September 2018 Meeting of the CWRT:Tim Smith: U. S. Grant and the Vicksburg Campaign

Tim Smith: U. S. Grant and the Vicksburg Campaign: For nearly nine months, Ulysses S. Grant tried repeatedly to capture the Confederate river city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. He maneuvered and adapted numerous times, reacting to events and enemy movements with great skill and finesse as the lengthy campaign played out on a huge chessboard, dwarfing operations in the east. This reexamination of the familiar story is organized around Grant’s eight key decisions during the campaign. Grant’s nontraditional choices went against the accepted theories of war, supply, and operations as well as against the chief thinkers of the day, such as Henry Halleck, Grant’s superior. Yet Grant pulled off the victory in compelling fashion. Smith shows how Grant’s decisions created and won the Civil War’s most brilliant, complex, decisive, and lengthy campaign. Dr. Timothy Smith, Civil War author and historian, is a native of Mississippi but now resides in Tennessee, where he teaches history at the University of Tennessee at Martin. Smith received both BA and MA degrees in history from the University of Mississippi and a PhD from Mississippi State University in 2001. Pursuing his love of history, Smith worked for the National Park Service at the Shiloh National Military Park for seven years, where his interest in the Civil War was intensified. Dr. Smith is the author of numerous books, including Champion Hill: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg (2004), Mississippi in the Civil War (2010), and Shiloh: Conquer or Perish (2014). His most recent book is The Decision Was Always My Own: Ulysses S. Grant and the Vicksburg Campaign. Dr. Smith is currently finishing a book on Grierson's Raid.