The Final Fortress: The Campaign for Vicksburg 1862-1863

by Samuel Carter

Of all events of the Civil War, none was of greater significance than the fall of Vicksburg. Though the defeat at Gettysburg halted Lee's invasion of the North, and the loss of Atlanta crushed the South's hopes for a military victory, it was at Vicksburg that the Confederacy suffered a mortal wound from which there was no recovery.

The Final Fortress is the first comprehensive story of the prodigious struggle, from 1861, when the city was initially singled out by Lincoln as the key target for a major Union victory, through the grueling two-year effort to take it both by sea and by land. The great battle is examined from the strategic military standpoint offered by the Official Records of the War, published by the Federal government, and through the intimate recollection of soldiers and civilians, Yankees and Rebels alike.

The author vividly recounts the stories of a Union inventor creating a unique war machine; a Confederate engineer whose ships bests the Union Navy; a young Southern woman trapped within the was of Vicksburg; a courier carrying his dispatches down the Mississippi on a floating log; Ulysses S. Grant in his private struggle with boredom and alcoholism; President Jefferson Davis's futile efforts to come to the rescue of the city of Vicksburg, and countless other human dramas.

The Final Fortress is as readable as a novel and as compelling as the best of stories of men at war. No other book has dealt with the subject in such depth, or so eloquently woven the public and private histories of the critical Civil War site into a coherent whole. Samuel Carter's animation and literary skill make The Final Fortress an indispensable addition to the libraries of Civil War buffs in particular and historians in general.

Genres: Civil War, American Civil War, History, Civil War Western Theater

354 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1980

Reviews

[William Guerrant · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-written telling of an episode unique in American history, the author does a nice job of incorporating into the narrative perspectives of both civilians and soldiers, North and South. The book would have benefited from an appendix with the Order of Battle.

[Binston Birchill · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a wealth of civilian and military sources at hand Carter weaves the Vicksburg campaign narrative in an immensely readable fashion. You get to know the generals, the civilians in Vicksburg, and the obstacles they face. There is a severe lack of maps for those interested in the finer details but aside from that the book is very well done.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked the way that Carter mixes accounts of the campaign and battle, along with the civilian stories from inside and outside the walls. Not a bad find off the $2 stack in Half Price books. Has to be one of the better accounts of the campaign from 1970's-1980's, and reads like a modern account.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A historical text that examines the Union siege of Vicksburg and its important outcome to the American Civil War.

[Dan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite knowing almost nothing about Vicksburg before starting this book I felt that The Final Fortress left a lot to be desired. This book never develops the sense of drama that I felt while reading Stephen Sears' Chancellorsville, nor does it ever achieve the dry but clinical analysis of Edwin Coddington's The Gettysburg Campaign. Troop movements were very hard to follow as only two maps in the whole book showed any kind of troop movements and they were oversimplified. Carter clearly tries his best to give the reader an idea of the sentiments of both the soldiers and the civilians at the time, but his attempts to evoke drama and conflict usually fell flat and instead came across as just so much dry prose. While the topic is undoubtedly fascinating, the book would have been better served with a better author.