The Darkest Days of the War- the Battles of Iuka and Corinth

by Peter Cozzens

  They were wrong. Cocky and full of fight at daybreak, Rosecrans at noon felt the first flutters of doubt. As Sanborn pressed on to Cartersville, Rosecrans and his staff rode into Barnett’s Crossroads. There, beside the recumbent soldiers of Sullivan’s brigade, they huddled around their maps. Rosecrans studied the roads confidently until Colonel Mizner reported the true distance between the Jacinto and Fulton roads to be nearly five miles, more than twice what he had assumed.

  Rosecrans had made a terrible error. He had cajoled Grant into allowing him to advance in two columns on the assumption that Hamilton and Stanley would be within supporting distance of each other. When he realized they would not, he changed his plan of march. Rather than move in two columns and risk defeat in detail, Rosecrans elected to send both Hamilton and Stanley up the Jacinto road. In doing so he would leave Price a means of escape from Iuka, but Rosecrans reasoned that he lacked the troops needed to block the Fulton road.

  The absence of any word from Grant also constrained Rosecrans from dividing his forces. Having heard nothing from him in nearly eleven hours, Rosecrans had no idea what, if anything, had transpired on Ord’s front. At 12:30 P.M. two members of Grant’s staff, Cols. Clark Lagow and Theophilus Dickey, met Rosecrans at Barnett’s Crossroads. They may or may not have brought a message from Grant—Dickey said they did; Rosecrans said they did not—but they were full of gratuitous advice.

  “General, do you think the enemy is in force at Iuka?" Lagow asked.

  “Yes,” answered Rosecrans.

  “Are you going to pitch into him?" Lagow wondered.

  “Yes of course, that is the understanding of my movement, and we are only five or six miles from the enemy. We ought to hear Grant’s opening guns on the Railroad by this time.”

  “Maybe he is waiting for you to begin,” Lagow suggested, adding that there had been no activity on Ord’s front since 3:00 A.M.

  Rosecrans grew impatient with the impertinent staff officer. “Not so,” he snarled. “The main attack should begin on the Railroad to attract the enemy’s attention and enable me to surprise his left flank and get the roads in his rear.”

  Lagow persisted. Did Rosecrans not understand that he must attack at once to prevent the Rebels from retreating? Of course he did, but Rosecrans thought “it would be very bad policy to allow the enemy’s attention to be first attracted towards his line of communication, to seize and secure which was the object of my movement.”14

  Despite his reservations Rosecrans issued orders for the army to press on to Iuka. He recalled Sanborn to Barnett’s Crossroads and then sent him up the Jacinto road. General Hamilton rode with Sanborn at the head of the column. Captain Willcox redeployed his cavalry to screen the march. Sullivan roused his brigade and fell in behind Sanborn.

  Rosecrans hastened to apprise Grant of his whereabouts. From Barnett’s Crossroads he wrote, “Reached here at 12. Cavalry advance drove pickets from near here; met another stand at about 1 mile from here. Hamilton’s division is advancing; head of column a mile to the front now. Head of Stanley’s column is here.” He concluded the note with a few trivialities, saying nothing of his decision to leave open the Fulton road.15

  Rosecrans loitered at Barnett’s Crossroads to watch the first of Stanley’s infantry turn onto the Jacinto road. It was nearly 1:00 P.M. That morning Rosecrans had blithely assured Grant he would be at Iuka by 2:00 P.M., yet the town was still eight miles away. Colonels Dickey and Lagow remained with him, Lagow still carping about the need to make haste, and Rosecrans just as emphatically insisting that it was Ord who must attack first.

  The crackle of rifle fire ended their unseemly debate.16

  7. Their Delay Was Our Salvation

  Captain Willcox and his Michigan cavalrymen were having a grand time. Since swinging into the saddle before daybreak, they had brushed aside every Rebel trooper who dared confront them. Riding north now along the Jacinto road, ahead of Sanborn’s brigade, they had no reason to expect anything less. On the far side of Barnett’s Crossroads the Michiganders made contact with a squadron of General Armstrong’s Confederate cavalry under the command of Lt. E. B. Trezevant.

