With the destruction complete at Bogue Chitto, Grierson moved farther south, keeping to the railroad so the troopers could burn every bridge they came across as well as any logistical support structures such as water tanks. A little after noon, the column approached Summit, described by an Illinois man as showing “many signs of once having done considerable business; of a neat, lively appearance, a pretty location.” To the delight of the Federals, the citizenry welcomed the raiders, which illustrated the anti-Confederate attitude held by most folks in that area. Grierson chalked the greeting up to news from other locales such as Brookhaven “of our kind and considerate action towards the people.” The Federals “found much Union sentiment in this town, and were kindly welcomed and fed by many of the citizens.” To his surprise, Grierson was something of a celebrity: “I suddenly found myself an object of special interest, and it seemed as if the inhabitants of that section of the country, as a rule, could not do too much for us. I became as great a favorite as General Pemberton.”55
The people of Summit welcomed the Illinoisans, but that did not spare any assets that could assist the Confederate war machine. Feats of destruction included a train of 25 cars and a large cache of Confederate sugar. Unlike at Bogue Chitto, however, the troopers spared the depot. Summit also contained 40 barrels of Louisiana rum, which Grierson described as “an enemy more dangerous just then than Wirt Adams’ Cavalry and other rebel troops.” Surby thought the rum “the meanest stuff in existence, warranted to kill further than any rifle in Uncle Sam’s service.” Much to his troopers’ chagrin, Grierson “emptied the vile stuff” before they could touch a drop.56
Grierson’s decision to dump the rum was a clear indication he was unwilling to take any risk that might disrupt his column and overturn all his good work. He was also laboring under significant stress because he had a major decision to make. The column was moving rapidly south along the railroad, which meant he was increasing the distance between Grant’s army and his command. Grierson, who did not know Grant was over the river, could either hover in the area and await news of Grant’s activities or call the raid a success and ride to Union-held territory in Louisiana. The Federal raider had already accomplished more than anyone had expected. The danger for his regiments would only increase the longer he stayed put. After weighing his options, he decided to ride south for Baton Rouge as rapidly as his men and mounts would allow. From that point, he could always sweep east into Alabama and then north to Tennessee or even cross the Mississippi River and move north through Louisiana. “Hearing nothing more of our forces at Grand Gulf,” he explained, “I concluded to make for Baton Rouge to recruit my command, after which I could return.” By midafternoon on April 30, Grierson had no choice but to put the interests of his command ahead of everything else.57
After a short two-hour rest at Summit, Grierson had his men back in the saddle. This time, however, he left the railroad to begin the trek toward safety. He left in his wake a railroad even more torn up than the Southern Railroad at Newton Station, “a distance of twenty-one miles [about as badly wrecked] as any road could well have been in so short a time.” Years later Grierson remembered both the playing of “Boots and Saddles” and a startling encounter with the wife of a Confederate officer just as they were leaving Summit. Grierson was leading the way out of town when word arrived that a lady wished to see him. He guided his horse to her gate and greeted her, dismounting to “listen in a most respectful manner to what she had to say.” Grierson described the woman as “very ladylike, polite and courteous, and her civility met a suitable response from me as she apologized for occupying a few moments of my time.” She admitted to being a Confederate officer’s wife and that “her whole soul . . . was enlisted in the Confederate cause,” but that she was “amazed at my great success; that the whole thing from beginning beat anything she had ever heard of or read in history.” She even told the raider that if the Union was successful in this war and Grierson ever ran for president, her husband would vote for him or “she would certainly endeavor to get a divorce from him.” A startled Grierson thanked her and said his goodbyes, no doubt wondering as he trotted back to the head of the column about the show of respect from a die-hard Confederate.58
