Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  The Murfreesboro surrender had climaxed a marathon of long-distance riding, fighting, and railroad destruction for Forrest’s troopers. They departed the town late on July 13 needing rest, and he gave them four days. From camp on Mountain Creek north of McMinnville, they paroled 1,700 prisoners, made a place in their ranks for the pair of artillery pieces they had captured, and exchanged their worst horses for better Federal ones.

  They also scouted new targets, of which they had noted a profusion. A captured and then paroled member of the Seventh Pennsylvania Cavalry claimed to have overheard John Morgan, James W. Starnes, and Forrest exulting over the Murfreesboro coup and plotting continued disruption of Buell’s supply line. They planned to destroy a bridge and then, just as it was repaired, to destroy another one, and so on. By Confederate design, perhaps, the Pennsylvanian escaped to tell an officer at Nashville.1

  It was a good plan. The Murfreesboro strike had shown that the Federals’ Louisville-Alabama supply line, which Buell had regarded as safer than the longer one to Memphis, was just as dangerously vulnerable. The Murfreesboro destruction had so broken the flow of Union provisions that it forced Buell to put his men on half rations. Buell’s chief of staff warned a subordinate that getting even that half was not certain; to others, he wired that Buell’s troops would “starve at this rate.” Halleck ordered General Bull Nelson to hurry north from Alabama to reorganize the shambles at Murfreesboro. At the same time, he summoned Major General George H. Thomas eastward to take Nelson’s place in Buell’s force in northern Alabama.2

  The instigator of all this commotion soon set off to cause more. Forrest left the Mountain Creek camp on the afternoon of July 18, intending to overpower an Ohio regiment garrisoned at Lebanon, Tennessee, east of Nashville. When he got there at dawn on July 20, however, the Ohioans had left for Nashville the previous midnight, burning everything they could not carry.3

  Forrest rode on into the suburbs of Nashville, which he and his cavalrymen set about terrorizing. Five miles out, he captured three Federal pickets, then turned southwest to the Nashville-Chattanooga rail line, took two more pickets, and cut telegraph wires. He skirmished heavily with strong guard details posted at three railroad bridges on the city’s south side, then destroyed the bridges. He would report killing a total of ten Federals, wounding at least that many, nabbing ninety-seven prisoners, and burning supplies at a suburban railroad depot. When more Federal troops rushed toward him, he fell back to McMinnville, having sustained not a single casualty.

  Forrest’s fighting style was heavily psychological; it had to be to compensate for his lesser numbers. The Federals had become so spooked that he could have taken Nashville with a few thousand men, he reported, but he had only 1,400. Similar fear swept Murfreesboro, where Federal troops were now fortifying and trying to blockade the road to his McMinnville base. He said he saw the same consternation everywhere he looked. He regretted that the size of his force would not let him “avail myself of this terror.”4

  He did not scare everybody, though. Some, he just frustrated. Federals were wearing themselves out looking for him. General Bull Nelson, having rushed into Murfreesboro in the wake of Forrest’s departure, discounted to Buell the fearful wires from Nashville. Nelson promised when other converging troops were in position, “I will have about 1,200 cavalry, and Mr. Forrest shall have no rest.” But that did not convince everybody, including General Buell, who himself appeared affected by the widespread, debilitating panic generated by Forrest’s activities. When Halleck warned Buell from Washington that the slow progress toward Chattanooga was unacceptable, Buell replied that “a vastly superior cavalry force” was bedeviling his supply line to such a degree that he had “to fortify every bridge” on more than three hundred miles of railroad. Nelson promised Buell that he would start after Forrest on July 28, but the 1,200 Union cavalrymen he expected did not arrive by then. And chasing Morgan and Forrest with infantry in a hot Tennessee summer was “hopeless,” he wrote. The two Confederate cavalry demons were “mounted on racehorses.”5

  While Nelson awaited his reinforcements, Bragg’s flowed in. On July 24, Bragg’s troops from Tupelo began arriving in Chattanooga from their rail trek through Mobile. During that week and the following one, Forrest continued to divert Federal attention by repeatedly striking the Nashville-Chattanooga tracks. In early August, he received word that the Confederate Congress had approved his promotion to what he had been calling himself since his memorable birthday in Murfreesboro: brigadier general. The notification came from General Kirby Smith in Knoxville, who ordered Forrest to continue his depredations in Middle Tennessee while the last of Bragg’s men chugged into Chattanooga to the southeast. Smith also indicated that new command arrangements were in the wind. Forrest, he wrote, should now copy Bragg on all his communications.

