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Top Attractions in Vicksburg

Big Black River Railroad Bridge

Big Black River Railroad Bridge is a 465 feet (142 m)long concrete open-spandrel arch bridge over the Big Black River built in 1917 near Bovina, Mississippi. It spans the river between Warren County and Hinds County; the nearest settlements are Bovina (in Warren) and Edwards, Mississippi (in HInds). It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. According to its listing in the Mississippi Historic Bridge Survey in 1988, It is significant as the largest and "most impressive" concrete open-spandrel bridge in Mississippi (out of just two in the state). Open-spandrel concrete arch bridges were built in the early 1900s in areas where concrete was not too expensive relative to alternatives and where the span would be sufficiently high so that the arch could span the requisite distance. (Truss bridges can be built lower.)

Davis Island

Davis Island is a large island located in the Mississippi River. It lies mostly in Warren County in the state of Mississippi but is also partly in Madison Parish, in the state of Louisiana. It is located about 20 miles southwest of Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA. The island is approximately 30,000 acres in size depending on the level of the Mississippi River. It was formerly a peninsula known as Davis Bend, with an eleven-thousand acre area of rich bottomlands, bounded on three sides by the Mississippi River. Before the American Civil War, Joseph Davis developed his Hurricane Plantation for cotton production on the peninsula. He worked to develop a model slave community, providing more autonomy to his slaves, for instance allowing them to keep a certain portion of monies they earned. He bought the land in 1818. He gave the adjoining property of Brierfield Plantation to his much younger brother Jefferson Davis, helping him get started in the 1830s. Jefferson Davis later was elected as the President of the Confederate States of America. The peninsula was separated from the mainland by a shift in the river in March 1867, after which it was an island accessible only by water. After the war, Davis provided a mortgage to Benjamin Montgomery, his former slave who had managed his plantation, and other freedmen to acquire both plantations. They operated them for several years, but declining cotton prices, economic hard times in the financial panic, and the repeated flooding caused failure. Montgomery descendants and others moved off the island to higher ground. In 1878 Jefferson Davis regained possession of his Brierfield plantation from the heirs of his brother. He never lived at the plantation again; both he and other Davis family members leased the properties to tenant farmers. Following the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which inundated nearly 30,000 square miles, the US Army Corps of Engineers raised the height of the levees to try to prevent such damage in the future. This had the unintended consequence of increasing the severity of flooding of the island. It has been underwater more than once. The Davis family finally sold the properties in 1953, and the private Brierfield Hunting Club has controlled most of the island since then. Access is only by water.

