Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Lincoln’s approval of McClernand’s scheme underscores something important about the president: his openness to contributions from anybody, West Pointer or not, aristocrat or commoner. That McClernand had neither a West Point education nor military training did not matter. West Pointers and aristocrats, after all, were mostly failing Lincoln by this point in the war. What mattered was that McClernand wanted to save the Union and might be able to help do it.

  For Grant, these activities of his furloughed division commander were threatening. He soon heard ominous rumors about them. On October 29, an officer wired him that McClernand, without going through channels, had ordered the holding at Cairo of some rifles destined for Grant’s army. Grant directed the officer to ignore the order. The same day Grant wired Sherman that newspaper and other reports indicated McClernand planned to take his new units to Helena, Arkansas. There, the information had it, McClernand would report to Major General Samuel Curtis, a Mexican War colonel and three-term Iowa congressman.32

  Grant became alarmed. Knowing McClernand’s ties to Lincoln, he wondered if the White House intended for a McClernand Mississippi campaign to trump Grant’s. Pending McClernand’s arrival from the Midwest, some of his new units already were showing up in Memphis, where Sherman was in command. Pretty certain that Halleck had little use for the ex-politician, Grant wired his chief on November 10 to ask if he, Grant, was expected to “lie still here while an expedition is fitted out from Memphis”? Or did Halleck want him to push as far south as possible? Was Sherman still his subordinate? Or were Sherman and his troops now “reserved for some special service?” And could Grant expect reinforcements for his projected drive toward Grenada? In other words, were these new troops, coming into Sherman’s command post in Grant’s department from McClernand in the Midwest, to be under Grant’s supervision or McClernand’s? Halleck’s reply was swift and unequivocal: “You have command of all troops sent to your department, and have permission to fight the enemy where you please.”33

  That message arrived on November 11, the day before Grant’s cavalry drove the Confederates out of Holly Springs. Two days later, on November 13, Grant ordered Sherman to march from Memphis toward Oxford with at least two divisions of infantry. Sherman brought three divisions, which almost certainly included some of McClernand’s new levies. By November 29, Sherman had proceeded to Wyatt, Mississippi, twenty miles southwest of Holly Springs, and Grant had established Holly Springs as his southernmost supply depot. All of its matériel had to come by rail from Columbus, Kentucky, “a long line,” Grant later noted, “to maintain in an enemy’s country.”34

  Then Halleck reined Grant in. Grant had wired on December 4 to say he would cut the Mobile & Ohio Railroad south of Tupelo and asked how much farther south his chief wanted him to go. Should he hold the Confederates south of Grenada while moving a force from Memphis and Helena downriver to Vicksburg? Halleck replied on December 5 approving the destruction of the railroad but directing Grant not to try to hold territory south of Abbeville, Mississippi. And Sherman had to have his troops back in Memphis by December 20, Halleck warned.35

  Grant and Halleck were now communicating almost in code, rarely mentioning whom this was all about. Grant wanted to get the river operation started from Memphis to Vicksburg under Sherman out of fear that McClernand would soon show up on the lower Mississippi to lead those troops himself. The obnoxious politician outranked Sherman and would be able to assume independent command. Halleck’s mention of December 20 concerned the same thing. Halleck felt as nervous about McClernand’s Washington clout as Grant—it threatened to make McClernand independent of not just Grant but also General in Chief Halleck—and Halleck obviously had a good idea of when McClernand would leave the Midwest for Memphis. It would be best for both of them if Grant could hijack McClernand’s new army before McClernand arrived to command it.

