by Jack Hurst
At Bragg’s order, Wheeler crossed the Tennessee River and rode up the Sequatchie Valley. Reaching Altamont on August 30, he surprised the McCook Federal unit that had obstructed Forrest’s way across the mountain the day before. Then Wheeler dropped back into the valley and took up the duty Bragg had originally assigned to Forrest, covering the front and left flank of Bragg’s army as it moved north.20
Forrest continued to have brushes with Union troops. The significance of these encounters varied from source to source. The Federals reported that they continually whipped Forrest, while he dismissed the incidents as skirmishes. The most convincing indication that Forrest “was handled pretty roughly” at the end of his six-week sojourn behind the lines is the fact that those words came from Thomas. One of the most experienced and level-headed Union commanders, he wrote Buell from McMinnville that Forrest was “whipped” on August 28 near Woodbury, “whipped again” the next day at Morrison, and “whipped” yet another time near Altamont as he tried to escape into the Sequatchie Valley. On turning back toward Woodbury, he was overtaken “and again badly whipped and dispersed,” Thomas wrote. The unexcitable major general is unlikely to have inflated these claims, although subordinates reporting some of them to him may have done so.21
Whatever his punishment by Federal pursuers, Forrest accomplished most of his purposes. His aim at the time was not victory so much as occupying as many Federals as he could. At that, he was anything but whipped.
The Confederate advance had turned into a race. Bragg’s northward thrust, flanking Buell’s entire Louisville-Nashville-Alabama supply line, sent the Union general scrambling backward before his army could be cut off and defeated. He abandoned Alabama and marched hard for Nashville, then continued north toward Kentucky.
But Buell’s fallback, although heartening to Confederates, did not repair all the damage the Union presence had done to secessionism in central Tennessee. This was especially true of slavery. Jefferson Davis had tried to shield as much Southern territory as possible in part to prevent slaves from fleeing their owners and actively or passively assisting the Union anywhere the Federals gained influence.22
The Confederate president’s fears of slave disarray were now being realized. At Murfreesboro, even though Union troops had pulled out to head for northern Kentucky, the lasting damage was apparent. The farm of Confederate soldier Robert D. Jamison, away fighting with the Forty-fifth Tennessee Infantry, had escaped Federal foraging back in the summer, but not its effects. Jamison’s twenty-two-year-old wife, Camilla, had trouble with refractory slaves. Several had fled, Camilla bitterly wrote, adding that she would not mind if others did. One named Erline had apparently left for the “glory land” to the north. The day the Federals departed Murfreesboro, Erline gathered “Becky, Susan, Dick, and Bob” and vanished. And Camilla’s mother was missing six more, including a Harry, a Silas, and a Mariah. Camilla told her husband that if he encountered any of them, he should sell them to buyers farther south, “for I never want to see one of them again.”23
On September 3, Forrest caught up with Bragg’s army at Sparta, as he had planned. Over the next ten days, however, he would have slowly realized that he had been supplanted as Bragg’s cavalry leader before serving a day in that post. Bragg’s message of August 27 (likely the last Forrest had received, if, indeed, he did receive it) had said that Forrest was expected to cover the army’s left and front. Yet near Glasgow, Kentucky, on September 12, he literally ran into Wheeler and found him doing the job supposedly assigned to Forrest—and at the head of the cavalry that had been promised him.
One can only wonder how much of a surprise this was. Bragg himself had not been at Sparta when Forrest got there, so the Tennessean had had to ride twenty miles farther southeast to report to his commander. There Bragg ordered him to harass the rear of Buell’s northbound army, observe it closely, and screen Bragg’s movements. Forrest’s reaction soon afterward indicates that Bragg did not tell him Wheeler now commanded the cavalry. If Bragg did tell him, he probably did so in such a passing way that Forrest took it as a stopgap measure until he himself could arrive.24
Bragg and Buell were now entering the climactic heat of a race to northern Kentucky. Buell had snatched up every “cartridge or . . . ounce of provisions” at such bases as Murfreesboro before abandoning them. He was hurrying past Nashville toward Louisville, and Bragg was marching hard to cut him off. Forrest, meanwhile, complied with Bragg’s orders and began dogging Buell’s rear.
