24Surby, Grierson Raids, 109-10; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 172.
25OR 24, pt. 1, 540; George C. Reinholdt, Compiled Service Record, NARA; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 172; Abbott, “Heroic Deeds of Heroic Men,” 280; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863; “Camp Correspondence,” May 26, 1863; “From New Orleans,” n.d., Thomas W. Lippincott Papers, ALPL; Surby, Grierson Raids, 110, 112, 114.
26OR 24, pt. 1, 540; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 172-73; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863; Surby, Grierson Raids, 111.
27“The Great Federal Raid,” Natchez Daily Courier, May 5, 1863; OR 24, pt. 1, 527; George C. Reinholdt, Compiled Service Record, NARA. The small affair at Wall’s bridge was also known at the time as the battle at Tickfaw bridge.
28“Camp Correspondence,” Fulton City Register (Canton, IL), May 26, 1863; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 173; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 105; 1860 Amite County Population and Slave Schedules; James M. Newman, Deed, Book 66, Amite County Chancery Clerk, 356-58.
29“Camp Correspondence,” Fulton City Register (Canton, IL), May 26, 1863; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 173; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 105; Bearss, The Vicksburg Campaign, vol. 2, 230; Dinges, “The Making of a Cavalryman,” 334, 386-87n144; Erastus D. Yule, Compiled Service Record, NARA.
30House Report 650, 53rd Congress, 2nd Session, 1-2.
31Curtiss, diary, May 1, 1863; OR 24, pt. 1, 527, 543; Jackson, The History of Orange Jackson’s War Life, 12; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 173; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 107; Grabau, Ninety-Eight Days, 116; Freyburger, Letters to Ann, 45; Daniel E. Robbins to Brother, May 7, 1863.
32Jackson, The History of Orange Jackson’s War Life, 12-13.
33Forbes, “Grierson’s Cavalry Raid,” 117, 119; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 108; Surby, Grierson Raids, 117.
34Surby, Grierson Raids, 115-16; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 173; Winschel, Triumph and Defeat, 54; Daniel E. Robbins to Brother, May 7, 1863.
35OR 24, pt. 1, 527; Surby, Grierson Raids, 116; Freyburger, Letters to Ann, 45.
36Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 173-74.
37OR 24, pt. 1, 524-526; Surby, Grierson Raids, 116; Surby, Grierson Raids, 116.
38Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 174.
39OR 24, pt. 1, 527; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 174; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 108; Surby, Grierson Raids, 117; Daniel E. Robbins to Parents, May 5, 1863.
40OR 24, pt. 1, 527; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 174; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 108; Surby, Grierson Raids, 117; Daniel E. Robbins to Parents, May 5, 1863.
41Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 174.
42Forbes, “Grierson’s Raid,” 28; OR 24, pt. 1, 527, 537, 543; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863; Lewis Cole, “Served in the Army and then in the Navy,” Confederate Veteran (March 1913), vol. 21, no. 3, 112; Fannie A. Beers, Memories: A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1889), 233; Bearss, The Vicksburg Campaign, vol. 2, 231.
43OR 24, pt. 1, 527, 537, 543; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863.
44OR 24, pt. 1, 533, 542; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 106.
45OR 24, pt. 1, 548-50.
46Ibid., 537.
47Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 174.
48Forbes, “Grierson’s Cavalry Raid,” 120.
49Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 175; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 108.
50OR 24, pt. 1, 527-28; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 175; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863; Surby, Grierson Raids, 118; Grabau, Ninety-Eight Days, 116.
51OR 24, pt. 1, 537.
52Ibid., 528, 536-38; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 176; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 109.
53Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 109.
54Ibid.
55“The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 176-78; Abbott, “Heroic Deeds of Heroic Men,” 281; Surby, Grierson Raids, 123.
56“The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863; OR 24, pt. 1, 528-29; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 176.
57Forbes, “Grierson’s Cavalry Raid,” 120; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 176; Henry C. Forbes to His Sister, May 23, 1863, in Henry Forbes Papers, CHM.
