by Sandra Merville Hart

President Lincoln saw the capture of Vicksburg, Mississippi, as a vital key to winning the Civil War. General Ulysses S. Grant agreed that it must be taken.

The Union Navy bombarded the city for sixty-seven days from May to July of 1862. Confederate soldiers fired cannons on the fleet while citizens hunkered in hastily dug cave shelters. One battered Confederate ship called the Arkansas possessed enough power to convince the Union fleet to head south on July 27^th.

The defeat only whetted Grant’s desire to take Vicksburg by force. He’s in command of the Army of the Tennessee at the end of January, 1863, when he arrives at Young’s Point just north of Vicksburg. He studies the abandoned remnants of canal that had been started by General Thomas Williams’s troops to in the summer of 1862. The canal had been intended to go through De Soto Point and divert the flow of the Mississippi River to the south of Vicksburg because the city on the bluffs above the Mississippi River had proven to be difficult to capture.

Grant sees that the idea still has merit. He orders General Sherman to complete the canal. Using picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows, troops were to dig Grant’s Canal to a depth of 6 – 6 ½ feet, 60 feet wide, and 1 ½ miles long.

It wasn’t an easy task. Work began on January 24^th. Vicksburg residents watched Union troops and black men dig from across the river. Most saw the attempts to alter the mighty river’s flow as foolhardy.

Indeed, the task was ridden with challenges from the start. Men got sick from cold, rainy weather. The Mississippi River’s seasonal floods caused some deaths when it reached the camps. They were using steam pumps to remove the water by February 19th. The troops took heart when the river crested and then receded.

Heavy rains at the end of February halted the work. When steam pumps stopped working, floating steam dredges were brought in. Confederate artillery at Vicksburg drove the dredges away.

The river floods again, and a massive crevasse pours water into the camp, forcing the soldiers to seek the safety of higher ground.

Confederate soldiers, who have watched everything happening at Young’s Point from across the river, move big cannons south to guard the canal’s exit.

Grant gives up on the idea and ordered work to stop on March 27^th.

But he has not given up on capturing Vicksburg as the whole state of Mississippi realizes within two months.  

Grant’s Canal takes place in my novel, River of Peril, Book 5 in my Spies of the Civil War Series. This book tells the story of Felicity and Luke, who were courting before the war began. She volunteers as a nurse to distract herself from her worry about her soldier—then her worst nightmare happens. Luke has been wounded in battle. Worse, he doesn’t remember her…or why he was fighting for the Confederacy when his loyalty is with the North. It begins in December of 1862. Grant’s Canal worries the Vicksburg citizens in history and in the story.

Sources

Bearss, Edwin C. with Hills, J. Parker. Receding Tide: Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the Campaigns that Changed the Civil War, National Geographic, 2010.

“Grant’s Canal,” National Park Service, 2025/02/09 https://www.nps.gov/vick/learn/historyculture/grants-canal.htm.