Siege of Corinth, 1862: Halleck's month-long crawl to an empty town

On the morning of 30 May 1862 a Union army of more than 100,000 men stood drawn up for battle outside a small Mississippi town, its commander warning that an attack was expected at any moment. Nothing came. When the Union troops went forward, the Confederate trenches were empty, and so was the town. For weeks the trains had been running in and out of Corinth, and the defenders had been cheering every train that arrived, as if reinforcements were pouring in. They had in fact been leaving.²

Background: the crossroads of the Confederacy

Corinth, in the northeast corner of Mississippi, had grown up in the 1850s where two railroads crossed: the Memphis and Charleston, running east to west, and the Mobile and Ohio, running north to south. That junction made the small town one of the most important strategic places in the western Confederacy. Grant later wrote that Corinth was a valuable point for the enemy to hold, and so a valuable one for the Union to take.³ › Ulysses S. Grant

In the spring of 1862 the Union armies in the West were winning. Grant had taken Forts Henry and Donelson in February, and Nashville had fallen. The Confederate commander in the West, Albert Sidney Johnston, concentrated his army at Corinth and struck at Grant at Shiloh on 6 and 7 April. After the battle the defeated Confederates, now under General P. G. T. Beauregard, fell back to Corinth, about 22 miles away, and finished an extensive line of defenses around the town.⁴ › Battle of Shiloh, 1862

Armies and commanders

The Union department commander, Major General Henry W. Halleck, came down to Pittsburg Landing and took command in the field. He combined three armies, over 100,000 men by the American Battlefield Trust's count and 120,000 in round numbers by Grant's, and divided them into wings: George H. Thomas commanded the right, Don Carlos Buell the center with the Army of the Ohio, and John Pope the left with the Army of the Mississippi.⁵

Grant, the victor of Fort Donelson and Shiloh, was named second in command of the whole. In his memoirs he describes the post as making him little more than an observer: orders went straight to the wings without passing through him, and he applied several times during the siege to be relieved. Halleck, the American Battlefield Trust notes, was considered a master tactician who preferred maneuver to assault and followed the French doctrine of field fortifications, in which the enemy was meant to wear himself out attacking strong works.⁶

Beauregard worked to reinforce his army. Grant writes that Earl Van Dorn brought him about 17,000 men soon after Shiloh and that new regiments came in from across the Southwest. The American Battlefield Trust puts Beauregard's force at about 70,000, the figure the Union command estimated at the time; Grant judged that the Confederates had a large army on paper but probably not much over 50,000 effective men.⁷

The siege in phases

The slow advance

The advance began at the end of April, on 29 April in the Trust's account and on the 30th in Grant's. Halleck had been surprised at Shiloh and did not mean to be surprised again. Every night his armies dug in. Roads were cut and corduroyed ahead of each move, lateral roads were built so that the wings could support one another, and commanders of the scouting parties were told not to bring on an engagement. Grant called the whole movement a siege from the start to the close, with the Union armies entrenched all the way from the Tennessee River to Corinth.⁸

Skirmishes on the way

There was still fighting, almost every day, at places such as Farmington, the Russell House and the Widow Surratt farm. On 3 May Pope's men took Farmington, only four miles from Corinth, but Pope was ordered back to keep in line with the slower wings, and the same thing happened after a second push on 8 May. To Grant the delays were wasted chances: in his view there was no time between Shiloh and the evacuation when the enemy would not have left if pushed.⁹ › 29 April in military history

Closing in

On 28 May Halleck moved his whole force forward. On the right, Union troops took a fortified log house less than a mile from the Confederate works and threw back a counterattack; the American Battlefield Trust credits the attack to Thomas's wing, Grant to Sherman's division within it. In the center, Buell's men took the Surratt farm and the hill above it. The Union lines were now close enough to shell the Confederate positions, and Grant considered the investment of Corinth as complete as it was ever made.¹⁰

Turning point

Beauregard decided that he could not win. Disease was spreading through his army and water was short, and he concluded that he could not attack Halleck's fortified lines without heavy losses. Faced with losing either his army or the town, he chose to give up the town. He issued his orders for the evacuation on 26 May, and on the 29th the trains began to carry away the sick and wounded, then the food and supplies. To deceive the Federals, his men cheered every time a train came in.¹¹

Aftermath

On the morning of 30 May the Union army found the town empty. Everything had been destroyed or carried away, and not a sick or wounded man was left behind. The Confederates withdrew south toward Tupelo. A Union pursuit followed for some thirty miles, in Grant's account, without taking anything but a few stragglers.¹²

The cost in battle was low. The American Battlefield Trust estimates about 1,000 casualties on each side, mostly in the skirmishing, while disease weakened the Confederate army. Grant called the possession of Corinth of strategic importance but barren in every other way. The Confederate army had escaped with all its stores, and he doubted whether its morale had not actually improved; he was satisfied that a prompt two-day campaign after Shiloh could have taken the town and broken the army defending it. Instead Halleck began fortifying Corinth on a scale that would have needed 100,000 men to man the works.¹³

Legacy and memory

Corinth stayed important. In October 1862 a Confederate army under Earl Van Dorn and Sterling Price tried to retake it from William S. Rosecrans, fighting through the old Confederate trench line, by then called the Beauregard Line, and the Union batteries closer to town. The two days of fighting on 3 and 4 October cost more than 7,000 casualties and ended in a Confederate repulse, leaving northern Mississippi largely in Union hands. The town became a base for the operations that led to Vicksburg.¹⁴ › Siege of Vicksburg, 1863

The siege itself is remembered mostly as a lesson in caution. The American Battlefield Trust describes a campaign of almost constant skirmishing in which no serious action came about; Grant, writing twenty years later, remembered officers and men who could not see how the mere occupation of places would end the war while large rebel armies still existed.¹⁵

Visiting today

The Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center is a unit of Shiloh National Military Park and explains the key role of the railroad junction in the war. The National Park Service recommends starting a visit to Shiloh there and then following the road the Confederates took to the battlefield. Two active railroads still cross near the center of town, and portions of the battlefield and the siege lines are preserved.¹⁶