If the Confederate troops could not find supplies, they could not remain a threat to the river. Sherman therefore created a plan to destroy the rail lines in Mississippi, hoping to cripple the state’s military value to the Confederacy and end the Rebel threat to the Mississippi. If the Confederate threat was eliminated, Federal officials could remove thousands of garrisoning troops along the river for use on battlefields elsewhere.

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After retaking Jackson in the summer of 1863 after the fall of Vicksburg, Sherman had thought about moving down the railroad track toward Meridian, a small town of about four hundred people, located about one hundred miles east of Jackson near the Alabama border. This bustling community contained warehouses, storehouses, depots, an armory, a hospital, and other noteworthy military targets. It served as a hub for Confederate traffic between Mississippi and the rest of the eastern Confederacy. The Confederacy used the Mobile and Ohio Railroad and the Southern Railroad of Mississippi, which intersected at Meridian, to shuttle vast amounts of men and supplies through the Magnolia State. Additionally, these lines worked as an important interior route to transfer Confederate troops from one front to another quickly and efficiently.

At the time, Sherman decided that because of the hot summer weather and the exhaustion of his men, he should postpone any movement on Meridian. Simultaneously, however, he became determined to rid the state of its guerrilla elements and other Confederate forces that harassed river traffic and posed a threat to the Mississippi River itself. Convinced that a strike at Meridian could stymie these forces, at every opportunity he pressed his request to take the town. His plan suggested the possibility of an amphibious assault near Mobile, a large cavalry raid, numerous feints, or a march of more than twenty thousand infantry straight across a hundred and fifty miles of enemy territory.

Grant, Sherman’s superior, had bigger plans than Meridian, but an attack on the Mississippi town would fit nicely into his larger strategy. Grant sent letters to President Abraham Lincoln’s general in chief, Henry W. Halleck, on several occasions in July and August, suggesting an attack on Mobile. Grant believed that the Alabama city could provide an excellent base for his operations into the Confederate states farther east, where he could hit some of the South’s manufacturing and supply sectors. Mobile could provide the southernmost anchor for another split of the Confederacy. The important port city had become, with the Union victories at Shiloh and Corinth, the only rail link, besides Meridian, from Mississippi to the eastern Confederacy.

Halleck thought Texas was a more important target, so he did not provide Grant with the approval he wished. In this he was reflecting Lincoln’s belief that Texas was especially important to U.S. interests.

As early as August 1863, Sherman had begun to make plans for a move against Meridian. He ordered a map containing his intended route. The map included information on Meridian in Mississippi as well as Demopolis and Mobile in Alabama. He hoped to move across Mississippi as soon as his men were rested and the cool fall weather had arrived.

When word came in September that Confederate General Braxton Bragg had cornered Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans at Chattanooga, Sherman thought that the best way to relieve his colleague was to direct an attack on Mobile through Meridian, making a “powerful diversion.” He argued that if the Army of the Tennessee moved rapidly across Mississippi and Alabama, Joseph Johnston would have to take large numbers of men from Bragg’s army in order to counter the move in Alabama. Sherman therefore chose the destruction of Meridian as his main objective for the winter of 1863-1864.

Most of the tactics Sherman employed during the Meridian campaign, such as using feints and acquiring supplies from the countryside as he progressed, were not new to war. Abandoning his supply lines, however, was an innovative idea. Sherman had witnessed Grant’s army practically perform this maneuver during the Vicksburg campaign of 1863. When Confederate cavalry destroyed Grant’s main supply depot at Holly Springs, Mississippi, and damaged the Mobile and Ohio Railroad in Tennessee, Grant’s army subsisted mainly on food and forage the soldiers gathered from farms along the railroad.

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