July Fourth and the Greatest Forgotten Battle of the Civil War
What we choose to remember -- and forget -- about events like Independence Day and the Civil War's Battle of Vicksburg provide a window into national myths that are often misleading and incomplete
Trick question: When did the United States officially declare independence for all its people?
Answer: Not with the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, which as we all know, purposely excluded African Americans and perpetuated the sin of slavery. It was June 19, 1865, otherwise known as Juneteenth, the date following the end of the Civil War on which the final enslaved Americans in Texas were finally granted their freedom. Or, it can be argued, Dec. 6, 1865, when the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing slavery was ratified.
Trick question: What battle marked the true turning point of the American Civil War?
Answer: Not the Battle of Gettysburg, which gained a symbolic stature that far exceeded its strategic importance by means of Lincoln’s famous address months after the battle had ended. Rather, it was the battle that concluded the day after Gettysburg, July 4, 1863, when Vicksburg, Mississippi, fell to Ulysses S. Grant’s Army following an epic 47-day siege. The fall of Vicksburg gave Union forces control of the mighty Mississippi River, and as any Civil War military historian will attest, control of the Mississippi was a prerequisite to victory for either side. In contrast, the small town of Gettysburg, with its surrounding farmlands, held no significant strategic value; it just happened to be the place where two mighty armies met midway through the war. A union defeat at Gettysburg, though a huge blow to Northern morale, would not have ultimately changed the outcome of the war. Union forces would have retreated to fight another day, while Confederate forces would have still lacked the critical access they needed to the Father of Waters to move supplies and equipment.
Today, July 4, 2023, marks not only our nation’s 247th birthday, but the 160th anniversary of the most important — and most forgotten — battle in U.S. history: Vicksburg. While Gettysburg has become synonymous with the Civil War and one of the nation’s great historical tourist attractions, Vicksburg is largely lost to history.
The Siege of Vicksburg, which ended on July 4, 1863, marked the true turning point of the Civil War.
These twin July 4 events of our national narrative (the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Battle of Vicksburg) are a sobering reminder that the stories and national myths we have created for ourselves through the course of our long, inspirational yet painful journey as a nation have also often been overly simplistic and deceptive. July 4, 1776, was indeed a pivotal date in the history of the land we call America, and indeed the world, but as we all know now, the definitions of independence, liberty and equality that formed the basis of that document were woefully inadequate and hypocritical. It would take a great Civil War generations later, and a great Civil Rights movement a century after that, to bring us measurably closer to realizing the true meaning of the beautiful prose produced by slaveholder Thomas Jefferson. And nearly 250 years after it was written, we are still struggling to bring full truth to the elusive words embodied in the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
At the same time, while we’ve created national myths around spectacular singular events like the Declaration of Independence of the Battle of Gettysburg, we’ve tended to overlook the more laborious, less-dramatic events that often have played a more pivotal role in the uneven progress we’ve made as a nation toward achieving true liberty, equality and freedom for all our people. The Declaration of Independence was a mesmerizing, and relatively generic, example of lofty wordsmithing by a brilliant statesman that largely overshadowed the grueling, seemingly endless debates and revisions that went into the crafting of the U.S. Constitution and the amendments that were appended to it in the decades and centuries that followed. It was that process, which continues to this day, that created a template, albeit flawed, for achieving the principles set out in the July 4 declaration that the signers themselves didn’t even seem to take all that seriously at the time.
The same is true when we look at the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg. It wasn’t just Lincoln’s immortal words months later that elevated Gettysburg into a mythic event that was never warranted by what occurred on the battlefield itself, and eclipsed the infinitely more important outcome at Vicksburg the following day. It’s that Gettysburg had Hollywood appeal before Hollywood even existed. Two mammoth armies that had clashed repeatedly in the hills of Virginia and Maryland over the previous two years engaged in a tense, dramatic, back-and-forth three-day tilt that would go down as the largest, bloodiest engagement of the war, even if it was not the most significant. Vicksburg, on the other hand, was a brutal, incremental slog that played out over weeks as Grant literally starved a city into submission, combining brilliant military acumen with dogged determination. But even if history would make different judgements about which battle would be elevated to mythic status, it was crystal clear in the moment which had mattered more. “Vicksburg is the key!,” Lincoln said. “The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.” Once it was in the Union’s pocket, Grant was well on his way to becoming the national hero and president who is a fixture of every U.S. history book. And who was the Union general who led the great victory of Gettysburg? George C. Meade (anyone remember him?), whom Lincoln effectively demoted after the battle for letting Robert Lee’s army slip across the Potomac and regroup to fight another day.
Ultimately, Juneteenth is to the Fourth of July what Vicksburg is to Gettysburg, and what so many other forgotten events in American history are to the ones that we’ve granted mythic status. The stories we tell ourselves about our nation’s path to greatness are not always the fullest, most accurate ones. The events that streak across the sky like a bolt of lightning are often fleeting in their actual significance, eclipsed by the long, steady slogs of persistence and determination that ultimately do much more to move us closer to that dream of becoming a truly perfect union, than the ones for which we light up the sky with fireworks.