Union Logistics in the Vicksburg Campaign

On New Year's day 1863 President Abraham Lincoln stood gazing out of his office window. The view from his office on the second floor of the White House was panoramic, a sweeping scene of the south lawn, the Potomac River, and the distant hills of Virginia. But Lincoln paid scant attention to the landscape before him. He was absorbed in the problems of a divided nation. The Union had suffered terribly over the past several months and the future held little encouragement.
Lincoln pondered many thoughts that day. Politically, the Union was in an uproar. His preliminary emancipation proclamation the previous autumn had set off a storm of controversy, especially in much of the lower North and
Midwest. Although Lincoln's Republican supporters defended his proclamation as "indispensable for the salvation of the Union," the populace thought otherwise and dealt the Republican party a discouraging blow in the 1862 Congressional
elections......