No Better Place to Die- The Battle of Stones River

by Peter Cozzens

  Breckinridge rode away in disgust. According to one account, he paused to confide in William Preston his doubts: “General Preston, this attack is made against my judgement, and by the special orders of General Bragg. If it should result in disaster, and I be among the slain, I want you to…tell the people that I believed this attack to be very unwise, and tried to prevent it.” Preston makes no mention of the encounter in a lengthy letter of 26 January 1863 to his nephew, William Preston Johnston, in which he airs much of the Army of Tennessee's dirty laundry, so the episode may be the fabrication of one of Bragg's detractors. On the other hand, Preston was an outspoken member of the anti-Bragg clique, so it is conceivable that Breckinridge would choose to confide in him.

  In fairness to Bragg, Major Pickett recalled nothing “invidious or critical” in his instructions to Breckinridge. Pickett agreed with Bragg's conclusion that the Kentuckian's division was the least cut up and thus most able to make an attack and that an assault launched so near dark, if successful, would preclude a Federal counterattack.1

  Breckinridge's return brought his troops to life. Skirmishers moved forward, staff officers crisscrossed the lines carrying orders—everywhere were the unmistakable signs “of a general waking up.” Before long, the Orphans were filing off Wayne's Hill by the right flank to join the remainder of the division.

  Sam Beatty and his brigade commanders watched this flurry of activity closely. The Ohioan suspected trouble long before any Confederate action suggested it and during the morning had requested that Grose's brigade be sent over to reinforce his left. Palmer complied. Grose deployed behind Fyffe, placing the Twenty-fourth Ohio and the Thirty-sixth Indiana behind log breastworks and the Sixth Ohio and the Eighty-fourth Illinois to their rear. Grose's remaining regiment, the Twenty-third Kentucky, advanced to support Fyffe's second line. Beatty also brought the Third Wisconsin Artillery across the river, and they unlimbered in front of Price.

  By noon, reports from his front line confirmed Beatty's suspicions. Price notified him that he had counted fifteen regiments and an undetermined number of guns passing across his front; a few minutes later, Confederate skirmishers opened on Price and Fyffe, leading Beatty to feed Grider's Seventy-ninth Indiana into the front line. At 1:00 P.M. Confederate artillery joined in with a barrage that continued intermittently for two hours.

  Crittenden was keeping Rosecrans apprised of these ominous developments. Apparently having learned from the destruction of the Right Wing not to place undue confidence in his lieutenants (Thomas excepted), Rosecrans moved at once to shore up the left. He pulled Negley's division from the far right and placed it in reserve behind McFadden's Ford. Morton's Pioneer Brigade formed on Negley's left a short time later. Artillery followed. Captain George Swallow's Seventh Indiana Battery, Cockerill's Battery F, First Ohio, and Parson's eight guns unlimbered on a gentle slope overlooking the ford. By 3:00 P.M., there were four brigades—those of Miller, Stanley, Morton, and Cruft—and eighteen guns within supporting distance of Beatty.2

  Actually, for a time it appeared as if any Confederate effort would be directed once again against the Nashville Turnpike—Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad salient. Before dawn, Bishop Polk concentrated five batteries below the Round Forest. The rumble of limbers and caissons escaped the Federals’ notice, and the opening salvo at 8:00 A.M. caught them by surprise. Harker's infantrymen, sandwiched between the Confederate artillery and their own startled gunners, fell immediately to the ground and largely escaped harm. But the artillerymen and battery horses were forced to stand by their pieces and return the fire. Harnessed to caissons and limbers, the horses were an easy mark. Lieutenant George Estep lost so many that, when he tried to withdraw his guns to a less exposed position, he had to leave two pieces behind for want of teams to pull them.

  Captain Cullen Bradley faced an additional, wholly unexpected, threat to the integrity of his command. Captain Stokes, responding to an order to advance his battery to what today is the southeastern edge of the national cemetery and engage Polk's artillery, mistook Bradley's gunners for his target. His four James Rifles unleashed a volley of grape into the backs of the unsuspecting Ohioans, wounding five. For Bradley, anger quickly overcame amazement, and he spurred his horse toward the Chicagoans. Again they fired. Bradley's mount was hit, and animal and rider tumbled. Regaining his balance, Bradley sprinted the last hundred yards, reached the battery just as its gunners were ramming home a third charge, and “by the use of very vigorous English” convinced them to cease fire.

