Mississippi in the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 9th of January, 1861, Mississippi became the second state in the United States to vote itself out of it. Its ordinance of secession named the reason plainly. It proclaimed that "our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world." Jefferson Davis, then a Democratic senator from the state and soon to be Confederate president, offered his own explanation. He said Mississippi had heard proclaimed the idea that all men are created free and equal, and regarded that sentiment as threatening. Davis stated his opposition to what he called the invocation of the Declaration of Independence to maintain "the equality of the races."

  The state sat along the Mississippi River, and control of that waterway was central to both sides' strategy. Dozens of battles would be fought on its soil. What drove this state into secession, and what happened when the war it declared began to turn against itself from within?

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• 2. A Declaration About Slavery

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  John C. Breckinridge, the Southern Democrat candidate, carried Mississippi in the 1860 presidential election with 40,768 votes, or 59 percent of the 69,095 ballots cast. John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party finished second with 25,045 votes, about 36 percent. Stephen A. Douglas, the northern Democrat, received only 3,282 votes. Abraham Lincoln, the Republican who won the presidency nationally, was not on the ballot in Mississippi at all.

  Through the 1850s, the Whig party had collapsed in the state, and Southern Democrats had moved toward an increasingly hard position. They discussed openly the possibility of leaving the United States if the federal government ever moved to restrict the spread of slavery. A Mississippi newspaper captured the mood in the late 1850s. It wrote that the slavery controversy presented "a case of the most violent antagonism of interests and opinions" and that "no persuasions, no entreaties or appeals, can allay the fierce contention between the two."

  Governor John J. Pettus, elected in 1859, belonged to the most radical wing of this movement, known as the Fire-Eaters. In his inaugural address, he pledged to defend what he called "the superiority and supremacy of the white race" against what he termed "Black Republicans." His state's congressional delegation shared his position. It included Senator Albert G. Brown and Representative William Barksdale, all of them pro-slavery Democrats.

  Mississippi was one of only two states in 1860 where enslaved people made up the majority of the population; South Carolina was the other. A Mississippi lawyer named Fulton Anderson traveled to Virginia's secession convention in 1861 to explain his state's decision. He told Virginia's delegates that opposition to what he called "the ultimate extinction of slavery" was the primary catalyst for Mississippi's secession. When Mississippi's senators and representatives withdrew from the US Congress in January 1861, many moved directly into positions in the Confederate Army. Others stood for election to the Confederate States Congress.

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• 3. The Armies They Raised

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  Around 80,000 white Mississippians served in the Confederate Army over the course of the war. The state contributed 45 infantry regiments, 18 cavalry regiments, multiple artillery batteries, and numerous smaller organizations. Twelve infantry regiments and two artillery batteries served in the Eastern Theater as part of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. The remainder fought in the Western Theater under generals including Braxton Bragg, Joseph E. Johnston, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and John Bell Hood.

  Volunteering was uneven. Men who owned more property, including enslaved people, were more likely to sign up than poor men. Men living near the Mississippi River, regardless of wealth, were less likely to enlist than those in the interior. Union control of the river made river-county residents especially vulnerable, and many military-age men in those communities had simply moved elsewhere.

  Confederate conscription took effect in 1862, making white men aged 18-35 eligible for the draft. As the war continued, exemptions were narrowed and the eligible age range expanded. By war's end, men aged 17-50 could be conscripted.

  The Mississippi State Troops, formed in 1862 from the pre-war militia, offered an alternative to regular Confederate service. Under the governor's direct control, the State Troops suffered from poor organization and high absenteeism. Many men joined specifically to avoid being drafted into the regular Confederate Army. Most of the State Troops cavalry units were absorbed into Nathan Bedford Forrest's Cavalry Corps in 1864.

  White Mississippians who fought for the Union numbered only 545, organized into the 1st Battalion, Mississippi Mounted Rifles. That figure excluded the many Confederate soldiers who would later desert; some of those men would actively support the Union cause from within Mississippi's interior.

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• 4. Black Mississippians at War

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  Wilson Brown was born enslaved in Natchez. He became a sailor in the United States Navy and won the Medal of Honor for bravery. His is one story among more than 17,000: the number of formerly enslaved Mississippians who chose to fight for the Union.

  Before the 22nd of May, 1863, African-American men had been legally barred from service in the United States Army. The formation of the United States Colored Troops changed that. By that spring, the conditions for Black military service were already taking shape in the Mississippi Delta. General Frederick Steele led a Union expedition around Greenville, seizing nearly 1,000 head of livestock and burning 500,000 bushels of corn. The corn had been intended to supply Confederate forces at Vicksburg. As Steele's soldiers moved from Rolling Fork back to Greenville, several hundred enslaved people chose to follow rather than remain on their plantations. General Ulysses S. Grant determined that any enslaved person who crossed Union lines could become a US soldier. The first Black regiments were organized during that expedition. By its end, nearly 500 formerly enslaved men were learning "the school of the soldier."

  Black soldiers died at higher rates than their white counterparts. An unknown number of enslaved men were simultaneously forced to labor for the Confederacy, building fortifications and serving as servants for Confederate officers.

  Portions of northwestern Mississippi were already under Union control when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on the 1st of January, 1863. Union forces began freeing enslaved people in those areas immediately, as the Proclamation had declared all of Mississippi "in rebellion." By the time the war ended, approximately one-third to one-half of the state's 436,000 enslaved people had already been freed before any formal peace arrived.

