The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign by Shelby Foote

The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign Reviews

• 
  Manray9

  The Beleaguered City is a Modern Library adaptation of part of Foote's masterpiece, The Civil War. Excerpted for the popular reader, nothing of Foote's careful research or literary skill is lost. While always taking a backseat in American history to Gettysburg (the subject of another Modern Library edition of Foote "Lite"), Vicksburg was arguably the critical campaign of the Civil War -- it permanently severed the Confederacy, guaranteed Federal domination of the nation's premier waterborne transportation route, and made the career of U. S. Grant. Foote's history is a delight -- good scholarship and good writing. I recommend it highly to Civil War buffs and casual readers alike. Just like Stars in Their Courses however, it suffers from poor maps.
• 
  Jan C

  I picked this up on a visit some years ago to the Vicksburg National Battlefield. I didn't know much about the Vicksburg campaign at the time that I visited the battlefield. I was basically taking a vacation down Highway 61. This included a visit to Clarksburg and a drive down the Natchez Trace - an excellent drive.
  
  I picked up 2 books at the bookstore there. One was the memoir of a lady who had been living in the caves during the siege. And the other was this. Which I have finally finished. Actually thought I had already finished it but caught it hiding on a shelf behind a chair.
  
  This one was very good. I have since picked up Foote's 3-volume Civil War history - but haven't started reading it yet. My visit to the battlefield was quite moving. I discovered that units from my own state of Illinois were among the attackers and had left monuments. And, of course, the general in charge was from Illinois (and Ohio).
  
  A very interesting book and a good introduction to the Vicksburg campaign. I'd read a number of
  Bruce Catton's books but hadn't remembered much about Vicksburg. Both the Union and the Confederacy wanted to hold Vicksburg because it meant control of the Mississippi River.
• 
  Erik Graff

  I obtained this without having known it was excerpted from Foote's series about the Civil War but having gotten a positive impression of him from Ken Burn's Civil War series on PBS. It also is the case that that conflict was the major crisis in the history of the United States, the effects of which are still reflected in the relations between the North and South, Blacks and Whites, urban and rural America.
  
  I've read a lot of books about the war. Those by Bruce Catton, especially his two trilogies, have touched me most deeply, Catton conveying sympathy for the infantrymen who fought on both sides and for the civilians, slave and free, most affected by the conflict. Foote, while he conveys a comparable depth of sympathy in his PBS work, is not so effective in this excerpt, most of which concerns itself with the military and logistical particulars regarding the Union siege of Confederate Vicksburg. This is not, in other words, the book to start with in attempting to grasp the Civil War. It does, however, give the detail of the Vicksburg campaign in a comprehensible fashion.
• 
  Sean Chick

  A fair apprisal of the campaign. Foote acknowledges Grant's abilities without vapid hero worship (a problem as of late in books about the general) and his views on Pemberton are fair. Best of all, events outside of Vicksburg, such as Port Hudson and Brashear City, are discussed. All in all this is a good account of the campaign.
• 
  Swjohnson

  Shelby Foote’s “The Beleaguered City,” a book-length excerpt from his 3000-page three-volume “The Civil War: A Narrative,” focuses on the Vicksburg campaign of 1862-63, an epic collision of then-modern military technology, trial-and-error tactics, and unforgiving near-Gothic landscape as Grant and Sherman attempted to “break the back” of the south by gaining dominance of the Mississippi river.
  
  It may surprise the modern reader that the small town of Vicksburg was known as the “Gibraltar of the West” for its strategic importance. Its natural setting was unusually challenging, and there is something undeniably novelistic in Foote’s vibrant images of ironclad warships floundering through narrow channels in the Mississippi delta, running gauntlets of burning cotton bales as the machinery of the industrial age attempts to vanquish a swampy agrarian order.
  
  Foote is unapologetically “narrative” is in his technique, as his larger series title suggests, and that approach often rankles academic historians. Idiosyncratic, personal and defiantly undocumented (the only insolent footnote in the entire work is a reference to family history), Foote writes from a less academic, more renegade era of history writing, where novelistic speculation is occasionally allowed to crush objectivity, as in many scenes where the emotions or motivations of key players appear boldly on the page. He is to history writing what Edmund Wilson is literary criticism, addressing the educated reader but not the academic peer. Like Wilson, he is literally (but not qualitatively) amateur.
  
  Foote’s colorful narration springs directly from that amateur’s freedom and it is often at its best when it captures the rawness and immediacy of the campaign’s challenges. Vivid anecdotes of daily experience are often more compelling than the densely informational accounts of military tactics. In those moments, particularly those where Foote quotes officers’ strikingly expressive letters, another era of American life appears vividly in its contrasting mixture of physical challenge and rhetorical eloquence.
  
  In the end, the debate over Foote’s objectivity is fleeting; the reader will never know how much research underlies his compellingly readable account. James MacPherson, one of the most distinguished historians of the same era, offers a ringing endorsement of Foote’s work; I’ll respect the opinion of the author of the definitive one-volume“Battle Cry of Freedom” and rely on his book as a more reliably documented supplement.
  
