The Battle of Tupelo, also known as the Battle of Harrisburg, was a battle of the American Civil War fought July 14–15, 1864, near Tupelo, Mississippi. Union troops were sent from Memphis, Tennessee into Mississippi to pursue Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest's Cavalry Corps, which had defeated a larger Union force at the Battle of Brice's Cross Roads the month prior. Outside the town of Tupelo on July 14, the outnumbered Confederate forces made a badly-coordinated frontal assault on the fortified Union lines, suffering heavy losses.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
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