With the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers open to Federal gunboats and troop transports, the entire Confederate position in western and central Tennessee was untenable, and Johnston began an evacuation. He ordered Polk to abandon Columbus while he fell back from Nashville with Hardee’s command. Few sympathized with Johnston’s predicament, and he was mocked both in the press and within the army as a defeatist.
Control of the Army of Tennessee slipped from Johnston’s grasp. Johnston yielded to the demand of Gen. Pierre G. T. Beauregard, commander of the district comprising western Tennessee, that the two generals unite to protect the Mississippi River Valley, instead of Middle Tennessee as Johnston had intended. In compliance, Johnston transferred his army to the northern Mississippi railroad junction town of Corinth, where Beauregard had moved his command.
At Corinth Beauregard officially became Johnston’s second in command. In fact, he dominated the relationship. Beauregard used fear to subvert Johnston’s authority over the Army of Tennessee, bombarding both him and Richmond with dire warnings of an invasion of West Tennessee. Richmond responded as Beauregard calculated, sending large reinforcements directly to his district, rather than to Johnston as department commander. Four regiments came to Beauregard from New Orleans. Recruits intended for him were marshaled in Alabama and Mississippi. Braxton Bragg reported to him with 10,000 troops gathered from the garrisons of Mobile and Pensacola.
Only Earl Van Dorn’s small army eluded Beauregard’s grasp, until Johnston conceded even that to him. On March 2 3 Johnston directed Van Dorn to report with his command to Corinth, there to join him and Beauregard in an offensive against Grant at Pittsburg Landing (where Grant’s army lay encamped) designed to regain the initiative and retake Tennessee.11
Anxious to redeem himself, Van Dorn answered Johnston’s summons at once. On March 29 he left to confer with Beauregard at Memphis. Before going, he told Price to march his Missourians to Des Arc, a village on the White River. There they would board steamers for the eighty-mile trip to Memphis.
Delays occurred. Price languished a week at Des Arcs while transportation was arranged. There, on April 8, he resigned from the Missouri State Guard to accept a major general’s commission in the Confederate service. The Missourians were organized into a two-brigade division under his command. Word of their impending transfer east of the Mississippi River sparked talk of mutiny among the men—they had enlisted, they declared, to fight for Missouri. Price had misgivings equally strong, but he exerted his influence to reconcile the soldiers to their new duties. The day he accepted his Confederate commission, Price asked the Missourians to “go with us wherever the path of duty may lead, till we shall have conquered a peace and won our independence by brilliant deeds upon new fields of battle. Now is the time to end this unhappy war. Soldiers! I go but to mark a pathway to our homes. Follow me!”12
They did, almost to a man. Few would see their homes again.
2. Fifth Wheel to a Coach
Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant fought three enemies in the spring of 1862, only one of which wore gray. Any of the three might prove his undoing. The obvious foe was Albert Sidney Johnston at Corinth. Only somewhat less dangerous was Grant’s immediate superior, Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck. Jealous of what more Grant might accomplish after Fort Donelson, Halleck stood ready to exploit Grant’s third enemy—his reputation among officers of the Regular Army as an unreliable drunkard.
Halleck had plenty of company. Grant had come a long way since the days when he shuffled about his father’s leather goods store in Galena, Illinois, a disgraced ex-army officer bereft of a future. Officers who had known Grant in the Regular Army resented his rapid elevation to high command, and they watched for the slightest slip from sobriety.
Fort Donelson was the first significant Union victory of the war, and it elevated Grant from an obscure western general into a national hero. Newspapers called him “Unconditional Surrender” Grant and told their readers what brand of cigars he smoked. The Senate applauded him. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton enjoyed the victory immensely, telling Halleck that “the brilliant results of the energetic action in the West fills the Nation with joy.”
