Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

  The plan was for Ord to attack on the morning of September 19, with Rosecrans coming up from the south and west and taking Price’s troops in the flank, and if it had gone according to schedule Price might well have been annihilated. As usually happens with plans of this kind, however, things did not go according to schedule. Grant got word that Rosecrans had been delayed, and told Ord to wait; they would attack when they heard the sound of Rosecrans’s guns, and not before. Rosecrans, meanwhile, gained position a mile or two southwest of Iuka during the afternoon and began to form line of battle; and Price, realizing the trap that was about to be sprung, pulled away from Ord’s front and moved down just before evening to break his way through Rosecrans’s line.

  An uncommonly sharp little battle developed, and some freak of atmospheric conditions perverted the acoustics. Not a sound reached Grant and Ord; and while Rosecrans’s troops were fighting desperately, the column that was to have co-operated with them rested on its arms a few miles away, with Grant and Ord wondering why Rosecrans was not getting into position and opening the battle. Rosecrans had sent a courier with word that he was on the edge of Iuka, but the message did not reach Grant until after nightfall.

  Rosecrans had not actually reached his chosen battle position when Price struck him, and the bulk of the Confederate attack was borne by the Union advance, a brigade of Brigadier General C. S. Hamilton’s division. General Hamilton wrote afterward that he never saw “a hotter or more destructive engagement,” and said that Price’s unaccountable hesitancy in opening the action was all that saved the Federals from defeat, since the delay gave just time enough to get the Federal regiments out of marching column and into line. Men in the 11th Ohio battery, drawn up to repel the anticipated Confederate charge, found the waiting hard to bear. They could see their enemy massed for the attack, and the gunners muttered: “Why in hell can’t we let them have it?” A sergeant complained: “My God, they’re coming right here in the bush and are going to gobble the whole damned caboodle and shooting match of us, and damned quick if we don’t mind, before we strike a damned lick.” Then the shooting started, Hamilton sent frantic messengers back to Rosecrans for reinforcements, and the 11th Ohio battery lost forty-eight men, ending the day with no more than one cannoneer to a gun. Colonel Joe Mower, a giant of a man who was beginning to develop into one of the army’s most gifted combat soldiers, led a brigade forward in a bayonet attack, and when darkness came the line was just held. Rosecrans called a midnight council of his brigade and division commanders, feeling that a fresh Rebel attack at dawn might overwhelm him; he cried bitterly “Where in the name of God is Grant?” and concluded that his only salvation was to make a bayonet charge at the moment of dawn. David Stanley, commanding the first division, remarked glumly: “I feel that I shall be killed tomorrow, but your order shall be obeyed,” and then retired to his blanket for a brief sleep.10

  But with dawn the menace was gone. In his advance on Iuka, Rosecrans had left uncovered one road to the south, and during the night Price used it, getting his army away and then moving west in a forced march to rejoin Van Dorn. The Federals had Iuka, the battle went into the books as a victory, it was no longer possible for Price to get around Grant’s flank and go north toward Kentucky—but his army had not been destroyed, and Grant’s elaborate enveloping movement had failed. It was clear that Price and Van Dorn together would make a new assault, sooner or later, and during the following ten days it became equally obvious that when this attack came it would strike Corinth.

