But Price refused to play Davies’s game a second time. Indeed, the Missourian would have been pleased to stop for the day. His men were tired and thirsty. Most had emptied their canteens, and scores fainted while chasing the Yankees from the breastworks. When the enemy disappeared from the far side of the field, Price elected to rest his command.9
* * *
Brig. Gen. John Creed Moore was a solid troop commander—"an officer of fine ability and courage,” said Dabney Maury—well capable of acting on his own. His men found him to be a strict disciplinarian with a grim and haughty demeanor, but they recognized his ability. Here at Corinth Moore did not disappoint them. Unlike Lovell, who stopped after capturing Oliver’s hill, Moore pursued the Federals along the Chewalla road, forcing them to seek refuge behind the entrenched camps of the Seventeenth Wisconsin and the Twenty-first Missouri, a mile southeast of Oliver’s hill. There, independently of each other, Oliver and McArthur began to piece together a battle line.10
Oliver was resting his shattered brigade between the camps and Battery F, an earthen redoubt on the crest of a long, gentle ridge a quarter of a mile to the south, when the Seventeenth Wisconsin, which had passed the morning comfortably in reserve, and Battery F, Second Illinois Light Artillery, reported for duty. Col. John Doran told Oliver that he had orders to report either to him or to McArthur. Oliver had no idea where McArthur had gone but suggested Doran form the Seventeenth on high ground across the railroad tracks, fronting northward. Oliver promised to support him, but in truth his small command was in no condition to fight. The Fifteenth Michigan was nearly out of ammunition, and the survivors of the Fourteenth Wisconsin were broken in spirit. Even Colonel Hancock, revered by the soldiers of the Fourteenth as one of the “coolest and bravest” officers in the army, lost his composure. Recalled a member of Company E, “After we fell back . . . the colonel came around and asked how many men each company had. When he came to our company, I told him we had seven, but could tell him nothing of the balance; told him Captain Vaughan was killed and two or three more I knew of. I never saw such a look on a man’s face before. He said nothing, but sat down on a log and cried.”11
General McArthur rode up a few minutes later. After taking one look at Oliver’s troops, he relieved them of further duty and told Oliver to report to General McKean, who had made his headquarters behind Crocker’s brigade at Battery F. McKean already was showing signs he was too old to cope with the stress of combat. The gray-haired Pennsylvan- ian had done nothing during the morning, seemingly content to allow McArthur to assume, de facto, the mantle of division command.
The Scotsman discharged his expanding duties gracefully. He sent skirmishers from the Seventeenth Wisconsin to occupy their former camp. As other units reported in, McArthur fed them into line on the left of the Seventeenth, parallel with the railroad and facing northeast. Col. Frederick Hurlbut showed up first with his Fifty-seventh Illinois. Hurlbut had redistributed ammunition and had combed the nearby forest and fields for stragglers; he was able to muster a respectable force, but the men were on the brink of collapse. “The heat is intense,” wrote the regimental historian. “There is no water, and the men are famishing. Some of the Fifty- seventh fall in their tracks, fainting and exhausted under the rays of the scorching sun. Teams had been sent to the rear for the purpose of hauling water, but as yet none reached us.” McArthur told Hurlbut to wait beside the Seventeenth Wisconsin for further orders. Colonel Baldwin tried to intervene and reassert his authority as brigade commander, but Hurlbut ignored him. So, too, did Col. Andrew Babcock, who complied with McArthur’s command that he place the Seventh Illinois next to the Fifty- seventh Illinois. Lt. Col. William Swarthout likewise reported directly to the ubiquitous Scotsman, who directed his Fiftieth Illinois into line on the left of the Seventh. Anchoring the left flank on Battery F, McArthur rounded out his hastily assembled, half-mile-long line of batde with the Sixteenth Wisconsin and the Twenty-first Missouri of his own brigade.
No sooner had McArthur completed his dispositions than the Wisconsin skirmishers returned to report their camp swarming with Confederates. Already scattered shots from Rebel skirmishers were striking men in McArthur’s main line. As the Southerners drew nearer, their fire increased in precision. Cannoneers and horses from Battery F, Second Illinois Light Artillery, which had unlimbered a section in front of the Seventeenth Wisconsin, became the principal targets.12
At 2:00 P.M. McArthur acted to save his artillery and rid the camps of Confederates: “I determined to drive them out of it, and ordered the line to charge with the bayonet en echelon of battalion from the right.” The Scotsman rode to Col. John Doran and asked him if his Seventeenth Wisconsin “could charge successfully on the brigade doing such execution on our battery.” Doran said he could, and he did. Baldwin’s brigade took up the charge on Doran’s left, and the Sixteenth Wisconsin and the Twenty- first Missouri swung north from Battery F.
