August 29, 1863

August 29, 1863

---Federal cavalry regiments from Corinth, Mississippi, and from La Grange, Tennessee, have completed an extended raid into northern Mississippi where they destroyed railroad lines and facilities in Grenada and other locales.  The damage is reported in the Richmond Daily Dispatch:

In addition to the machinery, there were no less than forty locomotives and several hundred cars, passenger and freight, amounting in value to millions of dollars, a property invaluable and impossible to be replaced until the end of the war, when it can lend us no assistance in the one great object we have all at heart — our liberty and independence. The enemy appears to have been more fully aware of its importance to our interests than our own authorities. . . . It is difficult to look these stern facts in the face without a feeling of bitterness and a sickening lamentation for such important and irreparable losses — rather, sacrifices.

When the witnesses of the sad scene left, the work of destruction was still going on, and the flames were leaping high in the air from store-houses groaning beneath the weight of Government stores. Fifteen miles from the scene the blood-red light of the conflagration still gleamed in the sorrowful eyes of the observers. Not before to-day has Gen. [Stephen D.] Lee been able to concentrate his cavalry and threaten the vandals. . . .

 

---On this date, the troops of Maj. Gen. McCook’s XX Corps and Maj. Gen. Thomas’s XIV Corps begin crossing the Tennessee at three points downstream, with apparently little opposition.  Maj. Gen. Thomas Crittenden also begins crossing with his XXI Corps at one point upstream and north of Chattanooga.


—In Charleston Bay, the experimental CSS Hunley, a submarine vessel, sinks to the bottom with a five of her crew of nine drowning. But the vessel is quickly raised and work resumes on refining its navigational features and training a new crew.