Plaudits aside, Grierson had larger issues on his mind as he led the brigade south. He realized his thus-far successful raid could meet a miserable end if he did not push ahead and finish it. Nerves, stretched tight by two weeks of stress and exhaustion, were beginning to fray. One Illinoisan remembered fighting with a fellow trooper he accused of eating his bread. “We got into a racket,” he admitted. “I grabbed for my pistol and he caught my hand.” The trooper drew his blade and chased his comrade on horseback, “cutting at him with my saber.” The pursuit galloped past two companies until the other soldier drew his pistol, which prompted the aggrieved trooper to reverse course as fast as his horse could run. By this time both men seemed to realize the foolishness of their actions, and a captain brought the two together. As Orange Jackson put it, “You can see what a fellow will do when he is hungry.” The famished trooper would have scoffed in disgust had he read the Jackson Mississippian, which informed its readers that Grierson’s raiders were “eating fried ham and eggs and broiled spring chickens every morning for breakfast, at the expense of the planters whom they choose to honor with a visit—luxuriating on fat mutton, green peas and (of course) strawberries and cream for dinner.”59
Grierson’s route took him south to throw off any pursuers and then southwest on the road toward Liberty in Amite County, where anti-Confederate feelings were rampant. The column rode another 15 miles before stopping late in the day at a plantation owned by Thomas J. Spurlock, a 33-year-old doctor and a native Tennessean. The raiders had put another 30 miles behind them.60
Spurlock himself was away, serving in the army, leaving his wife, Amanda, to care for their infant son and oversee the plantation. Almost certainly, a deep feeling of dread and apprehension coursed through her when the Federal cavalrymen appeared. She had used her inheritance from a grandfather to buy the house and land a few years earlier in 1859. Was her investment about to go up in smoke? At least she had the moral support of her sister, who was visiting from Atlanta.61
Fortunately for the Spurlocks, the Federals had little interest in anything other than rest and any available foodstuffs. The men were settling into their bivouacs that evening when Grierson decided he wanted chicken for dinner. He placed the normal guards around the smokehouses and other outbuildings and a special guard at the hen house (the latter to reserve the chickens for himself and staff officer Woodward). To his dismay, when he went to get a few birds, he “saw the last chicken and a hand grasping for it.” The Federal commander, who was as enervated as the rest of his men, drew his saber and went after the soldier. “I jumped clean over the hen coop, around the pig sty, through the stable, behind the smokehouse, between the horses and under the horses,” Grierson remembered. “Dodging trees and shrubbery, hopping over briars [and] up and down steps, smashing the trellis, and vociferating in language more forcible than polite.” He chased the man and the “squeaking hen” all around the plantation while other officers laughed at the ludicrous scene. The colonel finally got what he was after when the terrified soldier dropped the bird while crossing a rail fence. “I grasped the fluttering, cackling thing with a firm hand and held it up in triumph,” boasted Grierson, adding, “It did not need much picking by that time.”62
The humorous event flushed out some of Grierson’s stress, but it did not change the strategic situation. He had failed in his attempt to join up with Grant’s army, and that left him and his men on their own. “That night,” he recalled, “we held the forks of several important roads, on all of which the rebels were closing in on us. Besides myself and [my] adjutant and a few of the scouts, our dangerous situation was unknown to the command.”63
1“The Great Federal Raid,” Natchez Daily Courier, May 5, 1863; “The Yankee Raid in Mississippi,” n.d., Mobile Advertiser and Regi
ster, copy in Stephen A. Forbes Papers, UI.
2OR 24, pt. 3, 781-800.
3Ibid., pt. 1, 527.
4Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 166.
5Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 709.
6OR 23, pt. 1, 248-49, 256-57, 287-89.
7Ibid., pt. 3, 247; Pierce, History of the Second Iowa Cavalry, 56-57; John to Jennie, April 28, 1863.
8OR 24, pt. 1, 579; Davis, diary, April 29, 1863, http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mscivilw/davis.htm; John to Jennie, April 28, 1863.
9OR 24, pt. 3, 240, 244, 261; Sherman, Memoirs, vol. 1, 319.
10OR 24, pt. 3, 261.
11Smith, The Decision Was Always My Own, 94-101.
12“The Yankee on the N. O. and Jackson Railroad,” Jackson Daily Mississippian, April 28, 1863; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 166; “The Yankees at Brookhaven,” Jackson Daily Mississippian, April 30, 1863.
13J. M. Quin to John J. Pettus, April 28, 1863.
14OR 24, pt. 3, 791, 794, 797.
15Ibid., 791, 802.
16Ibid., 792-94.
