No Better Place to Die- The Battle of Stones River

by Peter Cozzens

  At the command of Lovell Rousseau, who happened to be in the area, the Nineteenth Ohio and Ninth Kentucky pursued the Confederates. They spilled across the field, driving the enemy a quarter of a mile before empty cartridge boxes forced them to halt. At that point Beatty again took charge of his brigade. He directed a passage of lines under fire, a difficult maneuver under the best of circumstances. The Nineteenth Ohio and Ninth Kentucky broke into column, and the second-line regiments—including the green Seventy-ninth Indiana—advanced. The passage went flawlessly, and the brigade resumed its pursuit of Ector, driving him another six hundred yards across a large field and into the timber south of the Widow Burris house.

  Major Manderson was grateful that his regiment had been removed from the front line. During the advance he had had his horse shot out from under him; as he tumbled to the ground, his eyeglasses shattered, leaving the battlefield a blur to the nearsighted Ohioan. After mounting a second horse, Manderson dispatched his servant rearward to retrieve his spare pair of eyeglasses. Manderson waited. The afternoon passed, the fighting sputtered out, and Manderson returned to the unit baggage train to search for the eyeglasses himself. Only then did he learn that his servant and glasses had disappeared in the direction of Nashville.

  Despite the absence of Ector, the Tenth and Eleventh Texas fought well, not withdrawing until Beatty was deep in their rear. Fortunately Captain Morton crossed the turnpike just far enough to occupy the knoll the Texans had abandoned, and so the two regiments escaped unmolested. Battery B, Pennsylvania Light Artillery, Stokes's Chicagoans, and Rosecrans were right behind. The general paused briefly to tell Stokes that “if he could hold that place for one hour, he would save the day.” A flattered Stokes said he would try, and Rosecrans spurred on after Beatty's brigade.1

  Beatty, meanwhile, had been joined on his right by Fyffe, who took position near the Asbury Church at 1:00 P.M. Harker arrived a few minutes later to extend the line northward as far as the Widow Burris house. The three brigades continued the pursuit of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Texas until Van Cleve halted them along the southern boundary of a large sward, within sixty yards of the cedars. The next move belonged to the Confederates.

  They made it sooner than Van Cleve or his lieutenants expected. Where two regiments had melted into the timber, four brigades emerged, scattering the Federal skirmishers and startling the frontline regiments. “We received such a Southern greeting as we had never before experienced, not even in the bloody forests of Shiloh,” remembered a member of Fyffe's staff. The greeting came courtesy of Pat Cleburne. Cleburne had shattered Davis and pried loose Sheridan. Now he was after Van Cleve. “My orders,” he wrote, “frequently received from General Hardee during the day, being to push the enemy…I did not halt the division or lose any time in rectifying distances or alignments.”

  Cleburne's line engulfed Van Cleve and Harker. Lucius Polk confronted Beatty, Vaughan stood opposite Fyffe, Bushrod Johnson faced Harker, and Liddell lapped his right. The Warren Light Artillery unlimbered in a cornfield east of the Asbury Church and opened a devastating fire on Harker's flank. Harker panicked. Without consulting Van Cleve or notifying Fyffe, he marched his brigade by the right flank to the northwestern slope of the Widow Burris house ridge. “The position selected proved a most fortunate one,” Harker wrote later. For Harker, perhaps; for Fyffe, it was disastrous. As Vaughan neared his line, Fyffe looked with horror on the gap Harker's rash maneuver had created: if nothing were done to close it, Vaughan's left regiments would march into it and turn his flank. Fyffe hurried three messengers to Harker with the same plea: Close the breach. The Stars and Bars drew nearer. Harker replied merely that he too was threatened on his right and therefore could not return to his earlier position. The enemy was within range. On his own now, Fyffe instructed Lieutenant Colonel George Dick to wheel the Eighty-sixth Indiana to the right to secure the flank. Before Dick could act, Vaughan was on top of him. The fight was brief. As Fyffe had feared, within minutes the Forty-fourth Indiana was outflanked. Moments later the Eighty-sixth fragmented into squads: in their haste to reach the turnpike the Hoosiers abandoned their colors, and ninety-nine men fell prisoner.2

