VETERANS STORY: Treated like dogs

The Union victory at Gettysburg has gone down in history as the turning point of the Civil War. In fact, there were several turning points, all bloody with high casualties, all considered necessary by both sides to win the war. Nonetheless, President Abraham Lincoln considered a small river town in Mississippi as the real path to victory. He remarked, “Vicksburg is the key! The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.” His opposite, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, was likewise knowledgeable of Vicksburg’s importance, stating that the riverside community was, “The nail head that holds the South’s two halves together.”

The Union forces were overwhelming: 77,000 boys wore blue, 33,000 boys wore the gray. Still, it took the soldiers of Ulysses S. Grant’s army over a year to capture Vicksburg, mostly due to a stranglehold siege. The casualties were horrendous. Around 17,000 Union soldiers fell and were interred in the 116 acres of the Vicksburg National Cemetery, the largest Union cemetery in the U.S. Of the 17,000 soldiers buried there, almost 13,000 of those graves are marked as unknown. Confederate dead from the Vicksburg siege were originally buried behind the lines until re-interred to the Vicksburg City Cemetery, known as the Cedar Hill Cemetery. Approximately 5,000 boys in gray fell, of which only 1,600 have been identified.