Lovell never gave a reason for his inaction. Perhaps to deflect criticism from himself, Lovell afterward said publicly that he had opposed the whole operation from the beginning. As despicable as was Lovell’s duplicity, Van Dorn must bear a share of the blame for his inertia. Throughout the day Van Dorn had stuck close to the center of Price’s corps, so near the action, in fact, that after the capture of Oliver’s hill he was largely unaware of events on the right. He knew nothing of Moore’s fight with McArthur near the entrenched camps or his subsequent engagement with Crocker. Not until he had abandoned the notion of attacking Rosecrans’s inner works did Van Dorn communicate with Lovell, and then merely to tell him to feel his way cautiously “to develop the positions of the enemy.”27
Van Dorn’s ignorance of affairs beyond Price’s narrow front nearly had tragic consequences. Neither the Mississippian nor his staff had an inkling that an entire Federal division lay in the deep forest east of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, nearly a mile behind them. Van Dorn’s left rear was completely exposed, with no one prepared to protect it.
* * *
Colonel Ducat ran the gauntlet of Rebel skirmishers and found General Rosecrans where he had left him, in the field of fallen timber near Battery Robinett. It was well past 4:00 P.M., and the pressure on Davies was extreme and growing. Rosecrans was beside himself. He listened with thinly veiled fury while Ducat related both Hamilton’s recalcitrance and his own efforts to clarify for him the meaning of Rosecrans’s order for a flank attack. Yes, Rosecrans assured Ducat, he had interpreted the order correctly for Hamilton. Flipping the paper over he scribbled on the back, below Hamilton’s response: “Ducat has been sent to explain it.” Ducat suggested that new, unequivocal written instructions, as well as a sketch of what the commanding general intended, might be appropriate. Rosecrans agreed. Ducat drew the diagram, and Rosecrans signed the new order himself. Having lost faith in Hamilton’s judgment, Rosecrans was careful to address every possible exigency—or excuse for noncompliance. The order read, in part, as follows: “Rest your left on General Davies and swing round your right and attack the enemy on their left flank re- enforced on your right and center. Be careful not to get under Davies' guns. Keep your troops well in hand . . . . Do not extend too much to your right. It looks as if it would be well to occupy the ridge where your skirmishers were when Colonel Ducat left by artillery well supported. . . . Use your discretion. Opposite your center might be better now for your artillery.”28
Ducat started on his fifth ride of the day. He had both the route and the location of the enemy skirmishers memorized and had reduced the trip to fifteen minutes. Nevertheless, Rosecrans dispatched two orderlies with similar orders in case Ducat did not make it.
Ducat reached Hamilton at 5:00 P.M. The two orderlies were killed en route. Hamilton found the order both verbose and insulting but at least agreed to obey it. Ducat stuck with him to ensure the order was carried out correctly.29
It was not. Error followed error with a darkly comic inevitability. Hamilton decided he could not use his artillery as Rosecrans had envisioned because “the ground was too uneven and the forest too dense.” Ducat concurred but suggested that Hamilton at least send forward one battery with Sullivan’s brigade. Hamilton relented and ordered the Sixth Wisconsin Battery to support Sullivan as closely as the ground allowed.
Hamilton summoned Sullivan to explain to him the plan of attack, but the Indianan was in no condition to listen. What was wrong with him is uncertain. His senior regimental commander, Colonel Holmes of the Tenth Missouri, said he seemed “very much exhausted and barely able to keep his saddle.” Sullivan himself said he had received a severe contusion from a large splinter that unfitted him for further duty that day. Hamilton accepted Sullivan’s explanation and excused him.
