And to further seal the trap, should the Yankees be so foolhardy as to flee toward the south, Pemberton also telegraphed General Franklin Gardner at Port Hudson, Louisiana: “A raid of the enemy, some 700 strong, reached Southern Railroad this morning, and it is possible they are making their way to join Banks.* Send all your disposable cavalry in direction of Tangipahoa, to intercept him.”11
And so began the rapid draining away to the east of Pemberton’s reserve strength, in pursuit of less than a thousand elusive cavalrymen, while Grant across the Mississippi was preparing to strike him hard on the west with a force of thirty thousand.
V
By mid-afternoon of the 24th, Grierson and his brigade were five miles below Newton Station, caught up in a wave of frightened citizens fleeing in wagons, in buggies, on foot. Some were carrying loads of bacon, flour, even household goods and valuables. From those overtaken the raiders seized such food stocks as they could carry in their haversacks.
Grierson would have preferred marching until well after dark, leaving far behind him the broken railroad—a sure rallying point for his enemy. But it was obvious that the column must halt, and on a plantation along the Bogue Falema he ordered a short bivouac.
After a three-hour rest they resumed march in the cool of the late afternoon, reaching the outskirts of Garlandville just before dark. “At this point,” Grierson said, “we found the citizens, many of them venerable with age, armed with shot-guns and organized to resist our approach.” He ordered a charge, but the old men of Garlandville met it bravely, firing blindly into the Yankee advance. One raider was severely wounded, a horse fell dead under another. But the charge swept on through the town, capturing several armed citizens. “After disarming them,” Grierson continued, “we showed them the folly of their actions, and released them. Without an exception they acknowledged their mistake, and declared that they had been grossly deceived as to our real character. One volunteered his services as guide, and upon leaving us declared that hereafter his prayers should be for the Union Army. I mention this as a sample of the feeling which exists, and the good effect which our presence produced among the people in the country through which we passed.”12
A different version of the little skirmish and its after-effects was reported a few days later by the Paulding (Mississippi) Clarion: “After leaving Newton Station, the federals proceeded to Garlandville, in Jasper County. This neighborhood being one of the richest in this part of the State, suffered severely from their depredations. As they approached Garlandville, three shots were fired at them, resulting in the killing of one of their horses and severely wounding one of the men. … The parties who fired on them (Cole, Marshal, Levi, and Chapman) escaped. … A company of about fifty men, armed with double-barrel guns, were made up at Paulding on Saturday to defend the place.”13
Before leaving Garlandville, Grierson ordered his officers into the houses to search for food. “Lieutenant Samuel Woodward,” said Grierson, “entered a house where the lamps were lighted, the supper on the table, the corn bread actually steaming hot from the stove, and everything else correspondingly fresh. Not a soul was to be seen, nor would come for calling nor could be found about the premises.” The lieutenant summoned Grierson, and the colonel and his staff “sat down and ate the supper at their ease; but never learned for whom it was prepared.”14
With the volunteer guide riding ahead to assist the Butternut Guerillas, the column turned southwestward, marching slowly across prairieland and through dark forests of pine, then down into darker bottomlands of tall water oaks and sweetgum. The men desperately fought away drowsiness; none of them had slept more than five hours of the last seventy-two. Many were sound asleep now as they rode, slumped forward over saddle horns.
Even the tireless Sergeant Surby succumbed. His horse, being ahead of the column, wandered astray, and when Surby awoke he had no idea how long he had been asleep. He found the road but had lost his sense of direction. Dismounting, he searched in the darkness for hoofprints, feeling for toe and heel marks of the horseshoes. “Mounting my trusty steed I put him on the track,” he said, “with a slack bridle and smart canter. … After traveling about two miles I was rewarded by overtaking the rear-guard to the column. I assure you I felt relieved.”15
At last they halted for the night camp on C. M. Bender’s Plantation, two miles west of Montrose. It was almost midnight, and for the first time in forty hours the horses felt the relief of saddles being unstrapped for removal.
