On the other hand, Union forces engaged against the raiders had sustained total losses approaching two thousand, most of them paroled prisoners. The damage inflicted upon Rosecrans’ communications and supply lines was incalculable. Even before Morgan’s men rode into Smithville on January 5, Major General Horatio G. Wright, commanding at Cincinnati, was desperately attempting to deliver one million overdue rations to Rosecrans’ army. Wright shipped the rations down the Ohio River to the Cumberland, but the Cumberland was at low water stage and there was only one light-draft boat available for transport to Nashville. “We must open the railroad soon,” Wright telegraphed General Boyle at Louisville, “or Rosecrans will starve.”
The Christmas raid had come too late, however, to hinder Rosecrans’ assault on Bragg’s army. By the time the raiders reached Smithville, the Stone’s River campaign was ended, both armies withdrawing from the field badly blooded. Each side claimed victory, but Lieutenant McCreary noted in his diary of January 6: “Received dispatch of ‘victory’ of Bragg’s army. Bragg deemed it expedient to fall back towards Tullahoma. I don’t believe in such victories. Bragg’s talent seems to be all on the retreat.”
Weary as they were, Morgan’s men found no prospect of rest at Smithville. Bragg ordered them to immediate duty covering the left of his retreating army.
It looked like another long hard winter in Tennessee.
9
Winter of Discontent
I
BY MID-JANUARY 1863, THE Army of Tennessee was dug in for the winter along Duck River from Shelbyville to Tullahoma, with its cavalry guarding front and flanks. General Morgan established headquarters at McMinnville, and John Hutchinson took the 2nd Kentucky out to Woodbury, “a beautiful and rebellious village” on the Murfreesboro turnpike.
During this early period of what was to be a long stalemated winter, Morgan’s men found themselves in the midst of a “paper war” between Rosecrans and Bragg. Couriers were kept busy carrying vitriolic messages back and forth between the lines, and much of the subject matter concerned Morgan’s raiders. Even before the Christmas raid, the two generals had been arguing about the proprieties of guerrilla warfare, and during the brigades’ absence in Kentucky, Rosecrans had composed an indignant message relating to Morgan’s action in taking overcoats from the 104th Illinois Infantry. “Whether your idea of humanity consists in robbing them of their overcoats, I know not,” Rosecrans wrote, “but such they assure me was the treatment they received from your troops.” Rosecrans also added a repetitive complaint that Morgan’s cavalry did not always wear recognizable Confederate uniforms, and must therefore be considered guerrillas.
To this, Bragg replied tartly that “we aim to clothe them as uniformly as the exigencies of our situation will admit. Whenever you will afford us the facilities to obtain the requisite material, we shall be most happy to make the desired change. In the meantime we shall use the best to be procured.” Apparently Bragg considered “the best to be procured” were Union overcoats and the best means of procuring them was to capture the wearers.
The overcoat incident was only one minor facet of the question as to whether Morgan’s cavalrymen were or were not guerrillas—in essence, whether they were or were not to be treated as regular troops subject to the rules of war when captured. Rosecrans attempted to settle the matter by issuing an edict that all Confederate soldiers caught without uniforms would be treated as spies, but this only added fuel to the controversy.
One of the incidents swirling out of this “paper war” was an accusation that Lieutenant George Eastin of the 2nd Kentucky had killed Colonel Dennis Halisey after the latter had surrendered and should therefore be turned over to Union authorities as a murderer. Eastin, with his youthful ideals of knighthood, was outraged by the charge. The accusation was a half-truth, he maintained, which overlooked the fact that Halisey had attempted resistance after surrendering.
And even though Union authorities placed a price on his head, Eastin continued wearing the dead Colonel’s sword as a talisman, a sword with Halisey’s name engraved upon the hilt, and which would prove to be an embarrassing possession when Eastin found himself trapped in an Indiana woods a few months later.
As if to balance all these charges and denunciations, the raiders received a paper accolade during the winter, a resolution of thanks from the Congress of the Confederate States of America:
The thanks of Congress are due, and are hereby tendered to General John H. Morgan, officers and men of his command, for their varied, heroic, and invaluable services in Tennessee and Kentucky immediately preceding the battles before Murfreesboro—services which have conferred upon their authors fame as enduring as the records of the struggle which they have so brilliantly illustrated.
