Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Then, in mid-September, the Confederate aim began taking shape. They appeared to be massing on the Alabama border near Iuka, Mississippi, hardly more than twenty miles from Corinth. From Iuka, Colonel Robert Murphy of the Eighth Wisconsin Infantry reported by courier that Armstrong’s cavalrymen had attacked him on September 13. Two Confederates taken prisoner during the clash had told him infantry was a day or two behind them. Murphy said he had fended off that morning’s attack, but telegraph wires had reportedly been cut. When the attackers reappeared the same day, Murphy withdrew, leaving behind commissary supplies that he should have burned.19

  Three days later, a large reconnaissance force from Rosecrans’s Army of the Mississippi set out from Burnsville, just west of Iuka, to see how many Confederates were gathering there. Numbering three infantry regiments and two sniper companies, plus cavalry and artillery, Rosecrans’s troops ran into Confederate pickets six miles from Iuka. They drove the pickets backward under increasing fire until, at the edge of woods less than two miles from town, they detected enemy activity on their right flank. The Federal commander, Colonel Joseph Mower, retreated to a hill and decided to camp there—until a Confederate deserter came in and reported that Iuka contained at least 12,000 Confederates under Price. The Confederates planned to flank the Union position after dark, the deserter said. Mower changed plans and ordered his Federals back to Burnsville.20

  Grant now knew where the nearest enemy force was—Price’s half of it, anyway. But Grant could only guess what the Confederates were up to. One report, Grant wrote Halleck, had Price aiming to cross the Tennessee River to the north and head for Kentucky. Another had Van Dorn and Price combining to attack Corinth from opposite directions, southwest and northeast. According to a third, Price would cross the Tennessee toward Nashville, and Van Dorn would attack Corinth if Grant moved any troops from Corinth to pursue Price.21

  Whatever the plan, Grant aimed to wreck it. Figuring that with infantry and artillery Van Dorn would need four days to reach Corinth from his Vicksburg base, Grant decided to attack Price first. A few weeks earlier Halleck had cautioned against any move that might weaken the Federal defense, but on September 17 the general in chief had new priorities. He ordered Grant to use all possible means to keep Price in Mississippi. Allowing him to join Bragg in Tennessee or Kentucky, Halleck said, would spell disaster.

  There was also a risk that Price and Van Dorn would combine to attack Grant. Grant accordingly brought 3,400 troops from Bolivar and stationed detachments south and southeast of Corinth to guard against a cavalry dash. Then he ordered Rosecrans to march 9,000 men toward Iuka via two roads from the southwest and the south, while Ord moved another 8,000 on Iuka from the northwest. Halleck and other West Point book soldiers shrank from launching an attack with less than three-toone odds, but Grant told Halleck he considered the 17,000 total troops in the Rosecrans-Ord force equal to or greater than the Confederate numbers. His Mexican War hero, Zachary Taylor, had often ignored the West Point ratio. For Grant, too, equal was enough.22

  On September 18, Grant moved out with Ord by train to Burnsville, halfway to Iuka. Beating Van Dorn to the target was crucial, but while Ord encountered Armstrong’s cavalry and pushed it from the northwest to within four miles of Iuka on September 18, part of Rosecrans’s command took a wrong road, and he remained well short of his southern attack sites. Rosecrans suggested Ord strike first “and draw their attention that way” to give Rosecrans time to approach and attack from the opposite side of town. This idea strained plausibility. It required part of Rosecrans’s force to rush twenty miles and still have the energy to attack.23

  Grant received Rosecrans’s dispatch in the wee hours of September 19. Thinking Rosecrans was closer to Iuka, he had ordered him to advance as fast as possible and do all the damage he and Ord could on September 19 because Van Dorn might arrive the next day. Rosecrans’s late dispatch necessitated redrawing Ord’s instructions. Rejecting Rosecrans’s suggestions, Grant directed Ord not to open the battle but instead to wait until he heard Rosecrans’s guns.

