The plot Hood had concocted was to leave two-thirds of Stephen Lee’s corps, and almost all the artillery, in front of Schofield while the rest of the army maneuvered to a pontoon bridge the engineers had secretly constructed about three miles upriver at Davis ford, to the northeast and around Schofield’s left flank. Thus, while Lee blasted away at Schofield with his cannons and threatened an immediate frontal attack, the main body of the army, at dawn, would be sneaking around to his rear, trapping him between the two pincers—the classic turning movement, worthy, Hood said, of “the immortal Jackson” himself. In the relish of contemplating Schofield’s fate, Hood described his scheme as “one of those beautiful and interesting moves upon the chessboard of war.” Twice before in his career he had hoped for just this kind of chance—once at Gettysburg, when he had practically begged Longstreet to let him outflank the federal position at Round Top, and again at the battle of Atlanta, where only Hardee’s lateness had thwarted his expectations. This time Hood concluded to see to it himself that the ploy was carried out to the letter; despite his physical handicaps, he would go in person and lead the army forward. “The enemy must give me a fight,” he declared to his friend Chaplain Quintard, “or I’ll be in Nashville before tomorrow night.”
Hood delivered this singular and heavy prophecy to the chaplain before hobbling off to bed, but another prophetic episode elasped before the Army of Tennessee embarked on its swirling dreams of conquering the Ohio. Sometime during all the blustering and festivities around Columbia, General Pat Cleburne rode by St. John’s, the lovely little Episcopal chapel that the Polk clan had built in a grove of magnolias near one of the Polk family mansions called Ashwood Hall. Stopping to admire its Gothic ivy-covered brick walls and tidy green graveyard, the reserved Cleburne remarked to his ordnance officer, a Captain Hill, “It is almost worth dying for, to be buried in such a beautiful spot.”
Patrick Ronayne Cleburne was one of the more remarkable officers in all of the Confederate armies; newspapers called him the Stonewall Jackson of the west, but he remained only a division commander, probably because of his audacious notion that slaves should be freed and recruited into the Southern armies.
Cleburne was born in 1828 in County Cork, Ireland, of a well-todo Protestant family of distinguished lineage. He was raised in private schools, but with the death of his father, a physician, the family fell on difficult times, and at the age of eighteen he enlisted in the British army in a regiment that was posted near Dublin. He served for nearly four years until a harsh British domestic policy prompted Cleburne and his mother and siblings to emigrate to America. He ultimately settled in Helena, Arkansas, on the west bank of the Mississippi River not far from Memphis, where he bought and ran a drugstore, later studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1856. By the outbreak of the Civil War Cleburne had become a landowner as well as a member of the Arkansas militia, and as hostilities opened, he was elected colonel of the 15th Arkansas Regiment, with a promotion to brigadier shortly afterward. After serving in the battles at Shiloh and Perryville, he was advanced to major general and quickly established himself as a superb combat leader in the western army, including crucial heroics at the battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga.
By 1864, Cleburne was one of the genuine folk heroes of the Confederate army. Like Hood, he had also become engaged to be married. Just before the Atlanta campaign, Cleburne’s friend General William Hardee had asked him to serve as best man at his wedding at a plantation near Demopolis, Alabama. As it turned out, Cleburne, then a bachelor of thirty-six, fell immediately in love with the maid of honor, Miss Susan Tarleton of Mobile, daughter of a wealthy cotton broker. The two became affianced during one of the leaves Cleburne was able to take. After the arduous Atlanta fight, he had planned to go again to Mobile, but Hood’s decision to take the army to Tennessee foreclosed all possibility of a furlough. Learning of this, Miss Tarleton had a good cry and then wrote to a friend, “I suppose I can but wait patiently and keep up a brave heart.”
And so here, two months later, Pat Cleburne stood in front of a beautiful little church up in Columbia, Tennessee, a handsome, wiry man with a thick shock of reddish hair, probably thinking of his sweetheart and musing on how this would be such a lovely spot to be buried, just the way his ancestors were, in churchyards back in Ireland.
