The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

  The sky was red with more flames than these; for the blue horsemen—especially those who were off on their own, as stragglers or outriders; “bummers,” they would be called a bit later in the conflict—did not neglect the chance to scorch the holdings of secessionists in their path. What was more, a Federal colonel added, slaves on plantations roundabout, “driven wild with the infection, set the torch to mansion houses, stables, cotton gins, and quarters,” and “came en masse to join our column, leaving only fire and absolute destruction behind them.” Smith, for one, was “deeply pained” to find his command “disgraced by incendiarism of the most shocking kind. I have ordered the first man caught in the act to be shot,” he notified Grierson, “and I have offered $500 reward for his detection.” As for the Negroes, though he had encouraged them to join him as a means of increasing the disruption of the region and decreasing its future contribution to the Confederate war effort, he now had some 3000 of them on his hands and was finding them a severe encumbrance to his so-called “flying column,” just at a time when he seemed likely to have to move his fastest. Despite his relief that Forrest had failed to “show fight” in the early stages of the march, it had begun to occur to him that the Tennessean might be postponing his attack until he reached a position “where he could concentrate a larger force, and where we would be to some extent jaded and farther from home.”

  By way of confirmation for these fears, a recently captured Indiana trooper managed to escape and rejoin his outfit on February 19, south of Okolona, with information that “Forrest’s whole force was reported to be in the vicinity of West Point,” barely a dozen miles ahead, and was “said to be 8000 or 9000 strong.” Consequently when his lead elements ran into stiffer resistance next morning in that direction, Smith paused for thought. It seemed to him that his adversary, with the unexpected advantage of superior numbers, was laying a trap for him just down the line. He thought about this long and hard, and that evening his adjutant replied to a dispatch from one of his brigade commanders: “The general is very sick tonight.”

  His information was partly wrong, but his conclusion was entirely right. Though Forrest had a good deal less than half the number of men reported by the slippery Hoosier, he was indeed laying a trap for the blue column moving toward him down the Mobile & Ohio: a trap whose springing, incidentally, would commit his green command to its first concerted action. He had come to Mississippi in mid-November with fewer than 300 veterans from his old brigade, and two weeks later he took them northward, deep into West Tennessee, on a month-long tour of recruiting duty behind the Union lines, from which he returned by New Year’s with some 3500 effectives, a sizable drove of hogs and cattle, and forty wagonloads of bacon. As here applied, the term “effectives” was questionable, however, since his recruits were mostly absentees and deserters, men who had skedaddled at least once before and could be expected to do so again at the first chance. “Forrest may cavort about that country as much as he pleases,” Sherman had said when he heard what the rebel cavalryman was up to, north of Memphis. “Every conscript they now catch will cost a good man to watch.” That this was a quite reasonable assertion no one knew better than the newly promoted major general who had this jumpy, unarmed mass in charge. But he depended on rigorous training and stern discipline—along with a few summary executions, if they were what was needed—to discourage the fulfillment of the Ohioan’s prediction; after which would come the fighting that would knit what he now referred to as “my force of raw, undrilled, and undisciplined troops” into a cohesive unit, stamped with the aggressive personality of its leader and filled with a fierce pride in itself and him. With this in mind, he began in early January a program of unrelenting drill, mounted and dismounted, combined with a system of sharp-eyed inspections to assure compliance with his directives. This had been in progress barely a month when he received word at his headquarters, north of Panola, that Sherman was on the march from Vicksburg, 150 miles to the south, evidently intending to strike at Meridian and possibly also at Selma or Mobile. Eight days later, Smith left Collierville, 50 miles to the north, and Forrest made this second column his concern, determined to prevent a junction of the two, though even the smaller one had twice his strength and was infinitely superior in experience and equipment.

