The Darkest Days of the War- the Battles of Iuka and Corinth

by Peter Cozzens

  Grant was discouraged and later wrote in his memoirs, “The possession of Corinth by the National troops was of strategic importance, but the victory was barren in every other particular. . . . It is a question whether the morale of the Confederate troops engaged at Corinth was not improved by the immunity with which they were permitted to remove all public property and then withdraw themselves.”2

  The grumbling of his generals left Halleck unmoved. As he saw it, military logic dictated a halt at Corinth. Were he to take his huge army to Chattanooga, he risked opening the Mississippi River Valley to a Confederate counteroffensive. If he were to march on Vicksburg, he would uncover Louisville and Cincinnati. To his cautious mind, it was far more important to hold these cities than to overrun the Confederacy.

  Then, too, there were the wishes of the president. Profoundly moved by the suffering of the Unionist inhabitants of East Tennessee, the preceding winter Lincoln had urged Halleck to seize the region; with Corinth in Union hands and the Mississippi River open to Memphis, he again called for the relief of East Tennessee. The president wanted Chattanooga occupied and the railroad into the region secured, tasks he thought “fully as important as the taking and holding of Richmond.”3

  Halleck acceded to the president’s proposal, and during the first week of June he began to disperse his armies to effect it. He ordered Buell to take 30,000 men and “with all possible energy” open communications with Brig. Gen. Ormsby Mitchel in northern Alabama. Together they were to march aggressively against the enemy at Chattanooga. But in subsequent orders Halleck reverted to his habitual caution, admonishing Buell not to move so fast as to jeopardize repairs on the Memphis and Charleston Railroad. With no other offensive designs, Halleck dispersed the rest of his huge command along the railroads in western Tennessee. He dispatched Maj. Gen. John McClernand with two divisions forty miles northwest of Corinth to Bolivar, recalled Pope to Corinth, and sent Sherman with two divisions to repair the Memphis and Charleston Railroad to Memphis.4

  Halleck also had been reluctant to venture far into Mississippi for fear that operations in the swampy, disease-ridden interior of the state would prostrate the army. That may have been true, but Corinth was hardly salubrious. By mid-June, quipped an Iowa soldier, “General Summer” commanded at Corinth, and a more miserable summer few Corinthians could remember. Afternoon temperatures topped 100 degrees. Dust settled six inches deep over the streets of town and swirled about marching troops in dense clouds. Two hundred thousand soldiers, blue and gray, and their animals had inhabited Corinth during the preceding three months. Their waste polluted the soil. Flies bit at men and horses, and mosquitoes swarmed about the camps. Streams dried up. Buckets dropped twenty feet into wells before reaching water. The celebrated mineral springs of nearby Iuka went dry for only the third time in a century.

  With the bad water and mosquitoes came disease. Diarrhea and dysentery swept through the ranks, taking a hard toll on regiments depleted from their losses at Shiloh. Sherman was “quite unwell” until he left for Memphis, and Halleck spent much of June confined to quarters in the Curlee mansion with what he called “the evacuation of Corinth.” By month’s end 35 percent of the troops in town were sick.5

  Compounding their misery was the labor to which the soldiers were subjected. One of Halleck’s first acts upon occupying Corinth was to construct a chain of fortifications that rivaled the efforts of Beauregard and Bragg. The Confederate earthworks ran in a semicircle north of town. Halleck put his men to work erecting forts on every piece of commanding ground south of Corinth for a distance of three miles. From Memphis Grant marveled at the wasted effort. The works, he said, were built “on a scale to indicate that this one point must be held if it took the whole National army to do it. They were laid out on a scale that would have required 100,000 men to fully man them.” For the moment, Grant could only mutter his dissent.

  Rosecrans unexpectedly found himself in a position to do more. General Pope had left the army the second week of June to visit his family in St. Louis. He never returned to Corinth; a telegram from Stanton summoning him to Washington cut short his leave. On June 26 Rosecrans assumed command of the Army of the Mississippi.

