Seventeen thousand Union soldiers rest on the hillside where they fell. Nearly thirteen thousand have no names. Vicksburg National Cemetery was established in 1866 — time enough to understand the scale of what happened here, not enough to know who most of the dead were. The Confederate dead are across town at Cedar Hill, gathered and interred by local women after the war. The division holds, more than 150 years on. Illinois, which sent 36,325 men to the campaign — more than any other state — built its memorial to look like the Pantheon: sixty granite steps to the portico, one for each day of the siege, every name on bronze tablets inside. The ground around it preserves twenty miles of trenches exactly where they were dug. The siege lasted 47 days. Vicksburg did not celebrate the Fourth of July again for 81 years.