  As September 19 wore into afternoon, Ord heard nothing. He rode back to see Grant at Burnsville at about 4 p.m. He had hardly left when, around 4:30 p.m., the commander of his advance units, Brigadier Leonard Ross, saw “dense smoke” rising over Iuka. From seven miles off, Ross thought Price was retreating and burning his supplies. But Ord and Grant, miles away from Ross, did not know this as they conferred. The two agreed that Rosecrans could not get in position in time to attack that day. Grant told Ord to push the Confederate pickets backward onto Price’s primary force but to bring on no battle unless he heard firing from the south. Only around 6 p.m. did a dispatch from Ross reach Ord reporting the thick smoke over Iuka and Ross’s interpretation of it as evidence of a Confederate retreat.24

  Ross could not have been more mistaken. The smoke was Price ambushing Rosecrans. Price, who had participated in the considerable trans-Mississippi battles of Elkhorn Tavern and Wilson’s Creek, described the ensuing struggle as “the hardest-fought fight . . . I have ever witnessed.” But a hard wind from the west prevented Ross or Ord from hearing the battle’s roar.25

  Earlier that afternoon, Rosecrans had pushed Confederate cavalry and sharpshooters six miles toward Iuka in a steady skirmish. Hurrying to open his attack while there remained enough daylight, he either forgot, or chose not, to divide his column and send some of it farther east to block the Fulton Road, the second of two thoroughfares running south from Iuka. He took his whole force up the nearer, more westerly Jacinto Road.

  At about 4:30 p.m., a mile or so from the town, just past a log church at a hill-crowning crossroads closed in by trees and briary underbrush, a withering volley of musket and artillery fire stopped Rosecrans. Then four regiments of Confederates sprang out of a ravine and charged his right front in three lines two men deep. Crowded into the road by trees, underbrush, and steep ravines on either side, the Federals at first could field a front line only three regiments wide.

  It was inordinately vicious. There was no room for the Federals to maneuver or retreat. An Ohio battery lost all its officers and most of its horses and men before being captured by the Confederates. Then it was retaken, lost again, and again retaken, its gun carriage riddled with musket balls. Two fresh Union regiments rushed in to stop a Confederate push, shoved the attackers back, then withstood three charges in which “in several instances the enemy was received on the point of the bayonet and then shot off.” Some Confederates were pistol shot in the face by Federal officers at point-blank range. An Iowa unit made three bayonet charges, the last because their ammunition was gone. They had expended some of it in fury against their own comrades, who after falling back had fired into them. An Iowa captain, left in the lurch by his vanishing colonel, was himself put out of action when his bullet-struck, dying horse bashed him against a tree trunk.26

  As dusk fell on the Jacinto Road, it was hard to discern who had won—or even if the battle was over. Rosecrans was holding on, but, in his own mind, just barely. At 10:30 p.m., from two miles south of Iuka, Rosecrans sent Grant a dispatch indicating grave concern, if not outright fright. “You must attack in the morning and in force,” he wrote. “Push in onto them until we can have time to do something. We will try to get a position on our right which will take Iuka.”27

  Rosecrans may or may not have meant that he planned to send some troops onto the Fulton Road at this point; if so, it was too late. His dispatch did not arrive until 8:30 a.m. on September 20. Grant hurried to Iuka to find that Price had departed overnight by the route Rosecrans had neglected. “This was the first I knew of the Fulton road being left open,” Grant told Halleck. But at least the Confederates had headed south, not toward Tennessee or Kentucky to join Bragg.28

  The principal fighting, lasting a bare three hours between 4:30 p.m. and dusk, had involved most of Price’s army of 15,000 and hardly more than a Federal division, but the casualties were dreadful. The Federals reported 790 lost, while the Confederates adm
itted losing 901—and the Confederate total omitted the missing.29

  Two weeks after the vicious standoff at Iuka, Van Dorn and Price combined their forces and struck.

  Grant, then headquartering at Jackson, Tennessee, had his men as ready as possible, considering they were stretched paper-thin and uncertain where the blow might fall. Van Dorn had been at LaGrange, Tennessee; Price, southeast at Ripley, Mississippi. The two had thrown a cavalry curtain between them, the mounted Confederates maintaining a tight twenty-five-mile line stretching from northwest to southwest of Corinth. Grant, seeing that the screen made it possible for Van Dorn to move his and Price’s troops undetected between LaGrange and Ripley, began to suspect the target. He ordered Rosecrans to concentrate his troops at Corinth and positioned potential reinforcements. He sent two regiments from Bolivar to a bridge six miles south toward the Ripley-LaGrange line and told General Stephen A. Hurlbut at Bolivar to try to strike the rear of any large Confederate force heading for Corinth from the west. He provided for other contingencies, too, but he was becoming certain the objective was Corinth. He told Rosecrans to expect an attack from the north cutting resupply routes and communications with Grant at Jackson.

