Colonel Matthies’s Fifth Iowa arrived first, and Sanborn directed it to the right side of the Jacinto road. The left companies of the regiment formed on top of the ridge in the timber, and the right companies lined up down the southeastern slope. Matthies drew in his right flank to follow the convex trace of the ridge.
General Hamilton was right behind the Iowans, too worried to remain in the rear. Had the aim of Faris’s gunners been better, his anxiety might have cost him his life. “Just as the first regiment was placed, the enemy opened one of his batteries with canister,” said Hamilton. “The charge passed over our heads, doing no damage beyond bringing down a shower of twigs.”15
Next up was the Eleventh Battery, Ohio Light Artillery. The battery presented Sanborn with a dilemma similar to that which had confronted Hébert moments earlier: should he order his artillery into action on what was commanding—but exposed — ground before more of the infantry came up? The Minnesota lawyer elected to do so. He told ist Lt. Cyrus Sears to take his battery into action on the brow of the ridge, astride the Jacinto road. A decrepit log cabin, framed by a small clearing, stood just in front of the position Sanborn chose. Young timber blanketed the rest of the ridge. Although he disliked the ground, Sanborn felt Hamilton’s hectoring precluded him from looking for a better spot.
For a moment ist Lt. Henry-Neil, commander of the right section of Sears’s battery, doubted he would have enough men alive to place his guns. Rifle fire swept the ridge the instant his limbers rattled up the slope. Neil whirled in the saddle to follow the flight of the bullets: “I turned my head to look for the men, expecting to see half the men and horses down. To my great joy I found all uninjured. The storm of bullets was passing just over our heads. We hastened to get into position and unlimber before they could get the range.” Sears chose ground a few yards behind the spot that Sanborn had selected for him, planting the battery colors in a dense growth of hazel at an angle where the road bent to the right. There he waited for his artillerymen to clear a space large enough to accommodate his six cannon, which Sears intended to align nearly hub to hub.16
The next regiment of infantry on the ridge was Col. Norman Eddy’s Forty-eighth Indiana, which had never fired a shot in anger. Organized nine months earlier, the regiment still numbered a respectable 434 men. Colonel Eddy hurried them into line on the left of the Eleventh Ohio Battery, fronting an old, farmed-out field. He ordered the men to lie down and hold their fire. Hamilton, who had returned to the business of placing Sanborn’s regiments for him, accorded Eddy poor ground, especially for green troops. In front of the right wing of his regiment the forward slope of the ridge fell off so sharply that, as Eddy complained, “it was impossible to reach with musketry. On the left of the regiment the descent was less rapid and abrupt, and in many points offered a cover to an enemy’s approach.” Eddy conformed his left wing to the slope.17
Sears’s battery was booming out its first salvos when the Fourth Minnesota came up still farther to the left, facing the same field the Forty- eighth Indiana fronted. Four hundred eight strong, it too was untested in battle. Worse yet, it was led by a captain, Ebenezer Le Gro, who was in over his head. After Sanborn was promoted to brigade command, Le Gro had wangled regimental command by convincing his fellow captains he had seen combat service somewhere before. If so, it taught him little. First Le Gro ordered the men to fix bayonets, which would make it harder for them to deploy. Next he formed line of battle too far to the rear, so that his front was masked by timber. Then he overcompensated for his mistake, marching the men forty yards forward into the open field. A few minutes later he marched the Minnesotans back to their proper place beside the Forty-eighth Indiana. Unfortunately their assigned position offered little more in the way of cover. The ridge ended just beyond the regiment’s right flank, and the left wing was anchored on nothing more substantial than a lightly wooded ravine, just south of a cabin belonging to the Yow family. The men were able to lie down in a slight hollow, but the ground was bare, the timber belt being thirty yards behind them.
