Sherman's Mississippi Campaign

3. “We Whipped Him Handsomely”

By the beginning of 1864, the Confederacy’s early hopes for a quick victory had vanished. With the loss at Gettysburg in the East and crushing Federal victories at Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and Chattanooga in the West, Southern civilians began to reexamine their attitudes toward the war. Confederate casualty reports listed their fathers, sons, and brothers. The scarcity of provisions and enormously in®ated food prices resulting from the Confederacy’s prosecution of the war hit civilians hard at the kitchen table. The 1861 concept of a tranquil independence for the Southern states was not the reality of 1864 for its people. A “nudge” from William T. Sherman might very well push Southern civilians to give up their cause and stop providing support for their army. Southerners would worry more about protecting and feeding their families and less about supplying the army.1 As Sherman had hoped to leave Vicksburg by February 1, he worked hard to coordinate all the troops, equipment, and horses coming into the city. If things went as planned, he would take Jackson before the Confederates even realized he had left Vicksburg. With a little luck, he could be halfway across the state before General Leonidas Polk could maneuver his Mississippi army into position to intercept him. The ¤rst few days of his campaign would indeed set the tone for Sherman’s experiences in Mississippi, with the Union army moving swiftly and strongly forward, meeting minimal resistance. The Confederates would remain confused throughout the campaign and 3 / “We Whipped Him Handsomely” would continue to make poor decisions. Polk, new to his command in Mississippi , would miss an opportunity to concentrate his forces near Jackson. Despite information to the contrary, he would continue to believe that Sherman was headed to Mobile, to which Polk would mistakenly maneuver his men. Just when his army needed his leadership most, Polk would even travel to Mobile and leave William W. Loring in charge of the Mississippi army. There were no reinforcements available to Polk from any source other than Mobile, so he lost valuable time before gathering troops from the garrison there. In December 1862, Confederate President Jefferson Davis relieved Joseph E. Johnston from the command of the Army of Mississippi and sent him to Dalton, Georgia, to assume control of the Army of Tennessee, a force of about thirty-six thousand effective troops. Johnston was in charge of the Department of the West during the Vicksburg campaign. When the Federal pressure on Vicksburg increased in the winter of 1862, a frustrated President Davis and Secretary of War James A. Seddon urged Johnston to take over John C. Pemberton’s command there. Instead of traveling to Vicksburg, however, Johnston, blocked by James McPherson’s corps, remained at Jackson with his Army of Relief and begged Pemberton to evacuate Vicksburg to avoid a siege. When the “Gibraltar of the West” fell, many Southerners, including President Davis, blamed the loss on Johnston. When Braxton Bragg failed to follow up the Confederate victory at Chickamauga, the Confederate high command searched for a general to replace him as head of the Army of Tennessee, which had now fallen back to Dalton after its loss at Chattanooga. Johnston wanted the position, and his advocates pressured the president to appoint him to the post. When Davis decided ¤nally to send Johnston to Dalton, he ordered him to regain the territory that the Confederacy had lost in Tennessee. The Army of Tennessee, in its new commander’s opinion, did not have enough men to accomplish the order, so Johnston’s army wintered at Dalton while Johnston begged Richmond for reinforcements .2 Leonidas Polk, an Episcopal bishop and good friend of the president, took command of Johnston’s army in Mississippi, renamed the Army of Mississippi . He was a North Carolinian and son of a war hero of the American Revolution. Polk graduated from West Point in 1827, where he was the ¤rst cadet to proclaim his faith and be baptized there. After graduation he resigned from the military and studied at the Virginia Theological Seminary, 34 / Chapter 3 gaining ordination as an Episcopal priest in 1831. In 1841 he had become bishop of Louisiana and lived brie®y in the state. By 1854 he had moved to a twenty-seven-hundred-acre plantation in Bolivar County, Mississippi, where he farmed and worked on the creation of the University of the South, an Episcopal-af¤liated...