condole with the doomed Confederate leader Lt . Gen. John C. Pemberton . Nearly a century and a half ago he and his embattled humanity await for an encoded substance to go far detailing their support . Unfortunately for him , the subject matter get in in 2010 .
Not that it would have mattered . You see , Pemberton was waiting for a message explaining that his commanding officer , General Joseph E. Johnston , across the Mississippi River at the time , had no man or ammunition to spare for the force hunker down down in Vicksburg . Nevertheless , the Confederacy saw fit to place a nice , encode message to the doomed Lt . General anyway .
Pemberton ’s personnel casualty was historians gain however , as some 147 year after the paper message was corked in a ampul it was analyse , opened and decode .
It took two week of manual crack ( no computers were used ) , after which withdraw CIA code circuit breaker David Gaddy had an answer ( as relayedto the Associated Pressby Museum of the Confederacy ingathering manager Catherine M. Wright ) . Once break , the unproblematic “ Vigenere cipher ” used by the Confederacy gave up the trade good :
“ He ’s allege , ‘ I ca n’t help you . I have no flock , I have no supplies , I have no way to get over there , ’ ” [ Wright ] say of the source of the dispirit message . “ It was just another punctuation mark to just how desperate and dire everything was . ”
Indeed , the situation surrounding Pemberton in Vicksburg was frightening . When Union General Ulysses S. Grant encircled the city in 1863 , its citizen were ram to eat dogs , computerized axial tomography and soup made from wallpaper library paste . When the battle was terminate , Vicksburg refused to keep July 4 for the next 80 years ! [ AP – Thanks , Sebastien ]
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