SURRENDER!
July 4, 1863

Responding to Confederate pressure to try to save Vicksburg, Joe Johnston finally set out for the city on July 1. But by the time General Pemberton received his message to expect him on July 7, it was already too late.

PEMBERTON KNEW IT WAS THE END. He had received an anonymous letter, probably from his own troops (though this was never determined), that was signed “Many Soldiers,” telling him, “If you can’t feed us, you had better surrender us.” On July 2 he called his generals together to decide what to do. Their meager rations would run out in a few days. Doctors treating the sick and wounded had no more medicine. Because so many men were ill or injured, the 19,000 soldiers still in the trenches had to stay there all day and night, with no relief. They were too weak to fight well, and if the North launched an all-out attack, it would surely be a bloodbath. The generals also knew how much the townspeople were suffering.

Nobody wanted to give up. But was it right to continue in the face of such overwhelming odds? Was it fair to sacrifice more lives to a cause that now seemed hopeless?

At Champion’s Hill, General John Bowen led a counterattack that almost defeated the Federals.

Pemberton was painfully aware that he would be blamed for the loss of Vicksburg. The only way to salvage his reputation was to lead his soldiers in an attempt to break through the Union lines and unite with Johnston’s army to fight Grant and Sherman. “This is my only hope of saving myself from shame and disgrace,” he told his generals. But when they voted to surrender, Pemberton nodded in agreement, feeling he must “sacrifice myself to save the army which has so nobly done its duty to defend Vicksburg.” He said he would officially surrender the city on the Fourth of July.

Startled, his generals protested that doing so on America’s greatest holiday would be too humiliating for Southerners. Pemberton reminded them that he was a Northerner and knew the North’s “national vanity.” He said, “I know we can get better terms from them on the Fourth of July than on any other day of the year. We must sacrifice our pride to these considerations.”

In what must have been one of the hardest things he had ever done, Pemberton wrote to Grant, requesting that they meet to discuss Vicksburg’s surrender. He chose General John Bowen, who had fought valiantly at Champion’s Hill, to deliver this message. Bowen was thirty-two and prior to the war had been an architect in St. Louis, where he and Grant had been friends and neighbors. Bowen hoped their friendship might help in negotiating the terms of surrender.

Bowen was so ill with dysentery that to even get on his horse required all his strength. But the next morning, July 3, with an aide riding next to him holding a flag of truce, the young officer rode toward the Union lines. Soldiers saw the white flag and held their fire. For the first time in forty-seven days, the air was silent. Men in the trenches on both sides climbed out, met in the middle, and talked in hushed tones. Was this merely a break to bury the dead?

Or was it something else?

Riding slowly, the day’s heat and humidity already at suffocating intensity, Bowen reached Union headquarters and handed over Pemberton’s note. He asked to speak to Grant but was informed that the general would not see him, for he was not willing to discuss terms for the surrender. Grant held all the cards: Confederate deserters had confirmed that the Rebels were weak from starvation and could not hold out long. Grant’s all-out assault on July 6 would finish them off. But while Grant’s note back to Pemberton stated that he would only accept an unconditional surrender, he added that he would be willing to meet with Pemberton at three o’clock that afternoon.

This was something, at least, and Bowen rode back to deliver Grant’s message. Then, pale with pain, he turned around and headed back once again to the Union lines to announce Pemberton’s agreement. Shortly before three that afternoon, Bowen was by Pemberton’s side, along with one other officer, as they rode to a spot between the two camps to meet Grant. Men in gray and blue watched in silence. Pemberton was determined to get some concessions for his men. An unconditional surrender would send them all to Northern prison camps—and those vile places, so full of disease, were a death sentence just as surely as was remaining in the trenches at Vicksburg.

In the Union camp, thirteen-year-old Fred was so excited about the afternoon’s meeting that he could almost forget how sick he was. Though already miserable because of his leg wound and typhoid fever, Fred’s dysentery had gotten worse. “Dysentery had pulled me down from 110 pounds to sixty-eight pounds and I had a toothache as well,” Fred remembered. Sick or not, he wasn’t going to miss a moment of what was happening. At three o’clock, Grant’s delegation rode toward the appointed spot. “Soon,” Fred recalled, “a white flag appeared over the enemy’s works, and a party of Confederates was seen approaching … and General Grant met his opponent.”

Grant wrote of this meeting, “Pemberton and I had served in the same division during part of the Mexican War. I knew him well, therefore, and greeted him as an old acquaintance. He soon asked what terms I proposed to give his army if it surrendered. My answer was the same as proposed in my reply to his letter.” Pemberton stiffened. He said that unconditional surrender was not acceptable and that he and his men would resume fighting. Grant wrote, “Pemberton then said, rather snappishly, ‘The conference might as well end,’ and turned abruptly as if to leave. I said, ‘Very well.’”