  Bragg had recently succeeded an ill Beauregard to command of the Confederacy’s largest western army. The new theater chief soon ordered Forrest to Chattanooga for a conference.

  In August, a misleadingly bland wire arrived in Chattanooga. It would prove the most fateful of Forrest’s military life—and perhaps nearly so for the Confederate States of America. Addressed to Bragg from G. W. Randolph, the Confederate secretary of war, it informed the western commander that “Forrest and Withers are appointed brigadiers, and ordered to report to you.”

  In blue blood–controlled Dixie, possibly no high commander besides the far-sighted Lee or the iconoclastic Beauregard (if even he) would have heeded the opinions of such a coarse but brilliant commoner as Forrest. Still, it is hard to imagine a Confederate commander less so inclined than Braxton Bragg. Just as the new man on a job tends to overachieve in trying to fit in, Bragg, a plebeian who had blasted a path into the upper class as a Mexican War artillerist, now brandished that class’s prerogatives with thoroughgoing egotism. His marriage into huge wealth on the strength of his Mexican glory only compounded his surpassing sense of self-worth. An adjunct aristocrat, he had become master of a large Louisiana sugar plantation and property that included more than two hundred slaves.

  Like Forrest’s blacksmith father, Bragg’s, a carpenter, had worked with his hands. Each son had endured the snubs of the self-described “better class of people” in the community of his youth. Both men also were born of strong-willed mothers. There, though, the similarities ended. Bragg had been born in Warrenton, North Carolina, at a time when his father, who had bootstrapped his way upward, was constructing some of the upscale town’s finer buildings. By the time youngest son Braxton had reached boyhood, his father owned twenty slaves. He was able to send Braxton, at age seven, to the fashionable Warrenton Male Academy. The boy would never have to soil or callus his hands with the kind of labor his father performed. Forrest, by contrast, had been born in humbler Chapel Hill,Tennessee, and his father’s finances had gone “to wreck,” as the son’s authorized biography vaguely puts it. The family then fell from land ownership in comparatively settled Tennessee to lessee status in northern Mississippi, from which the government had only recently removed Native Americans. Bedford, the eldest son, labored dawn to dark clearing and tilling leased fields.6

  The difference in their respective sides of the Appalachians would have been significant to Bragg. His North Carolina hometown, Warrenton, was located just a few miles from the Virginia border in his state’s longest-settled eastern half, far from the wilderness of the western mountains. Tennessee, by contrast, was a more insular area offering fewer educational and cultural advantages. Bragg tended to view Tennesseans as backwoods rustics lacking in character and inclined toward shiftlessness and cowardice, much the way twentieth-century society often viewed so-called hillbillies. By the time Bragg approached manhood, his older brothers had raised the family into the lower levels of the upper class, one having become a congressman and the other a judge. A personality with a bent toward caustic criticism of others and rare self-examination buttressed, if anything, Bragg’s consciousness of higher status. He wrote thousands of letters but neve
r mentioned his mother, who was once briefly jailed for killing a slave because of alleged impertinence. Her son would rarely, if ever, accept shame or blame.7

  Like every other Civil War West Pointer, Bragg would have heard Napoleonic precepts taught by famed professor Dennis Mahan. According to Mahan, an army must be professional, its commanders bold. Forts are valueless if they inspire a defensive mind-set. An enemy’s country must be invaded to make him feel war’s burdens. Obsession with opportunities to deceive the enemy, a firm resolve not to waste resources, rigorous intelligence gathering, and zealous guarding of security—all these were central tenets of Mahan’s military philosophy, along with cavalry and bayonet charges and strong cautions, too often ignored by Civil War commanders, against attacking fortifications head-on.8

