived into the details with his trademark gusto. Groom has written half a dozen volumes of military history over the decades, and he’s become a practiced hand at searching archives and assembling facts. His presentation of those facts is unfailingly dramatic -– this is certainly the most engrossingly page-turning book on Vicksburg ever written.

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One of the most attractive elements of Groom as a writer is also one of the rarest among even amateur historians: he never loses his sense of humor. It sparkles most in the footnotes that are sprinkled across the bottom of his pages, where he alleviates the grim goings-on of his main tale with colorful details turned up in his researches, things like Confederate president Jefferson Davis’ odd partiality for using camels in Western survey work:

The camels proved something of a mixed benefit for the military surveyors. For one thing, their appearance unsettled herds of cattle, often causing them to stampede, but in general they proved as advertised until the Civil War broke out and surveying expeditions and other western exploits were quickly forgotten. The camels reverted to the wild and their progeny were occasionally seen roaming the southwestern deserts until after the turn of the century. The last sighting of one of the Egyptian camels was reported in 1929.

And Groom might as well be referring to those wandering camels when he elsewhere sums up Davis’ personality – one of the many memorable and spot-on characterizations he doles out in the course of the book:

The episode demonstrates two things about Davis’s personality: that once he decided on something, no matter how large or small, he was tenacious in seeing it through, and, second, he invariably took a direct hand in its implementation. These traits, admirable enough in most people, were to cause trouble when, as president of the Confederacy, he often injected himself directly into the military decision making as the war in the West heated up.

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The only persistent flaw of Vicksburg 1863 is, alas, a gigantic one: the author’s novelistic flair for the picturesque too often wallpapers some of the greatest human misery this hemisphere has ever seen. Margaret Mitchellesque passages like this one crop up much too often:

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Until the war came Vicksburg and its genteel environs were like a land in a storybook. Passengers aboard steamboats plying the Mississippi could look with awe and envy upon broad lawns and green pastures surrounding the elegant mansions that lined both sides of the river. Beginning in early spring the white blossoms of apple, peach, pear, and citrus trees perfumed the air and by midsummer an ocean of white cotton boles stretched as far as the eye could see. On Sundays, along the great River road, which was shaded by magnolias and moss-draped oaks, fashionable carriages carried families for visits to nearby plantations or other outings, accompanied by men on thoroughbreds dressed in stylish suits with velvet trim and wearing felt or beaver top hats.

If you can spot what’s missing from that astonishing, openly nostalgic picture, you’ll know the central blind spot of this otherwise excellent book. And if you have an ancestor who was starved, whipped, raped, dragged, chained, or beaten to death in the course of building those broad lawns and green pastures and elegant mansions, you may find the omission too hard to forgive.

–Steve Donoghue