The White Man's Siege, The Black Man's Seize
The first war ended in 1865; the second one still shapes how Southerners see suffering, loss, freedom, sacrifice, and the redemptive struggle for truth.
Image: Confederate General Lloyd Tilghman dies with flair. Monument at The Vicksburg National Military Park, Vicksburg, Mississippi. Source: Roadside America.
in Memory
The classroom on the first floor of Bowmar Avenue Elementary was small and bright, with chalk dust on the window sills and the faint, metallic smell of the radiators that clanked in winter. On its walls hung a map of the United States—its colors fading to a yellowed pink where Mississippi met Louisiana—and a print of Robert E. Lee on horseback, the general gazing nobly into an imagined distance. Beneath him, in block letters, someone had written “The South Shall Rise Again.” It was here, in this room, that we were first told the story of the siege of Vicksburg.
In the classrooms of that old river city, history was not studied; it was staged. It was not told as a story of war and slavery, nor of liberation. It was told as a story of faith.
We were told that even the enslaved hated the Yankees and prayed for the deliverance of their masters. The teacher, a thin woman with hair pinned tightly at the nape of her neck, said it as though she had seen it herself: “Even the slaves,” she said softly, “even they prayed.” It was recited not as rumor or folklore but as lesson—part of a civics unit titled “Our Heritage.” The tone was reverent, as if we were being initiated into a secret of endurance. The siege, we were told, had not been a reckoning but a test—a time when the people of Vicksburg had proved their nobility by suffering together, white and Black alike, under the same bombardment. That slaves had understood, in some deep and obedient way, that the cause of their bondage was also their home. It was told not as rumor, not as fable, but as fact. The lesson was repeated so often, with such solemn certainty, that it took on the weight of scripture.
Image: Siege of Vicksburg - Assault on Fort Hill, fighting between Union and Confederate forces on June 25th, 1863, at the 3rd Louisiana Redan, known as Fort Hill during the siege of Vicksburg. Artist: Thure de Thulstrup.
No one said it outright, but the meaning was clear enough to a child who listened closely: slavery had been unfortunate, yes—but it had also been affectionate, orderly, and somehow mutual. That was the catechism. And so what we were really being taught was not history at all. It was amnesia.
The myth of “shared suffering” was the Southern gospel of redemption—the Lost Cause rewritten for the classroom. Every town had its own version, but in Vicksburg, the myth carried special weight. For forty-seven days in 1863, the city had been starved into submission by Grant’s army. It fell on the Fourth of July, and for nearly a century afterward, the Fourth was not celebrated. The day itself had become a wound. The white people of Vicksburg remembered their defeat not as the fall of a slaveholding citadel but as an act of purification—a city sanctified by siege. Their suffering, they said, had made them righteous.
Image: The Mississippi State Memorial, the Vicksburg National Military Park, National Park Service, Photo/ L. Brewer.
That was the moral economy of the Lost Cause. Suffering became virtue. Defeat became proof of grace.
The city’s textbooks, courthouse speeches, and Sunday re-enactments all repeated the same refrain: the siege had revealed the South’s faith. The people of Vicksburg were not victims of their own political order; they were martyrs to endurance. The hunger that emptied their cellars became a parable of character. The loss that destroyed their city became the foundation of its pride.
And within that retelling, the enslaved could not be permitted to exist as human beings. They could appear only as loyal figures in the background—grateful, obedient, pious. The logic was simple and cruel. If the enslaved had prayed for their masters, then slavery could not have been evil; it must have been a family. The war, in that version, had not been about bondage at all, but about the defense of a beloved home.
This was the story white Mississippi told itself. And in our classrooms, it was told with such authority that to question it was to commit a kind of heresy.
We, the Black children in those rooms, knew better. We could feel the falseness of it, the way one feels a storm in the pressure of the air. The idea that our ancestors prayed for the Confederacy was absurd, but it was an absurdity we were required to repeat. To contradict it would have been an act of rebellion. So we recited the lines, passed the tests, nodded through the pageants—and carried the truth in silence.
That silence was its own education.
The Architecture of Memory
Image: Memorial markers overlooking the siege battlefield toward the Mississippi River. Vicksburg Mississippi.
Out on the edge of town, the Mississippi Memorial in the National Military Park—its bronze reliefs freezing heroism into permanence. Nearby, in Cedar Hill Cemetery, lay “Soldiers’ Rest,” where the Confederate dead lay in perfect rows, their names etched into silence.
Beyond the park, the plantations still stood in the city’s imagination. The old Davis estate—once home to Jefferson Davis and his brother, Joseph Emory Davis—rose just beyond the limits of town, its white columns gleaming through the trees. After the war, Joseph returned to his city home with his granddaughter, living out his last years as the Mississippi River shifted course and cut his grand lands off from the mainland. From the balcony of Anchuca, as the Choctaw said, his “happy home,” Jefferson Davis delivered one of his final public addresses in 1869 to townspeople who gathered below, mourning a cause already turning to legend. Time had not dismantled the stage; it had only changed its props. The same columns that framed his speech now frame weddings and weekend retreats, the old houses reborn as bed-and-breakfasts, their verandas draped with nostalgia, their gardens manicured to erase what once grew there. In Vicksburg, even commerce had learned to speak the language of reverence.
