by Jack Hurst
Polk paid no attention. On September 23 he ordered Forrest to position his “brigade”—the men assigned to Forrest now numbered nowhere near that—twelve miles from Bardstown, place detachments a dozen miles right and left, keep in “constant” touch with the pickets by courier, immediately report any enemy movements, destroy bridges and culverts on the Louisville-Bardstown rail line as far toward Louisville as he could, and do it all “as promptly as possible.” At 10 p.m. that night, Forrest replied that he did not have a full company in his “brigade” because of guards and pickets that he already had supplied, but he would take from the remnants of his force enough men to obey the order. No enemy, he said, appeared closer than 10 miles.40
Forrest had not exaggerated the condition of his men and mounts. An order from Bragg that very day, September 23, indicates that. It required all cavalry horses to be inspected and all found permanently disabled or unlikely to recover in four weeks to be shot. As many replacement mounts as were available would be purchased locally, and riders unable to be remounted would become “sharpshooters.”41
On September 25, Forrest was relieved of duty with Bragg’s Kentucky army. He was allowed to keep just four companies of his original regiment. The rest of the cavalry of the right wing was put under Wheeler, enlarging his command. Bragg ordered Forrest to Middle Tennessee to scrape up a new force to guard Bragg’s rear. At a meeting in Bardstown on September 27, Bragg told Forrest that all troops he was able to gather in Middle Tennessee would be his.42
Forrest wasted no time on the road. Trekking the 165 miles from Bardstown to Murfreesboro in five days, he arrived in early October. He hardly reached his new command before it came under attack.
On the night of October 6, Federals from Nashville marched to La Vergne, on the railroad between Murfreesboro and Nashville, and attacked a Confederate garrison of mostly raw recruits. These scattered. A day or so earlier, Forrest had sent forward a veteran Alabama infantry regiment, the Thirty-second, and it held its position until overwhelming Union numbers forced its retreat. With just his own cavalry battalion and Captain S. L. Freeman’s artillery, Forrest pushed through the flood of fugitives to LaVergne. But by then the Federals had returned to Nashville, satisfied to have dispersed the Confederates.43
Forrest quickly rearranged. He formed the green survivors into stronger units, recruited others, and consolidated irregular remnants. The last-mentioned included the Fourth Tennessee Cavalry of Colonel James Starnes of Tullahoma. Starnes had fought under Forrest at Sacramento, Kentucky, and been active in the Murfreesboro-McMinnville region, cooperating with Forrest there. Other new units were the Eighth Tennessee of Colonel George Dibrell of Sparta, with whom Forrest’s youngest brother, Jeffrey, served as major; the Ninth Tennessee of Colonel Jacob B. Biffle; and Colonel A. A. Russell’s Fourth Alabama. Forrest spread the newer recruits among these.44
Forrest also sought help from his immediate superior, Major General Sam Jones in Knoxville. The day of the LaVergne debacle, he telegraphed Jones that the Federals were advancing. Jones ordered some troops to him, along with “arms, ammunition, and accouterments.” On October 10, Jones wired that he had no more men to send and authorized Forrest to fall back to Tullahoma if need be, but he suggested that if the Federal force in Forrest’s front was no larger than reported, “the cavalry ought to be able so to harass the enemy as to prevent their advancing to Murfreesboro.” Intelligence was obviously conflicting. On October 16, Forrest sent forward 1,500 cavalry and a section of artillery to investigate a “strong rumor of evacuation of Nashville.” Meanwhile, Jones sent him five infantry regiments. As many arms as he needed were also on the way, Jones promised. But Forrest’s first, mediocre stint as a leader of combined infantry and cavalry lasted little more than two weeks. Jones informed him on October 20 that Major General Breckinridge was headed to Murfreesboro to take command.45
Forrest’s service with Breckinridge was brief also. During it, he launched one notable operation, a heavy demonstration against Nashville, which had been all but abandoned by the departure northward of Buell and Thomas. In the overnight of November 4, Forrest led 3,000 cavalry and some Kentucky infantry on no less than seven roads into Nashville from the south and east. Just across the Cumberland River, Colonel John Hunt Morgan attacked with still another force. By 10 a.m., the Confederates had carried the outer fortifications and were within two miles of the city proper. Then Breckinridge apparently withdrew the attack’s necessary infantry element on orders from Bragg, and the attack foundered.46
Bragg returned from Kentucky amid shattered Confederate hopes. He had fought Buell to a bloody draw on October 8 at Perryville, southeast of Louisville, and came hurrying back by way of East Tennessee. Whereas in September he had raced Buell for Louisville, in November he had to try to beat the Federals back to Middle Tennessee, which had become vulnerable because Earl Van Dorn and Sterling Price, held in Mississippi by the unproductive battles of Iuka and Corinth, had never arrived.
