First people The area that is now Vicksburg was long occupied by the
Natchez Native Americans as part of their historical territory along the Mississippi. The Natchez spoke a language isolate not related to the
Muskogean languages of the other major tribes in the area. Before the Natchez, other indigenous cultures had occupied this strategic area for thousands of years.
European settlement The first
Europeans who settled the area were
French colonists who built
Fort Saint Pierre in 1719 on the high bluffs overlooking the Yazoo River at present-day
Redwood. They conducted
fur trading with the Natchez and others, and started plantations. On 29 November 1729, the Natchez
attacked the fort and plantations in and around the present-day city of
Natchez. They murdered several hundred settlers, including
Jesuit missionary Paul Du Poisson. As was the custom, they violently took a number of women and children as captives, adopting them into their families. The Natchez War was a disaster for French Louisiana, and the colonial population of the Natchez District never recovered. Aided by the
Choctaw, traditional enemies of the Natchez, though, the French defeated and scattered the Natchez and their allies, the
Yazoo. The Choctaw Nation took over the area by right of conquest and inhabited it for several decades. Under pressure from the US government, the Choctaw agreed to cede nearly of land to the US under the terms of the
Treaty of Fort Adams in 1801. The treaty was the first of a series that eventually led to the
removal of most of the Choctaw to
Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River in 1830. Some Choctaw remained in Mississippi, citing article XIV of the
Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek; they became citizens of the state and the United States. They struggled to maintain their culture against the pressure of the binary slave society, which classified people as only white or black. In 1790, the Spanish founded a military outpost on the site, which they called
Fort Nogales (
nogales meaning "walnut trees"). When the Americans took possession in 1798 following the
American Revolutionary War and a treaty with Spain, they changed the name to
Walnut Hills. The small village was incorporated in 1825 as Vicksburg, named after Newitt Vick, a
Methodist minister who had established a Protestant mission on the site. The town of Vicksburg was incorporated in 1825, with a population of 3,000 people; of which approximately twenty people were
Jewish and had immigrated from
Bavaria,
Prussia, and
Alsace–Lorraine. In 1835, during the
Murrell Excitement, a mob from Vicksburg attempted to expel the gamblers from the city, because the citizens were tired of the rougher element treating the city residents with contempt. They captured and hanged five gamblers who had shot and killed a local doctor. Historian Joshua D. Rothman calls this event "the deadliest outbreak of extralegal violence in the slave states between the
Southampton Insurrection and the Civil War." In 1862, fifty Jewish families formed the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Anshe Chesed in Vicksburg, and received a charter from the state. The Confederate president,
Jefferson Davis, was based at his family plantation at
Brierfield, just south of the city.
Civil War During the
American Civil War (1861–1865), the city finally surrendered during the
Siege of Vicksburg, after which the
Union Army gained control of the entire Mississippi River. The 47-day siege was intended to starve the city into submission. Its location atop a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River proved otherwise impregnable to assault by federal troops. The surrender of Vicksburg by Confederate General
John C. Pemberton on July 4, 1863, together with the defeat of General
Robert E. Lee at
Gettysburg the day before, has historically marked the
turning point of the Civil War in the Union's favor. From the surrender of Vicksburg until the end of the war in 1865, the area was under Union military occupation. Celebrations of the 4th of July, the day of surrender, were irregular until 1947. The
Vicksburg Evening Post of July 4, 1883, called July 4 "the day we don't celebrate", and another Vicksburg newspaper, the
Daily Commercial Appeal, in 1888 hoped that a political victory would bring an enthusiastic celebration the following year. In 1902, the 4th of July saw only "a parade of colored draymen". In 1947, the Jackson
Clarion-Ledger stated that the city of Vicksburg did not celebrate the 4th of July again until 1945, and then it was celebrated as Confederate Carnival Day. A recent scholar disagrees, stating that large Fourth of July celebrations were being held by 1907, and informal celebrations before that. A large parade was held in 1890.
