Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 7.djvu/579

98 strongly intrenched; that Vicksburg was strongly fortified and held by about 6,ooo men under General Smith; while he had confronting Grant, including cavalry and artillery, about 22,000 effectives. On December 1st he felt compelled to abandon the Tallahatchie and fall back on Grenada, making the Yallabusha his line of defense.

Grant, following up, made his headquarters at Oxford, and his cavalry advanced as far as Coffeeville, where they were defeated on December 5th by troops under command of Gen. Lloyd Tilghman; the Twenty-third Mississippi, Lieut.-Col. Moses McCarley; the Twenty-sixth, Maj. T. F. Parker; and the Fourteenth, Major Doss, being the principal Confederate forces engaged.

In the meantime Hovey was taken care of by Colonel Starke’s cavalry and the various outposts, and after skirmishes at the mouth of the Coldwater on the Yockhapatalfa, at Mitchell’s Cross-roads and Oakland, he retreated to the Mississippi river, having done little damage except burning some bridges and sinking the steamer New Moon on the Tallahatchie. Grant waited at Oxford for Sherman to make his way down the river, but the latter did not reach Friar's Point with his advance until December 21st, and meanwhile a great change in the situation had been wrought by the Confederate cavalry. On the 19th Nathan B. Forrest, then a brigadier-general, a brilliant soldier in whose exploits Mississippi felt a motherly pride, as his youth had been spent in this State, drove the strong Federal garrison from Jackson, Tenn., and then made a clean sweep of the enemy and their stores and the railroads north of Jackson, drawing 20,000 Federals from Corinth, Grand Junction and La Grange.

On December 20th, General Van Dorn, in command of the cavalry of Pemberton’s army, advanced by way of Pontotoc, and struck an equally effective blow at Holly Springs, surprising the garrison and burning up all the supplies and trains collected at that place, the value of