Bragg reached central Tennessee in mid-November. Headquartering at Tullahoma, roughly halfway between Chattanooga and Nashville, he installed Wheeler as permanent leader of his cavalry, naming him chief of the three mounted brigades that Bragg considered “regular”; he viewed Forrest’s and Morgan’s men as mere partisans. Wheeler took over Forrest’s headquarters, and Bragg ordered Forrest west to Columbia, Tennessee, to prepare for his most dangerous assignment yet: a strike deep into occupied West Tennessee to relieve growing Federal pressure on Mississippi.47
The draw at Iuka and the incomplete Union victory at Corinth had done more than just keep Van Dorn and Price out of Bragg’s Kentucky campaign. The two battles had so depleted these two generals’ forces that they could no longer mount an offensive in Mississippi. The Federals were now dotting West Tennessee with rail-supported supply dumps and forwarding stations for ominous operations farther southward. During the autumn, matériel and newly recruited Midwestern regiments were hurried forward from Columbus, Kentucky, into bases and depots in southern Tennessee and northern Mississippi. Grand Junction, Tennessee, at the crossing of the Memphis & Charleston and the Mississippi Central railroads, was now a staging area for establishment of a huge supply base at Holly Springs in northern Mississippi. If Federal progress down the Mississippi Central was not stopped, Union troops would soon reach Mississippi’s capital at Jackson. The statehouse was just forty-five miles east of vital Vicksburg, now the last major connection between the eastern Confederacy and the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. If Vicksburg fell, the Confederacy would be cut in two, and Union troops and commerce could travel every mile of America’s primary river.
Forrest’s resentment was meanwhile hardening. Around December 1, 1862, a small and slender youth showed up at Forrest’s headquarters carrying orders naming him Forrest’s new chief of artillery. Lieutenant John W. Morton, son of a prominent Nashville physician, had commanded a gun crew intrepidly at Fort Donelson, braving fire that killed or wounded thirty-three of his forty-eight comrades. Now, released from the Johnson’s Island prison and exchanged, he had wangled this appointment to join the fierce cavalryman who had disdained the Donelson surrender. But Forrest knew only one thing about Morton: that Bragg was using the young man to insult him again. Bragg was purporting to take from Forrest’s command an experienced and gallant man and replace him with a stripling. The chief of artillery, Captain S. L. Freeman, was an antebellum attorney whose steady courage Forrest was coming to admire.
“I have a fine battery under Captain Freeman, and I don’t propose to be interfered with by Bragg,” Forrest defiantly told Morton. That was that. The aghast youth stumbled out, and Forrest wheeled on an aide to curse. “I don’t know why in the hell Bragg sent that tallow-faced boy here to take charge of my artillery,” he said. “I’ll not stand it.”48
He ordered an aide to fire off a letter of outrage to Forrest’s new immediate superior, another comparative boy: Wheeler. Had there been any doubt about Forrest’s attitude toward the man who h
ad become head of Bragg’s cavalry, there could be none now.49
IV
VICKSBURG: IMPREGNABILITY DEFIED
17
OCTOBER-DECEMBER 1862—GRANT AT CORINTH
“You Have Command of All Troops and Permission to Fight”
Grant’s patience was worn thin.
Newly minted major general William S. Rosecrans, commander of the Union’s base at Corinth, was proving unmanageable. Back on September 19, he had arrived late at Iuka, Mississippi, to initiate the battle plan he himself had suggested. Then, hurrying to catch up, he had left open a road down which Confederate general Sterling Price’s army escaped. Now, in early October, Rosecrans was slow to the chase as General Earl Van Dorn’s winnowed ranks retreated from Corinth—this despite Grant’s repeated orders to get on the Southerners’ heels as soon as they broke, then dog them “to the wall.”
