The siege of Port Hudson (May 22 – July 9, 1863) was the final engagement in the Union campaign to recapture the Mississippi River in the American Civil War. While Union General Ulysses Grant was besieging Vicksburg upriver, General Nathaniel Banks was ordered to capture the lower Mississippi Confederate stronghold of Port Hudson, Louisiana, then to go to Grant's aid. When his assault failed, Banks settled into a 48-day siege, the longest in US military history up to that point. A second attack also failed, and it was only after the fall of Vicksburg that the Confederate commander, General Franklin Gardner, surrendered the port. The Union gained control of the river and navigation from the Gulf of Mexico through the Deep South and to the river's upper reaches.
From the time the American Civil War started in April 1861, both the U.S. and Confederates made controlling the Mississippi River a major part of their strategy. The Confederacy wanted to keep using the river to transport needed supplies; the Union wanted to stop this supply route and drive a wedge that would divide Confederate states and territories. Particularly important to the South was the stretch of the Mississippi that included the mouth of the Red River. The Red was the Confederacy's primary route for moving vital supplies between east and west: salt, cattle, and horses traveled downstream from the Trans-Mississippi West; in the opposite direction flowed men and munitions from the east.
In the spring and early summer of 1862, the Union advanced their control of the Mississippi from both the north and the south. From the mouth of the river, a fleet commanded by Flag Officer David G. Farragut fought its way through Confederate fortifications in the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, resulting in the capture of New Orleans. A second Union fleet commanded by Charles H. Davis occupied Memphis, Tennessee, after defeating Confederate riverine forces in the First Battle of Memphis. To make sure it could continue to use the middle section of the river, the South fortified positions at both Vicksburg and Port Hudson.
The initial idea of fortifying the heights of Port Hudson came from the south's master of fixed defenses, General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, Commander, Army of the Mississippi. Writing to Major General Mansfield Lovell, Commander of the lower Mississippi in March 1862, Beauregard recommended, "...the fortification of Port Hudson as a measure of precaution against the fall of our defenses north of Memphis." In June 1862, Major General Earl Van Dorn wrote Jefferson Davis: "I want Baton Rouge and Port Hudson". A few days after the fall of Baton Rouge to the Union, Confederate General John C. Breckinridge with 4,000 men, carried out the wishes of General Van Dorn by occupying Port Hudson, situated between Baton Rouge and Bayou Sara, with troops under the command of General Daniel Ruggles. Soldiers of the 4th Louisiana Infantry arrived at the site on August 15, 1862.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
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