There was nothing much to Corinth, Mississippi, a small town in the far northeast corner of the state near the Tennessee line, except the one thing that made it priceless. Two of the most important railroads in the South crossed there, right at the town depot (the rail station where the lines met). The Mobile & Ohio ran north and south, tying the Gulf coast at Mobile all the way up to the Ohio River. The Memphis & Charleston ran east and west, and it was the only continuous rail line in the whole Confederacy linking the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. The two lines met and crossed at Corinth. Whoever held that crossing held the ability to move troops and supplies across the western half of the Confederacy, which is why the period gave the town a nickname far grander than its size: the “crossroads of the Confederacy.”

The railroad junction was the object the two armies fought over, but it was not the reason. The Confederacy existed to preserve and extend slavery. Eleven states had broken away from the United States rather than accept any limit on the enslavement of Black people, built their economy and their society on it, and now fielded armies to defend it. The railroad at Corinth mattered because it fed that war effort, carrying the soldiers and the supplies of a slaveholding republic. The Union wanted Corinth because taking it was one more cut into the body of that republic.

The Union already had the town. After the bloodbath at Shiloh in April 1862 (about 20 miles, or 32 km, to the north), Major General Henry Halleck (North) had crept down on Corinth in a slow, dug-in siege, and the Confederates under General P.G.T. Beauregard (South) evacuated it in late May rather than be trapped. That spring affair, the Siege of Corinth, was nearly bloodless, a matter of maneuver and entrenching shovels. The hard, two-day pitched battle this story tells came five months later, that October, which is why it is often called the Second Battle of Corinth, to set it apart from the spring siege that gave the town to the Union in the first place. Corinth had been in Union hands ever since.

By the fall of 1862 the Confederacy wanted it back. The man who decided to take it was Major General Earl Van Dorn (South), a cavalier of a general with a reputation for boldness. The overall Union commander in this stretch of the western theater was Ulysses S. Grant, and his forces were scattered across the region: a column under William T. Sherman (North) at Memphis, a reserve at Jackson, and Major General William S. Rosecrans (North) holding Corinth itself with about 23,000 men, answering to Grant. If Van Dorn could fall on the Corinth garrison fast, before all those pieces concentrated, he might overwhelm it, retake the junction, and relieve the pressure on General Braxton Bragg’s (South) ongoing invasion of Kentucky by tying Grant’s western armies down. He gathered roughly 22,000 men, gave the combined force the grand name of the Army of West Tennessee, and marched on the crossroads.