  On December 8, Grant grabbed the initiative. He ordered Sherman to take one of his three divisions back to Memphis, board steamers, pick up another 12,000 men—many recruited by McClernand—at Helena, Arkansas, and proceed downriver to a point north of Vicksburg. Grant also asked Sherman to “come over this evening” to Grant’s Oxford, Mississippi, headquarters “and stay to-night or come in the morning” for the kind of chat Grant rarely sought with others. The subject doubtless would be McClernand. Grant’s note said he would like to talk with Sherman about how to go at Vicksburg. His idea, he said, was for Sherman to strike it from the river in tandem with Grant, who would bring his own command down the Mississippi Central Railroad and keep much of Confederate general Pemberton’s army preoccupied well north of the city. If Grant could not hold Pemberton north of Vicksburg, he would stay on the Confederate general’s rear and follow him to the city’s gates.36

  Halleck did much to enable the Grant-Sherman Vicksburg operation. He extended Grant’s authority to Helena and promoted McClernand’s friend Curtis to command of the Department of the Missouri, getting him out of the way. So Helena and the trans-Mississippi forces based there were now temporarily in Grant’s department and his to use as he wished. Brigadier General Frederick Steele, a member of Grant’s West Point class of 1843, now commanded at Helena, and Grant notified his old classmate of his evolving plans.37

  The next day, December 9, Halleck warned Grant that Lincoln “may insist upon designating a separate commander.” They both knew who that would be. If it did not happen, however, Grant could name the commanders of the operation as “you deem best.” Halleck added that he, like Grant, preferred Sherman as “the chief under you.”38

  If Grant wanted to oversee the attack on Vicksburg, he needed to strike first—exactly as he was now racing to do. Having arranged a deft theft of McClernand’s army, he was readying a hard one-two punch at the western Confederacy. He would hold Pemberton in central Mississippi while the trusted Sherman floated downriver to Pemberton’s rear and attacked Vicksburg.

  Little did Grant know, though, that his own rear was now suddenly in danger. On December 15, 1,800 Confederate cavalrymen finished crossing the Tennessee River at Clifton, Tennessee, more than a hundred miles northeast of Oxford. They were heading for the Kentucky-to-Mississippi rail line that Grant considered “long . . . to maintain in an enemy’s country.”

  At their head was a far deadlier general than McClernand or Pemberton. It was Forrest—in a rotten mood.

  18

  DECEMBER 1862—ORREST IN WEST TENNESSEE

  “We Have Worked, Rode, and Fought Hard”

  Mississippi was in disarray. The disheartenment that Grant and other Federals had perceived in its residents was not wishful Union spin.

  As Grant readied his double-edged slash into the state’s heart, an alarmed Mississippi lawmaker wrote Jefferson Davis to warn of its “listless despondency.” Writing on December 9, Senator James Phelan urged the president to return home, “unfurl your banner at the head of the army,” and deliver Mississippians from not only Grant but also the lackluster Pemberton and the discredited Van Dorn. A military court had just acquitted the latter of charges of bloody carelessness at Corinth, but Phelan said the state remained rife with “narratives of his negligence, whoring, and drunkenness” so damning that “a court-martial of angels would not relieve him of the charge.”

  Generalship and manpower were not the only difficulties facing Mississippi Confederates. They were not even foremost. Phelan reported that efforts to enforce the new conscription law in his state and neighboring Alabama were bungling, corrupt, and inciting resistance. Crowds of fighting-age males were “everywhere,” unenrolled in the ranks. Populism was hardly a pet subject of the South’s ruling oligarchy, but Senator Phelan raised it. He condemned the Confederacy’s policy of letting substitutes carry rifles for able-bodied people wealthy enough to hire them, saying it had infuriated the poor.

  Impartial imposition of conscription was essential to mollify the public rage, Phelan wrote. The system needed wholesale redress, and “the prominent, rich, and influential” should be driven
into the army like everybody else. A new measure also exempted from service anyone owning twenty or more slaves, and Phelan said this favoritism for the wealthy was scandalous. The injustice of exempting slave owners was “denounced even by men whose position enables them to take advantage of it” and had reportedly “aroused a spirit of rebellion” among poor whites.1

  Into this trans-Appalachian morass, Davis in late November threw Joseph E. Johnston. The fourth-highest-ranking Confederate behind Adjutant General Samuel Cooper, the late Albert Sidney Johnston, and Robert E. Lee, Johnston had spent the past several months recuperating from serious wounds incurred in Virginia on May 31 at the battle of Seven Pines. Named head of the Department of the West, Johnston became a supervisor with no army of his own. He could only advise as General John Pemberton in Mississippi cried for help from Tennessee to hold off Grant’s horde. Johnston’s geographical problem was thorny. If Grant or one of his subordinates captured Vicksburg, “we cannot dislodge him” because of the strength of Vicksburg’s fortifications, Johnston wrote Adjutant General Cooper in Richmond.

