Charles Dickens’ famous opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities — “it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness” — could have as well been written about the greatest American tragedy that started less than two years after the book was published: the 1861-65 American Civil War. By far the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history, it put to rest the shameful institution of slavery, but it cost almost one million lives.
The longest and on of the most bitterly fought campaigns of the war was over the control of Vicksburg, a small town in Mississippi that was of major strategic importance for both the Union and Confederacy.