17Ibid., pt. 1, 533, 538; pt. 3, 792, 798-99; R. R. Hutchinson to Wirt Adams, April 17 and 27, 1863, in Wirt Adams Collection, University of Mississippi.
18W. A. Rorer to Susan, June 13, 1863, in W. A. Rorer Letters, Duke University, copy in MDAH; OR 24, pt. 1, 547, 550, 757; pt. 3, 798-99; Waldon Loving, Coming Like Hell: The Story of the 12th Tennessee Cavalry, Richardson’s Brigade, Forrest’s Cavalry Corps, Confederate States Army, 1862-1865 (Lincoln, NE: Writer’s Club Press, 2002), 21-22.
19OR 24, pt. 1, 547.
20Ibid.
21Ibid., pt. 3, 797.
22Ibid., pt. 1, 526; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 166; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863; 1860 Jefferson County, Mississippi, Population and Slave Schedules.
23Milly McLean, Deposition, October 29, 1873, Southern Claim File of Mariah McLean Buie, Case #2723, NARA RG 123, U.S. Court of Claims, http://www.angelfire.com/folk/gljmr/McLeanMilly.html. For additional descriptions by a slave, see T. H. Bowman, Reminiscences of an Ex-Confederate Soldier, or Forty Years on Crutches (Austin, TX: Gammel Statesman Publishing Company, 1904), 12.
24Charles Roundtree, Deposition, October 1873, Southern Claim File of Mary Buie, Case #2568, NARA RG 123, U.S. Court of Claims, http://www.angelfire.com/folk/gljmr/RoundtreeC.html; Alex Roundtree, Deposition, October 1873, Southern Claim File of Mary Buie, Case #2568, NARA RG 123, U.S. Court of Claims, http://www.angelfire.com/folk/gljmr/RoundtreeA.html; and Levi Adams, quoted in “Between the Gate Posts,” April 30, 2013, http://betweenthegateposts.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-body-of-cavalrymen-coming-up-road.html.
25Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 166.
26OR 24, pt. 1, 526; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 709; S. L. Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid, April 17th to May 2d, 1863,” Journal of the United States Cavalry Association (July 1904), vol. 15, no 53, 95; Surby, Grierson Raids, 78-80; Freyburger, Letters to Ann, 45.
27OR 24, pt. 1, 526; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 167; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 95; Surby, Grierson Raids, 80.
28OR 24, pt. 1, 526; Roth, “Grierson’s Raid,” 60.
29Roth, “Grierson’s Raid,” 60.
30OR 24, pt. 1, 538-39; “Skirmish at Union Church in Jefferson County,” Jackson Daily Mississippian, April 29, 1863.
31OR 24, pt. 1, 526; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 167; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863; Surby, Grierson Raids, 84.
32Curtiss, diary, April 28, 1863; OR 24, pt. 1, 526, 533; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 167; Forbes, “Grierson’s Cavalry Raid,” 115.
33Surby, Grierson Raids, 82-84, 95-96; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 96-98.
34Surby, Grierson Raids, 82-84, 95-96; Woodward,” Grierson’s Raid,” 96-98.
35OR 24, pt. 1, 526, 533; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 166; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 95; Surby, Grierson Raids, 80-81, 92.
36OR 24, pt. 1, 526, 533; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 166; Freyburger, Letters to Ann, 45.
37Surby, Grierson Raids, 93-94.
38OR 24, pt. 1, 526.
39Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 166; “Grierson’s Big Raid,” n.d., in Thomas W. Lippincott Papers, ALPL; B. H. Grierson to T. W. Lippincott, March 13, 1886; Daniel E. Robbins to Parents, May 5, 1863.
40B. H. Grierson to T. W. Lippincott, March 13, 1886; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 166.
41T. W. Lippincott to S. A. Forbes, December 20, 1908; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 166-67; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 98.
42Forbes, “Grierson’s Cavalry Raid,” 115; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 167-68; Surby, Grierson Raids, 96.
43OR 24, pt. 1, 526-27; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 167-68; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 99.
44OR 24, pt. 1, 533, 538, 547.
45Augustus Hurff Memoirs, n.d., ALPL; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863; OR 24, pt. 1, 527; Surby, Grierson Raids, 97.
46Surby, Grierson Raids, 97.