10
The Best Move Come to Naught
In the cold misty dawn of November 29 Frank Cheatham’s corps began to march across the pontoon bridge over Duck River. They were moving along an old wagon road lined with bare hardwoods and cedar brakes. Four miles to the east, at Columbia, the crash of Stephen Lee’s artillery broke the autumn silence and swelled to a continuous roar. Riding in the vanguard of the crossing with General Mark P. Lowrey’s brigade of Cleburne’s division was Hood, strapped to his saddle. They could see the federal cavalry watching them from the hills to the west, but the army kept moving. By late morning, seven divisions—more than twenty thousand men—had passed over the river and turned due north toward the little village of Spring Hill, about a dozen miles away.
They were marching along poor country roads, soggy and rutted from the rain and snow, but without the artillery and supply wagons the going was not as slow as it might have been. Clear skies and a warm sun turned the morning into a beautiful fall day, and by 3 P.M. the leading elements of the army had crossed a small stream called Rutherford Creek, about two miles from Spring Hill. Hood, still riding at the head, stopped atop a low rise from which he later recalled that the advance troops and wagons of Schofield’s Union army were clearly visible, retreating toward Spring Hill along the Columbia-Franklin Pike. In his memoirs Hood wrote that he sent immediately for Generals Cheatham and Cleburne and, after pointing out the federals on the pike, said to Cheatham, “Go with your corps, take possession of and hold that pike at or near Spring Hill. Accept whatever comes and turn all those wagons over to our side of the house.” Then, turning to Cleburne, Hood charged him with similar duty: “General, you have heard the orders just given. You have one of my best divisions. Go with General Cheatham, assist him in every way you can, and do as he directs. Go and do this at once. [General A. P.] Stewart is near at hand and I will have him double quick his men to the front.”
At least that’s what he said he said. What transpired from that moment through the next twelve hours—and a great deal did—became one of the great mysteries of the war, ranking right up there with Lee’s infamous “lost orders” during the Antietam campaign. From that day until well into the next century when the last of the participants was dead and buried, what became known as the Spring Hill affair prompted countless charges, countercharges, rebuttals, speculations, rumors, analyses, and acrimonious debates. What is certain is that somewhere between “I told you to do it” and “No, you didn’t,” “I ordered it done” and “I never understood,” the federal army managed to elude the lovely trap Hood had designed. As event piled upon event, a visible truth was put to the old adage, “For want of a nail the shoe was lost . . .” and so on. The controversy over Spring Hill began there and then with the conversation among Hood, Cheatham, and Cleburne. Cheatham disputed Hood’s entire account of the conversation and said later that there was not “a bit of truth” in Hood’s recollection of seeing Union men and wagons moving on the pike and that even if they had been, the pike was “never in view” of the three generals as they conversed.
Whatever exactly Hood said to Cheatham and Cleburne on that magnificent November afternoon, the commander of Hood’s leading corps began deploying his men toward Spring Hill with about two and a half hours of daylight remaining. At that point, Hood had on the field, or within easy support distance, two full army corps plus one of Lee’s divisions and Forrest’s cavalry, giving him twenty-five thousand men with which to crush what was later ascertained to be but a single division of fifty-five hundred federals that had been sent by Schofield as an advance party with the supply wagons and reserve artillery. As will be seen, that this was not accomplished re
mains one of the greatest might-have-beens of the Civil War, surrounded by dark accusations of drunkenness, cowardess, stupidity, debauchery, treachery, dereliction of duty, drug use, ennui, lying, failure to follow instructions, and failure to give them—characteristics thus far so foreign to Confederate armies as to inspire disbelief.
Back down in Columbia, Stephen Lee’s division, with most of the army’s artillery, was still smashing away at the Union position and threatening a frontal attack, and Schofield himself was in a quandary. He later claimed that his telegraph operator, who possessed the only cipher to the codes, had deserted and run away to Franklin, thus depriving him of any instructions from Thomas up in Nashville and any way to communicate his own situation to Thomas. Schofield pointedly chastised Thomas after the war for not being personally present on the battlefield, for not concentrating his forces—including A. J. Smith’s divisions and those of General James B. Steedman, near Chattanooga—more rapidly, for not bridging the Harpeth River between Columbia and Nashville, and for not leaving him precise orders about what he should do.
