Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  The stalemate on the square ended first. Before 8 a.m., Forrest put aide James Saunders, the Alabama colonel who had urged Beauregard to assign Forrest to Chattanooga, in command of a remnant of Texas Rangers. He sent them against General Crittenden’s staff and other Federals in buildings around the square. At the same time, he ordered Colonel Morrison and part of the First Georgia to storm the courthouse. Several Georgians fell dead or wounded crossing the street, but their comrades rushed the courthouse doors. In front of each of two groups charging from opposite sides of the building, Forrest put a single file of troopers. The first man of each group carried an axe, and Forrest ordered that both axes be kept in the air, no matter how many men fell carrying them, until they reached the doors and battered them open. They soon did. The Federals withdrew to the building’s second story, where they continued firing at anybody in the street, soldiers and civilians alike.

  On the other side of the square, Colonel Saunders was initially unable to find Crittenden in the hotel or other buildings. The colonel hurried back outside and, remounting to search elsewhere, took a musket ball to a lung.38

  In the besieged courthouse, the Federals were now on the same floor as the jail. When the Confederates demanded surrender and were refused, the Georgians threatened to torch the first floor. The Federals continued to resist until, Forrest’s report says, the courthouse “was fired.” With smoke rising, a detachment of the Second Georgia, already having overwhelmed the town’s telegraph office and captured the telegrapher, charged up the stairs. That ended it. The Ninth Michigan’s B Company had held the Confederates at bay for perhaps three hours—killing twelve of them, Federals reported, and wounding eighteen. Now, though, they were out of options. From the hotel, Crittenden’s staff watched the courthouse capitulate. The general’s staff then surrendered to Saunders’s Texans.39

  For the men in jail, horror remained in store. Overjoyed at seeing the whooping Confederates thunder into the square at dawn, they had then listened for hours to the fighting that ensued. Prisoner Richardson said that when their rescue seemed sure, several Federals came to their cell door and fired in at them; the inmates avoided the bullets by crouching in an out-of-the-way corner. Then, as the Federals surrendered to the Confederates storming the stairs, a laggard Union guard struck a match to paper, pushed it under loose planks in the floor of the hallway in front of the cell, and departed with the keys. Only by means of an iron bar did desperate rescuers manage to bend a bottom corner of the heavy, locked metal door enough to allow the prisoners to lie on the floor, squeeze out, and avoid roasting.

  At this point, Richardson remembered, Forrest “dashed up” to the jail cell. Perhaps worried that setting fire to the first floor—likely under his orders—had harmed the inmates, he asked if the prisoners were safe. The officer in charge, the Second Georgia’s Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Hood, said yes, but added that the Federals had tried to burn the inmates alive.

  “Never mind, we’ll get them,” Forrest replied. Richardson said Forrest’s eyes looked as if they were “on fire,” his face flushed dark with obvious passion.

  In a few minutes, the Federals from the courthouse and the hotel were lined up in the street, and Forrest turned to Richardson. He asked him to identify those who had behaved “inhumanly” toward the prisoners. Disregarding the soldiers who shot into the cell, Richardson said he wished to designate just the man who had lit the fire to incinerate them, then pointed him out.40

  According to Graber, the man was brought to Forrest, who “pulled out his pistol and killed him on the spot.”

  Forrest galloped out the Nashville pike again. He had to make sure the nine Minnesota companies with their battery of artillery could not join the five Michigan companies at the Maney estate.41

  The troopers he had dispatched from town had kept the Minnesotans in position, but that was all. Artillery captain Hewett reported that after his fire dispersed the first Confederates he saw that day—the initial detachment led by Forrest—he put a section of his guns on the turnpike. The pieces were barely in place when he saw a larger enemy force, Forrest’s Lawton-led reserve, advancing from town. A few artillery shells drove them into some woods, which Hewett then shelled.42