Forrest headed to McMinnville and then to Woodbury, aiming to overtake Buell at Murfreesboro. There he found that Federal soldiers had set the town’s courthouse afire, but he arrived in time to save it. As Buell pushed his units up the road through Nashville, Forrest crossed the Cumberland River between Lebanon and the Tennessee capital and drove Federal protective cavalry back onto the Union rear. He then attacked the Federals at Tyree Springs on the Nashville-Louisville turnpike, halfway between Nashville and the Kentucky border. A little farther north, he again assailed them, this time with artillery. He later claimed to have delayed Buell’s progress for four hours, requiring the Federals to form for battle. When they halted and shelled a position Forrest had taken in the cover of some woods, he sneaked his men away and into a roundabout ten-mile trot to get ahead of the Union column.25
The Federal delay may have been as much Wheeler’s work as Forrest’s. On the night of September 11, seven hundred of Wheeler’s men had set an ambush in Buell’s front just north of Woodburn, Kentucky, on the Bowling Green road. The Federals discovered the danger and turned back, Wheeler reported, but not before his men had captured a Union captain and several enlisted men. The hidden Confederates waited awhile longer, then withdrew two miles off the highway to rest and feed. At about 2 p.m., Federal cavalry and infantry came looking for them. A fraction of the seven hundred Confederates fell back fighting, hoping to draw the foe to the main body of Wheeler’s troops and separate the Union infantry from its cavalry. The Federals refused the bait and retired, but they had lost time responding to Wheeler’s threats.26
Hearing the firing, Forrest pushed forward, looking for the fight. Then scouts reported an enemy force approaching pell-mell from his right. Ordering his Eighth Texas to assail these troops head-on, he moved the rest of his men to attack from the flank. The Texans were preparing to charge when they discovered that the presumed enemy was Wheeler, whose men were as surprised as Forrest’s. The flank attack was barely aborted in time to prevent friendly-fire losses. Forrest then learned from Wheeler that Wheeler had struck the Federals at the approximate point Forrest had gone to the front to hit. If their encounter here was strained, neither Forrest nor Wheeler commented on it. Wheeler’s report dismissed the incident with a single, clipped sentence: “General Forrest came up in the rear while the fight was going on, but finding he could not engage the enemy to advantage he retired toward Glasgow.”27
If his battlefield interactions with Wheeler did not embitter Forrest, plenty of other things about the young colonel would have. Wheeler’s personality could not have helped their relationship. Fifteen years Forrest’s junior, he stood five feet, five inches and was a human wisp of 120 pounds. He was humorless, aloof, and full of a stiff, pompous courtliness that the pragmatic Forrest would have regarded as silly in general and infuriating in particular. That, however, was not all. Nominally hailing from Augusta, Georgia, Wheeler had New England Yankee roots. His parents had come to the Peach State from Connecticut, where their son had attended a prep school. He had also lived for a time in New York City.28
Wheeler was much more like Bragg than Forrest. Indeed, the two West Pointers already had a history. Wheeler’s first Confederate assignment had been as a first lieutenant of artillery at Pensacola, Florida, under Bragg. His antebellum combat experience had been limited to scouting with the US Army against Indians in New Mexico. But at Pensacola he had ingratiated himself. In some ways, Wheeler was the perfect Bragg subordinate. Extraordinarily polite, genteel, and serious, he was
the product of an elite education, both civilian and military; he was also hyperenergetic and eager to please.29
Wheeler’s ambition initially created friction with his superior. His introduction to Bragg had come when he bypassed the chain of command and entered Bragg’s Pensacola headquarters one evening. He volunteered to mount and arm some captured siege guns that the commander had been unable to get his politically appointed volunteer officers to render operational. Bragg gave Wheeler permission to do it, and he did. But then the young officer made a slight misstep. As a West Point graduate, Wheeler was obviously overqualified to serve as a lieutenant in the state forces of Georgia, but he became overzealous. With his cooperation, Alabama politicians coaxed such a spectacular promotion for him out of Confederate secretary of war Leroy Pope Walker that Bragg complained. Walker then resigned to become a brigadier general, so Bragg could only protest to Walker’s successor. Walker had vaulted the young lieutenant all the way to colonel—a megapromotion that, Bragg grumbled, injured the morale of those of his subordinates who possessed more distinguished records in the old army. It also, Bragg said, drew attention to his own failed efforts to get these other men promoted.30
Nevertheless, Wheeler remained colonel of the Nineteenth Alabama Infantry. He fought heroically at Shiloh with the Nineteenth and saw a third of his men killed or wounded there. He carried the unit’s colors in its final charge of the battle, and his brigade and division commanders, along with corps commander Bragg, all praised his performance. In the reorganization that followed Bragg’s succession of Beauregard, Bragg first turned to one of his Pensacola favorites, infantry brigadier general James R. Chalmers, to lead the unit’s cavalry. But then, when Chalmers asked to return to his infantry unit, Bragg drafted Wheeler, despite his distinctly marginal credentials. Although his first assignment out of West Point had been to the Cavalry School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Wheeler had ranked fourth from the bottom of his West Point class. And although he was about to become commander of all the cavalry of the Army of the Mississippi, his worst marks had been in cavalry tactics.31
On September 13, Bragg reached Glasgow, Kentucky. Forrest arrived there the same day, almost certainly intending to clarify the situation regarding Wheeler.