The nation, perhaps, but not Halleck. In his mind, Grant’s gain was his loss. Halleck did not even feign pleasure at the triumph. Instead he denied its importance and tried to discredit its author. Just days after the fall of Fort Donelson, as a demoralized Army of Tennessee abandoned Nashville, Halleck wired Washington of a “crisis in the war in the west” and warned that “we are certainly in peril.”1
Of course only Halleck’s future was in peril. Union military command in the sprawling western theater was exercised through a series of departments. The vast country between the Missouri River and the Cumberland Mountains was divided into two departments: the Department of Missouri, commanded by Halleck from St. Louis, and the Department of the Ohio, commanded by Don Carlos Buell, whose headquarters initially were in Louisville. It was an imprecise division. Neither Halleck nor Buell knew where his departmental authority ended. Both reported directly to Washington and, as coequals, were jealous of their perquisites. Neither could plan a major offensive without the consent and cooperation of the other. In such a situation the gain of one was the other’s loss, as was any freelance victory by a subordinate, such as Grant.
So when downplaying their importance failed, Halleck tried to claim credit for Grant’s victories and use them as proof of his own fitness for overall command in the West, promising General in Chief George B. McClellan he would “split secession in twain in one month” if he were placed in command.
When McClellan refused him, Halleck tried another tack. At a time when Washington improvised strategy, he correctly adjudged the importance of conquering the Mississippi River in order to, as he had put it, split secession in twain. Having cleared the northern flanks of the Mississippi, that is to say Missouri and Kentucky, Halleck was anxious to press on farther down the river itself. To this end he instructed Maj. Gen. John Pope to reduce Island Number Ten and the nearby garrison at New Madrid, Missouri, in mid-February. Halleck also wanted to push the Federal advantage in Tennessee with a broad-front sweep southward. For this he needed Buell, or at least his army. Halleck tried to induce Buell to come into his department, which would place him under Halleck’s orders, but Buell demurred, instead marching south to take Nashville on his own.2 Already angry over Buell’s act, Halleck was incensed to learn that Grant had gone to Nashville to confer with his rival. To McClellan Halleck complained that Grant had “left his command without my authority and went to Nashville. . . . It is hard to censure a successful general immediately after a victory, but I think he richly deserves it. I can get no returns, no reports, no information of any kind from him. . . . I am worn out and tired with this neglect and inefficiency.” McClellan agreed that Grant should be reigned in, and he told Halleck to “arrest him at once if the good of the service requires it” and replace him with his second in command, Charles F. Smith.
Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant (Library of Congress)
But Halleck was not content with disciplining Grant. He wanted Grant’s ruin, and to accomplish it, he resorted to innuendo. In early March Halleck wired McClellan: “A rumor has just reached me that since the taking of Fort Donelson General Grant has resumed his former bad habits. If so, it will account for his neglect of my often-repeated orders. I do not deem it advisable to arrest him at present, but have placed General Smith in command of the expedition up the Tennessee.” Halleck ordered Grant to remain at Fort Henry and turn over command to Smith. Despondent but with his wit intact, Grant told Halleck he would have a hard time staying at Fort Henry, since “the water is about six feet deep inside the fort.”
Contrary to Halleck’s expectations, Grant’s allies did not desert him. Congressman Elihu Washburne demanded that Secretary Stanton restore Grant to command. Nine of Grant’s generals signed and placed at his disposal a letter of support “for such use as you may think proper to make of it.” The efforts
of Washburne and Grant’s generals succeeded, and Lincoln told Stanton to have him reinstated.
In the end, both Halleck and Grant came out of the affair with enhanced responsibility. Grant was promoted to major general, and Halleck got the western command. Secure now in his authority, Halleck grew more tolerant. Also, he had learned that a pro-Confederate telegraph operator at Cairo had prevented many of his dispatches from reaching Grant. After Smith was incapacitated from an injury, Halleck restored Grant to command of the Army of the Tennessee, enjoining him to “lead it on to new victories.”3
But Grant embarrassed himself badly in command. On April 5, while his army rested in camp near Pittsburg Landing, waiting for Buell to form a junction with him, Grant reported to Halleck that he had “scarcely the faintest idea of an attack being made upon us.” The next morning Johnston’s Confederates pushed his unprepared army to the banks of the Tennessee River. Grant, who himself arrived late on the field, fed reinforcements into action on April 7 and drove the Confederates off, but the thin luster had been wiped from his new reputation. People spoke again of Grant the drunkard, and Halleck hastened to Pittsburg Landing.4
Halleck had intended to take command of the united armies of Grant and Buell and lead them against Johnston at Corinth. The Battle of Shiloh had upset his timetable but not his resolve to seize Corinth as the first step in his sweep south through the Mississippi River Valley. The Confederate withdrawal to Corinth added the prospect of destroying an army in the bargain.
