Clarksville Civil War Roundtable’s next meeting is April 17th, 2013

The 109th meeting.

Clarksville, TN – The next meeting of the Clarksville (TN) Civil War Roundtable will be on Wednesday, April 17th, 2013 at the Bone & Joint Center, 980 Professional Park Drive, right across the street from Gateway Medical Center. This is just off Dunlop Lane and Holiday Drive and only a few minutes east of Governor’s Square mall.

The meeting begins at 7:00 pm and is always open to the public. Members please bring a friend or two – new recruits are always welcomed.

Topic: “Grant’s Canal in the Vicksburg Campaign”

Vicksburg was a tougher nut to crack that what Union General Ulysses S. Grant had previously thought. His December 1862 offensive to take the citadel on the Mississippi River was stopped due to Confederate cavalry raids. His next offensive in May 1863, moved his army down the left side of the river before crossing over at Bruinsburg.

Once across, Grant moved quickly defeating Confederate forces at Raymond and then Jackson before turning to deal with the Vicksburg garrison at Champion Hill and Big Black River. The latter battle bottled up the Confederate army of John Pemberton in the city but its massive fortifications stopped Grant cold.

Seeking to keep his troops busy, Grant realized that the real goal of the campaign was not really to take the city but open up the Mississippi River. If the Federals could bypass the city by water somehow Vicksburg would become a moot point.

Working with his engineers, Grant found a place to dig a canal across the neck of land across the river from the city and set his men into doing so. Complications and lower water eventually negated what grant sought to do and ultimately the siege itself ended up being enough to capture the city and 30,000 man garrison.

Our speaker this month from Annapolis, Maryland, is David Bastian, author of the only book on Grant’s canal. His program will feature a slide presentation, based on his book, referencing the two Union campaigns against Vicksburg and focusing on the efforts to divert the Mississippi River away from Vicksburg by digging the canal. Had they succeeded, they would have had immediate and complete control of the river (definitely in the summer of 1862 and possibly in the winter of 1863).

Beyond Vicksburg’s geographical significance, Mr. Bastian will also discuss the city’s topography and why this made the city very defensible for the Confederacy. Needless to say, if the Union had succeeded in its plan, Vicksburg would have lost much of its importance as a Union objective.

David Bastian is a retired hydraulic engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where among his accomplishments he had a 6-year stint in Panama as a delegate to the tri-national Commission for the Study of Alternatives to the Panama Canal. Bastian holds a degree in civil engineering from Georgia Tech and a master’s degree in river engineering from Delft in the Netherlands. He is now a practicing engineering consultant.