  A fight for Corinth would be Rosecrans’s fight, mostly, and the Army figured that the fight would be in good hands. Rosecrans was big, burly, a devout Roman Catholic who nevertheless had a good command of profane idiom in the heat of battle, a tireless excitable officer who, in the jargon of the time, “looked after his men.” It was recalled fondly that at a regimental inspection held not long after he took command, “Old Rosy” came upon one private soldier whose shoes were badly worn. He demanded why the soldier let himself wear such trashy equipment, and the soldier replied that he had asked for new shoes but had not received them. Raising his voice for all to hear, Rosecrans announced that the man should demand shoes of his first sergeant, go on from there to his company commander and thence, if need be, to regimental, brigade and divisional command; and if he still did not get shoes he was to come to Rosecrans himself. There were plenty of shoes in the warehouse, Rosecrans declaimed, and all hands ought to raise a fuss until the shoes were properly issued. It was told, too, how the new shelter tents, popularly called “pup tents,” had been issued early that fall, and how the men did not like them; in one brigade the men put up derisive signs over their cramped new homes—PUPS FOR SALE … RAT TERRIERS … DOG HOLE NO. 1 … SONS OF BITCHES WITHIN and so on. Rosecrans and his staff came riding through the camp and saw all of this, and the general threw back his head and roared with red-faced laughter. It was known, too, that Rosecrans was certain to appear on the front lines when there was fighting. General Hamilton had complained that the commanding general was hard to find when the battle opened at Iuka, but the men insisted that he always got up where there was shooting and said that the sight of him there, fearless amid flying bullets, steadied them and helped them behave as good soldiers should. An Illinois soldier said that Grant was well-liked and “could get more votes than any other man for commander of the army—always excepting Rosey.”11

  Grant had welcomed Rosecrans’s appointment, and although he was somewhat disillusioned with him for the performance at Iuka—the Rebel army had got away, and for Grant that made the battle very imperfect—he trusted him as a solid fighting man, and when it became clear that the Rebels were going to try to take Corinth Grant was content to leave the defense in Rosecrans’s hands.12

  Corinth was ringed by massive fortifications built during the spring, fieldworks extensive enough to accommodate a large army; these were far too big for the numbers now available, and Grant had had new works built, close to town, far inside of the old works. When October began, Old Rosy was planted here, with something more than twenty thousand men, and when Van Dorn and Price led an army of approximately equal size down from the northwest the Federals were ready.

  They needed to be ready, because defeat at Corinth would in all probability cost the Union all of West Tennessee; and Grant’s army might find itself hastening back to Kentucky, where Buell was painfully maneuvering in the hope of bringing Bragg’s army to battle. Lee’s invasion of Maryland had, by this time, ended in defeat; President Lincoln, taking heart from it, was issuing his preliminary proclamation of emancipation, but to lose West Tennessee while Bragg and Kirby Smith still were on the loose near the Ohio River would be as heavy a blow as the Union cause could easily absorb.

  Grant remained back in the vicinity of Jackson, where he was in relatively close communication with all three segments of his army, and Rosecrans prepared to give battle. He had three divisions in line north and west of the town, with a fourth held in reserve, and his advance skirmish line occupied the old works which Beauregard had built, two miles or more from the inner line. The Confederates showed up on the morning of October 3, Van Dorn’s battle line collided with the Federal skirmishers, and the battle was on.

  It was a hot fight, from the moment it began. The skirmish line put up a stiff resistance, and two of Rosecrans’s four divisions moved up in support. Going forward, they lost contact with each other, and the advancing Confederates got in between them and broke them, inflicting heavy losses and driving the Federals back to the inner line of defense. Rosecrans tried to swing his right around—Hamilton’s division, which had been so heavily engaged at Iuka—to strike the advancing Rebels in the flank, but his orders were poorly worded, Hamilton had to ask for a clarification, and by the time the misunderstanding was straightened out darkness had come and any further fighting would have to wait until the next day. Rosecrans held council with his division commanders, drew his force into a compact semicircle with strong redoubts for anchors, an
d rode the whole length of his front to make sure that all of his troops were where they were supposed to be.

  The day had been hot, and water was scarce. Federal wagons loaded with water barrels went lumbering along the lines during the night, giving drink to exhausted soldiers; fires were not allowed, so no one could cook anything to eat, and the men were too weary to dig entrenchments. Rosecrans himself did not reach his cot at headquarters until after three in the morning, and his sleep was short. At 4:30 the Confederate batteries opened, Union batteries fired in reply, and the battle was renewed. Van Dorn was not able to get his infantry forward as promptly as he had hoped, but by ten o’clock or thereabouts he got things moving and his Confederate brigades came on in a charge which, for a time, looked as if it would drive the Federals all the way to the Tennessee River. One of the stout Union battery positions was lost, recaptured, and then lost again, and the dazed cannoneers who lost their guns said that before they were driven away they had been firing in three different directions at once. Cheering Confederates swept on past the captured battery and got all the way into Corinth, and there was sharp, confused fighting in the streets of the little town. At one time it was rumored that the army’s reserve artillery had been captured, and baggage and commissary trains were hastily driven out of reach. Then some of the beaten Federal regiments rallied; a brigade from Hamilton’s division made a hot counterattack; the Confederates were driven back out of the town and the lost battery was recaptured.