• 
  Marc Brueggemann

  Very good description of the Vicksburg Campaign and Siege. Even though though there were some Lost Cause talking points, Foote describes in good detail how Vicksburg played out, it's importance to the Civil War, and it's generals including Ulysses S. Grant. There were times when he jabbed at Grant, creating so many inaccuracies, myths, and stereotypes about Grant that aren't true. Personally, Ron Chernow's biography Grant is the best and most accurate book on Grant I have ever read, and Donald Miller's most recent book on Vicksburg is the best Vicksburg book I have ever read. But Foote's is up there, but not entirely the most detailed as Miller and Chernow are. Four stars.
• 
  Kendrick Hughes

  interesting read
• 
  Stuart Smith

  A brilliant history of the Vicksburg Campaign.
• 
  Zachary Mezz

  A fantastic account of the Vicksburg campaign, with anecdotes about Grant that were very enlightening.
• 
  Adam

  I enjoyed this detailed account of the Vicksburg campaign. It reads more like a play by play of troop movements with sidebar discussions on the strategy. If you're not into military, this probably is not your thing. This book brings to reality the importance of the Vicksburg campaign because of location and Confederate supply chain. We oftentimes see things in other non-military books that make it seem so easy; things like "Grant moved his army South to supplant Stonewall's position" This story fills you in on all the nuances and daily hardships. How to cross that river? Build a bridge on the spot... How are troops going to eat tonight? Commandeer what they could from citizens; or make awful tasting grits with half ground wheat or corn with water. It was good to read into this level of detail and strategy. Is a great companion to the Shaara books of the eastern battles of the Civil War.
• 
  Ken

  Thus ends my recent foray into the Civil War. Shelby Foote, himself a Mississippian, provided the narrative in an objective manner but with some sympathy toward Pemberton and the Vickburg defenders who were apparently thrown under the bus by the Richmond government in favor of Lee's pointless invasion of Pennsylvania. With Vicksburg, the Union split the Confederacy in two and regained use of the Mississippi River. Foote was criticized by some for the lack of footnotes (there is only one) or references but he was a story teller and this was only intended to be a narrative -- he told the story as if he was sitting in your living room sipping Southern Comfort and smoking his pipe.
• 
  Gary Pearson

  Most "Northerners" may not have even heard of the Vicksburg Campaign to caputre the Confederate forterss, divide the Confederacy in two and open up the Mississippi to Northern commerce, but it was arguably more important than even the most famous battle of the Civil War, won just one day earlier at Gettysburg. And Shelby Foote's book is perhaps the best one on the topic. It was a great loss when Foote passed away in 2005. His three volume history is regarded by many as the best contemporary history of the war. (third time I've done this one). And if you like this, you'll like his companion book on the battle of Gettysburg, "Stars in their Courses."
• 
  Ken

  I have copies of both the print and audiobook versions of this work. I like both, but the audiobook version I especially enjoyed because the narrator was Shelby Foote himself.
  
  This work is excerpts from Foote's "The Civil War, Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian". It is a complete recounting of Grant's campaign to capture Vicksburg, including all the attempts that failed, and auxiliary actions to assist this effort. Foote's writing is spare, to the point and gets to the character of the campaigns' participants and the action without encumbering the story with hero worship.
• 
  Tim Wendel

  This one snuck up on me. Now I knew Shelby Foote from the PBS Civil War series, but I didn't realize he could write narrative so well. This one flew along from Grant to Sherman to the doings back in D.C. to the Southern side with Johnston and Pemberton. Foote excels at not letting the quotes slow the piece down. He finds the key lines, the real nuggets, rolls those out and keeps going. It's a wild ride of Americana
• 
  Jpaflas

  Shelby Foote is a great writer. He takes this thoroughly interesting but equally confusing campaign and makes it flow as well as possible. The western/ Trans Miss theatre is one that is often ignored in favor of the more famous eastern theatre. I would recommend this to anybody interested in American history and will certainly read more Shelby Foote in the future.
• 
  Angie

  One of the best books, ever.
• 
  Greg

  Would have liked a little more social and political history to go with the military history but still some good writing.
• 
  Greatredwarrior

  I haven't checked it for sure, but I believe this is functionally just an excerpt of the much larger, The Civil War: A Narrative. However, it is focused and still excellent work by Foote.
• 
  Steve

  OK book, Too much and felt like it dragged a little. I enjoyed Vicksburg 1863 by Winston Groom much better.
• 
  Gary Power

  He is your go to guy when it comes to the Civil War. Quite an interesting character himself and a friend of William Faulkner's.
• 
  P. E.

  Very detailed and thorough about the siege of Vicksburg. Of course a lot more could be written. The fall of Vicksburg, accompanied by the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, initiated the end of the war a year and a half later. This is not a book to be read in a rush. Take your time in absorbing the facts and story.