Loss of Mississippi access and commercial status in Vicksburg, circa 1905 Because of Vicksburg's location on the Mississippi River, it built extensive trade from the prodigious
steamboat traffic in the 19th century. It shipped out cotton coming to it from surrounding counties and was a major trading city in West Central Mississippi. However, in 1876, a Mississippi River flood cut off the large
meander next to Vicksburg through the De Soto Point, which changed the Mississippi River's course away from the city. Vicksburg only retained access to an
oxbow lake formed from the old channel of the river, which effectively isolated the city from accessing the Mississippi riverfront. The city's economy suffered greatly due to the lack of a functional river port; Vicksburg would not be a river town again until the completion of the Yazoo Diversion Canal in 1903 by the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Political and racial unrest after Civil War In the first few years after the Civil War, white Confederate veterans developed the
Ku Klux Klan, beginning in Tennessee; it had chapters throughout the South and attacked freedmen and their supporters. It was suppressed about 1870. By the mid-1870s, new white
paramilitary groups had arisen in the
Deep South, including the
Red Shirts in Mississippi, as whites struggled to regain political and social power over the black majority. Elections were marked by violence and fraud as white Democrats worked to suppress black Republican voting. In August 1874, a black sheriff,
Peter Crosby, was elected in Vicksburg. Letters by a white planter, Batchelor, detail the preparations of whites for what he described as a "race war," including acquisition of the newest Winchester guns. On December 7, 1874, white men disrupted a black Republican meeting celebrating Crosby's victory and held him in custody before running him out of town. He advised blacks from rural areas to return home; along the way, some were attacked by armed whites. During the next several days, armed white mobs swept through black areas, killing other men at home or out in the fields, in what would come to be known as the
Vicksburg massacre. Sources differ as to total fatalities, with 29–50 blacks and 2 whites reported dead at the time. Twenty-first-century historian Emilye Crosby estimates that 300 blacks were killed in the city and the surrounding area of
Claiborne County, Mississippi. The Red Shirts were active in Vicksburg and other Mississippi areas, and black pleas to the federal government for protection were not met. At the request of Republican Governor
Adelbert Ames, who had left the state during the violence, President
Ulysses S. Grant sent federal troops to Vicksburg in January 1875. In addition, a congressional committee investigated what was called the "Vicksburg Riot" at the time (and reported as the "Vicksburg massacre" by northern newspapers.) Testimony from both black and white residents was given, as reported by the
New York Times, but no one was ever prosecuted for the deaths. The Red Shirts and other white
insurgents suppressed Republican voting by both whites and blacks; smaller-scale riots were staged in the state up to the 1875 elections, at which time white Democrats regained control of a majority of seats in the state legislature. Under new constitutions, amendments and laws passed between 1890 in Mississippi and 1908 in the remaining southern states, white Democrats
disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites by creating barriers to voter registration, such as
poll taxes,
literacy tests, and
grandfather clauses. They passed
Jim Crow laws through which they imposed racial segregation of public facilities. In 1908, a publication documented some of Vicksburg's leading African Americans including lawyer and banker
W. E. Mollison. On March 12, 1894, the popular soft drink
Coca-Cola was bottled for the first time in Vicksburg by
Joseph A. Biedenharn, a local
confectioner. Today, surviving 19th-century Biedenharn
soda bottles are prized by collectors of Coca-Cola memorabilia. The original candy store has been renovated and is used as the Biedenharn Coca-Cola Museum.
20th century The exclusion of most blacks from the political system lasted for decades until after Congressional passage of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s.
Lynchings of blacks and other forms of white racial terrorism against them continued to occur in Vicksburg after the start of the 20th century. In May 1903, for instance, two black men charged with murdering a planter were taken from jail by a mob of 200 farmers and lynched before they could go to trial. In May 1919, as many as a thousand white men broke down three sets of steel doors to abduct, hang, burn and shoot a black prisoner, Lloyd Clay, who was falsely accused of raping a white woman. From 1877 to 1950 in Warren County, 14 African Americans were lynched by whites, most in the decades near the turn of the century. The
United States Army Corps of Engineers diverted the Yazoo River in 1903 into the old, shallowing channel to revive the waterfront of Vicksburg. The port city was able to receive steamboats again, but much freight and passenger traffic had moved to railroads, which had become more competitive. Railroad access to the west across the river continued to be by transfer steamers and ferry
barges until a combination railroad-highway bridge was built in 1929. After 1973,
Interstate 20 bridged the river. Freight rail traffic still crosses by the old bridge. North-south transportation links are by the Mississippi River and
U.S. Highway 61. Vicksburg has the only crossing over the Mississippi River between
Greenville and Natchez, and the only interstate highway crossing of the river between
Baton Rouge and
Memphis. During the
Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, in which hundreds of thousands of acres were inundated, Vicksburg served as the primary gathering point for refugees. Relief parties put up temporary housing, as the flood submerged a large percentage of the
Mississippi Delta. Because of the overwhelming damage from the flood, the US Army Corps of Engineers established the Waterways Experiment Station as the primary hydraulics laboratory, to develop protection of important croplands and cities. Now known as the
Engineer Research and Development Center, it applies military engineering, information technology, environmental engineering, hydraulic engineering, and geotechnical engineering to problems of flood control and river navigation. In December 1953, a
severe tornado swept across Vicksburg, causing 38 deaths and destroying nearly 1,000 buildings.During World War II, cadets from the Royal Air Force, flying from their training base at Terrell, Texas, routinely flew to Vicksburg on training flights. The town served as a stand-in for the British for Cologne, Germany, which is the same distance from London, England as Vicksburg is from Terrell. Particularly after World War II, in which many blacks served, returning veterans began to be active in the civil rights movement, wanting to have full citizenship after fighting in the war. In Mississippi, activists in the Vicksburg Movement became prominent during the 1960s.
Early 21st century In 2001, a group of Vicksburg residents visited the
Paducah, Kentucky, mural project, looking for ideas for their own community development. In 2002, the Vicksburg Riverfront
murals program was begun by
Louisiana mural artist
Robert Dafford and his team on the floodwall located on the waterfront in downtown. Subjects for the murals were drawn from the history of Vicksburg and the surrounding area. They include President
Theodore Roosevelt's bear hunt, the
Sultana, the
Sprague, the
Siege of Vicksburg, the
Kings Crossing site,
Willie Dixon, the
Flood of 1927, the
1953 Vicksburg, Mississippi tornado,
Rosa A. Temple High School (known for integration activism) and the
Vicksburg National Military Park. The project was finished in 2009 with the completion of the Jitney Jungle/Glass Kitchen mural. On December 6–7, 2014, a symposium was held on the 140th anniversary of the 1874 riots. A variety of scholars gave papers and an open panel discussion was held on the second day at the Vicksburg National Military Park, in collaboration with the Jacqueline House African American Museum. ==Geography==