The award-winning “superb account” of the longest and most decisive military campaign of the Civil War (The Wall Street Journal).
Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the last stronghold of the Confederacy on the Mississippi River. It prevented the Union from using the river for shipping between the Midwest and the Gulf of Mexico. Sitting on a high bluff, Vicksburg successfully repelled naval attacks. It took Grant’s army and Admiral David Porter’s navy to finally invade Mississippi and force the city to surrender. In this “elegant . . . enlightening . . . well-researched and well-told” work, Donald L. Miller tells the full story of this year-long campaign (Publishers Weekly).
Miller brings to life all the drama, characters, and significance of Vicksburg, a historic moment that rivals any war story in history. In the course of the campaign, tens of thousands of slaves fled to the Union lines. More than twenty thousand became soldiers, while others seized the plantations they had been forced to work on, creating a social revolution. With Vicksburg “Miller has produced a model work that ties together military and social history” (Civil War Times).
Winner of the Civil War Round Table of New York’s Fletcher Pratt Literary Award
Winner of an Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award
Winner of the Austin Civil War Round Table’s Daniel M. & Marilyn W. Laney Book Prize
Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History Emeritus at Lafayette College and author of ten books, including Vicksburg, and Masters of the Air, currently being made into a television series by Tom Hanks. He has hosted, coproduced, or served as historical consultant for more than thirty television documentaries and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications.