Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
In his memoirs, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant said that one of the great lost opportunities of the Civil War was Gen. Henry W. Halleck’s failure to strike south after seizing the strategically critical railroad junction town of Corinth, Miss. in June 1862. With an army of 125,000 men, Halleck had pushed aside the Confederate Army of Mississippi, a force less than half his strength, opening the way, Grant thought, for a bloodless advance against Vicksburg, Miss., or Atlanta, conquests that would make Union victory in the war swift and inevitable. Instead, Halleck dispersed his troops across the western theater, handing the initiative to the Confederates.
They took it, and a great chess match unfolded across the mid-South. In September Gen. Braxton Bragg invaded Kentucky with the army Halleck had allowed to escape. From Nashville, Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell set off in pursuit of Bragg with the Army of the Ohio. To defeat Buell, Bragg first had to prevent reinforcements from reaching him. That meant pinning down Grant, whose two armies held sway in western Tennessee and northeastern Mississippi.
Bragg handed responsibility for protecting his strategic left flank to Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn, who in late September mustered a 22,000-man force in the north Mississippi town of Ripley. Grant’s combined strength was nearly three times greater than Van Dorn’s, but his men were scattered. The only force capable of reinforcing Buell quickly was Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans’s 23,000-man Army of the Mississippi, then stationed in the vicinity of Corinth, about 30 miles to the northeast.
Library of Congress
The Battle of Corinth, Oct. 3-4, 1862.
Rosecrans and Van Dorn were no strangers to each other; both graduated from West Point in 1842, Rosecrans near the top of the class, Van Dorn near the bottom. But there the similarity ended. Rosecrans was a man of rare ability and high principles who had an unfortunate knack of irritating his superiors. His greatest shortcoming was a tendency to become overexcited in battle and issue too many orders.
Van Dorn, in contrast, “possessed only modest ability and limited intellect,” observed a classmate. The only quality the Mississippian had in abundance was an unquenchable thirst for glory — he had no patience with reconnaissance, staff work, logistics or anything else that might keep him from closing quickly with the enemy. At the Battle of Pea Ridge, in Arkansas, his rashness nearly wrecked his army in a defeat that cost the Confederacy control of the state. Only his friendship with President Jefferson Davis, forged during their service together in the Mexican War, kept Van Dorn from being sacked. His second-in-command in the upcoming campaign, Maj. Gen. Sterling Price, was far more competent, but he had earned Davis’s enmity in 1861 when, as a Missouri politician, he tried unsuccessfully to keep the state out of the war before belatedly casting his lot with the Confederacy.
On Sept. 29, Van Dorn began his march toward Corinth. He approached the town indirectly, first marching 28 miles north to the Tennessee border, to deceive Rosecrans about his true objective, and then swinging east 10 miles to the hamlet of Chewalla, Tenn. Van Dorn intended to cover the remaining nine miles to Corinth the following day and then immediately attack the town from the northwest. Not only did he hope to catch the Union unawares, but he would also hit them in what he knew to be their weakest spot. Before evacuating Corinth in June 1862, the Confederates constructed a chain of earthworks three miles outside town, but they faced northeast, leaving the northwest relatively exposed.
Van Dorn assembled his campaign plan hastily, but not before weighing strategic considerations, even if his conclusions seemed a bit farfetched. Retaking Corinth, he reasoned, would guarantee the safety of Vicksburg, the most strategically important Mississippi River city between New Orleans and Memphis, by forcing the federals to abandon West Tennessee. That in turn would open the way for him to march north and help Bragg capture Kentucky. The trouble was his army was no larger than Rosecrans’s, a fact Price pointed out in voicing his opposition to Van Dorn’s plan. Price couldn’t see how the Confederates could hold Corinth with so few soldiers, much less exploit its capture. There also was the matter of Grant, who could quickly reinforce Rosecrans with at least 20,000 troops.
Price’s points were sound; military doctrine of the day called for an attacking army to outnumber an entrenched defending force by at least three to one. But tactical axioms did not interest Van Dorn. On Oct. 3 he roused his men before daybreak, marched them eight miles to Corinth under a scorching early-autumn sun and threw them into battle. Price, with two divisions, attacked on the east side of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, which entered Corinth from the northwest; Maj. Gen. Mansfield Lovell attacked on the west side with Van Dorn’s remaining division.
The battle opened well for the Confederates. Van Dorn’s feint toward Tennessee had bewildered Rosecrans, and most of his army was on outpost duty south of Corinth. The Confederates rolled over the three federal brigades manning the earthworks northwest of the city and drove the enemy back toward town as quickly as Rosecrans threw fresh troops into the fight. By late afternoon, Van Dorn was within a half mile of Corinth. Victory seemed assured. “So far as my brigade was concerned, I could have gone into the town,” said one Southern general. “There was nothing in the way.”
General Price, closer to the front lines, saw matters differently. For eight hours, his men had attacked in 100-degree heat with no food and scarcely a drop of water. Sunstroke felled scores on both sides. To have a chance at taking Corinth, Price needed help from Lovell’s division. But Lovell was far to the rear; after seizing the outer works he inexplicably halted for the day. Not knowing what had become of Lovell, Price reluctantly concluded it better to delay the attack on the town until the next morning. Van Dorn acquiesced, and at dusk Price’s brigades stood down.
