Message Decoded 147 Years Too Late

They found out the hard way, turns out, possibly without ever receiving the message.

They in this case would be the Confederate forces at Vicksburg, the famed one of the one-two punch, along with Gettysburg, that finally set the Union on course to ultimate victory. With the victory at Gettysburg, the advance of the Army of Northern Virginia was stopped, never to return. With the victory Vicksburg, the Confederacy was split in two and, possibly more importantly, the vital waterway the Mississippi River was firmly in the hands of David Farragut and the Union Navy.

But Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton had no way of knowing all that as he hunkered down behind his defenses, trying desperately to hold out until reinforcements arrived to raise the siege of the Confederate positions at Vicksburg. All Pemberton knew was that he was running out of everything — food, medicine, men, munitions, and time. Ringing his position with a smug sort of aplomb was Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who would later end the war by accepting the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Pemberton was waiting, in particular, for word from one of his fellow commanders who was stationed just to the west of Vicksburg. This was the promise of reinforcement that Pemberton was seeking. If he could just hold out until …

But the day of reinforcement never came, instead turning into a day of reckoning, as on July 4, 1863, Pemberton surrendered to Grant both his men and his position.

But that is all old hat. The new hat is on the recently unencrypted message intended for Pemberton from this mysterious fellow commander who mysteriously never turned up. The message was found in a tiny bottle given over by a Confederate captain who somehow ended up with the message. Pemberton, it runs out, never got the message — not that it would have cheered him up any.

The bottle had sat in the Museum of the Confederacy for some time, since 1896, in fact. The bottle was recently re-examined and found to contain a message that didn't initially make sense. That's when the code-breaking began.

A retired CIA code-breaker cracked the code, utilizing the Vigenere cipher, a common enough code during the Civil War but not used in quite awhile. In this code, letters are shifted to create different letter combinations. The code cracked, the museum released the details.

In the end, it mattered little whether Pemberton got his reinforcements or not. They would most likely have been too late anyway, if they had come. Vicksburg was soon in Union hands, as was much of the rest of the Confederate lands. The Union's overwhelming advantage in money and manpower proved too much for the Confederacy to withstand. The nation was whole again.