Fortunately for the army, Rosecrans issued a number of timely orders before succumbing to his anxiety, orders second only to Sheridan's stand in their impact on the outcome of the battle.
Thomas received the first order. Through him, Rosecrans directed Rousseau's three brigades, then bivouacked in a grove midway between army headquarters and the Round Forest, into the cedars to sustain Sheridan's exposed right. Next, he commanded Crittenden to suspend Van Cleve's crossing and to instead deploy Price behind McFadden's Ford while retaining Fyffe and Sam Beatty in reserve along the railroad for deployment as needed.
No sooner had Rosecrans issued these instructions than a rabble of dazed infantry stumbled out of the cedars west of the turnpike; a most disgraceful scene, recounted Yaryan: “Soon fugitives and stragglers emerged from the cedars in full view, and came toward us on the run, followed by confused masses of panic-stricken troops firing their muskets in the air, or back in the faces of their comrades, following them.”
With the collapse of McCook now painfully evident, Rosecrans abandoned any hope of retaining a reserve and instead mustered every available unit to piece together a new front line west of the Nashville Turnpike. Van Cleve's wet and shivering infantry, tramping toward the railroad, suddenly found themselves running into the cedars to extend Rousseau's right, and Hascall's idle brigade received orders to march up the turnpike as far as army headquarters, then turn to the southwest and press forward with Van Cleve until Rebels were encountered. The ever-present Rosecrans issued Harker similar instructions in person.
Beatty, Fyffe, and Harker swung north through a growing throng of wagons and demoralized troops. Despite the congestion they eventually reached their destination. Not so Hascall. Starting last, his men found the way blocked after moving just two hundred yards. A nightmare of confusion lay before them: “Shot and shell from the Rebel batteries were plowing up the ground all around us,” recalled a veteran, “and wagons, teams, ambulances were flying about seeking places of safety.” Unable to advance, Hascall likewise sought a place of safety, placing his brigade behind the Round Forest in reserve—a wise decision, as his command would prove indispensable in repelling a series of afternoon assaults against the wooded salient.
Rosecrans's next decision was his wisest of the day as well. Aware that his patchwork line could not hold indefinitely and that a Confederate drive against the turnpike itself was likely, he placed Morton's Pioneer Brigade and Captain James Stokes's Chicago Board of Trade Battery on a commanding rise near army headquarters. From there, the Chicagoans could train their guns on any Confederates attempting to cross the eight hundred yards of open ground between the eastern edge of the cedars and the turnpike.
To stem the flow of demoralized soldiers up the turnpike and out of the battle, Rosecrans directed Lieutenant Colonel John Parkhurst to form a stragglers’ line north of headquarters with his Ninth Michigan Infantry. As commander of Thomas's provost guard, Parkhurst was experienced in collecting skulkers, and so took the assignment philosophically; until, that is, he saw the magnitude of his task. A leaderless transportation train, its drivers “in the most rapid retreat, throwing away their arms and accouterments, and apparently in the most frightful state of mind, crying ‘We are all lost,’” nearly trampled Parkhurst's men before he was able to deploy them astride the turnpike on the north side of Overall Creek. Once formed, they netted several hundred cavalrymen, seven artillery pieces, and two regiments of infantry in a matter of minutes. With these, Parkhurst recrossed the creek and shook out his stragglers’ line behind army headquarters as ordered.3
Meanwhile, to the west, Rousseau's division had joined the fray. “The ground was new and unknown to us,” wrote Rousseau, “the woods were almost impassable to infantry.” Still, by 9:30 A.M. his men had joined Sheridan's right in good order, Colonel John Beatty's brigade touching Greusel's flank and fronting southwest, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver Shephard's seven battalions of regular infantry falling in on Beatty's right, and Colonel Benjamin Scribner's five-regiment brigade coming to rest in line of battle one hundred yards to the rear. Now in position, Rousseau's men lost no time in preparing for the enemy. Skirmishers disappeared into the cedars, fallen trees became breastworks, and blue forms scrambled for cover as the Confederates, now only a few hundred yards away, closed rapidly.4
The Rebels were showing signs of life on Sheridan's front as well. His piecemeal assaults having accomplished nothing, Patton Anderson now called upon Brigadier General Alexander Stewart, whose brigade occupied the earthworks the Mississippians had vacated, to commit two regiments in support of a second run at the Yankees. Stewart refused. A talented officer who would rise to corps command before the war's end, Stewart had no intention of repeating Anderson's mistake; rather, after conferring with Withers, he chose to throw his entire brigade simultaneously against the Federals.
