Vicksburg, 1863

I'd never read any of Groom's work before this, and I have to confess that I was a little skeptical about reading a book about the Vicksburg campaign by the author of "Forrest Gump." I'm a believer now, though. In fact I think Groom's experience as a novelist, like Shelby Foote's, makes him a much better historian as well. Too many books about military campaigns are dry and tedious, but this one...more

I'd never read any of Groom's work before this, and I have to confess that I was a little skeptical about reading a book about the Vicksburg campaign by the author of "Forrest Gump." I'm a believer now, though. In fact I think Groom's experience as a novelist, like Shelby Foote's, makes him a much better historian as well. Too many books about military campaigns are dry and tedious, but this one was fascinating, exciting, and superbly written. It's also very interesting and refreshing that Groom, a native Mississippian, was able to describe the many different personalities on both sides of the conflict--Grant, Sherman, Johnston, Pemberton, and others--with admirable candor and humanity. Too many casual students of the Civil War think the Battle of Vicksburg was simply a long static seige, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Up until the last 90 days of the conflict it was a dynamic and fluid campaign of maneuver and attack, one that lasted almost a year from the first unsuccessful attempt to take Vicksburg. The repercussions of the battle were profound, not just for the immediate course of the war--coming on the same day as the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, and the Fourth of July at that--the final surrender of Vicksburg was the death knell of the Confederacy. The more than a year and a half of costly fighting that followed was, as Groom himself persuasively argues in the last chapter, a terrible tragedy that Southern leaders could have avoided by conceding to the inevitable, and that ultimately did far more lasting damage to the South than it had suffered up to July 1863.   hide