The spirits of Tucker and his Wisconsin comrades sank in the gathering darkness. “Our pickets could very plainly hear what seemed to be artillery and wagons moving, and in the distance see what appeared to be lights from camp fires,” he remembered. “We could not estimate the enemy’s strength. . . . Still all indications very clearly showed that there was an army in force in our front.”22
* * *
General Grant was back in Jackson. Whatever tonic his trip to St. Louis might have provided evaporated in the heated confusion at headquarters. “I returned here from St. Louis just in time to find my presence very much required,” he wrote Julia with almost comic understatement. No more able to read Van Dorn’s intentions than were Generals Rosecrans, Ord, or Hurlbut, Grant felt obliged to leave his forces “where they were until the enemy fully exhibited his plans.”
Grant’s instructions, then, necessarily were vague and tentative. To Hurlbut he wrote on October i, “If Van Dorn is in west of you it will not do to detach too much of your force to look after the Rebels about Pocahontas— I have instructed Rosecrans to follow them if they move towards Bolivar.” To Rosecrans he wrote, “Inform yourself as well as possible of the strength and position of the enemy and if practicable—move on them as you propose. Inform me if you determine to start and I will give you all the aid possible from Bolivar.” To Halleck Grant penned what amounted to a confession that his trip to St. Louis had been ill considered and his confident declaration that all would remain quiet had been premature: “My position is precarious but hope to get out of it all right.”23
14. More Trouble Than We Could Care For
October 2 dawned cloudy. A light rain fell, just enough to cut the heat and settle the dust. At Corinth General Rosecrans waited hopefully for a report that might clarify the enemy’s intentions. He expected it to come from Oliver’s brigade, and to hasten contact he told Oliver to send mounted parties from Ford’s Independent Illinois Cavalry Company, on detached service with him, to reconnoiter toward Kossuth and Pocahontas.
Colonel Oliver had patrols on the road at daybreak. Early reports were inconclusive but disturbing. A twenty-man patrol sent to Kossuth saw nothing but heard drums beating in the forest. Their report caused Oliver to retire his command, less two companies from the Fifteenth Michigan left as skirmishers, to the junction of the Chewalla and old Kossuth roads.
Contact occurred at 10:00 A.M., when Company F of the Fifteenth Michigan, deployed in a loose skirmish line on a hill west of Oliver’s new position, was charged by the entire Seventh Tennessee Cavalry. The Michiganders fired a few wild shots, then ran headlong down the hill onto their reserves, a squad of pickets from Company E. Together they formed in an open field beside the Busby house — six and a half miles northwest of Corinth—and charged the Seventh Tennessee Cavalry, which dismounted to meet them. The Rebel troopers gave ground readily, losing one man—Pvt. John Young of Memphis, the first Confederate casualty in the advance on Corinth — in the encounter. When they saw infantry and artillery replace the cavalry, the Michiganders stopped, fired a volley, then slowly withdrew.1
The infantry that had stopped the Michiganders' brave little charge was Rust’s brigade of Lovell’s division, the vanguard of Van Dorn’s advance. Shuffling along under a fine, warm drizzle, the Southern soldiers were as downcast as their generals. Only Van Dorn, and perhaps Maury, were optimistic of the outcome. Said Willie Tunnard, “The men pushed toward Corinth and . . . remembered the fortifications around this entrenched position, strengthened under the energetic labors of the enemy . . . and their hearts misgave them as to the final result when it was known where they were going.”