For an advance on Corinth Halleck assembled at Pittsburg Landing the largest force ever seen on the continent. Three armies—more than 125,000 men—made camp near the putrid battlefield of Shiloh: the Army of the Ohio under Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, Grant’s Army of West Tennessee, and the Army of the Mississippi under John Pope, whom Halleck had summoned after the fall of Island Number Ten. Halleck organized the armies into a left wing, center, right wing, and reserve. This time Halleck showed greater finesse in dealing with Grant. Rather than remove him outright, Halleck elevated Grant to the meaningless position of second in command of the army, with direct responsibility for the right wing and reserve.
Early in the siege of Corinth Grant learned that his authority over even the right wing and reserve was illusory. “I was little more than an observer,” he recalled. “Orders were sent direct to the right wing or reserve, ignoring me, and advances were made from one line of entrenchments to another without notifying me.”
Among Grant’s friends, Pope in particular felt his humiliation. Together he and Grant had organized Illinois volunteers in Springfield, and as a brigadier general in Missouri, Pope had been among the first to speak out on behalf of Grant, at a time when most were still trading stories of his Regular Army drinking. With nothing to do, Grant came often to Pope’s camp outside Corinth. “A more unhappy man I have seldom seen,” said Pope. Watching Grant pass the hours lying on a cot in his tent, silent and brooding, saddened Pope. “I never felt more sorry for anyone,” he averred. Grant uttered not a word against Halleck, said Pope; when he spoke at all, it was to talk of resigning.5
The days wore heavily under the sultry Mississippi sun, and Grant found it hard to maintain a dignified silence. He told a colonel from Galena that he felt as useless as “the fifth wheel to a coach.” Twice he asked Halleck to relieve him. Once in May Grant suggested a movement that might accelerate the pace of Halleck’s painfully slow advance. “I was silenced so quickly that I felt that possibly I had suggested an unmilitary movement.” Grant withdrew to his tent, banished, as his biographer William McFeely expressed it, “to an island in the midst of his men.”6
* * *
Why Corinth? What made this small Mississippi town so vitally important to two huge, contending armies? Railroads. Corinth sat squarely at the junction of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad and the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. Good railroads were scarce in the Confederacy, and these were two of the best and most strategically critical. The Mobile and Ohio Railroad penetrated the Deep South all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. The Memphis and Charleston Railroad, which former Confederate secretary of war Leroy Walker called “the vertebrae of the Confederacy,” was the only direct line from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi River.
The loss of Corinth would play havoc with Confederate lateral communications, cutting off Southern forces operating in the upper reaches of the trans-Mississippi region, particularly Arkansas, from the Confederate heartland. A Federal army astride the Memphis and Charleston Railroad at Corinth would compromise the security of Chattanooga and render Southern control of the track west of the East Tennessee bastion meaningless. Corinth itself was the only practical base from which to support Confederate operations aimed at regaining western Tennessee.7
Oddly, Secretary Walker seemed to have been one of the few Confederate leaders to have appreciated the strategic value of Corinth. Absorbed in the battles before Richmond, the president pursued what might most charitably be called a laissez-faire policy toward the West. Davis had given Johnston broad authority because he admired him. Beauregard, who assumed command after Johnston’s death at Shiloh, he distrusted. Yet during Beauregard’s first six weeks in command neither the president nor the War Department gave him any “instructions . . . relative to the policy of the government and the movement of the armies of the Confederacy.” Gen. Robert E. Lee, formally in charge of overall Confederate military operations, assured Beauregard that Richmond was concerned about his army, explaining its apparent neglect by saying that “full reliance was felt in your judgment and skill . . . to main the great interests of the country.” Revealing Richmond’s ignorance of the true state of affairs in the West, Lee added hopefully that Beauregard would follow up his “victory” at Shiloh with an advance northward.8
In contrast to the distracted leaders of the Confederacy, to whom Corinth seemed less important than it should have, General Halleck exaggerated its significance. The primary purpose of his offensive was not the destruction of Beauregard’s army but the capture of Corinth. Enamored of eighteenth-century theories of “strategic points” as the keys to victory and of Baron Henri Jomini’s emphasis on movement over annihilation, Halleck hesitated to give battle. He believed “Richmond and Corinth are now the great strategic points of the war, and our success at these points should be insured at all hazards.”9
There was little remarkable about Corinth besides the railroads that passed through it. The town lay in Tishomingo County, an area that had been home to the Chickasaw Indians. The story of white encroachment was a familiar one. Settlers drifted down the Natchez Trace to hack small farms from the forest, compelling the Indians to sign the Pontotoc Treaty, in which they ceded their remaining land east of the Mississippi River to the State of Mississippi in 1832. The vast tract was carved into ten counties, of which Tishomingo County was the largest.
