The Darkest Days of the War- the Battles of Iuka and Corinth

by Peter Cozzens

  For forty-five minutes the Confederates endured the pounding. The slaughter was terrific. Colonel McLain had his leg sliced off by a solid shot. The badly depleted Third Louisiana lost thirty-two men—one- third of those engaged. Company K of the Thirty-seventh Mississippi lost every officer.29

  The fall of McLain took the fight out of his brigade. His Mississippians wavered, inspiring the Federal artillerymen to intensify their fire. The Forty-eighth Indiana delivered a particularly heavy volley at the same instant, and the leaderless Confederates broke and fled. The Forty-eighth swept forward on the run after them, firing as they went. The huge Fifty- ninth Indiana Infantry, 636 strong, joined the pursuit.

  McLain’s brigade got off without a man being taken prisoner. Colbert’s brigade, which tarried until the Indianans were behind it, had 132 seized. Buford’s Federals kept up the chase for nearly a half-mile before recall was sounded at 11:30 A.M. The attack on the Union right, in which Van Dorn had placed his greatest hope for victory, had ended in a rout.30

  * * *

  William H. Moore was still advancing when Gates, on his left, withdrew. There were no reserves behind the Seventh or Second Iowa of Sweeny’s brigade or Du Bois’s shattered Fifty-seventh Illinois, so Moore’s men were able to chase the Yankees into Corinth. As they passed among the houses, fragments of Federal regiments rallied and began a door-to- door struggle with their pursuers.

  Rosecrans was in the thick of the battle, but his presence was hardly inspiring. The Ohioan had lost all control of his infamous temper, and he cursed as cowards everyone who pushed past him until he, too, lost hope. Near the Tishomingo Hotel were the trains of Du Bois’s brigade. With them were many of the brigade wounded. Both were under the charge of the chaplain of the Fiftieth Illinois. The crash of combat drew steadily nearer, when from a side street appeared a retinue of mounted officers. One rode forward, pointed at the wagons of the Fiftieth Illinois, and asked who was responsible for them. The chaplain spoke up. The officer declared that the army was whipped and told the chaplain to burn his baggage. “We are not whipped, sir,” retorted the chaplain. The officer and his retinue galloped away, and the chaplain guided his train to safety a half-mile beyond town. Only later did the chaplain learn that the forlorn officer had been Rosecrans.

  Rosecrans’s histrionics nearly cost him his life. “On the second day I was everywhere on the line of battle,” he wrote with disingenuous pride. “Temple Clark of my staff was shot through the breast. My sabre-tache strap was cut by a bullet, and my gloves were stained with the blood of a staff-officer wounded at my side. An alarm spread that I was killed, but it was soon stopped by my appearance on the field.”31

  Van Dorn was as removed from the action as Rosecrans was swept up in it. He was unable to correct the piecemeal deployment of Green’s division, and Maury’s failure to take up the attack in a timely manner escaped his notice. Rosecrans was too close to the fight to fashion a coherent response to the Rebel breakthrough; Van Dorn was too distant to exploit it.

  21. My God! My Boys Are Running!

  The delay in Green’s assault may have perplexed Dabney Maury, but when it came his turn to attack, he proved equally delinquent. A desire to keep his command out of harm’s way could hardly have been the reason; just 400 yards from the guns of Batteries Williams and Robinett, Maury’s men had been taking a pounding since dawn.1

  Shortly after daybreak Lt. Charles Labruzan of the Forty-second Alabama volunteered his company to reinforce the brigade skirmishers. Nearing the skirmish line Labruzan realized the danger to which he had exposed his Alabamians. “We got behind trees and logs, and the way the bullets did fly was unpleasant to hear,” rued Labruzan. “I think twenty must have passed within a few feet of me, humming prettily. Shells tore off large limbs and splinters struck my tree several times. We could only move from tree to tree, bending low to the ground while moving. Oh how anxiously I watched for the bursting of the shells when the roar of the cannon proclaimed their coming!"2

  Labruzan’s company took cover beside the Second Texas Infantry. The Second was a sterling unit—"one of the finest regiments I have ever seen,” proclaimed General Maury. Its colonel, William P. Rogers, was perhaps the most gifted regimental commander in Van Dorn’s army. A burly, square-faced man with black hair and an iron gaze, Rogers was forty-four years old at the time of Corinth. He had led with distinction a company in Jefferson Davis’s Mississippi Rifles during the Mexican War, and Rogers was said to be the second man to have scaled the fortress walls of Monterrey. Following the war he served as American consul in Vera Cruz, a post he resigned when his wife refused to follow him across the border. But she consented to go as far as Texas, where Rogers opened a successful legal practice. Rogers was an intimate friend of Sam Houston. Like the eminent Texan, Rogers deplored secession but felt duty bound to fight with the Confederacy, and he accepted a commission as lieutenant colonel of the Second Texas upon the outbreak of hostilities.