58“The Great Cavalry Exploit of the Times,” New Orleans Era, May 5, 1863, copy in Thomas W. Lippincott Papers, ALPL; “Army Correspondence,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), May 11, 1863; “From One of Grierson’s Cavalry,” Union Monitor (Litchfield, IL), June 5, 1863.
59Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 176.
60OR 24, pt. 1, 528; Forbes, “Grierson’s Raid,” 27; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 177-78. For Godfrey, see John Franklin Godfrey, The Civil War Letters of Capt. John Franklin Godfrey, Candace Sawyer and Laura Orcutt, eds. (South Freeport, ME: Ascensius Press, 1993).
61OR 24, pt. 1, 528; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 177-78, 180; “The Grierson Raid,” Weekly Register (Canton, IL), September 7, 1863; Freyburger, Letters to Ann, 45; Woodward, “Grierson’s Raid,” 111; Daniel E. Robbins to Parents, May 5, 1863; Daniel E. Robbins to Brother, May 7, 1863.
62Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 178.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Results
“Isn’t the Grierson ‘raid’ glorious?” asked Edward Havens of the 103rd Illinois in a letter to his parents from La Grange. Two other expeditions, he added, “started from this point and were gone respectively five and 10 days each. Although they made good long marches and took about 40 prisoners and 500 animals, still we forget them in looking after Grierson.” Others compared the raid to more famous expeditions. “The account of Grierson’s raid in the South is as cheering as that of [George] Stoneman’s and is its equal if not superior,” argued another soldier. Other raids achieved important results, but Grierson’s thrust through Mississippi consumed so much attention and drew heavy praise because of its length and audaciousness.1
Northern newspapers had done their best to keep up with the column, usually reporting what Mississippi newspapers had already printed, such as the sudden attack at Newton Station. “I remember with what interest I watched its progress,” explained a newspaperman in Illinois who knew Grierson and Colonel Prince personally. Major media outlets back east, such as the New York Times and the New York Herald, ran long, detailed stories with multiple illustrations. The Times, for example, declared that Grierson made a wonderful raid “through the length and breadth of the very long and quite broad State of Mississippi.” The reports were reprinted in papers across the continent as far away as Sacramento in its Daily Union. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper reported that “till very lately our military men have been content to leave all the dashing cavalry raids in the hands of [Jeb] Stuart, Fitzhugh Lee and other daring rebels,” but now raids by Federal units were soaking up the limelight, “to crown all, that of Col. Grierson’s.” One Harper’s writer exclaimed that “the exploits of [John] Morgan, Stuart, and [Joseph] Wheeler, boasted as they have been, are as child’s play in comparison with such a raid as this.”2
One correspondent wondered at the enormity of the raid. More than “20,000 rebel troops were sent out from various points with a view to intercept or capture the bold raider,” he marveled, “but they always fell in the rear.” Left unwritten was the question of what those 20,000 troops could have done if they had concentrated not against Grierson but against Grant, as he was attempting to cross the Mississippi River south of Vicksburg.3
Others were watching as well. General Hurlbut in Memphis provided his superiors with information as reports of Griers
on’s whereabouts dribbled in. “I learn from two independent sources that Colonel Grierson has passed below Jackson, Miss.; cut the railroad at Hazlehurst, and destroyed 50,000 pounds of bacon and an ammunition train, and is on his way down to Baton Rouge to join General Banks,” Hurlbut wired President Lincoln at noon on May 2. “I believe it to be true,” he added, “as my orders were to push south if safer than to come north.” A response to Grierson’s raid from inside the Federal war machine in Washington was bureaucratic in nature. The adjutant general’s office, for example, complained about not having received muster rolls and other paperwork from the 6th and 7th Illinois Cavalry on time.4