There is no account of the conversation. Since his September 3 meeting with Forrest south of Sparta, Bragg had had ten days to decide what to do about the command of his mounted troops—whether to leave them under Wheeler or transfer them to Forrest. Bragg was a harsh disciplinarian, and he likely intended to impress on Forrest the necessity of obeying orders, received or otherwise. He had first given Wheeler command of his cavalry out of necessity and also, apparently, out of irritation at Forrest’s prolonged stay in Middle Tennessee when Federals blocked him from entering the Sequatchie Valley. Bragg was given to snap judgments followed by equally swift reversals, and now, faced with a man whose rank and exploits fully entitled him to head the cavalry, Bragg backed off a bit. On September 14 his headquarters issued orders dividing the cavalry into two brigades.They placed Forrest in command of mounted troops on the army’s right wing under plodding General Leonidas Polk. Wheeler got the left under General William J. Hardee, a much-respected military author and professional soldier.
Under other circumstances, Forrest might not have felt abused. As John Morgan’s second in command Basil Duke would write, Forrest did not appear to aspire to lofty positions—likely because, as Duke did not have to add, such heights would have made him more conscious of his cultural limitations. But working-class pride rarely permitted Forrest to ignore a slight, and Bragg’s public disregard of his rank and reneging on the appointment to head the cavalry had all the hallmarks of one. It also made Bragg appear emphatically ungrateful for the work Forrest had done from Murfreesboro onward.
Over the next two weeks, Bragg continued to slight him. The right was the lesser wing. Its commander, Episcopal bishop Polk, was the army’s least-experienced top general. The September 14 order transferred the Eighth Texas Cavalry, one of Forrest’s most valued units, to Wheeler. The next day, Hardee, commander of Bragg’s right, temporarily ordered to Wheeler two units given to Forrest by Bragg the day before. Hardee then quickly reassigned the Texans back to Polk, but not specifically to Forrest. Also on September 15, Polk ordered Forrest to supply one of his remaining regiments to a right-wing division commander. Overnight, the five cavalry units under his command had shrunk to two.32
Why Bragg rethought his initial impulse to put Forrest in charge of his cavalry is not difficult to guess. It occurred so soon after their meeting on September 3 as to make Forrest’s inability to get back across the Cumberland Plateau on time seem like an excuse. Bragg prided himself on his cultivation, and in their earlier, first encounter, he likely was put off by Forrest’s lack of polish. Forrest’s speech was backwoodsy, full of such words as “mout” for “might” and “fetch” for “bring.” There may have been additional contributing factors. Two of Bragg’s admiring colonels at Pensacola, now in his army as brigadiers, had known Forrest years before. Chalmers was a lawyer who remembered seeing Forrest as a young farmer, when he was tilling leased hill land. James Patton Anderson had boarded with the Forrests when Bedford was selling farm equipment. The portraits both men could draw of Forrest would have diminished him in Bragg’s eyes. Bragg plainly looked down on him.33
Forrest’s service in the Kentucky invasion lasted just a dozen more days. His performance was decidedly lackluster, but not as much so as Bragg’s. Bragg beat Buell to central Kentucky, then dithered. And on September 19 at Munfordville, he moved his 30,000 troops aside and offered Buell’s 38,000 Federals an open road to the safety of Louisville. Wheeler later recalled that Bragg permitted Buell to pass him on the Louisville road because Thomas’s troops from Nashville had caught up with Buell’s on September 19, swelling the retreating army. Wheeler said Bragg did not feel strong enough to take on the combined Federal commands without help from Kirby Smith’s 10,000 troops, with whom he had yet to form a junction. Bragg, Wheeler said, presumed he would get a better chance to fight later.34