  Rosecrans was at the timber's edge, redeploying Van Cleve and Harker's regiments as they reeled across the field. He placed the Ninth and Eleventh Kentucky on the right of the Pioneer Brigade, which—along with Stokes's gunners and Rousseau's massed batteries—had just repelled a charge by Harper over the same ground stained red by Rains and Ector. Fyffe's Thirteenth Ohio and Eighty-sixth Indiana rallied on the Kentuckians’ right, and the Fifty-ninth Ohio remained on the ridge out in front. Beatty's remaining regiments fell in next; on their right Rosecrans placed the Fifty-first Ohio and the Thirteenth Michigan. At that moment Colonel Luther Bradley appeared at the head of the Fifty-first and Twenty-seventh Illinois, in search of ammunition after their long ordeal in the cedars that morning. Rosecrans diverted them into his patchwork line; to Bradley's protest that he needed ammunition, the general replied that it was a desperate moment and they must go forward, with or without ammunition.3

  The situation appeared desperate indeed. As the sun sank beneath the horizon and the chill of a winter's eve set in, Cleburne's seemingly invincible veterans drove toward the Nashville Turnpike and the Union rear. Cleburne's lieutenants were confident of success. So certain was St. John Liddell of the outcome that he paused at the Widow Burris house to chat with Union surgeons. Liddell's frame of mind had improved considerably since his encounter with Surgeon Doolittle that morning. His son was not dead as Liddell had been led to believe, and a trusted staff officer had pulled him off the field and seen him safely to the rear in an ambulance. Liddell this time was happy to accommodate the Federal doctors who begged his protection from prowling Confederate skulkers. He told the chief surgeon to chalk his name on the wall and claim for him the hospital. Then, recalled Liddell, the unbelievable happened: “While this was occurring, which was in an incredibly short space of time, I discovered our lines breaking rapidly to the rear, to head off the stragglers and check the retreat, not knowing what was the cause of this sudden movement. On halting and rallying the stragglers, I found that they were General Johnson's men, who were passing in rear of my line, and were retreating toward my position, on the left.”

  Liddell stemmed their route, realigned them, then galloped to Johnson to demand an explanation for the miserable performance of the Tennessean's command. Johnson had none. Dumbfounded, he simply pointed to a neck of wood where Liddell's equally demoralized brigade lay cowering. Johnson later wrote of his shock: “The movement was to me totally unexpected, and I have yet to learn that there exists a cause commensurate with the demoralization that ensued. At the moment in which I felt the utmost confidence in the success of our arms I was almost run over by our retreating troops. I contended with the tide step by step, but made no impression on the retreating columns.”

  What had gone wrong? Why did Cleburne's division crack just as it reached its final objective? The reports of brigade and regimental commanders offer no answer: each blames the other for giving way first. Evidence suggests that Vaughan wavered after taking only a few ragged volleys. And when Bradley's two weary regiments counterattacked with empty cartridge boxes, Vaughan's brigade disintegrated. Polk and Johnson may have held on longer. George Blakemore, on leave from duties with the garrison at Charleston, South Carolina, witnessed their effort to seize the turnpike from atop a knoll near the Widow Burris house. “Our boys charged repeatedly to capture the annoying guns,” he wrote, “but were each time forced back in confusion.” Nevertheless their collapse, when it came, was as irredeemable as it was unexpected. Colonel D. C. Govan, acting brigade commander during Liddell's untimely visit to the Union hospital at the Widow Burris house, had halted the brigade a few hundred yards behind Johnson while a staff officer was dispatched to satisfy his regimental commanders’ cries for ammunition. Govan joined his subordinates in conversation and awaited the return of his staff officer. To the h
orror of all, Johnson's Tennesseans came running back in disorder, and their panic threw Liddell's ranks into confusion. Major W. F. Douglas of the Sixth Arkansas was surprised to see them, as the gunfire along the turnpike had seemed light; Lieutenant Colonel John Murray of the Fifth Arkansas was furious, calling the retreat “disorderly and disgraceful.” Govan waited until the demoralized Tennesseans cleared his lines, then followed them.

  Pat Cleburne offered perhaps the best explanation for the defeat of his men when they appeared to be on the brink of victory. Simple exhaustion and not Yankee bullets had turned the tide: “It was…after 3 o'clock; my men had had little or no rest the night before; they had been fighting since dawn, without relief, food, or water; they were comparatively without the support of artillery, for the advance had been too rapid to enable my single battery to get into position and answer the enemy; their ammunition was again nearly exhausted and our ordnance trains could not follow.”