  Rogers’s Texans revered him. “A better or a braver man never led troops anywhere,” averred one. Rogers returned their affection, and loyalty to his men overcame Rogers’s desire to leave the army. His brother officers felt no less strongly toward him. Before Iuka, twenty field-grade officers from Arkansas and Texas regiments joined in recommending him for a major general’s commission.

  That Rogers had not risen in rank was a result of a deep personal enmity between him and President Davis. During the Mexican War the two had a quarrel resulting in a challenge to a duel, which only the intervention of Gen. Zachary Taylor prevented. The cause of their dispute is obscure — Rogers reviled the lieutenant colonel of Davis’s regiment, with whom Davis apparently sided against Rogers, despite protestations of goodwill—and the antipathy between Davis and Rogers lingered. On the night of October 3, as he was visiting the wounded of his regiment, Colonel Rogers said to his senior company commander, “Captain McGinnis, tomorrow Jeff Davis must allow my promotion, or tomorrow I die.”3

  Rogers obviously was not a man to shirk battle. While Maury waited, the Texan pushed forward his regiment, reinforced by two companies of the Thirty-fifth Mississippi, to skirmish aggressively with the Yankees. From the edge of the forest the Texans exchanged fire with skirmishers from Fuller’s Union Brigade, who were deployed among the fallen timber and partially completed abatis between the forest and Battery Robinett. So sharp was Rogers’s fire that General Van Dorn feared he would bring on a general engagement before Green was ready to attack.4

  The morning passed to the thunder of artillery and the crackle of skirmish fire. At 9:30A.M. Lieutenant Labruzan came off the skirmish line with his Alabamians and took up behind a log with the major of the Forty- second. Thirty minutes later Labruzan was stunned by the “heavy volleys of musketry” coming from far to the left that told of Green’s encounter with the enemy. That was to have been the signal for Maury to take up the attack, but no call to attention came. Not until 10:30 A.M. was the command given to form for an assault. After donning an armored vest and pinning to his shirt a short note with his name, rank, and the address of friends, Colonel Rogers delivered the attack order to the Forty-second. Riding up to its supine officers, Rogers said simply, “Alabama forces,” and the regiment came to life. Throughout the division the response was the same. “When the order to advance was given that fine body of soldiers obeyed as unhesitatingly as if the impulse to move had been that of a single man,” said a member of the Second Texas. Generals Phifer and Moore formed their brigades in densely massed regimental columns. Each column was five lines deep with a front two companies wide. One hundred yards separated the assaulting columns. Moore was behind and to the right of Phifer, so that Phifer’s right regimental column masked Moore’s left.5

  Col. William P. Rogers (courtesy of T. Michael Parrish)

  From the high ground on either side of Battery Robinett Colonel Fuller’s Federals watched the Confederates mass for the assault. Capt. Oscar Jackson of the Sixty-third Ohio, a twenty-two-year-old former schoolte
acher from Hocking County, looked on in awe as “the rebels began pouring out of the timber and forming strong columns. All the firing ceased and everything was silent as the grave. They formed one column of perhaps two thousand men in plain view, then another, and crowding out of the woods another. . . . I thought they would never stop coming.”