Enslaved people standing outside Hurricane Garden Cottage at Davis Bend, Joseph Davis’ plantation. Photograph from the J. Mack Moore Collection, Old Court House Museum, Vicksburg, MS.
Slave wedding at Hurricane Plantation. Photograph from the J. Mack Moore Collection, Old Court House Museum, Vicksburg, MS.
Exterior of the Vicksburg home of Joseph Davis, brother of Jefferson Davis, who gave his last public address on this balcony. Source: TripAdvisor.
Inside the classrooms, that same language was sanctified as fact. The Mississippi Textbook Purchasing Board still dictated what children could know. Even in the 1970s it banned any book that called slavery cruel or suggested that Black people had longed for freedom. A 1964 history text—used for more than a decade—described the enslaved as “faithful workers” and called Reconstruction “a time of Negro rule and white suffering.” The memorial in the park, the graves at Soldiers’ Rest, the restored Davis plantation, the textbook itself—none were separate acts of remembrance but parts of a single architecture of memory. The same faith that built the monument wrote the lesson plan.
Together they formed a system of belief: a regional catechism in marble and ink, in tour-guide scripts and classroom recitations. And in that system, history was not a record to be studied but a faith to be rehearsed—a South imagined whole, its sins absolved by sentiment, its monuments standing not for what was lost but for what it refused to see.
That was its true faith.
The Memory of Truth
Image: The author reclining on a replica cannon on a bluff overlooking a Mississippi River battlefield in Vicksburg. 1997.
And yet beneath that official story, other voices endured. In the 1930s, interviewers from the Works Progress Administration recorded the memories of the formerly enslaved. Those narratives told of flight and famine, of Union soldiers greeted as liberators, of starvation not in the caves beneath Vicksburg’s hills but in the slave quarters beyond them. Confederate diaries confirmed the rest: it was enslaved labor that built the fortifications, hauled the guns, cooked the food that fed the besieged. And when the city finally fell, thousands crossed into Union lines— not in confusion, not in loyalty, but in the certainty that the world that had owned them was ending.
That was the truth the Lost Cause could not bear.
To sustain white innocence, Southern educators had to construct a memory in which no one was guilty. If everyone had suffered together in 1863, then everyone could share the same civic identity a century later—no debt to pay, no reckoning to endure. The myth made history a solvent: it washed away crime, thinned out responsibility, left behind only sentiment.
But the cracks showed. We saw them. And in seeing, we learned something no textbook could teach—that in the South, history was not about the past. It was an instrument of power. It determined what could be mourned and what must be denied. It governed silence .
To call that story “cosplay” is not to mock it but to name it. It was a costume drama written to keep the defeated unrepentant and the oppressed compliant. The real story of Vicksburg—the one passed down in family memory—was different. Freedom did not come from cannons or caves. It was not given by those who claimed to suffer. It was taken by those who stopped praying for their masters’ deliverance, and began, instead, to work for their own.
Useful Sources
Ballard, Michael B. Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
https://uncpress.org/book/9780807871287/vicksburg/
Bearss, Edwin C. The Campaign for Vicksburg. 3 vols. Dayton, OH: Morningside House, 1985–1986.
“Black Soldiers Are Honored … at Vicksburg National Military Park.” Associated Press News, 2024.
https://apnews.com/article/72df46a6761c7b3504b1a5ebd3edb211
Dorsey Jr., Albert. “Vicksburg’s Troubles”: Black Participation in the Body Politic and Land Ownership in the Age of Redeemer Violence. PhD diss., Florida State University, October 29, 2012.
Downs, Jim. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sick-from-freedom-9780199758722
“The End of Reconstruction / The Vicksburg Massacre (1874).” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicksburg_massacre
Hermann, Janet Sharp. The Pursuit of a Dream: The Story of the Davis Bend Colony, 1865–1881. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1981 (Banner Books ed.).
https://upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-Pursuit-of-a-Dream
McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo5979308.html
“Mississippi Textbooks and Race.” Mississippi Encyclopedia.
https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/history-textbooks-and-race/
National Park Service. “African Americans at Vicksburg.”
https://www.nps.gov/vick/learn/historyculture/african-americans.htm
Old Court House Museum (Vicksburg). Manuscript Index – Civil War / Local Diaries.
https://oldcourthouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Manuscript-Index-Revised.pdf
Rawick, George P., ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Supplement Vol. 10, Mississippi Narratives. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977.
Redding, Saunders. The Lonesome Road: The Story of the Negro’s Past in America. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1958.
Silver, David M. “In the Eye of the Storm: Isaiah T. Montgomery and the Plight of Black Mississippians.” Honors Thesis, Amherst University, 1993.