  As a student at West Point, Bragg would likely have memorized these maxims. But he had a self-satisfied mind and an archly contentious attitude toward viewpoints other than his own. He never checked a book out of the academy’s 8,000-volume library, and in the prewar army, he became the subject of an undoubtedly apocryphal story that points up a larger truth. Serving in a regiment, the story went, he held the position of both company commander and quartermaster. As company commander, he purportedly requisitioned some supplies, then as quartermaster denied the requisition. He then disputed back and forth over it until the regiment’s commander supposedly said, “My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarreling with yourself.” Such traits only assured his neglect of another Mahan rule, which went over not just Bragg’s head but those of countless other privileged young officers-to-be, especially ones from Dixie. It warned cadets to act “like ordinary people, to court society in general,” because in associating with everybody, rather than just other officers or the upper crust, they would find and absorb “that floating capital, ideas common to the mass, called common sense.”9

  Bragg and the Confederate high command forgot or ignored Mahan’s social advice. They seemed unable to comprehend that a person from the “mass” could already know by instinct or personal experience the commonsense essentials of Mahan’s strategic precepts. So, along with the Mahan principle of cultivating common connections, Bragg and his fellowaristocrats neglected to notice the capabilities of men such as Forrest. Of the bagging of Murfreesboro, Bragg wrote to Beauregard, a fellow Louisiana planter and close friend, “The whole affair, in proportion to numbers, [is] more brilliant than the grand battles where ‘strategy’ seems to have been the staple production on both sides.”10 Forrest had obviously planned the three-pronged Murfreesboro operation with care, then devised some of its elements on the fly. Bragg recognized the brilliance of the result, but he seemed to miss the mental ability that produced it. Professor Mahan presumably would not have done so.

  GENERAL BRAXTON BRAGG

  On August 17, the day he received Randolph’s wire assigning Forrest to his command, Bragg sent a dispatch requesting that the Tennessean cross the mountains to Chattanooga for a face-to-face meeting. Had it occurred, it probably would have been their second. The first appears to have happened a few days earlier.11

  The mood of that initial conversation, for which Forrest also had to ride to Chattanooga, was likely cordial. Although the month was August, Bragg was in the springtime of his hopes, just starting his reign as commander of what would soon be redesignated the Army of Tennessee. He would have been patronizingly genial to a new, working-class subordinate—even one whose sometimes primitive English would have been off-putting. Forrest, for his part, would probably have been more than willing to accept the authority of an eminent superior such as Bragg, who was nationally famed for his performance during the Mexican War.

  The Chattanooga round-trip, made during the second week of August, was two hundred miles, but Forrest made it in four days. His job, as he doubtless learned from Bragg, was to bedevil Federal forces and prevent them from advancing farther east. In holding them in central Tennessee, Forrest could help ensure that they would not get in the way of the campaign Bragg was mulling.12

  Bragg’s idea was to strike northward in concert with Kirby Smith from Knoxville and Van Dorn and Price from Mississippi. While the rickety rails of the South’s already deteriorating railroads continued to bring the last of Bragg’s units into Chattanooga from Tupelo, Bragg pondered whether to attack Nashville or adopt a suggestion from Kirby Smith. On August 9, Smith had proposed that they make a joint invasion of Kentucky, recommending that they do it by separate routes and unite when they reached the Bluegrass State. Four days later, Smith hurried off from Knoxville toward eastern Kentucky, while Bragg still contemplated.

  In his second dispatch to Forrest, on August 17, Bragg requested that Forrest provide an advance guard for Bragg’s northward move. It had become “perfectly evident you cannot cope with the enemy in your front as he is now located,” the general said. This seemed obvious to Bragg because of the number of Federal units that Buell was rushing into Middle Tennessee to safeguard Union supply lines from Forrest, John Morgan, and Bragg’s developing northward thrust. With enemy presence mounting in Forrest’s vicinity, Bragg continued, his cavalry could be of more use screening Bragg’s front and western flank as the army headed up the Sequatchie Valley, then crossed the Cumberland Plateau westward into Middle Tennessee.

