Chickasaw Bluffs
"We will lose 5,000 men before we take Vicksburg, and we may as well lose them here as anywhere else."
-Gen. William T. Sherman
At the opening of the campaign to take Vicksburg, Mississippi, Grant and Sherman were looking for a weak spot in the Confederate defense. Vicksburg stood on a bluff over the Mississippi, strongly fortified and completely controlling the river. Grant and Sherman selected Chickasaw Bluffs on the Yazoo River just north of Vicksburg.
Philip Reilly wrote of the attack:
"Batteries that had hitherto been silent now opened upon us with fearful effect. Solid shot, shell, grape, cannister, rifle balls and musketry poured down upon us from all sides. The effect was terrible. It seemed as if the heavens and earth were coming together far as the eye could reach. You might behold riderless horses with distended nostrils galloping wildly to and fro and quivering with affright while over the plain you might behold headless bodies, legs and arms scattered to and fro. ...We advanced steadily into this human slaughter pen until we drove them from their first rifle pits were our brave boys were so badly cut up that they/we, I mean, were forced to retreat."