The Federals drove Moore’s brigade through the camps and beyond, until McArthur stopped them along a grassy ridge above the Chewalla road. Moore regrouped in nearby woods. Acquitting himself as well as McArthur had, Moore restored order to the Second Texas, the Thirty- fifth Mississippi, and the Forty-second Alabama, which had borne the brunt of the Federal charge, and then called up his reserve regiments, the Fifteenth and Twenty-third Arkansas, to extend his line to the left. With a front reaching beyond McArthur’s right, Moore counterattacked. At the same instant, the errant First Missouri of Bowen’s brigade, which had continued on after the fight on Oliver’s hill, emerged from the timber behind McArthur’s left flank. Threatened with a double envelopment, McArthur called on McKean for reinforcements and slowly backed his men off the ridge.13
McKean’s first combat order was a catastrophe. Although he had at his disposal the 2,189 soldiers of Col. Marcellus Crocker’s Iowa brigade — the only truly fresh troops in Rosecrans’s army—he chose not to call on them. Instead McKean told Colonel Oliver to gather the parched and exhausted survivors of the Fourteenth Wisconsin and the Fifteenth Michigan and march to McArthur’s relief. Crocker’s Iowans remained beside Battery F, where they had stood since dawn.
The consequences of McKean’s decision were predictable. Oliver’s men marched off the naked ridge, away from Battery F and into a narrow strip of wood that hid the track of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad. Emerging from the timber, they came upon McArthur’s command falling back. The noise and confusion sent a tremor of panic through their ranks. McArthur was compassionate; he simply reported the “reinforcements were unable to comprehend the situation.” Colonel Doran understandably was more direct. After trailing his men “tardily, at a long interval of both time and distance,” Oliver’s two regiments “discharged their muskets into the Seventeenth, turned, and ran.”14
Moore’s Confederates were too broken up to pursue closely, allowing McArthur to pull back to the foot of the ridge. There, protected by a blanket of shot and shell, he re-formed his command a third time. McArthur’s presence was electric. The Fiftieth Illinois had nearly lost its regimental colors when the color-bearer was shot down. While a corporal of the color guard rushed out to retrieve them, the bearer of the national standard stepped forward to rally the men, but they shoved past him, heedless of the colors. McArthur rode up as the men paused on the friendly side of the timber to catch their breath and, said an Illinoisan, “observing the colors with only its guard and a few men, called out as he lifted his Scotch cap, ’What regiment is this?' Being informed that it was the Fiftieth he at once, with the assistance of the officers of the regiment, placed the colors in position, and in a few moments the regiment was ready for work.”15
MAP 7. The Fight for the Federal Camps, 2:00 P.M.
The bold front the Fiftieth showed him fooled neither McArthur nor the regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Swarthout. The men were played out. Said Swarthout, “Quite a number had to be taken from the field, some suffering from sunstroke and others from utter exhaustion.” Matters were the
same in the other regiments. McArthur gave no thought to their fighting again, and McKean had the good sense not to demand it. He permitted McArthur to retire a quarter-mile to the south and ordered Crocker to form a new line of battle to block the inevitable advance of Moore’s Southerners.