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• 5. The Fracturing Confederacy

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  The Twenty Negro Law exempted from Confederate military service any man who owned twenty or more enslaved people. For poorer soldiers already fighting in the field, the law made the war's class structure impossible to ignore. Many called it what it was: a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.

  Following the fall of Vicksburg in 1863, desertion became a severe problem for Confederate forces throughout Mississippi. Thousands of troops abandoned their posts and returned to their home counties, forming armed bands for mutual protection. Women and enslaved people often aided and concealed them. Some deserters simply wanted to support their families as economic conditions worsened. Others turned actively against the Confederacy and sought to support the Union cause. Some became bandits who preyed on civilians.

  Newton Knight of Jones County became the most well-known deserter-guerrilla. His band assassinated Confederate officers, raided supply depots, and overthrew civil authority in Jones County and surrounding areas. Confederate forces were sent to capture him in 1864. Some of his men were killed in skirmishes or executed. Knight himself was never captured and later participated in post-war Republican politics.

  Jones County became known as the center of the Confederacy's "inner civil war," but by 1864 it was far from alone. In the south-central part of the state, nine counties including Covington, Greene, Marion, and Smith had fallen outside Confederate authority. In north Mississippi, Itawamba, Monroe, Tippah, and Tishomingo counties faced the same armed gangs of deserters. In the central region, Choctaw, Kemper, Neshoba, Newton, Rankin, and Winston counties were all severely affected. Choctaw County Unionists organized a "Loyal League" allied with the United States. Their stated aims included advising desertion, robbing the families of Confederate soldiers who remained in the army, and informing federal authorities of Confederate movements.

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• 6. The Towns They Fought Over

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  Two railroad lines crossed at Corinth, and that junction made the town one of the most contested pieces of ground in the Western Theater. After the Battle of Shiloh, Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard retreated there. Union Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck pursued, but advanced so cautiously that Beauregard simply abandoned the town. Halleck spent more than a month digging entrenchments at every stop along the way. The episode became known as the Siege of Corinth. On the 3rd and the 4th of October, 1862, Confederate Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn attempted to retake the city at the Battle of Corinth. His forces briefly succeeded before Union reinforcements arrived and forced them out.

  Jackson, despite its small population, had become a manufacturing center for the Confederacy. On the 13th of May, 1863, Union forces captured it for the first time, driving Confederate troops north toward Canton. Two days later, troops under William Tecumseh Sherman burned and looted key facilities in the city. The Union army then turned west to besiege Vicksburg. When Vicksburg surrendered on the 4th of July, Confederate forces moving to relieve the siege retreated back into Jackson. They were unaware that the city they had come to save had already fallen. The Siege of Jackson that followed lasted approximately one week before the city fell again.

  Vicksburg sat on high ground above the river, well fortified and difficult to assault directly. The hardships of civilians during the siege were extreme, with heavy shelling and starvation throughout the campaign. Some 30,000 Confederates surrendered when it ended. Rather than being sent to prison camps, they were paroled and sent home to await exchange for Union prisoners.

  The disastrous Chunky Creek Train Wreck of 1863 happened 30 miles from Meridian, when a train was en route to the Vicksburg battle. In February 1864, Sherman's army reached Meridian and destroyed its railroads before burning much of the area. Sherman is reputed to have said afterward: "Meridian no longer exists."

  Oxford was burned to the ground on the 22nd of August, 1864, by General A.J. Smith. Only the University of Mississippi and two shops were left standing. The burning was ordered because Nathan Bedford Forrest had taken refuge in the city.

  Natchez surrendered to Flag-Officer David G. Farragut in May 1862, after the fall of New Orleans, and largely escaped physical destruction. One civilian died during the entire war: an elderly man who suffered a fatal heart attack in September 1863 after a Union ironclad shelled the city from the river. In 1864, William Henry Elder, the Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Natchez, refused a Union order. The order had required him to compel his parishioners to pray for the US president. Union forces arrested Elder, convicted him, and jailed him briefly.

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• 7. Memory and Reconstruction

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  The Lost Cause myth took hold in Natchez with particular force after the war. White Natchez became markedly more pro-Confederate in the postwar years than it had been during the fighting. The major organizations that maintained this tradition were the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Elite women played a particularly central role, especially in establishing memorials. The Civil War Monument in Natchez was dedicated on Memorial Day 1890, an event organized largely by women of the city's upper class.

  Historian Joyce Broussard's analysis of the memoir left by Ellen Shields offers a detailed account of how Confederate women in the city experienced Union occupation. Shields was a member of the local elite. Her account shows that Confederate men, absent because of the war, were seen to have failed their households and communities. Women used their class-based social position to navigate the presence of Union forces.

  The 340 planters who each owned 250 or more slaves in the Natchez region in 1860 had never been reliable Confederates. Many had opposed secession and held social and economic ties to the North. Yet many of their sons and nephews enlisted in the Confederate Army when war came. Charles Dahlgren had arrived in Natchez from Philadelphia and built his fortune in the region before the war. He supported the Confederacy and led a brigade, but was sharply criticized for failing to defend the Gulf Coast. He left for Georgia when Union forces arrived, returned in 1865, went bankrupt, and moved to New York City in 1870.

  Adelbert Ames was one of three generals who commanded the Fourth Military District. That district was the Union Army structure that administered Mississippi and Arkansas under the Reconstruction Acts. The state had separated from the Union of its own accord; now it was being returned to it on the Union's terms.

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