The other Federal diversions made proper coordination even more difficult. These were diversions for Grierson’s raid, which in turn was the main diversion for Grant’s overall advance on Vicksburg. With Chalmers’s hands full trying to deal with Sooy Smith’s and Bryant’s marches, it fell to Ruggles to defend the seam running down the center of the state. He had pitifully few troops to do so. Only two regular cavalry regiments, Lt. Col. Clark Barteau’s 2nd Tennessee and Lt. Col. James Cunningham’s 2nd Alabama, along with a newly organized Mississippi militia cavalry regiment and two cavalry battalions, were at his disposal. Cunningham’s Alabama cavalry regiment was farther south while Barteau manned his headquarters at Verona, nearer to Tupelo, to be in proximity to his dispersed Tennessee companies watching the approaches to the district across the Tallahatchie River.44
Fortunately for the Federals, Ruggles was not focused on watching the fault line between the districts. Dodge’s eastward movement had caught his attention, but he had not yet sent any troops to assist those chasing Streight’s mule-mounted raiders. Confederate attention was split, focusing on the flanks, with no one watching the center. And that is exactly where Hurlbut intended for Grierson to ride—if the colonel returned in time.
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), 134.
2OR 24, pt. 3, 45; Stephen A. Forbes, “Grierson’s Cavalry Raid: Eastern Mississippi Invaded,” 1937, Vicksburg National Military Park, 1.
3OR 24, pt. 3, 45; John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. 32 vols. to date. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-present), 7:307; Forbes, “Grierson’s Cavalry Raid,” 101; T. W. Lippincott to S. A. Forbes, December 20, 1908, in Stephen A. Forbes Papers, U of Illinois.
4Simon, PUSG, vol. 7:317.
5OR 24, pt. 3, 58; T. W. Lippincott to S. A. Forbes, April 7, 1907, and December 20, 1908.
6Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 135-36.
7OR 24, pt. 3, 62-63; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 136; Charles S. Hamilton to B. H. Grierson, February 20, 1863, in Benjamin H. Grierson Papers, ALPL.
8Simon, PUSG, vol. 7, 364; OR 24, pt. 3, 62.
9Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 137; Simon, PUSG, vol. 7, 407.
10OR 24, pt. 3, 126-27; Simon, PUSG, vol. 7, 406-7.
11Simon, PUSG, vol. 7, 406-7.
12OR 24, pt. 3, 112, 119; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 138.
13Simon, PUSG, vol. 7, 407.
14W. S. Smith to S. A. Forbes, May 4, 1907 and November 25, 1908, in Stephen A. Forbes Papers, UI; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 138-39; OR 24, pt. 1, 27.
15W. S. Smith to S. A. Forbes, May 4, 1907 and November 25, 1908; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 138-39; OR 24, pt. 1, 27.
16W. S. Smith to S. A. Forbes, November 10, 1905, May 4, 1907, and November 25, 1908, Stephen A. Forbes Papers, UI; William Sooy Smith, “The Mississippi Raid,” Military Essays and Recollections, Essays and Papers Read Before the Illinois Commandery, 4 vols. (Chicago: Order of the Commandery, 1907), vol. 4, 380; Forbes, “Grierson’s Cavalry Raid,” 108, 123-24.
17W. S. Smith to S. A. Forbes, November 10, 1905, May 4, 1907, and November 25, 1908; Smith, “Mississippi Raid,” 380; Forbes, “Grierson’s Cavalry Raid,” 108, 123-24; T. W. Lippincott to S. A. Forbes, February 20, 1908.
18OR 24, pt. 1, 27.
19Simon, PUSG, vol. 8, 6, 41.
20Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 138, 140.
21OR 24, pt. 3, 185; Grierson, A Just and Righteous Cause, 138, 140.
22OR 24, pt. 3, 185.
23Ibid., 185.
24Terrence J. Winschel, Triumph and Defeat: The Vicksburg Campaign, 2 vols. (New York: Savas Beatie, 2006), vol. 2, 34.