  Afterwards, Hardee would complain bitterly of the absence of reinforcements at this, the critical moment of the battle. The time Cleburne expended breaking off the pursuit of Rousseau and regrouping prior to attacking Harker and Van Cleve had been excessive but, without fresh units to replace him, unavoidable, reasoned Hardee. It was this delay, he believed, that allowed Rosecrans to patch together a final defensive line near the turnpike.4

  Hardee's analysis is sound, his criticism justified. To several requests for reinforcements, Bragg responded that none were available. By 3:00 P.M. this was true: Bragg had committed them in a reckless attempt to break the Union salient that had developed around a small copse along the railroad. For four hours this little wood obsessed Bragg, and his obsession cost him the battle.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WHIRLWIND IN THE ROUND FOREST

  WILLIAM Babcock Hazen was a soldier's soldier. The army was his life—before, during, and after the war. A boyhood friend of James Garfield and a West Point graduate, Hazen had his first taste of combat chasing Commanches in Texas. There, in 1859, he took a wound that left him on sick leave until the outbreak of the war. Given command of the Forty-first Ohio in October 1861, Hazen went on to distinguish himself in every major action of the Army of the Cumberland, and before the war ended he would earn every brevet through major general in the regular service. After the war, Hazen followed the Germans as an observer during the Franco-Prussian War and later became the U.S. Army's chief signal officer.

  Although still a colonel, Hazen at Stones River was among the most experienced and capable commanders in the army. The battle would only add to his reputation, as it fell to him to defend what was to become the most fiercely contested spot on the entire field—a copse of cedar and oak known to posterity as the Round Forest.

  A singularly unimpressive bit of timber, the Round Forest at its highest lay only three feet above the fields of cotton and winter wheat that encircled it. From the southeast the charred remains of the Cowan farm, resting on an elevation midway between the lines, dominated it completely. The Round Forest became critical to the Union defenses only through a tactical error.

  It took Hazen's division commander, John Palmer, until the morning of the thirty-first to recognize the importance of the Cowan farm and the vulnerability of his own brigades, particularly Hazen's, which was deployed in the field between the forest (then held by Colonel George Wagner) and the farm. Hazen described the position as “utterly untenable…being commanded by ground in all directions with covers of wood, embankment, and palisading at good musket range in front, right, and left.”

  As the Confederates to his front showed no inclination to attack, Palmer at 8:00 A.M. set his brigades in motion toward the Cowan farm. Negley had agreed to advance with him, but all that emerged from the timber beyond Cruft's right was the echo of heavy firing. Riding down McFadden's Lane, Palmer discovered that Negley, instead of advancing, had retired his lines in response to Cheatham's attack against Sheridan. Staff officers rode at once to halt Cruft and Hazen.

  Palmer returned to find his subordinates awaiting orders, their units having covered just one hundred yards. Palmer directed Cruft to retrace his steps into the timber, a movement he accomplished rapidly and in good order. Matters were more complicated on Hazen's front. Wagner had been compelled to pull three of his four regiments out of the Round Forest to extend his line to Stones River and close the gap made by Harker's departure. But in filling the breach on his left, Wagner opened a larger and potentially more dangerous one on his right. Palmer ordered Hazen to fill it. Leaving the Ninth Indiana south of the turnpike, the Ohioan led the remainder of his command into the forest. Colonel Walter Whitaker and his Sixth Kentucky formed line of battle astride the turnpike. The One Hundred Tenth Illinois—another green three-year unit mustered in that summer—settled into the wood itself behind Captain Dan Cockerhill's Battery F, First Ohio Artillery. The Forty-first Ohio rounded out the line in support of the Tenth Indiana Artillery, left behind by Wagner to shore up Hazen's defenses.1

  Hazen's men fell out to gather logs and rocks for breastworks. Just as quickly they picked up their rifles and fell back in. Scattered firing from the picket line announced the first challenge to the Round Forest salient.