2
As for the boys of the 2nd Kentucky out on daily patrols in rain and sleet, they were too busy to be concerned with what generals and congressmen were writing about them. These veterans of the oldest Morgan regiment, as usual, were stationed on the hottest outpost corner, facing Union headquarters at Murfreesboro.
Early on the morning of January 24, Lieutenant Ben Drake, acting as officer of the guard, reported to Lieutenant Colonel Hutchinson’s headquarters that Union troops were reconnoitering on the Murfreesboro road. Drake had withdrawn his videttes to the edge of Woodbury, and suggested that the regiment be bugled out for an expected attack from at least four enemy infantry regiments with an accompanying battery.
Hutchinson received the news calmly, although he realized this might be the first real testing of the 2nd under his sole command. Duke was convalescing somewhere in Georgia, and Morgan was at McMinnville. Turning to John Castleman who was acting as his second in command, Hutchinson said that he would take charge of the pickets replacing Drake’s night guard. “We’ll hold the enemy in check, Castleman, until you can bring out the regiment.”
Castleman remonstrated politely, pointing out that Woodbury with its surrounding rough hills was a better defensive position than the Murfreesboro road. Hutchinson shook his head. He looked older than his twenty-four years, his weather-beaten aquiline features always serious. Dropping a hand on Castleman’s shoulder, Hutchinson replied bluntly that he had “promised the people of Woodbury that no live Yankee should come into their town unless over my dead body. I’m going to keep my promise. Form the regiment and come ahead.”
A few minutes later Castleman had the 2nd in motion. As he led the way across a ravine, he could hear brisk exchanges of gunfire between Hutchinson’s pickets and the Union advance. Dismounting the troopers, Castleman moved them by companies up a slope and along the right of the road until they joined with Hutchinson’s men.
They were one regiment against four—the 6th and 24th Ohio, the 23rd Kentucky (Union) and the 84th Illinois. The 2nd Regiment, however, held a terrain advantage, digging in behind a stone fence, the Union infantrymen clinging to a hill crest opposite. After an hour or so of firing which inflicted little damage upon either side, the Union troops appeared to be withdrawing.
It was then that John Hutchinson, forgetting or disregarding his towering form, recklessly rode out into the open, calling to Captain Castleman. A moment later a bullet whined out of the brush, striking him in the temple, and he fell from his horse.
Castleman was so shocked that for a few seconds he scarcely realized that command of the 2nd Regiment was now his responsibility. His first concern was for Hutchinson. Corporal Charley Haddox, Hutchinson’s orderly, had already reached his commander’s side, and it was obvious from the orderly’s actions that Hutchinson was dead. Castleman’s first order as acting commander of the 2nd was to Private George Keene, who was in firing position behind the stone fence. “George,” he said softly, “help Charley Haddox put Colonel Hutchinson’s body on his horse and carry him back to camp.”
All of a sudden Captain Castleman discovered that commanding a regiment under attack by superior enemy forces was no slight responsibility. The Union troops who had appeared to be withdrawing had
only been shifting positions while their batterymen were bringing two pieces of artillery into range of the 2nd’s stone fence. Charley Haddox and George Keene had scarcely departed with Lieutenant Colonel Hutchinson’s body when the first shells whistled over. As soon as the enemy gunners found the range, the stone fence began to fly apart.
“It was a hopeless engagement,” Castleman reported. As he had no artillery for retaliation, he ordered a withdrawal to the Woodbury camp on the double-quick. The retreat was swift but orderly, and the strategic position of the campsite discouraged the Union attackers. After the enemy withdrew from Woodbury, acting regimental commander Castleman noticed a burning sensation in his right ankle. A Yankee sharpshooter had found his mark, but Castleman had been luckier than big John Hutchinson.
