Chickasaw Bayou Battle

Chickasaw Bayou was the wreck of a larger plan. In late 1862 Grant meant to hold Pemberton's army in north Mississippi while Sherman came down from Memphis with more than thirty thousand men. Then Forrest tore into Grant's supply lines in Tennessee, and Earl Van Dorn's raid on the Holly Springs depot took fifteen hundred prisoners and over two million dollars in stores. Grant called off the advance, but cut telegraph lines kept Sherman from learning it. He landed on the Yazoo and attacked fourteen thousand defenders on the bluffs on December 29.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• USS Cairo Gunboat and Museum — 2.3 mi
  The raised hull of a Union river ironclad sunk by a mine in the Yazoo in 1862, displayed at Vicksburg National Military Park with the artifacts the river mud preserved.
• Old Court House Museum — 4.1 mi
  Vicksburg's Greek Revival courthouse of 1860, raised on a hilltop with the labor of enslaved artisans and now a private local-history museum heavy on Confederate relics.
• Vicksburg National Military Park — 4.2 mi
  A 16-mile tour road through the trenches of the 47-day siege of 1863, with a national cemetery and the story of the thousands of enslaved people who reached freedom behind Union lines.

More markers nearby

• Waltersville — 2.2 mi
• Fort Nogales — 2.7 mi
• Soldiers Rest C.S.A. Cemetery — 3.0 mi
• Burial Site of Lynching Victims — 3.1 mi