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The Hey, everyone. Thanks for tuning in to the 505th episode of our Civil War podcast. My name is Rich.

And I'm Tracy. Hello, y'all. Welcome to the podcast. With the last episode, we continue to set the

stage with the Atlanta campaign by sharing some biographical info about William Tecumseh.

And to do that, we hit the pause button as he was setting out on the Meridian raid in Mississippi,

the first week of February, 1864.

But now we'll hit the play button again.

And what we see is that naturally, when Sherman set out from Vicksburg, marching eastward into the interior of the state of Mississippi, it set off alarm bells on the Confederate side.

Commanding the rebel forces in Mississippi, Alabama, in East Louisiana, was the Bishop General, Leonidas Polk. And we call him the Bishop

General, because in 1827, upon graduation from West Point, where he'd been a friend of Jefferson

Davis, rather than taking up his officers' commission in the U.S. Army, Polk instead entered the Episcopal

ministry, and in time became a bishop. After the Civil War began in 1861, Jefferson Davis made

Leonidas Polk a major general, based on nothing other than his high ecclesiastical status and the fact the two had

been friends at West Point.

Leonidas Polk proved over and over that he was not a good general, but he was personally

...