  While Smith was moving southeast, from Holly Springs to Okolona, Forrest paralleled the blue march by shifting from Panola to Starkville. Outnumbered two to one, he could not risk an all-out attack in open country; nor could he lie in wait for the invaders until he knew where they were headed and what route they would take to get there. They might, for example, cross the Tombigbee east of Tupelo for a link-up with Sherman at Demopolis or Selma, leaving the graybacks crouched in a useless ambush far behind, or they might turn abruptly southwest and make for Jackson, passing in rear of the butternut column hurrying eastward. So Forrest bided his time and awaited developments, keeping his four undersized brigades spread out to counter an advance from any one of several directions. Then on February 19, when Smith began his wrecking descent of the M&O, it was plain that he intended to follow the railroad all the way to Meridian, and Forrest was free to develop a specific plan to stop him. Which he did. Sending one brigade to West Point as a bait to lure the bluecoats on, he ordered the others to take up a position three miles below, in a swampy pocket enclosed on the west and south by Sakatonchee and Oktibbeha creeks and on the east by the Tombigbee. That was the trap. The bait brigade, commanded by Colonel Jeffrey Forrest, the general’s twenty-six-year-old brother, fell back next day as ordered, skirmishing lightly to draw the Federals through West Point and into the pocket prepared for their destruction. They followed cautiously, into and just beyond the town; but there they stopped, apparently for the night. Believing that they would come on again next morning, February 21, Forrest continued his preparations to receive them with a double envelopment.

  He was wrong. Although there was an advance, which brought on a brief engagement, it soon became evident that this was a mere feint—a rear-guard action, designed to cover a withdrawal. Nearly two thirds of the way to his objective, Smith had given up trying to reach it; had decided, instead, to backtrack. Ahead were swamps and an enemy force reported to be larger than his own, while he was already ten full days behind schedule, still with eighty-odd miles to go and some 3000 homeless Negroes on his hands. “Under the circumstances,” he afterwards declared, “I determined not to move my encumbered command into the trap set for me by the rebels.”

  Forrest, having gained what he called the “bulge,” reacted fast. If the Yankees would not come to him, then he would go to them. And this he did, with a vengeance. Being, as he said later, “unwilling they should leave the country without a fight,” he ordered his entire command to take up the pursuit of the retreating bluecoats. Moreover, the rearguard skirmish had no sooner begun than he attended to another matter of grave concern: namely, the behavior of his “raw, undrilled, and undisciplined” troopers in their reaction to being shot at, many of them for the first time. As he approached the firing line he met a panic-stricken Confederate stumbling rearward, hatless and gunless, in full flight from his first taste of combat. Forrest dismounted to intercept him, flung him face-down by the roadside, then took up a piece of brush and administered what a startled witness described as “one of the worst thrashings I have ever seen a human being get.” This done, he jerked the unfortunate soldier to his feet, faced him about, and gave him a shove that sent him stumbling in the direction of the uproar he had fled from. “Now, God damn you, go back to the front and fight!” he shouted after him. “You might as well be killed there as here, for if you ever run away again you’ll not get off so easy.” Still raw and undrilled, but by no means undisciplined, the man rejoined his comrades on the firing line, and the story quickly spread, not only through the division—as the general no doubt intended—but also through both armies, until finally it was made the subject of a Harper’s Weekly illustration titled “Forrest Breaking in a Conscript.”


  For the next two days he handled Smith in much the same fashion. After driving the rear-guard Federals through West Point, he came upon them again, three miles beyond the town, stoutly posted along a timbered ridge approachable only by a narrow causeway. His solution was to send one regiment galloping wide around the enemy flank, with orders to strike the rear, while the others dismounted to attack in front. Admittedly, this was a lot to ask of green troops, but Forrest employed a method of persuasion quite different from the one he had used a while ago on the panicked conscript. “Come on, boys!” he roared, and led the way, thus setting an example which caused one of his men to recall, years later, that “his immediate presence seemed to inspire everyone with his terrible energy, more like that of a piece of powerful steam machinery than of a human being.” So led, they drove the bluecoats from the ridge, then remounted and continued the pursuit until nightfall, when their commander called a halt, midway between West Point and Okolona, in a hastily abandoned bivouac area, stocked not only with rations and forage, but also with wood for the still-burning campfires. While the graybacks bedded down and slept beside the cozy warmth provided by their foes, Smith kept his main body plodding northward and did not stop until well past midnight, within four miles of Okolona. Burdened with captured stock and runaway slaves, and weary as they were from their long march—since sunup, they had covered better than twice the distance they had managed on any one of the other nine days since they left Collierville—his men got a late start next morning. By that time Forrest, who had had his troopers up and on the go by dawn, well rested and unencumbered, had closed the ten-mile gap and was snapping again at the tail and flanks of the blue column.

