Vicksburg

By 1860 Warren County had 20,696 people, and 13,763 of them were enslaved. Vicksburg had a large slave market. The county's free Black population, once over a hundred, had fallen to 37. About a thousand residents were foreign-born, many Irish and Italian, the second-highest total in Mississippi, and eighteen churches served them, eight of them Methodist. Sisters of Mercy began an educational and religious mission there that year. Lincoln had said as early as 1861 that Vicksburg was the key. The city he meant had grown on steamboat trade and enslaved labor.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Court House Museum — steps away
  Vicksburg's Greek Revival courthouse of 1860, raised on a hilltop with the labor of enslaved artisans and now a private local-history museum heavy on Confederate relics.
• Vicksburg National Military Park — 1.7 mi
  A 16-mile tour road through the trenches of the 47-day siege of 1863, with a national cemetery and the story of the thousands of enslaved people who reached freedom behind Union lines.
• USS Cairo Gunboat and Museum — 1.8 mi
  The raised hull of a Union river ironclad sunk by a mine in the Yazoo in 1862, displayed at Vicksburg National Military Park with the artifacts the river mud preserved.

More markers nearby

• Sheriff Peter Crosby — steps away
• Old Natchez District — steps away
• Tommie Lee Williams Sr. — steps away
• Anchuca — steps away