When Rosecrans did move, he seemed to overcompensate. He repeatedly beseeched Grant to allow him to trail the shattered foe all the way down through central Mississippi to Mobile. Grant twice refused. Rosecrans nevertheless would not halt despite the fact that outposts across West Tennessee and northern Mississippi were dangerously vulnerable because Grant had borrowed every available man to aid Rosecrans at Corinth. Rosecrans had bungled his chance. He “did not start in pursuit till the morning of the 5th”—after the battle ended at 11 a.m. on October 4—then encumbered himself with a wagon train and took the wrong road, Grant later wrote.
“Two or three hours of pursuit on the day of battle, without anything except what the men carried . . . , would have been worth more than any pursuit commenced the next day,” Grant asserted. He added that, even with the late start, if Rosecrans had taken the road Van Dorn took, he would have overtaken the Confederates in a swamp with a stream in front and Union troops under General Edward Ord holding the only bridge.1
On October 7, Grant wired Rosecrans to halt. “We can do nothing with our weak forces but fall back to our old places,” he told him. The same day, Rosecrans wired back three times in almost confrontational disagreement. Grant likely felt himself being maneuvered toward a chain-of-command set-to with General Henry Halleck. He wired Washington; Halleck responded with typical equivocation, keeping his options open. Why not pursue? Halleck asked.2
Grant by now was wary of snares laid by better-connected colleagues. He already had sidestepped many. Halleck just above him and Major General John McClernand just below were both snakes in the grass, and General Lew Wallace too bore watching. Plus vague warnings from Halleck had indicated that unnamed higher-ups—Secretary of War Edwin Stanton? President Abraham Lincoln?—were always ready to fire him for his drinking, as if whisky and armies were mutually exclusive and none of his higher-born peers imbibed.
Grant had learned to meet perfidy with steely resolve. He now circumvented Rosecrans’s trap. When Halleck seemed to take Rosecrans’s side, Grant offered Halleck the accountability. He said he believed “disaster” was around the corner, but “if you say so,” he would join Rosecrans’s pursuing column himself. The question died.3
William Starke Rosecrans was another upwardly focused Grant subordinate who misjudged his commander. He had been a star of the class preceding Grant’s at West Point, ranking fifth. Like Grant, he had stayed in the old army until 1854, and like Grant, he had encountered difficulty after leaving the military. At the war’s outset, he had headed a struggling Cincinnati kerosene firm.
Unlike Grant, Rosecrans did not fight in the Mexican War. He had been occupied elsewhere in the engineer corps, whose prized places were open only to top West Point graduates. After South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter, Rosecrans obtained one of the spots Grant failed to get on the first staff of General George McClellan. He then went with McClellan to western Virginia in 1861. There, after McClellan went east to head the Army of the Potomac, Rosecrans finished the job of chasing Robert E. Lee’s Confederates out of the heavily unionist part of the Old Dominion. That allowed formation of the new state of West Virginia.4
This success, though, did not keep Rosecrans ahead of Grant. In mid-February 1862, the victory at Fort Donelson, the Union’s largest to date, vaulted Grant into a major generalship that outranked Rosecrans. Sent west from Virginia, Rosecrans arrived in Mississippi just before Halleck marched into empty Corinth. He commanded a wing in Major General John Pope’s Army of the Mississippi, then took Pope’s place when Pope headed east to command all the Virginia forces except McClellan’s. Soon Halleck too was called east, and Rosecrans found himself reporting in Mississippi not to Halleck but, instead, to the unimpressive fellow Ohioan who had been one class behind him at West Point.
