Review - "The Inland Campaign for Vicksburg: Five Battles in Seventeen Days, May 1-17, 1863" by Timothy Smith

[The Inland Campaign for Vicksburg: Five Battles in Seventeen Days, May 1-17, 1863 by Timothy B. Smith (University Press of Kansas, 2024). Hardcover, 22 maps, photos, illustrations, orders of battle, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxvi,385/557. ISBN:978-0-7006-3655-6. $54.99]

Written and published in non-chronological sequence between 2020 and 2024, Timothy Smith's masterful five-volume history of the long and winding 1862-63 Vicksburg Campaign has come to an end with the release of the middle installment The Inland Campaign for Vicksburg: Five Battles in Seventeen Days, May 1-17, 1863¹. The series certainly concludes with a bang, as the two and a half week interval addressed in the book encompasses the most consequential and combat-intensive period of the entire eight-month land and naval contest for possession of the western theater's Confederate Gibraltar.

Smith begins with the first moves that followed the unopposed landing on the Mississippi shore at Bruinsburg of the leading elements of Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Tennessee. Immediately striking inland, John C. McClernand's four-division Thirteenth Corps, soon trailed by a pair of divisions from James B. McPherson's Seventeenth Corps. As was the situation with McPherson's third division, the entirety of William T. Sherman's Fifteenth Corps remained on the other side of the Mississippi guarding key points in Grant's rear and, in Sherman's case, keeping up appearances of a possible landing north of the city. Deprived of a cavalry screen of their own on the ill-timed and ill-conceived orders of Confederate theater commander Joseph E. Johnston and much distracted by Grierson's Raid to the east, the often blind defenders were scattered across central Mississippi's military chessboard. Over the ensuing seventeen days, Grant would aggressively maintain the initiative against a hesitant and confused opponent, employing local superiority at the point of attack against detachments of John C. Pemberton's army at every turn. The result was comprehensive defeat for the Confederates over a series of battles fought at Port Gibson, Raymond, Jackson, Champion Hill, and Big Black River Bridge.

Though those five connected battles have been strongly detailed inside a number of previous books (most notably Ed Bearss's classic Vicksburg Campaign trilogy) and essays, standalone full-length histories of them are limited to Smith's own 2004 Champion Hill study and Battle of Jackson titles from Chris Mackowski in 2022 and co-authors Bearss and Warren Grabau in 1981 (and even the last shares space with the later Jackson siege and some other regional events). In the preface, Smith is quick to disclose upfront that this book is designed to be an operational-scale history and analysis of the campaign (with maps of corresponding scale), and that readers should know from the start that this narrative will not provide text and map treatments of each battle on the small-unit tactical levels of those found in Smith's earlier Champion Hill book or in the similar style of other battle micro-histories from the likes of Earl Hess, David Powell, and others.

But what a smart and insightful operational history this is. The pros and cons of each critical decision made (or not made) by Grant and Pemberton are carefully weighed by Smith, and logistical concerns are always accorded their full and proper context and significance. The narrative is marked by the heavy contrast in levels of operational thinking and skill the veteran campaigner Grant and the comparatively untested Pemberton displayed. At every turn, the former sought opportunity to seize and maintain initiative and tempo. As demonstrated by his mobile army's almost seamless changes in front, direction of movement, and operational objective as opportunity arose and circumstances allowed, Grant's flexibility along with the ability and willingness of his subordinates to promptly carry out his directives consistently resulted in his formations being in line where and when he wanted them.

On the other side, Pemberton, caught between incompatible directives from President Jefferson Davis and immediate superior Johnston, maintained his headquarters too far away from the front to adequately respond to the accelerating pace of events, and he was indecisive with the limited information he did get. When Pemberton did finally react to Grant's inland advances with intercepting movements of his own, they were marked by rampant command confusion, poor staff work, and lack of coordination. Earlier in the series, Smith presented a compelling command portrait of Pemberton as a desk general who could effectively manage slow-developing events but was easily overwhelmed by those requiring a series of quick decisions from incomplete information. What happened over the first half of May 1863, as recounted in this book, definitively buttresses that keen assessment of Pemberton's fatal limitations as a field general.

