Today Union Navy Admiral David Farragut manages to slip two of his ships back past the forts of Vicksburg, Mississippi in preparation for a campaign to attack the city. Having probed the city’s defenses, Farragut now prepares for an impending rendezvous with land forces. The Vicksburg campaign officially commences six days hence, when U. S. General Ulysses S. Grant, with 40,000 soldiers, begins his advance southward in an effort to meet up with Union naval forces.
The state of Mississippi, home to some of America’s wealthiest citizens prior to the war (these persons being large planters owning many slaves), is also home to a growing Baptist population. As the Union naval vessels slip by the town’s defenses this day, the members of Vicksburg’s Antioch Baptist Church — founded in 1819, and the oldest Baptist congregation in Warren County — worry along with the city’s other residents. In the graveyard of the Antioch church are buried some of Vicksburg’s early settlers. Many of today’s citizens realize that their lives are about to change, but few probably anticipate what lies ahead when Union forces converge upon and lay siege to the key river city in late spring.
Sources: “This Day in the American Civil War of March 23” (link); “Vicksburg Campaign and Siege, March – July 1863,” National Park Service (link); Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, 1894, pp. 12ff (link); Antioch Baptist Church” (link); see also Gordon A. Cotton, Antioch, the First Baptist Church in Warren County, Mississippi, Vicksburg, MS: 1997
