After a period of anxious suspense, the symbol of surrender appeared along the length of works. The terms were accepted by the Confederates. The long siege was over. The garrison stacked arms; twenty-seven thousand Confederates received their paroles; and the anniversary of American independence was gilded with a new lustre, for at length, after two years of battle and siege, and such outpouring of blood as did in very deed incarnadine the Father of Waters, the great West made good its vow-the Mississippi went "unvexed to the sea."

war

III.

RESULTS OF VICKSBURG.

The story of the fall of Vicksburg leaves its effect on the course of the war so plain and palpable as to require little exposition to bring it into clearer light. Most obviously it was one of those strokes the greatest and most decisive in the capture of an army. For this was not the surrender of a mere garrison of a post. The thirty-seven thousand men that from the time of the crossing of the Mississippi by General Grant, fell captives into his hands, were an army the army defending the valley of the Mississippi, made up of the same battalions that had barred the advance of the Union force from Shiloh down, and augmented by resources in men and material that, drawn from the well-nigh drained reservoir of the Confederacy, left the defence of other important lines weak and inadequate. It was truly a loss irreparable to the South.

Of its direct military bearing, the first in importance was the fall of Port Hudson - a place which, though two hundred miles below Vicksburg, may be regarded as an outwork of that stronghold, destined to cover the flank of it from attack by the Lower Mississippi squadron, and tó enclose with Vicksburg a sufficient stretch of the river for free intercom

This post, as

munication between the right and centre zones. has already been seen, was invested by General Banks, with a force from New Orleans, about the same time that Grant drew his lines around Vicksburg. The commander of the post, General Gardner, was, like Pemberton, instructed by General Johnston to evacuate the place, but the Confederate officer was already under siege before the order came to hand. The besieging army was composed of five divisions, and to this Gardner could only oppose a force of about five thousand men. After essaying, on the 27th of May, an assault that was repulsed, Banks opened the siege in force, and after another unsuccessful attempt, made the 14th of June, to carry the place by storm, he confined himself to regular approaches. At length, on the 7th of July, General Gardner having meanwhile heard tidings of the fall of Vicksburg, sent a communication to General Banks asking for "official assurance whether this is true or not, and if it is, for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to the consideration of terms for surrendering this position." Banks, in reply, transmitted the official dispatch in which General Grant communicated the fact of the fall of Vicksburg, and on this the Confederate commander accepted the terms of capitulation offered the formal surrender being made the 9th of July.

This double victory opened the Mississippi through its mighty length to the Gulf. Finger by finger the hand of iron with which the Confederates had grasped the jurisdiction of the great river had been unloosed, till the last hold, clutched the more nervously as the tenure became the weaker, had, with overmastering force, been wrenched from them at Vicksburg.

If we now take into account that the fate of that stronghold was not merely the capture of a specific fortified point of the Mississippi, but the elimination of the entire army for the defence of the Mississippi Valley, and therefore the extinction of all possibility of its further defence by the Confederates, we shall rise to the height of the appreciation

"The pos

of this colossal achievement. For, what is the possession of the Mississippi? A great soldier shall tell us. session of the Mississippi River is the possession of America, and I say that, had the Southern Confederacy held with a grip sufficiently strong the lower part of the Mississippi River, we would have been a subjugated people; and they would have dictated to us, had we given up the possession of the Lower Mississippi. It was vital to us, and we fought for it, and won it."

This is the language of General Sherman, and it does not overpass the far-reaching reality of this conquest. For the Mississippi plays a greater part than do, ordinarily, rivers. These commonly form only lines of defence; but the Mississippi was the dividing line betwixt two zones of the continental theatre of war. Now, the right zone, comprising the vast territory lying westward of this river, though, in a military point of view less important than the centre and left zone, comprised respectively between the Mississippi and the Allephoures, and the Alleghanies and the Atlantic, was yet the store-house from which the belligerent South obtained a very large part of its supplies, and especially, was the corral whence it drew those great herds of cattle that went to feed the armies in Tennessee and Virginia. It need not be said that when the Confederates lost Vicksburg they lost their last means of communication with the Trans-Mississippi, and military operations in the right zone ceased thenceforward to be of any magnitudė or importance.

When in December, 1862, at the time General Grant was preparing to move against Vicksburg, Mr. Davis addressed the citizens of Mississippi at Jackson, he urged them to go to Vicksburg, and "assist in preserving the Mississippi River, that great artery of the country, and thus conduce, more than in any other way, to the perpetuation of the Confederacy, and the success of the cause." To say, therefore, that with such estimate of the importance of this stronghold, its fall must have been to the people of the South the gravest of blows,

would be to state a mere truisim. So that, to its material effect we must also add its moral effect, accounting it, as we are bound, one of those disastrous strokes which, rudely shaking the spirit of the South, threw gloomy doubts upon the possibility of their ever realizing "the success of the cause." Whatever work remained to be done in order to make the conquest of Vicksburg fulfil all the conditions it should in the process of the war, was soon accomplished. Immediately on the surrender, Sherman, with his own corps, strengthened by the Fifteenth, was despatched to finish Johnston, who had retired to Jackson. The position taken up by the Confederate commander proved so strong, that Sherman, instead of wasting life in assaults, wisely resorted to the surer operations of the engineers. Appearing in front of Jackson on the 9th of July, he had by the 12th completely invested the place, so that both flanks rested on the Pearl River. Johnston seeing the impossibility of further maintaining himself there, retreated on the night of the 16th, and soon afterwards his troops were returned to the quarters whence they had come. Sherman, after destroying the railways, retraced his steps to the Big Black. Other expeditions were also sent out in various quarters to give the finishing touches to the great work, and Grant having a large surplus of men, sent the division of Steele to Helena to aid Schofield, then commanding the Department of Missouri, and Ord and Herron to Banks, to take part in new movements projected in the Department of the Gulf.

The army now had a long rest from its labors; but when, in October, it again took the field, there was found in all the Valley of the Mississippi no foeman worthy of its steel. On the river line of the West, conquest had been pushed to its utmost limits, and for grand military operations in the centre zone, there only remained the mountain line of Tennessee, where Rosecrans, ensconced in Chattanooga, pointed the way to Atlanta and the sea.