  They drove the Southerners handily to within four miles of Iuka before matters took an abrupt turn for the worst. Drawing rein at a shallow rivulet known as Moore’s Branch, Willcox’s scouts scanned the horizon. Four hundred yards up the road, on a commanding knoll, stood an attractive, whitewashed house belonging to Mrs. Moore, the widowed matron of a prominent Iuka family. Around her home Rebel cavalrymen were dismounting and hurrying into line. It was nearly 1:30 P.M. Without pausing to reconnoiter, Captain Willcox sent forward at the gallop his lead element, Company K under Sgt. H. D. Cutter. Cutter’s troopers splashed across the streamlet and charged up the road. The Rebels scattered into the timber behind the Moore house, but they returned — a full squadron strong. The Michiganders wheeled their horses and made for Moore’s Branch. A hail of bullets hurried them along.1

  At that moment General Hamilton arrived at Moore’s Branch. With him were his staff and mounted escort. Cutter’s cavalrymen scattered, making Hamilton’s entourage the principal target of the Rebels, who had dismounted around the Moore house. Several horses were hit, and a bullet struck Lt. Louis Schraum, commander of Hamilton’s escort, in the chest. The volley missed Hamilton, who had worries greater than his own safety. “I was immediately in rear of the skirmishers, and taking in the situation at a glance, dashed back to the head of the column,” he recalled. “If this should become enveloped by the enemy, a rout was inevitable, and our force would be doubled back on itself.”

  Brig. Gen. Charles S. Hamilton (Massachusetts Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion)

  Hamilton met John Sanborn at the head of his brigade. Messengers from the Third Michigan Cavalry had apprised Sanborn of the skirmish at the Moore house, and he agreed with Hamilton that his lead regiment, the Fifth Iowa, must sweep the farm clear of Confederates. Hamilton told Sanborn to hasten his follow-on regiments; he would see to the Fifth Iowa himself.2

  The Fifth Iowa needed no encouragement. Its commander was every bit as eager to dislodge the Rebels as were Sanborn and Hamilton. An officer in the Prussian army before emigrating to America in 1849, Col. Charles Leopold Matthies was one of the most capable commanders in Hamilton’s division. With a patriotic fervor common to European immigrants, he had offered to raise a company for Federal service in January 1861 —four months before Fort Sumter. His offer was politely rejected as premature. Five months later he was back as a captain in the First Iowa.3

  Aggressive but prudent, Matthies had been listening to his men grumble for a chance to fight since the first shot from the Moore house echoed through the woods. He deployed three companies under Lt. Col. Ezekiel Sampson—a political intriguer whom the men despised—in a long skirmish line across the road and retained the rest of the regiment in march column. After Willcox’s cavalry passed to the rear, Sampson’s men advanced, shooting as they went. The Confederates fell back firing, and at2:00 P.M. the Iowans took the Moore house. General Hamilton and his retinue were right behind them. Either from anger at the death of Lieutenant Schraum or from plain mean-spiritedness, Hamilton ordered Sampson’s skirmishers to set fire to the widow’s home.4

  The sky was a cloudless blue, the day was warm and dry, and the wooden planks of the Widow Moore’s home burned well. Blast-furnace heat rolled from the tall flames out over the Jacinto road, nearly suffocating the passing Federals. Lieutenant Trezevant’s Southern troopers kept up their annoying fire, challenging the Iowa skirmishers to venture beyond the Moore knoll. It took the Iowans an hour to inch forward a mile; all the while the long Federal column stacked up behind them.

  The Iowans emerged from the timber into a poorly plowed field, too exhausted to keep skirmishing. Colonel Sanborn relieved them at 3:00 P.M. with four companies from the next regiment in line, the Twenty-sixth Missouri. Lt. Col. John Holman deployed one company forward and one in reserve on either side of the road a
nd started across the field. The Rebels fled, and the cat-and-mouse game of skirmishing resumed.5

  Confederate resistance weakened. A handful of rebels took refuge around the Curtis farm and contested the progress of the Missourians a few moments. Farther up the road, part of the enemy command remounted and prepared to charge. Holman brought up his reserves. The sight of four companies of infantry arrayed in line of battle dissuaded the Rebels, and they withdrew.

  A half-mile north of the Curtis farm Holman’s Missourians came upon a wide, level field. On its western edge stood a large, two-story frame house belonging to a farmer named Ricks. In the farmyard was a well and a small circular signboard that told the Federals they were only two miles from Iuka. Troops from the main column would pause later to drink at the well—and pillage the abandoned farmhouse — but Holman pushed his men on, intent on closing the final two miles to town.

