[1][2] Early in 1863, Major General Charles Hamilton, the commander of the Corinth section of Grant's division, suggested what would eventually become Grierson's Raid.

[4] The task of drawing the attention of Confederate raiders away from the Siege of Vicksburg fell to Col. Benjamin Grierson, a former music teacher who disliked horses after being kicked in the head by one as a child.

Grierson and his 1,700 horse troopers, some in Confederate uniforms serving as scouts for the main force, rode over 600 miles (970 km) through hostile territory (from southern Tennessee, through the State of Mississippi and into Union-held Baton Rouge, Louisiana), over routes no Union soldier had traveled before.

[1] Grierson and his troopers, exhausted by days in the saddle, ultimately rode into Union-occupied Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the capital of the state in early May.

[7] With an entire division of Pemberton's Southern soldiers tied up and dug-in defending the vital Vicksburg-Jackson east/west railroad from the evasive Grierson on mobile horseback, combined with Northern Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman's (1820-1891) feint to the northeast of Vicksburg (in the Battle of Snyder's Bluff), the beleaguered Confederates were unable to muster the forces necessary to oppose Gen. Grant's eventual bypassing landing below Vicksburg on the east side of the lower Mississippi at Bruinsburg.