Born to Battle
Page 12
Federal behavior sometimes deliberately antagonized local citizens. According to Spence, Federal lieutenant colonel John G. Parkhurst of the Ninth Michigan assumed the title of the town’s military governor and staged a mock parade around the Rutherford County courthouse, dragging from his horse’s tail a makeshift Confederate flag.
Murfreesboro residents longed for Confederate deliverance, but uneventful months passed.The occupiers grew lax. Federal enlisted men played ball and marbles, and evening dances were held in the streets, attended by some of the local belles.15
But the Murfreesboro leadership was in flux. In May the post commander, Colonel William W. Duffield of the Ninth Michigan, had been ordered to Kentucky, and the command devolved onto Colonel Henry C. Lester of the Third Minnesota. Lester soon divided his forces into two camps at least two miles apart—because of water shortage, he claimed. But Duffield, who arrived back in Murfreesboro on July 11, said the division had resulted from jealousy among the officers. The primary antagonists were Parkhurst, filling in for Duffield at the head of the Michiganders, and Lester. At root, John Spence indicated, was disagreement over which Union officer would govern the city. Spence implied that the residents preferred Lester, suggesting that he was more lenient.16
Disturbing incidents occurred. A Union scouting party ran into a band of Confederate partisans—or perhaps the hovering, inquisitive cavalry. Spence wrote that the Southerners surprised the Federals and killed one. The Federals assumed the ambushers were local bushwhackers and cracked down. They searched residences for guns and arrested a dozen citizens. According to Spence, two of the twelve were to be selected and hanged for the killing of the Union soldier. Spence may not have learned the whole of it. A spy using the name James Paul and a Confederate captain, William A. Richardson, who had escaped a Northern prison, were reputedly also among the condemned, along with five others who lived in the area of rural Rutherford County where the Union soldier was slain. Spence’s description makes two things clear: at this time his hometown was resentful, and its Union occupiers feared no return of Confederate troops on a significant scale.17
Beneath a searing July sun, Federal general Don Carlos Buell was plodding across northern Alabama. He had a big job, which he had made bigger. He was repairing not only the Memphis & Charleston tracks from Memphis, as General Henry Halleck had ordered, but also the Louisville-Nashville line, which continued south from Nashville by two routes to the northern Alabama towns of Decatur and Stevenson. Buell was leery of Halleck’s implied instruction to supply his army by rail from Memphis to the west, using tracks crossing four hostile states. A less vulnerable plan, Buell thought, would be to resupply from the north at Louisville on the Ohio River via the Louisville-Nashville line. So he was repairing—and stationing guard detachments along—these tracks too. He also delayed any push on Chattanooga proper until the Louisville-Nashville route had been repaired, presumably by end of the second week of July.18
Guarding both routes required large numbers of Buell’s 40,000 men. And during the first week of July, John Morgan’s raid into Kentucky with 1,000 Confederate cavalrymen prompted Union commanders in the Bluegrass State to clamor for reinforcements. Buell sent two regiments from Murfreesboro, his strongest station between Nashville and Chattanooga. If he had to follow them with an entire division, he said, further advance toward East Tennessee would be out of the question.19
The Federals completed repairs to the Louisville-Nashville-Alabama tracks on July 12. This closed a twenty-three-mile break at which supplies had to be offloaded, hauled by wagon, then reloaded onto train cars. The first shipment of expedited provisions for Buell’s Chattanooga-bound army was scheduled for the next day, July 13.
