By April 1863 the regiment had been involved in numerous raids, patrols, and its share of combat. The extensive resumption of operations and warming weather, however, exhausted the men and weakened the horses. “This big sand hill is not a very cool place,” grumbled trooper James Cole. “The horses of our regiment are mostly all run down [and] we are turning over a lot today, preparing for hard work again.” Rations were monotonous, continued the trooper, who observed that he and his comrades “are living on hard tack and sow belley. We get bakers bread a part of the time. Hard crackers & sow belley will thou be ever near & dear to me.” Despite their plight, Loomis’s command maintained good morale and was ready for action.27
Grierson was very proud of his regiment as he prepared to lead his Illinois troopers on the raid into Mississippi on April 17. He knew he would also probably need to depend upon them heavily during the coming days. After all, he had made them into what they were, and he was not about to let his best regiment go to waste.
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On paper, at least, the 7th Illinois Cavalry seemed to have much in common with its sister regiment. Both it and the 6th Illinois Cavalry hailed from the same state, both were brigaded together under Grierson, and both would follow him deep into Mississippi. But that is where their similarities ended.28
Most of the men in the 6th Illinois Cavalry came from the southern counties, but the men of the 7th came from all over the state. A few southern counties sent men to the regiment, including Randolph on the Mississippi River and White County farther east. Gallatin and Edwards Counties, which had also sent men to the 6th Illinois Cavalry, provided men for the 7th. In central Illinois a group of eastern counties (including Macon, Shelby, Fayette, and Edgar), together with a few western counties (Knox, McDonough, and Fulton) provided men. An additional slate of northern counties also had sons in the regiment. These included Carroll, Ogle, Lee, and LaSalle, the latter having also provided riders for Grierson’s 6th Illinois. Many counties sent only partial companies, although Edgar, Knox, Fayette, Shelby, Macon, McDonough, and Randolph fielded entire companies for the regiment. Only two counties, Knox and White, sent men to more than one company.29
Like its sister regiment, the 7th Illinois Cavalry was mustered into service at Camp Butler in October 1861. Colonel William Pitt Kellogg was its original commander, although he missed some of the early training because he was on detached duty in the west. Much of the initial training was overseen by Lt. Col. Edward Prince of Quincy, Illinois. An assortment of majors came and went throughout the early months, but the Midwest farmers and artisans quickly learned their equestrian trade. “My horse pleases me well,” professed one of the 7th Illinois men, “and is learning to follow me like a dog.”30
Like Grierson’s regiment, the 7th Illinois Cavalry was split in two, with four companies sent to the Cairo area. After a brief concentration of the entire regiment there on Christmas Day 1861, 8 of the regiment’s 12 companies were shipped in January 1862 across the Mississippi River to Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The 7th Illinois spent most of its time keeping marauding Confederate guerrillas away from the Federal garrisons, “scouting the country, giving protection to Union citizens and running out the rebels.”31
Major campaigns took form as the weather warmed in the spring of 1862. The 7th Illinois once again concentrated at Cape Girardeau as part of Maj. Gen. John Pope’s newly created Army of the Mississippi. Pope was preparing for a combined army-navy advance against New Madrid and Island No. 10, two Confederate defensive positions 60 miles below Columbus, Kentucky, guarding the Mississippi River. While most of the fighting was conducted by the navy, the 7th Illinois provided important support scouting and covering supply lines and leading the advance of the army against New Madrid, where it captured a battery of steel breech-loading guns. When the operation ended with the fall of Island No. 10 in early April, Pope and his command were ordered east to the Tennessee River to join with two other armies led by General Halleck, who was preparing an advance from Pittsburg Landing to Corinth, Mississippi. The grueling drive on Corinth included the laborious task of corduroying roads in preparation for the advance and fighting the Rebels. The 7th Illinois’s Maj. Zenas Aplington was shot through the head and killed on May 8.32