VI
Captain Forbes and the men of Company B met trouble at Philadelphia, where Colonel Grierson had stopped on the previous day to make a speech to the hostile citizens. If Grierson had won any converts to the Union cause, they were not in evidence when Company B reached the town.
As they approached Philadelphia about noon, Captain Forbes decided to stop and feed before entering the town. He ordered his bugler to blow the halt but the three scouts, Charles Martin, William Buffington, and Isaac Robinson, were too far ahead to hear the call. They rode on alone in their Confederate disguises, stopping at the next house to obtain information about the town. Three genuine Confederate soldiers met them at the door.
“You’re Federal spies!” one of the rebels cried. Denying the charge, the scouts attempted to stall, expecting Company B to appear at any moment on the road. But they were unsuccessful in prolonging an argument. The Confederates drew their arms and a quick gunfight followed.
Hearing the firing, Captain Forbes immediately ordered his men to horse. “We galloped down the road,” said Sergeant Stephen Forbes, “and within about half a mile, as our horses bolted suddenly to the roadside, we saw one of our men, dead on his back in the middle of the road.”16 He was William Buffington. Corporal Martin, his arm bleeding, came crawling out of the brush, and behind him was Isaac Robinson uninjured. The Confederates had fled at the approach of the company.
“We left our dead soldier,” said Captain Forbes, “stretched on a Southern porch, under solemn promise from the householder that he would decently bury him—a pledge which I had afterwards the satisfaction to learn was honorably fulfilled.”17
They rode angrily into Philadelphia, skirmishing with a company of home guards. The fight, according to Stephen Forbes, resulted in the capture and parole of about thirty of the guards, “the destruction of their firearms, the appropriation of their very welcome dinner, and the rapid consummation of several horse trades highly advantageous to the federal company, just then very much in need of a remount. As the horses of these home guards had been brought together to overtake Grierson, we gladly took them at their owners’ estimate of their fitness for this task—which was also our own.”18
But as they continued southward toward Decatur the men of Company B grew increasingly wary. “The guerilla and the bushwhacker and the ambush by the roadside, familiar to us from two years’ service in the field, were in all our minds as we rode that day through the thickety woods, scanning every cover and watchful of every turn in the road.”19
That night they marched without a halt, hoping to overtake the brigade on the morrow, moving closer and closer to what was now the enemy’s main point of concern—Newton Station on the Vicksburg railroad.
VII
Until five o’clock on the afternoon of the 24th, General Daniel Ruggles at Columbus persisted in the belief that his cavalrymen were successfully chasing the main body of Yankee raiders out of Mississippi. His only concern was for the Mobile & Ohio bridges, and during the day he had mounted two guns on a railroad car which he kept moving up and down the tracks parallel with Colonel Hatch’s retreat.
But Colonel Hatch’s Iowans were finding it too difficult to extricate themselves from the persistent Barteau to attempt any forays against railroad bridges. As the Iowans approached Birmingham, Hatch divided his regiment, sending six companies to the left while he and the remaining companies, their thirty-one prisoners, the train of captured horses and mules, and the volunteer Negro drivers moved on toward the town.
/> Meanwhile, Colonel Barteau and his Second Tennesseans were making a forced march along with General Gholson’s state troops, and at 11:30 in the morning they overtook Hatch’s four companies, driving in the rear guard. The guard recovered quickly, however, dismounting and forming a line across the road.
Gholson, eager to gain some glory for his state troops, pushed Colonel Smith’s regiment up front and they charged three times against the Colt’s revolving rifles of Hatch’s infantry-trained horsemen. A fourth attack from the flank finally broke the Yankee rear guard, but there were dead and wounded Confederates lying on the road and among trees. The retreating Iowans had not lost a man.
