Council of War

Forrest's cavalry gathered at Booneville on June 9, 1864, about 3,500 men facing a Union column of roughly 8,000 that had left Memphis a week earlier. He planned to move before dawn and reach Brice's Cross Roads first, telling Rucker the Union cavalry would arrive about three hours ahead of infantry who would be worn out by the march. Black soldiers of the 55th and 59th U.S. Colored Infantry guarded the Union rear. Two months earlier, at Fort Pillow, historians generally agree Forrest's men shot many surrendering soldiers, Black troops above all.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site — 14 mi
  The crossroads where Nathan Bedford Forrest routed a larger Union force in June 1864, and where Black regiments, many raised at Corinth, held the bridge that let most of the army escape.
• Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center — 20 mi
  A Park Service center at Battery Robinett telling why two railroads made Corinth a prize, from the siege of 1862 to the battle of October, and what happened to the people who sought freedom there.
• Corinth Contraband Camp — 20 mi
  The site of a Union-run town of freedom seekers in 1862 and 1863, with a quarter-mile walkway of life-size bronze figures and the origin of a Black regiment that fought at Brices Cross Roads.
• Tishomingo State Park — 21 mi
  A Civilian Conservation Corps park around Bear Creek's sandstone canyon at milepost 304 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, with a swinging bridge and cliffs found nowhere else in Mississippi.

More markers nearby

• Capture of Booneville — 0.3 mi
• Booneville Armory — 0.8 mi
• Booneville — 1.0 mi
• Battle of Booneville — 1.0 mi