Several minutes of rapidly receding daylight were lost in tracking down Colonel Holmes. The Missourian reported to Sullivan before the general quit the field, acquainted himself with the situation quickly, and moved to the attack shortly before 5:30 P.M. Hamilton and Ducat watched the brigade step off into the timber east of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, satisfied that Holmes had matters well in hand.30
Brig. Gen. Napoleon Bonaparte Buford, on the other hand, was doing his best to prove himself unworthy of his distinguished name. He had intended to obey Hamilton’s order that he wheel southwestward across the railroad, but a band of Armstrong’s roving cavalry and a single cannon firing into his right flank while he was changing front distracted him. Rather than form alongside Holmes, he marched off after the Rebel troopers and the gun; that is to say, instead of wheeling to the southwest, he moved toward the northwest. Ducat noticed the movement first and asked Hamilton if Buford’s brigade “was going to Bolivar or to attack the enemy.” Hamilton sent a courier galloping after Buford to recall him, but the fifty-five-year-old Kentuckian was determined to chase chimera. To the messenger bearing Hamilton’s summons, he replied, “Tell General Hamilton, the enemy is in my front and I am going to fight him.” With a half-mile gap between Buford’s left and Sullivan’s right, Hamilton postponed the advance until Buford returned.31
Writing after the war, Hamilton expressed deep regret that Buford’s detour had delayed the flank attack. That feeling apparendy was the inspiration of memory. Just before Buford set off, Hamilton had let slip to Colonel Sanborn, with whom he was on intimate terms (and whom he probably would have preferred to have seen still in command of the brigade), his honest appraisal of the situation. It is a confession that goes far to explain Hamilton’s halfhearted actions that afternoon and, as such, bears retelling in full. Recalled Sanborn,
At about four o’clock in the afternoon, when the command was out about three miles on the Purdy road, and the enemy’s line of skirmishers appeared in front, General Hamilton, in confidence, informed the writer that he saw no way of saving the position at Corinth; that the enemy’s center was near the town and our depots; that his lines extended across the road by which we marched out to our position — which, in fact, was our rear—and that he supposed that the army would retreat during the night and would try and cross the Tennessee at Pittsburgh Landing and try and effect a junction with Buell’s army in northern Tennessee or Kentucky, and that in that event my force must act as rear guard and fight and hold the enemy as long as possible at all available points. This was a thunderbolt. I had formed no idea of the seriousness of the situation. I went into action feeling that all was lost except the army, and that we must fight with desperation to save that.32
So Sanborn led the Fourth Minnesota in at 5:30 P.M., determined to fight to save the army from what Buford feared was the “much larger concealed force” before his brigade. His first contact with the enemy seemed to bear out Buford’s fears. As the Minnesotans marched through an overgrown field toward a heavy belt of timber near the railroad, they were hit by an enfilading volley from the trees. Sanborn looked to his skirmishers, who were scattered in the field 100 yards in front of his right. Their commander, Capt. Robert Mooers, beckoned to Sanborn with his sword as if he had something important to tell him. Sanborn galloped toward the captain. He had ridden but a few yards when Mooers collapsed, shot through the head. From the course of the bullets, Sanborn guessed that Mooers had meant to tell him that the enemy was passing around their right flank. Sanborn quickly conveyed his impressions to Buford, who ordered him to change front to the rear and charge the enemy. Sanborn executed the movement flawlessly, drawing to within 150 paces of the enemy’s concealed line, when the “fire increased to a perfect shower of balls.” Sanborn screamed, “Forward 150 paces, double-quick!” The regiment rushed ahead with a shout. With fifty yards to go, the Minnesotans watched the now visible enemy flee “to the rear with the greatest precipitancy.” The Minnesotans paused to deliver two or three parting volleys, then fell back to rejoin the brigade. When the toll was taken, it was found that just five men beside Captain Mooers had fallen.
Sanborn’s was the only regiment from the brigade to encounter oppos
ition. Satisfied that whatever threat had existed to his flank had been cleared away, Buford at last relented and took up his proper place beside Holmes. But his grudging cooperation came too late. Said Hamilton, “A precious hour had been lost, the sun had gone down, and the attack having to be made through a forest of dense undergrowth, it was too late to execute the flank movement with any chance of success. The enemy’s fire on Davies’s division had ceased.” Hamilton called off the attack.33
But Holmes had gone ahead. While Ducat and Hamilton were trying to draw in Buford, the Missourian had marched to the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. There he captured eighty-two startled Rebel skirmishers, one of whom confessed that the Confederates' left flank lay in tangled woods 150 yards beyond the railroad. A sudden blast of solid shot and canister confirmed the prisoner’s confession. The railroad track ran along a five-foot-deep cut, and Holmes and his regimental commanders waved their men into it. The cut “formed a good shelter,” said Maj. Nathaniel McCalla of the Tenth Iowa, “their balls passing over our heads, many of them lodging in the opposite bank so closely had they raked the ground.”34
Holmes had stumbled upon the batteries of Landis and Guibor. Deprived of infantry support by the advance of Gates and Green, the cannoneers had to fend for themselves. Recalled Sam Dunlap of Landis’s battery, “A body of the enemy appeared on our left about two hundred yards distant and we could almost count the buttons on their coats. We had to think fast and act likewise, immediately wheeled the guns to the left at the same time pouring a heavy fusillade of grape and canister into their ranks.” The Federals disappeared into the railroad cut, “and with greater confusion than they made their debut, we rent the air and made the woods ring with shouts of our little success.”
