Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Fighting cavalrymen as infantry was becoming a Forrest habit. It let them find cover more easily, take better aim, and deliver more devastating fire. This tactic had occasionally been practiced against Plains Indians in the 1850s, but Forrest likely knew nothing of that. His placing of cannons up front, all but unsupported, was even more original. Others sometimes credited Morton, but Morton said the idea was Forrest’s; he himself just saw its sense. The closer a cannon came, the more accurate and daunting it was. At Parker’s Crossroads, however, Forrest had a more immediate reason for leaning heavily on his artillery. Expecting to fight Fuller’s Federal brigade after finishing with Dunham’s, he was hoarding his human resources and sustaining as few casualties as possible so as to have optimum strength available to meet Fuller.

  He may have had a specific reason, too, for putting Morton’s battery in the center of his advancing line. The “tallow-faced boy” was, after all, still a new member of Forrest’s unit, and in the center—Forrest’s own position—Forrest could watch Morton’s performance under fire. Now, out in front of the Confederate center, in a peach orchard and open field facing Dunham’s ridge south of the crossroads, Forrest gave Morton a curt order: “Give’em hell.”53

  Morton fired. The Confederate guns drove the Federals off the ridge and down into some woods behind it. Dunham complained that a Confederate battery to his right, probably Morton’s, enfiladed his line with “terrible” fire. The Federals were stubborn, though. Between 10:30 a.m. and noon, they made three charges at the Confederate guns. Two of these got within eighty and sixty yards of the targets, but that was all. In one, the Confederates countercharged and took two disabled Federal cannons ringed by dead and wounded men and horses.54

  The Federals again fixed bayonets to charge the enfilading guns. Suddenly Colonel Napier attacked the Union right rear “furiously” with a “heavy dismounted force,” Dunham would recall. Napier forgot or did not know of his chief’s aim to let cannons do most of the labor. The assault, breasting fire all the way to a fence covering the prone Federals, cost Napier his life and those of several men in his battalion.55

  By the time Napier’s assault failed, another mass of Confederates was moving along the east-west byroad in Dunham’s front. They were crossing the Huntingdon-Lexington Road, heading to the Federal right. Dunham misconstrued their aim. They were moving in the general direction of the Tennessee River, and Dunham still thought Forrest was trying to escape. Actually, Forrest was surrounding him.

  Dunham had no sooner fought off Napier than Russell’s dismounted Fourth Alabama attacked his right rear. Then Dunham’s tenuous circumstances turned dire. In the early afternoon, 250 mounted troopers under Starnes rushed back from their detached duty at Huntingdon, and Forrest sent them to the right to find and attack the Federal rear. They soon thundered up the Huntingdon-Lexington Road from the south and got between the Federals and their wagons, parked in a hollow 150 yards behind the Union left.56

  The disparate attacks were shaking the Federal line. Around noon, about half of the green Thirty-ninth Iowa on the Federal left, pounded by Confederate cannon fire, had broken to the rear. When Russell and Starnes struck, the Iowans broke again. They fled into a cornfield west of the road, chased by canister. The Confederates now got other assistance: Biffle, hurrying back from his detached duty near Trenton. The initial breaking of the Thirty-ninth Iowa had provided Forrest with a throng of prisoners and a developing hole in Dunham’s left front. Behind the position the Iowans vacated, a company of the One Hundred Twenty-second Illinois, assigned to guard the Federal wagon train, fought off Starnes. Dunham lost his wagons, anyway, though; separated from the bulk of Dunham’s force, spooked Federal teamsters fled with the vehicles and were captured.57

  Amid the flight of the Iowans into the cornfield to the left and the Confederate attacks on the Federal right and rear, Sergeant Nat Baxter Jr. had seen white flags “all along the Union line.” Needing to reorganize his badly mixed men and refill their cartridge boxes, Forrest sent forward a flag of truce. Dunham came out to meet it. One of Forrest’s aides told Dunham that Forrest understood Dunham had surrendered. According to Dunham, he replied that he had “never thought of surrendering” and that any white flag was unauthorized. The aide left but soon returned; Forrest demanded unconditional surrender. Dunham said that if Forrest thought he could “take me, he can come and try.”58

  Indeed, Forrest had already taken Dunham’s only three pieces of artillery and isolated his wagon train. He soon reported that Dunham offered to withdraw if allowed to bury his dead. Forrest refused, thinking surrender imminent. Men on both sides apparently thought the same. During the parley, they mingled as if the Confederates had already won. Forrest’s adjutant, Major J. P. Strange, took charge of the Federal wagons and inventoried booty. Artillerist Baxter strolled forward to talk with a Union officer. Observers reported Dunham had not fired a shot for as much as half an hour. The day “seemed inevitably lost,” wrote one.59

  The problem for Forrest was that these observers were Federal.