25Field Manual 3-0: Operations (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 2008), A1-A2.
26B. H. Grierson to T. W. Lippincott, March 13, 1886, in Benjamin H. Grierson Papers, ALPL.
27For Hurlbut, see Jeffrey N. Lash, A Politician Turned General: The Civil War Career of Stephen Augustus Hurlbut (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003).
28OR 24, pt. 3, 179-80, 201; William T. Sherman, Memoirs of General William T. Sherman: Written by Himself. 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1875), vol. 1, 315; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: Charles L. Webster and Co., 1885), vol. 1, 542-43; Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822-1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 174.
29OR 24, pt. 3, 231, 240; John F. Marszalek, “‘A Full Share of All the Credit’: Sherman and Grant to the Fall of Vicksburg,” in Steven E. Woodworth, ed., Grant’s Lieutenants: From Cairo to Vicksburg (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 18.
30OR 24, pt. 3, 242-43.
31Ibid., 502-3.
32Ibid., 502-4.
33Timothy B. Smith, The Decision Was Always My Own: Ulysses S. Grant and the Vicksburg Campaign (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 80-101.
34OR 23, pt. 2, 214; Bearss, The Vicksburg Campaign, vol. 2, 129-31.
35W. S. Smith to S. A. Forbes, May 4, 1907; OR 24, pt. 3, 557-59; Edwin Levings to Parent, April 25, 1863, in Edwin D. Levings Papers, University of Wisconsin-River Falls.
36OR 24, pt. 3, 554-55, 562-63; Andrew Brown, “The First Mississippi Partisan Rangers, C.S.A.,” Civil War History (December 1955), vol. 1, no. 4, 384.
37Bearss, The Vicksburg Campaign, vol. 2, 129-31. For Halleck, see John F. Marszalek, Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies: A Life of General Henry W. Halleck (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004).
38For Streight’s Raid, see Bearss, The Vicksburg Campaign, vol. 2, 129-77 and Edwin C. Bearss, “Colonel Streight Drives for the Western and Atlantic Railroad,” Alabama Historical Quarterly (Summer 1964), vol. 26, 133-86.
39OR 23, pt. 2, 214.
40Ibid., pt. 3, 197.
41Ibid.
42Ibid., 185, 197.
43Warren E. Grabau, Ninety-Eight Days: A Geographer’s View of the Vicksburg Campaign (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), 112.
44Ibid., 116-17.
CHAPTER TWO
The Leader
While generations of Lees had long dwelled in Virginia by the time of the Civil War, and Ulysses S. Grant traced his ancestors back to early New England, Benjamin Grierson had no such American lineage. His family’s arrival in America was much more recent, but that did not prevent him from obtaining success in this newfound country of opportunity.1
Grierson’s family was Scots-Irish, his mother and father hailing from Dublin, Ireland. His grandfather commanded cavalry in the Irish Catholic Rebellion of 1798, and his father Robert worked as a bookkeeper in Ireland, but opportunities were limited and the family ambitious for a better life. After a trip to the New World in 1810 as a logbook chronicler and navigator on a sailing ship, Robert determined to take his family there for good. The journey, Grierson later concluded, was “no doubt the main cause of his subsequent emigration to this country.” In 1818, Robert booked passage on a ship bound for New York. The vessel, blown off course and damaged, was fortunate to have made it to Bermuda. It was months before the family, including Robert, his two young daughters, and his pregnant wife Mary, who was less than enthusiastic about moving to America, arrived in New York. She gave birth to a third child soon after they arrived, but the infant boy died just a few months later. Hardships aside, Robert was determined to become a merchant and, after a short stop at Philadelphia, set out for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, in western Pennsylvania, Robert opened a small store, and the Griersons immersed themselves in the American way of life.2
Benjamin H. Grierson. Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson rose to national fame with his epic cavalry raid through Mississippi. Just a couple of years prior he had been a business failure deep in debt, but the raid almost single-handedly made him a national hero and helped launch a long
and successful career in the United States Army. Randy Beck
The family lived in the same building Robert kept his thriving store and made shoes. Mary, however, was still unhappy, leaving Grierson to later speculate, “It probably appeared to her as if she had been journeying to the end of the rainbow for much less than the fabulous pot of gold.” The couple welcomed more children, another son and their third daughter. On July 8, 1826, yet another boy was born. This one they named Benjamin Henry.3