47OR 24, pt. 1, 527; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 168; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 100; Surby, Grierson Raids, 97.
48Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 168; Surby, Grierson Raids, 99.
49OR 24, pt. 1, 527; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863.
50Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 101.
511860 Lawrence County, Mississippi, Population and Slave Schedules, NARA; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863; OR 24, pt. 1, 527; Freyburger, Letters to Ann, 45.
52Smith, The Decision Was Always My Own, 100-103.
53OR 24, pt. 1, 527; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863.
54OR 24, pt. 1, 527; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 102; Surby, Grierson Raids, 100-101; Jackson, The History of Orange Jackson’s War Life, 11. The troopers destroyed all the bridges they came across as they approached Bogue Chitto (which should not be confused with the incorporated Bogue Chitto farther north in Neshoba and Kemper Counties), especially where the railroad crossed the Bogue Chitto River just north of its namesake town.
55OR 24, pt. 1, 527; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 169; Surby, Grierson Raids, 102; Freyburger, Letters to Ann, 45.
56Surby, Grierson Raids, 101; OR 24, pt. 1, 527; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 169; Surby, Grierson Raids, 101.
57OR 24, pt. 1, 527.
58Forbes, “Grierson’s Cavalry Raid,” 116; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 170.
59Jackson, The History of Orange Jackson’s War Life, 11; Bettersworth, Mississippi in the Confederacy, 113.
60OR 24, pt. 1, 527; 1860 Amite County, Mississippi, Population and Slave Schedules; Thomas J. Spurlock, Deed, Book 63, Amite County Chancery Clerk, 393-94, 513-14.
61Robert Glen Huff and Hattie Pearl Nunnery, Amite County & Liberty, Mississippi: Celebrating 200 Years (Virginia Beach: Donning Co., 2009), 123.
62Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 170-71.
63Ibid., 171.
CHAPTER TEN
The Escape
“The sun arose in all his glory, not one cloud visible in the sky to obscure its dazzling brightness,” wrote an Illinois trooper early on May 1. “A gentle breeze floated through the trees, causing a rustling among the green leaves of the oaks. Perched among the branches was the mocking bird,” he continued, “singing a variety of notes, the whole impressing the beholder with a sense of a Creator of all this beauty.” The beautiful May Day morning belied the horror of the long and deadly war.1
In Virginia, Joseph Hooker pushed part of his Army of the Potomac past a small crossroads and encountered the first enemy resistance from Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, triggering the battle of Chancellorsville. The long and bloody combat would witness t
he mortal wounding of Stonewall Jackson, the defeat and retreat of Hooker’s army, and a stunning victory that turned the strategic momentum in the east over to Lee, who would invade the North once more in June and end up at Gettysburg in early July.2
Closer to Grierson’s camp at Spurlock’s plantation in Amite County, Mississippi, Grant was also engaged in battle. The Army of the Tennessee had made an uncontested crossing of the Mississippi River the day before, and with no enemy force of any strength to his front, Grant pushed his divisions inland from Bruinsburg. He found the enemy just west of Port Gibson, around the Shaifer house and Magnolia Church. Grant’s leading corps under John A. McClernand fought throughout May 1, pushing weaker Confederate forces under John Bowen back toward Port Gibson. By the end of the day the town was in Union hands and Grant was more than a dozen miles inland. He now had a firm foothold in Mississippi, and only a decisive defeat in a pitched battle could derail his plans.3
When Grierson awoke that morning, he decided the time had come to affect his escape. He had performed his duty well, diverting Confederate attention and breaking up Southern railroads. Meeting up with Grant was no longer feasible, but riding to Union-controlled Baton Rouge remained a viable option. His part of the grand scheme appeared over; certainly the headline-grabbing aspects of his ride were now a thing of the past. The Confederates, however, had finally concentrated large numbers to hem in the raiders, and they were coming after the Union column from almost every direction.
“I knew just where the rebel forces were, and decided just how to avoid them and outwit them,” he would later boast, albeit with the benefit of hindsight. His troopers knew much less of what was going on, with one Illinoisan remarking, “Various were the conjectures as to what point on the Mississippi River we would make.” Perhaps it was best they did not know what was happening or just how dangerous their situation was that May Day morning.4
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