Both they and their commanders were jittery, particularly after meeting Oliver’s outpost. Riding with his staff at the head of Bowen’s brigade, General Lovell caught sight of several wheels standing on the horizon, partly obscured in tall grass between the Chewalla road and the track of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, which ran on a high dirt fill. Lovell ordered Bowen’s lead element, Caruthers’s Mississippi Battalion, to face to the left. Drawing his saber, he pointed to the wheels, which looked to him like a battery of enemy artillery, and ordered a charge. “In an instant we were scattered over all the ground we could cover at ten paces apart and advancing at a full run to drive in the enemy’s skirmishers, if there were any,” recalled Lt. William C. Holmes. “I kept my eye on those wheels, in their solemn stillness, till I got so near that there could be no mistake as to their reality. . . . [They were] the wheels of an old abandoned sawmill.” Holmes looked behind him; the entire brigade was advancing in line of batde. “I did not know at what moment insanity might possess the brigade and they might fire on us, as there was nothing else to fire at.” Holmes kept his head. He tied his pocket handkerchief to the end of a cornstalk and, waving it madly, ran back toward the brigade. Holmes blocked the path of the Twenty-second Mississippi, which stopped when its officers heard his explanation of the oddly silent enemy. The rest of the brigade stopped as well, and Holmes could congratulate himself on having “saved further injury to that innocent old mill.”2
There was little damage done to either man or machine the remainder of the day on the Chewalla road. Late in the morning Rosecrans ordered Oliver to withdraw to Alexander’s Crossroads, the junction of an old country lane with the Chewalla road, four miles northwest of Corinth. Oliver’s Federals fell back firing throughout the afternoon but never held a piece of ground long enough to inflict or receive serious casualties.
Brig. Gen. John McArthur (Illinois State Historical Library)
Oliver performed his delaying action well, forcing General Rust to move his brigade in line and the Seventh Tennessee Cavalry to screen their advance dismounted until sunset when, weary of the chase, Rust halted his brigade a few hundred yards east of the Busby house. Oliver withdrew the final two miles to Alexander’s Crossroads unmolested. There he met General McArthur, who had ridden forward with the Sixteenth Wisconsin to reinforce him. McArthur’s presence cheered Oliver’s exhausted soldiers. “A noble man every inch of him, and a common every day sort of person too,” said a Wisconsin soldier of the thirty-five-year- old Scottish immigrant who was temporarily without a command. “He will speak to anyone, no matter what his rank.” McArthur made himself useful. He helped Oliver place his pickets in the dark and stayed with him through the night, alert to any sounds of enemy activity.3
* * *
General Rosecrans had passed a fitful day at Corinth. While the skirmishing on Oliver’s front convinced him the enemy indeed was in great force near Pocahontas, it failed to demonstrate conclusively whether Van Dorn intended to march on Corinth or, as the Ohioan conjectured, “cross the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, go north of us, strike the Mobile and Ohio road and maneuver us out of our position,” in which case the push against Oliver would merely be a feint.
Regardless of Van Dorn’s intentions, it was imperative Rosecrans concentrate his army at Corinth. Should Van Dorn choose to attack the town, Rosecrans would need every man he could muster in its defense. If Van Dorn marched northward to force Rosecrans into batde on open ground, having his whole force on hand would assume even greater importance.
Rosecrans called in his scattered forces during the day. Outposts at Rienzi and Danville were abandoned. Crocker came in from Iuka and made camp two miles northwest of Corinth. Hamilton’s division was reunited at Camp Big Spring, two miles south of Corinth. Davies’s division rested at Camp Montgomery, a mile farther south. Stanley passed the day in the neighborhood of Kossuth, watchful for a Confederate crossing of the Hatchie River. As the sun set on October 2, the only troops in town were two brigades of McKean’s division.4
For reasons known only to himself, Rosecrans hesitated to summon his troops into Corinth. Not until 1:00 A.M. did he dictate orders that at last would bring his army together. Even then he was unsure whether Van Dorn would move against Corinth or, if he did, from what direction he would strike. Two good roads ran from Chewalla to Corinth. The C
hewalla road entered the old Confederate entrenchments from the northwest. A second road joined the Purdy and Monterey roads northeast of town. Van Dorn might approach over either, or both.
Although Rosecrans assumed Van Dorn would come from the northeast, where the ground was open, he had to protect all possible approaches. Said Rosecrans of his evolving tactical plan, “The controlling idea was to prevent surprise, to test by adequate resistance any attacking force, and, finding it formidable, to receive it behind the inner line that we had been preparing from College Hill around by Robinett.” In other words, Rosecrans would place part of his army in the old Confederate earthworks two and a half miles from Corinth. From there they were to fight an intentional retrograde, forcing the enemy to reveal the direction of his main attack while drawing him toward the Federal lunettes and rifle pits on the edge of town.