A July 11 train from Nashville into Murfreesboro had brought two Federal officers: the returning Colonel Duffield and thirty-six-year-old Brigadier Thomas T. Crittenden, the new post commander. Crittenden and Duffield planned immediate changes for Murfreesboro. They especially wanted to reconsolidate the garrison’s separated units, saying that the Parkhurst camp, serviced by huge springs at a plantation belonging to the Maney family, had enough water to supply three times the number of troops present at Murfreesboro. Despite Lester’s blasé assertion that no substantial Confederate force was closer than Chattanooga, Crittenden doubled the number of pickets around the city. Lester neglected, however, to disclose two important details: Confederate cavalry had been on the increase around McMinnville forty miles to the east, and Lester had been allowing Federal pickets to withdraw from the roads each evening after nightfall. Such laxness was idiocy, but Crittenden could not change a system about which he knew nothing.20
That same day, July 11, Forrest’s Confederates entered McMinnville. The First Georgia rode in from Kingston to join the Eighth Texas, Second Georgia, and two smaller units of Tennesseans and Kentuckians. Together, Forrest’s disparate command now numbered 1,400 men.21
The march from Chattanooga across two mountain ranges had been forced and exhausting, but Forrest rested only overnight at McMinnville. The cavalry already there doubtless informed him that Murfreesboro’s Federal camps were widely separated; Crittenden and Duffield, having just arrived, had yet to institute their plan to consolidate. In the early afternoon of July 12, Forrest pushed on west to Woodbury, where he stopped to feed mounts around 11 p.m.
The women of Woodbury brought out food for the men and, in anguish, reported that a Federal patrol had dragooned many male residents into the Murfreesboro jail on July 11 amid dire threats of hanging. The prisoners would soon be free, Forrest promised. He also announced that on the next day, July 13, he had been born forty-one years before in the nearby county of Bedford. He expected to celebrate the morrow with a significant present from his men: Murfreesboro.22
He quickly pushed on. In the middle of the night, his brigade crossed the Rutherford County line and approached the hamlet of Readyville (pronounced “Reedyville”). They rode in silence, but whispers of their coming preceded them. At the brick home of Colonel Charles Ready, the family’s women—along with slaves Malindy, Aunt Winnie, and Uncle Martin—had, like the women of Woodbury, prepared food for the troopers. Colonel Ready’s young granddaughter helped hand it out.
To the young girl, the troopers’ unpolished commander was an instant hero, a tall man coming to rescue her jailed kinsmen. Her admiration quickly became more personal. Out of deference for females, or his reputed regard for young people, or just the heightened consciousness of the wonder of life that can grip a man facing battle, he gave the girl a compliment she never forgot.
“Your face,” he said, “is as beautiful as the moonlight.”23
A round 4:30 a.m., Forrest’s scouts reported pickets just ahead on the town’s eastern outskirts. Lester’s lack of orders had left nocturnal vigilance, if there was to be any, up to individual commanders. One of the in-town units—the Ninth Michigan or the Pennsylvania cavalry—had posted fifteen of its men along the Murfreesboro-Woodbury highway on which Forrest’s men were now approaching.
Forrest detailed a few Texas Rangers to take the fifteen pickets with no noise. The Texans veered off into a field, skirted the picket post, then reentered the road, turned, and trotted back from the town side. In the predawn, the Federals took the approaching horsemen for other Federals until the Texans were on them with drawn pistols. From the captives, Forrest learned that General Thomas Crittenden had arrived and taken command, but the Federal camps were still separated. Each was also well removed from the courthouse square, where Crittenden occupied a hotel and a Michigan company guarded the jail on the second floor of the courthouse.24
Forrest conferred with subordinates, then issued orders. Wharton’s Texans were to charge the Seventh Pennsylvania Cavalry’s camp just ahead to the right of the road. Most of the Texans and some men of the Second Georgia would dash on to attack the five companies of the Ninth Michigan, whose tents were pitched near the Maney estate and its great springs more than a half mile north of town. Forrest himself would lead the
rest of the troops a mile or so farther west toward the public square. Near it they would separate again. A company of Texas Rangers would storm the buildings around the courthouse in search of General Crittenden. Some companies of the First and Second Georgia would assault the single company of Michigan troops camped on the square guarding the jail. The Georgians were also to liberate the prisoners held there.
Forrest’s plan also provided protection for these operations. Colonel J. K. Lawton and much of his Second Georgia would be held in the rear as a reserve, and Forrest—after breaking off from the Texas Rangers and the Georgia infantrymen in the vicinity of the courthouse—would lead a third column to seal off roads northwest to Nashville and north to Lebanon, the likeliest routes of Federal reinforcement. That would wall off the Third Minnesota, holding it in its camp a mile and a half northwest of the courthouse. Colonel Lester’s nine Minnesota companies, aided by the four guns of Captain John M. Hewett’s battery of Kentucky Light Artillery, made up the strongest Federal unit at Murfreesboro, and Forrest meant to keep them isolated while he reduced the others.25
Forrest plotted a fight the way an attorney plots a court case. He prepared in advance his response to each opposition alternative. But rule one was psychological: “Git’em skeered.” Federal reveille was at 5 a.m.; only cooks would be fully awake before then. Forrest wanted to surprise the others in their tents.