A little past midnight of the previous day, James Wilson, the federal cavalry commander, acting on information his men had obtained from Confederate prisoners, sent an urgent message to Schofield warning that Hood’s army was in the process of laying pontoons over Duck River to flank him and cut him off. Schofield’s reaction to this apprehensive news was to retire to a state of perplexity. On the one hand, if Wilson’s report was correct and Hood was in the process of flanking him, Schofield would have no time to lose in fleeing back to Spring Hill before Hood got there—which Wilson warned in his message could be as early as noon that day. His task would be to get his entire twentythousand-man army, along with nearly a thousand supply and artillery wagons, moved twelve miles north before Hood could get at him. But on the other hand, if Hood’s flanking movement turned out to be a trick, the moment Schofield started his army marching, Hood could come rushing across Duck River and strike him in the rear as he moved out. The fact that most of Stephen Lee’s corps was still at his front and, for all he knew, the rest of Hood’s army as well, seemed to paralyze Schofield, which was precisely what Hood had intended.
Through the rest of the night Schofield waited and wondered what the morning might bring. About sunrise, when Lee’s artillery opened up on him, he received word that Hood’s divisions were in fact crossing Duck River around his flank, but this brought a new concern—were they destined to outrace him to Spring Hill, or would they simply turn back west once they crossed the river and attack him in flank around Columbia or on the road? Realizing that complete inaction would be disastrous, Schofield summoned General David Stanley, who commanded the Fourth Corps, and ordered him to go with two divisions—General Nathan Kimball’s and General George D. Wagner’s—to Spring Hill, taking all the wagons and the reserve artillery, but to drop off Kimball’s division a little way up the road to guard against a direct flank attack by Hood. Thus, about 8 A.M., Stanley began the trek that may have saved the Union army.
David Stanley was a thirty-six-year-old Ohioan who grew up in a typical frontier family of farmers, dressing in buckskin and homespun clothes. He was apprenticed to a doctor to learn that profession but, like Schofield, got an appointment to the Military Academy after another cadet was found unacceptable. He graduated from West Point in 1852 in the class with Generals Sheridan and Slocum and served as a cavalry officer, fighting Indians, until the war broke out. He was actually offered a commission in the Confederate army but turned it down and served with distinction in the Missouri campaigns until he was appointed brigadier general and sent to Grant’s Army of the Mississippi, where he commanded a division. A year later he was made chief of cavalry in Rosecrans’s army and fought at Murfreesboro. By the time the Atlanta campaign got under way, Stanley had been promoted to corps commander, but he was faulted by Sherman for allowing the Confederates to escape in the last days of the fighting around Atlanta, which probably accounts for Sherman not taking him on the march to the sea.
Stanley now found himself in a dead earnest heat for Spring Hill, with Hood having a good head start. He had been moving about two hours when he stopped inside a “handsome house” along the road for some refreshment and was chatting up “some very pretty southern ladies” who complained to him about the behavior of Union troops, when a courier rushed up to him “breathless, saying Forrest’s force was in sight of Spring Hill and driving in the pickets. . . .” Stanley reacted to this news by starting the division toward Spring Hill at a run, and by 1 P.M. he had gotten his men set up for a defense.
If Stanley’s recollection of the time is correct, it puts him at odds with Hood’s account of seeing Union troops and wagons hurrying up the road toward Spring Hill when he arrived on the field at 3 P.M. This recollection would also square with Cheatham’s version of his meeting with Hood, because by 3 P.M. Stanley would have been off the pike and into his breastworks. Whatever the case, the first enemy troops Stanley saw that day were from Forrest’s cavalry, who were on the verge of taking both the town and the turnpike when the veteran infantry division opened fire on them. According to Stanley, the Confederate horsemen were “brushed away as you would shoo away blackbirds.”
