Impetus

By Ed Piper

The latest impetus for my energy toward the Civil War is our recent trip to Mississippi and Louisiana, which took us for 13 days to Vicksburg--my big reason for going--as well as Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans. I hadn't realized that New Orleans was a Civil War site, but it was, quickly taken over by Admiral David Farragut (who has a street named in his honor in Point Loma, not too far from us here in San Diego).

We drove the beautiful, and immense, 16-mile drive within the Vicksburg National Military Park our first full day in Vicksburg April 21. It was hot (84 degrees or more), and humid, which had me lagging and dragging as we got out of our rental car to walk up to the giant Illinois monument and other memorials within the park.

The Northerners really stuck it to the Southerners. Just by setting the immense area of this park aside as a national park in Southern territory says all it has to say--commemorating a Union victory that Southerners aren't about to celebrate.

Someone commented on this: There are a great number of monuments by Northern states who sent soldiers into the Siege of Vicksburg to defeat the "Gibraltar of the Confederacy" overlooking the strategic Mississippi River. The statues were paid for by the individual states. Can you imagine the response of the Southerners who had been Confederate supporters when all this activity took place to canonize the Northern heroes, right in the Condederacy's back yard?

It's right up there with the Union turning Robert E. Lee's home at Arlington into a Union cemetery. They started burying Union soldiers on the grounds, and eventually took over the whole place. Of course Robert E. Lee wasn't going to return to live there. Would you, with graves situated all around your house, and dedicated to the victory of the opposing side? Not a subtle move to stick it to the South.

I'm sure I'll expand on and detail more the places we saw on our Mississippi-Louisiana journey April 20-May 2, 2017.