Hunt Wilson of Guibor’s battery told a similar story. As the Federals drew near the railroad, “one of the liveliest cannonades took place that I ever witnessed. We cut our shells at one and a half seconds and began blazing away. The effect of our shells could be plainly seen. Their line halted and then began to waver.” Unlike Dunlap Wilson did not cheer. Both batteries were still unprotected, and Wilson was convinced that a determined rush by the Yankees would overwhelm them: “If that line had opened fire and charged—we were in easy rifle shot—they would have taken the last one of us.” But no attempt was made. It was growing dark, and the Federals seemed unaware that they faced only artillery. Major McCalla contemplated a sortie against a battery—probably Wade’s — that had unlimbered in front of his right flank to enfilade his line, but it was recalled the instant his men rolled over the railroad embankment. It was just as well, because Price and Maury had used the time bought by the artillerymen to bring up Colbert’s and Cabell’s brigades. They formed a hasty line of battle fronting the railroad that closed the way to the Confederate rear. Desultory skirmishing continued until nightfall.35
Hamilton’s abortive flank attack was thus over before it had really begun. Far from destroying Van Dorn, as Rosecrans had hoped, Hamilton caused no more than “a great commotion.” “Had the movement been executed promptly . . . we should have crushed the enemy’s [left] and rear,” Rosecrans wrote two decades later. Time had not mellowed his fury. “Hamilton’s excuse that he could not understand the order shows that even in the rush of battle it may be necessary to put orders in writing, or to have subordinate commanders who instinctively know or are anxious to seek the key of the battle and hasten to its roar.” Rosecrans declined to confess that he had not discovered “the key of the battle” until mid-afternoon or—to Davies’s way of thinking—ever “hastened to its roar.”36
19. The Men Would Do All They Could
In the blue dusk General Davies shuffled among his troops like a night- mare-racked somnambulist. His division was all but destroyed. Nearly a third of the men of Oglesby’s and Hackleman’s brigades were lost: dead, wounded, missing, or incapacitated by the heat. All three brigade commanders were wounded—Baldwin lightly, Oglesby and Hackleman presumed mortally. Davies made no effort at restoring order that evening. The men begged for water, and he had water hauled to them in barrels. They demanded food, and he saw to it pork and crackers were issued. They begged for whiskey, and he turned a blind eye while commissary sergeants confiscated liquor from sutlers and brought it to the front line. Buckets of whiskey passed among the soldiers, but most—knowing the morning would bring a renewal of the battle — drank sparingly.
Night came, clear and cold. The temperature plummeted quickly after dark. Campfires were prohibited. Opposing skirmishers rolled into ditches or crouched behind tree stumps and traded shots. The moon rose, full and bright—"the brightest moon I ever saw,” swore Samuel Byers of the Fifth Iowa — and the stars gleamed with an incongruous luster.1
Davies wandered off to see Generals Oglesby and Hackleman. He found them lying in the ladies' parlor on the ground floor of the Tishomingo Hotel. The lightly wounded Colonel Baldwin sat nearby. Above them the rickety ceiling creaked and moaned from the weight of hundreds of wounded soldiers and scores of moving surgeons and orderlies.