Stewart's thoughtful decision spelled the end of Sheridan's stronghold. Within minutes of this final attack Roberts was dead; just moments after assuming brigade command, Colonel F. A. Harrington of the Twenty-seventh Illinois died instantly as a shell fragment tore away his jaw; and, after watching nearly all of his artillery horses fall, Captain Houghtalling went down, severely wounded.
The Federals may have overcome the loss of their officers, but they could not fight without cartridges. “There was no sign of faltering with the men,” Sheridan would later boast, “the only cry being for more ammunition, which unfortunately could not be supplied.” And as it could not be supplied, Sheridan prepared to withdraw. He began by riding to the heavily engaged Forty-second Illinois and summarizing the division's plight to its colonel: the division—or more correctly what remained of it—was nearly surrounded, the ammunition train was gone, and there was no hope of resupply. In short, it was time to leave. Sheridan pointed over his shoulder toward the northeast, and the Forty-second backed out of the fight. The Twenty-second Illinois followed.
From across the field northwest of the Harding house, Maney and Manigault watched the Illinoisans disappear into the timbers north of the Wilkinson Pike. Ben Cheatham saw them go too and decided to follow. As Sam Watkins recalled: “The impression that General Frank Cheatham made upon my mind, leading the charge on the Wilkinson Pike, I will never forget. I saw either victory or death written on his face. When I saw him leading our brigade…I felt sorry for him, he seemed so earnest and concerned, and as he was passing me I said, ‘Well, General, if you are determined to die, I'll die with you.’ Then it was that I saw the power of one man, born to command, over a multitude of men then almost routed and demoralized.”
Watkins's narrative makes good reading, but it is as far from the truth as is his mistaking Cheatham's drunkenness for courage and clarity of thought. In reality, by the time Cheatham reorganized his command (placing Manigault on Maney's left) and led it—or reeled alongside it—across the pike, only dead and wounded Federals remained to greet him. Meddling in the affairs of Sheridan, his most capable division commander, McCook had reappeared at the front long enough to order Greusel to break contact and fall back to the Nashville Turnpike. Greusel's ill-timed withdrawal allowed Lucius Polk to completely overrun Houghtalling's battery, and all six guns fell to the Arkansans and Tennesseans. With their right now in the air, the Twenty-seventh and Fifty-first Illinois fell back, dragging Hescock's battery and all but two of Bush's guns with them. After covering the retreat of Bradley (now in command of Roberts's brigade), Schaefer broke contact and turned northward at 10:45.
“I cannot remember now or ever seeing more dead men and horses and captured cannon, all jumbled together,” recalled Watkins as he stood at the center of what had been Roberts's final position. But Watkins's horror was fleeting. Noticing a dead Yankee colonel nearby (perhaps Harrington), Watkins's gaze was drawn to the officer's fine riding boots. The bitter cold stung more than his conscience, and so, taking hold of a foot, Watkins tugged at the boot. Midway through his labors, Watkins happened to glance at the colonel's face. He “had his eyes wide op
en, and seemed to be looking at me. He was stone dead, but I dropped that foot quick. It was my first and last attempt to rob a dead Yankee.”
