While Grant, Ord, and Rosecrans second-guessed one another, General Stanley drove his division down the Fulton road after Price. The Rebels were an hour ahead of their pursuers. Any real chance at slowing them was lost when Mizner’s cavalry failed to reach the intersection of the Jacinto-Tuscumbia and Fulton roads before the Confederates. The Yankee troopers charged but were driven away by a few shots from Hébert’s artillery, and the Southerners marched on unmolested.
Colonel Hatch and his eight companies of the Second Iowa Cavalry proved more irksome. Ranging ahead of Stanley’s column, they nipped at the Rebel rear guard all morning, and at noon began a running skirmish with a patrol of Armstrong’s cavalry. By 2:00 P.M. Armstrong and Maury had grown weary of the Iowans. They had tried once unsuccessfully to lure them into a hastily laid trap. Eight miles south of Iuka they prepared a more deliberate ambush. Maury halted the trailing regiment of the rear guard, the Second Texas Infantry, and placed it in line of batde with Bledsoe’s Missouri battery along the fringe of a low, dense stretch of forest through which the road ran. Col. Robert McCulloch’s Second Missouri Cavalry formed out of sight, ready to charge. A squadron of Wirt Adams’s Mississippi Cavalry Regiment would be dangled out on the Fulton road as bait.
On came the Iowans, yelling and galloping after a Rebel cavalry patrol they had been chasing for four miles. They ran headlong into Adams’s Mississippians, who fled as planned. But the abrupt Rebel flight raised Colonel Hatch’s suspicions. Just north of the ambush site, atop a hill, he called a halt and ordered his skirmishers to dismount. They edged forward toward a depression filled with blackjack oak, on the far side of which the Second Texas lay in wait. Maury sprang his ambush—prematurely. The Second Texas let go a mighty volley from the timber, Bledsoe’s guns filled the road with canister, and McCulloch’s Missouri troopers charged. For all the racket, the now rapidly retreating Iowans had lost only six men wounded.13
Still, it was enough to disrupt the Federal pursuit. Hatch withdrew to Stanley’s sluggish infantry column. Stanley’s division had been without rations for three days. The men were tired and hungry, perhaps as hungry as the enemy they chased, and by sunset were played out. Stanley bivouacked his division along the north bank of Crippled Deer Creek, and Hamilton rested his men at Barnett’s Crossroads. Both were convinced that the enemy, by marching all night, would reach Bay Springs before daybreak. Further pursuit seemed pointless. Said Rosecrans, “Our rations being exhausted, and the country towards Bay Springs destitute, I was satisfied that further pursuit with our infantry would be utterly unavailing, and directed my command to return the next day to Jacinto.”14
More worried about his own lines of communication and supply than chasing Price, Grant approved Rosecrans’s decision. By midnight on the twentieth he was back in Corinth, remaining there just long enough to see Julia and the children off to St. Louis before boarding a train himself for Jackson, Tennessee.15
Grant’s sudden shift in priorities was occasioned by unexpected activity on the part of Earl Van Dorn during the three days that Grant and Rosecrans had devoted to Price at Iuka. Never one to wait for the enemy to find him, Van Dorn marched his army first to Pocahontas, where he had suggested Price join him for a joint attack on Corinth. From there Van Dorn struck out for Bolivar, hoping to create a diversion that would allow Price to escape from Iuka. At sunset on September 20 Van Dorn made camp just seven miles from the strategic railroad town. He was too late to prevent the Federals from concentrating against Price, but his feint into Tennessee caused Grant to disperse his forces after Iuka. Rosecrans returned to his old encampment at Jacinto with Stanley’s and Hamilton’s divisions on September 21. Ord reached Corinth the same day, and Grant hurried reinforcements from there to the garrisons at Bolivar and Jackson.16
Unlike Grant, Rosecrans saw Van Dorn’s advance more as an opportunity than a threat, and he offered his army to a combined movement against the Mississippian. Having just received word of his promotion to major general, Rosecrans was in good spirits. In the early morning hours of September 21, he wrote Grant, “If you can let me know that there is a good opportunity to march on Holly Springs to cut off the forces of Buck Van Dorn I will be in readiness to take everything. If we could get them across the Hatchie they would be clean up the spout.”17
There is no record of Grant’s response to Rosecrans’s exuberant proposal, which Van Dorn’s withdrawal into Mississippi to meet Price rendered moot.18
That Price would have an army fit to fight with Van Dorn was in grave doubt during the four-day retreat from Iuka to Baldwyn. Morale was bad, discipline lax, and straggling heavy. Soldiers looted homes and robbed crops. Said a correspondent of the Jackson Mississippian, “I doubted, on the march up and on the retreat, whether I was in an army of brave men, fighting for their country, or merely following a band of armed marauders, who are as terrible to their friends as foes.” David Garrett of the Sixth Texas Cavalry, which had seen no fighting at Iuka, watched men slip away for no apparent reason. Garrett’s friend Tom Wood “just got tired and said he would not travel any further, the Feds he said could take him and go to hell with him and that is the last we had of him.”
