Booknotes: Confederate Gibraltar

New Arrival:

• Confederate Gibraltar: The Vicksburg Campaign from the Fall of New Orleans to the Battles in the Bayou by Matt Atkinson (Savas Beatie, 2026).

Some Civil War campaigns are so long in duration, complicated in their dimensions, and full of battles of various sizes that the standard single-volume overview treatment of the kind we've come to expect from the ECW series won't cut it. Currently, we are in the middle of a multi-volume 1864-65 Richmond-Petersburg Campaign series from Sean Chick, and the ECW crew has now moved out west with the first of three planned Vicksburg Campaign volumes from Matt Atkinson.

The subtitle of Atkinson's Confederate Gibraltar: The Vicksburg Campaign from the Fall of New Orleans to the Battles in the Bayou makes it clear enough as to what events are covered in the first volume. Of course, every Vicksburg study recognizes the fact that Grant's campaign as it unfolded would not have been possible without the benefits of the naval supremacy placed at his disposal.

Another major theme explored in the volume is its terrain challenges. From the description: Arrayed against Union army and naval forces were "Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton and his Confederate army and perhaps an even more formidable opponent—the terrain. That part of Mississippi, riddled with alluvial lowlands, malarial swamps and canebrakes, woods, deep bayous, and steep ridges presented high-water floods and low-water navigation hazards." As recounted in the book, federal combined operations "spent months probing, maneuvering, bombarding, assaulting, and even digging in their effort to find a way to reach the nearly unreachable Confederate Gibraltar."

The volume ends with Grant's initial crossing of the Mississippi River below Vicksburg. Four maps support the text, and the volume features a dense collection of illustrations as well as period and modern photographs (an ECW series staple). There is also a single appendix consisting of contributor John Castaldo's review of the Yazoo River sinking of the ironclad U.S.S. Cairo.

On a related note, in his foreword to the book Timothy Smith mentions that Atkinson's master's thesis was on Chickasaw Bayou. Perhaps he can be prevailed upon to produce the first standalone study of that battle. I would definitely be interested in something like that.