  “They moved forward in splended style,” Colonel Thomas Sedgewick of the Second Kentucky wrote of the Confederate advance. Brigadier General James Chalmers's two thousand Mississippians may have looked impressive as they passed the Cowan farm, but it is unlikely that they entertained much hope of success. Not only was the brigade fated to cross eight hundred yards of open ground in full view of the enemy, but Chalmers's right-flank regiment, the Forty-fourth Mississippi, went into action virtually unarmed. According to Major J. O. Thompson, the brigade ordnance officer had gathered all the rifles in Thompson's command five days earlier for redistribution among the other regiments of the brigade. Two days later, he returned with several wagonloads of what Thompson derided as “refuse guns.” Inspecting them, Thompson was mortified: “Many of these guns were worthless—some being bent, some cocked could not be pulled down, some whose hammers had to be carried in the men's pockets until time to commence firing, others so foul as to render it impossible to ram home the cartridge, many without ramrods and only one bayonet in the lot. Even of these poor arms there was not a sufficiency and after every exertion on my part to procure arms, one half of the regiment moved out with no other resemblance to a gun than such sticks as they could gather.”

  The majority of Chalmers's brigade swung south of the Cowan farm and into the rifle sights of the Second Kentucky and Thirty-first Indiana. A few well-aimed volleys from behind boulders and rail fences sent the Mississippians reeling over the ridge and out of sight. Almost immediately the Stars and Bars reappeared above the ridge, and Chalmers led his men through the cotton and winter wheat to within fifty yards of the Federals. The Confederates held on longer this time and paid the price. For thirty minutes they stood in the open, exchanging volleys with the six hundred men of Cruft's front line. The Rebels fell in windrows. The ground in front of the Thirty-first Indiana was so heavily blanketed with dead and wounded that it was later labeled the “Mississippi Half-Acre.” Among the wounded was Chalmers. Struck in the head by a shell fragment, the thirty-one-year-old attorney was carried from the field, bleeding and unconscious. Chalmers's staff failed to inform the next ranking officer, Colonel T. W. White, of the Virginian's wound, and so the brigade fell back to its rifle pits in leaderless disorder.

  But not all the Mississippians quit the field. The brigade had split as it negotiated the outbuildings of the Cowan farm: while most followed Chalmers, the Ninth Mississippi and Thompson's Forty-fourth drifted north. Although the Ninth remained near the farm, the Forty-fourth continued on to within two hundred yards of the Forty-first Ohio and the Round Forest, stopping on a small rise that commanded the Union lines. After clearing away the Federal skirmishers, Thompson's men deployed behind what cover they could find, and those with serviceable weapons opened fire on the Ohioans. After an hour
the Forty-first withdrew in search of ammunition, and the Ninth Indiana took their place. This new regiment proved too much for the Mississippians, who crawled behind a small dip in the ground in front of the Hoosiers. Here Thompson and his men remained until sunset, watching as brigade after brigade swept by them in fruitless assaults against the Round Forest.2

  It was 9:30 when the last of Chalmers's units broke contact. No fresh troops appeared to renew the attack, and a lull fell over the field. Grateful for the respite, Cruft and Hazen adjusted their defenses. The former conducted a passage of lines, replacing the Thirty-first Indiana and Second Kentucky with the First Kentucky and Nineteenth Ohio; a few minutes later, Hazen reinserted the Forty-first Ohio into the front line.

  At 10:00 Brigadier General Daniel Donelson led the last uncommitted Confederate brigade on the west side of Stones River into action. Donelson, at sixty-two the oldest troop commander in the army, and his Tennesseans began the day in reserve near Bragg's headquarters, moving forward at 9:00 to occupy the rifle pits abandoned by Chalmers. There they witnessed the Mississippians’ attack on the Round Forest. “It soon became apparent to everyone that Chalmers's brigade was giving way,” noted Lieutenant Colonel John Anderson of the Eighth Tennessee, “for it was with great difficulty that I could keep his men from running over my men; they came running back in squads and companies.” As the last of the Mississippians cleared his front, Donelson gave the order to charge. The command echoed from company to company, the men raised a cheer, and the long Butternut line surged out of the rifle pits.

  Donelson went down in the first volley, his horse shot out from under him. But the old Tennessean was unhurt. Rising to his feet, he led his men into the garden alongside the Cowan farmhouse, where they met scores of stragglers from Chalmers's brigade cowering among the outbuildings and behind the garden fence, squarely in their path. The Mississippians were too frightened to step aside, so the brigade split to keep its alignment: the Sixteenth Tennessee and three companies of the Fifty-first drifted north toward the Round Forest, while the Thirty-eighth, Eighth, and remaining companies of the Fifty-first drove west toward Cruft.