The raiders themselves knew they had done something remarkable, if just not all the details. Captain Henry Forbes joked with his sister in a letter from Louisiana, “You don’t need an introduction I trust to a gentleman writing you from this remote spot in Uncle Sam’s domain, to save him from the charge of impertinence. If you do, though, it is I.” Forbes had much to be gleeful about, having felt as much pressure as anyone except the colonel himself. Forbes described himself to his sister as “a wanderer by flood and waste. I have at last found a resting place, and a refuge out of the wilderness.” He went on to describe their “dare devil expedition—our neck or nothing ride through the heart of Dixie” as “the greatest march, in a given time, on record.” Forbes was especially proud of his company’s six-day detachment, during which “we were the blind used to obscure the real movements.” He enumerated how for those six days the company had only 4 meals, 12 “feeds,” and 14 hours’ sleep, all while being “given . . . up for lost.” Yet the company managed to provide “employment to one Maj. Gen. (Loring) and no less than 4000 rebel troops with artillery.” His sister also learned that he had gone 48 hours without food and ridden 52 miles without feeding the horses. To another acquaintance, Forbes kidded that they should come “ride out with me a few hundred miles a week for your health,” and he recommended they “sleep in the cow pasture without a blanket, eating little or nothing for breakfast, crackers and water for dinner, and tea for tea, which may result in making you as healthy as it has me.” Forbes noted that he had lost 22 pounds on the perilous journey, and he wished he had a daguerreotype of “the seat of my unmentionables as viewed before and after the ‘great raid.’” The captain was quick to give credit for the success elsewhere, writing that Company B’s feat was doing “pretty well for one little company,” but that “with such men you can accomplish what you will.” In a nod to a higher power, he insisted “there was One who covered our defenseless heads.”5
Other Federals echoed Forbes. Henry Heald of Company K, 7th Illinois Cavalry, boasted that the troops had “performed the greatest feat of the war,” and he revealed his own surprise: “The end finds us in Louisiana instead of Tennessee.” Another penned that he “stood it tip top, but was very tired, as was every one of us, and glad when we got through.” Still another described the brigade “having made the journey through the State of Mississippi on horseback,” arrived at Baton Rouge “tired and worn out thinking we had done a big thing.” An exhausted trooper informed his hometown newspaper, “We think we have accomplished a great deal in this trip. How we are to get back we do not yet know. We certainly cannot go back the way we came. Perhaps we will not go back at all, but I hope we will, for it is too hot here.”6
Many echoed the wondrousness of the entire thing. Forbes’s brother Stephen described “the rapid march, the subtle ruse, the gallant dash, the sudden surprise, and the quick and cunning retreat which leaves an opponent miles in the rear before he knows that the fight is over.” Daniel Robbins embellished a bit when he declared that “not a bridge was destroyed before us not a ford disputed we marched as we pleased when we pleased & where we pleased as far as resistance was concerned.” Another described the “panic stricken people through whose country it passed like a tornado. Like a tornado, too, it was in its work of destruction.” One Illinoisan recalled the losses of “two men killed and several wounded through bad management,” though most of the troopers stood in awe at the lack of casualties and general good health enjoyed by the men. “It is remarkable that so few were left on the expedition from sickness, and so few were killed and wounded,” marveled one trooper. “It was the most successful raid of history, or of this war, and attended with the smallest loss. Surely, God was their protection and shield.” Once in Baton Rouge, observed yet another participant, “the General here remarked that he thought he had seen cavalry before, but he had not.”7
Not only were the soldiers praised but so, too, were their horses and mules. Many of the cavalrymen acknowledged the important role the animals played in the success of the raid, even as they were traded out for new animals, which were in turn traded for fresher mounts. “Of the horses that started not more than one hundred come through,” recalled one Illinois trooper, “but we captured the finest that there were in Miss., and La.” Scout Richard Surby explained “many troopers had to change four or five times.” According to one man, “Only a very few of the horses we started with came through. I have the same one I started with, but he is run down so that he is hardly fit for anything—will have to trade him off or buy new, I expect. But I would not have missed the trip for more than the value of 2 horses.” Trooper William Dunaway wrote his wife from Baton Rouge, “We had a long, weary-some trip of it. It was trying on man and horse. We traveled almost day and night. A many a night we traveled all night through rain and mud. We wore out one set of horses,” he continued, “but we captured another set just as good as the old ones, if not better. I have got as fine a young mare as ever traveled and she did not cost me anything.”8
