Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Grant’s forces were now on the vulnerable side of Vicksburg with means to cross the river. They also had all necessary accessories when, a few days later, another nocturnal run of the Mississippi lost just one of six steamboats, and six of twelve barges passed the gauntlet with cargo completely undamaged. This second lunge, along with wagon freight hauled down the Milliken’s Bend–New Carthage Road, got all Grant’s men and provisions into position to launch their move toward Vicksburg’s back door.39

  When April ended, Grant himself was downriver. At the plantation of a Louisiana family named Perkins, he assessed targets across the Mississippi forty to fifty miles south of Vicksburg, between the town of Grand Gulf and the village of Rodney.

  Grant also ordered the fanning out of diversionary forays to protect his amphibious invasion. Sherman steamed north with 20,000 men to threaten the Haynes Bluff area on the Yazoo River above Vicksburg. A cavalry raid was launched from Grand Junction, Tennessee, through the interior of Mississippi under Grant’s best leader of mounted troops, Colonel Benjamin Grierson, to cut Vicksburg’s eastward rail communications. Grant’s department also lent Rosecrans in Nashville nearly 8,000 troops under Brigadier General Grenville Dodge to disguise a second, even more dangerous rail-cutting raid across northern Alabama under Colonel Abel Streight.40

  With combat looming, Grant had sent Julia home, along with all the children except Fred. On April 28, the day after his forty-first birthday, he wrote her with typical, understated satisfaction that he had “been fretting here” readying an attack on Grand Gulf “with weather, water, and roads all against me. Tomorrow morning at furtherest will see the work commenced.”

  This letter’s preoccupation with a host of domestic details connotes a shrugging, plebeian trust in the gods of battle and Grant’s own grit. He instructed Julia on business she should take care of in St. Louis. He apologized for not writing her sister, Emma; “tell her I think just as much of her as though I wrote every week.” He said he and Fred were soon to “be off in a tug witnessing the naval attack upon the land batteries and the debarkation of troops.” And finally, with little more intensity than if he were informing her when he would be home for dinner, he wrote, “You had better not return to Memphis until you hear of me in Vicksburg.”41

  Sherman’s letters home were more animated on the subject. Sherman could only see Grant’s violation of an elementary West Point axiom. Grant had all but isolated his army. Its resupply was possible only by hazardous runs past Vicksburg’s cannons or by wagons hauled down a dirt road vulnerable to guerrillas and floods; at its lowest points, the route’s surface was just twenty inches above surrounding swamps. And now the army was about to head across the wide Mississippi into a hostile interior, even farther from aid. Nearly two weeks earlier, after watching the boats glide past the Vicksburg guns on April 16, a very troubled Sherman had written his wife that “I tremble for the result” of Grant’s plan. He added, “I look upon the whole thing as one of the most hazardous and desperate moves of this or any other war.”42

  22

  MARCH 4-MAY 3—FORREST IN MIDDLE TENNESSEE AND NORTH ALABAMA

  “Shoot at Everything Blue and Keep Up the Skeer”

  The attack on Dover had been a disaster, and its aftermath was humiliating. Wheeler’s force, without ammunition, had to flee the debacle in freezing weather ahead of Union pursuers.

  Chased by Federals from Fort Henry to the west and Franklin to the southeast, Wheeler’s Confederates hurried almost due south, well west of the direct route. They had to push for a Duck River crossing at Centerville before they could turn east toward Confederate-held Columbia. They barely made it. They had to leave the icy roads and take to fields and woods in some places, then scrounge means of ferrying troops across the flood-swollen Duck. The cold was intense. The current swept away one man testing whether the river was fordable on horseback, and when citizens pulled him—still alive—from the river, his clothes froze on his body within minutes. Along the route, pursuers captured thirty of Forrest’s battle-depleted troop, including two staff members.1