  Rosecrans hurried troops northwestward to blunt the coming blow. There was no attack on October 2, only skirmishing north and west of Corinth, and Grant used the time to send four regiments by train down to Corinth from Bolivar. He ordered two more to join the pair already dispatched to the bridge south of Bolivar. Becoming ever surer of the Confederate object, he put these combined four regiments under McPherson and sent them hastening from the bridge to Corinth. Then the trains stopped, and the Corinth telegraph went dead.30

  Colonel John Oliver commanded the first troops Rosecrans had ordered northwest. On October 1, they had marched toward Chewalla north of the Tennessee border on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. The next day they met a large Confederate force that pushed them backward until, with reinforcements, they charged and drove the Confederates backward. Then, coming upon a line of battle with artillery, they fell back. That night a flood of arriving Confederates poured southeastward into the top of a left-tilted V formed by the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, running northwest to Memphis, and the northbound Mobile & Ohio. The two tracks funneled the flood toward Corinth.

  On the morning of October 3, the Confederates barreled down the Chewalla Road and in twenty minutes overwhelmed Federals in entrenchments Beauregard had dug there in May. Rosecrans sent a division rushing a mile and a half up the Mobile & Ohio tracks between the railroads to stem the tide. But hardly more than two hundred men held the point where this division linked up with the Union troops left on Chewalla Road. Van Dorn found the weak link and broke it.

  October 3 was freakishly hot for that time of year, even in Mississippi. Thermometers registered ninety-four, and along with murderous artillery and musket fire, sunstroke and dehydration felled men on both sides. The Federals between the railroads, their center smashed, scrambled backward in continual withdrawals. But they got indispensable assistance from an unexpected source.

  Van Dorn, in a failing characteristic of him, had done minimal reconnaissance, grossly underestimating the number of Federal cannon and the force needed to take them. Rosecrans’s man in the middle was Colonel Thomas A. Davies, whose command included the cannon. His ammunition repeatedly ran low and was replenished by a six-mule team running into Corinth. His cannoneers’ faces were blackened by gunpowder, their horses leaving a bloodstream in the road while units on their left withdrew, but Davies and his cannons held their position for a critical ninety minutes. By day’s end they had fallen back five times, and the Confederates got close enough to shell Corinth. But the Federal left held onto two fortified artillery bastions north and northwest of the town, and, thanks in great part to Davies, Van Dorn could not drive between Rosecrans’s two wings.31

  Grant was in the dark back in Jackson, Tennessee, as he had anticipated he would be. Couriers had to go roundabout in a seven-hour trek because Van Dorn and Price were between Jackson and Corinth. So Grant’s reports from Rosecrans were few and late. One said Oliver’s brigade had “acted feebly” and incorrectly implied that Davies’s left had been driven backward for the same reason: “Our men did not act or fight well.” Rosecrans added that a usually reliable scout remained sure the main Confederate target was Bolivar.

  Grant had not bought it. Corinth, the rail hub and Union base in northern Mississippi, was obviously a much more attractive prize to Van Dorn than Bolivar, and the Confederate attack there presented Grant with an opportunity almost as alluring: a chance to take the Corinth attackers in the rear and possibly crush them. So he had ordered Hurlbut’s division to march from Bolivar toward Corinth on October 3 and sent Rosecrans a roundabout message conveying how badly he wanted to get at Van Dorn.32

  “Genl. Hurlbut will move today towards the enemy,” he wrote. “We should attack if they do not. Do it soon. . . . Fight!”

  Typically, no question of defeat clouded Grant’s mind. He directed Rosecrans to pursue the enemy “the moment” he began to retreat. And if, in retreat, Van Dorn attacked and drove back Ord, who also was coming down from Bolivar, Rosecrans was to hound Van Dorn’s rear all the way to Bolivar if need be.33

  That night, Rosecrans continued to show his slight regard for Davies. Assigning positions for October 4, he granted Davies’s request to have his men—who had borne so much of the brunt of the fighting the day before—moved out of the center. But Rosecrans did not move him far, despite Davies’s warning that he “must not depend on my command” on October 4. Even with the move, Davies remained near the center.

