Confederate Gibraltar

Vicksburg, the "Gibraltar of the Confederacy," faced threats from both ends of the Mississippi River early in the war. New Orleans-one of the Confederacy's most important cities-fell in April 1862. Memphis to the north fell two months later. Vicksburg, Mississippi, stood defiantly between the captured cities atop 300-foot bluffs overlooking the wide river. So long as "the Hill City" remained in Rebel hands, the Confederacy controlled river traffic and maintained a vital connection between the Trans-Mississippi states and those east of the river.

Federal Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's skillful use of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers helped capture Nashville and Forts Henry and Donelson. His next goal: opening the Mississippi River, which meant capturing Vicksburg. Doing so required unparalleled cooperation from the Navy and its ambitious commander, Adm. David Dixon Porter. Opposing them: Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton and his Confederate army and perhaps an even more formidable opponent-the terrain. That part of Mississippi, riddled with alluvial lowlands, malarial swamps and canebrakes, woods, deep bayous, and steep ridges presented high-water floods and low-water navigation hazards. The general and the admiral spent months probing, maneuvering, bombarding, assaulting, and even digging in their effort to find a way to reach the nearly unreachable Confederate Gibraltar.

Historian Matt Atkinson's Confederate Gibraltar: The Vicksburg Campaign from the Fall of New Orleans to the Battles in the Bayou is the first of three volumes on this Herculean effort to split the Confederacy asunder and open the Mississippi River to the sea.