The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

  It did not look at all good from the rear, where a nearly mile-long causeway across a stretch of flooded bottomland led to and from a narrow bridge over Tishomingo Creek; “artillery and ambulances and led horses jammed the road,” he observed, and when he reached Brice’s about noon, another mile and a half toward Guntown, he found the cavalry hard pressed, fighting dismounted amid “considerable confusion.” One brigade commander declared flatly that he “would have to fall back unless he received some support,” while the other, according to Sturgis, was “almost demanding to be relieved.” Grierson was more stalwart. Though the rebels were there “in large numbers, with double lines of skirmishers and heavy supports,” he was proud to report that he and his rapid-firing troopers had “succeeded in holding our own and repulsing with great slaughter three distinct and desperate charges.” The sun by now was past the overhead. How much longer he could hang on he did not say, but it could scarcely be for long unless he was reinforced, heavily and soon, by men from the infantry column toiling toward him through the mud and heat. Sturgis reacted promptly. With no further mention of concern about “distressing the troops,” he sent word for McMillen to hurry his three brigades forward and save the day. “Make all haste,” he told him, and followed this with a second urgent message: “Lose no time in coming up.”

  Grierson was wrong in almost everything he said, and Sturgis was fatally wrong in accepting his estimate of the situation. Those three “desperate charges,” for example, had simply been feints, made by Forrest — a great believer in what he called “bulge” — to disguise the fact that his troopers, dismounted and fed piecemeal into the brush-screened line as soon as they came up, were badly outnumbered by those in the two blue brigades, who overlapped him on both flanks and had six pieces of horse artillery in action, unopposed, and four more in reserve. He opened the fight, as he had said he would do, by attacking with Lyon astride the Wire Road, then put Rucker and Johnson in on the left and right, when they arrived, for a second and a third attack to keep the Federals off balance while waiting for Morton’s guns and the rest of his command to complete their marches from Booneville and Rienzi. “Tell Bell to move up fast and fetch all he’s got,” he told a staff major, who rode back to deliver the message.

  It was just past 1 o’clock when this last and largest of his brigades came onto the field, close behind Morton; by which time, true to his schedule, Forrest had the enemy cavalry whipped.

  Convinced, as he said then and later, that he had been “overwhelmed by numbers,” Grierson was asking to have his division taken out of line, “as it was exhausted and well-nigh out of ammunition” for its rapid-firing carbines. McMillen rode up to the crossroads at that point, in advance of his lead brigade, and was dismayed to find that “everything was going to the devil as fast as it possibly could.” Like Sturgis earlier, he threw caution to the winds. Though many of his troops had already collapsed from heat exhaustion on the hurried approach march, and though all were blown and in great distress from the savage midday, mid-June Mississippi sun, he sent peremptory orders for his two front brigades to come up on the double quick and restore the crumbling cavalry line before the rebels overran it.

  They were hurrying to destruction, and hurrying needlessly at that; for just as they came into position, every bit as “tired out” as Forrest had predicted, a lull fell over the crossroad. It was brief, however, and lasted only long enough for the Confederate commander, now that all his troops were on the field, to mount and launch his first real assault of the day. Giving direction of the three brigades on the right to Buford, a Kentucky-born West Pointer two years his senior in age, he went in person to confer with Bell, whose newly arrived brigade comprised the left. This done, he came back to the right, checking his line along the way. In shirtsleeves because of the heat, with his coat laid over the pommel of his saddle, he “looked the very God of War,” one soldier would remember, and as he rode among them on his big sorrel horse, saber in hand, he spoke to the dismounted troopers lying about for some rest in the blackjack thickets. “Get up, men,” he told them. “I have ordered Bell to charge on the left. When you hear his guns, and the bugle sounds, every man must charge, and we will give them hell.” Other things he said, then and later, went unrecorded. “I notice some writers on Forrest say he seldom cursed,” one watcher was to recall. “Well, the fellow who writes that way was not where the 7th Tennessee was that day.… He would curse, then praise and then threaten to shoot us himself, if we were so afraid the Yankees might hit us.”

