A glass vial stopped with a cork during the Civil War has been opened, revealing a coded message to the desperate Confederate commander in Vicksburg on the day the Mississippi city fell to Union forces 147 years ago.
The dispatch offered no hope to doomed Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton: Reinforcements are not on the way.
The encrypted, 6-line message was dated July 4, 1863, the date of Pemberton's surrender to Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Siege of Vicksburg in what historians say was a turning point midway into the Civil War.
The message is from a Confederate commander on the west side of the Mississippi River across from Pemberton.
"He's saying, 'I can't help you. I have no troops, I have no supplies, I have no way to get over there,"' Museum of the Confederacy collections manager Catherine M. Wright said of the author of the dispiriting message. "It was just another punctuation mark to just how desperate and dire everything was."
A Navy cryptologist independently confirmed Gaddy's interpretation. Commander John B. Hunter, an information warfare officer, said he deciphered the code over two weeks while on deployment aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. A computer could have unscrambled the words in a fraction of the time.
"To me, it was not that difficult," he said. "I had fun with this and it took me longer than I should have."
From FOX news. The whole story is HERE.
2 comments:
"...he deciphered the code over two weeks while on deployment aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific..."
"To me, it was not that difficult," he said. "I had fun with this and it took me longer than I should have."
Must have been a slow period during the deployment.
It was a very busy period. That's why it took two weeks. A few hours is all it would take to decipher the code.
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