During the summer of 1863, while the nation's attention was focused on the battle in Gettysburg, another momentous conflict was being fought along the banks of the Mississippi; in the longest single campaign of the war, the siege of Vicksburg left 19,000 dead and wounded on both sides, gave the Union Army control of the river, and left the Confederacy cut in half. Here Christopher Waldrep takes a fresh look at how the Vicksburg campaign was fought, deftly recounting the experiences of African American troops fighting for the Union, and suggests that the nation's memory of the battle was shaped by the legacies of race and slavery that played out over the decades that followed.