On the same day Grant telegraphed to Halleck: ‘General Sherman will command the expedition down the Mississippi. He will have a force of about forty thousand men.’
On the 22d of December this army rendezvoused at Friar's Point, ready to move up the Yazoo River to the rear of Vicksburg., On the 27th, the four divisions, Steele's, M. L. Smith's, Morgan's, and A. J. Smith's, aggregating over forty-two thousand men, were landed in front of the bluffs over-looking the swamps through which ran Chickasaw Bayou. To flounder through this boggy low land, cross the bayou, and storm the heights beyond, was the task Sherman laid out for his army. It was his first attempt to command more than a division in action, and he had not before directed a battle. Though the rebels had been reenforced in consequence of the failure of Grant's cooperative movement from Holly Springs, they were still far inferior in numbers to Sherman's army. Their position, however, was impregnable. The high bluffs were strengthened from base to summit with rifle-pits and heavier parapets, and to assault seemed madness then to many of the officers, and appears so still when all the facts can be