  Smith was learning, as Streight had learned before him, that it could be even more dangerous to run from the Tennessean than it was to stand and fight him. However, instead of turning on him with all he had, he dropped off a couple of regiments just beyond Okolona and a full brigade at Ivey’s Hill, five miles farther along on the road to Pontotoc, still intent on saving his train and protecting the Negroes in his charge. After a running fight through the town, hard on the heels of the rear guard, the gray pursuers came upon the first of these two prepared positions and were brought to a halt by fire from the superior Federal weapons. At this point Forrest arrived. “Where is the enemy’s whole position?” he asked Colonel Tyree Bell, whose brigade had the lead this morning. “You see it, General,” Bell replied, and added: “They are preparing to charge.” “Then we will charge them,” Forrest said: and did. The result was a blue rout. Five guns were abandoned shortly thereafter by an artillery lieutenant who complained hotly in his report that his battery had been forced off the road and into a ditch by Union troopers who overtook him “in perfect confusion,” hallooing: “Go ahead, or we’ll be killed!” The chase continued to Ivey’s Hill, where the defenders, allowed more time to get set, gave a considerably better account of themselves. Opening ranks to let the fugitives through, they took under well-aimed fire the two brigades advancing toward them across the prairie. At the first volley the commanders of both were shot, one in the hand, the other through the throat. The second of these was Jeffrey Forrest, and though the general reached him immediately after he fell—this youngest of his five brothers, posthumously born and sixteen years his junior, whom he had raised as a son and made into a soldier—he found him dead. He remained bent over him for a minute or two, then rose and ordered his bugler to sound the charge. The fighting that followed was savage and hand-to-hand. Within the next hour, Forrest had two horses killed under him and accounted in person for three enemy soldiers, shot or sabered.

  Thus assailed, the Federals once more fell back to try another stand in a position ten miles from Pontotoc; which was also lost, along with another gun, but which at any rate ended the relentless chase that had begun two days ago, nearly fifty miles away, below West Point. “Owing to the broken down and exhausted condition of men and horses, and being almost out of ammunition,” Forrest presently reported, “I was compelled to stop pursuit.” Smith was unaware of this, however, and kept going even harder than before. Judging the rebel strength by Forrest’s aggressiveness, he believed that Stephen Lee had arrived to join the chase, though in point of fact he now had nothing on his trial but the “rabble of state troops” he had brushed aside when he passed this way the week before, headed in the opposite direction. In Pontotoc by midnight, he resumed the march at 3 a.m. and cleared New Albany that afternoon, February 23, destroying in his rear the bridges across the Tallahatchie. All next day he kept moving, unwilling to risk another stand, and rode at last into Collierville on the 25th, having covered in five days the same distance he had required ten days to cover while going south. Not even then did he call a halt, however; he kept going all the following day, through Germantown to Memphis, there ending at last what one brigade commander described as “a weary, disheartened, almost panic-stricken flight, in the greatest disorder and confusion.”

  His loss in men had not been great (it amounted to 388 in all, including 155 missing, as compared to a total of 144 for his opponent—a disparity which Forrest, as the attacker, could only account for by “the fact that we kept so close to them that the enemy overshot our men”) but the cost in horseflesh had been cruel. Smith returned with no more than 2200 riders who could be described as adequately mounted; the other 4800 were either on foot or astride horses no longer fit for service in the field. A corresponding loss in cavalry morale, so lately on the rise in all the Union armies, was indicated by an unhappy colonel’s remark that “the expedition filled every man connected with it with a burning shame.” Nor was that by any means the worst of it from the northern point of view. The worst was still to come, resulting not so much from Federal losses as from Confederate gains. Practically overnight, by this victory over twice their number—and the capture, in the process, of six guns and several stands of colors—Forrest’s green recruits had acquired a considerable measure of that fierce pride which in time would enable their commander to prevail against even longer odds and for much larger stakes. Already he was preparing to go over to the offensive, beginning with a return to West Tennessee and the accomplishment there of a great deal more than the mere enlargement of his now veteran division.

