Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 13.djvu/308

 Campaign Against Grant in North Mississippi. 307

We must now go back a little to relate the more clearly the sequel of these operations of General Grant, which ensued only a few days after his Holly Springs' disaster, terminated in Sherman's defeat at Chickasaw Bluff, and was the last act of the Grant campaign in Mis- sissippi in 1862.

In December, while Grant was so leisurely moving down the Cen- tral railroad and bearing our little army back towards Grenada. Sherman was sent with a force, estimated at twenty thousand men, to seize Vicksburg.* He would then move to Jackson, and thus Van Dorn would be placed with his little army of just sixteen thousand men between the armies of Grant and Sherman, and would have been forced to evacuate Mississippi. Sherman disembarked his army on the Yazoo river, above Vicksburg, about December 2oth. The place was then defended by an insufficient force, and must have fallen an easy prey to an energetic attack by such an army as General Sherman now brought against it. But Sherman delayed his attack several days, thus losing precious time and opportunity, and it was not until December 2yth that he moved in battle array to fight the battle of Chickasaw Bluff, which, so far as we know, is the only battle General Sherman ever did fight.

On that day General Stephen D. Lee commanded five regiments of infantry and two light batteries, twenty-five hundred men and twelve guns, which confronted Sherman's army on the Chickasaw and Willow bayous. Lee arrayed his little force along the road which leads under the Chickasaw Bluff. His centre fronted the opening between the bayous through which Sherman would debouch to the attack. An open cotton field six hundred yards across lay between the hostile lines. The centre of Lee's line, Louisiana troops, lay in the road, with the bluff at their backs. There was no ditch or embankment, or cover of any sort along this part of Lee's line; nor was there any obstacle to the approach of the Federal forces, except the steady rifles of the brave men who that day achieved the most signal victory of the war.

The troops of Lee's wings were much better posted than his centre; they were on more elevated ground. Their front was, in great part, securely covered by deep and impassable fissures or gul- lies, which the enemy could not discover until within point-blank range, and their fire could sweep the whole front of attack. About

ber.
 * Sherman, in his "Narrative," puts his force at a much greater num-