Rosecrans never committed his plan to paper. Rather, he briefed his division commanders orally as they arrived with their commands. Issued at 1:30 A.M., the only written order that night merely told Rosecrans’s generals where, in broad terms, they were to form their divisions. McKean was to remain in place. Davies was to occupy a line between the Memphis and Charleston and the Memphis and Ohio Railroads. Hamilton was to form behind the Rebel earthworks from the Purdy to the Hamburg road, and Stanley was to remain in reserve south of town.5
Simple though these instructions were, their execution proved problematic. The orders came as no surprise; before midnight, division commanders were put on notice to have their commands ready to “move at a moment’s notice.” Delays were inevitable whenever officers tried to move their units over narrow country lanes in the dark of night, but lapses by the division commanders and their staffs compounded the problem.
General Hamilton had neglected to have tents struck and rations cooked, and it was 3:00 A.M. before the soldiers of Sullivan’s brigade were on the road to Corinth. Sullivan was slow in clearing camp, so that Brig. Gen. Napoleon Buford (commanding the brigade Colonel Sanborn had led at Iuka) was unable to get his men started before 6:00 A.M. Ahead lay a five-mile march to their assigned positions north of Corinth.
That Buford should be slow in moving out surprised no one. The fifty- five-year-old half brother of cavalryman John Buford, he had graduated from West Point in 1827. Buford resigned his commission in 1835 to take up engineering and banking in Rock Island, Illinois. He prospered until 1861, when Southern states holding bonds of his bank repudiated their debt. Assigning his property to creditors, Buford accepted the colonelcy of the Twenty-seventh Illinois. Although well meaning and kind, Buford was a failure as a combat officer. The men of his brigade dismissed him as a silly old man in his dotage, an opinion strongly seconded by John Rawlins. Buford’s antirepublican sentiments appalled him; the graying brigadier general hoped and fervently believed the “final result of this war will be the overthrow of our present system . . . [giving] us Dukes and Lords and titled castes and that his family will be among the nobility.” General Oglesby ignored Buford’s ranting, but to Rawlins it “evidenced a diseased brain, a weak and foolish old man.”6
General Hamilton had his division on the road by daybreak. General Davies, on the other hand, had yet to break camp. Somehow he misunderstood the intent of the 1:30 A.M. instructions and thought he was to await explicit marching orders before starting. Consequently, although rations were cooked, haversacks packed, and “arms stacked on the color- line” before 2:00 A.M., Davies did nothing. Roused and formed on the color line at 3:00 A.M., the men were left to stand sleepily as precious hours slipped by. At dawn Davies learned that Hamilton’s division had left. He telegraphed Rosecrans for instructions and, after getting a reply that never made it into the records — perhaps because the language was unprintable, Davies hastened his division onto the road at 7:00 A.M. Six miles of hard marching lay ahead.
In his haste Davies forgot to call in three of his regiments: the Eighth, Twelfth, and Fourteenth Iowa, part of the old “Union Brigade” that had been bled white at Shiloh and attached to Davies’s first brigade during the summer. In consideration of their service at Shiloh the Iowans — so few in number they were led by a lieutenant colonel — had been allowed to retain their old sobriquet of Union Brigade. Davies had ordered them out on a reconnaissance beyond the Tuscumbia River two days earlier, and they were bivouacked near Danville on the night of October 2. Not until 8:00 A.M. on the third did they receive orders to rendezvous with the division in Corinth. Theirs would be a ten-mile march under a sun bright and hot.7
General Stanley gave a better account of himself and was well served by his brigade commanders, but with farther to march than Hamilton or Davies he could not possibly reach Corinth before mid-morning. Mower had his brigade under arms an hour before the order to march came and on the road by 3:00 A.M. Fuller got started at dawn. His men heard a low boom off in the distance, and they debated its meaning. Recalled Capt. Oscar Jackson of the Sixty-third Ohio, “Some said it was a gun, others said not and that it would rain. A few minutes afterward, boom, boom, boom, a whole battery opened, stopping the argument, as the evidence was now on one side. It was curious to observe the effect it had on the men, who, tired and strong, were dragging themselves along. Instantly every head was raised, the step quickened and all forgot they were tired.”8
Thomas McKean had little to do. His second brigade (Oliver’s) was at Alexander’s Crossroads waiting for the enemy. Despite the confusion at army headquarters, someone remembered General McArthur was without a command. In the course of the night a special order was issued giving him field command of the First Brigade. It was not much of a brigade, just three regiments strong, but McArthur intended to make the best of it. First, however, he had to reassemble his new command. At 6:00 A.M. McArthur left Alexander’s Crossroads with the Sixteenth Wisconsin and established brigade headquarters beside the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, a few hundred yards southeast of the old Confederate earthworks. There McArthur was joined by his second regiment, the Twenty- first Missouri, which had returned from outpost duty at Kossuth shortly before midnight. The Scotsman retrieved his remaining regiment, the Seventeenth Wisconsin, which had started off at daylight to reinforce Oliver. At 5:00 A.M. General McKean’s Third Brigade, commanded by Marcellus Crocker, formed near Battery F, one of a chain of six artillery lunettes built a mile and a half outside Corinth to guard against Confederate attacks from the west and south.