Just past 4:30, a carefully kept Confederate silence exploded. Whoops, gunfire, and thunderous hoofbeats descended on Murfreesboro like a summer storm. “I first saw the enemy when charging on my camp,” Major James Seibert of the Seventh Pennsylvania reported.26
FORREST’S MURFREESBORO RAID:This period map by a US Army engineer shows the courthouse square at the bottom center; the approximate location of the Maney estate, which is possible represented by the rectangle at the top center between the Lebanon and Liberty turnpikes; and the location of Colonel Henry Lester’s Minnesotans out the Nashville Turnpike to the far left.
Wharton’s Texans were “yelling like Indians,” one of the Federals recalled. They dashed in among the Pennsylvanians’ tent supports and got entangled in long, thick ropes stretched between trees as hitching places for the Union mounts. Shooting and yipping, they fought through the ropes and torched the tents. Union cavalrymen “hardly had time to get out,” let alone arm themselves and mount their horses, a member of the Ninth Michigan Infantry would remember. The half-dressed or undressed unfortunates, traumatized, offered scant resistance. Most were captured in camp, Major Seibert reported. But Seibert and a few others made it to the Ninth Michigan companies on the Maney property north of town. Seibert reported losing five killed and twenty wounded out of eighty troopers. Most of the rest became Confederate captives.27
Then snags developed for the Confederates. To get to the Ninth Michigan at the Maney estate from downtown, they had to ride north more than a half mile on what amounted to the Maney driveway. There, among tents along the fence bordering the extensive front lawn, Michigan private Charles Bennett of Company G had risen early, at about 4:15. He was washing himself near where cooks were chopping wood for their fires when he heard “the clatter and roar of cavalry on the gallop.”
“I ran to each tent in our company yelling, ‘Turn out, the Rebels are coming,’” Bennett wrote in his journal. By the time he reached the second tent, the aroused bugler had sounded the alarm, and a drummer was beating the long roll of warning.
Bennett heard shooting from the direction of Woodbury pike. The shots woke more Federals, but too late. Wharton’s troopers were on them. The bugler was still in his tent, trying to dress, Private Bennett wrote, when a bullet to the head killed him. The captain of Company K abandoned his troops and fled.28
Lieutenant Colonel Parkhurst reported that before his men could form, the Texans “with terrible yells, dashed upon us from three directions . . . with double-barreled shotguns and Colt’s navy revolvers. Some of my men gave way under this charge.” Those Federals who did not break fell back toward the middle of the camp and rallied, some in just underwear. For perhaps twenty minutes, the combat became “nearly hand-to-hand,” remembered Parkhurst’s commander, Duffield. Somebody, likely Wharton himself, shot Duffield in the left thigh—and, Duffield would note in his report, the “right testicle”—as the Federal commander urged his men to rally.
Wharton likely did not yet know that he was understrength. Forrest had taken more Texans toward the public square than his plan called for. As two dozen of his Confederate troopers died or were wounded on the Maney grounds, Wharton ran out of muscle. Parkhurst had more men, and his rifles overmatched the Confederate pistols and shotguns. The Federals wounded Wharton in the arm and stopped the Texans at the center of the camp.They turned away from the rifle fire, and the Ninth Michigan’s Company C chased them three hundred yards in the direction they had come.
Most of the Wharton contingent retreated toward the Woodbury pike. A few dismounted and tried in vain to charge again. But they could do no more than hold the Federals at Maney’s.29
Forrest’s theft of some of Wharton’s Rangers had occurred on the fly. H. W. Graber, a Texan riding in the Rangers’ column, wrote that as they were following Wharton into the side street leading toward the Maney estate, Forrest found that his Georgia and Tennessee troops had not come up. So he ordered the rear of Wharton’s column—“about fifty or sixty men”—to peel off and go with him to assail the formidable Third Minnesota northwest of town. Forrest’s spontaneous order put Graber among the first four horsemen in Forrest’s borrowed column, riding just to the left of Forrest himself.