  Forrest set about replenishing and refitting his shattered command. Bragg’s headquarters meanwhile ordered the transfer of a valued Forrest unit—the seven hundred men of Colonel A. A. Russell’s Fourth Alabama—to Wheeler. Two battalions of guerrillas, totaling nine companies, replaced them and, along with two more guerrilla companies, were cobbled together to form the Eleventh Tennessee Cavalry. The consolidation provoked protests so strong within the units that Forrest felt forced to arrest several officers and confine them at Columbia. In keeping with his heavy reliance on inspections, he instituted twice-weekly dress parades. If Bragg was paying attention to any Forrest-connected reports besides Wheeler’s self-serving account of the Dover battle, he should have divined that the Tennessean was far more than an undisciplined irregular; he was in fact Bragg’s best manager of that notoriously lax arm, the cavalry. Extant records for the period show that while the present-and-effective strength of the rest of Bragg’s mounted force was 58 percent of its total number, Forrest’s was 70 percent.2

  Forrest soon received what he had vowed to get on that freezing night at Yellow Creek Tavern: a new commander. Bragg, outnumbered in Middle Tennessee by Rosecrans, had resisted sending more troops from his army to aid Vicksburg, particularly Forrest. As the winter wore on and every Union ploy in Mississippi appeared increasingly blocked, he beseeched western commander Joseph E. Johnston to return or at least replace some of the Army of Tennessee infantry units he had already sent. Instead, Johnston finally ordered Pemberton to dispatch to Middle Tennessee two-thirds of his Mississippi cavalry. It arrived under its checkered major general, Earl Van Dorn, who outranked Forrest militarily and socially.3

  Although he graduated fifty-second in the fifty-six-member West Point class of 1842, Van Dorn was nevertheless a career soldier with a fat prewar resume. Thanks to his gallantry in the Mexican War and against the Comanches, he was a major in the US Army by January 31, 1861, when he resigned to join the Confederacy. But headstrong carelessness dogged his Confederate performance. Sloppy scouting cost his troops the battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas in March 1862. Then, in April, his fixation on his own agenda delayed the arrival of his 15,000 troops east of the Mississippi, too late to aid Generals Albert Sidney Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard at Shiloh. Bad reconnaissance helped defeat him at Corinth in October, after which Jefferson Davis demoted him from commander in Mississippi to chief of cavalry. But before coming north, Van Dorn had rehabilitated his reputation somewhat by wrecking Grant’s Holly Springs supply base in December.4

  Except in their Mississippi roots and fiery touchiness, Forrest and Van Dorn were opposites. Van Dorn was a plantation scion, conceited and highly polished. His family tree bristled with some of the South’s more prominent people, especially such Tennesseans as Presidents Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk and the similarly prominent Donelson family. Van Dorn was a skilled painter, and his drawing room repartee sparkled with quotations from classic poets and philosophers. Brave and dashing, he paid marked attention to other men’s spouses while markedly neglecting his own. His inattention to reconnaissance suggests questionable aptitude for fighting on the Civil War’s mammoth scale. Forrest’s achievements already outshone his new chief’s. Van Dorn’s careless dandyism and Forrest’s rustic obsession with the job at hand hardly figured to bond them.5

  Van Dorn reached Middle Tennessee in late February and set to work covering Bragg’s left flank. Gathering his 6,300 effectives at Spring Hill, he headed north for Union-held Franklin on March 4—and ran into Federals with a hundred supply wagons approaching him on the Franklin Road.The Federals had heard about the Confederate camp at Spring Hill, and, wishing to verify enemy locations in front of his army, General Rosecrans in Nashville had ordered 2,800 infantry, artillery, and cavalry southward from Franklin. They were half of a two-pronged drive, the other being Union troops coming from Murfreesboro.6

  North of Thompson’s Station, a depo
t on the Tennessee & Alabama Railroad four miles above Spring Hill, the appearance of about 1,000 Confederate cavalry and two artillery pieces slowed the Franklin column. Federal Colonel John Coburn deployed his five regiments of infantry and five-gun battery and pushed forward. Artillery exchanges and skirmishing kept up during the afternoon. Concealing most of his force, Van Dorn withdrew behind the station and a nearby rock fence. Dusk fell. Overnight, scouts from each side probed the other’s strength. Coburn’s worried dispatches to Franklin got no reply. He concluded that his orders required him to advance or “show cowardice.” Van Dorn, too, resolved to fight.7

