Calvin is now engaged in The Siege of Corinth, Mississippi which was the First Battle of Corinth lasting from April 29 to May 30, 1862. It took 19 days for Calvin and the other Union soldiers to travel by boat from New Madrid to Corinth. A collection of 120,000 Union forces under the overall command of Major General Henry Halleck engaged in a month-long siege of the city of Corinth, Mississippi. There were 65,000 Confederate soldiers commanded by General P.G.T. Beauregard. The siege resulted in the capture of Corinth by Union forces. Both the Union and Confederate sides lost approximately 1,000 soldiers each.
Corinth was a strategic point at the junction of two vital railroad lines, the Mobile and Ohio Railroad and the Memphis and Charleston Railroad. Former General Halleck argued: "Richmond and Corinth are now the great strategic points of the war, and our success at these points should be insured at all hazards”.
The siege of Corinth ended when the outnumbered Confederates withdrew on May 29. This effectively cut off the prospect of further Confederate attempts to regain western Tennessee. The Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant took control and made it the base for Grant's operations in the siege of the Mississippi River. Grant in his memoirs recalled the importance Corinth: "Corinth was a valuable strategic point for the enemy to hold, and consequently a valuable one for us to possess ourselves of". The Confederate armies had been driven from the Ohio River, almost out of the States of Tennessee and Kentucky reaching the Gulf States. Sherman wrote of the importance of Corinth: "In Memphis I could see its effects upon the citizens, and they openly admitted that their cause had sustained a death-blow".