  Bitterest fighting of the day centered around a Federal redoubt known as Battery Robinette, over on the left of the inner defense line. Before the battle the Federals had cut down all of the trees for several hundred yards in front of this place, to give the guns a field of fire, and across the stumps and logs which littered this clearing came a solid mass of Confederates, making an attack which drew postwar tribute from Rosecrans himself: “It was as good fighting on the part of the Confederates as I ever saw.” Rocked back by heavy musket fire, the Southerners huddled in the down timber, keeping up a hot fire of their own; then they sprang up and renewed the advance, and a Union officer watched, fascinated, as a Texas colonel led his men straight up to the battery—“He looked neither right nor left, neither at his own men nor at mine, but with eyes partly closed, like one in a hail storm, was marching slowly and steadily upon us.” This Texas colonel got clear into the battery, and died amidst the guns. Five Confederate color bearers were shot down, and men who could not get over the parapet stayed in the ditch just outside and tried to keep up the fight.

  But the Union fire was too intense. One of the Confederates who tried to hold his ground in the ditch wrote afterward that “it seemed that by holding out my hand I could have caught a dozen bullets.” He and the others got up to run for it, most of them being shot down as they ran—and suddenly the climax of the battle was over, and the men who had charged so furiously were in full retreat. Van Dorn drew his mangled army away, and the Federals, too exhausted to pursue, let them get away unmolested. The battle of Corinth was over.13

  Considering the relatively small size of the armies engaged, it had been one of the sharpest battles of the war. Rosecrans had lost 2500 men, and Confederate losses ran close to 5000, including a substantial number of prisoners. Rosecrans himself had been all over the place, and at the end of the action he had bullet holes in his clothing and blood on his gauntlets, a mounted aide having been shot at his side. Ohio soldiers who defended Battery Robinette said that immediately after the final Confederate repulse Rosecrans rode up to them, took off his hat, and announced that he was baring his head in tribute to brave men. His reputation as a general who liked to get up into the fighting zone had been abundantly justified, and his care for his men was illustrated by the order he issued as soon as the Confederates began their retreat: his troops were to return to their camps, get some sleep, stock up with five days’ rations, and prepare to take up the pursuit the next morning, October 5.14

  It was this last act which displeased General Grant, and which led to a permanent coolness between himself and Rosecrans. Grant was never interested in simply making an enemy army retreat; he always wanted it destroyed, and he had done what he could to make sure that Van Dorn could never use his army again. While the battle was going on Grant had ordered General McPherson, then at Jackson, to pick up four regiments of infantry guarding the railroad line near Jackson and hurry down to Corinth, and McPherson and his improvised brigade reached the town just after the fighting ended on October 4. Meanwhile, Grant had taken steps to cut off Van Dorn’s retreat. To reach his base at Holly Springs, which is sixty-five air-line miles west of Corinth, Van Dorn had to follow poor roads and make several difficult river crossings. Grant had Hurlbut’s division posted at Bolivar, a railroad town some forty-five miles northwest of Corinth, and on the morning of October 4, before the battle at Corinth had been decided, Grant ordered Hurlbut to march cross-country to the town of Pocahontas, on the Memphis and Charleston railroad, and sent Ord down to assume command. By evening of October 4, therefore, it seemed to Grant that with good management Van Dorn and his army should be captured; Ord was in front of him and Rosecrans was close behind, and it should be very hard for him to escape. Grant sent Halleck a confident dispatch: “At this distance everything looks favorable, and I cannot see how the enemy are to escape without losing everything but their small arms.”15