  Fortunately for the Bluecoats, the barrage lasted just thirty minutes. Polk never explained why he ordered it, but his artillery must have welcomed the opportunity to inflict some damage on the Federals after their comparative inactivity on Wednesday.3

  Back on the east bank, events moved toward a violent climax. Shortly after 1:00 P.M., Pegram and his troopers trotted into position on Breckinridge's right. At Wharton's suggestion, the brigade dismounted and formed a skirmish line.

  The infantry, meanwhile, was still struggling into line. What began as an annoying drizzle had by noon turned into a numbing, driving sleet that slapped and blinded the soldiers as they tried to dress ranks and even alignment. It was 3:00 before Colonel Randall Gibson, successor to the wounded Dan Adams, had his brigade up and ready behind the Orphans. William Preston was not even notified of the impending assault until 2:30; as his command was then below the Round Forest on the west bank, it is unlikely that he was in position much before the signal gun sounded at 4:00. When Preston finally did fall in behind Brigadier General Gideon Pillow's brigade, he was disturbed by the spacing between the two waves. Three hundred yards customarily separated regiment- or brigade-sized lines, or waves, in an attack. This spacing insured that the trailing line would be safe from enemy bullets that might sail over the first line, yet near enough to provide effective support. But Preston had been instructed to follow Pillow at a distance of only one hundred fifty yards. This spacing may not have troubled Gibson, whose brigade lay a similar distance behind Hanson, but it alarmed Preston. Even before the attack began, he saw clearly that balls passing over Pillow's line would plough through his ranks and that his men would be unable to reply or maneuver.

  And then there was the presence of Pillow himself. Opportunely or inopportunely, depending on one's opinion of the man, the Tennessean had arrived on the field just an hour earlier. Ambitious, deceitful, mendacious, and—of cardinal importance to the soldiers he was about to lead—incompetent, Pillow was perhaps the last person Breckinridge would have chosen to command a brigade in his division. But the unsavory Tennessee lawyer had parlayed friendships within the government into a brigadier general's commission. A friend and neighbor of President James K. Polk, he had obtained a commission by similar means during the War with Mexico. Pillow accomplished little during that war, except to alienate Winfield Scott, who regarded him as insubordinate. Pillow was doing little better in the Civil War. During the Fort Henry and Fort Donelson campaigns, his vacillation and bungling had contributed substantially to the loss of both posts; in the bargain, he had made a lasting enemy of Leonidas Polk, with whom Pillow differed over the appropriate strategy to pursue in Middle Tennessee. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of these differences, he was a favorite of Bragg. The nearly friendless general was only too pleased to assign Pillow to brigade command on his arrival at headquarters. Whatever his other shortcomings, Pillow was not one to forget a favor: in the months that followed, he testified on behalf of his beleaguered commander, distorting the truth just enough to implicate Breckinridge in the failure of the attack.

  So Breckinridge was stuck with Pillow. To complicate matters, the brigade that the Tennessean rode imperiously forward to command had been assigned to the front line. But the hour of the assault was drawing near, and so no changes were made.

  Other personalities clashed as the seconds ticked away. While awaiting the arrival of Preston's four regiments from the west bank, Breckinridge and Captain Robertson fell into an imp
assioned argument over the proper disposition of divisional and attached artillery batteries. Robertson understood that the attack was to be launched by infantry alone; on the contrary, replied Breckinridge, it would be made by a combination of arms. In asserting his point, the Kentuckian ordered Robertson to insert his batteries between the two waves of infantry. Robertson demurred. Breckinridge then asked him to form behind the second wave and advance with it. Robertson refused: “I…repeated the general's [Bragg's] orders to me, viz, to wait until the infantry had crowned the crest, and then to rush up and occupy it.” Breckinridge relented, allowing Robertson to commit his guns as he saw fit; his own batteries, however, would move behind and simultaneously with the second wave. Robertson agreed that the two batteries under his control would occupy the hill near McFadden's Ford as soon as the infantry cleared it.