Significant changes greeted the regiment after the fall of Corinth. Colonel Kellogg resigned immediately after the campaign ended, leaving the post to the next in command, Edward Prince. Prince was a seasoned officer, if only in his late 20s, and had experienced his own share of problems, including a combat wound and an arrest courtesy of Kellogg. His new lieutenant colonel, William D. Blackburn, was just 25. Horatio C. Nelson, an ironically named subordinate tasked with leading horse soldiers, replaced the late Major Aplington.33
More change was on the way. Once Halleck captured Corinth at the end of May, he dispersed his huge army in various directions. The 7th Illinois Cavalry ended up in northern Alabama, guarding a 40-mile stretch of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad from Tuscumbia, Alabama, east to where the line crossed the Tennessee River at Decatur. When the line was abandoned later that fall, the regiment returned to the Corinth area, where it lost 40 men killed or wounded in the battles of Iuka and Corinth in early October.34
Late in the fall of 1862 Grant prepared to move south toward Vicksburg. The 7th Illinois skirmished heavily with enemy cavalry as Grant advanced toward Grenada. The Illinois troopers also took part in the raid on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad in mid-December that helped break the line near Okolona, Mississippi, and was instrumental in alerting Grant to Van Dorn’s raid toward Holly Springs. Confederate cavalry were discovered crossing behind their path near Pontotoc, riding north instead of chasing the Federal cavalry. According to the 7th Illinois’s official history, by the end of December it had “marched over 900 miles during the month of December, and being engaged with the enemy nearly every day to a greater or less extent.”35
Edward Prince. Colonel Edward Prince was commander of the 7th Illinois Cavalry and was a solid, if somewhat excitable, sounding board for Grierson on the raid. They would later have a falling out over Prince’s jealousy of Grierson’s fame. Randy Beck
After the failure of Grant’s Mississippi Central Railroad Campaign, the 7th Illinois Cavalry joined its sister regiment (the 6th) and the 2nd Iowa Cavalry at La Grange, Tennessee, in the brigade led by Benjamin Grierson. It “made frequent forages into West Tennessee,” reported the regiment’s historian, “relieving the rebel inhabitants of many fine horses and mules, which were abundant in that region.” The troopers also broke up Confederate conscription attempts. The major Confederate nemesis operating in the area, Col. Robert V. Richardson, saw his camp invaded and his quartermaster captured. Richardson himself barely escaped with a wound to his leg.36
The 7th Illinois was a seasoned cavalry command with good officers and men by the time it was to ride into Mississippi with Grierson. The regiment numbered 542 effectives. Its commander, Col. Edward Prince, was an able though excitable field officer with broad experience on many fronts. As was the case with many others of his day, Prince had migrated west to Illinois from his 1832 birthplace in East Bloomfield, New York. For a time he lived in Grierson’s hometown of Jacksonville before attaining a law degree and settling in Quincy. With the advent of the war, Prince became an expert drillmaster, which he parlayed into a commission from Governor Yates as lieutenant colonel of the regiment. By the time he ascended to the top position he was more than capable of handling that level of command—and was just what Grierson needed as he set out on this unique journey.37
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Grierson’s third regiment more than held its own in the brigade. In fact, the 2nd Iowa Cavalry was perhaps the most veteran of all three. It certainly was not afraid of a hard fight. As one Iowan put it in a letter home, “The Secesh up there [meaning back home], do they realize that the 2nd Iowa are just as ready to kill them as Southern rebels and if anything more so.”38
The members of the 2nd Iowa Cavalry came from two parts of the Hawkeye State.