Some men found it hard to leave their beloved horses behind in a trade that even the animal found hard to understand, as one owner discovered. “It would sometimes arouse a feeling of regret to witness the attachment displayed by the faithful old horse,” admitted Sergeant Surby, “who, on being turned loose by the road-side, to wander where he pleased, would be seen following up the column, and when it stopped he would lay down in the road to rest, and as we started again could be seen occupying a place in the ranks, where he would remain from morning to night, faithful in the discharge of his duty.”9
The high command was just as impressed. Generals Hurlbut and Sooy Smith were giddy over Grierson’s success, with the latter officer erroneously boasting, “The conception and general plan of the raid were mine. Its masterly execution belonged to Grierson and to his able and gallant subordinate officers and brave men, and to them and him I have always gladly given the praise they deserved.” Smith was liberal with his praise for Grierson, whom he described as “an ideal cavalry officer—brave and dashing, cunning and resourceful—and his troops were excellent and well worthy of such a commander.” Hurlbut was also effusive in his praise for the manner in which the raid was conducted. “By referring to my previous communications,” he wrote Grant,
you will perceive that the several movements indicated in them to be carried on by this command have been performed with a reasonable degree of accuracy, and with a very brilliant success in the main attempt to pierce the enemy’s country. The movement on Tuscumbia on the one side drew attention and gathered their cavalry in that direction, while the movement on Coldwater and Panola drew Chalmers and his band in the other. Thus our gallant soldier, Grierson, proceeded with his command unchallenged, and has splendidly performed the duty he was sent upon. I very earnestly support his claim for promotion, earned by long and meritorious service, and now crowned by this last achievement.10
The success of the raid prompted both Hurlbut and Smith to lay claim to its planning and execution—assertions that did not sit well with either officer. According to Smith, Hurlbut changed his story once Grierson arrived safely in Baton Rouge. Hurlbut maintained that Grierson had discretionary orders to go to Baton Rouge if need be, a point Smith took exception to, given his strong arguments prior to the raid. Smith even claimed Hurlbut changed his story “ex post facto to the ou
tcome of a successful expedition and I am sorry to feel that he may have been guilty of such reprehensible conduct.”11
Others in the high command also appreciated Grierson’s success. “There is lots of high officers here at this place say that they would rather been a private in the rear rank on this trip,” noted one trooper, “than to have been an officer in command.” General Nathaniel Banks, who suddenly found himself with a brigade of veteran cavalry in his department, hailed the raid as “the most brilliant expedition of the war. . . . The moral effect of that remarkable expedition upon a wavering and astonished enemy, and the assistance rendered us in breaking up the enemy’s communications, in establishing our own, and in covering the concentration of our forces against this place, can hardly be overestimated. Their timely presence has supplied a want which you will remember I have frequently represented was crippling all our operations.” The loquacious officer continued: “I trust the services of Colonel Grierson and his command will receive at the hands of the Government that acknowledgment which they so eminently deserve.” Sherman praised the raid and its leader with a nod toward the wider strategic importance of the mounted thrust, writing on May 5 to a fellow general, “It was Grierson who made the cavalry raid down to Meridian, and he is supposed to be traveling toward Baton Rouge or Dixie. It has produced a sort of panic South, and Grant’s movements will complete it, some say.”12
No one was more pleased than Grant himself, who received the first indication of Grierson’s success on May 1 while moving inland toward Port Gibson. In a quick note to Admiral Porter, Grant observed, “Grierson of the cavalry, has taken the heart out of Mississippi.” He later added, “Colonel Grierson’s raid from La Grange through Mississippi has been the most successful thing of the kind since the breaking out of the rebellion.” He also sang the raider’s praises to General Halleck in Washington in a report by explaining the course of Grierson’s raid: “[He] was 5 miles south of Pontotoc on April 19. The next place he turned up was at Newton, about 30 miles east of Jackson. From there he has gone south, touching Hazlehurst, Byhalia [Bahala], and various other places. The Southern papers and Southern people regard it as one of the most daring exploits of the war. I am told the whole State is filled with men paroled by Grierson.” The general borrowed “the expression of my informant” to offer perhaps the most succinct summation of the raid when he added, “Grierson has knocked the heart out of the State.”13
The Real Horse Soldiers Page 34