The Grierson store was successful, but the lure of the westward movement called. After selling the business, the Griersons moved northwest into the Ohio country to Youngstown. Benjamin was only three, but he made the journey well. The family enjoyed the slower pace of life in the frontier village, and Robert made good on his endeavors, opening a store and making money in real estate.4
The family grew into a middle-class existence in Youngstown. They enjoyed literature, theater, and especially music, which Robert and Mary instilled in Benjamin at an early age. Mary was the soul of the family, a caring, religious, warm woman. Robert, on the other hand, was a stern patriarch, a good provider with a tendency toward rage some called the “Grierson temper.” Benjamin so hated his father’s temper that he developed a lifelong tendency of avoiding confrontation in any way possible. As the boys grew, Benjamin’s older brother, John, developed into a hard worker while Benjamin gravitated toward play. His father once chastised young Benjamin, who recalled him saying that “he would rather have one boy like John to work than a ten-acre lot full of such boys as myself.” Many years later, Benjamin fondly remembered a pond in the middle of town where the boys sailed their boats in the summer and skated in the winter. “Were it possible,” he admitted later, “gladly would I be placed back to live in reality those happy and memorable boyhood days.”5
Not all memories were as pleasant. It was in Youngstown that the eight-year-old lad suffered a terrible injury. Against her better judgment, Mary allowed her young son to accompany the older males on a day of work in the countryside to clear land for farming. Benjamin convinced his mother to allow him to go despite the free-flowing alcohol that usually attended such events. The trouble started when the boy’s horse bolted, but young Grierson managed to hold on to the runaway beast by the neck, which he seemed to find great fun: “I kept my position quite well for a time and was enjoying the ride hugely, laughingly chirping at the horse.” Once the horse stopped and he dismounted, however, the spooked animal kicked the boy “with full force, striking me squarely in the face.” The kick opened a large gash, temporarily blinded him, and knocked him unconscious. He remained in a coma for days. Fortunately, he came out of the coma and recovered his sight. “The skill of the doctors, good nursing, and the prayers of my dear mother finally brought me through to health again,” he explained. The only noticeable result was a scar on his face that he covered with a thick beard as soon as he was able to grow one. Some blamed his brother for the accident, but Grierson took full responsibility, writing that “the calamity was brought upon myself by my reckless desire for a free and unencumbered ride on that wild horse.” Some historians claim Grierson developed a strong fear of horses from the incident, an assertion others dispute and have been unable to verify. Either way, the boy who would grow up to be one of the greatest cavalrymen produced in the Civil War experienced a singularly significant childhood event involving a horse.6
While a teenager, Grierson made the acquaintance of Alice Kirk, whose similar Irish heritage drew the two together. She was an artful young lady with a similar love for music, but her most obvious trait was her deep religiosity inherited from her strict father. The two were almost inseparable during their teenage years, but her father was not predisposed to young Grierson because of what he thought were bad habits. His attention to music did not bode well for a livelihood, but most of all, he was not very religious. After an episode in which Grierson innocently climbed the trellis to Alice’s porch to talk to her and her aunt (by invitation of the aunt), Kirk admonished him at the store where he worked and gave “me a talking to on account of my injudicious action.” Alice’s father was so concerned that he sent his daughter away to school for three years.7
Alice was back home by 1848, but the renewed relationship hit another snag. When it came time to consider marriage, Alice refused because Grierson was not a man of faith. She tried to discuss his vices, but Benjamin, who had already made it a habit to avoid confrontations whenever possible, refused to listen. She endured several months of inner turmoil, the desire to marry the man she loved battling against her concern it was not God’s will that she marry him. That fact that Grierson refused to attend church, drank alcohol, and chewed tobacco did not help.8
