No Better Place to Die- The Battle of Stones River

by Peter Cozzens

  Sheridan now confronted three Confederate brigades from his position along the Wilkinson Pike: Manigault and Maney opposite Roberts, Vaughan opposite Schaefer and Greusel. As before, it was not the forces to his front that troubled Sheridan most, but rather those beyond his right, where the patchwork Union line was again crumbling. This time the little Irishman decided to see for himself what was happening to Davis's division. He galloped past Woodruff to Carlin, who with Davis was trying in vain to rally his brigade. The contrast in their behavior under fire surprised the Ohioan: “The calm and cool appearance of Carlin, who at the time was smoking a stumpy pipe, had some effect,” Sheridan noted, “and was in strong contrast to the excited manner of Davis, who seemed overpowered by the disaster that had befallen his command.” But even Carlin's coolness could not stem the retreat—the men simply were too demoralized to turn and fight. A cursory inspection of Carlin's disintegrating line was enough to convince Sheridan that he would have to draw in his right still further. Turning his horse, he retraced the route to his division. What Sheridan saw as he passed Woodruff only added to his dismay. Only seven days in command, Woodruff was just sitting and staring as his men streamed rearward. “There seemed to be no fear, no panic, but a stout indifference, which was unaccountable,” Woodruff recalled. “Officers and men passed to the rear; no words or exhortation could prevent them.” On their heels came the brigades of Wood, Polk, and Johnson, right-wheeling as they neared the Wilkinson Pike.

  Rejoining his command, Sheridan instructed Greusel and Schaefer, whose troops were woefully low on ammunition, to withdraw from the pike and into the cedars just as Polk bore down on them from the west, Johnson in echelon to his left, Wood in line to his right. Greusel, with only the Eighty-eighth Illinois and Twenty-fourth Wisconsin remaining under his direct command, retired into the timber north of the Blanton house. To his left, Schaefer reconstructed his brigade. The Fifteenth Missouri deployed to the left of the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin, and the Forty-fourth Illinois wedged itself into line between the Fifteenth Missouri and one battalion each from the Second Missouri and the Seventy-third Illinois: the second battalion of Missourians was shaken out as brigade skirmishers; the second battalion of the Seventy-third had become separated from the brigade during the withdrawal, to be picked up by Rousseau as his division moved up on Sheridan's right.

  “In falling back, we found the cedar woods so thick, and so filled with rock and caverns and fallen trees, that it was almost impossible to get through it,” remembered one member of the Seventy-third Illinois. “The history of the combat in those dark cedar thickets will never be known. No man could see even the whole of his own regiment,” maintained a veteran of the Thirty-sixth Illinois.9 His observation is still true today. The events of the next two hours remain shrouded in uncertainty: the tangled cedar glades and the smoke of battle obscured the precise movements of units Blue and Gray, resulting in after-action reports that are vague and often contradictory. The final movements of Greusel and Schaefer are speculative; only the final stand of Roberts's brigade can be recreated with certainty. And as for the succession of Confederate attacks against Sheridan's final stronghold by Wood, Polk, Johnson, Manigault, and Anderson, all that can be said without fear of contradiction is that they were launched within minutes of one another, but with an unaccountable lack of coordination.

  S. A. M. Wood, it seems, was the first to encounter Sheridan's salient. Although Wood had entered the timber northeast of the Gresham house supported by Polk on the left and Vaughan on the right, Vaughan's decision to halt behind the ridge near Maney left Wood's flank in the air as he pursued the remnants of Woodruff's brigade across the Wilkinson Pike and into the field west of the Blanton house. Houghtalling's busy gunners, joined by those of Taliaferro and Lieutenant D. Flansburg (leader of a two-gun section from Bush's battery detailed to reinforce Houghtalling), wheeled their pieces and opened on this new target. Wood charged. His Alabamians came within two hundred yards of the guns before a murderous converging fire from Schaefer's brigade and Roberts's Twenty-seventh Illinois stopped them. Left standing in an open field, the Alabamians had no chance against an enemy invisible among sink holes and outcrops, and so Wood ordered them to fall back seventy-five yards to the left of the batteries of J. H. Calvert and Putnam Darden, which Cleburne had called on to silence the Federal artillery. There Wood held on for perhaps an hour. His men kept up a steady fire, digging deeper and deeper into their cartridge boxes until, ammunition exhausted, they left the battle in search of the division ordnance train. “After this,” notes Alexander Stevenson, “there was but little firing for some time; it was the calm—warning of the approaching storm.”10

