On the third day after the capture of New Orleans, Wang Mingshan finally left 2 battleships and 3 other cruisers in New Orleans, plus 1 gunboat captured, to make up 6 warships to guard between the two forts downstream of New Orleans, and led the remaining 13 warships with a shallow draft to escort the troop carriers carrying the main force of the two infantry divisions carrying 16,000 men, and marched to the upper reaches of the Mississippi River.

And Wang Haiyang and Xi Baotian also left 4 infantry regiments to defend the city of New Orleans, and began to repair and strengthen the forts of Fort St. Philip and Fort Jackson, ready for defense.

The mighty fleet, escorted by 13 small and medium-sized warships, went all the way up the Mississippi River, along the river in Baton Rouge and Natchez, and the small defenders of the Southern Confederate States surrendered directly.

Three days later, the fleet sailed out of the border with Louisiana and into Mississippi. Fort Adams is an important fortress on the banks of the Mississippi River, guarding the border between the two states.

However, at this moment, several yellow star flags on a red background of the Chinese Empire were displayed above this fortress, waving in the wind, making Wang Mingshan, Wang Haiyang, Xi Baotian and others on the fleet ecstatic. They naturally understood the meaning of the appearance of the Red Flag of the Chinese Empire on the fort, which meant that the 4th Infantry Division of Liuye led by Peng Yulin had arrived here ahead of schedule and had already captured Fort Adams.

The two armies met victoriously.

Without any celebration or anything like that, Peng Yulin directly ordered to continue to swim up the Mississippi River and seize the time to attack. At this moment, he had already received the news that the emperor had sent a large number of additional troops from Shengjing to support, and it was at this time that he learned about the emperor's establishment of the field corps, and the original 11th and 21st infantry divisions of the captive army had been reorganized into the 1st Infantry Division and the 4th Infantry Division of the 6th Field Corps.

Peng Yulin rejoiced at the expansion of the empire, but also agonized at the slowness and delay in delivering news. If the emperor's news could be delivered to him in time, maybe he would not be so passive. He could ask Lin Qirong to slow down for a month or two before attacking along the Mississippi River, and then send troops after the domestic reinforcements were about to arrive, so that Lin Qirong's Hexi Army would not be besieged, so that now he didn't know his life and death, and there was no news at all.

Fortunately, because the Pacific Fleet, the 2nd Infantry Division, and the 8th Infantry Division captured many merchant ships of the New Orleans Shipping Company when they captured New Orleans, Wang Mingshan ordered these merchant ships to be directly converted into spare troop carriers when he left New Orleans.

However, according to the orders of Emperor Feng Yunshan, Peng Yulin controlled all the Chinese Empire's troops in the United States, and the three infantry divisions and the Pacific Fleet were under Peng Yulin's unified command. Peng Yulin did not let all the infantry get on the troop carrier, but chose to send three infantry reconnaissance battalions on each side of the Mississippi River to ride the collected war horses to clear obstacles along the way in advance and reconnoiter the enemy's situation.

But with such a vigorous march, it is simply impossible to hide the news.

Within two days, the news that the Chinese Empire had sent troops to capture the city of New Orleans and sail up the Mississippi River to attack Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas immediately spread out, causing a sensation throughout the Confederate States of America in the South and the American Confederation in the North!

But at this moment, what made the Southern Confederate States depressed was that they never thought that the Chinese Empire would sail across the ocean and send so many troops directly to the American mainland, even under the guise of the Hexi United Army. As for the Southern Union States, they have always only targeted the so-called United Kingdom of Hexi, and the strategy of sending troops is also aimed at the American land of the United Army of Hexi.

When the Confederate army, which had already set out on the way to attack the United Kingdom in the west of the river, learned that an army was going upriver from the mouth of the Mississippi River, it immediately abandoned its original strategy of crossing Texas and rushing to California, and gathered nearly 30,000 of its infantry to garrison around Vicksburg, a strategic location nearly 200 kilometers upstream of Fort Adams on the Mississippi River.

Vicksburg was not only a military powerhouse in western Mississippi, but also a large river port and a local trading center for cotton and livestock in the vicinity. The Vickers Fort was built on a hill more than 100 meters higher than the Mississippi River, easy to defend and difficult to attack, the terrain is wonderful, as early as the Spanish and French colonizers built a fortress here, after these years of construction, Vickers Fort is extremely strong. Coupled with the fact that it was now heavily guarded and extremely tightly defended, the Southern Alliance army wanted to defeat the Chinese Empire's army in Vicksburg in one battle.

And, they had to do the same. If Peng Yulin's troops broke through the Vickers Fortress, Jackson City, the capital of Mississippi, which was only 60 kilometers away from Vickersburg, would be completely exposed, and the defenseless Jackson City would be easily attacked. Moreover, Fort Vicksburg is the most important fortress in the lower reaches of the Mississippi River, once lost, the entire lower reaches of the Mississippi River, until Memphis, the largest city in Tennessee, there is only another Fort Hudson, which is smaller than Fort Vicks, and the weakly defended hinterland of the middle reaches of the Mississippi River is exposed under the fleet of the Chinese Empire.

Of course, Vicksburg could not accommodate the 30,000 troops of the Confederate army. The Confederate army was commanded by General John Pemberton, who scattered 30,000 troops around the two forts of Vicksburg and Fort Hudson, and also chose several easy ports to attack and land on the cliffs that stretched for about 100 kilometers between the two forts, and set up artillery to guard the river with heavy troops.

Three days later, the Chinese Empire's land and water alliance led by Peng Yulin met no resistance and successfully reached the front of Vicksburg. The reconnaissance battalion had already reported the enemy's defense in Vicksburg, and Peng Yulin was ready to meet and immediately summoned the generals above the deputy division commander for discussion.

Peng Yulin led the crowd to analyze that only by capturing Vicksburg and cutting down the enemy forces connecting the north and south could a big victory be obtained. But a frontal attack by the Pacific Fleet from the Mississippi River would be tantamount to hitting a stone with an egg. After all, because these Pacific Fleets were established earlier, a large number of artillery guns were originally installed on warships purchased directly from the United States and France, and not many were replaced by long-range Krupp cannons, and because Vicksburg was built on a cliff, it was difficult to shoot at a long angle.