Smith's lasering in on the role of logistics in Grant's inland campaign is proper, deeply considered, and also insightful as to what might have been had the Confederates responded better. While Grant handled his army's precarious logistical tail with the same attention and skill that he gave to his army's marching orders and fighting, he was always under the gun when it came to supply. As the book explains, the long Union supply line back across the Mississippi and up its right bank to depots at Milliken's Band and beyond could be supplemented by organized foraging, but there were clear limits as to the quantities of local foodstuffs and animal forage what could be obtained. Like all large-scale expeditions highly dependent on foraging, Grant's army had to stay on the move to keep from starving. Though undoubtedly anxious, Grant demonstrated the same calmness over his logistical problems that he did under fire. A key turning point described in the book is the post-Port Gibson operational pause inside the protective cul de sac formed by the Big Black River, Mississippi River, and Bayou Pierre, during which Grant was able to accumulate, under no pressure from Pemberton's entirely defensive stance, the minimum amount of supplies that would enable him to hazard the subsequent leap into the unknown that paid off in spades. In the end, as revealed through an abundance of sources (from top to bottom) raising the same concerns, the campaign between Bruinsburg and Vicksburg was a close run thing in terms of supplies and, as Smith argues, any additional delay (such as Johnston holding on for a day or two longer in Jackson, or Pemberton maintaining his preferred defensive line across the Big Black River's opposite bank) would have made Grant's food situation fast approach critical levels. A strong case could be made, as Smith does, that Pemberton did not even need to defeat Grant militarily in the Mississippi interior, he just had to maintain his own position until dwindling supplies and the exhausted countryside forced Grant to make a very difficult decision as to the further direction of the campaign.

However, all of this is not to say that the book is lacking in matters of tactical-level discussion. There is about as much of that detail as could be expected to fit inside just under four-hundred pages of narrative. The closest comparison is with the corresponding battle sections of the Bearss trilogy, with Smith's more modern accounts of those events much further enriched through incorporation of participant accounts gleaned from the author's extensive manuscript research. There is small-unit detail present in Smith's collection of battle narratives, but it is selectively focused on the most noteworthy battlefield moments rather than applied generally throughout. In interpreting the May battles, the book does not offer startling departures from current mainstream understanding, but the overviews are first class. There is perhaps some evidence of evolved thinking in regard to Champion Hill, of which Smith is the leading expert. For example, compared to what he wrote twenty years ago, Smith's pared down to essentials version of the battle in this study seems a bit more critical of McClernand and leading division commander Peter Osterhaus's Middle Road passivity in the face of desperate fighting that was raging just a short distance away.

Timothy Smith's The Inland Campaign for Vicksburg wraps up a truly epic campaign history series project, an instant classic that will undoubtedly stand the test of time. When added to Smith's other similarly authoritative works on the Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, and (both) Corinth campaigns, the continuity that emerges represents what is essentially a western theater mega-series tracing the rise of Grant in the West and, more generally, the first half of the war in the Mississippi River Valley corridor², an eighteen-month series of operations that proved critical to Union victory and equally disastrous to future Confederate fortunes. Coming from a single author, there's really nothing quite like it in the Civil War literature.

Notes:
1 - Below is a list of the series volumes with links to their CWBA reviews:
• Volume 1 - Early Struggles for Vicksburg: The Mississippi Central Campaign and Chickasaw Bayou, October 25-December 31, 1862 (2022)
• Volume 2 - Bayou Battles for Vicksburg: The Swamp and River Expeditions, January 1 - April 30, 1863 (2023)
• Volume 3 - The Inland Campaign for Vicksburg: Five Battles in Seventeen Days, May 1-17, 1863 (2024)
• Volume 4 - The Union Assaults at Vicksburg: Grant Attacks Pemberton, May 17–22, 1863 (2020)
• Volume 5 - The Siege of Vicksburg: Climax of the Campaign to Open the Mississippi River, May 23-July 4, 1863 (2021)
2 - Of course, it can only be considered a series in hindsight, so there are gaps such as the campaign for Island No. 10.