  After Halleck’s fortifications were built, there was nothing pressing to occupy Rosecrans’s attention. Nonetheless, the Ohioan kept busy. He moved the army to Clear Creek, a more sanitary campsite six miles outside Corinth, had a convalescent hospital erected, and organized an antiscorbutic and antifever diet for the troops. The army’s sick list fell from 35 to 12 percent.

  As the health of the men returned, Rosecrans turned to matters of command. During July he reorganized the army, which consisted of five divisions of infantry and one of cavalry, shuffling generals from unit to unit. The marginally competent Eleazer Paine led the First Division until July 15, when command passed for thirty days to its promising senior brigade commander, James D. Morgan. Brig. Gen. David Sloane Stanley, a capable but petulant officer, led the Second Division. Brig. Gen. Charles Smith Hamilton commanded the Third Division; the hot-tempered and proud Jefferson C. Davis headed the Fourth; Hungarian emigre Alexander Asboth led the Fifth; and the testy but talented Gordon Granger commanded the cavalry.6

  A more contrary lot seldom served an army commander, but Rosecrans seems to have gotten on well with all of his generals except Hamilton. A member of Grant’s West Point class, Hamilton was touchy, pugnacious, a schemer, and a liar. In Mexico he had earned a brevet for gallantry at the Battle of Molino del Rey. Hamilton resigned his commission in 1853 to farm and to manufacture flour in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. At the outbreak of the war, he was appointed colonel of the Third Wisconsin Infantry. Six days later he was commissioned a brigadier general. Hamilton’s first real test came as a division commander on the Peninsula. He failed miserably, and less than a month into the campaign McClellan relieved him. Political pressure failed to persuade McClellan to restore Hamilton, whom he declared “not fit to command a division.” But Hamilton had enough friends in high office to get a second chance as a division commander. Somewhat chastened by his humiliation, Hamilton was for the moment behaving himself.7

  Rosecrans kept occupied through the hot, quiet summer weeks, inspecting his camps incessantly and ruminating on ways to improve the fortifications around Corinth. In late July he shared his views on the subject with the new commander of the District of West Tennessee, Ulysses S. Grant.

  * * *

  Grant’s return from exile had been abrupt. It also had come as a surprise to Grant, who had no idea why Halleck wanted him in Corinth. Still bedridden, Halleck had received a telegram from the president directing him to assume the post of general in chief, with headquarters in Washington. Lincoln took the decision less from a regard for Halleck’s abilities than from frustration over McClellan’s failures on the Virginia peninsula. Although Halleck’s personal contributions to western successes had been minimal, he at least had not failed, and that was recommendation enough for Lincoln.

  Halleck lingered at Corinth for six days, but he may as well have left the day he read Lincoln’s telegram. Before starting from Memphis, Grant asked Halleck why he wanted to see him. “I was not informed by the dispatch that my chief had been ordered to a different field and did not know whether to move my headquarters or not,” said Grant, so he posed the question to Halleck. “This place will be your headquarters. You can judge for yourself,” Halleck wired back tersely. Grant left Memphis at once and reached Corinth on July 15. Halleck remained closeted in the Curlee mansion until the seventeenth. “He was very uncommunicative, and gave me no information as to what I had been called to Corinth for,” Grant recalled. Nor, apparendy, did he tell Grant of a note from Rosecrans, dated July 5, relating rumors of Confederate troop transfers toward Chattanooga. Halleck went on his way, with Grant still wondering what he was doing in Corinth.8

  By the time Rosecrans visited him, Grant had learned the nature — and limits — of his assignment. Halleck had been commander of the Department of the Missi
ssippi with control over an area as far east as Chattanooga. Grant, however, assumed command only of the District of West Tennessee, which embraced those counties of Tennessee and Kentucky west of the Cumberland River. The Army of the Ohio, operating near Chattanooga, was outside Grant’s authority, and its commander, Don Carlos Buell, reported direcdy to Washington. So, too, did Grant, meaning that “practically I became a department commander, because no one was assigned to that position over me and I made my reports direct to the general-in-chief.” 9

  It was an empty honor. Grant had at his disposal only two badly depleted armies. The Army of the Tennessee, which he continued to command in person, numbered just 38,485 at the end of July. Rosecrans counted only 25,224 men fit for duty in his Army of the Mississippi at Camp Clear Creek. New recruits destined for Grant’s district were still at Northern depots, and his veterans were a tired, sick, and dispirited lot. Oppressive heat, bad water, and inactivity blackened their thoughts. “A cloud of darkness and distress pervaded” their camps, said an officer of the Sixty-fourth Illinois. “It was without doubt the darkest days of the war.”

