At Holly Springs supplies are lost. For want of supplies, tactics are changed.

Although the cost in human carnage was relatively light in Van Dorn’s Holly Springs raid—1,500 Union soldiers were captured and quickly paroled—the destruction of supplies was massive. Fires lit up the skies; smoke and smells clogged the air. Thousands of bales of cotton, intended for sale to finance Grant’s army, were burned; railroad car after railroad car packed with bacon was torched, great pools of fat spreading out beneath. Estimates at the time set damages at $1 million for the loss of medical supplies alone.

There was one instance of quarter given—at the Walter Place, the town’s grand gothic confection where Julia Grant was staying, Van Dorn’s men, whether through choice or the intervention of the homeowner, declined to enter her personal quarters. Van Dorn hailed from Port Gibson, in southern Mississippi; when Grant finally reached that town, he declared it “too beautiful to burn” and spared it. Some said it was because of the kindness toward Julia Grant.

Grant, however, couldn’t have felt too much charity toward Van Dorn. It was the final humiliation, and without supplies, his army was forced to pillage their way northward. Still, for Grant those fires at Holly Springs had proven illuminating. As he explained later, until that time he hadn’t believed that an army could survive without provisions. Being forced to “live off the land” showed him a new and brutal path toward success, a path that Sherman would later most famously take in his march to the sea that helped secure the Union victory.

Yet in the Mississippi Hills, in the waning days of the war, even Sherman would meet his own surprising failures as the daring tactics of Nathan Bedford Forrest cemented the Confederate’s reputation as one of the finest cavalry leaders in history.