Rebel Victory at Vicksburg (review)

BOOKREVIEWS205 national holocaust. Although visiting in Abingdon, Virginia at the time, her roots were planted deep in Kentucky's soil. (Ben Hardin Helm was but one of several cousins.) Lizzie, her mother, and sister proceeded to their home in Harrodsburg. In the summer of 1862 the entire Hardin family was arrested by Kentucky's Unionist provost guard and imprisoned for a time in Louisville. Exile to the South followed release from prison. The three women then rambled extensively through the Confederacy, as the subtitìe of Lizzie's diary states. War's end found Lizzie in Savannah. She then returned to the Bluegrass country, where the diary abrupdy ended on August 9, 1865. Several factors make this a unique chronicle of the Civil War. Lizzie was one of the few women who lived and traveled on both sides of the line. She had as much contact with Federals as with Confederates. Yet her sentiments were never in doubt: she was violentíy pro-Southern. At Virginia's secession she exclaimed, "The magician who was to free us from a hated Union had lifted his wand!" And in writing of Federal generals, she quipped, "Every general came in a Napoleon and went out an Arnold." In addition, Lizzie showed herself to be vivacious, extremely perceptive, and an extraordinary observer of people and events. Her pen-pictures of such Confederate notables as John Hunt Morgan, Braxton Bragg, Simon Buckner , and P. G. T. Beauregard are vivid and comprehensive. Sometime during the postwar years Lizzie took her diary, with its day-byday entries, and rewrote it in narrative form. The latter is the version now printed for the first time. Editor Clift has done an admirable job of documentation , clarification, and indexing. Richard Harwell, an authority on women in the Civil War, has contributed an illuminating foreword. Much of Lizzie Hardin's diary is quotable. Particularly provocative is this observation of the Confederacy and the war: . . . When I remember the holiness of our cause, the injustice and cruelty of our foes, the almost unexampled success of our arms against an enemy so gready our superior in numbers, in wealth, in equipment, in everything but courage and brains, I do not wonder that we were confident, that we deemed the triumphant end not far distant when the struggle had scarcely begun. We were more than confident, we were defiant. We asked only our own but we laughed at the thought that any should be able to take that from us. It was a beautiful fancy, a pleasant dream. I shall never forget the awakening. James I. Robertson, Jr. U. S. Civil War Centennial Commission RebelVictoryatVicksburg. ByEdwin C. Bearss. (Vicksburg: Vicksburg Centennial Commemoration Commission, 1963. Pp. xi, 299. $5.00.) "The successful defense of Vicksburg [in 1862] and the recovery of the reaches of the Mississippi between Port Hudson and Vicksburg was a great victory by Confederate arms which has been largely bypassed by military 206CIVIL WAR HISTORY historians." This, the last sentence in Edwin C. Bearss's new book, fairly states its thesis. Historians have frequentiy pictured the Federal campaign on the Mississippi as a giant pincers movement from both upstream and down which closed steadily and inexorably until Vicksburg, the last important riverside bastion left to the Confederacy, fell to Northern arms and with it the great river from Cairo to New Orleans. Although this may accurately describe the broad view, author Bearss is convinced that it does not give sufficient credit to those heroic Vicksburg defenders who turned back the first effort to close the pincers in 1862. Bearss describes in minute detail the advances on Vicksburg by David Farragut's blue-water squadron from New Orleans and Charles Davis' freshwater flotilla from Memphis. Then he turns to the attack on the fortress itself. Farragut's running of the Confederate batteries to join Davis, the disheartening realization that the troops with Farragut were too few to storm the heights, the failure of the navies to reduce the town's defenses, the unavailing attempt of accompanying Federal soldiers to divert the river away from Vicksburg—all of these events and more are fully reported. The climax, of course, comes when the Confederate ironclad...