  Forrest now took over for Lawton, still hunkered down in the woods. He sent some Georgia troopers to feign a forward movement, then led most of his force on a wide swing to the right to attack the camps the Minnesotans had left. It took three charges to dislodge a hundred-man rear guard sheltered by wagons and rock ledges. After the second lunge failed and the cavalrymen, still new recruits, fell quickly back, Forrest gathered these troops. In a rage, he challenged their manliness and said that he would never tolerate premature departure from a field of battle. If they had not known it before, they now saw that they served a commander who would shoot them if need be. The third charge carried. The cavalrymen killed or captured the rear guardsmen and fired the tents and reserve ammunition. The billowing smoke attracted the attention of Captain Hewett. He shelled and finally drove out the attackers, but his shells could hardly extinguish the conflagration, free the captives, or save the ammunition.43

  Hewett had just finished bombarding the burning camps when two hundred or more Southerners charged his battery from in front. He drove them into the woods, where they disappeared. But Forrest had accomplished what he came to do. His destruction of the Minnesotans’ camps and supplies weakened them and further demoralized Lester. Now he headed for the Maney plantation.44

  At the Michigan camp, the Texans and part of the First Georgia had periodically made sham shows of bellicosity. Parkhurst had replaced the wounded Duffield and stabilized his situation. His Federals piled hay bales and arranged supply wagons to block the half-mile Maney driveway. He had fashioned, Parkhurst thought, “quite a formidable position.”

  Parkhurst soon learned, however, that no aid was coming from across town. Hearing that Lester had not advanced his Minnesotans, Parkhurst sent him word by courier of the fighting at the Maney estate. He said his position was good, and he could hold it if reinforced. Hearing nothing back, he ordered off another courier.45

  The bad blood between Parkhurst and Lester now became a hemorrhage. It likely also augmented the already demoralized Lester’s mounting paranoia. Probably around 9 a.m., Parkhurst heard that Lester had ordered his two couriers arrested “as spies.” When a Lester scout eventually arrived at Maney’s, Parkhurst wrote out another plea for aid and an explanation of his position. When Lester’s scout returned from Parkhurst’s camp, he reported Confederates in force on the Lebanon road between Lester and Parkhurst. Lester decided that getting his troops through to join Parkhurst was impossible. He stayed where he was.46

  With Lester atop his hill and Parkhurst behind his barricades, Forrest faced another standoff. His men had now been in Murfreesboro for seven hours, and his officers were nervous. Their troops had shut down the Murfreesboro telegraph office and cut its wires, but Federal garrisons north and south, alarmed by the dead wire, could rush troops in by train. Subordinates urged Forrest to be content with what he had accomplished and quit the town.

  No, Forrest said, perhaps recalling Donelson and Shiloh and the disasters that had followed unfinished Confederate victories there. Yet, he knew the same thing his officers did: he had to make something decisive happen soon.47

  Hours earlier, as Captain Hewett’s guns scattered Forrest’s band of Texans in front of the Third Minnesota, a comrade had hailed Ranger H. W. Graber.

  Reeling in his saddle, his arm shattered by a shell, the man begged Graber not to leave him. Graber grabbed the bridle of the man’s horse and hurried mount and rider into the woods. He continued until he came to a house, whose resident hitched up a buggy. With Graber following, the civilian drove the injured trooper on a swing around the town. Out the Woodbury road, they found Rangers who had withdrawn from the attack at Maney’s and Forrest’s initial, outmanned move against Lester. Gathered around the wounded Colonel Wharton and some captives, the Texans were fo
rming ranks when a messenger arrived from an angry Forrest: Get back up town! Even Federals soon heard he had considered court-martialing Wharton for leaving the field.48

  At Maney’s following his destruction of the Minnesotans’ camp, Forrest had dismounted his Tennessee and Kentucky troopers and ordered them to skirmish with the Federal front while he sent units of the Second Georgia to the Federal right. He told the Georgians to prepare for a dismounted charge.Then he had the Second Georgia’s Colonel Lawton write out an ultimatum and took it forward himself under a white flag. The note’s language was formal, but hardly genteel.