Colonel Hatch in the meantime had dismounted the remainder of his men and formed a fighting line based around his two-pounder cannon. Keeping to the saddle, he took his position in the center of the line and waited.
Barteau’s Tennesseans charged on this formidable defense and were repulsed. They rallied and tried a flank movement. But Hatch checkmated this by falling back too rapidly to allow his enemy to pass his flank. Once more Barteau tried the center and failed. By this time the fighting had moved back to Camp Creek, and as soon as Hatch was across he burned the bridge.
The gallant Barteau and his Tennesseans could do no more. Their ammunition was all gone. With ten more rounds they might have won the day, ten rounds being all that Hatch’s men had left for their deadly revolving rifles.
A few hours after the fighting ended at Birmingham, while Barteau and Gholson were still burying their dead, General Ruggles received the first startling news of the enemy raid far south at Newton Station. If Ruggles believed that these raiders had reached the Vicksburg railroad by passing through his district, he was not going to admit it officially. He got off a hasty message to Pemberton: “… Enemy completely routed at Birmingham. …”20
* Twenty years later, Sergeant Surby said that William Ponder, Company A, Seventh Illinois, had given him a wallet found beside the train. The wallet contained $2500 in Confederate fifty-dollar greenbacks. Before the raid ended, this money was to prove itself quite useful to Surby.—National Tribune, Washington, D.C., Sept. 6, 1883, p. 1.
* The Jackson Appeal for April 28, probably minimizing the damage, described it as follows: “Two bridges, each about 150 feet long, seven culverts and one cattle cap, constitute the injury done. Twenty freight cars were burned at Newton, and the depot buildings, and two commissary buildings. The telegraph wire was taken down for miles, and cut in pieces. In many instances the wire was rolled up and put into the ditches and pools. But few poles were destroyed. We can hear of but little outrage having been committed upon the persons of noncombatants or upon their property, except by the seizure of every good horse, and of the necessary forage and provisions. They had to depend upon the country for these. The safe at the railroad depot was broken open and the funds abstracted. The money was returned, however, by their commanding officer, with the exception of fifteen hundred dollars that, it was claimed, some of the men had stolen.”
* General Nathaniel P. Banks, commander of the Union Army’s Department of the Gulf.
PINEY WOODS COUNTRY
SCATTERED AMONG THE PINES of Bender’s Plantation, the breakfast fires of Grierson’s two regiments spun out lazy streamers of blue smoke; there was a cheerfulness in the sweet smell of roasting pork looted from Mr. Bender’s smokehouses. For the first morning in days, the men ate leisurely, propped against tree trunks. Their hardtack was all gone but they wiped greasy fingers on soiled trousers and trooped off in small groups to the sandy creek below the camp to strip and swim.
The word had gone around that the brigade would not march until eight o’clock, and only necessary duties were assigned. Pickets and scouts were out, of course, and over at the plantation’s stables a farriery detail was hard at work shoeing horses.
On such a pleasant morning it is probable that Colonel Grierson and his staff met for their conference on Mr. Bender’s broad front veranda. Undoubtedly they reviewed the raid on Newton Station with the usual jesting remarks and easy humor of men who have suddenly been relieved of a heavy burden.
But Grierson reminded his officers that although the deed was done they had yet to escape from it. Until yesterday they had in their favor all the advantages of surprise. But surprise was no longer possible, regardless of the direction in which they moved. And the enemy by this time, having more or less correctly ascertained their strength, could probably dispose troops of sufficient numbers to make escape impossible.