Le Gro’s peregrinations so confused T. P. Wilson, the commissary sergeant of the Fourth Minnesota, that he rode into the ranks of the Third Texas. Lying face down in the grass to escape the canister that Sears’s cannon were spewing into the ravine, the Texans failed to notice that the rider in their midst wore blue. “Where are you going,” yelled one of them, surprised to find someone foolish enough to be on horseback amid the flying canister. Wilson recognized his mistake at once. “Oh, just looking around a little,” he replied as he cast a glance back up the Jacinto road. “You had better not go very far in that direction,” cautioned the Rebel, still too preoccupied by the roaring artillery to notice Sergeant Wilson’s Union blue. “I’ll be careful,” said Wilson, who wheeled his horse to the left and made his way back to the Fourth.18
By the time Sanborn’s last regiment, the Sixteenth Iowa, appeared, Hamilton had run out of defensible ground on which to place troops, and he confessed as much to Sanborn. As the veteran regiment in the brigade, the Sixteenth might have made a decisive contribution in the front line, but Hamilton, judging the right to be well protected and the left to be in little danger, had the Sixteenth Iowa wait below the ridge behind Sears’s battery and the Forty-eighth Indiana.19
Returning from skirmish duty, Colonel Boomer re-formed his Twenty- sixth Missouri behind the Fifth Iowa. Before Boomer could look for a place in the front line, Colonel Sanborn intervened and told him to remain behind the Iowans and watch the brigade’s right flank. Boomer’s left companies rested behind the Fifth Iowa, and his right companies settled into a shallow ravine laced with sassafras and hazel bushes that ran between two low spurs.
It was 5:00 P.M. before Hamilton had Sanborn’s 2,200 infantry formed to his satisfaction. In the thirty minutes it took him to deploy, the firing had risen from a light rattle to a steady thunder. Both sections of the Clark Missouri Battery were engaged and had the ridge nicely ranged; a single shot from Faris’s section had torn apart six soldiers from the Forty- eighth Indiana while the regiment was still in column. The Confederate line of battle was formed and appeared ready to advance. Hamilton wasboth pleased and mystified that they had not: “Why they did not move forward and attack us at once is not understood. Their delay, which enabled us to form the nearest three regiments in line of batde . . . was our salvation.”20
The arrival of General Rosecrans and his retinue interrupted Hamilton’s musings. The New Yorker hastened to explain his dispositions. Rosecrans agreed that he had placed the Eleventh Ohio Battery on the “only available ground” and otherwise approved of his actions — or so said Rosecrans in his report. Colonel Sanborn told a different story, one decidedly more in keeping with Rosecrans’s contentious temperament. The general, said Sanborn, rode up “in a fault-finding mood,” utterly disgusted with the way Hamilton had formed the line.
Rosecrans’s conduct certainly was more consistent with Sanborn’s story than with his own report. Whatever he may have thought of Hamilton’s dispositions along the ridge, he obviously concluded that the New Yorker had neglected his flanks. Both rested near roads that might provide the enemy with a means of approaching the Federal flanks undetected. On the right a narrow and sandy trail called the Mill road led southeast toward a small settlement. Rosecrans called for Colonel Miz- ner, whose cavalry had been relegated to the role of spectators, and ordered him to send a battalion of the Third Michigan Cavalry to ascertain whether the Mill road joined the Fulton road or simply trailed off harmlessly into the woods. Captain Willcox rode off with four companies. Observing that, in his obsession with drawing up Sanborn’s command, Hamilton had forgotten he had a second brigade, Rosecrans took it upon himself to call on Brig. Gen. Jeremiah Sullivan for reinforcements to cover the road that led to the left of the line.21
Sullivan was pleased to oblige. Eleven days shy of his thirty-first birthday, the young Hoosier was on familiar terms with Rosecrans, having served under him in western Virginia. Shortly after recei
ving his commission as a brigadier general in April 1862, Sullivan was sent west to command a brigade in the Army of the Mississippi, perhaps at Rosecrans’s behest. Although he enjoyed the commanding general’s confidence, Sullivan was an undistinguished commander; his sobriquet of “Fighting Jerry” was attributable to his personal bravery, which the major of the Seventeenth Iowa said was the only quality that fitted him for command. For the past thirty minutes here at Iuka he had been waiting with his brigade stacked up along the Jacinto road below the meetinghouse while Hamilton fidgeted about the ridge. To Rosecrans’s request that he patrol the settlement road that forked to the left at the meetinghouse, Sullivan responded with the Tenth Iowa and a two-gun section of the Twelfth Battery, Wisconsin Light Artillery.22
Col. Nicholas Perczel commanded the Tenth Iowa, and ist Lt. L. D. Immell led the Twelfth Wisconsin Battery. They were an odd pair. Perczel, a gruff and gray-haired Hungarian loved by his troops, had seen service in Europe during the rebellious decade of the 1840s. Immell, a young martinet utterly despised by his men, had no combat experience and had come to command by default.
