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As General U.S. Grant gazed down the rolling landscape of the Mississippi Hills, he saw two things:  a slight obstacle and a large prize.  The prize was Corinth, the Crossroads of the Confederacy where the longest rail lines in the nation converged and crossed.  The obstacle was the few hundred miles of hill country that Grant’s armies would have to conquer to take Grenada, where Pemberton’s fortifications guarded the grandest prize of all—Vicksburg, the Gibraltar of the South.  To Grant, the goal seemed simple enough.  First, take Corinth, then in a two-pronged advance, lead his army down the Mississippi Central Rail line toward Grenada while Sherman took his forces down the Mississippi River toward Vicksburg. Grant could foresee Vicksburg taken with hardly a shot.

What Grant could not foretell were the mysteries, how an entire army might vanish into thin air as it did in Corinth, how a fierce, murderous battle might take place in seemingly total silence, as it did in Iuka.  He could not see how in Coffeeville a retreating army, harried and on the run, would turn like an injured animal and inflict a fatal blow to his plan and a near-fatal wound to his own command and reputation, so that his own men would boo him when he walked their ranks.  He had not learned, as he would in Holly Springs, the concept of Total War, a hard truth that would produce a seismic shift in tactics, and a brutal lesson that Grant and Sherman go on to teach the rest of the South to its eternal sorrow.

Grant faced some of his darkest hours here, and while Corinth fell to the Union and in the end Vicksburg was his, he gained his second great victory only after he retreated to Memphis, and to a complex plan of labyrinthine canals that somehow seemed easier than heading back into the hornet’s nest of the Mississippi Hills.

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