  This lull, welcome to the exhausted Federals, was not calculated; rather, it was the by-product of confusion among the Confederate commanders. The determined resistance of Sheridan—as fierce as it was unexpected—had splintered the attacking Gray lines, so that now at 9:00 Vaughan, Maney, and Manigault languished in the fields south of the Wilkinson Pike waiting for someone to bring order to the confusion, while Cleburne's brigadiers found themselves suddenly isolated, far in front of the remainder of the Confederate left. Thus exposed, Wood had been mauled. Now Polk, advancing in his stead, faced the same fate as he neared the pike. Hardee's whereabouts were unknown, and Bragg was out of touch with the tactical situation. Only Cleburne was on hand and had the presence of mind to halt the North Carolinian below the pike. While Darden and Calvert kept Houghtalling occupied, orders went out to Bushrod Johnson directing him to realign and advance his command to assist Polk.

  The Tennessean did his best to comply. He marched his brigade by the left flank across the pike and into the cedars northwest of the Blanton house, then eastward up a rock-strewn slope until he reached what he thought was Polk's left. But as he stopped the brigade his skirmish line opened on a file of dark forms that were drifting silently across their front. Thinking he had come up behind Polk rather than on his left, Johnson rode forward and ordered his skirmishers to cease firing. He no sooner had quieted his skirmish line when the rattle of musketry erupted from out beyond his right front, toppling Major J. T. McReynolds, the last field-grade officer in the Thirty-seventh Tennessee. His regiment returned the fire until Johnson withdrew the brigade south of the pike. Although he later reported that a heavy force had been encountered flanking his right, what the Tennessean actually had stumbled upon was Greusel in his final position. Far from trying to turn Johnson's flank, Greusel's weary Bluecoats were merely conserving what little strength—and ammunition—they had left to hold their own line; consequently, little real damage was done Johnson's brigade. In twenty minutes of desultory fighting with a largely invisible foe, only the Thirty-seventh Tennessee suffered significant losses. The Twenty-fifth, occupying the brigade center, did not lose a single man.

  But what of Lucius Polk during all this? Johnson had not found Polk because the North Carolinian, after detaching his two smallest regiments to support Darden and Calvert, had disappeared into the smoke-blanketed cedars to do battle with Schaefer. Johnson drifted past Polk, leaving him to fight Schaefer alone and outnumbered.11

  While Polk and Schaefer sparred among the cedars and limestone outcrops north of the Wilkinson Pike, Manigault belatedly led his brigade against Roberts's stronghold. The situation had changed appreciably since the South Carolinian had convinced Maney to attack Bush's battery. Bush was now posted beside Hescock, on the knoll at the junction of the Wilkinson Pike and McFadden's Lane. Manigault made this new concentration of Federal artillery his objective, sending his Alabamians against the guns and their infantry support, the Twenty-second and Forty-second Illinois, from the south. The Rebels came close, but ultimately the results were the same. “So dense were the cedar bushes in front of the Forty-second Illinois,” remembered one veteran, “that they were not aware of the approach of the enemy until they saw their glistening bayonets a few feet from them.” The ensuing struggle was bitter but brief, as for a third time the Alabamians stumbled
rearward through the cedars.

  If Manigault were to take the guns, he would need help. And so, shortly after 9:00, he rode to the commander of the as yet uncommitted brigade to his right, Brigadier General Patton Anderson. Like Maney, Anderson agreed to help Manigault and his Alabamians. At his command the Forty-fifth Alabama and Twenty-fourth Mississippi left their temporary breastworks and formed on Manigault's right for a second charge from the south. Ten minutes later they too met with a bloody repulse as Houghtalling, Hescock, and Bush combined their fire to rake the entire Confederate line.

  Two attempts to dislodge Bush and Hescock from the flank having failed, Anderson and division commander Jones Withers agreed to apply direct pressure. The forty-three-year-old Tennessean committed his three remaining regiments to take the batteries from the front, “if necessary,” while he moved the Alabama battery of Captain David Waters to their left in support of the attack.

  Lieutenant Colonel J. J. Scales of the Thirtieth Mississippi found the discretionary order to seize the knoll superfluous: “It was impossible indeed at that juncture to move forward without taking it,” he later wrote, adding that “we therefore attempted what I candidly confess, not knowing at the time that I had any support, appeared to me a hopeless undertaking.”