Taylor, Amy Murrell. Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
https://uncpress.org/book/9781469643494/embattled-freedom/
Works Progress Administration. Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, Mississippi Narratives. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1936–1938.
I think I posted a couple of months the story of my own fifth grade history class, the text straight out of Owsley. It was not a southern school, I attended but a US military school. I didn't of course know Owsley then but I knew enough to know many of the text's claims were bogus.
Homer recreated the myth of fallen Mycenaeans and The fallen Judaeans in Persian captivity began recreating the myth that their teeny weeny city-state had once been greater Israel.
The fallen Romans recreated the myth of their fall to Barbaric Huns (johnny-come-latelys of the steppe hordes), not blonde, not blue-eyed and Rome the city had already fallen (possibly to blue-eyed invaders).
Opposed to Owsley is Meachum (another Vanderbiltian scholar) whose over-glorification of Lincoln appears to me just as made up.
The absurdity of the idea that Ben Franklin knew anything at all about the "Iroquois Confederacy" in 1754!
Maybe some Dutch from New York might have known a little, but by 1754 most of their relationship had been suspended. That is why in 1754 the Haudenosaunee could not have influenced Ben Franklin, the replacement of Dutch-protestant alliance with the Haudenosaunee was in complete disarray.
The Haudenosaunee at one time consisted of several other tribes that extended into the north, to the western historian notably the Huron but there were four other families that became absorbed into the western mind as part of the Huron, so there were 10 families (our term is tribe). The French in Quebec sene soldiers and missionaries and eventually the northern families (not necessarily all of the Individuals of course) had converted to Catholicism. To combat the threat of the northern Haudenosaunee who now became missionaries and militant combatants and the missionaries converted some of the Seneca and Cayuka which caused both intra-family conflict but severely alarmed the eastern three tribes and they allied with the Dutch but only as far as getting arms to combat against the Sneca and Cayuka tribes. While this was the Huron and the French decided they needed a buffer and they invited the Algonquin into the region between themselves and the southern tribes. The buffer allowed the southern families to prevail and form what we came to know as the Iroquois confederacy ( a language, not a people that included other Natives in Canada beyond the Haudenosaunee, but not the Algonoquin which spoke Anishinaabemowin also spoken by Objiway,Cree,Cheyenne, Blackfoot, et al.). Now this was occurring throughout most of the period in which Ben Franklin was supposedly modeling the Albany Convention on the Confederacy's organization. It did not yet exist so Franklin certainly couldn't have modeled or been influenced by a league that was not yet formulated. The eastern families, though led by the Mohawk, circa the late 1750's to around 1760-1761, did find a conduit with Konwatsi'ts (known to us as Molly Brant) who was the consort of a British governor in western New York and had eight children by him.Although a Mohawk, the father of her children William Johnson, was basically the British overseer of the lands where the Seneca and some of the Cayuka resided. She and her brother Joseph Brant (don't recall her brother's real name) were therefore able to bring the British proposal to the Seneca, and Cayuka, now isolated joined. The five nations as we now know them actually then began in 1761 when the five tribes agreed to the British proposal of alliance in 1761.
It was through Konwatsi'ts that two things occured, the first translation, or written Haudenosaunee, (which I learned to read) and our notions of the Confederacy. It is out of this that their and our notions of the Hiawatha legend is reset to a much earlier setting. Of course there was probably some notions of that legend from past traditions but probably included all ten families, since in the legend the Peacemaker is a Huron).
But why Americans would promote this idea that Franklin had modeled anything after the governing manner of the Haudenosaunee, remains baffling to me since their "democracy" was completely based of absolute agreement between the families and then between all of the Kanonhsésne (longhouses) within each family since Konwatsi'ts was a loyalist and moved to Canada and spent her last years amongst the Hurons.
Nevertheless this conception that the Confederacy governance somehow influenced the constitution is post-Morgan since no American knew anything whatsover amount Haudenosaunee culture or governance before them. In fact Morgan's work was ridiculed at first because when he first published it what everyone knew was the were savage tribes ruled by a chief who together met and decided the tribe's destiny and everyone had to follow. What everyone knew they didn't live in Kanonhsésne but wandered aimlessly in search of food and were mere hunter gatherers.
What everyone knew was what Jefferson wrote in his Notes that the five nations had no capacity four any kind of governance and so how in the hell could people with no capacity for governance have ever influenced the framers of the constitution?
Of course the Haudenosaunee was one of my prime studies in mythology(the development of) that I studied in college, and so now history tells us a false history.
History can be (shouldn't be) both an erasure and a reinvention. History should be an attempt not at promoting what one wants by attempting to obliterate the past and as I think I stated the last time it is both white and black history that america has tried to alter. The difference is even most whites know a deal more truth about the attempt to cover up black history, the conflict between the races is perpetuated because the whites almost unanimously have no idea how their own history both in America and Europe has been covered up.