Forrest’s plan had been to avoid the courthouse and proceed through town to the Minnesota camps on the Nashville pike, but circumstances again intervened. As they passed in sight of the courthouse, two Federals on its upper floor saw them and raised weapons. Forrest and Graber saw them and fired first—with well-nigh tragic results. When Forrest’s pistol went off, his horse bolted to the left, “almost in front of me just as I fired,” Graber wrote. The Texan “very nearly” shot Forrest in the head.30
Graber heard firing north of town, signaling Wharton’s attack on the Ninth Michigan. Joyous townspeople, including half-dressed women and girls, were rushing into the streets. Forrest plainly presumed that the absent Georgians and Tennesseans had lost their way in the commotion and would find their assigned positions besieging the courthouse. So he and the fifty or so Rangers, except a few shot by guards as they bypassed the courthouse, poured through the square toward the other side of town and the Third Minnesota.31
On the courthouse’s second floor, prisoner William Richardson stood on a box to peer out a narrow jail window. His fellow inmate, the spy calling himself James Paul, had shaken Richardson awake to hear the hoofbeats. Before the two saw horses and riders, they heard the high, keening rebel yell. Then some of the charging troopers—those Forrest had suddenly dragooned—rushed by, while others halted in front of the jail to confront the Federals in the courthouse square.32
The commotion in town had alerted the Minnesotans. Captain John M. Hewett’s Battery B, First Kentucky Light Artillery, had camped just southeast of the Third Minnesota. Hearing firing downtown, Hewett ordered his horses harnessed before hurrying back to the infantry. He told Colonel Lester he was ready to advance into town. Lester told him to wait for the riflemen. When the Third Minnesota arrived in front of Hewett’s camp and Hewett asked Lester “in what order we would advance on the town,” the bad blood between Lester and Parkhurst resurfaced. Rather than rush to Parkhurst’s aid, Lester said they were not going into town. They would move forward a half mile, position themselves on a hill in a sage field to their left front, and await orders. They proceeded to do so, then sat there, listening to the fight in town, for nearly thirty minutes. Finally, they sighted Confederates a half mile or more to their left. Hewett’s battery opened fire.
The Confederates “instantly dispersed,” Hewett wrote. The account by Graber, who was on the other end of the barrage,
agrees. It adds that Forrest, who had led Graber to the area, had disappeared.33
Forrest galloped pell-mell northwestward. He lost his way and had to stop at a house for directions to the Minnesota camp.34
He had reached the target area as Hewett’s cannons opened up. When they did, they underlined what Forrest doubtless knew: he needed more troops to keep the Minnesotans in place while he dealt with the smaller Federal force at the courthouse. So he had immediately turned and galloped back to town to send his reserve—Lawton and some Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky troopers, all stationed just east of the square along the Woodbury pike—to attack and occupy Lester.35
At the square, Forrest found his men in a sniping standoff, dodging cross fire. Here, as at Maney’s farm, blood was flowing. The attackers endured heavy fire from the windows of the courthouse and hotel. Some Georgians and a few Texas Rangers were pinned down between the Ninth Michigan’s B Company in the courthouse and General Crittenden’s staff seventy-five yards across the street in a hotel. Crittenden was trying to get a civilian-clad courier out to Duffield at the Maney plantation to coordinate with the Michigan troops, but it was no use. The Confederates had surrounded his quarters as soon as they entered the square.36
Numbers of townspeople tried to aid the Confederates. Parkhurst reported that assailants of his position at the Maney farm included “a large number of citizens of Rutherford County, many of whom had recently taken the oath of allegiance to the United States Government.” For some time, Murfreesboro had reputedly been under a standing order from Parkhurst that, in event of enemy attack, his Michigan troops were to fire on all citizens—men, women, and children—who took to the streets. The order, diarist John Spence wrote, was now carried out. Federal bullets killed one civilian and wounded another.37