Although Grant's army had only done this for two weeks, Sherman (and Grant) thought that his army could carry all necessities except food in wagons during his march to Meridian and live off the Mississippi countryside for the entire campaign.

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Marching on Meridian, Sherman combined all the tactics he had learned during the first three years of the Civil War. What Sherman learned about the limitations of the Confederacy and the Southern people during his first large-scale use of hard war provided him with the insight he needed to use his style of warfare on an even larger scale later, marching through Georgia and South Carolina.

Sherman's method of war, under Grant's overall leadership, became the Federal strategy for winning the war. For the remainder of the conflict, the Union army sought to strike at all Southern resources and infrastructure, hoping to destroy the Confederacy's ability and will to keep fighting.

The Meridian campaign was hardly the brutish, purposeless destruction described in Lost Cause mythology. Rather, it was a planned strategy and tactic to end the war as quickly and bloodlessly as possible.

During the first year of the American Civil War, William T. Sherman had considered proper treatment of noncombatants and their property his soldierly duty. He took great care in seeing that his policies and the conduct of his men did not trample upon the perceived rights of secessionist or unionist civilians. He handed out harsh punishment to soldiers who did as little as steal fence rails for their campfires or take liberally from the countryside.

By the end of the war, however, most Southerners saw Sherman as a brute for his harsh treatment of Southern civilians and his destruction of property across the Confederate states. His "bummers" became notorious for their ability to strip the land of valuable goods, and Southerners greatly abhorred them. Many historians have credited Sherman with creating the policy of "total war," of modern warfare. Although recent works have rightfully concluded that Sherman was not the first general to promote a harsher attitude toward civilians, he nevertheless moved war in that direction to a far greater degree than any of his contemporaries.

The pivotal circumstances in Sherman's transformation came because of his dealings with guerrillas along the Mississippi River and his participation in the Vicksburg campaign in 1862 and 1863. Because of the partisans' menace to Union depots, communications, and supply lines, coupled with the Confederate populace's support of these raiders, Sherman developed a harsher, more encompassing policy toward Southern civilians.

Just after the fall of Vicksburg, while in Jackson for the second time, Sherman conducted a campaign of destruction to render the city unusable to the Confederate army. The Meridian campaign, some six months later, was his preliminary attempt to subjugate an entire region of the state and served as his proving ground for later campaigns into Georgia and the Carolinas.

Sherman adapted what he had learned during the first three years of the war into a new campaign technique that he designed to end the war as quickly and bloodlessly as possible. He wanted to quash the enemy's ability and will to fight without having to destroy the opponent's armies or capture and garrison large areas of the Confederacy.

Although he attended West Point, Sherman did not derive his principles from his education there. Most professional military officers, many of whom had attended West Point, had studied the works of Baron Antoine Henri de Jomini. While many historians contend that Jomini's works had little influence on these officers because his The Art of War was not translated into English until late in 1854, most military tacticians and strategists of the period drew upon this work for their own writings.

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