It was 3:00 P.M. when McArthur’s men passed through Crocker’s line. The day was over for the Scotsman’s two regiments and the five he had appropriated. They marched to Corona College, drew water, and dispersed to rest. Colonel Hurlbut of the Fifty-seventh Illinois deemed it his duty to report his regiment to Colonel Baldwin. He found him at the Tishomingo Hotel, nursing a slightly wounded hand. When Baldwin chose to leave the field is unknown, but he was not missed. The day, and his brigade, had belonged to McArthur.16
* * *
Marcellus Crocker was another of the talented Union brigade commanders at Corinth. Only thirty-two years old, Crocker had sad, sunken eyes and a “slender, nervous” frame, both the consequences of chronic poor health. He had been forced to leave West Point after two years because of tuberculosis, a disease that went into remission upon his return to Iowa but never completely left him. A lifetime of illness made him edgy as well. Attested a sympathetic captain of the Seventeenth Iowa, “He has a passionate temper, and is plain-spoken, often saying things which, in his calmer moments, he would leave unsaid.” Crocker compensated for both his infirmity and his peppery disposition by being a natural leader. He studied law after leaving the military academy and at the outbreak of the war was among the best lawyers in Iowa. Leaving his Des Moines practice, he was mustered into the service as a captain in the Second Iowa Infantry in May 1861. Six months later he was promoted to colonel of the Thirteenth Iowa. At Shiloh Crocker fought brilliantly in some of the heaviest combat of the battle. Afterward he was given command of the newly created “Iowa Brigade,” which, in addition to his own regiment, consisted of the Eleventh, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Iowa. As a brigade commander Crocker displayed a “mode of discipline severe and uncompromising, and a careless blunder he would never excuse.” But he was neither cruel nor shrunk from danger, and if they did not adore him, his troops admired him. They undoubtedly were proud to be part of what already was conceded to be one of the finest brigades in the western armies.17
The skill of Crocker’s Iowa Brigade was evident in the ease with which the men changed front, despite having to contend with what one regimental commander called “an almost unmanageable thick underbrush in the rear of its former line.” Lining up at right angles to its earlier line, the brigade deployed with the Fifteenth Iowa — its left touching the open, eastern flank of Battery F—and the Sixteenth Iowa in the front line. The Eleventh and Thirteenth Iowa regiments formed in close column fifty yards to the rear. The brigade stood on “a naked high ridge with nothing to protect us from the fire of the enemy” except underbrush and a smattering of skinny oak trees.18
Under the burning sunlight the Iowans squinted toward the forest along the railroad, from which McArthur’s retreating regiments had yet to emerge, and listened as the fighting drew nearer. Clint Parkhurst of the Sixteenth Iowa remembered the agony of uncertainty: “We were close enough to hear the combat well, but not close enough to see it. A few heavy explosions of musketry broke on the air, in quick succession. Then . . . the Union fugitives poured into view like scattered sheep, and reaching our line rushed on to the rear, scores of them being bloody from wounds.” Beyond rose the clear, wild cheers of the Southerners.
The Rebels broke out of the timber, were visible for an instant, then disappeared behind a roll in the ground, 200 yards short of the Iowans. The wait was brief but excruciating. Remembered Clint Parkhurst, “We knew that preparations must be going on to attack us, and to stand idly there awaiting the onset was a trying ordeal—a test of manhood keener than fighting.” The officers were no less affected. Riding along the line, reminding the men not to fire until ordered, were Crocker and Col. William Belknap, commander of the Fifteenth Iowa. Belknap was also thirty-two years old and a former lawyer, and between the two was a warm, open friendship built on mutual respect. The two paused a moment behind some small trees. A bullet struck a sapling that stood between them. “Do you know, old fellow, what I am thinking about?” said Crocker. “No, colonel,” Belknap answered. “I wish I was back in Des Moines.” So, too, did Belknap.
A silence heavy as death fell over the field; Moore’s Rebels seemed slow in coming. Then everyone’s attention was drawn to a new sound. “While we waited with intense interest and much anxiety the next move in what was to us a momentous drama, an appalling burst of martial thunder came from a locality a mile or more to the right of us,” wrote Parkhurst. “Musketry and artillery mingled in one awful and prolonged peal. It was not an affair of a regiment or two, but seemed like the collision of two heavy lines of battle, and the roar was incessant as long as I was conscious of listening to it. Our thoughts, however, were almost immediately concentrated on events in front of us.”
Bullets cut the air around the Iowans. Rebel skirmishers appeared and then vanished in the tall weeds. Remarkably, at that instant General McKean was handed an order from army headquarters to withdraw Crocker’s brigade to the inner fortifications of Corinth. The Pennsylvan- ian elected to obey, but in a manner that showed his judgment was improving. He would pull back in three stages. First, Crocker’s second-line regiments, the Eleventh and Thirteenth Iowa, would retire 400 yards to cover the withdrawal of the artillery from Battery F. In the meantime Crocker’s front-line regiments, the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Iowa, would fight a covering action to allow both the artillery and the Eleventh and Thirteenth Iowa regiments to get away and, if necessary, launch a limited counterattack to confuse the enemy long enough to make good their own escape.19
Crocker remained with the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Iowa regiments. The Confederates came on deliberately, with bayonets fixed. They were confident and, under the circumstances, well fed and rested. The delay between their first appearance and attack occurred because so many men had fallen out to plunder the Yankee camps that Moore had been obliged to pause. The troops were delighted. Recalled a Texan, “In this camp we found bread, butter, cheese, crackers, and other food in abundance, and while enjoying a short rest, partook of the enemy’s unwilling hospitality during his enforced absence — the first food we had tasted that day.” Morale improved further when two regiments from Cabell’s reserve brigade came up. Moore put them on the left of his line, which gave him seven regiments, or nearly 2,500 men, with which to confront Crocker.