  But Colonel W. F. Brantly, in command of the Thirtieth, felt otherwise, and the Mississippians marched forward. The line unraveled as the regiment trampled through the tangled thicket that lay between it and the guns. Unit integrity was lost, although not a shot had been fired. When the skirmishers came within range of the batteries, it was as if a wire had been tripped, and “every step from this time forth was marked by a terrific shower of grape, canister, and shell,” recalled Scales, who suddenly found himself in command as Colonel Brantly was felled by the concussion of an exploding shell. Bursting shells and falling limbs were claiming Mississippians by the score, and those not struck were beginning to scatter in search of cover, threatening to end the attack before it could be pressed home. Realizing that it would be suicide in such a state of confusion to give up the comparative safety of the thicket for the open field that spread between his regiment and the Federal guns, Scales halted to reform. While his troops dodged shells and dressed ranks, a courier from brigade headquarters brought new instructions: the batteries were to be taken “at all hazards.” Apparently the punishment that Sheridan's gunners were wreaking upon Scales and his Mississippians was enough to convince Anderson that any assault that did not have as its objective the knoll was pointless, as well as suicidal. Satisfied that order had been restored, Scales resumed the advance until his regiment stood poised at the wood's edge. Two hundred yards of open ground, punctuated only by brittle cornstalks and shallow middles between the rows, stood between it and the guns. The Mississippians stepped into view, and the Federal fire doubled in intensity as the Forty-second Illinois, Twenty-first Michigan, and the Eleventh Michigan of Stanley's brigade opened fire in support of the cannoneers.

  Pandemonium followed. As the Mississippians pressed on, slower now, through the corn rows “men fell around on every side like autumn leaves and every foot of soil over which we passed seemed dyed with the life blood of some one or more of the gallant spirits whom I had the honor to command,” wrote Scales. Finally the Butternuts could stand it no longer. Instinctively they fell to the ground, oblivious to Scales's frantic cries of “forward.” The regiment lay frozen, a mere seventy-five yards from the muzzles of Sheridan's artillery. Turning to those nearest him, Scales pleaded for help in making his commands heard. What followed filled the lieutenant colonel with pride and horror:

  Asking several around me to aid in shouting “forward” Private McGregor, Company A, an old man, after doing so at the top of his lungs in vain rushed ahead of the line crying “follow me boys, follow me.” He then roused several officers, shouting “the colonel commands forward,” this was repeated by them, but all lost amidst the deafening thunder around us. To lie there was death to the last man, but my order to retreat repeated again and again met with the same fate, and there lay these noble men and loaded and fired—fought and died as heroically as men ever did and in a manner worthy of the first great cause at stake.

  At long last, by shouting the command to those around him and having them repeat it to the next man and so on down the line, Scales was able to extricate his regiment from the slaughter. Stumbling back across the field and through the cedar thicket to their breastworks, now occupied by A. P. Stewart's brigade, the Mississippians gathered around Scales to rest and regroup. The thinness of their ranks reflected what they had suffered: by nightfall only two hundred remained of the four hundred who had answered roll that morning. Riding through the wood the next day along the route taken by Scales, Bishop Polk was moved to write: “Such evidence of destructive firing as were left on the forest…have rarely, if ever been seen. The timber was torn and crushed.”

  Meanwhile, on the right of the Thirtieth, the Twenty-ninth Mississippi had been dealt a blow equally severe. Its predicament was more troublesome even than that of the Thirtieth, as its path of advance took the regiment under Sheridan and Negley's guns from the moment it left its breastworks. The Bluecoats held their fire as the Thirtieth struggled through the corn rows, following the Mississippians down their cannon barrels and through their rifle sights. At thirty yards the command “fire” rang out, and the Rebel line melted as men dropped to embrace the earth. Young J. E. Robuck of Company A had been irritated by the deep furrows that separated the rows of corn when the charge began—jumping them winded him. Now, trying to escape the hail of bullets, he found them far too shallow. “I would have liked it better had they been four feet deep,” he admitted later. Mercifully the command to retreat was given, and the regiment hurried back to the breastworks. By Robuck's estimate the entire affair lasted just fifteen minutes, during which time two hundred one men fell dead or wounded on one acre of ground.

