July 4, 1863---The 87th U.S. Independence Day: Lee retreats; Vicksburg surrenders; the Rebels abandon Middle Tennessee

JULY 4, 1863:   

On the United States’ 87^th Independence Day:

General William Rosecrans U.S.A. commanding the Army of the Cumberland, drives the Confederate Army of Tennessee, commanded by Braxton Bragg C.S.A. out of Middle Tennessee, securing it for the Union. The Confederates hover just around Lookout Mountain, Georgia. Abraham Lincoln wrote of the Tullahoma Campaign, which cost only 569 Union casualties and “trifling” Confederate ones, "The flanking of Bragg at Shelbyville, Tullahoma and Chattanooga is the most splendid piece of strategy I know of."  

General Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia begin a slow and painful retreat from Gettysburg. It would take ten days to reach and cross the Potomac River into Virginia.  The weather, which had been viciously hot for the three days of the battle, changed suddenly as a cold front came through, pelting the battered army with icy pelting rain, hail and violent winds. This turned the dusty roads to muddy muck and made marching treacherous, particularly around South Mountain. Wagons and tired troops bogged down and were abandoned. Almost 7,000 of Lee’s wounded were left in Gettysburg in hopes that Union doctors would treat them. Others were left on the roadsides to the care of civilians. Lee’s hospital train was 19 miles long.

The Army of The Potomac pursued Lee’s troops, but by a circuitous route that had not been rendered impassable by thousands of marching feet and wagon wheels; Union attacks occurred at Fairfield, Monterey Pass, Smithsburg, Hagerstown, Boonsboro, Funkstown, and around Williamsport and Falling Waters.  At Greencastle, the army was attacked by axe-wielding civilians who chopped at the wagon train. These actions cost the Army of Northern Virginia at least 5,000 more casualties.

By the time Lee reached the Potomac, the rains (which had been ongoing for days) had caused the Potomac River to rise, washing out the bridges. As Lee began construction of a new pontoon bridge, a mass of Union troops appeared in his front.  In the skirmishing that followed, General J. Johnston Pettigrew C.S.A. was killed. Rather than launching an all-out attack, though, the Union began to entrench, as if for a long engagement. Lee sneered, “They have not much courage!” but it is notable that he did not attack them either. Rather, he and his battered army slipped across the new Potomac pontoon bridge they’d built, overnight on the 14th, in heavy rains, and escaped into Virginia.

As Lee prepared to withdraw from Maryland on July 3rd, General John C. Pemberton C.S.A., commanding the Vicksburg garrison a thousand miles away, sent a note to Ulysses S. Grant, asking for terms of surrender after 46 days of siege. Grant, as was his wont, first demanded unconditional surrender, but then reconsidered, not wanting to feed 30,000 starving Confederates in Union prison camps. Instead, he offered to parole all prisoners. Considering their destitute state, dejected and starving, Grant hoped they would carry home the stigma of defeat to the rest of the Confederacy. In any event, managing this army-sized surrender would have occupied his men full-time and taken months to manage. In the meantime, Grant’s army would be unable to fight.

As it turned out, most of the men who were paroled were back in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by September and some fought in the Battles for Chattanooga in November and against Sherman's invasion of Georgia in May 1864. This mass violation of Honor Parole by the Confederacy ended all further prisoner exchanges during the war except for hardship cases.

The surrender was finalized on July 4^th because Pemberton hoped that the appeal to patriotism would bring more sympathetic terms from the United States. Tradition allegedly holds that the Fourth of July holiday was not celebrated by municipal Vicksburg until World War II; however large private Fourth of July celebrations began again as early as 1907.

The surrender was formalized by an old oak tree, "made historical by the event." In his Personal Memoirs, Grant described the fate of this luckless tree: “It was but a short time before the last vestige of its body, root and limb had disappeared, the fragments taken as trophies. Since then the same tree has furnished as many cords of wood, in the shape of trophies, as the 'True Cross'.”

“The Gibraltar of The South” was gone. The surrender of Vicksburg cut the Confederacy in half, isolating all units to the west of the Mississippi River. As the news of the surrender clacked into the White House telegraph office, an exultant Lincoln, having just gotten word of the victory at Gettysburg, is reputed to have said: "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea."

July 1863 was the midpoint of the war not just chronologically but militarily. With Lee’s defeat, Bragg’s retreat and Pemberton’s surrender, the course of the war changed irrevocably in favor of the United States.