The Real Horse Soldiers

by Timothy B Smith

  The Real Horse Soldiers

  Also by Timothy B. Smith:

  The Decision Was Always My Own

  Altogether Fitting and Proper

  Grant Invades Tennessee

  Shiloh: Conquer or Perish

  The Mississippi Secession Convention

  Rethinking Shiloh

  Corinth 1862

  James Z. George

  Shiloh National Military Park - With Brian K. McCutchen

  The Battle of Shiloh

  Mississippi in the Civil War

  A Chickamauga Memorial

  The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation

  Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 - With Edward Cunningham and Gary D. Joiner

  The Untold Story of Shiloh

  Champion Hill

  This Great Battlefield of Shiloh

  The Real Horse Soldiers

  Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid Through Mississippi

  Timothy B. Smith

  © 2018 by Timothy B. Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Smith, Timothy B., 1974-author.

  Title: The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War RaidThrough Mississippi / by Timothy B. Smith.

  Other titles: Benjamin Grierson’s epic 1863 Civil War raid through Mississippi

  Description: El Dorado Hills, California: Savas Beatie [2018] | Includes bibliographical references

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018027431| ISBN 9781611214284 (hardcover: alk. paper) |

  ISBN 9781611214291 (ebook)

  ISBN 9781611214291 (mobi)

  Subjects: LCSH: Grierson’s Cavalry Raid, 1863. |

  United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Cavalry operations.

  Classification: LCC E475.23 .S55 2018 | DDC 973.7/33—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027431

  First Edition, First Printing

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  To God be the Glory

  Table of Contents

  List of Maps

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Plan

  Chapter 2: The Leader

  Chapter 3: The Brigade

  Chapter 4: The Start

  Chapter 5: The Detachments

  Chapter 6: The Push

  Chapter 7: The Attack

  Chapter 8: The Getaway

  Chapter 9: The Failure

  Chapter 10: The Escape

  Chapter 11: The Results

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  List of Maps

  Grierson’s Raid

  Grant’s Attempts

  Area of Operations

  Grant’s Diversions

  Grierson’s Migration

  Brigade Operations

  The Start

  The Detachments

  The Push

  The Attack

  The Getaway

  The Failure

  The Escape

  List of Illustrations

  Ulysses S. Grant

  William T. Sherman

  William Sooy Smith

  Stephen A. Hurlbut

  Daniel Ruggles

  Benjamin H. Grierson

  Alice Grierson and Sons

  Governor Richard Yates

  A Union Cavalryman

  Reuben Loomis

  Edward Prince

  Edward Hatch

  Woodruff Gun

  Samuel L. Woodward

  John C. Pemberton

  Houston-Starkville Road

  Benjamin Kilgore Grave

  Clark R. Barteau

  Palo Alto Cemetery

  William D. Blackburn

  Richard W. Surby

  Matthew Starr

  Henry C. Forbes

  Stephen A. Forbes

  Newton Station

  Elias Nichols Grave

  Leaf River Crossing

  Wirt Adams

  Robert V. Richardson

  Soldier Letter

  Franklin Gardner

  Wall’s Bridge

  William’s Bridge

  Grierson’s Brigade Column

  Grierson’s Brigade Camp

  Benjamin H. Grierson Grave

  Preface

  The people of Brookhaven, Mississippi, would have raised their collective eyebrows had they known the name of the officer on the train passing through their little town. Some would have likely cursed his name and memory. The colonel had made a national name for himself decades earlier as a Union cavalry officer during the Civil War. Now, he commanded one of the nation’s cavalry regiments stationed out west to keep the peace on the frontier.1

  Most people riding the train would not have taken any notice of the sleepy little Mississippi railroad community, but this man did. He was as interested in Brookhaven as its citizens would have been in him. The two shared a history that forever bound them.2

  Army officers routinely passed through Brookhaven, so the presence of one more would not have stirred much in the way of local interest. Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson of the 10th United States Cavalry, however, had a history not only with Brookhaven but with many other little towns along this stretch of the Illinois Central. Grierson had galloped through the region some 30 years earlier under quite different circumstances. As he put it, “Little did the citizens when passing to and from about the streets suspect that the modest-looking individual who sat in the sleeper quietly gazing at the place was the man who had created such a stir in their midst so long ago.”3

  The town’s calm demeanor stood in stark contrast to the scene he had witnessed back in 1863 when he rode through as an enemy raider. Grierson was in the middle of his famous ride through Mississippi that long-ago April, a bold, successful expedition that made him a household name north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. In fact, he had torn up sections of the railroad he was now riding on and damaged the infrastructure at Brookhaven and other nearby towns. This time he was passing through from south to north rather than the other way around, peering through a foggy train window instead of from atop his warhorse. Yet “the scenes . . . were brought vividly to mind,” Grierson recalled, “as were also those at other stations enacted nearly thirty-five years ago—by my command.”4

  One can only wonder about the emotions Grierson felt as he made that trip northward from New Orleans. What did he feel as the train approached the town of Summit? Did he think of the destruction he had inflicted there, including a large train and the cache of rum his soldiers had found? The train rolled past Bogue Chitto, where his soldiers burned the depot. Did he look about to catch a glimpse of the new structure that replaced the one destroyed? Perhaps he pondered the new bridges over which the train chugged; he and his men had destroyed many of the original trestles in 1863.

