This shows how full-handed he was in men, for he had the entire besieging garrison at Vicksburg in addition to the great army which Sherman took out to meet Johnston. The letter above referred to bears date June 15, 1863, and says: ‘A portion of the Ninth army corps, about 8,000 strong, has now arrived, and will take position, etc.’ All this shows that it is no unreasonable assertion to say that Grant had 100,000 men in the siege at Vicksburg. The parole lists indicated 29,491 men in the Vicksburg lines, of whom 23,233 were privates. Of these 3,084 were paroled in hospital. The men were marched out after being provisioned, and it was at once apparent by their painful and tedious progress that they could not have escaped from the siege. They were taken to Demopolis and there went into camp as paroled prisoners under charge of their own provost marshals. Port Hudson, La., had been invested May 24th and surrendered July 8th, and now the whole course of the Mississippi was in the hands of the United States, except such occasional attacks as steamers might expect in passing through a hostile country.
This text is part of:
[160]
As proof of this, on page 428, Vol.
XXIV, part 3, War Records, is found the following letter:
Atlanta, Ga. 1899.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.