Mule steak and dressed rat

The fall of Vicksburg was a turning point in the American civil warNOT a dog barked at us, not a cat shied round a corner. Poor things, they had all been eaten in the straitness of the siege. The eyewitness was a Yankee chaplain with the Federal Army when on Independence Day, July 4th 1863, it entered Vicksburg, the previously impregnable town that commanded the Mississippi River. The fall of the so-called Gibraltar of the West hastened the end of the American civil war by cleaving the Confederacy in two and cutting its supplies of grain, livestock, munitions and men. Civil-war buffs will be most interested in Winston Grooms contribution to the contentious debate on whether General Joseph Johnston, the Confederate commander in the West, could and should have done more to relieve the defender of Vicksburg, General John Pemberton. Others will be struck more by the archaic nature of the Vicksburg campaign. The tactics of the besiegers and the sufferings of the besieged bring to mind medieval, or even Roman, times rather than mid-19th-century America. ...