The retreat ended at Baldwyn on September 23. No one bothered to lay out a regular camp, and the men bivouacked as they pleased in the woods outside town. “Our trip accomplished, and we are again at Baldwyn,” Major Finley L. Hubbell of the Third Missouri noted in his diary. “But I am totally at a loss, as well as everybody else, to know what we accomplished by it.”19
* * *
What had been lost was as uncertain as what had been won. Confederate casualties undoubtedly exceeded those reported by Price and his lieutenants. Reports from Hébert’s brigade conceded 63 men killed, 305 wounded, and 40 missing of 1,774 engaged. Colonel Martin reported 22 killed, 95 wounded, and 117 missing from his brigade, which went into action 1,405 strong. The total reported killed was 85, with 410 wounded and 157 missing.
Not surprisingly, Federal estimates of Southern casualties exceed the 652 given in Confederate reports. Archibald Campbell, the medical director of the Army of the Mississippi, calculated from personal inspection and what he regarded as reliable information that the Rebels had lost more than 520 killed, 1,300 wounded, and 181 captured. General Rosecrans said 162 dead Rebels were found laid out for burial behind the Methodist church and that he counted another 99 on the battlefield. Extrapolating from that, he estimated Price to have lost 385 killed or dead from wounds, 692 wounded, and 361 captured. The Federal provost marshal, Capt. William Wiles, certified that 265 Southerners were found on the field and buried by Union troops.
Federal casualty totals are far more reliable. Rosecrans reported 141 killed, 613 wounded, and 36 missing. Given Union losses of 790, Price’s reported casualties of 652 seem low indeed, especially as the Confederates did the attacking.20
The dead were buried in long shallow graves where they fell. Green flies descended on the fields and clustered in the bushes atop the ridge. The weather turned hot. Bodies decomposed rapidly. The sickly smell of rotting flesh blew through the streets of town. Ten days after the batde Cyrus Boyd of the Fifteenth Iowa left his garrison duties in town and followed the odor to the scene of the fighting. Afterward he recorded his impressions: “I have never seen before evidence of such a desperate contest on a small piece of ground. The trees around are almost torn to kindling wood . . . . Twenty-five dead horses lay close together and about forty men belonging to the Fifth Iowa buried in one grave here, besides numerous other graves scattered all through the woods.” The ridge was a vast char- nel house: “The ground in many places was white as snow with creeping worms. The darkness of the forest and the terrible mortality made it one of the most horrible places I was ever in. Then the silence was oppressive. Not a sound could be heard except once in a while the chirp of some lonely bird in the deep forest. To think of our poor fellows left to sleep in that dark wood . . . . “21
13. We Had Better Lay Down Our Arms and Go Home
General Price arrived at Baldwyn somber and reflective. Iuka had convinced him of two things: Rosecrans and Grant could, at Corinth or any other point between Iuka and Memphis, rapidly concentrate 40,000 men—more than enough to crush his and Van Dorn’s armies in detail — and only by uniting their commands could the two Southern generals hope to accomplish anything. That dark revelation was enough to cause Price to submit to service under Van Dorn.
From Baldwyn on the morning of September 23, with his “utterly exhausted and demoralized” army resting outside town and stragglers still streaming in, Price wrote Van Dorn, “I will leave here in two days to form a junction with you, and I desire to know at what point we will meet.” Price recommended Ripley, a town midway between the two armies that he could reach easily in two days' march. Van Dorn agreed and said he hoped to meet Price there on September 28.1
Price’s march began inauspiciously. The men were weary and jaundiced. “Without waiting to fix things up and get together our old men we again started on a more foolhardy expedition than the last,” said Lt. Wright Schaumburg of Maury’s staff.
