Vicksburg: Town under siege

On Thursday morning, we toured the National Park Battleground which had a small visitor centre, with a video and a nice map with lots of LED's that lit up during a narration. We then took the driving tour. This graphically showed how close the two forces came to each other, the extent of the earthworks and trenches, the sheer size of the two opposing lines of engagement and gave some good information about what happened during those six weeks between May 19th and July 4th, when the union forces laid siege to Vicksburg before Pemberton surrendered to Grant. It was very interesting, though, as usual with battlegrounds, a little difficult to get a coherent picture of what happened on the ground. One could see how, once encircled, that the town was at the mercy of the bombardments from the Union. I don't knnow how it survived for six weeks.
What was most interewting was the USS Cairo. This is a complete Union Ironclad, that was sunk by a torpedo (more like a mine) in the Yazoo River in 1863. It was raised in 1960 and reconstructed, with a modern day 'ghost structure'to support it and show what it really looked like. This enabled us to see just how big it was. We could also walk round inside and see the original steam engines, look out through the gun ports and seen how everything was laid out. It was fascinating. Many thousands of artifacts from the ship were also recovered and on display, from weapons, to ships equipment, to personal belongings of crew and officers. It is a wonderful time capsule from 1863. It weighed 880 tons, with its 2 inch cast iron plating. It sank in 12 minutes, but no one was killed. As a ship it looked very inefficient, not much more than a big barge with a big sternwheeler hidden inside. Even at 179 feet long it was difficult to get everything inside it. Guns, steam boilers, coal, ammunition, engines, sternwheels, let alone crews quarter There appeared to be one main deck inside, which housed the guns. The middle was dominated by a huge steam reservoir which was use to divert steam to the two engines, the auxiliary engine or the steam driven capstan, which was used to do the heavy work, such as lifting anchor, or moving guns. It was designed to be used on the river. It could make 6 knots, having seen the Missisippi in October, I don't think it could have made much ground upstream. For a big river, the Mississippi flows very fast. A marvellous sight, well worth the visit.