They may have flown like blackbirds at that time, but Forrest’s cavalry had done more than yeoman’s duty from the beginning of the Columbia-to-Spring-Hill advance. First, they had chased away Wilson’s federal troopers to allow Hood’s engineers to lay down the pontoon bridge over Duck River. Then, as the army began to cross, Forrest’s brigades drove the federal horsemen before them through the woods like a herd of sheep, actually removing them from the entire battle area until they were huddled way up north near Franklin. That is not to say this was done without opposition. Wilson, in his chagrin at being outmatched by the wizard, later contended that he had deliberately retreated, giving fight only when he had to, and indicated that perhaps he had been deceived by Forrest into thinking that the Confederate cavalry’s intention was to go directly into Nashville. If this indeed were true, it does not explain how Wilson intended to fulfill his duty as the “eyes” of Schofield’s army or his mission to delay and harass Hood’s infantry column when he had allowed himself to be pushed nearly ten miles from the scene of the action.
In any case, with the whole Union cavalry corps now disposed of, Forrest left a small force to watch them and turned the attention of his main forces back south, toward the capture of Spring Hill. It was a near thing. Had he arrived just minutes earlier, he would have been in possession of the town and its fortifications and in control of the vital Columbia Pike up which Stanley’s division was frantically marching. As it was, however, Stanley got there first and was able to brush off the Confederate horsemen with his powerful infantry brigades. Nevertheless, Forrest continued to fight until his troopers literally ran out of ammunition. Trying to perform the crucial task of identifying exactly what federal troops were around Spring Hill and in what numbers, Forrest came upon a scene of battle overseen by one of his division commanders, James Chalmers. Chalmers’s troopers had just dispersed a horde of federal cavalrymen on the edge of some woods when they encountered strong fortifications, behind which was massed Union infantry, and they quickly retired. About this time Forrest rode up and saw about two hundred enemy cavalry coming into the open again.
“Why don’t you drive those fellows off?” Forrest asked. When Chalmers replied that there was federal infantry in breastworks behind the cavalry, Forrest was skeptical. “I think you are mistaken,” he told his trusted subordinate. “That is only a small cavalry force.” Bedford Forrest was not one to argue with, so Chalmers told him, “All right, I will try it,” formed his men, and yelled, “Forward, gallop!”
They raced through a beautiful grove of trees, but as they reached the woods again, all hell broke loose. Massed infantry rifle and artillery fire exploded in their faces; arms, legs, and heads were blown off; horses tumbled over each other and dashed away riderless; and “the ground was cove
red with limbs and bark.” When the smoke cleared, only a handful of Confederates were left unharmed, including Chalmers, who returned to his lines and encountered Forrest, who had been watching the charge.
“They was in there sure enough, wasn’t they Chalmers?” Forrest said to him.
“Yes sir, that is the second time I found them there,” was Chalmers’s sour answer.
* * *
Presently, a little past 3 P.M., Cheatham, acting on Hood’s instructions, set Pat Cleburne’s division moving toward Spring Hill to see what was there and to find out from Forrest, who had been in the vicinity for a couple of hours, what the situation was. Meantime, Cheatham said later, he waited at the crossing of Rutherford Creek for Bate’s division to come up, and when it did, he rode forward himself to about a mile and a half of the town and positioned Bate on Cleburne’s left, preparatory for an attack on the entrenched federals. Hood, said Cheatham, waited at the bridge for the arrival of Cheatham’s third division—Brown’s—which he would hurry along when it arrived. If and when Cheatham’s entire corps had gotten on the field, it should have been more than enough to crush Stanley, who was defending Spring Hill with only Wagner’s fifty-five-hundred-man division.
But Cheatham’s entire corps did not take the field. Cheatham said he sat on a knoll watching first Cleburne’s and then Bate’s divisions disappear over some hills toward the town, and then he heard the sinister crackle of heavy rifle fire echoed back to him indicating that Cleburne was engaged. But other evidence indicates that Cheatham did not in fact watch Bate’s men follow after Cleburne’s; and that, wherever he was on the battlefield, he did not hear Hood change Bate’s orders to turn directly westward, seize the pike, and sweep southward toward Columbia.