The crisis came in 1849 when the Griersons made yet another westward move, this time all the way to Jacksonville in west-central Illinois, a new land teeming with possibility. There, Grierson’s father would once more set up a successful store. Alice decided not to accompany Benjamin, and the decision broke both of their hearts. An opportunity to teach school in Springfield, however, moved Alice west soon thereafter and brought the two together again. Realizing the only man she would ever truly love was so nearby, Alice finally consented to marry him. The pair exchanged wedding vows on September 24, 1854. Alice’s father, an elder in their church, was still not convinced but performed the wedding. Her father, Grierson observed, was by that time “older and perhaps wiser” and “regained his former friendship for me.” Looking back years later, he would fondly recall, “I cannot see how we could have been made more happy than during the early days of our married life.”9
Alice, however, was not as happy as she thought she would be, especially with a little one on the way just a couple of months after the wedding. Grierson continued his occasional drinking, chewing, and pool playing—habits that did not bode well for the future. The main trouble the coupled faced, however, was financial. They initially had no choice but to live with his parents, never a good thing for mutual bonding, while he settled into business life as a merchant like his father.10
Alice Grierson and Sons. Alice was Grierson’s rock, and together they produced two sons. Colonel Grierson was playing with the boys in his hallway when orders arrived to return to camp and lead the raid. Fort Davis National Historic Site
When an opportunity developed to go into business just a few miles west of Jacksonville with a partner, Grierson had to borrow money to do so. Alice’s prosperous father was not inclined to make a loan to his son-in-law, but he did so anyway, and Grierson and his partner opened a small store in Meredosia. Unfortunately, the Panic of 1857 hit soon thereafter, and the store lost money because buyers could not pay the high prices. The new merchants had to extend credit if they wanted to move any inventory, and that resulted in mounting bad debts. “Instead of restricting our business when so many were breaking up,” Grierson later admitted, “we extended it too widely and sold largely on credit.” The arrival of a second child deepened Grierson’s financial troubles. Even worse, the boy died just two years later, a tragedy that sent both parents into a deep gloom amid all the other troubles they had to bear. Fortunately, a third child took away some of the heartache.11
The Griersons’ burdens, financial and otherwise, arrived as the nation experienced the worst political crisis of its young life. When the Southern states began to secede in 1860, Grierson’s store collapsed and both partners lost everything, including their homes. Without any income, Benjamin, Alice, and the children had no choice but to return to Jacksonville and move back in with Benjamin’s parents. Alice had been more than happy to leave that difficult situation years earlier, but now they had two young children and no viable way to feed them. The larger family, however, was not doing much better, because one of Grierson’s sisters had died and his mother had suffered a massive stroke.12
The stress was nearly unbearable, both on the Grierson family and on the nation they had adopted as their own.
***
In the midst of all the turmo
il, Grierson found outlets to keep his mind occupied. One was politics. He supported the antislavery crusade and John C. Fremont in 1856, describing himself as the “only man in the town and precinct who openly declared himself a Republican.” When a Democrat announced at a gathering there was not a man in town who would dare admit he was Republican, Grierson challenged the assertion and gave a short speech followed by his own “Hip, Hip, Hurrah!” The cheer, he later wrote with some bemusement, was “given with a will by myself alone, to the astonishment of the unterrified Democrats present.” Warned he would be assaulted if he went to the polls and voted Republican, Grierson armed himself and went anyway. Instead of violence, he convinced several others to vote Republican in the heavily Democratic precinct. Despite the titled political landscape, Grierson made good political friends. The Griersons welcomed an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln into their home to spend the night while he traversed the state amid the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Two years later, Grierson avidly supported Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860. Even more fortunate for Benjamin was the fact that Jacksonville native and good friend Richard Yates was elected governor of Illinois.13
The Real Horse Soldiers Page 5