  Grant agreed. His 63,709 troops were far too few to launch an offensive, particularly as the Army of the Tennessee was scattered across the district guarding railroads. Grant could only protect what had been won, and even that posed grave challenges. Guerrilla bands and Southern cavalry cut telegraph lines and tore up track as fast as the Federals repaired them. They disabled the railroad between Chewalla and Grand Junction, and Grant abandoned the track from Grand Junction and Memphis for lack of rolling stock. Memphis and Corinth were no longer in direct communication. Messages from Grant to Sherman had to go by railroad to Columbus, Kentucky, and then downriver to Memphis by boat. Troops were compelled to move from one town to another by way of Jackson, which left a huge expanse over which Confederate cavalry might raid with relative impunity.

  And there was Halleck in Washington threatening to strip Grant’s already slender command to reinforce Buell. It was no wonder Grant later wrote that “the most anxious period of the war, to me, was during the time the Army of the Tennessee was guarding the territory acquired by the fall of Corinth and Memphis and before I was sufficiently reinforced to take the offensive.” War correspondent William Shanks, a fixture at headquarters, said Grant seldom joked, rarely laughed, and “whitded or smoked with a lisdess, absorbed air.” But he and Rosecrans were on friendly terms. They dined together regularly, and Grant asked Halleck to see that Rosecrans was promoted to major general, a rank Grant thought “equal to his merit.”

  So Grant was disposed to hear out Rosecrans on his thoughts for the defense of Corinth. Rosecrans conveyed to him the recommendations of Capt. Frederick Prime, a gifted engineer officer on Rosecrans’s staff. Prime considered the “Halleck Line,” as the forts south of town had come to be called, too extensive to be defended by the small force then available to Grant. Prime suggested that a system of redoubts be built at key points closer to the town to protect the railroad depot. Rosecrans seconded Prime’s proposal, but Grant demurred. Rather than abandon the works constructed under Halleck, he set his men to improving them.

  Rosecrans’s conversations with Grant fell into a pattern.

  “How are you getting along with the line?" Rosecrans would ask after the usual greetings.

  “Well, pretty slowly, but they are doing good work,” Grant would answer.

  “General, the line isn’t worth much to us, because it is too long,” Rosecrans would insist. “We cannot occupy it.”

  “What would you do?”

  “I would have made the depots outside of the town north of the Memphis and Charleston road between the town and the brick church, and would have enclosed them by field-works, running tracks in. Now, as the depot houses are at the cross-road, the best thing we can do is to run a line of light works around in the neighborhood of the college up on the knoll,” offered Rosecrans.10

  Rosecrans’s persistence paid off. Grant at last relented, and work began at once on Prime’s line, designed to defend the town and the railroad depot against attacks from the west.

  Five earthen lunettes were constructed within a half-mile, of the railroad junction. Each had high parapets, ten-foot-wide ditches in front, and embrasures for cannon. Prime placed the first lunette 600 yards southwest of the depot (a large frame building filled with army supplies that had been erected beside the Tishomingo Hotel) and named it Battery Lathrop. He laid out the second lunette 300 yards west of Battery Lath- rop on a high knoll south of Corona College and named it Battery Tan- rath. The third was built 200 yards north of the college grounds and named Battery Phillips. Four hundred yards northeast of Battery Phillips, on a knoll just south of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, Battery Williams went up. Named for Capt. George A. Williams, commander of the army’s siege artillery, Battery Williams accommodated a battery of thirty-pounder Parrotts. Across the track, 200 yards north of Battery Williams and 675 yards west of town, was Battery Robinett, named for Lt. Henry Robinett of Company C, First United States Infantry. Battery Robinett mounted three twenty-pounder Parrotts, two of which were aimed west; the third, north.11

  Raising dirt fortifications, foraging for food, and chasing marauding guerrillas were the principal distractions for the Federals at Corinth. With Grant too weak to take the offensive, the prospects for batde depended on the Confederates at Tupelo.