Archibald Campbell, the army’s medical director, had not intended to use the hotel as a hospital. At daylight he had appropriated a nearby commissary depot for his surgeons. It was large and well built and lay in a slight depression, which made it the safest place in the vicinity. Campbell put a quartermaster detail to work and by mid-morning had the depot filled with medicines, surgical instruments, cots, and buckets of water. As the fight grew in fury, Campbell knew he would need more space. He took over the Tishomingo Hotel and hastily made it ready. By the time General Davies arrived, the wounded were spilling over into yet a third building, the Corinth House.
Baldwin mumbled to Davies that his torn hand had left him weak and nauseated. Davies probably paid him scant attention. When Davies arrived, General Hackleman was taking his last, gasping breaths. Surgeons had stanched the bleeding from his neck but could do little else, and Hackleman died in Davies’s presence. General Oglesby writhed about on his cot “in the most excruciating pain.” Davies remained with him a moment, then left the room. He made his way down the narrow corridor choked with the dead and dying of his division, stepped outside, and, tired and angry, set off for army headquarters.2
The less illustrious, too, had their visitors. Colonel Hancock of the Fourteenth Wisconsin went to see Capt. Samuel Harrison, a brave company commander who had been one of the first Union officers to fall. “I remained one shot too long,” Harrison told him. Hancock visited him every night until his death two weeks later.
Charley Colwell parked his wagons and entered the commissary depot, where the wounded of the Ninth Illinois had been brought: “Some were dying, some were groaning with pain of wounds, while others were talking and laughing. The doctors were all busy amputating their limbs and dressing their wounds.” Colwell snaked among the cots and operating tables, looking for his friends. A familiar voice called out, “Say, there comes Charley.” Another answered, “I wonder if he will come down here . . . . Be sure he won’t leave ’til he sees us all.”
Colwell spoke with each man. One begged, “Charley, I am so dry, won’t you bring me a drink of water.” Colwell passed water among them, as he had that afternoon near the White House. “I shook hands with all of them, covered them all and fixed their wounds as well as I could,” recalled Colwell. “They all seemed like brothers to me.” At midnight he left to lay down in an ambulance for a few hours of fitful sleep.
Sam Byers of the Fifth Iowa slipped away from his bivouac and hurried to the Tishomingo Hotel to see a lieutenant from his company who had been shot through the chest. “Never will I forget the horrible scenes of that night,” he wrote. “The town seemed full of the groans of dying men. In one large room of the Tishomingo House surgeons worked all the night, cutting off arms and legs. . . . I saw the floors, tables, and chairs covered with amputated limbs, some white and some broken and bleeding. There were simply bushels of them, and the floor was running blood.”
Byers’s friend was bey
ond help. Death would come shortly. “Go back to the regiment,” the lieutenant told Byers, smiling weakly, “all will be needed.” Byers obeyed. “It was a relief to me to get back into the moonlight and out of the horror, yet out there lay thousands of others in line, only waiting the daylight to be also mangled and torn like these.”3
* * *
Neither Van Dorn nor Rosecrans gave a thought to sparing the living their chance at agony, and Van Dorn, at least, considered renewing the fight by moonlight. Generals Bowen and Rust certainly hoped he would allow them to atone for their inactivity that afternoon by ordering a night attack. Rust acknowledged the hazards of doing battle at night but believed circumstances warranted the risk: “I think the enemy were whipped that night, and I would have attacked with more hope of success before the enemy had received re-enforcements than after they were there.”
Van Dorn gave the matter serious thought. He, too, was anxious to deny the enemy reinforcements, knowing that already he was waging an offensive against a foe of numerical parity. But the Mississippian, in a rare display of caution, rejected the idea on the grounds that his men were too tired and that in the dark he could not precisely locate the Federal lines.4
That Rosecrans intended to resume the struggle after dark is doubtful. The sole evidence he did came from the pen, and perhaps the imagination, of Hamilton. Writing twenty years afterward, Hamilton claimed Rosecrans directed him to attack at midnight over the ground Holmes had crossed. Hamilton said Ducat delivered the order at 9:00 P.M., an order Hamilton quoted in his article but that never made it into the Official Records. Hamilton said the order astounded him and that with much difficulty he talked Rosecrans out of it, thereby saving his division from almost certain destruction in the dark forest.5
The Darkest Days of the War- the Battles of Iuka and Corinth Page 27