Chagrin at his new position may explain the disputatious tone of Rosecrans’s October 7 protests against Grant’s order to halt pursuit of Van Dorn. His dispatches sound like those of commander to subordinate. He wanted Bridadier General James McPherson to launch a diversionary operation against the foe, he wrote. He advised Grant where to send General William T. Sherman and what road should be protected to supply him. He repeatedly insisted that the enemy should be hounded to Mobile or Jackson and given “no rest day or night”—except, of course, for the head start Rosecrans had already provided. He “deeply” dissented from Grant’s order. “We . . . should now push them to the wall,” he wrote.5
Their relationship skidded downhill. Grant was the bulldog of the battlefield, the little brawler who refused to allow an inch of territory to be wrested from him without all-out combat. He was just as territorial about the prerogatives of his new high rank, not least because he knew others with long pedigrees hungered to snatch them.6
On October 21, Rosecrans sent a haranguing response to a question from Grant. Grant had inquired whether Rosecrans expected a shipment of cavalry rifles Grant had obtained from Washington, but Rosecrans seemingly deemed it up to him, rather than Grant, to decide which units received the weapons. Grant replied that he would distribute the arms where they were most needed and cautioned that Rosecrans was making a mistake in seeming to regard himself on the level of a department commander.
Rosecrans responded with a howl. Protesting the “tenor” and “injustice” of this dispatch, he claimed Grant had had no truer friend or more loyal lieutenant. Then he went over the top and used a word sure to evoke the worst possible reaction. He implied that Grant had been told tales by “mischief makers, winesellers & mousecatching politicians” and demanded to know who had turned Grant against him.7
Rosecrans’s outbursts reached the ears of, and prompted discussion among, the staffs of other ranking officers. At least one implied that Grant should fire Rosecrans. On October 19 from Bolivar, Tennessee, Colonel M. D. Leggett of the Seventy-eighth Ohio wrote Grant aide John Rawlins that he was “pained” to see a subordinate make such a determined effort to add to undeserved popular prejudice against Grant. Leggett, apparently referring to talk by Rosecrans’s staff about the battles of Iuka and Corinth, said he considered it an outrage for aides of a newly minted major general to try to take credit for Grant’s victories and make “irresponsible assertions and mysterious insinuations. Major Genl. Rosecrans is undoubtedly an excellent officer—and I hope . . . that he is not a party in this hellish attempt to ruin Genl Grant—but the evidence is such that I cannot rid my mind of the conviction that he must be, at least, privy to the whole devilish scheme.”8
Grant valued loyalty—partly, no doubt, because he had seen so little of it. Two days later, on October 21, he recommended Leggett and five other colonels for promotion to brigadier. Meanwhile, Rosecrans addressed a communication to “My Dear General” Halleck in Washington requesting transfer to General Don Carlos Buell’s army, complaining of a “spirit of mischief among the mousing politicians on Grant’s staff to get up in his mind a spirit of jealousy.” He ended, though, with an ultimatum: if Grant did not frankly avow that he was satisfied with Rosecrans, “I shall consider that my ability to be useful in this department has ended.”9
Two days later, on October 24,
Halleck saw an opportunity in Rosecrans’s dissatisfaction. By now, Buell had bested Major General Braxton Bragg at Perryville, Kentucky, but Bragg had managed to flee the state after the battle. Lincoln had long condemned Buell’s continual sluggishness, and now he blamed him for allowing Bragg to escape. Halleck saw an out. Instead of just giving Rosecrans the place in Buell’s army that he had requested, Halleck gave him that army itself.10
Grant’s offensive possibilities were improving by late October. Midwest recruiting was swelling his ranks with new levies, and Rosecrans’s transfer had allowed the promotion of Grant’s obedient and loyal coordinator of rail transportation, James B. McPherson, to major general to take Rosecrans’s place.
Grant itched to be moving again. He wired Halleck from Jackson, Tennessee, on November 2 that he had ordered five divisions southward to Grand Junction, nexus of the east-west Memphis & Charleston Railroad and the north-south Mississippi Central. His eventual goal was of course Vicksburg, the Confederate Gibraltar on the Mississippi River. For the Union war effort, the taking of Vicksburg and the consequent reopening of the Mississippi from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico would be priceless logistically—and, as Grant later put it, an amputation to the Confederacy. Grand Junction was an ideal jumping-off point into interior Mississippi, and Grant planned to use it. He said he would repair rails and telegraph wires on the way forward and proceed if possible at least to Holly Springs, fifteen miles south of the Mississippi border. He might even go as far south as Grenada, some eighty miles past Holly Springs.