  4. This Will Be Our Opportunity

  Returning from Richmond on July 2, Price handed Bragg the only fruits of his journey: a War Department letter authorizing, at Bragg’s discretion, the return of Price and his Missouri division to the trans-Mississippi.

  But Bragg, intending to replace Van Dorn with Price as commander of the Army of the West, refused to release the Missourians or to let Price go. Not that Bragg had any immediate need for Price or his troops. Beyond a vague desire to strike Buell’s army sometime, he gave no thought to taking the offensive. A lack of transportation and the summer drought ruled out extended marches across northern Mississippi, and the nearest possible objective, Corinth, was too well fortified to attack.

  Disappointment had become part and parcel of Confederate service for Price, and he bore this latest setback well. His Missourians welcomed the news of his elevation to army command, and Price was careful to incite them to no greater antipathy than they already felt toward Richmond. Like Price, the Missourians resented fighting for the homes of others when their own were in enemy hands, and an alarming number had deserted to join guerrilla bands in Missouri.

  On July 4 the First Missouri Brigade marched to Price’s headquarters and demanded a speech. With a few intemperate words Price could have prompted a wholesale mutiny. Instead he calmed the waters with false assurances, telling his men he had President Davis’s permission to take the Missouri division back to Missouri but was “going to stay here awhile to see if a battle was to come off.” If it did not, he “would have one of his own for he was going to Missouri anyhow.” The Missourians were delighted. It was a short speech, recalled one, “but what he said was to the point and just what we wanted to hear.”1

  Price made the best of duty in Mississippi. For the first time in his career, he paid real attention to matters of organization and discipline. Price inherited an army that had lost a third of its strength in late June, when Maj. Gen. John McCown’s division was sent to Chattanooga. The remainder he divided into two divisions. Henry Litde led the first division, which contained the seven regiments Price had brought with him from Missouri. The second division, made up largely of Arkansans and Texans, he gave to Van Dorn’s former chief of staff, Dabney Maury. Price united the five understrength regiments and three independent battalions that comprised his cavalry into a brigade of 1,000 troopers. To lead them, Price selected Col. Frank Armstrong of the Third Louisiana Infantry.2

  Price relied heavily on Little, whose promotion to major general he urged at every opportunity. They had served together since the summer of 1861, when the forty-four-year-old Marylande
r had resigned his Regular Army commission to help Price train his Missouri volunteers.

  The Missourians took to Litde at once. Litde’s diary entries confirm their impression of him as a “quiet, unassuming, affable man” of self- deprecating humor. Despite his reticence, Litde was “a thorough soldier and an excellent disciplinarian.” His efforts were appreciated. General Hardee pronounced his division “the most efficient, best drilled, and most thoroughly disciplined body of troops” in Mississippi, and Braxton Bragg thought it “as fine a division as he had ever seen.”

  Little needed the praise, if only to sustain his nearly broken health. Service in Confederate gray had been hard on him. At Corinth in May he contracted malaria. After the acute chills and fever passed, Little was visited with recurring headaches, nausea, and persistent boils. His condition deteriorated as the summer dragged on. Diarrhea seized him in early August, and a few days later he contracted dysentery.3

  Little’s presence about camp became sporadic. Fortunately he was ably seconded by his senior brigade commander, Brig. Gen. Louis Hébert. A forty-two-year-old native of Louisiana, Hébert had graduated third in the West Point class of 1845. Family illnesses compelled him to resign his commission after only one year of service and return to Louisiana. Hébert parlayed his military education into an appointment as state engineer and a colonelcy in the militia. When war came, he helped organize the Third Louisiana Infantry, which he turned into the best-drilled unit in the trans-Mississippi. As colonel of the Third, said Willie Tunnard, Hébert was “genial and kind in manner and conversation.” But like Little, he was a “strict disciplinarian, punctilious in enforcing a rigid adherence to all orders.” Little, then, had no cause to worry that discipline would suffer while he was sick; Hébert was as exacting with the division as he had been with his own brigade.4