The Meridian Campaign, Sherman Erases a Railroad City

In February of eighteen sixty-four, General William Tecumseh Sherman left Vicksburg with about twenty thousand men and marched east across Mississippi toward Meridian. His stated objective was not to occupy the city but to destroy it as a Confederate military asset, and he was explicit about what that meant.

Meridian existed because two railroads crossed here: the Mobile and Ohio running north to south, and the Southern Railroad of Mississippi running east to west. The junction made Meridian one of the most important Confederate logistics hubs in the Deep South, a point through which troops, supplies, and artillery moved across the western theater. Sherman intended to make the junction unusable.

His forces entered Meridian on February fourteenth, meeting minimal resistance, as the Confederate commander Leonidas Polk had evacuated rather than defend the city. For five days, Sherman's army worked methodically. Soldiers tore up more than one hundred miles of railroad track, bent the rails over fires, and twisted them into what soldiers called Sherman's neckties so they could not be re-laid. Depots, warehouses, arsenals, shops, offices, and hotels were burned. Sherman reported afterward: "Meridian, with its depots, storehouses, offices, hospitals, hotels, and cantonments no longer exists."

The campaign was a precursor to the more famous March to the Sea that fall and winter. It tested Sherman's theory that destroying an enemy's infrastructure and economic capacity was more decisive than fighting its armies in the field. The theory worked. Meridian took years to recover from the destruction, and the railroads that had made it strategically vital took the Confederacy's collapse to rebuild properly.

The city that exists today rebuilt itself after the war and grew again when rail traffic returned. But the Meridian of eighteen sixty-three, the confident railroad hub, was deliberately and thoroughly unmade in five days of February.