  But the Confederate leadership could not send aid to Pemberton without endangering its cause elsewhere. Sending Bragg from Middle Tennessee to Vicksburg would abandon the forage-rich country south of Nashville to Rosecrans’s Union army. Johnston advised against sending Pemberton even a part of Bragg’s army, fearing to decrease the 47,000 men with whom Bragg at Murfreesboro faced Rosecrans’s 60,000 at Nashville. The Davis government had ordered General Theophilus Holmes in Arkansas to aid Pemberton, which Johnston favored instead.

  But Davis ignored the advice of the man he had named department commander. He determined to reinforce Vicksburg even if it cost him Middle Tennessee. Arriving in Murfreesboro on December 12, he ordered 9,000 infantrymen detached from Bragg’s army and sent to Pemberton. If necessary, the president told Bragg, he should fall back eighty miles south of Murfreesboro, behind the Tennessee River in Alabama.2

  But all that would take time. The Tennessee River lay between Bragg and Pemberton, and Pemberton, under pressure from Grant and Sherman, was moving south toward Vicksburg, not north toward Bragg. Johnston sent a December 4 telegram to Bragg asking him to help delay Grant’s further advance into Mississippi by loosing cavalry on Grant’s supply lines.3

  Communication in the west was so roundabout that, by the time Johnston’s recommended cavalry solution reached Bragg, Bragg had come to the same conclusion on his own two weeks earlier. On November 21, he wired both Pemberton and the Davis government that he was sending “a large cavalry force under Forrest to create a diversion” by attacking Federal communications in West Tennessee. He apparently informed Forrest of the assignment around the same time. On November 24, he wrote Davis that he had ordered Forrest “to seek a crossing, which he is confident of finding, throw his command across the Tennessee River, and precipitate it” on Union supply routes. Two more weeks passed, though, before Bragg ordered Forrest to prepare to leave. Forrest himself may have caused the delay. He repeatedly requested better arms for his men. Most had only shotguns and pistols brought from home, and some carried flintless flintlock muskets. The former would be ineffective, and the latter useless, against the Federals’ usual .58-caliber, bayonet-equipped Springfield percussion muskets or the similar British Enfield.4

  Bragg meanwhile decided to give himself the same sort of assistance he was sending Mississippi. He ordered more cavalry under John Hunt Morgan, now a brigadier, to wreck the Louisville-Nashville rails supplying Rosecrans’s Federals in the Tennessee capital. But Morgan’s assignment, to destroy track and two five-hundred-foot trestles just south of Louisville, was not as difficult as Forrest’s. Kentucky was not as hard to get into and out of as Federal-occupied West Tennessee. Forrest would have to cross the wide Tennessee River in territory inhabited by Union sympathizers, dodge contingents of Federals larger than his own, hack Grant’s vital railroads to pieces, and get back across the Tennessee alive.5

  On December 4, Bragg ordered Forrest to ready his mission. The weather was forbidding, which would make the crossing of the Tennessee River all the more treacherous. And Bragg gave Forrest none of the support he had requested. His troops would be the new, mostly untried, badly armed ones he had gathered around Murfreesboro and McMinnville while Bragg was returning from Kentucky. For their old shotguns they had just ten firing caps per man, and Forrest protested that pistols and largely flint-missing flintlocks were their only other weapons. Bragg did not care. Three weeks earlier he had reported having a surplus of rifles, tents, and other matériel, but he gave none of it to Forrest. Anything Forrest needed he would have to capture. Government supplies Bragg reserved for regular soldiers only, and he did not include Forrest in their ranks. Bragg wrote Jefferson Davis on November 24 that he had 5,000 cavalry in three “regular brigades” and an equal number under Forrest and Morgan. The latter were “on partisan service, for which, and which alone, their commanders are . . . suited.”6