  Coburn pushed farther southward around 8 a.m. of March 5. The terrain, a succession of ridges, impeded vision more than half a mile in any direction except down the roadway. Coburn found Van Dorn’s left-center, General W. H. “Red” Jackson’s division, spread dismounted along hills astride the road. Colonel J. W. Whitfield’s Texas Brigade held Jackson’s left; Brigadier General Frank Armstrong’s Arkansans and Mississippians held his right. Farther right, stretching nearly to a second north-south highway from Franklin to Lewisburg, Van Dorn had put Forrest’s 2,000 troopers and Captain S. L. Freeman’s battery.8

  Forrest was still taking position when Federal artillery opened fire on Jackson. To counter the Union guns, Forrest sent Freeman forward a half mile onto a hill and moved up his dismounted cavalry for support. Freeman began firing. His guns chased the Twenty-second Wisconsin and the Nineteenth Michigan Infantry, along with some cavalry, from behind a stone wall to Forrest’s left front. Freeman’s fire also joined that of the Confederate Second Missouri Battery well to Forrest’s left; together, the Confederate cannons drove two guns of the Eighteenth Ohio from along the road. The Ohioans hurried rearward with the wagon train, which Coburn by now had ordered to return to Franklin. Federal cavalry abandoned a cedar-covered hill to Forrest’s front and joined the wagons and the Ohio guns in retreat.

  Coburn’s left had broken, but his center and right had charged. Hoping to turn Van Dorn’s left, the Federals were nearly to the depot when Confederates rose from behind the rock fence and delivered a volley. The attackers took cover behind the railroad embankment. Van Dorn, seeing resistance melting in Forrest’s front, sent the Tennessean hooking toward the Federal left rear.

  Coburn saw Forrest moving. Now “convinced that we were in the neighborhood of an overwhelming force,” he ordered a withdrawal from the depot.The rest of Coburn’s support elements took that as an excuse to flee. His cavalry “disappeared,” he reported. His staff tried to rally the artillery to cover a retreat, but a skedaddle on his left “took with it the One Hundred Twenty-fourth Ohio, the ambulance train, the ammunition train, and all hope of an orderly retreat or a continued successful resistance.”9

  Coburn’s depot attackers fell back, chased by whooping Confederates. Abandoned by artillery, cavalry, and one regiment of infantry, the remaining Federals—men of the Thirty-third Indiana, Twenty-second Wisconsin, Nineteenth Michigan, and Eighty-fifth Indiana—held on for two more hours. They retreated to another cedar-crowned hill west of the road, where they repelled several Confederate assaults and a hail of artillery fire. They took prisoners, along with the battle flag of General Armstrong’s brigade. But after five total hours of combat, with ammunition running out—and Mississippians gaining their right rear as Forrest charged from behind their left—Coburn became “convinced that a massacre” was in the offing. A climactic assault took Forrest’s men within twenty feet of the Union line, at which point the ammunition-less Federals quit. Van Dorn described Forrest’s charge as “deciding the fate of the day.” Van Dorn reported 357 casualties but captured 1,200 Federals, including Coburn.10

  Three weeks later, Forrest bagged the rest. He had learned that the remainder of Coburn’s force had garrisoned fortifications and a bridge-guarding stockade at Brentwood, equidistant from Franklin and Nashville. With Van Dorn’s approval, he set out for Brentwood on March 24. Commanding there was Lieutenant Colonel Edward Bloodgood of the Twenty-second Wisconsin, who had taken about half of the 378 members of the regiment with him in abandoning Coburn at Thompson’s Station. With him now were also about 270 survivors of the Nineteenth Michigan and Thirty-third and Eighty-fifth Indiana, whose comrades’ valiant stand atop the cedar-topped hill Forrest’s charge had broken three weeks before.