  Forrest was negotiating with Dunham when disaster struck him from behind. With his commander riding with the rear guard, Colonel Fuller of Sullivan’s Second Brigade had been marching from Huntingdon when he heard the fighting involving Dunham, Sullivan’s other brigade. Instead of allowing Forrest to finish Dunham and then turn on Fuller’s brigade, as Forrest had intended, Fuller had taken the initiative, hurried forward, and attacked Forrest’s rear.

  Fuller struck at 1:30 p.m. During his approach, a unionist resident had informed him that cannons and rifles heard in the distance belonged to Dunham and Forrest and that Dunham “needed aid.” Fuller rushed to the field and struck with artillery and the bayonets of three Ohio regiments: the Thirty-ninth and three more guns of the Seventh Wisconsin Battery west of the Huntingdon Road, and the Twenty-seventh and Sixty-third regiments to the east.60

  Fuller’s men were capturing horses and their holders and bearing down on Forrest’s cannons. When a staff officer galloped up, yelling that Federals were in their rear, Forrest did not believe him. He raced back there and saw the horse holders running willy-nilly from, and some surrendering to, an enveloping Union line. The Sixty-third and Twenty-seventh Ohio were marching at double-quick pace down the Huntingdon Road. For the only time in the entire war, Forrest was totally surprised.61

  The trouble had started at Clarksburg. The second scout party Forrest sent there had misunderstood its orders, which were to watch the Huntingdon Road and warn of any Union reinforcements coming down it. Perhaps these orders were garbled in transmission between Forrest and the aide who dispensed them. Captain William McLemore had understood that his hundred-man detachment was to link up with Bill Forrest, make a reconnaissance, then return to the Confederates at Parker’s Crossroads. Reconnoitering and angling to Clarksburg by back roads had taken a while, and near the town McLemore learned that Bill Forrest had withdrawn during the night in the face of a heavy Federal force. McLemore’s men then heard the sound of fighting a half dozen miles behind them at Parker’s crossroads and saw Federal cavalry, probably Fuller’s rear guard, galloping south on the Huntingdon Road. McLemore started back toward Forrest, but by the time he could return—also by secondary routes—he found Union troops between him and his commander.62

  The Confederate rear was in chaos as Forrest rode up. The onrushing Ohioans were overwhelming three of his slimly supported cannons. Horses pulling three more caissons ran madly away with their pieces. Determined to save as many guns as possible, Forrest ordered the runaways ridden down, brought under control, and hauled away at breakneck speed. He collared every trooper he could hail and told him to turn and face the foes bearing down on the flying caissons. Seeing Sergeant Baxter running after one of the vehicles, Forrest ordered him to join the general’s escort and fifty more men under Major Jeffrey Forrest in a charge to save the guns. Baxter replied that he had not so much as a knife. Forrest said Baxter should join the countercharge anyway: “I want to mak
e as big a show as possible.” Dashing at the Federals with his patchwork force, Forrest slowed their advance and saved five of the cannons.63

  Forrest’s spontaneous tactics at Parker’s Crossroads became famous. One order supposedly issued by Forrest during the moment of crisis—“Charge both ways!”—is doubtless apocryphal, but its sense is substantially true. Forrest did charge to his rear to save five guns, and his men did charge Dunham, just not from Dunham’s front. Russell and Starnes, seeing Forrest’s predicament, instead resumed attacking Dunham’s rear and got his attention—apparently all of it. Two Union officers later complained that Dunham did not fire a shot at Forrest’s men as they galloped across his front and off to the west of the road. Colonel Z. S. Spaulding of the Twenty-seventh Ohio, in the center of the counterattacking line, reported that his riflemen had little time to do more than empty a few Confederate saddles before Forrest had made off with the reclaimed cannons.64

