There is a place about midway between Jackson and Vicksburg Mississippi known as Champions Hill. Even today it is a remote spot that would only be known to the few people who live in the area if not for an event that happened exactly 150 years ago today. For on that hill,on that day -May 16, 1863- the decisive battle of the decisive campaign of the American Civil War was fought. And yet, this pivotal battle falls into obscurity when compared to many other Civil War battles such as Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and the Wilderness. At Champions Hill there is no visitor center, no tour guides, no sea of historic markers and monuments that are found at the sites of the most famous Civil War Battles. Instead there are just a few scattered historic markers that provide the only clues to the Death Cage Match between two armies that took place on this otherwise unremarkable Hill. (There is a substantial National Military Park along the May 19 - July 4 siege lines around Vicksburg but the outcome of the campaign was decided by the time the Northern Army reached the outskirts of Vicksburg.)
This diary is not about the details of a Civil War battle; an excellent book on the Battle of Champions Hill can be found here. Suffice it to say that 1) the major victory achieved by the Northern Army under General Grant that day could easily have gone the other way and 2) if the battle had gone the other way Ulysses S. Grant's campaign to capture Vicksburg would have likely ended in failure and, as a result, the South might well have won its bid to establish a Slave Empire from sea to shining sea.
Why was the capture of Vicksburg, MS so important? The reason is that the bluffs upon which Vicksburg sat gave the Confederates the ability to block all commerce along the Mississippi River. The loss of the principle outlet for the products of the Midwestern States was a great hardship to the entire economy of the region. With the South controlling access to the Gulf of Mexico there was a real chance that the Midwestern states would make a separate peace with the Confederacy in exchange for a reopening of the Mississippi River to commerce. This was one of Lincoln's greatest fears. If, however, Grant's Army could take Vicksburg and open the Mississippi for commerce the political situation would change in favor of the North. For if the South won it's independence the Midwest would then find its vital commercial outlet reverting to the control of a very hostile Confederate States of America. Capturing Vicksburg would thus give the Midwest every incentive to fight to bitter end (see Georgia, March Through) to crush the Confederacy.
The purpose of this diary is to explore why there is often a disconnect between the importance of an event in history and the degree of remembrance of that event. No better example of this conundrum exists in American history than the collective lack of memory of the Western Theatre of the Civil War in general and the Battle of Champions Hill in particular.
Once explanation of the conundrum is the attention paid to an event in this country being inversely proportional to its distance from the Boston-New York-DC axis. It was as true then as it is now. We see the syndrome in the inordinate attention paid to the New York sports teams (how much have you heard about Jeremy Lin since he was signed by Houston?) to the relative attention paid to Chris Christie of New Jersey as compared to Brian Schweitzer of Montana or Sherrod Brown of Ohio.
There is also the tendency of people to assign importance to an event in proportion to its cost independent of the actual results. The famous Eastern battles of the Civil War mentioned above were largely indecisive slaughters that presaged the even larger indecisive slaughters of the First World War. In contrast, the Union Armies of the West were able to crush the rebellion in the vast territory between the Mississippi River and the Appalachians with fewer casualties than the Northern Army of the Potomac incurred in more than three years of fighting in an area that was largely confined to a one hundred mile corridor between DC and Richmond.
Another reason for the disconnect between importance and remembrance of the Western battles is the political soap opera that played out between Lincoln Administration and the leadership on the North's main Eastern force, the Army of the Potomac. The fascination that historians have with the many interpersonal conflicts surrounding the frustrating attempts of the AOTP to subdue Lee's Army is nicely echoed by the often personality and horse race driven coverage of government and policy by publications such as POLITICO and programs such as Hardball. In the West the personality conflicts were largely on the Confederate side but,not surprisingly, the Southern remembrance of the Civil War focuses more on the successes of its Eastern armies over comparatively mediocre performance of its Western Armies. The North's Western Armies were comparatively drama free partly because of being geographically removed from DC and thus had fewer distractions from actually fighting and winning a war. Thus it can be said that the success and the relative obscurity of the Union's Western Armies is strangely intertwined.
The significance of The Champions Hill battle is also obscured by it being part of a larger series of marches, river crossings, and smaller battles that constituted Grant's truly brilliant Vicksburg Campaign. Champions Hill owes its special importance as the best opportunity of the campaign for the Confederates to defeat Grant and make his campaign end in failure yet Champions Hill was not the only crucial event in the Spring of 1863 that broke the Confederate grip on the Mississippi River.
The essential contribution to victory of the Union's Western Armies is also obscured by the fact that subduing such a vast area required a long series of victories and not a single dramatic victory. Much of the North was fixated on capturing the Confederate Capitol of Richmond,VA as the surest route to putting down the rebellion and could readily measure the success (or mostly lack of success) of the war in the East by the progress toward that singular goal. Victory in the West required the Northern Armies to make a sustained effort to seize a series of far flung Confederate strongpoints from Fort Donelson and Corinth (1862), to Vicksburg and Chattanooga (1863), and to Atlanta and Savannah (1864). Collectively these Union accomplishments represent a historic high point of American Military Art yet their very number tends to make it difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the overall accomplishment.
So let us take a brief moment to recognize the essential yet far from certain victory of the forces of Freedom over the forces of the Slave Power that May day on a Hillside in the middle of Mississippi. Let the Battle of Champions Hill stand as a prime example that man's historical memory is imperfect and that sometimes the most important events can be all but forgotten even by those who live very much in the shadow of those events.