The Twelfth Wisconsin Battery had been organized in St. Louis as a company for the First Missouri Light Artillery, Wisconsin having fulfilled its first quota of volunteers. The Wisconsin men tolerated their assignment until the battery was attached to Hamilton’s division, when they demanded that their affiliation with Missouri be severed and that their commander, a Missourian, be dismissed. The captain took an indefinite sick leave to save face, and command devolved on Immell, who lost no time in applying his own unique brand of discipline to his fellow Wisconsin volunteers. During the march to Iuka Immell had dragged a sick private from an ambulance at gunpoint, then drawn his saber and threatened to thrust it through the artilleryman’s chest if he persisted in malingering. On another occasion he yanked a gravely ill private from his bed, shook him violently, and set him to work digging ditches until the man collapsed, near death. Those who got sick during the march he denied recourse to the battery’s ambulance, offering instead to tie them spread eagle to the spare wheels of a caisson. Those who complained of moldy rations Immell had bucked and gagged.
Immell was as contemptuous of his subordinate officers as he was of his enlisted men, and he showed it now by taking charge of the section detailed to support the Tenth Iowa. However, the army’s chief of artillery, Lt. Col. Warren Lothrop, had little confidence in Immell and so rode along with him to superintend matters. Immell set up the cannon north of the Yow place, on the east side of the road, facing the same played-out field that the Fourth Minnesota and the Forty-eighth Indiana fronted south of the cabin.
Colonel Perczel formed his regiment to the right of Immell’s cannon. Finding his right flank in the air, Perczel dispatched three companies into a wooded ravine that paralleled the settlement road to try and make contact with Sanborn’s left flank regiment, the Fourth Minnesota.23
After sending Perczel and Immell to reinforce the left, General Sullivan took it upon himself to strengthen the right. Two hundred yards southeast of the meetinghouse the prevailing timber gave way to a huge, oblong field of corn and cotton, 500 yards long from north to south and 600 yards wide at its widest, east to west. The eastern fringe of the field ran to the right and rear of the Twenty-sixth Missouri, which then held the extreme right of the Federal front line. Should the Rebels outflank the Missourians and penetrate the field, they would be able to sweep behind Sanborn with impunity. Mizner’s cavalry had ridden too far down the Mill road to detect any such movement.
To the far end of the cotton field, then, Sullivan sent the Tenth Missouri. Col. Samuel Holmes deployed his men at the edge of the woods, fronting east, and shook out skirmishers into the trees. His position was as perilous as it was crucial. Faris’s Confederate gunners on the knoll had glimpsed Holmes’s moving men, and they blasted them when they crossed the field. A single shell burst in the ranks of Company D with sickening effect, killing or mangling fourteen men. The regiment stopped, dressed ranks, and lay face down amid the cotton shrubs in what one Mis- sourian called a “most trying position.” Rebel cannoneers continued to send occasional shells their way. “The smoke soon became so dense that we could scarcely see the man next to us,” said a Missourian, “and though lying down we met with considerable loss, under the most trying conditions that soldiers can be placed in, that of receiving fire without the ability to return it or to move.”24
Rosecrans had come onto the ridge, reached his conclusions about Hamilton’s dispositions, and sent instructions to Sullivan to bolster the left flank, all in the space of three or four minutes. With plenty of nervous energy left to expend, Rosecrans turned to upbraid Colonel Sanborn for having placed the Eleventh Ohio Battery so far forward on the crest.
But Sanborn was spared what would have been an unwarranted dressing down. As Rosecrans began to speak, Colonel Eddy of the Forty- eighth Indiana galloped up and announced that “the whole rebel army was advancing.” Sanborn excused himself and rode forward to confirm the report. “I did, and the entire rebel line opened fire with both artillery and musketry,” said Sanborn. “As I came back through my own line . . . I gave the command as loud as I was able to both infantry and artillery to commence firing, and the battle opened as fiercely as it is possible to conceive. Leaves, twigs, men, horses — everything—was falling.”25
8. Like Lightning from a Clear Sky
General Hébert regained his composure during the lull following the Third Texas Dismounted Cavalry’s march into the ravine. While Hamilton and Sanborn sorted out their regiments atop the ridge, Hébert brought the rest of his brigade from column into line.
