Cardi는데 1985

Hey everyone.

Welcome to episode 216 of our Civil War Podcast. My name is Rich.

And I'm Tracy. Hello, y'all. Thanks for tuning into the podcast.

As y'all recall, with the last episode, we wrapped up the Periville story arc.

So with this show, we'll be moving on to something new.

We'll be staying out west, though, for a while yet.

Up next, we're going to turn our focus to important events in Northern Mississippi

and cover the battles of Ayuka and Corinth, which took place while Braxton Bragg and Kirby Smith were busy up in Kentucky.

And then after looking at Ayuka and Corinth, we'll shift our focus to the transmissive city to my home state of Arkansas, in fact.

And we'll talk about the Battle of Prey Grove.

Then we'll head back to the Eastern Theater and see what all was going on in Virginia. And that will take us to the Battle of Fredericksburg.

And then to wrap things up for 1862, we'll jump back out to Tennessee for the Battle of Stone's River.

Yep. And as Tracy said, that will be it for 1862.

We plan on doing a couple of year-in-review episodes for 1862, like we did for 1861, and then we'll hit the ground running in 1863.

And there is lots of great stuff we've got on the podcast timeline for 1863, like Vicksburg and Gettysburg. But...

But we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. So first things first.

Let's see what was going on in Northern Mississippi while Kirby Smith and Braxton Bragg were up in Kentucky.

And if you're wondering why this is important, well...

Well, Ayuka and Corinth aren't terribly well-known battles, but this actually proved to be a critical phase of the Western War, since it cleared the way for Ulysses S. Grant to then turn his attention to Vicksburg.

And as we'll see down the road on the podcast, Grant's long, difficult, but ultimately successful campaign aimed at capturing Vicksburg will end up being one of the true turning points.

As we've talked about before on the podcast, the first half of 1862 was disastrous for the Confederate Army in the West.

...