The Mississippi College Rifles

By Dr. Walter G. Howell The Mississippi College Rifles spent the winter of 1864-65 under siege at Petersburg, Virginia. Union General Ulysses Grant continued the encirclement of Petersburg with 125,000 troops, while other Union forces controlled large areas of Virginia. General Sherman had completed his march to Savannah and was in pursuit of the Confederate…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell While the siege of Petersburg continued through the later summer and fall of 1864, General Grant sent General Philip Sheridan into the Shenandoah to destroy crops in the Confederate breadbasket. Lee countered by sending General Jubal Early with a makeshift Confederate army of 20,000 that included what was left of…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell Ulysses Grant saw the Wilderness as a delay, not a defeat, in his Virginia campaign. He moved his army to the town of Spotsylvania, hoping to lure Lee into another battle under more favorable conditions. Lee’s army, however, reached the Spotsylvania courthouse crossroads ahead of Grant and dug into defensive…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell When the Mississippi College Rifles returned to Virginia in the spring of 1864 after spending the winter in Georgia, they numbered forty-nine. The Rifles started with 110 men at Manassas in 1861, but deaths and other casualties on the battlefield depleted their numbers. There were no replacements to fill the…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell After General Lee’s crushing defeat at Gettysburg, both Union and Confederate armies pulled back from further fighting for the remainder of the year. Several Mississippi College Rifles took a furlough to recuperate from wounds suffered during the battle. In early September 1863, the Confederate government directed General James Longstreet’s nine…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell While General U. S. Grant carried out his campaign in Mississippi from May to June of 1863, General Robert E. Lee proposed to Confederate President Jefferson Davis that an invasion of the North and a decisive defeat of Joe Hooker’s Union army would show France and England the Confederate State of…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell In the weeks after the Battle of Champion Hill, as the Union army lay siege to Vicksburg, the people of Clinton had a brief respite from war. Walter Hillman continued classes at the Central Female Institute and held a commencement on June 26. Those students who could returned home. Alice…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell The Civil War came to Clinton while the Union army was fighting Confederates in the Battle of Raymond. General Grant sent four divisions towards Clinton under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman, Grant’s most trusted general. Sherman camped with two divisions at Mississippi Springs, five miles south of Clinton, while…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell When Union soldiers entered Clinton on May 12, 1863, hundreds of Clintonians witnessed what took place. Alice Shirley, a school girl at the Central Female Institute, later wrote an account of what happened that day. Alice’s father, fearing for her safety, had traveled from Vicksburg by train to Clinton on…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell At the beginning of 1863, the American Civil War was in its third year. People in Clinton kept informed on the fighting on the Virginia front through letters received from the men fighting with the Mississippi College Rifles and news reports in the Hinds County Gazette. In May of 1863, the war…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell The Mississippi College Rifles spent winter quarters for 1862-63 in their entrenched positions behind the destroyed town of Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock River. General Lee’s strategy was to keep his army between the Union army and the Confederate capital at Richmond. Lee faced a new adversary in 1863, after President…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell While the Mississippi College Rifles fought in the Peninsular Campaign in the summer of 1862, people in Clinton experienced the shortages and inconveniences that war brings to a civilian population at home. President Lincoln’s blockage in April 1861 closed southern ports, and cotton grown around Clinton lost access to foreign…

By Walter Howell The Civil War in 1861 was a distant struggle to the people of Clinton, but the impact of the war was felt immediately.  The Confederate government declared an embargo on the shipment of cotton to outside markets, while the Union government declared a blockade on shipping from ports controlled by the Confederates. …

By Dr. Walter G. Howell When General Lee began the Confederate invasion of Maryland in September of 1862, the Rifles for the most part still wore uniforms made before they left Clinton fifteen months earlier. Mississippi started a uniform allowance late in 1862. The Rifles replaced torn and ragged clothing by swapping or buying the…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell After the stalemate at Sharpsburg, Lee pulled his army across the Potomac River into Virginia, ready to go into winter quarters. Lincoln’s new commander, General Ambrose Burnside, ordered the Army of the Potomac to cross the Potomac into Virginia. Burnside moved his army towards the Rappahannock River in the direction…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell The Mississippi College Rifles began the Seven Days campaign with 76 men on the company roll. Fifty-four soldiers from the original company of 130 were discharged for various reasons, transferred to other units, wounded and sent home to recuperate, killed in action, died in winter quarters or deserted. The only…

By Dr. Walter Howell When he was elected by the soldiers of the Mississippi College Rifles as company commander in December of 1861, William Lewis became the third officer to command the Clinton company.  Lewis was a native of Paris, Tennessee, the son of Patrick and Eliza Lewis, who moved to Clinton in 1935. Lewis…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell After occupying Yorktown, which was empty of Rebels, General McClellan claimed victory and sheepishly ordered his army towards Williamsburg in pursuit of the retreating Confederates.  The Rifles had no casualties at Yorktown, but Mike Carney, August Styles and George Swegart, all Irish laborers from Clinton, deserted to the Union army…

By Dr. Walter G. Howell In January 1861, the army of the United States was among the smallest in the world, and the army of the confederacy did not exist.  The federal army, still called the “Old Army,” numbered about 16,000 soldiers, scattered across the country.  The officer corps had 1,098 officers, the majority graduates…

By Dr. Walter Howell After the fighting at Edward’s Ferry in October 1861, the Mississippi College Rifles went into winter quarters at Leesburg, Virginia.  Their first task was to build huts to keep out the winter cold and damp.  Saws were not available, so the men had to use axes to fell trees, then notch…

By Dr. Walter Howell Edwards Landing, located on the Maryland side of the Potomac River, was across from Leesburg on the Virginia side.  After Manassas in July, three Mississippi Infantry Regiments, including the Mississippi College Rifles, took positions between Leesburg and Conrad’s Ferry, a few miles to the northwest.  A heavy exchange of fire between…

By Dr. Walter Howell The Mississippi College Rifles, Company E of the 18th Mississippi Infantry Regiment, were brought to full strength at Corinth in June, 1861 Seventeen Clinton men, including six Irishmen and one native of Germany, and other volunteers joined the original volunteers at Corinth.  The Regiment boarded trains for Virginia and arrived at…

By Dr. Walter Howell The American Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when federal troops surrendered Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor to Confederate forces.  In response, President Lincoln called for 200,000 volunteers to enforce federal law in those states that had seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America.  Confederates were…