This guide was written to help you bring to life the human struggle that was endured in the Campaign for Vicksburg. The guide can help you bring a complex subject to your students. You and your students will probably come up with new and different ways to see the Park. We hope this guide will give you a few new tools to teach and enlighten your class.   After all, the Campaign for Vicksburg was more than generals and maps, it was the common soldier, sailor and civilian who witnessed a lifetime in 47 days. Invite your students to experience those times and see beyond the hills to the people. If you plan to visit the park the following excerpt from John Brown's Body by Stephen Vincent Benet can help set the mood.

The Park Staff at Vicksburg National Military Park.

That is the chess and the scheme of the wooden blocks
Set down on the contour map.
Having learned so much,
Forget it now, while the ripple-lines of the map
Arise into bouldered ridges, tree grown, bird visited,
Where gnats buzz, and the wren builds a hollow nets...
See no names of leaders painted upon the blocks.

... but see instead

Three miles of living men - three long double miles
Of men and guns and horses and fires and wagons,
Teamsters, surgeons, generals orderlies,
A hundred and sixty thousand living men
Asleep or eating or thinking or writing brief
Notes on the thought of death, shooting dice or swearing
Groaning in the hospital wagons, standing guard...
Hearing a stream or a joke or a horse chopping grass
Or hearing nothing, being too tired to hear.

...A hundred and sixty thousand
Breathing men, at night, on two hostile ridges set down.