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…