Combining what he knew of Grant’s battle plans in relation to the timing of the cavalry raid with information obtained from captured documents, from prisoners, and from civilians, Grierson was fairly confident that a fight was in the making at or near Grand Gulf. “I … knew from previous conversation with the General [Grant], and afterwards by letter from an officer of high rank and in close relations with him, of his general contemplated movements, that the objective point was Vicksburg and that all his operations would lead to getting a foothold on firm ground, and then to fight it out for a final capture of that stronghold. From my study of maps and knowledge gained otherwise of the country, I needed nothing more to convince me as to the approximate route Grant’s forces would eventually take.”1
A glance at his map showed Grierson that the distance from their present location in the Piney Woods country to Grand Gulf on the Mississippi River was well over a hundred miles, crow’s flight. And the route was parallel with Pemberton’s bristling defenses along the railroad from Jackson to Vicksburg. Would it be possible for less than a thousand cavalrymen, cut off from their base and supplies, to march this distance deep in enemy territory and join Grant for his big river crossing? It was a bold proposal, indeed, but Grierson seems to have convinced his officers that it could be done.
Some one evidently remarked on the poor condition of the horses; a few of the men already were riding mules. Mules were slow, Grierson agreed, but they would take all of Bender’s anyhow and travel leisurely during this day’s march, with squads scouring the byroads and woods for hidden horse herds. The entire day would be devoted to replenishing mounts. At eight o’clock that morning the raiders marched slowly out of Bender’s Plantation, bound westward.2
II
“They took all Mr. Bender’s mules,” reported the Paulding Clarion, “and two of his negroes, and consumed a large amount of his corn and meat. Before leaving Mr. B[ender]’s they gave him a receipt for three thousand rations of meat and forage, signed by Wm. Prince, Colonel, Seventh Illinois cavalry.”3
This receipt was probably one of Prince’s sly jokes; he could have easily paid the plantation owner in Confederate money captured at Newton Station.
After leaving the plantation the column moved at a very slow rate of march. Halts were frequent and the horses were trotted only when it was necessary to relieve fatigued muscles. The pines grew closer together, the straight trunks bare of limbs to extraordinary heights. Through the forest the road twisted aimlessly, some places so narrow that two horsemen could not ride abreast, the trail’s sandy texture covered with a carpet of brown pine needles.
The needles silenced the horses’ hooves, and in the light filtering through the trees the column must have seemed a ghost company, the men’s heads and shoulders moving rhythmically up and down without a beat to mark the measures. The only sounds were the occasional snortings of the horses, the infrequent commands, and the soughing of the pines.
Here the farms were small, and houses were few along the way. Sometimes they passed log cabins with pine groves almost to the doors, the tree trunks scarified in V-shaped slashes, gummy resin oozing into wooden cups. Pine fumes drifted from stills boiling turpentine somewhere down in the forests.
This was the Piney Woods country, poor white country, the people owning few slaves or none, loyal neither to the Confederacy nor the Union, wanting only to be left alone. By 1863 Confederate conscription laws had aroused many of the Piney Woods dwellers to covert disloyalty. Small
bands of deserters were already operating as bushwhackers against conscripting agents, and in one county an attempt would soon be made to withdraw from the Confederate government.4
At Garlandville Colonel Grierson believed he had discovered sentiments disloyal to the Confederacy, although he had incorrectly interpreted them as pro-Union sympathies. And on this first day in the Piney Woods country his discerning scout, Sergeant Surby, also learned to his surprise that some Southerners were not his enemies.
Along the road to Pineville Surby halted his scouts in front of a double log-house. Five women of varying ages were sitting on the doorstep, but not a man was in sight. As Surby approached he could read fear in the women’s faces. At first he believed they had been warned of disguised Yankees, but soon learned that they feared him as a Confederate conscriptor.
The women lied in a chorus: Our husbands are all in the army at Vicksburg. No, they had no milk, only water. I suppose you are conscripting. Well, you’ll find no men around here. You’d better conscript all the women, too. We have no one left to care for us. We don’t own any blacks.5
But Surby discovered later from a chance remark that at least two of their men were hiding out in the woods, and when he convinced the women that he and his scouts were Yankees instead of conscript agents, they brought out not only milk, but bread, butter, and pies. The oldest of the women, according to Surby, opened a chest and showed him a Union flag which she had hidden away.