Brierfield Plantation

Brierfield Plantation was a cotton plantation located in Davis Bend, Mississippi, south of Vicksburg and the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. The more than 1,000 acre plantation was given to Davis by his much older brother, Joseph E. Davis , and had previously been a part of Joseph Davis's much larger Hurricane plantation which it adjoined on a bend of the Mississippi River twenty miles from Vicksburg. With financial assistance and slaves given by his brother, Jefferson Davis became a successful planter on the acreage following his brief first marriage to Sarah Knox Taylor (who died of malaria a few months after their wedding); after his second marriage to Varina Banks Howell in 1845, Davis erected a large comfortable frame house on the property that was home to himself, his wife, their children, as well as Davis's widowed sister and other relatives. Brierfield had very profitable years as well as years of disastrous flooding, but generally provided a very comfortable living to subsidize his relatively modest earnings from public office. Davis left the plantation for large periods of time including during his term in the House of Representatives, his service in the Mexican-American War, his terms in the Senate, and his four years as Secretary of War in the Franklin Pierce Administration. He considered Brierfield his primary residence and it was the home to which he returned when not in office and to which he returned upon his resignation from the United States Senate following the Secession of Mississippi in 1861. His return to Brierfield was very brief as he was soon notified, while tending the flower gardens of the house with his wife he would recall, that he had been chosen as president of the newly formed Confederate States of America and was summoned to Montgomery, Alabama, the Confederacy's first capitol. Davis did not visit Brierfield during his tenure as Confederate president. The plantation, along with Hurricane, began to be pilfered by Union troops and deserters soon after the fall of New Orleans in 1862, with many of the more than 200 slaves who lived on the plantation in 1860 fleeing from the advancing armies. Much of the family's personal property was crated and shipped from the house for safekeeping, though most was left behind and looted when Union forces officially seized and occupied the property during the undefended Vicksburg campaign. Unlike the far larger and finer mansion of Joseph Davis at the adjoining Hurricane Plantation, which was burned to the ground, the house at Brierfield was spared the torch and used as, consecutively, field headquarters, a hospital, and a supply house for Union troops during the Mississippi campaigns. A photograph of the occupied house bearing the banner "The House Jeff Built" was widely circulated in newspapers. When Jefferson Davis and his family visited the property after his release from prison in 1867 they found the fields neglected and the house unlivable. Joseph Davis, who had never given Jefferson Davis title to the property, negotiated its sale after the war on a mortgage to members of the Montgomery family, former Davis family slaves, bequeathing the income from the mortgage, but not the real estate, to Jefferson in his will. The Montgomery family defaulted on the mortgage after Joseph Davis's death and the property reverted to his estate. The heirs to Joseph Davis's Hurricane plantation claimed ownership of the reverted Brierfield as well, a claim disputed by Jefferson Davis, resulting in a lengthy lawsuit that was ultimately decided in Jefferson Davis's favor in 1881, giving him undisputed title to the Brierfield property for the first time more than forty years after he first settled the plantation. Though his primary residence in the final decade of his life was at Beauvoir (the house and farm he had inherited near Biloxi), Jefferson Davis spent much of the remaining years of his life attempting to make Brierfield profitable again, though fluctuating cotton prices and floods and the price of free versus enslaved labor combined to deprive him of the fortunes the land had once provided. He was in residence at Brierfield in autumn of 1889 seeing to harvest when a lingering cold developed into pneumonia and he had to be physically carried onto a riverboat bound for New Orleans to receive medical attention; he died a few weeks later. After Jefferson Davis's death, his widow and surviving children left Mississippi and none of his descendants ever resided at Brierfield again. The house was destroyed by fire in 1931. A drainage canal converted what had been a peninsula into the Mississippi River into an island. Some of the family's belongings that were taken from the house by troops were returned to the Davis family over the following decades and may now be found at various museums associated with the Davis family and the Civil War.

Vicksburg Campaign

The Vicksburg Campaign was a series of maneuvers and battles in the Western Theater of the American Civil War directed against Vicksburg, Mississippi, a fortress city that dominated the last Confederate-controlled section of the Mississippi River. The Union Army of the Tennessee under Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant gained control of the river by capturing this stronghold and defeating Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton's forces stationed there. The campaign consisted of many important naval operations, troop maneuvers, failed initiatives, and eleven distinct battles from December 26, 1862, to July 4, 1863. Military historians divide the campaign into two formal phases: Operations Against Vicksburg and Grant's Operations Against Vicksburg . Grant initially planned a two-pronged approach in which half of his army, under Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, would advance to the Yazoo River and attempt to reach Vicksburg from the northeast, while Grant took the remainder of the army down the Mississippi Central Railroad. Both of these initiatives failed. Grant conducted a number of "experiments" or expeditions—Grant's Bayou Operations—that attempted to enable waterborne access to the Mississippi south of Vicksburg's artillery batteries. All five of these initiatives failed as well. Finally, Union gunboats and troop transport boats ran the batteries at Vicksburg and met up with Grant's men who had marched overland in Louisiana. On April 29 and April 30, 1863, Grant's army crossed the Mississippi and landed at Bruinsburg, Mississippi. An elaborate series of demonstrations and diversions fooled the Confederates and the landings occurred without opposition. Over the next 17 days, Grant maneuvered his army inland and won five battles, captured the state capital of Jackson, Mississippi, and assaulted and laid siege to Vicksburg. After Pemberton's army surrendered on July 4 (one day after the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg), and when Port Hudson surrendered to Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks on July 9, Texas and Arkansas were effectively cut off from the Confederacy, and the Mississippi River was once again open for northern commerce to reach the Gulf of Mexico, and as a supply line for the Union Army. Grant's Vicksburg Campaign is studied as a masterpiece of military operations and a major turning point of the war.
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