The Battle of Yazoo City (March 5, 1864) was an engagement in Mississippi during a month-long Union expedition up the Yazoo River in the American Civil War. The Union force commanded by Colonel James H. Coates repulsed an attack led by Confederate Brigadier General Lawrence S. Ross. The Union force suffered greater losses and withdrew down the river the next day with a large amount of cotton seized or bought from plantations along the river. The expedition was undertaken in cooperation with Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's Meridian campaign.
In early 1864, President Abraham Lincoln wanted General Sherman to cooperate with the projected Red River Campaign under Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, but the river was too low for naval support until March. Therefore, Sherman undertook the Meridian campaign to destroy the Confederate railroads in central Mississippi. Sherman's main column of 25,000 troops left Vicksburg, Mississippi on February 3, 1864, headed for Meridian. Sherman directed William Sooy Smith to strike south from Memphis, Tennessee with 7,000 Union cavalry and meet him at Meridian. A second cooperating force was led by Colonel Coates.
Following orders from 17th Army Corps and additional instructions from General Sherman, Colonel Coates put his 947 soldiers aboard river transports at Vicksburg on January 31, 1864. The expedition included 21 officers and 539 enlisted men from the 11th Illinois Infantry Regiment under Major George C. McKee and 17 officers and 370 men from the 8th Louisiana Infantry Regiment (African Descent) under Lieutenant Colonel F. E. Peebles. Coates was appointed captain in the 11th Illinois Infantry on July 30, 1861 and rose through the ranks to become the regiment's commanding officer on July 8, 1863. The 11th Illinois was a veteran unit that fought at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg. The 8th Mississippi Infantry (AD) had previously been employed to dig trenches and other fatigue duties. The unit had never been in action and the soldiers were glad to take part in the expedition.
The transports, escorted by five gunboats under Captain Elias K. Owen, reached the mouth of the Yazoo River that evening and took on enough fuel to last two weeks. The flotilla turned into the Yazoo River and reached Haynes Bluff on the evening of February 1 where it picked up a recruiting detachment of 11 officers and 25 men from the 1st Mississippi Cavalry Regiment (African Descent) under Major Jeremiah B. Cook. The next day, the expedition advanced 25 mi (40 km) up the river to Satartia where five companies of the 11th Illinois and the cavalry went ashore and chased some Confederates out of the village.
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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