Settlers swarmed into the tract, a region of sharp contrasts and sinister beauty. Swampy bottomlands choked with scrub oak, cypress, beech gum, and chestnut trees alternated with gentle hills of wildflowers, persimmon trees, and muscadine vines in an oddly scenic patchwork. The soil was rich, and crops were excellent. Corn, peas, potatoes, and wheat, with a little cotton for homespun clothing, all grew well. Surplus produce was shipped from Eastport on the Tennessee River, bringing in thousands of dollars annually. By 1851 Tishomingo County was one of the more prosperous sections of the South.10
What Tishomingo County lacked was potable water. Streams and creeks were sluggish, and swamps checkered the land. On the outskirts of Corinth was a two-mile-long bog, delightfully named Dismal Swamp. During the summer the brackish water of Tishomingo County bred mosquitoes, making malaria a real hazard. In times of drought, wells often had to be bored 300 feet deep to reach potable water. Besides the mosquitoes they bred, the streams and creeks were a nuisance to travelers. Their soft beds and steep clay banks impeded fording. Annoying to settlers, the swampy bottomland and lack of good water was to prove “of controlling importance in moving and
handling troops” when war came to the region. As a Federal general remarked, “Men and animals need hard ground to move on and must have drinking water.” But, said Confederate Colonel Lawrence Ross, Corinth was a “sickly, malarial spot fit only for alligators and snakes.” The inhabitants, added a Minnesota lieutenant, were as degenerate as their natural surroundings. The men were ignorant and the women were “she-vipers,” with figures like “shad-bellied bean poles. The principal products are wood ticks, chiggers, fleas, and niggers.”11
The town that Colonel Ross and the Northern lieutenant traduced was only a few years removed from nature, born of the avarice of the Tishomingo County board, which had invited the Memphis and Charleston and the Mobile and Ohio railroad companies to lay their track through the county, and of local speculators who had raised buildings at the junction of the two lines.
MAP 1. Area of Operations, September 1, 1862
The railroads nourished the town’s growth. By 1861, only five years after the first building went up, Corinth boasted a population of 2,800 people, many fine homes, and an institution of higher learning called Corona Female College. Boosters lauded the college, which stood on a knoll southwest of the railway junction, as “a magnificent building surmounted by a lofty dome.” Doric columns added a neoclassical flair to the brick structure, which cost a lofty $40,000 to erect. However it may have looked when built, the building aged badly, moving a soldier who visited it in 1862 to write, “It is three stories high — the design is somewhat tasteful but the workmanship poor. . . . It has a dilapidated appearance.”
Corinth had a hotel that aspired to equal grandeur. Tucked in the southeastern angle of the two railroad lines and facing the Memphis and Charleston tracks was the Tishomingo Hotel, a long, two-story brick building. Despite its pretensions, the hotel wore a seedy aspect, and the second-story wooden porch looked as if it had been rattled loose by passing trains. The streets, too, were distressing. They were simply dirt lanes of varying width—pasty annoyances during rains, and the source of a miserable, fine clay dust on dry summer days.12
The Darkest Days of the War- the Battles of Iuka and Corinth Page 3