The Defense of Vicksburg: A Louisiana Chronicle (review)

214Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober tains that the antebellum trend toward greater property rights continued into the postwar era, augmented by testators' increased willingness to divide estates equally among sons and daughters. Even with more women controlling property, fewer were choosing to live on plantations. Censer argues diat elite white women in fact led the flight from the countryside, motivated by frustrations in dealing with servants and laborers and a fear of being isolated in rural areas with large numbers of black men. Those who moved to urban areas moved tentatively into "public" life, with many single women working as schoolteachers and othersjoining benevolent societies. She concludes the book with two chapters on women writers and literature. It is a truism that the historiography of the postwar South revolves around questions of change and continuity and is rarely, if ever, taken on its own terms. To her credit, Censer consistently avoids simplistic endorsements of one over the other. Instead, each chapter is ajudicious examination of change and continuity in a single aspect ofwomen's lives, the result being a complex portrait of an elite white womanhood in transition. At the same time, the notion ofwomen "in transition " does little to move postwar women's history past the point where it is judged relative to what came before and what came after. But perhaps that asks too much; Censer's book is a fine one that deserves to be read by all historians of the New South. Hartwick CollegeSean Kelley The Defense of Vicksburg: A Louisiana Chronicle. By Allan C. Richard Jr. and Mary Margaret Higginbotham Richard. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. Pp. xxvi+325. Foreword, preface, acknowledgments, illustrations, maps, epilogue, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 1-58544-279-8. $29.95, cloth.) The surrender of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, combined with the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg the day before, ended any hope die South had of a military victory in the Civil War. Given the significance of this campaign there is no shortage of scholarly works on the subject. Many participants on the Union side also wrote about the siege of Vicksburg after the war, but the perspective of ordinary Confederates trapped inside the city has been lacking. Allan C. Richard Jr. and Mary Margaret Higginbotham Richard have corrected this gap in Civil War historiography with The Defense of Vicksburg: A Louisiana Chronicle. The authors have examined a mass of archival material to produce a collection of excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs of soldiers from the many Louisiana units that participated in the Vicksburg Campaign. These firsthand accounts include those of officers and enlisted men, infantry and artillery units. Although soldiers from many western states fought at Vicksburg, the authors concentrate on Louisiana because of the high percentage of defenders that state provided and to portray the perspectives of troops whose homes would be threatened if the city were to fall. A work of this type requires a balance between letting the participants speak 2oo8 Book Reviews215 for themselves and providing the reader with a historical context in which to place the excerpts. The Defense of Vicksburg succeeds admirably in this regard. The authors divide the book into chronological chapters and begin each section with a brief outline of the progress of the campaign during that period. The participants ' accounts are arranged so that a variety of writers comment on each major event of the siege, for example the Union fleet slipping downriver at night. Although many of the Confederates record inaccurate information and rumors, die inclusion of these along with more accurate accounts greatly enhances the overall story of ordinary soldiers trying to make sense of the epic events that surround them. The authors also include seven detailed maps that make it easy for the reader to follow the course of the siege. Unlike many works that focus on a single campaign, this book looks at the lives and thoughts of the participants from the time of their enlistment in the Confederate army to the end of the war. This laudable approach gives the reader a better sense of the humanity of the people involved, men who worried about their families and homes while they risked their lives. In...