  The Federals would pay for Rosecrans’s refusal to heed Davies’s admonition. The next morning, Rosecrans watched in self-described “personal mortification” as a renewed Confederate attack routed Davies. Again facing an overpowering charge, some of Davies’s “wearied and jaded troops yielded and fell back, scattering among the houses” of Corinth, leaving exposed artillery to be taken by the Confederates.34

  But Missouri infantry posted along a ridge behind the front line of cannons fixed bayonets and delivered hot musket fire into the yelling, exultant Confederate horde. An uncaptured Wisconsin battery double-shotted its guns with canister, large projectiles made up of nearly fifty smaller ones per round—or one hundred per double shot—that separated like the contents of a shotgun shell when fired. The Wisconsin gunners fired 507 rounds and—working with the Missouri infantrymen—turned back repeated Confederate charges. They prevented the hauling off or spiking of the captured Federal guns, then recaptured them with a bayonet charge.

  Some of the Confederate attackers made it into Corinth’s courthouse square, but there most of Davies’s men rallied. Federal volleys, together with a charge by reinforcements, drove the Southerners into flight. They left behind flags, dead, wounded, and some three hundred prisoners. Price reportedly wept seeing his men mowed down by the Federal cannons.35

  The losses on both sides had been enormous. Of the 22,000 Confederates and 20,000 Federals who participated in the Battle of Corinth, some 1,100 were officially reported killed: 623 Federals and 515 Confederates. More than 5,000 more were wounded, and 1,600 were missing. Price’s men had been driven into retreat. He and Van Dorn had also escaped with the remainder of their men, fleeing across the Hatchie River to the southwest.

  The narrow Union victories at Iuka and Corinth were incomplete but notable. Grant was disappointed that Rosecrans did not follow instructions and stay on the Confederates’ heels. With Ord closing in from the north and Rosecrans to the south, they might have crushed Van Dorn. But Grant had kept two armies from joining Bragg and so thinned their ranks that they would never launch a campaign in Mississippi again.36

  The Iuka and Corinth battles weakened Grant’s trust in Rosecrans. The latter had shown himself prone to snap judgments based on sloppy reconnaissance. Price had escaped down that uncovered road at Iuka, and he and Van Dorn had departed Corinth without pursuit, con
trary to Grant’s direct order. And, as Grant surely soon heard, Price and Van Dorn were both able to escape Corinth at least partly because Rosecrans was venting his spleen at his own exhausted men.

  Davies, too, had had more than enough of Rosecrans. Almost three weeks after the battle, Davies all but dressed down his commander in an official letter. He reminded Rosecrans that on the afternoon of October 4, with the retreating Confederates barely out of sight, Rosecrans had said “upon the battle-field, among the piles of dead and groans of the wounded” felled by Davies’s men, that Davies’s men “were a set of cowards; . . . that they had disgraced themselves, and no wonder the rebel army had thrown its whole force upon [them] during the two days’ engagement.” Rosecrans’s accusation was “demoralizing” to Davies’s men and had prompted press articles denigrating them, Davies wrote. Virtually demanding a public apology, he noted that he now had filed a report of all that his men had done. Rosecrans took the hint and apologized.37

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  JULY-NOVEMBER 1862—FORREST IN THE CENTRAL SOUTH

  “Mounted on Racehorses”

  While Grant kept Price and Van Dorn from joining Braxton Bragg in the autumn of 1862, Bragg was benefiting from the work of a new, underappreciated subordinate: Forrest.

  The cavalryman’s Murfreesboro raid in mid-July had enabled Bragg to transfer a massive number of troops by rail from Tupelo through Mobile to Chattanooga. Loss of the Federal garrison at Murfreesboro halted Buell’s drive on Chattanooga and fixated that general’s defensive nature even more on protecting his rear. This gave Bragg time to gather his army at Chattanooga for a dramatic drive northward. This sweeping attempt to recapture Middle Tennessee and seize much of neutral Kentucky, coupled with Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Maryland, would be the closest the Confederacy ever came to coordinated grand offensives east and west of the Appalachians.