  COLONEL: I must demand an unconditional surrender of your force as prisoners of war or I will have every man put to the sword. You are aware of the overpowering force I have at my command, and this demand is made to prevent the effusion of blood. I am, colonel, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

  N. B. FORREST,

  Brigadier-General of Cavalry, C. S. Army49

  Surrender or die. Shaken, Parkhurst sent the note to Duffield. The gallant colonel, despite his wound to the groin, had led his troops while they fought off the initial Confederate attack. But now, lying in the Maney mansion in intense pain, he left to Parkhurst the decision about how to answer Forrest. While Duffield read the note, Parkhurst grew even less sanguine. He claimed to have learned that Forrest had all but one squadron of his forces now surrounding the Michiganders and obviously intended to carry out his threat.50

  If Parkhurst really knew what he claimed to about Forrest’s numbers, he could only have got the information—true or otherwise—from Forrest himself. The Confederates did look imposing. In addition to Texans, Georgians, and a crowd of Murfreesboro’s private citizens, Parkhurst saw “quite a number of negroes . . . armed and equipped,” who “took part in the several engagements with my forces during the day.” These were likely the enslaved teamsters, cooks, and so on normally attached to Confederate troops.

  Without help from Lester, the Ninth Michigan’s position was dire. Parkhurst now had just 134 able-bodied men, including the few Pennsylvania cavalrymen who had managed to make it from their camp to his. He gathered his officers for a conference.51

  Suddenly their situation worsened further. The hard-riding cowboys and Indian fighters of the Eighth Texas, summoned back to town from the Woodbury road, raced into view. The fearsome sight created an effect “most fortunate,” Forrest would remember. He did not squander this gift of fate. According to Graber, Forrest verbally warned Parkhurst that if the Confederates had to make another charge, the Federals would bear the blame for what happened—and “he had five hundred Texas Rangers he couldn’t control in a fight.”52

  Parkhurst’s report says the assembled Union officers thought better of continuing to resist. To a man, they voted for surrender.53

  It was now into afternoon. More time passed as Forrest’s troopers disarmed Parkhurst’s men, collected or burned their supplies, and headed the captives toward Woodbury.

  Northwest of town, Federal artillery captain John Hewett was plainly disgusted with Colonel Lester. For several hours after the burning of the Minnesota camps, Hewett saw few Confederates, and those he did see made no move to attack. Yet Lester, described in a subsequent official Federal document as “stupid with fear,” remained where he was. When the sound of fighting in town ended, he had sent a second scout “to try to get news from our friends.” This man was unable to get through Confederates guarding the Lebanon road, but around 2 p.m. a Michigan soldier coming from the opposite direction did. He reported that his regiment had surrendered. Lester then fell back to a farmhouse, purportedly to make a last stand behind its fence.54

  The Minnesotans were settling in behind the fence when a flag-of-truce party rode up. Sent from Maney’s at the stated order of Duffield, it directed Lester to come there for a conference. Lester mounted and left with the party.55

  Lester’s ride would show history, if not Lester himself, just how cunning Forrest could be. Cantering into town and out Lytle Avenue to Maney’s, Lester had to have seen Confederate troopers marching in heavy force behind two different stands of woods along the route. He could not know that these seemingly separate Confederate units were actually the same men marching and countermarching. Lester thought Murfreesboro was crawling with Confederates. Riding back out of town after conferring with Duffield, he again passed the two patches of woods behind which even more Confederates marched to simulate overwhelming numbers.56

  Lester never reported what he saw along the road. Nor did he mention Forrest’s surrender-or-die ultimatum. His report said only that Duffield told him the Confederates had “overwhelming force,” and even if they had not damaged the railroad tracks, no reinforcements would be coming because Federal forces at Nashville were gone on an “expedition.” Lester also reported that Duffield suggested he put the idea of capitulation to his subordinates. He claimed he did, with most recommending surrender. He obviously did not consult Hewett, whose report was clipped and outraged: “Returning, he surrendered the entire command. Up to the moment of surrender the utmost confidence was evinced by the officers and men.”57

