Battle of Jackson

The Battle of Jackson in May of eighteen sixty-three was not one battle but a campaign that left the Mississippi state capital burned and a ruined symbol of Confederate resistance. Grant's army, having crossed the Mississippi at Bruinsburg and driven east, needed to neutralize Jackson before turning west to besiege Vicksburg. Jackson, with its rail junction and manufacturing capacity, was feeding the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg. It had to go.

Union forces under William T. Sherman and James McPherson converged on Jackson from the west and southwest on May fourteenth. Confederate General Joseph Johnston, outnumbered and aware of it, chose not to defend the city but to evacuate most of his force, fighting a rear-guard action to buy time. The Battle of Raymond on May twelfth had already softened Confederate resistance in the region. By afternoon, Sherman's corps had entered the city from the south while McPherson pushed in from the west. Johnston's men held only briefly before withdrawing north.

Grant himself rode into Jackson that evening. In a famous detail, he and Sherman had dinner at the same hotel where Johnston had eaten breakfast that morning. Johnston's coffee, reportedly, was still warm.

Union soldiers burned the city's industrial infrastructure: the railroad depot, foundries, warehouses. Cotton and military stores went up in flames. Soldiers also looted and burned civilian property, and Jackson earned the nickname "Chimneyville" for the chimneys left standing amid leveled buildings. Grant's forces withdrew to pursue the Vicksburg campaign, but Sherman returned to Jackson in July after Vicksburg fell, driving Johnston out a second time in what historians call the Second Battle of Jackson. By the end, the city had been occupied, burned, and fought over repeatedly. The Mississippi state capital would not recover economically for decades.