  Captain Jackson’s fear caused him to exaggerate Rebel numbers, but even the most hardened veterans were dumbstruck. Colonel Fuller stood with his friend, Col. Joseph Kirby Smith, behind the Forty-third Ohio, to the left of Battery Robinett. Smith’s lighthearted humor had left him, and he nervously ordered his Forty-third to change front forward on its right company to better meet the impending attack (that is, conduct a right half-wheel so as to face north). Smith’s regiment held a key part of the line, the 200 yards of open ground between Batteries Robinett and Williams, but Colonel Fuller’s thoughts were elsewhere. He feared for the Sixty-third Ohio, which lay on the far side of Battery Robinett, astride the Memphis road. Smith’s Forty-third Ohio at least enjoyed the protection of breastworks; the Sixty-third was in the open. Assuming the Confederate columns guided on the road, Fuller deduced they would converge on Battery Robinett precisely in front of the Sixty-third. A regiment so exposed, he remarked to no one in particular, could not long withstand such an onslaught. Presupposing that the Sixty-third would collapse, Fuller placed the Eleventh Missouri twenty-five yards behind them. General Stanley shared Fuller’s concern, and he placed himself and his staff behind the Sixty-third.

  It was 11:00 A.M. before Dabney Maury set his brigades in motion. Captain Jackson studied their approach. “As soon as they were ready they started at us with a firm, slow, steady, step,” he remembered. “In my campaigning I had never seen anything so hard to stand as that slow, steady tramp. Not a sound was heard but they looked as if they intended to walk over us. I afterwards stood a bayonet charge when the enemy came at us on the double-quick with a yell that was not so trying on the nerves as that steady, solemn advance.”6

  Before the Federals fired a shot, they saw the attacking columns reduced by a third. Perhaps repenting his tardiness, Maury released Cabell’s Arkansas brigade to Green; that the Arkansans were needed was beyond question. As Cabell started his brigade toward Battery Powell, a courier from Gates’s galloped up. Drawing rein in front of the lead regiment, he screamed, “Colonel Gates has captured forty guns, but cannot hold them unless you reinforce him at once — follow me!” The courier wheeled his horse and started back.

  Cabell’s Arkansans followed the courier through the forest at the double-quick until Cabell judged his brigade was direcdy behind Gates. Facing to the front, the Arkansans moved out onto the flat before Battery Powell, expecting to find the Missourians. What they saw astonished them. Said Cabell, “The Missouri Brigade had fallen back, taking a road on my extreme right. . . . Instead of meeting the Missouri Brigade, as I had been informed I would, I found the enemy in line of batde just outside of the timber and about three hundred yards in front of their breastworks.” Cabell’s left regiments became engaged before he could take in the situation. Bowing to the inevitable, Cabell ordered a charge.7

  The Arkansans had run into the Fifty-sixth Illinois and the Tenth Missouri, which had chased Gates’s Missourians beyond the breastworks. Flushed with victory, the Federals were ready for Cabell. The Twentieth Arkansas came up against the Fifty-sixth Illinois. “Every musket of the Fifty-sixth was turned upon the head of the column,” said its commander. The Illinoisans fired with terrible effect. Col. H. P. Johnson toppled from his horse dead, and the lieutenant colonel and the major of the Twentieth also fell. Suddenly deprived of their leaders, the soldiers of the Twentieth Arkansas fled without firing a shot.8

  Cabell’s remaining regiments pressed on, forcing the Federals to retire into the breastworks. There, however, the Arkansans found a reformed Fifty-second Illinois and the remanned guns of Battery Powell. Coming up opposite the redan, the Twenty-first Arkansas was decimated in a matter of minutes. To the left of Battery Powell, the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Arkansas regiments held on a bit longer against the Seventh Iowa, and a few Arkansans made it over the breastworks; but ultimately the result was the same. The colonel of the Eighteenth was killed, and General Cabell fell from his dead horse, badly bruised. In the Nineteenth Arkansas, 15 officers and 105 men were wounded in twenty minutes.9

  Cabell’s belated assault had cost him more than 600 men and gained nothing. By 11:45 A-M- struggle for Battery Powell was over. Van Dorn’s grand flanking movement had played itself out in a series of fierce but poorly coordinated charges against a foe numerically equal and supported by seven batteries of artillery. At least 2,000 Confederates remained in Corinth itself, thronging the streets in the face of feeble resistance. Unless they were quickly and heavily reinforced by a decisive breakthrough somewhere along the Federal front line, their gains would prove as illusory as those of Gates had been.

