"Sam" Grant had his faults, but he was always willing to fight, and often able to win. Frustrated by a tactical stalemate in Virginia in 1863 Ulysses S. Grant embarked upon a strategy of strangling the Confederate supply line on the Mississippi. Central to the Union strategy was the capture of the Confederate-held Mississippi town of Vicksburg.Grant combined the coolness under fire necessary for operational command with a storekeeper's ability to figure odds, anticipate supply needs, and calculate rates of movement of his own and his opponent's armies. Facing him was a determined and talented Confederate opposition. Nathan Bedford Forrest's campaign of protracted cavalry raids frequently placed Grant's supplies and reinforcements in constant jeopardy. Isaac Brown and his scratch-built Confederate ironclad Arkansas took on the Union river fleet single-handedly, writing one of the most interesting chapters in American naval history. Inside the besieged Vicksburg itself, Southern