Encoded Civil War Distress Call Arrives 147 Years Late [History]

Pity the doomed Confederate leader Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton. Nearly a century and a half ago he and his embattled men waited for an encoded message to arrive detailing their reinforcements. Unfortunately for him, the message arrived in 2010 .

Not that it is going to have mattered. You notice, Pemberton was expecting a message explaining that his commanding officer, General Joseph E. Johnston, across the Mississippi River at the time, had no men or ammo to spare for the forces hunkered down in Vicksburg. Nevertheless, the Confederacy saw fit to send a pleasing, encoded message to the doomed Lt. General anyway.

Pemberton’s loss was historians gain however, as some 147 years after the paper message was corked in a vial it was examined, opened and decoded.

It took two weeks of manual cracking (no computers were used), after which retired CIA code breaker David Gaddy had an answer (as relayed to the Associated Press by Museum of the Confederacy collections manager Catherine M. Wright). Once broken, the straightforward ” Vigenere cipher” used by the Confederacy gave up the goods:

” He’s saying, ‘I can’t allow you to. I even have no troops, I even have no supplies, I actually have no technique to get over there,’ ” [Wright] said of the author of the dispiriting message. ” It was just another punctuation mark to just how desperate and dire everything was.”

Indeed, the placement surrounding Pemberton in Vicksburg was dire. When Union General Ulysses S. Grant encircled the town in 1864, its citizens were forced to eat dogs, cats and soup produced from wallpaper paste. When the battle was ended, Vicksburg refused to celebrate July 4 for the subsequent 80 years! [ AP - Thanks, Sebastien]

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This post is tagged: commanding officer, confederate leader, general ulysses s grant, joseph e johnston, mississippi river, museum of the confederacy