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Sunday, June 25, 1989 ■ The Clarion-Ledger ■ 5B
Civil War reenactments scheduled; this time Southern forces will win
By Ron Harrist
The Associated Press
Reenactments staged on the great battlefields of the Civil War usually end the same way — with the modern-day boys in blue routing the Confederate gray.
But not so in Mississippi this time round.
At Vicksburg, cannon will boom and muskets flash over the Fourth of July weekend to mark a clear-cut Confederate victory over Yankee troops when Gen. U.S. Grant made his first major attempt to silence the Mississippi River fortress 126 years ago.
And at Brice’s Cross Roads in Lee County, scene of a textbook attack by Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Confederate cavalry, historians recently replaced 99 markers to unknown Southern dead with 102 stones bearing the names of Rebel soldiers killed in the June 10,1864, battle.
“Last year was the first year we had a re-enactment at Vicksburg and, since it was the 125th anniversary of the siege, we felt it only appropriate to do the last few days of it, including the surrender,” said Gordon Cotton, director of the Old Court House Museum an organizer of the “Vicksburg Civil War Reenactment.”
“We did not realize when we planned last year’s event that re-liv-ing those days would be so emotionally straining on everyone here,” said Cotton.
“This year, the reenactors wanted
to do something different, something very dramatic and we didn’t want to go through another defeat,” he said. “So this battle was the obvious choice.”
The artillery demonstrations and engagements by several hundred reenactors will take place next Saturday and Sunday on private land in Vicksburg where the actual engagements occurred on May 22, 1863.
Across the state in Lee County, history buff Charles Sullivan and his associates found another way to remember a Confederate victory.
“Up to this point, all the battlefields I have marked were of Confed-
erate defeats,” said Sullivan, a department head at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College’s Per-kinston campus and Confederate graves registrar in Mississippi for the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “This time it was different.”
At the battlefield about six miles west of Baldwyn, Forrest won a major tactical victory over Gen. S.D. Sturgis’ larger Union force. When the fighting ended, more than 1,500 Union soldiers were captured.
“For Forrest, it was a textbook battle that has been studied at war colleges around the world,” said Sullivan, who will participate in the re-enactment at Vicksburg.