Early in the afternoon on the Fourth of July, roughly thirty thousand Confederate defenders stacked their arms in the city, then marched between Union lines on their way to temporary camps outside of Vicksburg. Most observers commented that there was no jeering, no taunting, that Grant’s men behaved themselves with aplomb. Soon after their departure, Grant and his officers began to assess the size of their victory. Not only had they captured a city and thirty thousand men, but they had taken nearly two hundred pieces of artillery and a vast amount of ammunition. They had achieved the single greatest Union success of the war to date.