Guest Blogging a trip to the "Gibraltar of the West"

Hello, readers of Domestic Tranquility. With the permission of DomTran herself, I am guest-blogging this week as I accompany a group of elementary, middle, and high school teachers from Wisconsin to Vicksburg, Mississippi. I'm writing this afternoon from Union Station, Chicago, where the group and I await the departure of Amtrak's overnight "City of New Orleans." Our plan is to arrive in Memphis tomorrow morning, find our chartered motor coach and head for Jackson, then Vicksburg. During the Civil War, the Confederate fortress at Vicksburg denied control of the Mississippi to the US. It was nicknamed the "Gibraltar of the West" in 1862-63, in part reflecting its strategic importance and in part reflecting its forbidding heights. The accompanying photo (taken in 1905) is of a place in the Vicksburg defenses called "Stockade Redan" where on May 22, 1863, the 8th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry was ordered to charge and take the Confederate strongpoint. Too bad for the Union that it couldn't be taken. General Sherman's army corps, of which the 8th Wisconsin was a part, suffered 3,200 killed and wounded trying to take Stockade Redan. After the failure of the final charge of the 8th and its brother regiments, Sherman called a halt to further attacks, saying that trying to take the position was "murder." Instead, his superior, General Grant, settled in for a siege of the Confederate army and the city it guarded. In his disappointment and rage, Sherman called for the US Navy gunboats to "rain down shells by the thousand on the city." Twenty-two thousand shells later, on July 4th, the Confederates surrendered. And tomorrow, the teachers of Wisconsin visit the site.
--OLGS, guest blogger