Federal troops quickly recognized the importance of controlling railroads, and by May 1862 the U.S. government held the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, with few exceptions, until the end of the Civil War. Up to 15,000 Union troops were stationed in camps along the line between LaGrange and Memphis to protect rails, bridges, telegraph depots, and intersecting roads. From the outset, Confederate leaders had also acknowledged the line's importance, with Jefferson Davis telling Robert E. Lee that the Memphis and Charleston Road was the vertebrae of the Confederacy and must be defended at all hazards. One of the earliest Union campaigns against it was mounted by William Tecumseh Sherman in 1862, when he was ordered to cut the line between Corinth and Iuka, Mississippi, but he backed down, saying he could not reach it without a considerable engagement forbidden by General Halleck's instructions. At the same time, Braxton Bragg warned that the railroad's fall was imminent, blaming the disorganized and demoralized condition of Confederate forces, pillage and plunder by Confederate troops, abandoned wood and water stations, unpaid employees who refused to work, and engineers and conductors who were worn down or left their posts. The line fell into Union hands early in the war and remained under Union control through 1865. Its strategic value was tied to places along and beyond it, including Collierville, a thriving community on the line, and Corinth, where the Memphis and Charleston Railroad intersected the Mobile and Ohio line, giving control over routes from Columbus and Memphis and lines running south into Mississippi and eastward toward Nashville and Chattanooga. Many Union leaders believed occupation of Richmond and Corinth could end the war, and Ulysses S. Grant called Corinth the great strategic position at the West between the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers and between Nashville and Vicksburg. In October 1863, while preparing in Memphis to move to Chattanooga over the railroad, Sherman remained on duty after the death of his nine-year-old son Willy, then boarded a train on October 11 with his staff and the 1st Battalion of the 13 U.S. Regulars for the trip through Collierville, where they would take part in the Battle of Collierville. At the war's end, the railroad rebuilt surprisingly quickly: by November 1865 the entire road was passable except for one bridge over the Tennessee River at Decatur, and that bridge reopened to traffic in July 1866. Financial recovery came too slowly, however, and the railroad entered receivership and was taken over by the Southern Railway in 1897. The line had owned 50 locomotives, 41 passenger cars, and 13 baggage cars. It had begun limited service over newly built track to Collierville in October 1852, and by May 1857 it offered regular service over the full route from Memphis to Charleston and south into Mississippi and Alabama; through its link at Stevenson, Alabama, to the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, it became part of the first contiguous rail route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. The Memphis and Charleston Railroad was also notable as the first railroad to offer sleeper cars, the only railroad to run east-west in what became the Confederacy, a line that made more money from passengers than freight, and a long-haul route built for direct connections to the East Coast and the Northeast rather than as a local branch line.