Friday, September 26, dawned cloudy and cool. Soaked to the skin by a “night spent under the weeping heavens with a chilling blast of a northwest wind, a wet couch of mud and leaves for our reveries,” Price’s soldiers set out for Ripley.
It was slow going. The road was bad and the country hilly. A heavy rain fell at dusk. “The darkness set in so thick that one could almost feel it; the mud in the road was soon deep, and grew deeper as we advanced,” said a Missourian. “I think nearly every man fell down from one to a dozen times that night.” The men caught a few hours of fitful sleep before resuming the march at dawn over a road pounded to paste. They made fifteen miles on September 27 and bivouacked five miles short of Ripley. The next morning, “covered with mud and thoroughly drenched with rain,” the army traipsed into Ripley. Guides led Price’s men through town to the fairgrounds, the site chosen for their camp, and the soldiers pitched their tents under a fine drizzle, “just the kind of day to make a soldier homesick,” wrote an Arkansan. At dusk a mild earthquake sent a shudder through camp.2
The mood was no better at headquarters. Before reporting to Van Dorn, a duty distasteful in itself, General Price had to contend with a crisis in his own military family. Expressing a sentiment shared by the entire staff, Major Snead told Price he would not serve under Van Dorn. So that there might be no misunderstanding about his feelings, Snead spelled them out in a lengthy letter of resignation. “I had once before . . . quit the army rather than serve under General Van Dorn and his staff. I could not endure the incompetency and rashness of the one, nor the inefficiency of the latter,” he began. “As soon as he got control over you,” warned Snead, Van Dorn intended to strip Price of his men, arms, and authority. Rather than “endure these wrongs and indignities,” Snead asked to be relieved from duty.
Integrity prevented Price from trying to refute what he knew to be true. Instead he appealed to Snead’s patriotism. “Every Missourian in the army shared Snead’s feelings,” Price conceded, but “the military position we occupy toward the enemy, with an engagement where the odds are heavy against us immediately impending, calls imperatively for a sacrifice on my part and that of my army of all that we feel to be due us to secure a victory to our arms in the impending conflict.” Snead relented.3
Price’s interview with Van Dorn on September 28 hardly lessened the uneasiness he and Snead shared. Hunched over two maps of the country around Corinth, Van Dorn explained his plan. Tracing a line northward from Ripley, he announced an “immediate and direct” attack was to be made on Corinth. He reviewed the distribution of Federal forces as he understood it: 6,000 men at Memphis, 8,000 at Bolivar, 3,000 at Jackson, 15,000 at Corinth, and another 10,000 dispersed among minor outposts, including Burnsville, Rienzi, Jacinto, and Iuka. Before the Federals could concentrate their forces to oppose him, Van Dorn intended to move on Corinth with the 22,000 men of his and Price’s commands.
Swiftness and surprise were critical, continued Van Dorn. To ensure surprise he would march first to Pocahontas and begin work ostentatiously on a bridge over the Tuscumbia River to give the impression his objective was Bolivar. But rather than cross the river and strike northward into Tennessee, Van Dorn would turn the army abruptly to the east and by forced march descend on Corinth. To impede Federal reinforcements, Armstrong’s cavalry was to break up the Mobile and Ohio Railroad north of Corinth.
It was nineteen miles from Pocahontas to Corinth. The road was good, the country gently rolling. One day should suffice to bring the army to the outskirts of Corinth, Van Dorn reasoned. The Confederates would attack the town from the northwest. Van Dorn was well aware he would be assaulting the very earthworks his men had helped construct some four months earlier. But he also knew the earthworks had been most thoroughly developed northeast of Corinth, the direction from which the Federals had approached after Shiloh. In coming from the northwest, Van Dorn would strike the weakest section.4
Despite the haste with which he put together his plan, Van Dorn had weighed strategic considerations, even if his conclusions seemed a bit fantastic. The retaking of Corinth, he reasoned, would guarantee the safety of Vicksburg by forcing the Federals to abandon West Tennessee. That in turn would open the way for him to march north and help Bragg to drive the enemy across the Ohio River.5
Van Dorn’s generals were decidedly divided on the merits and practicality of his plan. Dabney Maury, who despite his loyal service to Price had fallen under the sway of the Mississippian, came out wholeheartedly in favor of the scheme. Maury concurred with both “the great objects he sought to accomplish” and “the means by which he proposed to march to a certain and brilliant victory by which the State of Mississippi would have been freed from invasion and the war would have been transferred beyond the Ohio. Such results justified unusual hazard of battle.”