Quintessentially indecisive, Bragg had hamstrung himself. His army was suffering for lack of water and forage for its animals. In initially urging the campaign, Kirby Smith had volunteered to subordinate himself to Bragg, but Bragg had not ordered Smith’s 10,000 men to Munfordville to help him fight Buell. He also was slow to adopt Smith’s repeated recommendation that Bragg take Louisville, which on September 20 was defended by 6,000 Federals reportedly ready to abandon it. Had he followed Smith’s advice, Buell and Thomas would have had to face entrenched Confederates when they got there. At Munfordville on the night of September 17, Bragg had left Tennessee governor Isham G. Harris with the impression that Bragg and Smith would unite to take Louisville “doubtless . . . within the next ten or twelve days.” That, though, would not have beaten Buell and Thomas there. The Confederates would have had to fight their way into the fortified city against more than equal numbers.
On September 20, the day after Thomas caught up with Buell, Bragg moved east toward Kirby Smith’s army at Lexington in the lush Bluegrass pastureland. At Bardstown on October 4, he would install a rump Confederate state government that had no prayer of surviving if the Confederate armies left.35
This first cusp of autumn was hot, the ground hardened by a parched summer. The bluegrass had turned brown, many springs to dust. They mirrored the desiccation of Confederate hopes. In Maryland on September 17, Robert E. Lee had failed to defeat George McClellan at Antietam Creek. The battle there had cost the Confederacy 10,318 irreplaceable casualties.
On the Bluegrass side of the Alleghenies, Kentuckians were not rising to embrace the Confederate standard. Kirby Smith wrote Bragg on September 17 that the locals did not want to see themselves and their land scarred by war; their “hearts are evidently with us, but their bluegrass and fat-grass are against us.” Most of the surplus rifles Bragg and Smith had brought to arm new enlistees remained packed in wagons. General John C. Breck
inridge, the Kentucky statesman and recent US vice president, had not arrived to help rally them, as Bragg had wished and presumed. In late September, Breckinridge was still in Mississippi with Van Dorn, who was pursuing his own agenda. When Breckinridge did move, under orders from Richmond, it was toward Knoxville to help keep East Tennessee unionists from revolting.36
Meanwhile, Forrest’s patience with his superiors was wearing thin. On September 17 at Munfordville, he helped the Confederates capture 4,000 Federals after a three-day siege. There he began to complain. Many of his men’s horses had been killed at Murfreesboro, he wrote Polk, and the Confederacy owed them for the animals. He also filed a requisition for a variety of the small arms captured at Munfordville; they were “much” needed by his men, he said.37
The next night, September 18, Forrest’s horse, exhausted by long and hard use, fell and rolled on its rider. The accident dislocated his right shoulder and bruised his whole body. Confined to a jolting wagon, he continued to be peppered with orders from Polk, who appeared oblivious to the depletion of Forrest’s command. Forrest’s primary grievance, however, seems to have been against the ultimate source of his troubles: Bragg. According to lore, Forrest began to complain publicly about this commander who had driven his army so hard to block the enemy’s line of march and then done nothing after getting there.38
On September 20, as Bragg’s army began stepping out of Buell’s way and moving east toward Kirby Smith, Polk gave Forrest a profusion of orders. He was to throw a “strong force” in front of Bragg’s wagon train, protect both flanks, gather provisions along the road, and destroy the railroad between Louisville and Elizabethtown, Kentucky, as well as a spur track to Lebanon, Kentucky. The assignment was preposterous, and two mornings later Forrest, aching at Bardstown, rebelled. He said his horses were in no condition to do all these things even if he had sufficient men. He would “do the best I can to protect the wagon-train.” That was all.39