As horrendous as were Sheridan's losses in officers, men, and equipment, the Confederates had suffered more. Nine Butternut brigades had been thrown against Sheridan at one time or another—only Maney's had emerged with casualties anything less than severe. And beyond the dead and wounded were countless soldiers who, pushed to the limits of their endurance, simply fell out and drifted to the rear. J. E. Robuck of the Twenty-ninth Mississippi, detailed to escort prisoners to a division collection point, ran across one such soldier named, ironically, Joe Coward. Robuck, evidently trying to bait him, asked Coward if he were lost. No, he was not. Adding a bit of poetic advice, perhaps embellished by Robuck, Coward replied: “He who fights and runs away, may live to fight another day; but he who is in battle slain, will never live to fight again.”5
With Sheridan at last defeated, Hardee was able once again to turn his attention to the Nashville Turnpike and the Union rear, blocked only by Rousseau's now isolated division. The task of removing Rousseau fell to McCown, whose units were resting and drawing ammunition near the Gresham house. As Rains's brigade was the strongest, having suffered only a handful of casualties, McCown moved it from the division left to the right, with orders to take Rousseau from the front while Ector and Colonel Robert Harper (in command of McNair's brigade as the latter had taken ill and left the field) drove past his right flank toward the turnpike. Rains responded quickly. He marched his brigade to the edge of the cedars, reformed his regiments so that the Eleventh Tennessee and Twenty-ninth North Carolina traded places, then awaited the order to charge.
McCown's plan for gaining the Union rear, simple in design and seemingly guaranteed success, failed to allow for the generalship of Lovell Rousseau, a citizen soldier who made up in enthusiasm what he lacked in formal military training. In fact, this “natural leader,” as William Shanks styled him, threw himself so ardently into his new calling that, at Stones River, he was already among the most highly regarded generals in the army.
Rousseau's entire life had been one of self-education, and the parallels with Lincoln were not lost to contemporaries. Rousseau too was tall, nearly six-foot two. And, like Lincoln, he was born into poverty, a poverty deepened by his father's death during a cholera epidemic. The sole provider of his family at age fifteen, Rousseau labored by day and, we are told, devoted himself with Lincolnian energy toward self-improvement by night as, with book in hand, he “sat by the log-fire, its blaze his only lamp, and slowly but surely mastered not only the common but the higher branches of English classics.” Having taught himself all he could, Rousseau moved to Michigan to complete his education and obtain a law degree. After a term in the Indiana state legislature and brief volunteer service in Mexico, Rousseau—now a Whig—returned to Kentucky to throw himself against the tide of “Know-Nothingism” that was rising within the party. Stepping between a German immigrant attempting to vote and a mob determined to stop him during the height of Know-Nothing frenzy in Louisville, Rousseau took a bullet in the abdomen. Undaunted, he continued to oppose the Know-Nothings from his sickbed until, when their influence at last subsided and he recovered, an appreciative citizenry elected him to the state legislature. There he became an outspoken critic of secession until his resignation to join the Union army in 1861.
Here at Stones River, amid the tangled thickets west of the Nashville Turnpike, Rousseau realized even before the blow fell that his isolated command could not hope to hold out. As the scattered popping of rifle fire announced the approach of Rains's skirmishers, the Kentuckian wheeled his horse and rode off in search of a fallback position along the turnpike. Encountering Battery A, First Michigan Artillery, as it struggled over limestone outcrops behind Scribner's infantry, Rousseau told Lieutenant George Van Pelt to turn his limbers around and find firing positions near the turnpike.
Lieutenant Alfred Pirtle, Rousseau's ordnance officer, had just parked his train on the high ground between the railroad and the turnpike that today marks the national cemetery when Van Pelt's battery emerged from the timber “at a walk, in perfect order.” Right behind came Roussau. Judging that the battle might soon overtake his train, Pirtle rode forward to help Rousseau place the guns, suggesting that they might replace his vulnerable wagons on what was ideal artillery ground. Rousseau concurred and disappeared into the timber. Pirtle led Van Pelt up the slope, placed his guns where they could sweep the four hundred yards of open field west of the turnpike, then quickly moved his wagons into a small hollow behind the knoll.