At dawn, then, McKean’s was the only Federal command standing between the enemy and Corinth. Davies was just breaking camp six miles south; Hamilton was on the road, five miles from Corinth; and Stanley’s division was six hours away.
Rosecrans could do no more than hope his army would reach Corinth before the Rebels. He, like Crocker’s Iowans “in front of those wooded western approaches, on the morning of October 3, waited for what might happen, wholly ignorant of what Van Dorn was doing at Chewalla, ten miles away through thick forests.”9
* * *
The Confederates were closer than Rosecrans realized. They had, as Rosecrans guessed, passed the night near Chewalla but were on the road at 4:00 A.M. Lovell’s division continued to lead, with Villepigue relieving Rust as advance guard.
Impelled by a fear that reinforcements from Grant would reach Corinth first or strike his rear, Van Dorn drove the army hard. He launched the infantry on a nine-mile forced march, intending to attack the moment he reached Corinth.10
In spite of the mad pace of the march and prospect of impending battle, morale seemed to improve as the Army of West Tennessee neared Corinth. John Tyler thought “the spirit of the men was excellent. All were alike emulous of courageous bearing and gallant achievement.” Or perhaps their resolute bearing masked fear. Efforts at humor seemed forced. The Second Missouri Infantry was hurrying past Bledsoe’s battery, parked by the roadside waiting its turn on the road, when Ephraim Anderson heard a voice ring out, “Hello, Anderson!” It came from an artillerymen who had been his neighbor at home. “We are in for some fun today,” re
sponded Anderson. “We will sleep in Corinth tonight,” his friend rejoined before the regiment disappeared in a swirl of orange dust. Whatever their states of mind, there is no doubt Villepigue’s Mississippians were exhausted when they ran up against their first obstacle: Oliver’s command drawn up at Alexander’s Crossroads.11
Col. John Oliver seemed like the right man to direct the first phase of Rosecrans’s planned delaying action. The thirty-two-year-old graduate of St. John’s College, Long Island, had an intensity incongruous with his soft, pudgy frame. Oliver’s gaze was piercing and purposeful, his devotion to duty almost pathological. Oliver enlisted as a private and within a year was colonel of the Fifteenth Michigan. At Shiloh he had taken the regiment, which could have passed the battle safely in the rear as part of the headquarters guard, into the thick of the fight. Besides costing several dozen Michigan boys their lives, that act of audacity earned Oliver a citation for “conspicuous gallantry” and command of a brigade. But at the moment Oliver had only two regiments and two cannon. During the night the Eighteenth Wisconsin had been ordered away, leaving Oliver with 500 men to contest the Confederate approach.
Scattered shots from the skirmish line announced the enemy at 7:00 A.M. The two howitzers of the First Minnesota Light Artillery joined in, shelling the road beyond the wooded horizon. But Villepigue’s Confederates barely paused, so Oliver sent the Fourteenth Wisconsin forward to try to force them to deploy. Col. John Hancock pushed his regiment 500 yards before waving the men into line astride the road, along the slope of a gende, timbered rise. “Pretty soon we heard the rebels down in front of us, the officers giving orders, but the men did not seem to obey them very willingly,” said Pvt. John Newton. “At any rate they did not come on very fast. As soon as they came in sight we fired and ran. The rebels ran too, but they ran away from us, as well as we ran away from them.”12
The Darkest Days of the War- the Battles of Iuka and Corinth Page 19