The men of Brig. Gen. Henry McCulloch’s brigade were both nervous and excited. There were Yankees ahead, and the unproven Texans weren’t sure what to expect. They were confident, to be sure – but still, each man wondered – “Will I behave courageously?” “Will I be able to press on when I see my comrades falling around me?” “What if I am among the dead?” After more than a year in service, this would be the Rebels’ first significant encounter with the enemy.

The men of Col. Richard Owen’s 60th Indiana Infantry were heavily outnumbered. As McCulloch’s brigade approached, the Union pickets tried to slow the Confederate advance. Meanwhile, the rest of Owen’s regiment, along with 300 former slaves, piled up cotton bales to serve as improvised breastworks closer to the river at their back.  The gunboat Carondelet began lobbing shells towards the Confederate line, but did little damage. Capt. William Edgar brought up several “6-pounders” to provide artillery support for the Confederates, though his light artillery couldn’t faze the ironclad.

The Confederates began their advance, entering the Union camp where they paused to consume the breakfasts left behind by the surprised Yankees. McCulloch quickly restored order and pressed onward. The Yanks were getting away, rapidly boarding a transport on the Mississippi River.

McCulloch had sent word to both Generals Walker and Taylor, and they soon arrived with more troops. But by this time, the battle – such as it was – was over. Only one man had been killed on the Confederate side, a staff officer named Gallatin Smith. McCulloch estimated eleven Northerners had been killed, and one Yankee soldier and five black men were taken prisoner.

The small scrap at Perkins’ Landing, Louisiana, about 25 miles southwest of Vicksburg, did little to prepare the Southerners for what they would face just a week later. It did, however, boost their confidence and make their spirits soar. There was little reason to think Yankee forces at the scattered outposts along the Mississippi would offer much more resistance than the men of the 60th Indiana. Capt. Elijah Petty of the 17th Texas wrote of Perkins’ Landing: “If this is all the fear, I don’t mind a battle.”

He and his brother-soldiers could scarcely imagine what lay ahead, a week later, at Milliken’s Bend. Confederate private Joseph Blessington would recall that battle with horror a decade after the fact: “So fearful, so horrible are the scenes, that, long after you leave the place,…the screams of the wounded, the groans of the dying will ring in your ears.” At times, the memory of that violent battle drove him nearly to madness.

Source: Milliken’s Bend: A Civil War Battle in History and Memory, pp. 83-84.