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The Civil War in Mississippi: Major Campaigns and Battles

by Michael Ballard, University Press of Mississippi

The war came to Mississippi in the spring of 1862 when Henry Halleck’s large Union army crept over the border following the Battle of Shiloh. Before the state officially surrendered in May 1865, more than 94,000 men would join the Confederate cause and nearly 23,000 became casualties.

This new book by the esteemed Michael Ballard provides a comprehensive synthesis of the state’s major campaigns and battles. In familiar fashion, he balances a bold narrative of tactical and strategic movements with shrewd analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of the theater’s principals.

Ballard describes how, after Vicksburg fell in July 1863, the war in Mississippi devolved primarily into Union raids to deny the state’s foodstuffs and resources to the Confederate war effort and repeated efforts to keep Nathan Bedford Forrest from disrupting William Sherman’s supply line stretching from the Ohio River into northern Georgia. Major General Benjamin Grierson, the Union’s most accomplished cavalryman in the West, led the last serious military campaign of the war in the state, a 15-day, 460-mile raid in the winter of 1864-65.

Of particular note is Ballard’s astute argument that Brice’s Crossroads— usually considered Forrest’s greatest tactical victory—was actually a strategic defeat for the Confederacy. “While Forrest fought a relatively meaningless battle in Mississippi,” he observes, “Sherman’s supply line remained safe and secure.”

 

Originally published in the August 2011 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here