But John Bowen, who was to die ten days later from his illness, stepped forward and convinced both parties to continue to talk. Though unstated, both sides knew that as long as Joe Johnston refused to fight, the North was assured of victory—yet a final battle would take many lives, both blue and gray. Some concessions by the North could end this now.

Pemberton and Grant talked informally while their respective staffs hammered out details of the surrender.

Grant agreed to let his staff and Pemberton’s discuss terms of the surrender while he and Pemberton moved to the shade of a tree, where they exchanged small talk. When the officers signaled that they were finished, Grant told Pemberton as they parted that he would offer his final terms that evening.

Back in their own camps, both generals called together their most trusted advisers. At his father’s side, Fred took in everything that was happening. He reported, “Father was immediately joined by the largest assemblage of generals and officers which I had ever seen—the heroes of the most brilliant campaign and siege recorded in the history of the world—deciding upon … the fate of their foes.”

Just as Pemberton had suspected, having Vicksburg officially surrender on the Fourth of July pleased the Union officers. And they were sympathetic to Pemberton’s request that the Confederate soldiers not be sent to prison. Every soldier dreaded the prisons, both North and South. Besides, transporting 30,000 men to prisons in the North would tie up trains, boats, and wagons needed elsewhere in the war effort.

Grant decided to offer Pemberton’s men parole—which required them to sign an oath of allegiance to the United States government and state that they would not fight again. He knew the risk was that they would go join Joe Johnston, but he believed that most of these battle-weary men would just go home. Though he might draw criticism in the North for being this generous, he had respect for these defenders of Vicksburg. He didn’t want to humiliate them. He also felt that they would be better citizens once the war was over if he treated them with some consideration now.

That evening, Grant sent Pemberton his final terms, which included the offer of parole. Then he waited for a reply. Fred was with his father. “I remained in the tent, sitting on my little cot, and feeling restless, but scarcely knowing why. Father sat at his writing table.” Fred tried to be quiet as his father “began to write very hard, and with great interest in what he was writing.” The minutes ticked by. When Fred thought he could stand it no longer, “at last there came an orderly with a dispatch.”

Fred held his breath. He watched as his father “opened it, gave a sigh of relief, and said calmly, ‘Vicksburg has surrendered.’ I was thus the first to hear the news officially, announcing the fall of the Gibraltar of America, and, filled with enthusiasm, I ran out to spread the glad tidings. Officers rapidly assembled and there was a general rejoicing.”

The forty-seven-day siege of Vicksburg was over.

IN VICKSBURG ITSELF that evening of July 3, a Confederate officer stopped by the Lords’ cave and told the family that General Bowen had gone to see Grant that day. Margaret Lord reported that everyone felt sick with anxiety and dread.

That same evening, Lucy, who knew nothing of what was happening, feared that the Yankees were preparing to storm the city. What else could the guns’ silence mean? Mosquitoes whined in the hot, muggy darkness. Lucy wrote, “All was quiet. People could be seen walking around, concluding that the silence meant dreadful things on the morrow.”

To her surprise, she saw her father, who had steadfastly refused to leave the family home, coming toward them. “We were all sitting outside the cave, twilight approaching, when Father came in sight,” Lucy remembered. “Mother thought Father had decided to die with his family the next day, for everybody thought that General Grant would make the effort of his life to take the city on the 4th. Father came to mother, looking sad, with tears in his eyes, and said, ‘You can all come home for a night’s rest. General Pemberton has surrendered, and General Grant will enter the city in the morning.’”

And so, Lucy said, “We went home.”

DR. LORD WAS OUT AND ABOUT in the city the next morning when he learned the news. He returned quickly to his family’s cave. Mrs. Lord recalled that he was “pale as death and with such a look of agony on his face as I would wish never to see again.” He told her, “Maggie, take the children home directly. The town is surrendered, and the Yankee army will enter at ten o’clock.”

“I was speechless with grief,” Mrs. Lord said. “No one spoke, even the poor children were silent, [and] all the weary way home I wept incessantly, meeting first one group of soldiers and then another, many of them with tears streaming down their faces.”

The family had not left the area around their cave for weeks. As they walked home, they looked at the defeated town—at the craters in the streets, the torn-up sidewalks, flattened shrubbery and gardens, broken windows, and badly damaged or destroyed homes and businesses. Spent shells covered the ground. They were glad to see that the grand courthouse had suffered little damage, perhaps because captured Union officers had been held prisoner there, and when word of this had reached Admiral Porter, he made certain his cannon avoided it.

