[1] Union Army cavalry raiders of 1,700 troopers in a brigade of three mounted regiments (6th and 7th Illinois and 2nd Iowa Cavalry Regiments) under the command of Col. Benjamin Grierson (1826-1911), in an effort to disrupt Confederate States Army and civilian east-west communications and the railway line between Vicksburg and the state capital of Jackson further to the east.

The Yankee raiders also destroyed railroad facilities, equipment with the locomotives and box cars along with several miles of railroad track by tearing up and burning railroad ties, melting and twisting rails (nicknamed "General Sherman's neckties") and cutting telegraph wires and poles in the vicinity, severing communications between Confederate-held Vicksburg, under commanding Gen. John C. Pemberton (1814-1881) there and the Eastern Theatre with other Southern commanders in the Army of Northern Virginia, commanding General Robert E. Lee and the administration of President Jefferson Davis at the Confederate capital in Richmond, Virginia.

His men set fire to the trains, and exploding ammunition led the nearby Grierson to assume the worst, that a major battle had started.

Assembling his mounted forces, Colonel Grierson departed the area around 2 pm, leaving behind burned ruin, melted and twisted rails and devastated wreckage.

The 1863 Battle of Newton's Station and Grierson's cavalry exploits through Mississippi between La Grange, Tennessee and Baton Rouge, Louisiana were the basis of the 1959 movie The Horse Soldiers, directed by John Ford, starring John Wayne, William Holden and Constance Towers, and inspired by the earlier 1956 historical fiction novel by Harold Sinclair (1907-1966) of Bloomington, Illinois.