Corinth, Mississippi, 1862: Railroads, Rifles and Trenches in a New Kind of War

The railroad crossing at Corinth today. Image from the National Park Service's page

The tracks still cross in the middle of Corinth, a small town in northeastern Mississippi, and trains still run on them. During the Civil War, as many as 300,000 soldiers passed through as the Union and the Confederacy fought for this railroad crossover. Miles of earthen fortifications — some built to defend the junction, some to take it — still lie across the landscape, evidence of a way of fighting tested here that would be commonplace by the war's end in 1865.

Why Corinth mattered

Many military historians call the Civil War the first modern war. Officers on both sides were learning to exploit — and defend against — the newest technologies of the day: railroads and rifled weapons. In 1862, Corinth gave both armies a hard education in this "new warfare."

Corinth grew up in the 1850s where the Memphis and Charleston and the Mobile and Ohio railroads crossed. By 1862 it was a town of about 1,200. Its county had opposed secession, but now the town was full of Confederate soldiers: the railroads had rushed in nearly 40,000 men, from as far as Florida, Kentucky and New Orleans.

Major railroads, 1860. Image from the National Park Service's page

Early 1862 went badly for the South: Union forces threatened Richmond, took New Orleans, and pushed the Confederates out of southern Kentucky and much of West and Middle Tennessee. A large Union force under Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant moved up the Tennessee River toward Corinth. On April 3, the Confederates marched out to strike first; after nearly winning the bloody Battle of Shiloh, near Pittsburg Landing, they fell back to Corinth to regroup, dig in and wait.

The siege: April–May 1862

At the end of April, Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck set out for Corinth with almost 125,000 Union troops. Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard waited with about half as many, behind five miles of new earthworks. Both knew the stakes. Halleck called the rail centers at Richmond and Corinth "the greatest strategic points of the war"; Beauregard warned that defeat would cost the Mississippi Valley "and probably our cause."

Union troops of the 31st Ohio Volunteer Infantry building entrenchments on the road to Corinth, May 1862. Sketch by Edwin J. Meeker

Halleck took a month to cover 22 miles, on a 10-mile front across forested ridges and ravines, in bad weather, amid dysentery and typhoid. Cautious and constantly harassed, he had his men dig in at every stop — a ditch and parapet along each ridge crest, then a mile's advance and another line. By the end there were seven lines and about 40 miles of trenches.

By May 25, Union guns on high ground within a few thousand yards were shelling the Confederate works, supply base and rail yards. Outnumbered two to one, with bad water and thousands of men down with disease, Beauregard's officers concluded they couldn't hold Corinth.

Beauregard escaped with a hoax. On the night of May 29, the Mobile and Ohio carried off the sick and wounded, the heavy guns and tons of supplies — and every time a train pulled in, the troops cheered as if reinforcements had come. Dummy "Quaker" guns stood on the earthworks, campfires burned, and drummers and buglers played while the army slipped away. Union patrols entering on May 30 found the town empty.

The Confederate retreat from Corinth and the Union army's entry; the Confederates set fires and blew up their magazines as they left. Sketch by Henry Lovie, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, June 21, 1862

Most historians hold that taking the junction led directly to the fall of Fort Pillow, the loss of much of Middle and West Tennessee, the surrender of Memphis, and the opening of the lower Mississippi to Union gunboats as far as Vicksburg. No Confederate train ever again ran from Chattanooga to Memphis.

The battle: October 3–4, 1862

Over the summer, Union troops dug wells and fortifications: Halleck's large earthwork batteries for cannon, then an inner ring of batteries added by his successor, Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans, linked by trenches and fronted by sharpened logs.

Fortifications at Corinth, October 1862; the house-like symbols are Union batteries. Image from the National Park Service's page

Meanwhile the South had seized the initiative from Virginia to the Mississippi, and Britain seemed close to recognizing the Confederacy.

Each side had 22,000–23,000 men. On October 3, Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn's Confederates pushed the Union troops back about two miles through a day of heavy fighting, then halted at about 6 p.m., parched and exhausted in 90-degree heat, some just a few hundred yards from the inner works. That night Rosecrans pulled back into a compact line under two miles long, anchored by batteries including Williams and Robinett above the railroad cut and the unfinished Battery Powell to the north.

On October 4, a delayed Confederate assault struck at about 9 a.m. Some attackers fought into town, and Battery Powell changed hands twice. At about 10 a.m., four columns advanced on Battery Robinett. A Union defender remembered:

As soon as they were ready they started at us with a firm, slow, steady, step. In my campaigning I had never seen anything so hard to stand as that slow, steady tramp.

A soldier of an Alabama regiment saw it from the other side:

The whole of Corinth with its enormous fortifications, burst upon our view. … We were met by a perfect storm of grape[shot], canister, cannon balls, and minie balls. Oh God! I have never seen the like! The men fell like grass.

Looking up the Memphis and Charleston tracks toward Battery Williams (left) and Battery Robinett (behind the tent camp, right). Image from the National Park Service's page

The Confederates charged four times into cannon and musket fire until a Union bayonet charge broke them. By noon Van Dorn was retreating; Rosecrans didn't pursue until the next day, and Van Dorn saved his army.

Confederate dead who fell attacking Battery Robinett, October 4, 1862, gathered for burial; names scratched on the plate identify some of them

Union victories at Corinth, Antietam and Perryville set the stage for Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and helped keep Britain and France from recognizing the Confederacy, which never recovered from its losses of that fall. The Union held Corinth for another 15 months, raiding into Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, and control of its railroads opened the way to victory at Vicksburg in July 1863. When Union troops left on January 25, 1864, it was too late for the South: it hadn't built a single locomotive since 1861, and the only cars on the patched tracks were pulled by mules.

Why armies started to dig

Earthworks — any military structure made of dirt — served Civil War soldiers as they had Roman armies: to protect a key place, to let a few defenders hold off many, or to surround and cut off an enemy stronghold.

Then weapons changed. Rifling — spiral grooves inside the barrel — made guns more accurate at range: a rifle-musket firing the "minie ball" loaded as fast as a smoothbore and killed at 300 yards, three times as far. Attackers who once could close to a hundred yards of smoothbores and charge now lost too many men crossing that ground to finish with the bayonet. Mahan wrote that "the great destruction of life in open assaults" gave "additional value to entrenched fields of battle."

By 1864, all troops were entrenching routinely; the spade replaced the bayonet. European observers studied the earthworks at places like Richmond and Petersburg — and used the lessons in World War I, a war defined by trenches.

Sources

Based on "The Siege and Battle of Corinth: A New Kind of War," a Teaching with Historic Places lesson by Jenniffer Wamsley (Shiloh National Military Park) and Gloria Cartwright (Corinth City Schools), National Park Service, drawing on the National Historic Landmark documentation for the Siege and Battle of Corinth and quoting the Official Records, Oscar L. Jackson's The Colonel's Diary and Charles C. Labuzan's 1862 letter; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The lesson dates the Mahan edition it quotes to both 1861 and 1851, so no year is given here.