  Grierson remembered Brookhaven as the train pulled into the station. “There was much running and yelling as our cavalry dashed into the place,” he wrote. His recollections would have included leading his men as they put out fir
es spreading from government stores to privately owned buildings. He would also have been interested in Bahala, just north of Brookhaven, where he sent a detachment to break the railroad. And beyond Bahala there was Hazlehurst, where his raiding column first reached the railroad, created major havoc, and sent a phony message by telegraph to a Confederate commander.5

  Soon it was all over and the train steamed its way past the area he had shaken up so in 1863. All these towns, he reflected, “looked about as they did in 1863, leaving out the bustle and excitement then caused by the presence of the Federal cavalry.” Grierson slipped back into his seat, the memories his short sojourn had conjured up along the railroad in southwest Mississippi once again fresh in his mind.6

  Grierson’s Raid still conjures up emotions, though not on the personal level Grierson experienced or those the people of Brookhaven would have felt had he stepped off that train. The raid is an adventurous and dynamic story of daring and bravery, the perfect backdrop for literature and film. Despite its prominence, the true story has never been fully told.

  Many who have tried their hand at telling this wonderful tale have taken liberties with the truth. Novelist Harold Sinclair, in his 1956 book The Horse Soldiers, used the historic raid as its basis, but as novelists are wont to do, he made up conversations and events. Hollywood movies, notoriously weak when it comes to facts, have no qualms about using cinematic license to enhance a story. Such was the case with the 1959 motion picture The Horse Soldiers, starring John Wayne and William Holden, which was based on Sinclair’s novel. Even when the raid was presented as a history monograph, Dee Brown, the award-winning author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), felt free to take liberty with the facts and sources in his 1954 Grierson’s Raid in a manner no academic historian would allow. In fact, Neil L. York, a historian of the memory of the raid, surmised that Brown “was not above creating conversations and stretching inferences, practices which most professional historians avoid and look askance at when they see it in others. But Brown the storyteller has never been felt bound by traditional orthodoxies, nor has he been intimidated by the raised eyebrows of his academic critics.” I held off reading Brown’s book until I finished the manuscript for the present work so that only primary sources would guide my thoughts and analysis. I support York’s statement that Brown played extremely loose and fast with the sources, making his book at points almost fiction itself.7

  It is my contention that Grierson’s Raid is so deep, so enticing, and so adventurous that no embellishment is necessary. Stephen Forbes, one of the raid’s participants and later one of its historians, summed it up thusly: “A cavalry raid at its best is essentially a game of strategy and speed, with personal violence as an incidental complication. It is played according to more or less definite rules, not inconsistent, indeed, with the players’ killing each other if the game cannot be won in any other way; but it is commonly a strenuous game, rather than a bloody one, intensely exciting, but not necessarily very dangerous.”8

  My aim in this book is threefold. The first is to tell a good story. While novels and hybrid books on the raid may display deeper character development and more conversation, the basic adventure story itself is enough to keep the reader’s attention even when told strictly in a factual, academic manner. The second goal is to provide more social context to the raid than previous histories have done, with larger emphasis given to the soldiers in the saddle with Grierson and the inhabitants of Mississippi along the way who were affected by the raid. Finally, I seek to put the raid in the proper military context. Other accounts downplay, through a lack of attention, the larger context while focusing on the adventure itself. Without proper context, however, it is impossible to fully understand the real reasons for the raid and its true impact on the course of the Civil War.