As would be expected in this relatively new addition to the Union, the majority of the population was situated in the eastern swath, mostly along the Mississippi River. When the companies began forming during the first summer of the war, several counties sent men, including Des Moines, Muscatine, Scott, and Jackson Counties. Johnson and Delaware Counties, both inland counties, also sent companies. The other major county sources of manpower were in the north-central portion of the state, where Cerro Gordo, Franklin, Hamilton, Marshall, and Polk (home of the state capital at Des Moines) also sent men to the regiment. Some counties raised and sent entire companies, such as Marshall and Polk, while others provided men to multiple companies, including Jackson and Muscatine. Scott County, on the Mississippi River at Davenport and Rock Island, sent men to nine different companies.39
The companies that would become the 2nd Iowa Cavalry were mustered into service at Davenport, Iowa, in September 1861. The Iowa governor appointed West Point graduate and career army officer Washington L. Elliott as the regiment’s colonel. Unlike the inept Colonel Cavanaugh of the 6th Illinois Cavalry, Elliott introduced his troopers to rigid drill practice, and the 2nd regiment was soon one of the best-trained cavalry commands in the entire federal service. Its lieutenant colonel, Edward Hatch, was also an outstanding officer. The 30-year-old graduate of Norwich Military Academy in Vermont was a career officer, though he once found himself under arrest for swatting a soldier with the flat of his sword, cursing him, and tying up the unfortunate trooper by his hands. The majors were also solid. The regiment was a force to be reckoned with, especially with two of the three battalions armed with fast-shooting Colt revolving rifles.40
The 2nd Iowa left Davenport in December and moved to St. Louis’s Benton Barracks, where it received additional training. It moved to the front in mid-February 1862, first to the Cairo area. Like the 7th Illinois Cavalry, the Iowans took part in the New Madrid and Island No. 10 operations under John Pope, fighting at times as separate battalions. Like the Illinoisans, they, too, made the long journey east to the Tennessee River and participated in the operations against Corinth, Mississippi, in the spring of 1862.41
The Iowans showed their mettle in numerous skirmishes outside Corinth, including a daring charge against an artillery battery. The troopers played a dramatic role at Farmington on May 9 after being ordered to charge the battery. They did so with gusto, disrupting Confederate plans and helping break the line in several places. The Iowans also made a dash into the Confederate rear in late May. Unbeknownst to the Federal high command, the Confederates were evacuating south along the Mobile and Ohio Railroad just as Colonel Elliott led his regiment, together with the 2nd Michigan Cavalry under Col. Philip Sheridan, to Booneville. There, the daring cavalrymen broke the line and disrupted a portion of the enemy retreat.42
This string of successes resulted in Elliot’s promotion to brigadier general, and he served with General Pope as his cavalry commander thereafter. The regimental mantle of leadership fell to its lieutenant colonel, Edward Hatch, who was promoted to colonel of the 2nd Cavalry.43
While the 6th Illinois Cavalry operated farther in the rear and the 7th Illinois Cavalry guarded the railroad in Alabama, the 2nd Iowa spent the arduous summer and fall of 1862 camped mostly at Rienzi in a brigade led by Sheridan. The regiment was front and center in the actions around Iuka and Corinth in September and October. Occasionally, the Iowans found themselves in a brigade under Colonel Hatch, with Maj. Datus E. Coon commanding the regiment in Hatch’s absence. The regiment also took part in Grant’s initial advance into Mississippi in late 1862, although once that plan failed, it moved back to La Grange, Tennessee.44
At nearly 600 effectives, the 2nd Iowa Cavalry was the largest of Grierson’s three regiments. Its able commander, Colonel Hatch, had been born in 1832 in Maine and had been a part of the steady progress of westward migration during the early days of Manifest Destiny. As was the custom, most Americans migrated laterally, the Griersons being a prime example. As a result, most New Englanders wound up in the northwestern or midwestern states. Hatch settled in Muscatine, Iowa, in the 1850s and went into the lumber business along the Mississippi River. When the war broke out, he volunteered and steadily rose in rank from major to lieutenant colonel and, finally, colonel of the regiment. Hatch was an able and steady counterpart to Grierson, if somewhat a competitor in the no-holds-barred rise of field officers during the Civil War. Grierson was more than willing to accept that sort of competition if it provided him with a seasoned colonel at the head of a seasoned regiment. And that is exactly what Hatch and his Iowans provided.45
Edward Hatch. Grierson’s senior commander on the raid was Colonel Edward Hatch of the 2nd Iowa Cavalry. He was not happy about playing a diversionary role for the raid, but Hatch performed his duties well. Library of Congress
