Grierson's Raid

Col. Benjamin Grierson leading his 6th Illinois Cavalry

Date	April 17, 1863 (1863-04-17) – May 2, 1863 (1863-05-02)
Location	Start: La Grange, Tennessee End: Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Result	Union victory

Belligerents

United States (Union)

CSA (Confederacy)

Commanders and leaders

Benjamin H. Grierson

W. Wirt Adams
Robert V. Richardson
and others

Strength

3 regiments

unknown

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.

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.

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.

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