  Bragg’s distinction between Forrest’s troops and those in the “regular” units was arbitrary and typically rigid. Forrest’s fellow Bragg-designated “partisan,” John Hunt Morgan, was a Kentucky aristocrat with whom Bragg was very friendly, and Morgan had requested the partisan designation. Forrest had not. Forrest’s unvarnished machismo and seasoned maturity, compared with the obsequious boyishness and cultivation of Bragg’s hand-picked successor to Forrest, Joe Wheeler, would only have reinforced Bragg’s opinion that Forrest was barely a step above the status of guerrilla. The sycophantic Wheeler had charmed Bragg in Kentucky. His cavalry’s defense of the retreat from the Bluegrass State had prompted Bragg, on October 11, to shower Wheeler with praise. He termed Wheeler’s performance “brilliant,” adding, “No cavalry force was more handsomely handled and no army better covered.” Soon after Bragg’s army arrived back in Tennessee, Bragg directed Forrest to report to Wheeler for orders. Forrest continued to obey Bragg’s commands—most of them, anyway—but with ever more resentment.7

  Forrest’s rancor showed. His treatment of Lieutenant John Morton, the “tallow-faced boy” artillerist whom Bragg had named Forrest’s chief of artillery, was one such manifestation. When Forrest angrily told Morton that he would not “be interfered with” by Bragg and that his current artillery chief would remain in that position, the chagrined Morton said he never meant to supplant anybody, he just wanted to serve with Forrest and go on the campaign into West Tennessee. He said he trusted that Forrest would soon capture guns he and his crew could operate. Forrest’s disgust decreased slightly. Facing this chance to emphasize his contempt for both Bragg and Wheeler, he reiterated that his artillery chief, S. L. Freeman, would remain exactly that. He then challenged both Bragg and Wheeler by going out of his way to inform them of his disobedience of the order. He told Morton that, to remain with Forrest’s cavalry at all, Morton needed to obtain Wheeler’s approval. The cavalry chief was fifty-two miles away at LaVergne, so Forrest likely thought he had seen the last of the boy cannoneer. Instead, Morton left immediately for LaVergne, woke up Wheeler, got his signed permission, and galloped back to Columbia. He covered 104 miles in twenty-three hours.8

  But Forrest obeyed Bragg’s more important order, the one to prepare for his perilous raid into West Tennessee. He thought, long and hard, about how he would do it. He was given to solitary planning sessions, during which his concentration was remarkably impervious to distraction. A Forrest trooper who later became a judge and historian of a Forrest regiment would eventually recall that during these meditations Forrest would sit motionless, chin on chest, or walk in circles with his head down and his hands clasped beneath the tail of his coat. During one such ambling session before another West Tennessee raid later in the war, the judge recalled, Forrest strode in circles around a railroad station in West Point, Mississippi, lost in thought. An ill-advised person tried repeatedly to interrupt him with a request. Forrest finally reacted with a single blow from his fist, knocking the man unconscious. Without having uttered a word, Forrest
stepped over the man and kept walking.9

  Since his teens, Forrest had made it his business to know how to get things done. If he could not do something himself, he made sure to know—personally—somebody who could. Long treks in the operation of his slave business, monitoring countless auctions and estate sales, provided him with connections across lower- and middle-class Southern society from Kentucky to Texas. He made inroads into higher circles too. Heading the Memphis city council’s finance committee, he was a frequent spokesman for Memphis & Charleston Railroad president Sam Tate, to whom he sold slaves in 1854.10

  Forrest’s wide-ranging contacts had become vital. In July 1861, two Kentuckians had helped him buy and smuggle out of Union-leaning Louisville five hundred Colt pistols, a hundred saddles, and other equipment to outfit his first regiment. Now he put similar friends to work arming his troops once again. He dispatched unnamed agents into Union-occupied West Tennessee in search of firing caps. He also sent a party of carpenter-soldiers ahead to the Tennessee River to build and hide two flatboats. Braxton Bragg had forced him to use all his ingenuity; luckily for the Confederacy, Forrest had been using it for most of his life.11

  On December 10 Bragg ordered Forrest to get going. He departed Columbia the next day, a Friday, heading west with nearly 2,000 troopers, 500 of them all but unarmed. He covered the seventy miles in two days.