  The last of Anderson's regiments, the Twenty-seventh Mississippi, fared a little better. While the Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth were being thrown back to the breastworks, Lieutenant Colonel James Autry was able to guide his men out of the field by the left flank and into the protective cover of a wood, where they fell in alongside the Twenty-fourth Mississippi, before he was shot through the head.12

  As the last of the attackers retreated out of range, the thickets and fields on Roberts's front again fell silent, the stillness broken only by the groans of the wounded. His brigade and Hescock and Bush's gunners were the fulcrum of the Federal defense. With Greusel and Schaefer they had fought seven Confederate brigades—almost half of all Southern units on the west side of Stones River—to a standstill in ninety minutes of desperate combat. Some later would call it the most determined stand of the entire war. Aging veterans would write with pride of the part they had played in the “struggle in the cedars.” But for the moment, as they reached into their boxes to remove their final cartridge and searched those of the dead for more, many of Roberts's Bluecoats must have wondered if the next fight would be their last.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ROSECRANS RALLIES THE RIGHT

  THE muffled, faraway rattle of gunfire greeted the men of the Left Wing as they prepared to wade Stones River. At first, no one attached any importance to the clatter: after all, McCook had been fighting his way into position since the day before, and the plan of battle called for him to receive the attack of the enemy. Confident that McCook could contain the Rebels, Crittenden told Van Cleve to begin crossing as ordered at 7:00 A.M. Sam Beatty forded without incident and deployed along the east bank. Price followed. But as Colonel James Fyffe waited his turn and Hascall herded his own regiments into column, the firing drew suddenly nearer and heavier. The crossing continued, but now “the most terrible state of suspense pervaded the entire left,” recalled Hascall, “as it became more and more evident that the right was being driven rapidly back on us.” Lieutenant John Yaryan of Wood's staff reached the same conclusion: “The noise of battle was nearing too ra
pidly. McCook is certainly not going to hold the enemy in his front three hours at this rate. Not only did the sound travel too rapidly, but it broke out too much to the north and curled around to our rear with infernal speed and intensity. Men looked at each other for an explanation that each one knew for himself but dreaded to speak.”1

  Although his soldiers feared the worst, the approaching thunder initially left Rosecrans unmoved. The Ohioan's lack of concern was a consequence of poor reporting by McCook's staff. The first courier from the troubled right had told the commanding general only that McCook was “heavily pressed and needed assistance”; he said nothing of the collapse of Willich and Kirk. Lacking this information, Rosecrans merely sent the officer on his way with an empty admonition to McCook to “hold his ground obstinately.” A second staff officer, however, had the good sense to render an account of Johnson's defeat. It was “a fact that was but too manifest,” Rosecrans conceded, “by the rapid movement of the noise of battle toward the north.”

  This second report threw Rosecrans into one of his famed fits of nervous hyperactivity. He would remain this way until dusk, and from his agitation came a flood of orders, far too many, Sheridan and Crittenden thought, for troops struggling for survival to carry out. Rosecrans directed brigades, regiments, companies, any body of men he could admonish into his ragtag line. Sometimes his orders countermanded the efforts of subordinates trying to piece together their shattered units. Rosecrans would meet a brigadier, bark out a command, ride a few hundred feet, spot a regimental commander, then order him elsewhere. Such meddling only added to the prevailing confusion. His frenzy completely overcame his better judgment. Without regard for his safety, Rosecrans rode repeatedly to the muzzles of his frontline units and often beyond. (Perhaps he reasoned that, should the army be crushed, it would be better to be a fallen hero than a living scapegoat.) But whatever the wisdom of a commanding general exposing himself to direct individual brigades and regiments, it must be conceded that Rosecrans's presence helped restore the morale of those around him at a moment of supreme crisis. Numerous letters after the battle attest to this, and most men offered only their highest praise for a commander willing to share the risks of combat with them. Sergeant Henry Freeman of the Pioneer Brigade expressed the prevailing feeling: “The crisis seemed to rouse his every energy, and he appeared the embodiment of strength, courage, coolness, and determination as he directed the organization of his new line.” Recalled a member of the Seventy-fourth Illinois: “The men, reassured by their leader's serenity, felt that he was the man for the hour, and could be observed scanning eagerly their general's face, as if to read in its quiet lines whose plans which wrought success.” Not all wrote such hyperbole. The more discerning, peering beneath the veneer, saw Rosecrans's actions for what they were: the groping to do something, anything, of a man too stunned to seize control of events. Reflecting on the battle years later, the historian of the Forty-first Ohio wrote: “At Stone River…Rosecrans in person put the Forty-first in position at one time. This was while the hazard of the day was still undecided, and when the ablest commander might well have been overburdened with weightier affairs than posting a single regiment, and that for a duty not the most important conceivable. He failed to produce an impression as one who grasped the whole momentous situation with the hand of a master.”2