On the same day Grant telegraphed to Halleck: ‘General Sherman will command the expedition down the Mississippi. He will have a force of about forty thousand men.’ On the 22d of December this army rendezvoused at Friar's Point, ready to move up the Yazoo River to the rear of Vicksburg., On the 27th, the four divisions, Steele's, M. L. Smith's, Morgan's, and A. J. Smith's, aggregating over forty-two thousand men, were landed in front of the bluffs over-looking the swamps through which ran Chickasaw Bayou. To flounder through this boggy low land, cross the bayou, and storm the heights beyond, was the task Sherman laid out for his army. It was his first attempt to command more than a division in action, and he had not before directed a battle. Though the rebels had been reenforced in consequence of the failure of Grant's cooperative movement from Holly Springs, they were still far inferior in numbers to Sherman's army. Their position, however, was impregnable. The high bluffs were strengthened from base to summit with rifle-pits and heavier parapets, and to assault seemed madness then to many of the officers, and appears so still when all the facts can be
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[55]
Grant's order assigning him to the command, left both the details of the preparations and the plans of the movement entirely in his hands, as will appear from the first paragraph of that order:
Cincinnati: Wilstach, Baldwin & Co. 1875.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.