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The Vicksburg Campaign and Siege In the final days of March 1863, Major General U.S. Grant was checkmated in his campaign to capture Vicksburg and open the Mississippi River. His four attempts to bypass Vicksburg from upriver had failed. Grant put Sherman and McPherson's corps in motion and finally won his objective - the Confederacy was divided. |
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The Battle of Chancellorsville
On the evening of May 2, Lee sent Stonewall Jackson's Corps by a circuitous route to hit General Hooker's force in flank. Jackson's savage attack rolled up the Union right, driving it back in confusion . Later that evening, as Jackson and his aides returned from a scouting mission, he was shot accidentally by members of the 18th North Carolina regiment who had mistaken his party for Union cavalry. While Jackson lay mortally wounded in a Confederate hospital, the battle continued with neither side gaining a clear advantage. Hooker retreated across the Rappahannock river on May 6th, effectively ending the engagement. While considered a tactical victory for the south, the battle hurt the Confederacy badly. Stonewall Jackson died from pneumonia contracted as a result of his wounds, costing Lee the best battlefield general he would command during the war. 
"The attacking force emerged from the forest and rushed on...in such multitudes
that our men went down before them like trees in a hurricane."
Major General Oliver O. Howard, USA |
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Transcript of the Hay Copy of the Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. |