  Four hundred yards beyond the Ricks farm, on a hill beside a log meetinghouse, Holman paused. The Confederates had disappeared from his front, but in their place was an obstacle potentially more vexing. Where the meetinghouse stood, the Jacinto road forked. Should Holman choose the wrong branch, he might fatally delay the arrival of the army before Iuka. Fortunately Holman was well served by his guides, who not only knew the ground but also were honest in what they told him. The left fork, they said, ran along a ridge. Although it was wider and looked more promising, the left fork actually trailed off to the northwest, away from town. The narrower right fork, which initially followed a low ridge toward the east, was in fact the Jacinto road—unquestionably the correct route. Holman reported his location and with General Hamilton’s concurrence started his line of skirmishers forward at 4:00 P.M.6

  The Missourians followed the fork through an open wood of young oaks to the base of a short, convex ridge. It was some 300 yards long and trended generally from the northwest to the southeast. Tall grass, dense bushes, and tangled thickets blanketed its slopes and low summit. The Jacinto road ran up the center of the ridge, then dipped sharply into a deep, tree-choked ravine that paralleled the front face. In the ravine the road again forked: the Jacinto road veered sharply to the north, and a wagon road branched to the southeast to connect with the Fulton road just south of Iuka. On the far side of the ravine, 300 yards from the ridge, stood a high knoll.

  Holman swung his line up the ridge. At the top a scattered volley met the Missourians, who returned the fire, and Holman hastened up the slope to learn the cause of the shooting.

  His gaze fixed upon the ravine to his front. Drawn up in line of battle, 150 yards from the ridge where his skirmishers stood, was what looked to be a Confederate regiment of infantry. The bright glint of sunlight on bronze betrayed its artillery support, and a rising cloud of dust from the forest beyond suggested that more infantry was on the way. Holman halted his skirmishers and reported to Sanborn that “he had driven the rebel skirmish line into the main line of battle; that the rebel army was in line of battle, batteries in position; and that, in his judgment, the skirmishers should be withdrawn; saying that every indication was that the rebel army was about to advance and attack.” It was 4:30 P.M., two and a half hours later than the time Rosecrans boasted he would be at Iuka.7

  * * *

  Lieutenant Colonel Holman was guilty of hyperbole. The entire Rebel army was not about to attack him. Indeed, there was grave doubt whether the Confederates would be able to muster enough troops even to resist Sanborn’s brigade.

  The first report of Rosecrans’s advance up the Jacinto road had reduced Price to a perfect nonplus. All his attention, and all his infantry, had been concentrated on Ord’s force northwest of Iuka. Apart from Lieutenant Trezevant’s rapidly retreating cavalry squadron, at 3:00 P.M. not a single Confederate soldier stood between Rosecrans and Iuka, and the head of his column was as close to town as the divisions of Maury and Little.

  Price had learned of the Federal appearance south of town thirty minutes earlier. A sweat-stained scout, whose comrade had been shot down beside him in the initial clash with the Yankee cavalry, brought Price the news. The dead man’s blood covered the scout’s jacket, proof enough that the story was true. Other pickets brought in corroborating reports, and Price acted. Knowing nothing of the strength or intentions of the approaching Federals, Price sent what he guessed were the minimum number of troops needed to stop, or at least to slow, them.8

  The mission went to Hébert’s brigade, the only unit not committed to the line opposite Ord. General Litde received the order to detach Hébert at 3:00 P.M., about the time Lieutenant Colonel Holman relieved the Fifth Iowa on the Yankee skirmish line south of town. The long roll sounded, and Hébert’s brigade stumbled into march column, caught unprepared. “All is confusion, hurrying to and fro,” observed a soldier from another brigade. “Officers away from post. Can’t find commands. With a few bottles of the stuff which screws the courage up to the sticking point . . . their legs stick badly on terra firma and their heads set less firmly in the direction of the field of glory.”9 Every Confederate asked himself the same question: “How on earth, with the woods full of our cavalry, could they have approached so near our lines?” The simple truth was that the woods were not blanketed with Southern cavalry. The Fulton road was unguarded between Peyton’s Mill and Iuka, and the Jacinto road was patrolled only as far west as Barnett’s Crossroads. Armstrong’s resources were limited, but he should have pushed farther along the roads leading into town from the south. However, the ultimate responsibility for not ensuring that his southern flank was better screened rested with Price.10