Hutchinson’s death was a severe blow to the 2nd, not only because as Duke said “he was the best field officer in Morgan’s command,” but because the vacancy created temporary dissension among the companies. Some men wanted John Castleman for permanent commander, others James Bowles, and others Thomas Webber. Morgan had to settle the argument, and he commissioned Captain Bowles probably because Bowles had the longest period of service, having left his studies at Yale University in the summer of 1861 to journey to Richmond and enlist.
After a few days virtually all agreed that Morgan had arrived at the best compromise solution, and the command functioned smoothly again.
About this time, however, Morgan made a serious error of judgment in accepting a new officer, one John T. Shanks, who claimed he had been in a Texas regiment so badly cut up in the Stone’s River fighting that he was left without a command. Shanks became acquainted with St. Léger Grenfell while the latter was inspecting cavalry, and through the Britisher secured introduction to Morgan. In this chance encounter Grenfell sealed not only his own doom but that of several others in the 2nd Kentucky, for John Shanks was to become the instrument of destiny in a wild sequence of events to unfold in future months. Forger, embezzler, liar, cheat, traitor—John Shanks claimed to be a captain; he was not even a commissioned officer. But John Morgan, accustomed to dealing with honorable men, accepted Shanks on his word and sent him out to Woodbury for picket duty with the 2nd.
As the winter deepened, Morgan’s front line lengthened, running all the way from Woodbury for more than a hundred miles along an irregular curve into the hills of eastern Kentucky. For lack of sufficient forage around Woodbury, the 2nd was forced to spread out by companies into a thin line that invited constant hit-and-run attacks from roving Union cavalry.
Only the worst weather brought respite, and sometimes it was so bad the boys would have preferred receiving Yankees. Rains, sleet, snow and biting winds were so frequent that diaries of that winter are filled with such entries as: “Coldest day of the season. Ground frozen hard.…This country seems flowing with whisky and mud.…Snow. Below zero…Many a night have I slept with a sheepskin under me, a blanket over me, and my hat over my face to keep the frost off.”
For the first time, however, the men of the 2nd remained camped in one place long enough to construct shelters against the weather. They had a good supply of blankets captured on the Christmas raid, and almost every man had a gum cloth or poncho. Four or more troopers would combine their equipment, and by stretching blankets and ponchos across fence rails were able to erect weatherproof substitutes for tents.
To insure dry beds they drove forked sticks in the ground and laid rails and pieces of planking across. A fire blazing in front of the open fly furnished a certain amount of warmth. Favorite shelter sites were cedar thickets which broke the bitter winds and furnished aromatic wood for fires. On cold winter nights, the orange smoke of these fires glowed against a ceiling of greenery, the groves glittering with showers of sparks flitting upward like swarms of fireflies.
When Basil Duke—recovered from his wound—came out to Woodbury to visit his old regiment, he was amused by the “apparently inextricable confusion of these camps.…Men and horses were all huddled together, for the men did not fancy any arrangements which separated them by the slightest distance from their horses, and the latter were always tied close to the lairs of their masters.”
Yet, in spite of the comparative coziness of the winter camps, there was a growing discontent among the men during that cold, dragging winter of 1863. Lack of supplies—particularly boots and clothing, coffee and sugar—lowered morale and discipline. Ammunition was so short at times that patrols were forced to turn and run, after the men had emptied their cartridge boxes. What little clothing could be obtained by the regimental quartermaster was usually made of coarse, yellowish brown homespun which wore out quickly. Arms replacements were varied and undependable in action, and new issues of cartridge boxes, saddlebags and saddleskirts were made of cotton rather than leather. Paper for records keeping was so rarely available that it was not unusual for orderly sergeants to make out morning reports on wooden shingles.
A visitor to one of the mid-Tennessee camps that winter noted four or five different kinds of rifles and shotguns, “all sorts of saddles, some with rope stirrups, many of the saddles without blankets, all sorts of bridles, and in fact a conglomerate get-up fairly laughable.”