He placed the First Texas Legion of Col. John Whitfield1 on the right side of the Jacinto road, 300 yards northeast of the Fourth Minnesota. The Fourteenth and Seventeenth Arkansas regiments, merged because of batde losses, formed on the left of the First Texas Legion. To the left of the Arkansans went the Third Louisiana Infantry. Behind the left flank of the Louisianans Hébert placed the St. Louis Artillery. The untried Fortieth Mississippi he retained in the second line.
Hébert had his brigade deployed behind the knoll a full fifteen minutes before Sanborn formed his on the ridge, but he was loath to leave his sheltered position. While contemplating his next move, Hébert ordered skirmishers from his flank regiments to augment the Third Texas Dismounted Cavalry in the ravine. Company F of the Third Louisiana drew the duty on the extreme left of the brigade. The Louisianans felt their way across the heavily wooded bottom, where the long afternoon shadows cooled the air. Near the ridge they ran into skirmishers from the Fifth Iowa. Fighting among the dark trees was highly personal, bringing out the best or worst qualities in the combatants. The Louisianans killed four or five Yankees, one quite needlessly. Recalled Willie Tunnard,
Two of the enemy took shelter behind a large tree direcdy in front of Company F. The tree, however, was not large enough to protect the two, one of whom was instantly killed by Private Hudson; the other begged for his life most piteously, which would undoubtedly have been granted him had he relied on the word of a rebel. He was ordered several times to come to the company and his life should be spared, but he was afraid to expose his person. During the conversation between him and the captain, Private J. Jus, it seems, became rather restless, left his position in the line, and slipped around until he came in view of the Yankee, then raised his gun and shot him through the head, at the same time remarking, “Damned if I don’t fetch him.” The Federal proved to be a lieutenant.2
Hébert had concluded he lacked the troops needed to attack the Yankees— a wise decision, as he had no idea how many Federals might be lurking behind the ridge—when General Litde arrived at the head of Col. John D. Martin’s brigade and took command. Price had decided to detach a second brigade south of town. To improve the odds of success, he asked Little to accompany the brigade.3
Litde gave no hint of the afflictions that had brought him to the edge of collapse. He sized up the situation qui
ckly and, after a few words with Hébert, decided to attack with both brigades. Litde called for Colonel Martin, whose Mississippians and Alabamians were double-quicking down the road under a rain of shells one new soldier thought sounded like “buzzards passing.” Little told Martin to support Hébert’s left wing with the Thirty-seventh Alabama and the Thirty-sixth Mississippi; he would assume command of the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Mississippi regiments himself and support Hébert’s right wing, which was drawing fire from Immell’s Wisconsin battery across the open field. Unlike General Hamilton, Little recognized the importance of securing his flanks before beginning a fight with an enemy of unknown strength.4
Little reminded the commanders of the Thirty-seventh and Thirty- eighth Mississippi regiments that Hébert’s men were to their front; they were to hold their fire until Litde said otherwise. With that final word of caution, Little judged his brigades ready. At 5:15 P.M. he ordered the attack to begin. Hébert’s brigade, numbering 1,774 officers and men, and Martin’s brigade, some 1,600 strong, moved forward to do battle with the 2,200 Federals of Sanborn and, in close proximity, a similar number under Sullivan. All 8,000 combatants, North and South, were arrayed on a tract of rolling forest and field slighdy more than one-half mile wide.5
Hébert’s men let go a high-pitched “Rebel Yell” and marched slowly down the knoll. The Federal line was silent. In the ravine Col. Hinchie R Mabry recalled the soldiers of his Third Texas Dismounted Cavalry. Hébert halted the brigade long enough to allow the Texans to replace the Fourteenth and Seventeenth Arkansas, which fell back to join the Fortieth Mississippi in the second line. The advance resumed as deliberately as before. Faris’s cannon fell silent for fear of hitting their own men in the backs. Hébert’s Confederates descended into the ravine, 150 yards short of the ridge, and the Yankee line opened fire with a deafening crash.
The Darkest Days of the War- the Battles of Iuka and Corinth Page 11