  Lieutenant Morton, bloody from a saber wound in the thigh, helped spirit away the guns. Riding beside Forrest as they circled the Federal left and exited the field southward, he saw his chief deep in thought. Forrest was doubtless pondering why McLemore had not warned him of Fuller’s approach. Suddenly a minié ball sang past Morton’s temple, and Forrest’s head dropped to his chest. Alarmed, the lieutenant touched Forrest’s shoulder. “General, are you hurt much?” he asked. Forrest raised his head, took off his hat, and they both stared at a hole in its brim.

  “No,” Forrest replied. “But didn’t it come damn close?”65

  The Federals had significantly bloodied Forrest at Parker’s Crossroads. He approximated his losses as 25 killed, 75 wounded, and 250 captured—along with three cannons, four caissons, two ambulances, and five wagons containing 75,000 rounds of ammunition. Even this was an underestimation. Sullivan reported taking 300-plus prisoners and more than 350 horses. The reported Union casualties totaled 27 killed, 140 wounded, and 70 missing.

  His losses notwithstanding, Forrest had been lucky. Sullivan, one of whose subordinates wryly praised his “genius for tardiness,” had halted his column twice on the way to Parker’s and was himself nearly captured by Bill Forrest’s Thieves. Only Fuller’s repeated advances without orders got the second Federal brigade to the crossroads in time to save Dunham.66

  Forrest’s good fortune held after the battle. Sullivan’s pursuit exemplified the Federal general’s “genius.” Two hours after Forrest’s men fled, Sullivan mistook the approach of McLemore, who was finally returning from Clarksburg, for a Forrest counterattack. Sullivan threw out guards and did not pursue until the next morning. His men then marched only fourteen miles—two miles beyond Lexington—and camped for the night.67

  By then Forrest was long gone. He had hurried the twelve miles to Lexington and sent his wagon train and prisoners on ahead while briefly resting and tending his wounded. Then, at 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day, in dismal rain, he took the road to Clifton. En route, he paroled three hundred prisoners taken since departing Union City, eighty-three of them seized at Parker’s.

  The escape was briefly stymied when his advance ran into the Sixth Tennessee Union cavalry. It blocked the road. But around noon, when the main Confederate column came up, Forrest ordered Dibrell’s Eighth Tennessee to charge. They routed the Federals, and that night he ferried his main body across the Tennessee. McLemore and another separated detachment crossed at points north of Clifton.68

  He had not just made it out of West Tennessee. He had done so largely triumphant.

  Forrest left West Tennessee with more than he brought. Even without his 300 captured cavalrymen, he led more men back to Bragg than the 2,000 he had left with, thanks to the addition of 100 recruits and the Napier battalion that joined him at Union City. And he had made captives of at least 1,439 Federals, the number for which he turned in official paroles, and suffered no more than 500 casualties.

  As Forrest reported to Bragg from Clifton, “we have worked, rode, and fought hard.” Truly. In terrible weather, his seventeen-day operation spanned three hundred miles and decimated rail and telegraph communications vital to Grant’s campaign to get to Vicksburg through central Mississippi. Forrest also had made veterans of largely green troopers and armed them with Federal weapons. And he had preoccupied every Federal in West Tennessee, allowing none to reinforce Rosecrans as Rosecrans and Bragg fought between December 31 and January 2 to a titanic standstill at Stones River that ended in another Bragg retreat.69

  Most important, Forrest’s work—combined with Van Dorn’s December 20 raid on Holly Springs—had cut a leg from under Grant’s Mississippi plan. Forrest’s wreckage of four miles of trestle and track in the Obion bottoms would keep the Mobile & Ohio from full operation until March 7. By then, Grant’s army would have ceased using it altogether between Columbus and Jackson. Perhaps the greatest testament to Forrest’s feat would come from Grant himself. Grant later wrote that the raid had severed his northern communications for more than a week and stopped his rations and forage for two weeks. It shook his faith in maintaining such a long supply line through hostile territory ever again.