  Essentially, Grierson’s Raid had two major goals. One was destruction— the breaking of the important Southern Railroad of Mississippi at Newton Station. In that sense, it was not altogether different from many of the other cavalry raids of the war. The second objective, which added to its uniqueness when compared to other cavalry raids, was to divert attention away from what was transpiring west of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, where Ulysses S. Grant intended to cross the river below Vicksburg with the Army of the Tennessee to begin a land campaign to capture the Confederate citadel. As Grierson later explained, “My raid cannot be considered separately. It and Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign was one grand military achievement,” although he added that the raid was not planned down to the letter. “Definite orders were not possible,” he continued, “as every movement depended on circumstances & contingencies.” When considered with the other diversions underway at the same time (some to divert attention from Grierson, who was the main diversion for Grant), the complex but brilliant operation was not unlike a complicated football play in which the offense, with a player in motion, runs a fake trap, bootleg, reverse, flea-flicker, Hail Mary pump fake in order to run a draw up the middle. While Confederate attention was drawn all over the field by the fakes, diversions, and misdirections, Grant ran the ball right up the middle and scored a touchdown at Vicksburg.9

  Grierson, as part of this major trick play, managed to inflict a substantial amount of damage and divert attention away from Grant. For five critical days in April 1863, exactly when Grant was preparing and crossing the river, Grierson had the almost complete attention of the Confederate commander, John C. Pemberton. The hapless enemy commander was looking east and south for the elusive raider rather than west, where the main threat to Vicksburg’s existence waited. A study of Pemberton’s messages during those five days reveals that 95.7 percent were concerned with Grierson’s activities rather than Grant’s. Pemberton’s biographer, Michael B. Ballard, concludes that a dazed Pemberton was reacting to the tangible threat he could see rather than the rumored one across the mighty river. The real irony was that Grierson posed little actual threat; Grant was the one who could and did doom Vicksburg. In doing so, he also doomed the Confederacy.10

  Grierson’s Raid can be compared to the famous Doolittle Raid of World War II. The raid on Japan by American army bombers flown from an aircraft carrier deck did little lasting physical damage, but the psychological impact was significant. Grierson’s drive through the heart of Mississippi had a similar effect on the people of that state and the Confederate high command. The 1942 diversion was so important that it solidified key Japanese leaders’ views on operations against Midway, diverting attention away from other ongoing efforts in the South Pacific.11

  It is fitting, then, that such a story receives wide recognition, even in fiction and film. But there has long been a need for a comprehensive factual study. One Federal general involved in the planning wrote of the desire to be remembered: “We did it not for the laurels we might win, but I hope these will be planted on our graves when we are dead & gone, by a grateful posterity.” I hope I have done that in this book.12

  1Benjamin H. Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause: Benjamin H. Grierson’s Civil War Memoir, ed. Bruce J. Dinges and Shirley A. Leckie (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 168.

  2Ibid., 168.

  3Ibid.

  4Ibid.

  5Ibid.

  6Ibid.

  7Neil Longley York, Fiction as Fact: The Horse Soldiers and Popular Memory (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 28; John Lee Mahin and Martin Rackin, “The Horse Soldiers or Grierson’s Raid,” Civil War History (June 1959), vol. 5, no. 2, 183-87. For literature on the raid, see Dee Brown, Grierson’s Raid (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954); William H. Leckie and Shirley A. Leckie, Unlikely Warriors: General Benjamin H. Grierson and His Family (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984); Tom Lalicki, Grierson’s Raid: A Daring Cavalry Strike Through the Heart of the Confederacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); Mark Lardas, Roughshod Through Dixie: Grierson’s Raid 1863 (New York: Osprey, 2010); D. Alexander Brown, “Grierson’s Raid, ‘Most Brilliant’ of the War,” Civil
War Times Illustrated (June 1965), vol. 3, no. 9, 4-11, 25-32; Bruce J. Dinges, “Grierson’s Raid” Civil War Times Illustrated (February 1996), vol. 34, no. 6, 50-60, 62, 64; Bruce Jacob Dinges, “The Making of a Cavalryman: Benjamin H. Grierson and the Civil War Along the Mississippi, 1861-1865,” PhD diss., Rice University, 1978; Elizabeth K. Oaks, “Benjamin H. Grierson: Reluctant Horse Soldier and Gentle Raider,” MA thesis, Mississippi State University, 1981.

  8S. A. Forbes, “Grierson’s Cavalry Raid,” Address Before the Illinois State Historical Society, January 24, 1907, Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society (Springfield, IL: Phillips Bros. State Printers, 1908), 102.

  9Terrence J. Winschel, Triumph and Defeat: The Vicksburg Campaign (Mason City, IA: Savas Publishing Company, 1999), 36; T. W. Lippincott to S. A. Forbes, December 20, 1908 and February 20, 1909, in Stephen A. Forbes Papers, University of Illinois, hereafter cited as UI; T. W. Lippincott, “Grierson’s Raid,” n.d., in Stephen A. Forbes Papers, UI. For a discussion of mounted raids, see Edward G. Longacre, Mounted Raids of the Civil War (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1975).

  10U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880-1901), Series 1, vol. 24, pt. 3, 781-800, hereafter cited (all citations being Series 1 unless otherwise noted) as OR; Michael B. Ballard, Pemberton: A Biography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 139.

  11For the Doolittle Raid, see James M. Scott, Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015).