Mississippi

We drove back into Mississippi today and followed the river down to the city of Natchez, stopping a couple of times on the way. We've been following Highway 61, also known as "The Blues Highway" and have stopped in a few famous blues towns, it's easy to tell you're on the Blues Highway with street names like "John Lee Hooker Ln." It was easy to tell we were in mississippi due to the fast cotton plantations which we could see on the sides of the road, some of them going on for what seemed like miles.

After a while, we came to the city of Vicksburg, where one of the biggest battles of the Civil War took place, one which altered the course of the war completely. Abraham Lincoln once famously said "Vicksburg is the key, and we can not win unless we have the key in our pocket". Vicksburg was a city contolled by the Confederates, and was their last point on the Mississippi river that they could transfer supplies across to their other states, if the Union took it, they would cut off the Confederacy.

Ulysses S. Grant had been assaulting Vicksburg numerous times, and always failed, but only once had he been told by Abraham Lincoln himself that he needed to take Vicksburg, he devised cunning plans to distract the soldiers in Vicksburg so his own men could sneak around and begin to attack from the rear, it succeeded, but the attacks that the Union made during the siege of Vicksburg often failed, as they were repeatedly pushed back by the Confederate defenders. Eventually, the Confederate army had no choice but to surrender, as they were running low on supplies, and disease was spreading through their ranks.

Tonight we are actually staying on an old cotton plantation which has been renovated as an inn. We are staying in one of the rooms which used to be the slave quarters, it's much nicer now than it probably was back then. We're heading on to New Orleans tomorrow and we'll be back on the Blues Highway!