Grierson's Raid

Grierson's Raid was a Union cavalry raid during the Vicksburg Campaign of the American Civil War. It ran from April 17 to May 2, 1863, as a diversion from Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's main attack plan on Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Background
Early in 1863, Major General Charles Hamilton, the commander of the Corinth section of Grant's division, suggested what would eventually become Grierson's Raid. Subsequently, due to Hamilton's insistence on procuring a command that would garner him more glory, Hamilton offered his resignation. Grant quickly accepted.

Up until this time in the war, Confederate cavalry commanders such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, John Hunt Morgan, and J.E.B. Stuart had ridden circles around the Union (literally, in Stuart's case; see the Peninsula Campaign), and it was time to out-do the Confederates in cavalry expeditions. The task fell to Col. Benjamin Grierson, a former music teacher who, oddly, hated horses after being kicked in the head by one as a child. Grierson's cavalry brigade consisted of the 6th and 7th Illinois and 2nd Iowa Cavalry regiments.

The raid
Grierson and his 1,700 horse troopers, some in Confederate uniforms serving as scouts for the main force, rode over six hundred miles through hostile territory (from southern Tennessee, through the state of Mississippi and into Union-held Baton Rouge, Louisiana), over routes no Union soldier had traveled before. They tore up railroads and burned crossties, freed slaves, burned Confederate storehouses, destroyed locomotives and commissary stores, ripped up bridges and trestles, burned buildings, and inflicted ten times the casualties they received, all while detachments of his troops made feints confusing the Confederates as to his actual whereabouts, intent and direction. Total casualties for Grierson's Brigade during the raid were three killed, seven wounded, and nine missing. Five sick and wounded men were left behind along the route, too ill to continue.

Confederate Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton, commander of the Vicksburg garrison, was short on cavalry and could do nothing to stop Grierson. The premier Confederate cavalry commander, Maj. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, was off chasing another Union raider, Col. Abel Streight, in Alabama and thus had no opportunity to stop Grierson.

While Streight's Raid failed, occupying Forrest probably ensured the success of Grierson's Raid. Although many Confederate cavalry units pursued Grierson vigorously across the state (most notably those led by Wirt Adams and Robert V. Richardson), they were unsuccessful in stopping the raid. and Grierson and his exhausted troopers ultimately rode in to Baton Rouge, Louisiana; With an entire division of Pemberton's soldiers tied up defending the vital Vicksburg-Jackson railroad from the evasive Grierson, combined with Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman's feint northeast of Vicksburg (the Battle of Snyder's Bluff), the beleaugered Confederates were unable to muster the forces necessary to oppose Grant's eventual landing on below Vicksburg the east side of the Mississippi at Bruinsburg.

In popular media
The movie The Horse Soldiers, directed by John Ford, and starring John Wayne, William Holden and Constance Towers, and the Harold Sinclair novel of the same name on which it is based, are fictional variations of Grierson's Raid.