  Drawing rein at Morton’s position, Forrest told him to double-shot four of his guns with canister and join the charge when the bugle sounded, then keep pace with the front rank as it advanced. Afterwards, the young artillerist, who had celebrated his twenty-first birthday on the field of Chickamauga, told his chief: “You scared me pretty badly when you pushed me up so close to their infantry and left me without protection. I was afraid they might take my guns.” Forrest laughed. “Well, artillery is made to be captured,” he said, “and I wanted to see them take yours.”

  But that was after the third stage ended, two days later; now the second, the main effort, was just beginning, and there was a grim struggle, much of it hand to hand, before the contest reached the climactic point at which Forrest judged the time had come to go all-out. Returning to the left, where he believed the resistance would be stiffest, he put an end to the thirty-minute lull by starting Bell’s advance up the Guntown road. McMillen’s second brigade was posted there, sturdy men from Indiana, Illinois, and Minnesota who, winded though they were from their sprint to reach the field, not only broke the gray attack but launched one of their own, throwing the Tennesseans into such confusion that Forrest had to dismount his escort troopers and lead them into the breach, firing pistols, to stop what had the makings of disaster. Over on the right, Buford too was finding the enemy stubborn, and had all he could do to keep up the pressure along his front. Finally, though, the pressure told. Orders came from Forrest — who fought this, as he did all his battles, “by ear” — that the time had come to “hit ’em on the ee-end.” It was past 4 o’clock by now, and simultaneous attacks, around the flanks and into the rear of the Union left and right, made the whole blue line waver and cave in, first slowly, then with a rush.

  “The retreat or rout began,” in Forrest’s words, or as Sturgis put it: “Order gave way to confusion and confusion to panic.… Everywhere the army now drifted toward the rear, and was soon altogether beyond control.”

  Fleeing past the two-story Brice house at the crossroads, the fugitives sought shelter back up the road they had run down, four hours ago, to reach the battle that now was lost. But conditions there were in some ways worse than those in what had been the front: especially along the causeway through the Tishomingo bottoms and on the railless bridge across the creek, the narrow spout of the funnel-shaped host of panicked men, who, as Sturgis said, “came crowding in like an avalanche from the battlefield.” Morton’s batteries had the range, and their execution was increased by the addition of four Federal guns, captured with their ammunition. Presently a wagon overturned on the high bridge and others quickly piled up behind it, creating what a retreating colonel described as “one indiscriminate mass of artillery, caissons, ambulances, and broken, disordered troops.” Some escaped by leaping into the creek, swollen neck-deep by the rains, and wading to the opposite bank. But there was no safety there either. Though Sturgis had hoped to form a new line on the far side of the stream, the rebels were crossing so close in his rear that every attempt to make a stand only brought on a new stampede. The only thing that slowed the whooping graybacks was the sight of abandoned wagons, loaded with what one hungry pursuer called “fresh, crisp hardtack and nice, thin side bacon.” They would pause for plunder, wolf it down, and then come on for more.

  This continued, well past sundown, to within three miles of last night’s bivouac, where there was another and still worse stretch of miry road across one of the headwater prongs of the H
atchie River. It was night now and the going was hard, one officer noted, “in consequence of abandoned vehicles, drowned and dying horses and mules, and the depth of the mud.” Despairing of getting what was left of his shipwrecked train through this morass, Sturgis went on to Stubbs Farm, where he was approached before midnight by Colonel Edward Bouton, whose Negro brigade had served as train guard during the battle and had therefore suffered less than the other two infantry commands had done.

  “General, for God’s sake don’t let us give up so,” he exclaimed.

  But Sturgis, quite unstrung, was at his wit’s end. “What can we do?” he said, not really asking.

  Bouton wanted ammunition with which to hold Forrest in check, on the far side of the bottoms, while the remaining guns and wagons were being snaked across to more solid ground beyond. Sturgis was too far in despair, however, to consider this or any other proposal involving resistance. Besides, he had no ammunition to give.