  Now Grant would have to revamp his Vicksburg plan—and try to alert Sherman, who, with no idea how much his chief’s communications had been damaged, was floating down the Mississippi expecting help in attacking the Dixie Gibraltar.70

  19

  DECEMBER 1862-FEBRUARY 1, 1863—GRANT IN MEMPHIS

  “General McClernand . . .

  Is Unmanageable and Incompetent”

  Forrest and Van Dorn had smashed Grant’s plan. The Union commander had intended to assail Confederate general John Pemberton’s army and hold it in central Mississippi while Sherman swung down the river from Memphis and assaulted Vicksburg. But in less than three December weeks, Van Dorn had torched the cached Union supplies at Holly Springs, and Forrest had wrecked the rails that could bring more. Together, the two had islanded Grant’s army for more than two weeks. He had little choice but to withdraw from along the Mississippi Central Railroad.

  So now the other half of Grant’s scheme was in peril. No longer under threat, Pemberton’s 25,000 Confederates at Grenada, Mississippi, were free to rush the 150 rail miles southeast to Vicksburg to meet and defeat Sherman’s 32,000 Federals steaming downriver. And the Confederates’ wholesale slashing of telegraph wires across northern Mississippi and West Tennessee prevented Grant from even informing Sherman about what had happened.

  Sherman soon knew, though, that something was wrong. Almost as soon as Forrest crossed into West Tennessee, Sherman heard about it and divined the Confederate’s aim: “to draw us back from our purpose of going to Vicksburg,” he wrote General Willis A. Gorman in Helena, Arkansas, on December 17. Sherman thought that Forrest might indeed delay Grant—but not stop him. Sherman’s soldierly impulse was to do the reverse of what the enemy wanted, so he got going. He presumed, he wrote, that time was “everything to us.”1

  And not just to outfox Pemberton in Mississippi. There was also power-hungry John McClernand in Illinois. Sherman was as eager as Grant to foil the ex-congressman. Since October, McClernand had been recruiting Midwesterners and sending them to Memphis. Secretly but plainly backed by the White House, he expected to lead them on his own Vicksburg operation, trumping Sherman’s and beating Grant to a victory.

  The downriver half of Grant’s disintegrating Vicksburg project would be Sherman’s first independent operation since his nationally noted Kentucky paranoia of 1861. Both personal and professional dimensions were at play now. McClernand represented almost everything Sherman loathed: cutthroat politics, headline hunting, obsessive ambition, and civilian intrusion on the turf of soldiers.The two men resembled each other in volubility and overt nervousness, but little else. To McClernand, style was substance. To the apolitical Sherman, style was nothing, substance everything; it explained his attachment to Grant. He seemed to delight in eviscerating political hypocrisy and obfuscation with direct, cynical, and often outrageous speech. But McClernand, a Democrat p
ossibly angling to succeed his Republican president, was dangerous: a snake who struck at all in his path. Grant aide John Rawlins had not been far off in branding McClernand a “damned, slinking, Judas bastard.”2

  So Sherman from the outset had been an enthusiastic accomplice in Grant’s bid to scotch the McClernand plot. On December 20, at Grant’s bidding, Sherman hijacked the recruits McClernand had been sending to Memphis for his own intended Vicksburg drive. Sherman melded them into two Memphis divisions that accompanied a third from the Tallahatchie foray, then rushed the three out of Memphis. Totaling some 20,000 men, they were off downriver on an armada of transports and gunboats before McClernand could leave Illinois. Sherman left so fast that he forgot some pontoon parts he would need in the Vicksburg area’s boot-swallowing swamps.3

  He picked up more strength on the way. At Helena, Arkansas, and Friars Point, Mississippi, on December 21, he took aboard a fourth division—another 13,000 men—under Brigadier General Frederick Steele. At Friars Point, Sherman learned troubling news. Twenty-five men claiming to be sole survivors from the Union depot at Holly Springs had escaped to Memphis saying the big supply depot had fallen. Sherman wrote to Grant. He did not know, he said, “what faith to put in such a report, but suppose whatever may be the case you will attend to it.” Continuing to be certain that any damage to Grant’s supply lines was intended to stop Federal progress in Mississippi, Sherman was determined not to let that happen. Two days later, in an order to his division commanders, he wrote that the attack on Holly Springs only made their own mission more important.4