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

In the spring of 1862 the small town of Corinth in northeast Mississippi was one of the most valuable places in the Confederacy. Built in the 1850s, as the Mississippi Encyclopedia notes, it stood where the Memphis and Charleston Railroad crossed the Mobile and Ohio, the east to west and north to south lines of the western Confederacy. Ulysses S. Grant later wrote that it was as valuable for the enemy to hold as it was for the Union to take.²

After their defeat at Shiloh on 6 and 7 April, the Confederates under General P. G. T. Beauregard fell back to Corinth, about 22 miles away, and dug in. Grant writes that Earl Van Dorn brought 17,000 men to reinforce them soon after the battle, and that new regiments came in from across the Southwest.³

A siege from start to finish

On the Union side, Major General Henry W. Halleck, commander of the department, came to Pittsburg Landing and took charge in person. He gathered three armies, over 100,000 men by the American Battlefield Trust's count: George H. Thomas led the right wing, Don Carlos Buell the center and John Pope the left. Grant, the victor of Fort Donelson, was made Halleck's second in command, a post he described as little more than an observer. Orders went past him, he wrote, and he applied several times to be relieved.⁴

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 once and did not mean to be surprised again. Every night his armies entrenched. Grant recalled that commanders of the scouting parties were warned not to bring on an engagement, that roads were built and corduroyed ahead of each move, and that the Union armies were entrenched all the way from the Tennessee River to Corinth. He called the whole movement a siege from the start to the close.⁵

There was still fighting. Skirmishes flared at Farmington, at the Russell House and at 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 again after a second push on 8 May.⁶

Trains in the night

On 28 May Halleck moved his whole force forward. On the right, Thomas's men took a fortified double log house less than a mile from the Confederate works and threw back a counterattack; in the center Buell's troops took the Surratt farm and the hill above it. The Union lines were now close enough to shell the town.⁷

Beauregard had seen enough. His army was wasting away from disease and short of water. On 26 May he issued orders to evacuate, and on the 29th the trains began to take out the sick and wounded, then the food and stores. To fool the Federals, he told his men to cheer each time a train came in, as though reinforcements were arriving. Some Union soldiers who had worked on railroads before the war, Grant wrote, put their ears to the rail and could tell that loaded trains were leaving and empty ones coming back.⁸

On the morning of 30 May Halleck had his army drawn up for battle, expecting an attack. Corinth was empty. Everything had been destroyed or carried away, and the trophies, Grant wrote, were a few Quaker guns: logs mounted on wagon wheels and pointed at the Union lines.⁹

A barren victory

The siege cost both sides dearly in sickness, but little in battle. The American Battlefield Trust estimates about 1,000 casualties on each side. It puts the armies at 100,000 Union and 70,000 Confederate troops; Grant gives the Union 120,000 in round numbers and judges that Beauregard had, on paper, a large force but probably not much over 50,000 effective men.¹⁰

Grant called the possession of Corinth of strategic importance but barren in every other way. The Confederate army had escaped with its stores, and he was satisfied that a prompt two-day campaign after Shiloh could have taken the town and broken the army defending it. Halleck instead fortified Corinth on a scale that would have needed 100,000 men to man, and soon left for Washington as general in chief, leaving Grant in command in the West.¹¹

Corinth stayed important. In October 1862 a Confederate army under Van Dorn tried to retake it in two days of fighting that, the Mississippi Encyclopedia records, cost the attackers 4,838 casualties and failed. The town stayed in Union hands for the rest of the war, a base for the campaign that ended at Vicksburg.¹²