Deluded People
Read Time: 1 min 48 sec
The battleship illustrated was on a mission to draw artillery fire from entrenched Confederates at Vicksburg, Mississippi. As the Confederates spent their dwindling ammunition reserves, the Union naval officers celebrated their broadcasted fakeout, the ship was a hoax, made of wood.
Deluded People Cave In. Let that wash over you. Then carve it into your desk at work, that barstool you're sitting on, or tattoo your forearm as an everyday reminder.
Admiral Porter's second dummy frightening the rebels at Vicksburg. Illustration showing a phony ironclad made of wood meant to fool the Confederate batteries on the Mississippi River at Vicksburg into wasting ammunition trying to sink the dummy vessel. Created / Published 1863
This would not be the last of waging physiological warfare throughout the Civil War.
Vicksburg was under siege by Union forces commanded by Gen. Grant, ordered to regain control of the Mississippi River, the strategic gut of northern commerce throughout the violently cleaved country. The general's strategy was to bring the war to slavery, or, more specifically, to the minds of the slave-holding elites sheltering in the city.
News spread throughout the south that this little town was holding against Grant's incredibly large army. The irony was the more prolonged the rebels held, the worse things got inside and outside the walls of their perceived impenetrable citadel city. Everywhere Grant's army went, Mississippi and Louisiana, they worked to destroy plantation culture, burning crops and releasing thousands of the enslaved, more commonly called contraband, captured enemy property.
“I thought, what’s on the mind of every southern? What’s dancing in their minds, it’s their slaves, it’s slavery. It’s everything. It’s a civilization based on slavery.”
At this point in the war, plantations had switched from cotton to growing corn, a food source, things people can eat to sustain a siege. Grant was slowly crushing the will of rebel commanders from the outside by effectively cutting off the food supply to the slave owners provided by slave labor.
Now, back to that wooden boat, the rebels had been hoodwinked. Confederate sailors must have understood the hastily painted union message to be valid. Still, they went on believing their own bad faith truth based on white supremacy outlined in the Ordinance of Secession, racism, and for those institutions the slaveholders waged war.
Deluded people cave in. Vicksburg fell to Union hands on July 4, 1863.
"The lost cause was lost before it started to fight. Inability to see what is going on in the world can be costly," Bruce Catton, "A Stillness at Appomattox."
