May 1862, Corinth, Mississippi As far as the foot soldiers were
concerned, the other side could have the damned town. The
generals might have gladly given it up too, if not for the
railroad junction. Corinth was pestilential. Even the Union's
pitiless William Tecumseh Sherman said the place made him feel
"quite unwell." Sherman's superior, Henry Halleck, had such a
low opinion of it that when he fell ill with a bowel ailment, he
sourly named it "the evacuation of Corinth." It was wretched
ground for a fight, with boggy fields, swarms of bugs clouding
the fetid air, and a chronic shortage of decent drinking water.
A Confederate colonel called it a "sickly, malarial spot, fit
only for alligators and snakes." It left no better impression on
a Yankee lieutenant from Minnesota, who found the locals
"ignorant" and the women "she vipers" with the figures of "shad
bellied bean poles," he wrote. As far as he could tell, the
chief local produce consisted of "wood ticks, chiggers, fleas,
and niggers." But men on both si