On to Vicksburg!: The Mississippi Central Railroad Campaign

By Larry Allen McCluney Jr.

Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant became commander of all federal forces in the region of Mississippi and east Louisiana in October 1862. For the next nine months, he fought for control of Vicksburg and the Mississippi River, and the Mississippi Central Railroad Campaign was the first in a series of attempts to capture the Confederate citadel. It would end in failure because of a daring raid at Holly Springs, Mississippi, made by Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn. Larry Allen McCluney Jr. examines the campaign as Grant followed the railroad through the Mississippi towns of Holly Springs, Abbeville, Water Valley, Oxford, Coffeeville, and the outskirts of Grenada where his advance was halted, forcing him to return to Holly Springs after Van Dorn’s raid. The book addresses a too-little examined phase of Grant’s greater Vicksburg Campaign: His initial intent to take the “Gibraltar of the Mississippi” by going through Jackson, Mississippi, on the Mississippi Central Railroad.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Apr 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684701568

Larry Allen McCluney Jr.

Larry McCluney has been a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans for twenty-five years. He currently serves as a national officer of the Sons of Confederate Veterans; is a combined boards chairman of the nonprofit that oversees Beauvoir, Last Home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis; is a former member of the Golden Triangle Civil War Round Table; and is a Civil War Living Historian. He received his master's degree in history from Mississippi State University. Larry has taught history at the high-school level in the Mississippi public school system for twenty-four years and is an instructor at Mississippi Delta Community College. He has won numerous awards from the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans for historical preservation. He lives in Greenwood, Mississippi, with his wife, Julia.