Civil War in Mississippi

It was inevitable that Mississippi would play a major part in the Civil War. A Deep South Delta state where King Cotton reigned supreme, it’s heavy reliance on slavery to man the large cotton plantations that comprised the state assured that it would secede if the institution of slavery was threatened. The fact that the state was bordered by the mighty Mississippi River that made it home to several crucial ports guaranteed that the Union would not turn a blind eye to Mississippi when war was declared.

Thus Mississippi was the second state to secede from the Union and provided the Confederacy with some of its most important leaders, most notably President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis.

Sentiment for secession and the new Confederacy ran high in Mississippi, where approximately 80,000 men left their homes to fight with the Confederate Army; in comparison, only around 500 Mississippi men fought on the side of the Union. However, freedmen and escaped slaves from Mississippi accounted for around 17,000 Union soldiers.

Sixteen major battles of the Civil War were fought in Mississippi, and numerous other skirmishes. Among the most important of these battles was the Battle of Vicksburg. The Battle of Vicksburg was the culmination of Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign, which sought to cut the Confederacy off from the crucial ports that lay along the Mississippi River in its namesake state. From May through July 4, 1863, Grant and his troops fought to drive Confederate Lieutenant General John C. Permberton from the city of Vicksburg and thus gain control of the Mississippi River. The Union victory at Vicksburg, coinciding with the Union victory at Gettysburg, are thought to have turned the tide against the Confederacy and seal the fate of the South.

After the siege at Vicksburg, many Mississippi cities and towns found themselves occupied by Union soldiers. Towns including Corinth and Meridian, important railroad junction towns, Jackson, which supplied the Confederacy with manufactured goods, the infamous Natchez, and of course Vicksburg fell into Union hands during the war, an occupation that the fiercely Confederate residents strongly resented. Much of Jackson was looted and burned under Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, who also destroyed Meridian, and said afterward “Meridian no longer exists.” While the well-known cities of Vicksburg and Natchez remained largely intact, looting and burning of plantation homes in these cities, and in fact throughout the state of Mississippi, was not uncommon.

After the Civil War, Mississippi became home to many thousands of migrants, including freedmen, who were attracted to the area by the prospect of clearing grown-up lands and selling the timber, then farming the land. Freedmen were a significant number of these migrants, accounting for as much as two-thirds of the landowners in Mississippi in the Reconstruction area, cultivating cotton and operating lumber mills.

Jefferson Davis returned to Mississippi after the war, as well. He resided the remainder of his life at Beauvoir, a plantation he did not own, but was invited to reside in in order to write his memoirs of the Confederacy.