  General Rosecrans would characterize Bloodgood’s resistance as “feeble”; it lasted half an hour. As Bloodgood remembered, Forrest sent in word that he “would cut us to pieces” unless the Federals surrendered. The Confederates had only to stop one escape attempt and ready a general charge before Bloodgood waved the white flag. With just one man killed and four wounded, Bloodgood surrendered the Brentwood works. A single cannon shot produced a similarly hasty capitulation at the bridge blockhouse two miles south.The total haul was some 750 men, a dozen or more wagons of supplies, several ambulances, weapons, and other military and medical goods. The railroad bridge and Bloodgood’s camp were left in ashes.11

  But Forrest did not escape this raid unscathed. Within an hour or so, he had moved his column a few miles back toward a Harpeth River crossing when some six hundred cavalry from Franklin under Brigadier General Clay Smith attacked his rear, which had been delayed while attending wounded. Major William DeMoss, leading the Confederate Tenth Tennessee Cavalry, reported that men from other commands in the rear came running through the column spreading panic. The Tenth broke, and the Federals recaptured some wagons. Smith reported chasing the Confederates for miles. Colonel James Starnes, who had been detached capturing a Union wood-gathering force, heard the firing. He came galloping back and attacked the Federal right flank. A core of officers led by Forrest meanwhile hurried toward the rear of the stampeding column. Forrest cursed his wild-eyed stragglers, gathering them up as he came. One said he waved a flag above his head, roaring, “Fall in, every damned one of you!” With this motley troop, he counterattacked, flanking and routing Federals from behind a stone fence and putting them to flight.12

  It was an embarrassing end to a highly successful foray. Forrest lost and then recaptured some wagons of booty, which he had to burn because, in abandoning them, the Federals had cut the mule teams out of harness and run them off. His pursuit of the Union attackers took the Confederates back to where they could see the tents they had burned at Brentwood. Smith claimed to have killed, wounded, or captured four to five hundred Confederates, but Forrest reported total Confederate casualties of fifty-nine. He did acknowledge that, not knowing whether more Federals were approaching, he departed rapidly with his prisoners.13

  The captures at Thompson’s Station and Brentwood dramatically widened the natural gulf between Forrest and Van Dorn.

  Van Dorn, widely perceived as greedy for glory, became angry over articles in the Chattanooga Rebel giving Forrest the laurels at Thompson’s Station. In an encounter at Van Dorn’s headquarters in late April, the Mississippi aristocrat accused Forrest of prompting his own staff members to write the articles. He also claimed Forrest had disobeyed orders by keeping booty that should have been forwarded to headquarters. Forrest denied both allegations and said he would saber whoever made them. He added that Van Dorn was too ready to credit criticism of him. Van Dorn called him a liar and said now was a good time to settle their differences. He grabbed his sword off the wall.14

  Van Dorn’s claim may have had a partial foundation, but obviously, as usual, he had not done his homework. Forrest, routinely given new and badly armed troops and no equipment, habitually allowed his men their pick of the arms and ammunition they captured. Forrest reported ordering wagons, ambulances, and animals turned in to the quartermaster at Columbia, but at Brentwood his unarmed men “got guns on the field.” Those with inferior arms swapped them for better captured ones, “placing their old guns in the wagons.”The implication was that Forrest expected the inferior arms to be turned in, although he had not personally seen to it.

  Forrest staffers may have written articles about the Thompson�
�s Station battle. He had journalists on his staff. Former Memphis Avalanche proprietor Matthew Gallaway was his assistant adjutant general, and the editor of the Chattanooga Rebel, Henry Watterson, was briefly a Forrest trooper also.15

  Whatever the truth about the Thompson’s Station articles, any man who called Forrest a liar risked his life. Van Dorn saw Forrest’s face flame the dark crimson it took on in battle. Forrest seized his sword and half-drew the blade—then stopped and resheathed the weapon. It was the unpolished plebeian, not the refined aristocrat, who recognized the unpatriotic idiocy of what they were doing. A Van Dorn staff member said Forrest told Van Dorn that he did not fear him but would not fight him. The aide quoted Forrest as observing that it “would never do for two officers of our rank to set such an example to the troops.”16

  Van Dorn soon apologized. He told the staffer, Captain H. F. Starke, that he had gained a higher opinion of Forrest and that the two parted from this latest meeting—their last—on better terms. “Whatever else he is,” Van Dorn said, “the man certainly is no coward.” Van Dorn again had not done his homework. He should have known he was fortunate to still be breathing, a privilege he did not enjoy much longer. Two weeks later, a jealous husband shot him dead.17