was made vulnerable to Confederate attack by a 190 mile railroad supply line. Grant's plan to capture Vicksburg by a joint-venture with Sherman's Army was thwarted by two Confederate raids. On December 10, 1862, breaking from Confederate General Braxton Bragg's Army, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, began a series of raids that disrupted Union positions. Forrest destroyed Grant's rail and telegraphic communications, and inflicted 1,500 casualties on the Union Army. Grant's northern communications were cut off from Jackson, Tennessee to Columbus, Kentucky. On December 20, Confederate General Earl Van Dorn raided Union supply station at Holly Springs destroying "shops, depots, and warehouses." Grant was defeated, extended into enemy territory, and forced to withdraw to Tennessee, his army foraging the land. On December 29, Sherman's assault on Vicksburg at Chickasaw Bayou, was repulsed by Pemberton. Refugee cotton labor While Grant prepared to attack Pemberton's Confederate army, his army was flooded by fugitive slaves, considered contrabands by the federal government. In early November, Grant initiated a labor camp system where former refugee slaves would pick cotton, shipped north, to aid the Union War effort. Grant ordered Chaplain John Eaton to take charge of the contrabands. In return the black refugees would be protected by the army and the profits from the sale of cotton would be given to the black workers to "compensate for food, clothing, and shelter." Grant believed the labor camp system would "make the Negro a consciously self-supporting unit...and start him on the way to self-respecting citizenship." In November 1862, the first labor camp was established at Grand Junction. The Lincoln administration authorized Grant's program five days later. In December, Eaton was appointed by Grant to be superintendent of contrabands. African American common-law marriages were legalized. On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that expanded the war, to end slavery. Cotton, illegal trade, smuggling While Grant's Army marched deeper into the Confederate South, enemy territory, as far as Oxford, Mississippi northern traders followed, to profiteer in the cotton trade, driven by the North's "consuming need" for the highly sought after textile, used to make Union tents. The Union naval blockade forced Southern cotton planters to find alternatives to selling their product. Extensive cotton trade continued between the North and South. Northern textile mills in New York and New England were dependent on Southern cotton, while Southern plantation owners depended on the trade with the North for