  Lester said he surrendered at 3:30 p.m. By then, Forrest had his men gathering up all the supplies they could carry and burning the rest. He reported by dispatch to Major General J. P. McCown at Chattanooga that he had captured 1,200 Federals, taken $300,000 worth of supplies, and burned $200,000 more in matériel, along with the Murfreesboro railroad depot. Frugal by long habit, he counted and reported the rest of his haul: at least 50 wagons, 4 pieces of artillery, and 450 or more horses and mules. In a report to General Kirby Smith, he said he knew of losing only about twenty-five killed and forty to sixty wounded, although not all his unit commanders had yet reported. He said the Federals had sustained “about 75 killed . . . [and] 125 wounded.”58

  Forrest put the Minnesota prisoners on the road to McMinnville, behind those from Michigan and Pennsylvania. According to Private Charles Bennett of the Ninth Michigan, many of the officers and men were permitted to ride the captured horses and mules; Bennett may not have realized that this was likely because Forrest did not have sufficient troops to manage the animals as well as guard the prisoners. Lieutenant Colonel Parkhurst, though, was not as happy as Bennett. Having dished out harshness to Murfreesboro residents, he now got a taste of his own fare. Despite Forrest’s presurrender assurance that the prisoners could keep their private possessions, the Confederates took “everything not worn upon our backs.” And Forrest, who doubtless had talked to local residents, personally took Parkhurst’s horse.

  The Federal noncommissioned officers and privates were released at McMinnville on a pledge not to rejoin Union units until properly exchanged, a general for a general down to a private for a private. Officers were sent to Knoxville, then on to incarceration in a “filthy” cotton gin at Madison, Georgia—where, Parkhurst reported, guards charged them $2 a day for food.59

  As for Forrest, he left Murfreesboro having added to the tally of men he had killed in this young war, although he probably did not include them among the thirty Union combatants he claimed at war’s end. During the charge on the Third Minnesota camps, he had reportedly drawn his pistol and dropped an African American firing at him from behind a wagon so accurately that a shot had clipped his hatband. Even if the man was uniformed, Forrest likely regarded him as a fugitive slave; the so-called contrabands flocking out of bondage and trying to accompany their deliverers were still far from being enlisted in the army or even generally welcomed within Federal lines.

  Forrest’s other personal victim, at least according to Texas Ranger H. W. Graber, was the courthouse jailer who had tried to burn his prisoners alive. When the name of the arsonist guard was called out in a subsequent formation of captives, nobody answered. After the name was called a second time, Forrest himself spoke up.

  “Pass on,” he said. “It’s all right.”60

  15

  JULY-EARLY OCTOBER 1862—GRANT IN NORTH MISSISSIPPI

 
; “The Most Anxious Period of the War”

  On July 13, the day Forrest’s birthday torches singed the Federal fist at Murf reesboro, the Grant family was at Columbus, Kentucky, hurrying off a Mississippi River steamboat. Heeding an abrupt and mysterious summons from Memphis to return to army headquarters at Corinth, Grant wished to avoid endangering his wife and children by crossing ultrahostile North Mississippi. So he took the boat north from Memphis to Columbus, then a Mobile & Ohio train back south to Corinth. There, three weeks after resuming leadership of the Army of the Tennessee, he found himself promoted still further. Halleck gave him command of all northern Mississippi, West Tennessee, and western Kentucky.1

  This smile of fortune came about more by default than favor. Halleck had left for Washington, chosen by Lincoln to relieve McClellan as chief of all the Union armies. And Halleck had no time to reactivate the lengthy process of replacing his second in command. So Grant inherited the Corinth job.

  Well, two-thirds of it. Halleck generally respected Major General Don Carlos Buell, and he knew Buell-Grant relations were icy. So Buell, whose Army of the Ohio was headed east toward Chattanooga, would continue to report to Halleck. Grant, however, would oversee the Army of the Mississippi as well as command his Army of the Tennessee. So Brigadier General William S. Rosecrans, new commander of the Army of the Mississippi, now was to report to Grant. Rosecrans had just replaced Major General John Pope, who had been called to Washington on June 26 to command a new Army of Virginia.

  The South, it is said, never smiled after Shiloh. The Union victory there opened the Deep South to invasion from the north, and by June, Federals moving north up the Mississippi River from the Gulf of Mexico had captured not only New Orleans but also Baton Rouge. That narrowed Confederate control of America’s primary river to the area around Vicksburg, Mississippi.