  “For God’s sake,” he broke out, distraught by the events of this longest day in his life and the prospect of a sad birthday tomorrow, “if Mr Forrest will let me alone, I will let him alone! You have done all you could, and more than was expected.… Now all you can do is to save yourselves.”

  Mr Forrest, as Sturgis so respectfully styled the man he had said a month ago was “too great a plunderer to fight anything like an equal force,” had no intention of letting him alone so long as there was profit to be gained from pressing the chase. Heaving the wreckage off the Tishomingo bridge and into the creek, along with the dead and dying animals, he continued to crowd the rear of the retreating bluecoats. “Keep the skeer on ’em,” he told his troopers, remounted now, and they did just that, past sunset and on into twilight and full night. “[Sturgis] attempted the destruction of his wagons, loaded with ammunition and bacon,” Forrest would report, “but so closely was he pursued that many of them were saved without injury, although the road was lighted for some distance.” Furious at this incendiary treatment of property he considered his already, he came upon a group of his soldiers who had paused, still mounted, to watch the flames. “Don’t you see the damned Yankees are burning my wagons?” he roared. “Get off your horses and throw the burning beds off.” Much toasted hardtack and broiled bacon was saved that way, until finally, some time after 8 o’clock, “It being dark and my men and horses requiring rest” — they did indeed, having been on the go, marching and fighting, for better than sixteen hours — “I threw out an advance to follow slowly and cautiously after the enemy, and ordered the command to halt, feed, and rest.”

  By 1 a.m. he had his troopers back in the saddle and hard on the equipment-littered trail. Within two hours they reached the Hatchie bottoms, where they came upon the richest haul of all. Despite Bouton’s plea, Sturgis had ordered everything movable to proceed that night to Stubbs Farm and beyond, abandoning what was left of his train, all his non-walking wounded, and another 14 guns, all that remained of the original 22 except for four small mountain howitzers that had seen no action anyhow. This brought Forrest’s total acquisition to 18 guns, 176 wagons, 1500 rifles, 300,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition, and much else. He himself lost nothing, and though he had 492 killed and wounded in the battle — a figure larger in proportion than the 617 casualties he inflicted — his capture of more than 1600 men on the retreat brought the Federal loss to 2240, nearly five times his own. Many of the enemy, especially from Bouton’s brigade, which had the misfortune to bring up the rear and suffered heavily in the process, were picked up here in the Hatchie bottoms. A Tennessee sergeant later recalled the scene. “Somewhere between midnight and day, we came to a wide slough or creek bottom; it was miry and truly the slough of despair and despond to the Yanks. Their artillery and wagons which had heretofore escaped capture were now bogged down and had to be abandoned. This slough was near kneedeep in mud and water, with logs lying here and there. On top of every log were Yanks perched as close as they could be, for there were more Yanks than logs.” They put him in mind “of chickens at roost,” he said, but added: “We who were in front were ordered to pay no attention to prisoners. Those in the rear would look after that.”

  Four miles short of Ripley at dawn, the pursuers came upon a rear-guard remnant, which Forrest said “made only a feeble and ineffectual resistance.” He drove its members back on the town, where they were reinforced and rallied briefly, only to scatter when attacked. “From this place,” Forrest’s report continued, “the enemy offered no organized resistance, but retreated in the most complete disorder, throwing away guns, clothing, and everything calculated to impede his flight.” Beyond Ripley he left the direct pursuit to Buford and swung onto a roundabout adjoining road with Bell’s brigade, intending to cut the Federals off at Salem. But that was a miscalculation. Buford pressed them so hard the interception failed; the blue column cleared the hamlet before Forrest got there around sundown. He called off the chase at that point and turned back to scour the woods and brush for fugitives, gather up his spoils, and give his men and mounts some rest from their famous victory, which would be studied down the years, in war colleges here and abroad, as an example of what a numerically inferior force could accomplish once it got what its commander called “the bulge” on an opponent, even one twice its size.