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The final unit in the roughly 1,700-man force Grierson was preparing to take southward on his raid was Battery K of the 1st Illinois Artillery. Commanded by Capt. Jason B. Smith, it was the most unique organization of the brigade. Many Illinois batteries had already gained something of a reputation by this point in the war, including the two Chicago light artillery batteries that had seen action at Fort Donelson and Waterhouse’s, McAllister’s, and Bouton’s batteries of the same regiment that had fought at Shiloh. Smith’s Battery K, organized out of Johnson and Pope Counties in southern Illinois, had mustered into service at Shawneetown in January 1862, but it had not yet had much of an opportunity to make a name for itself.46
Smith was from Vienna, Illinois, and he was more than just an artilleryman in Uncle Sam’s army; he was also a minister of the gospel in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Born in South Carolina in 1805, Smith was older than most Civil War soldiers. He migrated west at an early age, first to Kentucky and then to Illinois, where he worked as a blacksmith and served as a county judge in Johnson County. Smith gained some military experience in the 1830s during the Black Hawk War. His son, Jasper, served in the battery as a cannoneer.47
Although Smith was a pious man, he had no problem standing up for himself and his men. The members of the battery went to war with their own horses and initially organized as a cavalry company. Because they were not fully equipped, however, the paymaster refused to pay the men the mandatory 70 cents per diem for their horses. After squabbling over the issue, someone suggested making the company into an artillery unit with small mounted cannon that could be used with the horses the men had brought with them. Thus the company transitioned to artillery. A second paymaster, however, refused to pay the men for their horses because they were not cavalry mounts but artillery horses! Smith, righteously indignant at such treatment, fought hard for his men to get them every penny to which they were entitled.48
While most batteries had 6- or 12-pound field guns pulled by large draft horses, Smith’s battery was armed with what he described as “2 Pound Mounted Cannon.” The two-pound Woodruff guns were steel tubes weighing about 150 pounds each. The guns sat on small and poorly designed carriages that were easily damaged. The entire cannon-and-carriage combination was so light it could be pulled by only two horses, with two others hauling the limbers holding the small ammunition chests. Grierson’s adjutant, Lt. Samuel Woodward, described them as “six very light field pieces” that shot “small round shot and canister.” The lightness and mobility of these guns also limited their firepower. Grierson, however, did not need to pack a heavy punch, because he did not intend to do any fighting that would require a serious artillery presence. If he got into a tight spot, the small steel guns offered more firepower than dismounted cavalry could deliver, making Battery K of the 1st Illinois Artillery the perfect guns to accompany him on this raid.49
Woodruff Gun. The six guns of Captain Jason B. Smith’s Battery K, 1st Illinois Light Artillery, provided Grierson with additional firepower at critical times. The battery was armed with small two-pound Woodruff guns, an example of which is on display in White Hall, Illinois. Author
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&n
bsp; On April 16, with the march scheduled to begin the next morning, the companies on detached duty were ordered to concentrate. News that the hour had arrived electrified the men, with one admitting, “Considerable emotion could be perceived in and about the camps.” Charles W. Whitsit, one of the 6th Illinois Cavalry’s captains, was doubly excited because he had just received word that same day of his promotion to major.50
With their orders in hand, the troopers set about making sure everything was ready. Leather items like bridles and harnesses were double-checked and oiled, weapons cleaned, and personal items carefully packed for the long haul ahead. Horses were fed and rested as much as possible while blacksmiths finished last-minute work on the animals still needing shoes. Surgeons examined the men to determine who was fit for the long ride and who was not; only those well enough to see the ride through would set off in the morning. Quartermasters double-checked the food the men would carry, although the five days of bread, coffee, sugar, and salt would not be enough to last the entire raid; the troopers would have to fend for themselves once they ran out. One Illinoisan remembered the rations were issued “with the understanding they were to last ten [days].” Ordnance officers distributed enough ammunition so that the regiments carried anywhere from 70 to 100 rounds per man, depending on what type of weapon each carried. Brigade and regimental adjutants finished the necessary paperwork. Few other than Grierson himself knew the purpose, direction, or length of the raid or of the dangers involved. What was patently obvious was that this expedition was going to be different than other routine forays.51
The Real Horse Soldiers Page 9
