For six months in 1862, the struggle to control Corinth’s crucial railroad crossover made the young town second only to Richmond in military importance. At the junction of the two longest railroads in the South, Corinth was regarded by General Ulysses S. Grant as “the great strategic point in the West,” while Confederate Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker insisted the rail line through Corinth “must be defended at all hazards” because those roads were “the vertebrae of the Confederacy.” In the weeks after the battle of Shiloh, five armies and over 200,000 men struggled there for possession of the vital railroad junction. General Pierre G.T. Beauregard recognized the stakes, warning that defeat there would mean the loss of the Mississippi Valley and probably the Confederate cause, but on May 30, 1862, advancing Federal forces compelled him to abandon the city.

Photo: Bernard Fisher