Chimneyville: The Battle and Burning of Jackson

Before Ulysses Grant could lay siege to Vicksburg, he had to make sure the Confederate army in his rear couldn't hit him from the east. That meant taking Jackson, Mississippi's state capital, and then making sure it could no longer function as a Confederate supply and railroad center.

On May fourteenth, eighteen sixty-three, Grant's army approached Jackson from the west. General William T. Sherman's corps probed the Confederate works and found them thinly held. Confederate General Joseph Johnston, outnumbered and unwilling to be trapped in the city, ordered a withdrawal, and the Union army marched in almost without fighting. Johnston sent word to Confederate commander John Pemberton at Vicksburg: the two armies needed to unite. They never got the chance.

Grant immediately ordered Sherman to destroy Jackson as a military asset. Sherman's troops spent days systematically wrecking the rail yards and manufacturing facilities, the machine shops, foundries, and warehouses that had supplied Confederate forces across Mississippi. When they were done, so much of the city had burned that soldiers nicknamed it Chimneyville. Brick chimneys stood in rows where buildings had been, like tombstones in an open field.

Jackson was not finished. After Champion Hill and the beginning of the Vicksburg siege, Johnston regrouped and returned to Jackson with a larger force. From July tenth through July seventeenth, Union General William T. Sherman besieged the city again, and Johnston again retreated. Jackson was occupied and burned a second time. Chimneyville earned its name twice over.

The destruction of Jackson as a rail hub in May eighteen sixty-three was one of the key decisions that sealed Vicksburg's fate. Cut off from reinforcement and resupply, Pemberton's army could only wait inside its fortifications as Grant tightened the noose.