A Civil War glass vial stopped with a cork 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 Pemberton, saying reinforcements were not on the way.
The encrypted six-line message was dated July 4, 1863, the date of Pemberton’s surrender to Union forces led by Ulysses Grant, ending the Siege of Vicksburg in what historians say was a turning point mid-way 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 Wright said of the author of the dispiriting message.
“It was just another punctuation mark to just how desperate and dire everything was.”
The bottle, less than two inches in length, had sat undisturbed at the museum since 1896. It was a gift from Captain William Smith of King George County, who served during the Vicksburg siege.
Ms Wright decided to investigate the contents of the strange little bottle containing a tightly-wrapped note, a .38-calibre bullet and a white thread.
“Just sort of a curiosity thing,” she said. “This notion of, do we have any idea what his message says?”
The answer was no.
Ms Wright asked a local art conservator, Scott Nolley, to examine the clear vial before she attempted to open it. He looked at the bottle under an electron microscope and discovered that salt had bonded the cork tightly to the bottle’s mouth.
He put the bottle on a hotplate to expand the glass, used a scalpel to loosen the cork, then gently plucked it out with tweezers.
The sewing thread was looped around the six-and-the-half-inch by two-and-the-half-inch paper, which was folded to fit into the bottle. The rolled message was removed and taken to a paper conservator, who successfully unfurled the message.
But the coded message, which appears to be a random collection of letters, did not reveal itself immediately.
Eager to learn the meaning of the code, Ms Wright took the message home for the weekend to decipher, but had no success.
A retired CIA code breaker, David Gaddy, was contacted, and he cracked the code in several weeks. Navy cryptologist Cmdr John Hunter independently confirmed Mr Gaddy’s interpretation while on deployment aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. A computer could have unscrambled the words in a fraction of the time, he said.
“To me, it was not that difficult,” he said. “I had fun with this and it took me longer than I should have.”
The code is called the Vigenere cipher, a centuries-old encryption in which letters of the alphabet are shifted a set number of places so an “a” would become a “d” – essentially creating words with different letter combinations.
The code was widely used by Southern forces during the Civil War, according to Civil War Times Illustrated.
The source of the message was likely to have been Major General John Walker, of the Texas Division, who had under his command William Smith, the donor of the bottle.