  The minutes passed slowly. “The short time seemed long as with strained nerves,” recalled H. B. Clay of Pegram's brigade. “We listened for the signal gun.” With nothing better to do, Ed Porter Thompson of the Orphan Brigade contemplated the ground over which he would be charging: “[It] was an uncleared space, covered, for the most part, with sassafras and other brushwood, and with briars, and a little ahead was another open flat of ground, descending from the bushes, for some distance, then ascending to the line upon which the enemy lay. The general character of the ground along the whole division was undulating and broken by thickets, forest trees and patches of briars.”4

  A little after 3:00, skirmishers threw down the fences to their front. A few minutes before 4:00, the men of the Sixth Kentucky descried the fleshy form of Brigadier General Roger Hanson galloping toward them. Hanson drew up in front of the regiment, accosted its colonel, and—in a stentorian voice that everyone could hear—yelled out: “Colonel, the order is to load, fix bayonets and march through this brushwood. Then charge at double quick to within a hundred yards of the enemy, deliver fire, and go at him with the bayonet.” Hanson relayed the order with more enthusiasm than he felt. When Breckinridge first explained Bragg's plan to him, the thirty-five-year-old Kentuckian had exploded in rage. The order was tantamount to murder, Hanson asserted; to forestall its execution, he would commit murder himself, and Breckinridge and Preston had to restrain him from shooting Bragg.

  Of course the men in ranks knew none of this. Snapping to attention at Colonel Joseph Lewis's command, the troops of the Sixth loaded their rifles and waited. At precisely 4:00 P.M., a single cannon boomed, and “the line seemed to leap forward.”

  The Kentuckians were immediately under fire. “There was nothing to prevent the enemy from observing neatly all of our movements and preparations,” Breckinridge wrote. Just after stepping off, Lot D. Young recalled seeing little white puffs of smoke rise from the Union batteries above McFadden's Ford, followed by “bursting shells that completely drowned the voice of man…plunging and tearing through our columns.” As they marched through the brushwood, Young saw a shell fall in the midst of Company E, just a few yards away: “When I recovered from the shock the sight I witnessed was appalling. Some eighteen or twenty men hurled in every direction.”

  Despite the telltale activity of his skirmishers an hour earlier, Breckinridge's attack, launched with only forty-four minutes of daylight remaining, surprised most Federals. Given the hour, “we now supposed that the attack which we had all day expected would be postponed until daylight the next day,” Colonel Benjamin Grider conceded. Sam Beatty was down by McFadden's Ford with Colonel Fyffe when the Rebel signal gun sounded. A messenger followed with news of the advance, and the two colonels hurried back to their commands. William Erb of the Nineteenth Ohio was about to enjoy his first meal in three days when the call came to fall in. Earlier that afternoon, while resting in a meadow, Erb's attention had been drawn to a spot where a Rebel shell had struck the sod and ricocheted away. The Ohioan decided to look for it. He traced its path to an old barn where, to his delight, he discovered a “fine, fat laying hen” and a brood of eggs. Sweeping the eggs into his forage cap and the hen under his arm, Erb retreated to his regiment amid the cries of hundreds of half-starved soldiers that he “drop that chicken.” A kettle was requisitioned, the bird boiled, and Erb and his messmates began dividing up the meat when the picket line released a volley. “We instantly knew the cause as well as the probable effect,” remembered Erb. The bird returned to the kettle, and the Bluecoats ran to grab their stacked rifles.

  Hanson's Kentuckians were the first to close with the enemy. Aside from a turgid pond, swollen by the heavy rains, that forced the Sixth Kentucky to trail the Second momentarily, the Orphan Brigade encountered no serious obstacles during the first nine hundred yards of its advance; not even the hail of shot and shell had disrupted its “perfect line of battle.” Only one hundred yards now separated them from Price's front line, which remained strangely silent. But the Federals simply were waiting for targets too close to miss. At ninety yards the Thirty-fifth Indiana opened fire, and the Fourth Kentucky wavered. At sixty yards Colonel Richard McClain ordered the men of the Fifty-first Ohio to their feet. Rising from behind a small declivity, the Ohioans stunned the Butternuts with their first volley, and the Second Kentucky shivered. Under orders to fire just one volley and then close with the bayonet, the Kentuckians kept coming, and Price's front line collapsed. As so often happened, retreating troops from frontline regiments threw those of the second line into confusion, and the Twenty-first Kentucky and Ninety-ninth Ohio managed only a few ragged volleys before Price waved them rearward.