Clint Parkhurst despaired of ever hearing the order to fire. Captains and lieutenants walked up and down in front of their companies, swords in hand, slapping up rifle-muskets that were leveled prematurely by nervous and impatient soldiers. The Confederates closed to sixty paces, stopped, and cocked their rifle-muskets to fire. Those of the Sixteenth Iowa already were cocked. Company officers jumped behind the ranks, the Iowans took deliberate aim, “and with a crash we fired.” The Rebels returned the fire. A wall of dust and smoke arose, and the opponents were lost to sight from another. The soldiers of the Sixteenth Iowa stood their ground. At Shiloh they had ducked behind trees or rocks at the first fire. Crocker’s incessant drilling and strict discipline since that battle had had an impact. Said Parkhurst, “A few men fought on one knee, but not a man lay down, and the great majority stood erect on the color line, and loaded and fired in drill-ground fashion.” Not all the credit was Crocker’s. The men had learned at Shiloh that those hit while fighting erect, with only their left side facing the enemy, were less liable to receive fatal wounds than if struck while on one knee or lying down. Parkhurst’s own experience here at Corinth was proof of that: “Once, while standing erect, I turned my left side to the enemy, to drive down a musket ball. The next instant a big bullet passed through my left pantaloons pocket, where I carried a package of ten rounds of ammunition. It tore the paper cartridges to pieces, but I was unhurt. Had I been facing squarely to the front I would have had a mortal wound.”
Matters were considerably more unsettled in the Fifteenth Iowa. The entire front line got down on one knee. The men had their rifle-muskets cocked and ready; but Colonel Belknap waited an instant too long, and the enemy fired first. The blue line shivered. “We heard the Rebel shout and yell,” remembered Cyrus Boyd. “Then somebody commenced firing and we shot away in the smoke and not knowing exactly where to aim as the enemy were in lower ground than we. But their first volley laid out many a man for us.” (Getting in the first volley often made a dramatic difference in a regiment’s casualties: the Fifteenth would end the day with 11 dead and 67 wounded; the Sixteenth would count only 1 man dead and 20 wounded.) The men fell back a few yards and broke ranks to take cover behind the scattered trees and logs, despite Colonel Belknap’s efforts at keeping order. Nevertheless, they maintained a constant fire for forty-five minutes and with the Sixteenth Iowa succeeded in holding the enemy to their front in check.20
MAP 8. Battery F and the White House, 3:30 P.M.
The sudden appearance of the First Missouri on their left flank broke the will of the Iowans. Cyrus Boyd was a member of the flank company of the Fifteenth, which bore the brunt of the Missourians' attack. “They swarmed around on our left and fired from behind trees and logs and kept pressing forward. Our ranks became much confused . . . and men fell in great numbers.”
Boyd’s company was cut to shreds. A corporal standing to Boyd’s left was shot in the stomach and fell with a dull groan; the man to his right collapsed with a bullet in the head. Their lieutenant was killed in the first volley from the Missourians. Boyd’s company disintegrated, and the entire regiment began to break up. To forestall a rout, Colonel Belknap ordered the Fifteenth off the field by the right flank. The Sixteenth, which had fought the Rebels to its front to a standstill, marched off in good order 200 yards ahead of the Missourians. Once again the Federals were spared greater damage by the rapacity of the Rebels, who stopped to plunder Crocker’s camp. After running through the rows of lowered tents himself, Boyd cast a backward glance. “I could see the Rebs tearing the sutlers' tents away and going for the goods. . . . By this time everything was on the retreat toward Corinth and the firing had almost ceased in the woods.”
The Darkest Days of the War- the Battles of Iuka and Corinth Page 23