Booknotes: Bayou Battles for Vicksburg

New Arrival:

• Bayou Battles for Vicksburg: The Swamp and River Expeditions, January 1 - April 30, 1863 by Timothy B. Smith (UP of Kansas, 2023).

I was very pleased by yesterday's arrival of Tim Smith's newest volume in his Vicksburg Campaign series. In addition to being an important part of that ongoing project, Bayou Battles for Vicksburg also represents "the first book-length examination of Ulysses S. Grant’s winter waterborne attempts to capture the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi."

From the description: "The dawn of 1863 brought a new phase of the Union’s Mississippi Valley operations against Vicksburg. For the first four months, Union attempts to reach high and dry ground east of the Mississippi River would be plagued by high water everywhere, and the resulting bayou and river expeditions would test everyone involved, including the defending Confederates."

More: "The accepted strategy up to this point in the war was aligned with the principles of the Swiss theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini, whose work was taught at West Point, where commanders on both sides of the conflict had been educated. But Jomini emphasized secure supply lines and a slow, steady, unified approach to a target such as Vicksburg, and never had much to say about creeks, rivers, and bayous in a subtropical swamp environment. Grant threw out conventional wisdom with a bold, and ultimately successful, plan to avoid a direct approach and rather divide his forces to accomplish multiple goals and to confuse the enemy by cutting levies, flooding whole sections of watersheds, and bypassing strongholds by digging canals far around them." With the benefit of hindsight, it becomes easier to accept Grant's series of "experiments" as inventive parts of a larger successful plan, but at the time there were certainly moments of potential disaster. The stunning level of triumph that crowned the campaign, with the capture of both the targeted strategic town and its entire defending army, can dissolve a lot of regrets incurred along the way.

Bayou Battles for Vicksburg "details each of the Union attempts to reach high ground east of the Mississippi River." Even though those operations have been examined in depth before in a variety of publications, including Bearss's pioneering trilogy, this new book-length account "includes fresh research on the Yazoo Pass and Steele’s Bayou expeditions, Grant’s canal, and the Lake Providence effort. Smith weaves several simultaneous Union initiatives together into a chronological narrative that provides great detail on the Union’s successful final attempt to get to good ground east of the Mississippi." The volume's significant coverage of the Arkansas Post operation, which still lacks a definitive-scale treatment, adds even more value to Smith's in-depth study. Twenty maps supplement the text.

On a more whimsical note, I noticed that the board covering of this particular volume is an exact match of in-state rival Kansas State's purple school color. Perhaps there is an infiltrator in Kansas's production/design department.