  The Orphans had carried the hill at the price of their brigade commander's life. Only minutes earlier, Breckinridge had watched his Orphans, their portly brigadier general in front, raise a cheer and disappear over a rise and into a meadow. Despite his disdain for Bragg's plan, Breckinridge could not contain the admiration he felt for his favorite subordinate. “Look at old Hanson,” he yelled as the Kentuckians marched out of sight. Accompanied by his staff and Major Pickett, who had attached himself to the party to see the attack through, Breckinridge followed the brigade across the briar-laced field. They were within a few yards of Price's abandoned breastworks when they spotted Hanson, lying alone against a fence. A shell fragment had gashed his leg and sliced open the femoral artery. Breckinridge tried vainly to stop the bleeding, and his staff summoned an ambulance. Pickett never forgot the scene: “It was a sight indelibly impressed on my memory—the dying hero, his distinguished friend and commander kneeling by his side holding back the lifeblood…. All this under the fiercest fire of artillery that can be conceived made it ever memorable. The scene passed almost as quick as it takes to write it. General Hanson was promptly moved by the ambulance. Breckinridge was soon as alert and clear-headed as ever.”

  Doctor John Scott, surgeon of the Second Kentucky, applied a tourniquet as the ambulance bounced toward Murfreesboro, and Captain Stephen Chipley maintained pressure above the artery. But the Kentuckian knew the wound was mortal. “Hanson did not utter a groan or speak a complaining word,” recalled Scott. “When I had done the little it was possible to do there, he asked me to leave him…and go to the help of his wounded men.5

  Gideon Pillow's behavior on the field was as craven as Hanson's was heroic. Breckinridge found the Kentuckian dying alongside a fence; he found Pillow cowering behind a tree, very much alive and apparently willing to do whatever was necessary to remain that way. The language Breckinridge used to order him forward can only be imagined.

  Pillow's brigade was fighting well, despite—or perhaps because of—their commander's absence. Colonel Palmer, relegated to command of the Eighteenth Tennessee with the arrival of Pillow, found that the line of defending Federals overlapped his regiment on the right; but, as his Tennesseans already were engaged with the Seventy-ninth Indiana, there was nothing he could do to silence the fire that the Forty-fourth Indiana was pouring into his flank. Lieutenant Colonel F. M. Lavender, following Palmer with the Twentieth Tennessee, ran into the same oblique fire. Screened in front by the Eighteenth
, Lavender was able to swing his unit by the right flank until it faced the troublesome Hoosiers. Lavender ordered his men to take cover and return the fire. As regimental historian William McMurray later wrote, “the slaughter was terrible.” At that moment, Wright rushed forward with his Tennessee battery. He had fired only a few rounds into the Forty-fourth Indiana and Thirteenth Ohio, which lay on the extreme left of Beatty's front line, when they broke contact and fell back. The Thirteenth attempted a stand three hundred yards to the rear, but Wright continued the duel from behind the fence it had abandoned, and Colonel Jarvis reluctantly withdrew his regiment across the river.

  Despite this initial success, the Confederate attack was beginning to unravel, particularly in front of the Seventy-ninth Indiana. There Pillow's left regiments had taken cover soon after striking the Hoosier's line. They were trading volleys with the Bluecoats and apparently getting the better of the exchange, when Preston's supporting line stumbled upon them. At first, the Floridians tried to stand and fire over the heads of their prone countrymen. It was a mistake. This unexpected “fire in the rear greatly alarmed my line,” wrote Pillow, echoing the sentiments of his regimental commanders, “and…my officers expressed the opinion that my men suffered severely from this fire.” Preston's men eventually joined the Tennesseans on the ground, but this was no better: now there was “one line of four deep…exposing both lines to a most destructive fire.” Colonel William Miller of the First and Third Florida Consolidated recognized the dilemma, but was unable to correct it. “The combination of movements caused an intermingling of regiments, which led to no little confusion, separating commands, and, again, the men from their commanders.” Despite the confusion, the weight of numbers told, and after forty minutes the Seventy-ninth Indiana joined the remainder of its brigade in flight across the river.6