  Hébert’s infantrymen paid in perspiration for the neglect at headquarters, setting off at the double-quick time to meet the enemy. A mile south of town they collided with Trezevant’s demoralized troopers. Hébert urged his men toward the large, high knoll overlooking the ravine in which the Jacinto road rejoined the branch trail from the Fulton road. Before them rose a second eminence—the low ridge upon which Holman’s Missourians had appeared. Hébert rushed his lead regiment, the Third Texas Dismounted Cavalry, into line near the base of the knoll, on its sheltered northeastern side. While waiting for the Texans to deploy, Hébert told the commander of the Clark Missouri Battery, Lt. James Faris, to run a section of guns up the knoll and shell the Federals off the far ridge.

  It was an impetuous act, deploying artillery without infantry support to silence enemy skirmishers. Lieutenant Faris chose his own section for the duty and accorded his second section the privilege of going into battery on the northwest side of the Jacinto road, where intervening timber would protect it from the Yankee skirmishers. As Faris feared, his cannoneers came under fire the instant they showed themselves on the knoll. Faris led them back down just as quickly, putting 150 yards between himself and the hill.11

  When Hébert saw artillery alone would not frighten off the Federals, he ordered the Third Texas Dismounted Cavalry to sweep forward in a skirmish line, both to silence the Yankee fire and to tease the enemy into revealing his strength.

  Col. Hinchie P. Mabry had his Third Texas Dismounted Cavalry formed and ready before Faris’s guns abandoned the knoll. It was to be their first fight on foot; a few weeks earlier, the Texans had sent their horses to Holly Springs to rest and graze. Their training as infantry had been minimal, and some of the men still carried double-barreled shotguns, effective only at close range. As the Texans stepped off toward the ravine, a nervous regimental officer asked Hébert, who was watching the movement, “General, must we fix bayonets?” “Yes sir!” barked the Creole in impatient, heavily accented English: “What for you have ze bayonet, if you no fix him? Yes, by gar; fix him! fix him!” Those Texans with rifle- muskets paused to fix bayonets.12

  It was a needless bit of posturing. The handful of Missourians who had ventured into the ravine to get a closer shot at the Rebel cannoneers scampered back up the ridge when Mabry’s dismounted troopers replaced Faris’s cannon on the knoll. The Texans marched down the knoll and settled into the ravine. Holman’s skir
mishers took cover behind a growth of blackjack oak trees seven to fifteen feet high, which covered most of the ridge. As the Federal fire died out, Faris returned to the knoll, loading his guns with canister and case shot to greet the Federal main body, which Hébert expected momentarily.13

  Apparently it was then, at 4:30 P.M., that Lieutenant Colonel Holman came onto the ridge and made his desperate report. His regimental commander, Col. George Boomer, arrived a few minutes later. He found no cause to doubt Holman’s estimate of Rebel strength, nor did Colonel Sanborn, who showed up next.

  By the time Sanborn arrived, a courier had returned with Hamilton’s reply to Holman’s note: Colonel Boomer was to advance his skirmishers aggressively. Sanborn passed Boomer the paper. The Missourian protested— to go forward off the ridge was suicide. “You have shown me your orders; under them I will assemble the skirmishers, and bring back my regiment as soon as possible,” Boomer announced defiantly.

  Hamilton’s arrival spared Sanborn the need of reconciling what he called a blatant “clash of authority.” Hamilton scanned the front as the remainder of Hébert’s brigade came into line on the knoll and in the tall grass on either side of it. He rescinded the order to advance; from confident aggressiveness he lapsed into an agitated panic. That he could fashion an adequate defense struck the New Yorker as doubtful: “The ground was on the brow of a densely wooded hill, falling off abruptly to the right and left. The underbrush and timber were too thick to admit of deployments, and the most that could be done was to take a position across the road, by marching the leading regiments into position by a flank movement.” Before returning to the column, Hamilton told Boomer to get his regiment into line of battle immediately. Sanborn was to place each succeeding regiment.14