Vicksburg was built on a high hills but “it was also located on a severe bend in the Mississippi River”, which Grant attempted to isolate by digging canals. His forces also destroyed the levees above and below Vicksburg in order to flood the area and then bring up more troops and supplies to besiege the city. Gen. John Pemberton, the Confederate commander, never had “enough men at his disposal to adequately defend his department”, while his immediate superior Joseph Johnston had a hostile relationship with Jefferson Davis (Wynne 96). Pemberton received conflicting orders from both, and since he was Northern-born with two brothers still fighting in the Union Army was always under suspicion. He had hardly any naval forces to defend the city, given the severe limitations on the Confederate ability to construct boats of any kind, and no possibility of receiving reinforcements from the East. After the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863, as Confederate hopes for victory vanished, he became “a convenient scapegoat when Mississippi’s fortunes began to decline” (Wynne 97). After this major defeat “Mississippi was no longer a primary focal point for major federal offensives”, although the war dragged on for nearly two years (Wynne 148).
Sherman marched his army out of Vicksburg in February 1864 with the goal of destroying the rail center at Meridian, which was the most important in the southwest. By this time “Confederate resistance to the great blue tidewas minimal” as Sherman left a trail of total devastation through central Mississippi fifty miles across (Wynne 153). This campaign was a dress rehearsal for his march though Georgia and South Carolina, and proved to be a “deep psychological blow” to Southern morale (Wynne 154). As everywhere else in the South black slaves flocked to the Union forces and over 200,000 joined the federal armies. This derived the Confederacy of its most important source of labor, just as Lincoln had planned. Economically the state of Mississippi was already bankrupt, while Confederate bonds and currency had become nearly worthless by 1864. On February 24, 1864, Sherman’s army captured Meridian without encountering any significant resistance and spent five days completely destroying and dismantling the town. After this time, Sherman was transferred to Tennessee, where he was positioned to drive on Atlanta in the fall of 1864. Throughout that time, Mississippi’s most famous Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest, “continued to be a thorn in the federal commander’s side”, but he did not have nearly enough forces left to defeat the invading Union armies (Wynne 158). Forrest continued to raid federal supply depots with his small cavalry force and destroy railroad lines, and even won a major victory at Brice’s Crossroads in June 1864 against a larger Union force that Sherman had sent to eliminate him, but this could not turn the overall tide of the war.
WORKS CITED
Wynne, Ben. Mississippi’s Civil War: A Narrative History. Mercer University Press, 2006.