Finally the Lords made it to their home. Willie’s mother never forgot it. “Such a scene of desolation you can hardly imagine … every room in the house injured and scarcely a window left whole.”

More bad news awaited the family. They soon learned that everything they had stored at the Flowers plantation outside Vicksburg—furniture, other valuables, and Dr. Lord’s vast collection of books—was lost. Willie reflected that had their possessions been stored in the church cellar, they probably would have been all right. Instead, one of Flowers’ slaves later told the family how camp followers broke into the house and destroyed everything they couldn’t carry with them. As for Dr. Lord’s treasured books—Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, and more—a sad fate had befallen them.

“A huge plantation wagon was loaded with my father’s invaluable library … and the contents were scattered upon the muddy road between the Flowers plantation and the Big Black River, so that for a mile and a half, as we were told, one might have walked on books.”

When Rebel soldiers surrendered their arms, Union soldiers watched respectfully.

AT TEN O’CLOCK on the morning of July 4, 1863, Confederate soldiers lined up, saluted the Confederate flag, and laid down their guns. Union soldiers, flush with victory, could have jeered. But none did. They stood by their trenches in silence, watching the thin, worn-out Rebels who had fought well and suffered gravely. Then one of the Northern boys started to clap. A few others joined in, and then more and more, until all up and down the line could be heard clapping, and then shouting, in recognition of a brave foe. At the tops of their voices, the boys in blue cheered themselves hoarse for the boys in gray. Breaking line, they came over to shake hands and to press food upon these defenders of Vicksburg who were enemies no more.

IN TOWN, in front of their damaged home, Lucy and her brothers and parents watched the Confederate soldiers gathering for the formal surrender. Lucy wrote, “How sad was the spectacle that met our gaze; arms stacked in the center on the streets; men with tearful eyes and downcast faces walking here and there; men sitting in groups feeling that they would gladly have given their life-blood on the battlefield rather than hand over the guns and sabers so dear to them!”

Lucy watched as “the drummer-boy of a Tennessee regiment, rather than give up his drum, gave it to my brother, but it was very soon taken away from him … The instruments of the band of the Tennessee regiment were stacked in the middle of the street. Men looked so forlorn, some without any shoes, some with tattered garments, yet they would have fought on.”

Like everyone in Vicksburg, she knew the town could not have held out much longer. Still, she reported, “men felt very bitterly toward General Pemberton because they were so determined that the place should not be taken on the Fourth and never dreamed that a surrender was ever thought of.”

In 1865, when this photograph was taken, the Stars and Stripes had been flying over the Vicksburg courthouse for nearly two years, a painful sight for many in the city.

As townspeople watched, most from behind the curtains of their homes, they saw several units of Grant’s army march into town accompanied by a band playing Northern patriotic songs. In her badly damaged house, Willie’s mother reported, “You can imagine our feelings when the US Army entered, their banners flying and their hateful tunes sounding in our ears … You may be sure none of us raised our eyes to see the flag of the enemy in the place where our own had so proudly and defiantly waved so long.”

The Union soldiers had waited for this moment when they would see their flag flying atop the grand courthouse. As they watched the Stars and Stripes replace the Confederate flag, they stood at attention and saluted with pride.

Then, just as the men who fought in the trenches had done, Union soldiers broke line and shared whatever they had with the Confederates. Grant arrived in the city a short time later and observed, “Our men had had full rations from the time the siege commenced, to the close. The enemy had been suffering, particularly towards the last. I myself saw our men taking bread from their haversacks, and giving it to the enemy they had so recently been engaged in starving out. It was accepted with … thanks.”

Missouri was split in its support of the war and had troops fighting on both sides at Vicksburg. A Union captain from Hannibal, Missouri, recalled one particular incident that day in Vicksburg that he would never forget. One of his young soldiers had a brother in the Rebel army at Vicksburg. In town, the brothers spotted each other and fell out of ranks. Wrapping their arms around each other’s waists, they walked together, one strong, in a fresh blue uniform, the other thin and weak, dressed in gray rags.

Union doctors set to work helping Confederate doctors with the sick and injured. Grant ordered that flour, coffee, sugar, tea, bacon, and other rations be distributed to townspeople, which drew them out of their homes and caves, in spite of their despair over what had happened. Then Grant went to the docks to personally greet Admiral Porter, who was bringing in all of his gunboats, rams, and transports to share the day’s triumph. The two men grinned and firmly shook hands as they congratulated each other.

Over a year after Union officers first demanded the surrender of Vicksburg, the guns overlooking the Mississippi River were finally silent.