Thirty-nine-year-old Maj. Gen. Mansfield Lovell, a veteran of the Regular Army who had been breveted for gallantry at Chapultepec in the Mexican War, was of two minds. A classmate of Van Dorn at West Point and a general whom Braxton Bragg considered “equal to any officer in our service,” Lovell was new to the theater, having arrived only three weeks earlier to take command of the lone division Van Dorn then had with him.
Maj. Gen. Mansfield Lovell (Library of Congress)
Lovell came to the army with a tarnished reputation. Five months earlier he had surrendered New Orleans after a Federal fleet pounded the small Confederate river flotilla there into driftwood. Lovell had had only local militia with which to man a chain of small forts that covered the myriad water approaches to the city, a difficult task that became impossible after the Federal fleet ran past the forts. A military court of inquiry cleared Lovell of blame for the city’s fall, saying he had defended New Orleans capably with his small command of green troops. But President Davis held Lovell solely responsible. Consistent with his unforgiving nature, Davis was waiting only for an unequivocal pretext to shelve him.
None of this worried Lovell. Conceited and self-absorbed, Lovell swaggered about Van Dorn’s headquarters like a conquering Caesar. Not surprisingly he made himself heard at the commanders' meeting. Lovell suggested an attack on Bolivar. It would isolate the Federal forces at Corinth, cut off their lines of supply, and force them to leave their entrenchments and fight on “an equal and open field.” At the same time Lovell conceded that a rapid advance on Corinth might also compel the Federals to evacuate the town. While he preferred to march directly on Bolivar, Lovell granted the merits of Van Dorn’s proposal, provided Corinth could be taken with minimal loss of life. And he, too, fixed his gaze on the Ohio River. “My opinion is that the enemy will evacuate Corinth, fall back to Jackson, Tennessee, and finally (if we get our additional forces from the returned prisoners) we shall be able to drive him to the Ohio River,” Lovell wrote his wife. “All this can be done with good generalship without the loss of much life, I think. A few weeks will develop the results
of the campaign, and I should not be much astonished if you should hear of us up in Kentucky.”
Price categorically opposed Van Dorn’s plan. He agreed the taking of Corinth “warranted more than the usual hazard of battle, [yet] was of the opinion that the hazard would have been much less to have delayed the attack a few days” until the 12,000 or 15,000 exchanged prisoners then assembling at Jackson, Mississippi, could be armed and sent forward. Without their added numbers, Price failed to see how the Confederates could hold Corinth, much less exploit its capture. Should Van Dorn attempt to march north from Corinth, the strong Federal forces at Bolivar and Memphis could readily strike at the left flank and rear of his small army. The heavy losses that Van Dorn inevitably would sustain in taking the town rendered doubtful his ability even to hold what he might win. Any gains would be temporary; better to wait for the returned prisoners.6
Van Dorn dismissed the objections of both Lovell and Price. An attack must be both immediate and directed against Corinth. The exchanged prisoners at Jackson would not be ready to join the army until the second week of October. “If I waited for their reception all opportunity of striking Corinth with a reasonable prospect of success would be lost,” Van Dorn told Price and Lovell; surprise, not added numbers, was the key to success. Van Dorn ordered Price and Lovell to have three days' cooked rations distributed. Lovell’s division would lead the advance the next morning, and Price would follow later that day, if possible, or on September 30.
John Tyler, the alcoholic son of the former president and an aide-decamp to General Price, whom he revered, listened to Van Dorn’s self- assured monologue with misgivings. The enemy at Corinth most certainly was as strong as Van Dorn’s army, and they enjoyed the protection of elaborate earthworks. Also, Tyler mused, they were led by General Rosecrans, “one of the most skillful and successful officers, alike prudent and sagacious, experienced in strategy, self-poised and courageous.” It was becoming clear to Tyler why Rosecrans had graduated fifth in the West Point class of 1842 and Van Dorn fifth from the bottom.7
The Darkest Days of the War- the Battles of Iuka and Corinth Page 17