Chicksaw Bayou, Mississippi. The poison spring - 00446
“We will lose 5,000 men before we take Vicksburg, and may as well lose them here as anywhere else." -U.S. Gen. William T. Sherman
The Battle of Chickasaw Bayou, Dec 26 – 29, was the first battle of the Vicksburg Campaign.
The Midwesterners of U.S. Gen. William T. Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee were in “good spirits and keen to start at any time”.
They were intrigued by the strange land that combined “low boggy ground, with innumerable bayous or deep sloughs” with a dense undergrowth of woods covered in Spanish moss.
None grasped that the terrain would be an adversary as formidable as the Confederates.