  Though Sherman had been doubtful of Smith’s competence from the start, deeming him “too mistrustful of himself for a leader against Forrest,” this took none of the sting from his censure of his fellow Ohioan for “allowing General Forrest to head him off and defeat him with an inferior force.” But that was later, after he learned the gloomy particulars of the cavalry excursion, and in any case he had waited for Smith no longer than it took him to wipe the appointed meeting place off the map. By the time the frazzled horsemen returned to Memphis, Sherman had recrossed the Pearl and gone into bivouac at Canton, north of Jackson, still with no knowledge of what, if anything, had happened to the mounted column, which in fact had begun its retreat from West Point on the day he ended his five-day stay in Meridian and abandoned his proposed advance on Selma.

  Not that he considered his own part in the campaign anything less than “successful in the highest degree,” both on the outward march and the return, which he made along a different route, twenty-odd miles to the north, so as to avoid the grainless, cowless, hogless trail his twelve brigades of infantry had blazed while slogging eastward. “My movement to Meridian stampeded all Alabama,” he informed Halleck three days later, on February 29. “Polk retreated across the Tombigbee and left me to smash things at pleasure, and I think it is well done.… We broke absolutely and effectually a full hundred miles of railroad … and made a swath of desolation fifty miles broad across the State of Mississippi which the present generation will not forget.” After listing his spoils, which included “some 500 prisoners, a good many refugee families, and about ten miles of negroes,” he announced that the destruction he had wrought “makes it simply impossible for the enemy to risk anything but light cavalry this side of Pearl River; consequently, I can reduce
the garrisons of Memphis, Vicksburg, and Natchez to mere guards, and, in fact, it will set free 15,000 men for other duty. I could have gone on to Mobile or over to Selma,” he added, “but without other concurrent operations it would have been unwise.” Privately, however, in a companion letter to his wife, he confessed his regret that Smith’s nonarrival had prevented him from applying what his foes were calling “the Sherman torch” to Alabama. “As it was,” he chuckled, for he always enjoyed a small joke on the clergy, “I scared the bishop out of his senses.”

  It was Polk he meant, of course, and he was right; the bishop had indeed been frightened, not only for Meridian, Demopolis, and Selma, but also for Mobile, a greater prize than any of those others in his care. His fears for the Confederacy’s only remaining Gulf port east of the Mississippi had been enlarged in late January when Farragut—who had just returned from a New York holiday, taken while the Hartford was being refitted in the Brooklyn Navy Yard—appeared before the place with a squadron of multigunned warships, evidently intending to launch another of his all-out attacks, not one of which had ever failed with him on hand to see that it was pressed to the required extremity. In point of fact, the admiral was only there to heighten Polk’s fears for the loss of the port and to discourage him from drawing reinforcements from its garrison when Sherman began his march. There was no need to attack; he accomplished his purpose merely by his month-long presence, just outside the bay, and gained in the process much valuable information which he would put to substantial use when he came back again, not for a feint or diversion, but in earnest. As a result, when Sherman set out from Vicksburg in early February, Polk was convinced that his goal was Mobile and that what was intended was a combined assault, by land and water, designed to remove that vital port from the list of the South’s assets in continuing its struggle to maintain its national existence. Outnumbered two to one, or worse, the bishop called loudly on Richmond for assistance, and Richmond passed his appeal to Johnston, the only possible source for reinforcements in a hurry. Whereupon there was staged in North Georgia a grim comedy involving a balking contest between the two commanders, blue and gray.