Big Black River Bridge

`The Harper's illustration is of the Battle of Big Black River Bridge, which took place on this date in 1863. It shows a bayonet charge led by General Mike Lawler (an Irish immigrant like Tom Sweeny), of a brigade in the division of General Eugene Carr (the military mentor of Frank Herron), in the corps of John McLernand (one of several generals underappreciated in Grant's Memoirs). It came the day after a major Union victory at Champion Hill, which came after several other engagements in the preceding two-and-a-half weeks.

Lawler's charge swept the Confederates back into Vicksburg, upon which city in the next few days Grant, the army commander, launched two unsuccessful assaults. The second of these, like the attack on Cold Harbor the next year, he regretted ordering, as he wrote in his honest book. Then, at Vicksburg, he and the army settled into a siege. 

But in the preceding three weeks, in the mobile phase of the campaign which ended at Big Black River Bridge, Grant's generalship was as brilliant and significant as any in the history of America.

Strategically, the biggest decision came in early May, when he elected not to move south to join General Banks in Louisiana, as Lincoln and General Halleck expected, but went east, into the heart of Confederate territory between two rebel armies, and away from his Mississippi River supply line.

At the same time in Virginia, after winning for Lee the Battle of Chancellorsville, Stonewall Jackson lay dying, shot in error there by his own troops. That time, mid-way through the war, with its outcome very much in doubt, was the true turning point. Or so thinks the cancer-riddled former president a generation later as he is drifting into death, in The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant.

The Confederate army in Vicksburg would surrender to Grant on July 4, 1863, which happened to be the day after the conclusion of the Army of the Potomac's great defensive victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. July 4 also was the birthday not just of the USA but of both Nellie Grant Sartoris and her nephew, Ulysses Grant III. They were among the many family members with Grant in July 1885 on Mount McGregor.