  But nothing went right. Van Dorn had halted for the night at Chewalla, no more than ten miles from Corinth, and Rosecrans moved after him on the morning of October 5, with McPherson in the lead; but the march was poorly handled, there was some mixup about the roads, and the Federals got into a traffic jam at a crossroads which delayed them so badly that by evening they had got no farther than Chewalla, which of course Van Dorn had left early that morning. Ord, meanwhile, had planted himself on the banks of the Hatchie river, squarely across Van Dorn’s line of march, and there he fought a brisk little action with Van Dorn’s advance guard, believing that Rosecrans would at any moment be pitching into the Confederate rear. Rosecrans was too far away, however; Ord was severely wounded in the fighting, and Van Dorn was eventually able to break off the action, march upstream six miles, and make a crossing unopposed. In the end he got away clean, and Rosecrans, picking up Hurlbut’s division, plodded after him. Van Dorn reached Holly Springs in safety, and Grant ordered Rosecrans, who was thirty miles east of Holly Springs, to break off the pursuit and come back to Corinth.

  Rosecrans protested vigorously—so much so that Grant referred the question to Halleck, by telegraph. Halleck told Grant to use his own judgment, but expressed surprise at Grant’s order, suggesting that the chase might well be continued, with the Federal army living off the country, requisitioning supplies as it went along. Grant stuck to his decision, Rosecrans grumpily brought his troops back to Corinth, and the campaign was over.

  Grant’s reasoning was clear, even though the decision he made may not have been one he would have made six months later.

  His original belief had been that Rosecrans and Ord, between them, could catch Van Dorn’s army while it was still in flight and either capture it or scatter it so effectively that it would be practically destroyed. Once Van Dorn got to Holly Springs the case would be very different; there were reinforcements there, and fieldworks, and the Union Army would be compelled to fight a regular battle, on ground of its enemy’s choosing, a long way from its own base. The thing might possibly work, but Grant thought it would be more likely to lead to disaster. It is possible to suspect that the lesson of the Shiloh campaign was on Grant’s mind. Beauregard had not been effectively pressed, when he retreated after that battle; when, at last, he was followed down to Corinth, an entirely new campaign was involved, and the opportunity offered by a disorganized retreat had vanished.

  “An army,” Grant told Halleck, “cannot subsist itself on the country except in forage.” This was an idea which Grant himself would abandon, some months later, but he had not yet learned what could be done by an army th
at boldly cut loose from its base in an area as full of foodstuffs as northern Mississippi. In his wire to Halleck, Grant did make one further point: “If you say so, however, it is not too late yet to go on, and I will join the moving column and go to the farthest extent possible. Rosecrans has been reinforced with everything at hand, even at the risk of this road [the Mobile and Ohio] against raids.”16 In other words, his considered judgment was against the move, but if Halleck wanted it made he would take on the job himself and fight it to a finish.

  However much soreness the incident may have created between Grant and Rosecrans, the administration and the country were satisfied. President Lincoln sent congratulations to Grant, and no one but Grant seems to have been bothered very much by the fact that the Confederates, twice beaten, had been able to get their troops away safely. The Union cause, which had been in such a dire situation in September, was beginning to look much better. Lee’s invasion of Maryland had been defeated, the Confederate blow at Western Tennessee had failed, and now Bragg’s invasion of Kentucky was coming to nothing. On October 8, Bragg and Buell fought a bloody, indecisive battle at Perryville, forty miles southwest of Lexington, and after this fight all of Bragg’s driving energy left him. He had missed his big chance, the Kentuckians had not given him the warm support which he had expected—he commented bitterly that “The people have too many fat cattle and are too well off to fight”17—and now he abandoned his campaign and marched back into Tennessee. Kirby Smith withdrew likewise, and the great Confederate counteroffensive was over.

  If Bragg had woefully disappointed Confederate expectations, Buell had done no better with Northern hopes. The administration believed that Bragg should be followed and roundly beaten and that the old dream of Federal occupation of East Tennessee could at last be realized; and when the methodical Buell showed that he was quite unlikely to fulfill either of these hopes he was finished. On October 24, the War Department relieved him of his command, and Rosecrans—made major general in reward for his victory at Corinth—was named to succeed him.