  There was no rest, though, for Sturgis and his men, who continued to flee in their ignorance that they were no longer pursued except by rumors of graybacks hovering on their flank. “On we went, and ever on,” a weary colonel was to write, “marching all that day and all that interminable [second] night. Until half past ten the next morning, when we reached Collierville and the railroad, reinforcements and supplies, we marched, marched, marched, without rest, without sleep, without food.” At any rate they made excellent time. The march down had taken more than a week, but the one back took only a night and a day and a night. In Collierville that morning (June 12; Morgan’s troopers were scattering from Cynthiana, 300 miles northeastward in Kentucky) the wait for the train that would take them on to the outskirts of Memphis, seventeen miles away, was in some ways even harder than the 90-mile forced march had been. Relieved of a measure of their fright, they now knew in their bones how tired they were and how thoroughly they had been whipped. An Ohio regimental commander reported that, in the course of their wait beside the railroad track, his troops “became so stiffened as to require assistance to enable them to walk. Some of them, too foot-sore to stand upon their feet, crawled upon their hands and knees to the cars.”

  Sturgis’s hurts were mainly professional, being inflicted on his career. Back in Memphis, amid rumors that he had been drunk on the field — a conclusion apparently reached by way of the premise that no sober man could be so roundly trounced — he put the disaster in the best light he could manage. Winding up his official report with “regret that I find myself called upon to record a defeat,” he added: “Yet there is some consolation in knowing that the army fought nobly while it did fight, and only yielded to overwhelming numbers.” Just over 8000 troops had been thrown into a rout and driven headlong for nearly a hundred miles by just under 5000, but he persisted in claiming (and even believing, so persuasive were Forrest’s tactics) that the odds had been the other way around, and longer. “The strength of the enemy is variously estimated by my most intelligent officers at from 15,000 to 20,000 men.”

  So he said; but vainly, so far as concerned the salvation of his career. For him, the war ended at Brice’s Crossroads. Despite the board’s finding no substance in the charge that he had been drunk, either in battle or on the birthday retreat, Sturgis spent the rest of the conflict on the sidelines, awaiting orders that did not come. Disconsolate as he was, he only shared what those who had served under him were feeling. Though in time their aching muscles would find relief and their wounds would heal, the inward scars of their drubbing would remain. “It is the fate of war that one or the other side should suffer defeat,” a cavalry major who survived the battle was to write, more than twenty years later. “But here t
here was more. The men were cowed, and there pressed upon them a sense of bitter humiliation, which rankles after nearly a quarter of a century has passed.”

  Sherman was disappointed, of course, but he was also inclined to give Sturgis credit for having achieved his “chief object,” which had been “to hold Forrest there [in Mississippi] and keep him off our [rail] road.” There was truth in a participating colonel’s observation that the expedition had been “sent out as a tub to Forrest’s whale,” and though the price turned out to be high, both in men and equipment, it was by no means exorbitant, considering the alternative. Learning that the raider had been in North Alabama, poised for a strike across the Tennessee River before Sturgis lured him back, the red-haired Ohioan wired the district commander instructions designed to discourage a return: “You may send notice to Florence that if Forrest invades Tennessee from that direction, the town will be burned, and if it occurs you will remove the inhabitants north of the Ohio River, and burn the town” — adding, as if by afterthought: “and Tuscumbia also.”

  He would send both places up in smoke, along with much else, if it would help to keep “that devil Forrest” off his life line. But that was only an interim deterrent. He had it in mind to follow through, as soon as possible, with a second expedition into northern Mississippi, stronger and better led, to profit by the shortcomings of the first. “Forrest is the very devil,” he declared, “and I think has got some of our troops under cower.” He proposed to correct this in short order. A. J. Smith’s three divisions were on their way back from service up Red River with Banks, hard-handed veterans whose commanders had been closely observed by Sherman in the course of the fighting last year around Vicksburg. He had intended either to bring them to Georgia as reinforcements or else to send them against Mobile; but now, he notified Washington, he had what he considered a better, or in any case a more urgent, use for them. “I will order them to make up a force and go out and follow Forrest to the death, if it costs 10,000 lives and breaks the Treasury. There will never be peace in Tennessee till Forrest is dead.”