Commemorative stamps preserve history of Civil War battles
How often do we look at the stamps we use on letters? Certainly less than in previous decades. With emails, texting and social media, the Postal Service has a dif cult task to keep the mail running.
Have you ever bought a block or page of commemorative stamps? They tell the story of American history in a delightful way. All of them are exquisite works of art in miniature form.
On May 23, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled two important stamps at the same time but over a thousand miles apart.
They commemorate the 150th anniversary battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Both unveilings were at the national parks dedicated to these events. The Gettysburg stamp represents part of the great cyclorama or huge mural that portrays the battle fought during July 1-3 in southern Pennsylvania.
It is arguably the most famous battle fought in the western hemisphere. The Vicksburg stamp was unveiled at the U.S.S. Cairo Museum in the national park. The Cairo was sunk while attempting to approach Vicksburg through the Yazoo swamp in December 1862. It was raised almost exactly 100 years later and today is the best-preserved Civil War-era combat vessel.
The stamp that was unveiled at Vicksburg is a miniature of a Currier and Ives lithograph print depicting the Mississippi Squadron running the Gauntlet on the night of April 16, 1863. This effort changed the siege, the fate of Vicksburg and, indeed, the Confederacy. There is no more tting image of this great endeavor or a more tting place to unveil it.
So, one might ask, “Why was it unveiled then and at that place?” One hundred and fty years ago, the bluffs above the museum had few trees. Of course, the monuments, the cemetery and the great, ironclad warship were not there. Tremendous numbers of guns lining the bluffs and the slopes down to the water’s edge looked down and out upon the great river.
Behind those bluffs, smoke rose and drifted about the landscape, and cries of anguish could be heard. On May 19 and again on May 22, two tremendous attacks by the Union Army were launched upon the Confederate lines guarding Fortress Vicksburg.
They failed. General Ulysses S. Grant met with his generals the night of the 22nd and decided Vicksburg could not be taken by storm.
Instead, Grant decided to besiege the city of a hundred hills.
The Union army engineers settled in to the task of building counter defenses. Other engineers began building sap trenches to approach the Confederate works and tunnel under them to destroy them with mines. This part of the Civil War began to resemble the siege warfare of the future World War I.
On the river, Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter and his mighty Mississippi Squadron had swept down the great river in 1862 and early 1863. Porter and his predecessors had, one by one, taken or neutralized every major Confederate fort and emplacement on the Mississippi north of Vicksburg.
They met with stiff resistance, and Mother Nature seemed to be pro- Confederate. Porter tried to approach Vicksburg through the Yazoo Swamp, and in doing this, he lost the U.S.S. Cairo to a mine. You can still see the hole that sank this powerful ironclad.
Grant’s siege lasted until July 4. The Confederates believed they would receive better terms if they surrendered on Independence Day. No one knew that, in a faraway battle eld in southern Pennsylvania during the three previous days, the Army of Northern Virginia met the Army of the Potomac in a great battle at Gettysburg.
The South had reached its high water mark. Never again would it go on the offensive in a large scale.
Dr. Gary Joiner is the Leonard and Mary Anne Selber Professor of History at LSUS, where he is also director of the Red River Regional Studies Center. Questions for “The History Doctor” may be addressed to editor@theforumnews.com.