Cooking vessels were as hard to come by as food with which to fill them. “If a cavalryman had any flour,” wrote Private George Mosgrove, “he mixed it with salt and cold water, plastered it on a board and set it before the fire to bake, or he would wind the dough around an iron ramrod and hold it over the fire. With the iron ramrod it was also an easy matter to broil a piece of meat.” By the end of winter the beef supply ran short, and when meat was available it was tasteless. “There was not an ounce of salt, and it was not to be got for love or money.” When only hardtack was available, the boys taxed their ingenuity to devise new ways of preparing it, a popular method being to soak it in carefully hoarded grease. “Prepared thus,” one man commented, “hardtack was a dish which no Confederate had the weakness or the strength to refuse.”
For some time the policy of the Army of Tennessee had been to furnish rations only to the infantry; the cavalrymen were supposed to be mobile enough to obtain food for themselves and forage for their horses. During the early months of 1863, however, with the Federals constantly threatening below Nashville, Bragg dared not permit any sizable force to be removed even temporarily from the cavalry screen protecting his army. Tied down to stationary camps, the cavalry was expected to maintain fighting efficiency without being clothed, shod, fed, or even paid—although if the men had received any money that winter there would have been little to spend it for except raw corn whisky.
By late February no oats or fodder could be procured around Woodbury, and corn had to be hauled thirty miles, each horse receiving a ration of only two or three ears per day, some days none. Every blade of grass around the 2nd Regiment’s camps was gone, and bark had been stripped from the trees as high as the horses could reach. Before spring, all of mid-Tennessee was stripped of meat, grain and everything edible. “It was as if a cloud of Titanic and omniverous locusts had settled upon the land,” wrote Duke.
The most discouraging feature of all was the condition of the horses. So many cavalrymen were without serviceable mounts—some doing picket duty on foot—that Bragg suggested transferring them to the infantry, thus creating a state of incipient mutiny throughout Morgan’s camps and inspiring a number of men to take unofficial leave to go into Kentucky in search of horses. General Rosecrans took note of one of these unauthorized “horse expeditions” on February 22 in a message to General-in-Chief Halleck: “Morgan has sent some men into Kentucky—a party to steal horses.”
All these desperate pressures for food, supplies and horses naturally led to large numbers of temporary delinquencies from duty by men forced to go in search of needs which the Army of Tennessee could not supply. For instance, so many of the boys in the 2nd traded their rifles for smokehouse meat and whisky—against the day when the long-absent paymaster appeared—that when a regimental arms inspec
tion was held almost half were found unarmed. Major Thomas Webber, acting as regimental commander in James Bowles’ absence, was so outraged by this unsoldierly practice that he ordered every man without a rifle to carry a heavy fence rail upon his shoulder until the missing Enfields and Springfields were found. Most of the boys “found” their rifles rather quickly in nearby farmhouses, and Webber let them off with a warning that they would be transferred to the infantry (the direst of threats) if they were ever caught unarmed again.
Even with all the discontent, however, the more irresponsible alligator horses of the 2nd managed to have some fun that winter. On bad days they played cards under their gum-cloth shelters, handling the packs tenderly because they were scarce and irreplaceable. On good days they raced horses, clandestinely because racing was forbidden in order to save the horses strength. And on off-duty nights they could visit girls in the neighborhood. “Beautiful daughters and good whisky,” wrote one diarist. “Miss Brown gave me some very sweet music on the piano.” And again: “I attribute my cure [from an insect bite] to the beautiful Miss Delia and her sweet music. She sings ‘Bonnie Blue Flag’ to perfection.”
Perhaps the incident which afforded the most amusement to the entire regiment involved Jeff Sterrett, Jack Trigg and Tom Ballard. These three were the regimental jesters, “the chartered libertines,” who moved in and out of one scrape after another, and whom neither Bowles, Duke nor Morgan could bear to punish severely because they had all been together since the Green River days. Late in the winter a faro dealer set up operations at McMinnville, and so many men began riding in from camps to gamble that in order to preserve both horses and discipline, Morgan ordered the dealer to cease operations. The gambler, however, moved into a nearby barn and continued running his game under cover. Learning of this, Morgan ordered his provost guard to raid the place and arrest all men caught there. Among the players arrested were Sterrett, Trigg and Ballard, and they were brought before Morgan for punishment.