  Bragg’s dispatch also said something else of equal importance. It promised Forrest command of “the whole” of the cavalry of the Army of the Mississippi as soon as the mounted force arrived in Chattanooga. The pledge of such an important position would have become even more meaningful to Forrest’s working-class pride. He had reluctantly left northern Mississippi only at Beauregard’s urging, then had been confronted with aristocratic officers who refused to serve under him. Given the self-consciousness he felt because of his educational deficiencies, he doubtless viewed the prospect of becoming cavalry commander with some concern. Such a prospect required planning, so he would have had to tell a few trusted subordinates. The Murfreesboro raid had more than indicated that he was up to the new job, though, and within his inner circle, expectations must have risen dramatically.13

  Bragg’s dispatch said he would like to see Forrest in person. It appeared, though, only to propose—not order—Forrest’s return to Chattanooga. Bragg seemed to suggest that Forrest leave only a token force in Middle Tennessee and bring most of his troopers into the Sequatchie, where they could prevent Federal incursions and prying reconnaissance from detecting the movement of Bragg’s main force.14

  Forrest was slow to respond. The August 17 dispatch appears to have taken a while to reach him. He had probably left the McMinnville neighborhood before Bragg’s communication arrived there. The Federals had sent two regiments and Major General Thomas, a first-class commander, into McMinnville, and another Union general, Richard W. Johnson, had more troops ranging nearby west of Smithville. Others were hurrying into southeast-central Tennessee.15

  Bragg sent Forrest another message on August 22. This one was abrupt and indicated displeasure. It ordered him to “act according to the instructions you have previously received” and prepare “your command for other service. The enemy is reported advancing up the Sequatchie Valley.” Bragg’s need of a cavalry screen was fast becoming more pressing.16

  Forrest, though, was busy spreading havoc among Buell’s supply lines. He was thus deflecting plenty of attention from Bragg’s advance, just not in the area where Bragg most wanted it. On August 27, Forrest attacked a Union column near Woodbury and, after being repulsed there, threatened Federal railroad communications again at Manchester. He seems to have received Bragg’s second dispatch around that time, for he next headed eastward, ostensibly to comply with Bragg’s order.17

  The Federals began closing in. Three large Union commands—at Winchester, Manchester, and McMinnville—crowded Forrest against the Cumberland Mountains, the western wall of the Sequatchie Valley. Riding to the top of a commanding peak in the early morning of August 29, he saw the trio of forces
converging on him on three roads. A fourth was approaching too. On August 30, George Thomas alerted General Alexander McCook at Altamont, a village southeast of McMinnville on the Cumberland Plateau, that Forrest was headed toward him, and around the time of the mountaintop reconnaissance, Forrest learned from a scout that a McCook unit was already approaching from the east.

  Forrest’s road into the Sequatchie Valley was now blocked. In grave danger of being surrounded and overwhelmed, he remembered that his force had just passed a dry creek bed with banks high enough to hide mounted men. He ordered his troopers backward, and they snuck down that creek bed and away. He gave up trying to cross into the Sequatchie Valley at Altamont. In the presence of so many Federals and with his intended transmountain escape route closed, he determined to join Bragg’s northbound army when it reached Sparta farther north, on the western slope of the Cumberland Mountains.18

  Masking his intended move, he hurried westward. On August 29, the same day that he saw he was blocked at Altamont, he attacked a stockade guarding a railroad bridge at Morrison, a dozen miles southwest of McMinnville. Opposed by a detachment of the Eighteenth Ohio Infantry, he suffered daunting casualties estimated at nearly two hundred. He withdrew to the northeast toward Sparta, leaving behind a dozen dead.19

  As Forrest maneuvered west of the Cumberlands, Bragg chose another cavalry commander east of them. Contradicting his August 17 dispatch promising Forrest the Army of the Mississippi’s mounted troops from Tupelo, Bragg on August 27 ordered these newly arrived cavalrymen into the Sequatchie under a twenty-six-year-old converted infantry colonel. Joseph Wheeler, number nineteen in the West Point class of 1859, had commanded the Nineteenth Alabama Infantry at Shiloh. In an apparent interim action, Bragg had named Wheeler head of the Tupelo cavalry in July. He now handed Wheeler the command he had promised to Forrest.