Coded Confederate message finally deciphered

RICHMOND, Va. - A glass vial stopped with a cork during the Civil War 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 six-line dispatch offered no hope to doomed Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton: Reinforcements are not on the way.

The message was dated July 4, 1863 - the date of Pemberton's surrender to Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Siege of Vicksburg in what historians say was a turning point midway into the war. It was from a Confederate commander on the west side of the Mississippi River across from Pemberton.

The note reads: "Gen'l Pemberton: You can expect no help from this side of the river. Let Gen'l Johnston know, if possible, when you can attack the same point on the enemy's lines. Inform me also and I will endeavor to make a diversion. I have sent some caps [explosive devices]. I subjoin a despatch from General Johnston."

The message "was just another punctuation mark to just how desperate and dire everything was," said Museum of the Confederacy collections manager Catherine M. Wright. The last line of the message, she said, seems to suggest that a separate delivery to Pemberton would be the code to break the message.

The bottle, less than 2 inches in length, had sat undisturbed at the museum since 1896. It was a gift from Capt. William A. Smith, of King George County, who served during the Vicksburg siege. It was Wright who decided to investigate the contents of the bottle, which contained a note, a .38-caliber bullet and a white thread.

She asked local art conservator Scott Nolley to examine the vial. He put the bottle on a hotplate to expand the glass, used a scalpel to loosen the cork, then plucked the message out with tweezers.

A retired CIA code breaker, David Gaddy, was contacted, and he cracked the code in several weeks. A Navy cryptologist, Cmdr. John B. Hunter, independently confirmed Gaddy's interpretation.

The code, widely used by Southern forces during the war, 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.

For Pemberton, the bottle is symbolic of his lost cause: the bad news never made it to him. The messenger probably arrived at the river's edge and saw a U.S. flag flying over the city.