When you open an old bottle, you never really know what you’re going to find. Maybe it’ll be champagne. Maybe it’ll be a frog. A sealed glass bottle sat on the shelves of the Museum of the Confederacy since it was donated in 1896. It contained the following: a piece of paper, white thread, and a .32 caliber bullet. Weird as it was, nobody opened it until recently. As it turns out, the bottle contained a message meant for the commander of the Confederate forces at Vicksburg, letting him know that his dire situation would only get worse.
The opening of the bottle wasn’t terribly difficult, but the message itself was a tougher nut to crack. The message was written in Vigenere cipher, which is a secret code method used by the South during the Civil War in an attempt to prevent Union forces from intercepting crucial communication between generals, such as this note informing Lt. Geneneral John C. Pemberton, the commander of the army besieged in Vicksburg, that there was no help coming from the forces of Major General John G. Walker of Texas.
The Siege of Vicksburg is considered a turning point in the Civil War. Pemberton surrendered the city to Union general Ulysses S. Grant on July 4, 1963. The soldier who donated the message to the Museum of the Confederacy, William A. Smith, served under Walker and was present at Vicksburg at the time the city fell. The note was dated on the day Pemberton surrendered.
Tags: Vicksburg, Mississippi, Siege of Vicksburg, Museum of the Confederacy, Vigenere cipher, John C. Pemberton, Civil War, Civil War message opened and decoded, message in a bottle decoded after 147 years, John G. Walker, William A. Smith, Civil War message decoded by the CIA