  * * *

  * * *

  Out on the low ridge beside Battery Robinett, Fuller’s Ohioans braced themselves for battle. Inside the redoubt Lieutenant Robinett’s gun crews loaded their three twenty-pounder Parrotts with canister and waited. It was a few minutes before noon. The “steady, solemn advance” Captain Jackson described was becoming unbearable. General Stanley rode back and forth behind the Sixty-third Ohio. Too nervous to be imaginative, he stole a line from history and yelled out to the men to hold their fire until they saw the whites of the Rebels' eyes. Few paid him much notice. All attention was given to the dense enemy columns, which were then marching with seemingly superhuman will into the abatis before Battery Robinett. Their pace was still measured, their lines yet compact. Captain Jackson walked behind his company. “I could see the men were affected. . . . They were in line and I knew that they would stand fire, but this was a strong test,” said Jackson. “I noticed one man examining his gun to see if it was clean; another to see if his was primed right; a third would stand a while on one foot then on the other; while the others were pulling at their blouses, feeling if their cartridge boxes or cap-pouches were all right, and so on, but all the time steadily watching the advancing foe.” Jackson tried to steady his men. He thought of all the customary battle cries that commanders uttered, such as “Remember some battle (naming it),” “Fire low,” or “Stick to your company,” but the best he could utter was “Boys, I guess we are going to have a fight.” A bit embarrassed at having stated the obvious, Jackson quickly added, “I have two things I want you to remember today. One is, we own all the ground behind us. The enemy may go over us but all the rebels yonder can’t drive Company H back. The other is, if the butternuts come close enough, remember you have good bayonets on your rifles and use them.”10

  When the enemy closed to within 250 yards, Fuller gave the order to lie down. Jackson’s company was behind a small roll in the earth, which shielded it from the enemy’s view. The guns of Batteries Robinett and Williams boomed their greeting, and the Rebel columns shivered. The first shell from Battery Williams exploded amid the Forty-second Alabama, knocking down or scattering some forty men. Wrote a soldier of the Thirty-ninth Ohio, “The shells from our battery made complete roads through them. You could see the poor fellows throw up their arms and leap into the air, and fall down. Still they pressed on.” Thomas Duncan of the Second Texas described the scene from the Confederate perspective: “When they encountered the abatis — an obstruction of felled trees, with sharpened and interwoven branches — the formation was necessarily somewhat broken, just as the enemy’s artillery began to blast and wither the moving mass of men; but each man, though but an atom of the fiery storm, moved with a separate though strangely cooperative intelligence, advancing with remarkable rapidity toward the common objective, Fort Robinett.”11

  The Confederates cleared the fallen timber and paused briefly to reform their columns. Fuller’s skirmishers stumbled before them toward the protection of the Federal main line. The order to charge was given, and the Rebels swept up a low ridge —
a “bluffish bank,” Captain Jackson called it—fifty yards in front of Battery Robinett.

  Fuller’s four regiments opened fire almost simultaneously. Lieutenant Labruzan crested the ridge as the first Yankee volley shattered the air. “The whole of Corinth with its enormous fortifications, burst upon our view,” said the Alabamian. “The United States flag was floating over the forts and in town. We were met by a perfect storm of grape, canister, cannon balls, and minie balls. Oh God! I have never seen the like! The men fell like grass. I saw men, running at full speed, stop suddenly and fall upon their faces, with their brains scattered all around; others, with legs and arms cut off, shrieking with agony.” Labruzan commended his soul to God and kept on running.

  The slaughter stunned the Federals. Captain Jackson’s regimental commander, Col. John Sprague, said the enemy’s “first line was literally shattered to fragments. The survivors rushed pell mell on the second line, throwing it into confusion.” Matters certainly looked that way to Jackson: “It seems to me that the fire of my company had cut down the head of the column that struck us as deep back as my company was long. As the smoke cleared away, there was apparendy ten yards square a mass of struggling bodies and butternut clothes.”12

  Five Confederate regiments — three from Moore’s brigade and two from Phifer’s — had come up against Fuller’s Ohioans and the cannon of Battery Robinett. West of the Memphis road the Forty-second Alabama tangled with Smith’s Forty-third Ohio. Colonel Rogers’s Second Texas charged along the road itself. The unreliable Thirty-fifth Mississippi felt its way through the abatis east of the road. To their left the Sixth and Ninth Texas Dismounted Cavalry regiments of Moore’s brigade came up against the Twenty-seventh and Thirty-ninth Ohio regiments.13