Grant emerged from the Vicksburg campaign with a hard-won reputation as a master strategist, which prompted President Lincoln to place him in supreme command of all the armies of the United States. From this position he was destined to direct the final campaigns of the Civil War and to receive Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. As for Pemberton, the fall of Vicksburg subjected him to painful criticism from those who held that a more resourceful defense might have saved the city, or his army, or both. Essentially, both commanders had disobeyed orders in like manner—Grant in striking behind Vicksburg alone rather than waiting to combine forces with Banks; Pemberton in deciding to protect Vicksburg at all cost rather than joining Johnston and risking loss of the city. But Grant’s gamble had succeeded and Pemberton’s had failed; and in war, as a leading Confederate commander had soberly remarked, the people measure a general’s merit by his success. “I thought and still think that you did right to risk an army for the purpose of keeping command of even a section of the Mississippi River,” President Davis wrote to General Pemberton after the fall of Vicksburg. “Had you succeeded none would have blamed, had you not made the attempt few if any would have defended your course.” In the Confederate capital, Gen. Josiah Gorgas, one of the most able of Southern leaders, confided to his diary the implications of the calamitous change in fortune to the South attending the twin disasters of Gettysburg and Vicksburg: Events have succeeded one another with disastrous rapidity. One brief month ago we were apparently at the point of success. Lee was in Pennsylvania threatening Harrisburgh, and even Philadelphia. Vicksburgh seemed to laugh all Grant’s efforts to scorn.... All looked bright. Now the picture is just as somber as it was bright then. Lee failed at Gettysburgh.... Vicksburgh and Port Hudson capitulated, surrendering thirty-five thousand men and forty-five thousand arms. It seems incredible that human power could effect such a change in so brief a space. Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success—today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction. In Washington, a grateful President sat at his desk seeking words to express appreciation to Grant “for the almost inestimable service you have done the country.” Explaining the fear he had entertained that the Union Army might be destroyed during its daring thrust in the rear of Vicksburg, which he believed at the time to be “a mistake,” Lincoln wrote to Grant, “I wish now to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right and I was wrong.”