Price prudently counseled a halt. The days’ fight bore out two additional military axioms: that hard-fought success can leave an army as disorganized as defeat, and that a defending force becomes stronger as its lines contract. During the night the last of Rosecrans’s forces had regrouped in Corinth, and by dawn on Oct. 4 he enjoyed numerical parity with Van Dorn. The federals hastily dug rifle pits on the outskirts of town. Five half-moon-shaped earthworks, each holding an artillery battery, strengthened the defenses.
The gains of the first day made it impossible for a man of Van Dorn’s temperament to consider withdrawing, and he ordered a dawn attack. Misunderstood orders and poor communications among subordinates delayed the assault. “Finally, about 10 a.m., somebody concluded we had better charge, and the order was given,” recalled a regimental commander. “With a wild shout, our whole brigade jumped swiftly across” the Memphis and Charleston railroad and “charged toward the enemy’s lines.” The slaughter was prodigious. “A sheet of flame leaped out from fronting rifle pits and showers of iron and leaden hail smote the onrushing men,” recalled a stunned Southern infantryman. “Death came in a hundred shapes, every shape a separate horror. Here a shell, exploding in the thinning ranks, would render its victims and spatter their comrades with brains, flesh and blood. Men’s heads were blown to atoms. Fragments of human flesh still quivering with life would slap other men in the face, or fall to earth to be trampled underfoot.”
Beating the odds, nearly 4,000 Confederates shoved through portions of the Union defenses and charged into town. Fearing the battle lost, Rosecrans became unhinged. He rode among retreating federals, screaming and swearing at them: they were cowards and old women; they would have no standing in his army until they won it back in battle; it was no wonder the Rebels had broken through. But the men kept running.
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Some of the heaviest fighting occurred around an artillery position called Battery Robinett, 675 yards west of town. Three times the Southerners charged the defensive works; three times they were thrown back. Seeing the futility of further fighting, the popular and talented commander of the Second Texas Infantry, Col. William P. Rogers, bent down in the saddle and grabbed a soldier’s ramrod. To it he tied his white handkerchief. In the smoke and confusion the Federals either did not see it or misunderstood his gesture. An Ohio captain shook the shoulders of several of his men and shouted at them to shoot the man on horseback. They did, and horse and rider collapsed beside a large stump a few yards in front of one of the gun embrasures of Battery Robinett. Rogers wore body armor, but he had been hit at least seven times at such short range that it was useless.
Well-placed reserves accomplished what Rosecrans’s histrionics could not, driving the Confederates out of Corinth in disorder. “My God! My boys are running,” General Price cried as the survivors streamed past him. Then, in a low tone, as if talking to himself, he added, “How could they do otherwise – they had no support – they are nearly all killed.” Price had no support because Mansfield Lovell, after scanning the Federal defenses, elected to ignore Van Dorn’s orders to reinforce Price.
Van Dorn conceded the contest at noon: “Exhausted from loss of sleep, wearied from hard marching and fighting, companies and regiments without officers, our troops gave way. The day was lost.” He ordered a withdrawal, and by nightfall his army was stumbling south with no clear destination.
Confederate losses at Corinth were staggering. Price contributed approximately 13,800 troops to the battle and lost 3,700 — nearly 35 percent of those who charged the federal works at Corinth were killed or wounded or went missing. Maj. Gen. Dabney Maury, Price’s senior division commander, took 3,900 men into battle and alone lost 2,500. More than half of Price’s line officers fell. Losses in Lovell’s division were scandalously light: Lovell went into action with 7,000 troops and reported just 560 casualties, almost all suffered in the opening hours of the battle. The federals lost 355 killed, 1,841 wounded and 324 missing, or 1 man in 10.
Grant followed the battle by telegraph from his headquarters at Jackson, Tenn., 55 miles to the north. Confident of victory, on the morning of Oct. 4 he ordered Rosecrans to pursue Van Dorn vigorously and sent a division under Maj. Gen. Stephen A. Hurlbut to cut the Confederate line of retreat. The next day Hurlbut struck the enemy at Davis Bridge on the Hatchie River, just across the Tennessee border, leaving 500 dead and wounded on a half-acre of ground in a failed effort to intercept Van Dorn.
Two days after Davis Bridge, Grant did a volte-face and ordered Rosecrans to halt before Van Dorn before reached Confederate fortifications at Holly Springs, back in Mississippi. Rosecrans believed he could have marched unopposed the entire 280 miles from Corinth to Vicksburg, and he squabbled bitterly with Grant over might-have-beens. But he obeyed.
Nevertheless, much had been won. “The effect of the battle of Corinth was very great,” Gen. William T. Sherman correctly observed. “It was, indeed, a decisive blow to the Confederate cause in our quarter.” And beyond, Sherman might have added: Rosecrans’s victory contributed to the collapse of Bragg’s invasion of Kentucky. Bragg himself said it was a determining factor in his withdrawal, as it exposed Chattanooga, Tenn., the gateway to the Deep South, to attack from the west. (Bragg undoubtedly exaggerated the impact of events in northern Mississippi to conceal his own errors.) Most importantly, Van Dorn’s army at Corinth eliminated the only mobile Confederate command in Mississippi. After Corinth, the way was clear for Grant to begin his march of conquest against Vicksburg.
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Peter Cozzens is the author of 16 books on the American Civil War and the Indian Wars of the American West, including “The Darkest Days of the War: The Battles of Luka and Corinth.”