Vicksburg, MS
The sheer number of monuments and memorials in Vicksburg is staggering. They coat the National Park and spill out onto city streets as if there were too many to be stuffed even into the massive expanse of park. It seems like Vicksburg was chosen by the men of the west to be their memorial park just as Gettysburg was so chosen by the men of the east.
Every brigade commander, North and South, gets a bas relief monument. Every division commander gets a free-standing bust. Almost every state has a significant memorial with the Illinois Memorial rivaling that of Pennsylvania in Gettysburg. I think, if you spent enough time wandering and studying the place, you could probably find some sort of marker for every Corps, Division, Brigade, Regiment, Company, Platoon, Squad and Private Soldier in both armies buried somewhere amidst the cliffs and gullies of the broken landscape.
And if that wasn’t enough to turn you on, the USS Cairo – Eads boat, Federal ironclad and the first ship ever sunk by torpedo/mine – sits under the bluff not far from what were the banks of the Mississippi River reconstructed in all her glory. Heavy guns, boilers, paddlewheel, railroad armor, side plate armor: a magnificent ship and one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen.
This is one of the times I really wish I didn’t have a car and had about a week to spare. You just can’t take this place in when you’re driving. I walked a good eight miles of the field when I visited in 1998 and although I didn’t come away with the comprehension I have now after two lengthy circuits of the field, I felt much more involved with the soldiers’ eye view of what happened here.
Vicksburg is a great monument to the men who did the fighting and to a lost way of life. In its own way, despite still standing, she too is a ghost town.