Rousseau, meanwhile, had returned to find his line already engaged. Thanks to poor communications within the brigade, Shephard's right battalions (First Battalion, Fifteenth United States Infantry, and First Battalion, Sixteenth United States Infantry) had missed the order to halt and instead continued deeper into the woods, enticed by Rebels clad in Union blue. According to Captain Jessee Fulmer of the Fifteenth United States, the Confederates, who “feigned to be us,” led his skirmishers to within a few yards of their main body. A spattering of fire grew to a sudden crescendo. The deception succeeded. The skirmishers collapsed on the battalion line, and Captain Fulmer, noticing that the Eleventh Tennessee had skirted past his right, withdrew his unit after firing just one volley. The Sixteenth fared a little better. Sheltered behind a limestone outcrop, Captain Robert Crofton's regulars challenged the advancing Twenty-ninth North Carolina to what that regiment's commander called “the struggle of the day.” Crofton contested the first seventy-five yards inch by inch, and his men even halted the North Carolinians momentarily. But the hasty retreat of the Fifteenth left him alone, and Crofton was compelled to withdraw his battalion by the right of companies.6
Crofton had been more isolated than he thought. Rousseau, after posting Van Pelt's battery, had decided to deploy his entire division along the high ground near the turnpike. As Shephard's remaining battalions were not engaged when Rousseau returned to the front, the Kentuckian ordered them to retire with Lieutenant Francis Guenther's Battery H, Fifth United States Artillery, to join Van Pelt. The Second and Thirty-third Ohio, meanwhile, had withdrawn to support Van Pelt—apparently at Rousseau's command, although he makes no mention of it in his report of the battle. Left with only three regiments, Scribner passed a worrisome twenty minutes until word came for these to be withdrawn as well.
Lieutenant Pirtle was surprised at the disorder of Scribner's retreat, particularly as the men had not been engaged: “Across the cotton field a few men straggled in leisurely fashion toward the rear; an ambulance came into view; a squad of soldiers moved rather rapidly from the front; I saw more unhurt men every moment; it looked badly to me as the crowd grew larger and larger; a color-bearer with the colors thrown carelessly over his shoulder moved to the rear, and the space was filled with an unorganized mob, so numerous that I thought I was about to see another Bull Run.”
Scribner too was mortified by the impression his troops made as they fled across the cotton field, the more so as General Thomas was watching the spectacle from a point near Pirtle's train. Seeing his reputation dissolve with his command, Scribner galloped to join Thomas. His men had not been driven from the cedars, he explained emphatically; rather, they had been ordered out and at his command had dispersed upon entering the field so as to present Rebel sharpshooters a scattered target. Looking over his shoulder, Scribner was relieved to see his brigade rally along the turnpike.
“And now, General, you see they are re-forming,” Scribner added, in case Thomas misinterpreted the obvious. “Have you any further orders?”
“No, re-form on the pike,” replied Thomas.
Had Thomas looked more closely at the drama unfolding along the turnpike, he may have noticed that a third of Rousseau's command was unaccounted for. While Shephard and Scribner reformed under the safety of Van Pelt and Guenther's batteries, John Beatty remained in the cedars, fighting the better part of a Confederate division without
knowing that he fought alone. Beatty's ignorance of the fate of the rest of the division is understandable: his own brigade had formed in a thicket “so dense as to render it impossible to see the length of a regiment.” But there is no satisfactory explanation for Rousseau's failure to inform Beatty of his decision to withdraw. Perhaps hoping to draw attention away from the incident, Rousseau made no mention of it, or of Beatty's subsequent stand, in his report of the battle. For his part, Beatty said only that he last saw his division commander at 9:00, when the Kentuckian enjoined him to hold his line “until hell freezes over.”
No Better Place to Die- The Battle of Stones River Page 17
