Sherman's Dress Rehearsal: The Meridian Campaign of 1864

Most Americans know the story of Sherman's March to the Sea, the November eighteen sixty-four campaign through Georgia that cut a sixty-mile-wide swath of destruction from Atlanta to Savannah. Fewer know that Sherman rehearsed the whole concept right here in Mississippi, ten months earlier, in what historians now call the Meridian Campaign.

In February of eighteen sixty-four, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman led roughly twenty thousand soldiers out of Vicksburg and marched east across central Mississippi. His target was Meridian, the largest remaining Confederate railroad center in the state, where the Mobile and Ohio Railroad intersected the Southern Railroad. Whoever controlled Meridian controlled the movement of Confederate troops and supplies across the Deep South.

Confederate Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk had assembled a substantial force in and around the city, but he lost his nerve as Sherman's columns advanced and retreated rapidly eastward without fighting. Sherman's men entered Meridian on February fourteenth and went to work. For six days they systematically demolished what was arguably the most important rail hub in Mississippi: tearing up tracks, burning depots and machine shops, destroying bridges, bending rails over bonfires into what soldiers called Sherman's neckties. When they left on February twentieth, Meridian had been reduced from a strategic asset to a ruin.

What Sherman took from this campaign was a lesson in logistics and psychology. His army had moved fast, lived off the land, and destroyed an industrial target without fighting a major battle. He had demonstrated that an army could operate deep in enemy territory by carrying the war directly to the infrastructure that sustained the Confederacy, and to the will of the population that supported it. He would refine that doctrine in Georgia that fall. The March to the Sea was not an improvisation. It was a tested plan, and it was tested right here.