Fuller’s first volleys drove them all back. The Rebels retired twenty or thirty yards. The survivors of the decimated frondine companies tumbled behind stumps and fallen trees and opened fire, while their regimental commanders regrouped the remainder for a second try at the Yankees.14
Now it was the Ohioans turn to suffer. The fight had become a contest of infantry. The cannoneers in and beside Battery Williams had ceased fire for fear of hitting their own men, as had the two guns situated behind the flanking walls of Battery Robinett; only one piece remained in action. The Confederates shot with greater accuracy than had the Ohioans, and Yankee losses were staggering. Although behind three-foot breastworks, nearly a quarter of the soldiers of the Thirty-ninth Ohio were gunned down. Colonel Smith sat behind them on horseback. “Those fellows are firing at you, Colonel,” yelled one of his men solicitously. “Well, give it to them,” answered Smith. An instant later a bullet smashed into his nose. It plowed through his head and emerged from his left ear, and Smith fell to the ground, dead. His “constant companion” and adjutant, the “accomplished young” i st Lt. Charles Heyl, galloped up and was shot too. He sat upright for a moment, grabbed for his horse’s mane to steady himself, then rolled off and fell beside Smith.
The death of Smith, whom Colonel Fuller called the “most accomplished officer in the brigade,” incapacitated the Forty-third Ohio. Forgetting the danger, those nearest Smith gathered around his body. Word of Smith’s fall spread along the line like an electric current. “The best testimony I can give his memory is the spectacle I witnessed myself, in the very moment of battle, of stern, brave men weeping as children as the word passed, ’Kirby Smith is dead,'” said General Stanley, who galloped up behind them. Colonel Fuller was too far away to help; he could only look on with alarm at a regiment that to him “seemed dazed and liable to confusion.” The presence of Stanley settled the men, and Lt. Col. Wager Swayne stepped forward to take command. Together they steadied the ranks before the next Rebel charge.
The Forty-third Ohio may have been crippled, but on the opposite side of Battery Robinett the Sixty-third Ohio was nearly obliterated. Almost half the men in its left companies were hit, and casualties in the rest of the regiment were dangerously high. Only Captain Jackson’s company seems to have escaped damage. The enemy in front of Jackson “fired too low, striking the ground, knocking the dirt and chips all over us, wounding not one man in my company.”15
Fifteen minutes after the first assault ended, the Rebels came on a second time, pouring over the low ridge, through a shallow ravine, and up the gentle slope before Battery Robinett. Again they were thrown back.16
The Confederates re-formed a second time among the fallen timber. Colonel Rogers became a galvanizing force for the disordered survivors of Moore’s brigade. He rode from regiment to regiment, challenging the men to greater efforts. Rogers’s presence was especially needed in the Forty-second Alabama. A relatively green command, the regiment had lost its commander in the first charge. Rogers teased the Alabamians back into action. Turning his back to them, he unsheathed his sword and cried to his own regiment, “Forward, Texans.” George Foster, the senior captain of the Forty-second, took the bait. “They shan’t beat us to those breastworks,” he remonstrated, then, raising his sword, yelled to his men, “Forward Alabamians!”
Moore’s sharpshooters had cleared the way considerably during the lull. They had grown more daring after the second repulse and would crawl through the undergrowth to within a few dozen yards of Fuller’s position to pick off officers. Jackson lost ten of his thirty-four men to sharpshooters' bullets and narrowly escaped death himself. Three bullets passed through his clothes, one of which burned a red streak across his ribs, but he was otherwise unhurt.17
Colonel Fuller was riding behind the Sixty-third Ohio when the enemy came on for the third time. The destruction the sharpshooters had wrought was apparent. “The Sixty-third, which had suffered greatly from a cloud of sharpshooters, seemed the principal target for the enemy, and its ranks were so riddled and broken that I could see the enemy’s column as well as if their line had never intervened,” he reported. With nine of thirteen line officers down, Fuller knew the regiment could not resist a third attack, and he yelled to the commander of the Eleventh Missouri to be ready to charge the moment the Sixty-third faltered. The ubiquitous General Stanley was on hand also, ready to rally the fainthearted.18
The first time they attacked, the Confederates had advanced deliberately, at the quick step. The second time they accelerated to the double- quick. This time they charged on the run. Still their losses were horrendous. Lieutenant Labruzan was at the head of his company, negotiating the carpet of bodies in front of the redan and bending low against the hail of bullets. “One ball went through my pants, and they cut twigs right by me. It seemed by holding out my hand I could have caught a dozen,” said the Alabamian. “They buzzed and hissed by me in all directions, but I still pressed forward. I seemed to be moving right in the mouth of the cannon, for the air was filled with grape and canister. Ahead was one continuous blaze.” Private McKinstry of Company D, the colors company, was also in the front rank of the Forty-second Alabama. He closed on the colors and plunged ahead toward Battery Robinett, just forty yards away. The flag had fallen once; now it fell again. A man named Crawford threw down his rifle and snatched it up. “On to the fort, boys,” screamed Crawford. Nine buckshots riddled his torso, and he and the flag fell. Huddled in the ditch around Battery Robinett, neither Private McKinstry nor the handful of men left in the company had the courage to pick up the colors. The defenders began tossing hand grenades over the wall, but the Ala- bamians were too frightened to respond; they merely crouched lower and waited for the grenades to explode. Then someone yelled, “Pick them up, boys, and pitch them back into the fort.” McKinstry grabbed one, lobbed it over the earthen wall, and had the satisfaction of hearing it explode among the defenders. “Over the walls, and drive them out,” somebody screamed next, and up the steep embankment clambered McKinstry and five or six other Alabamians. At the top they were met by a volley of musketry. The man on McKinstry’s right rolled into the redan; the soldier on his left was struck in the forehead. As he fell backward, the dying soldier clenched McKinstry savagely around the neck and carried him to the bottom of the outside ditch. There McKinstry lay, badly stunned.
Lieutenant Labruzan was hunched a few yards away, clutching the dirt. He and another man had tried to scale the wall of Battery Robinett, with ghastly consequences. The man beside him had “put his head up to shoot into the fort, but he suddenly dropped his musket and his brains were dashed in a stream over my fine coat, which I had in my arms, and on my shirt sleeves.”19
Several squads from the Second Texas Infantry and two companies of the Thirty-fifth Mississippi fell in with the Forty-second Alabama in front of Battery Robinett. The remainder of the Second Texas swept around the redan’s northern flank to grapple with the Sixty-third Ohio. At the head of the small band that came up against Battery Robinett was Colonel Rogers, still mounted on his black mare. He drew rein near the ditch and fired his revolver frantically through the embrasure. Next to Rogers, on foot, was Captain Foster of the Forty-second Alabama.20
Inside the redan all was bedlam. Shot in the head, Lieutenant Robinett fell beneath one of his cannon. Most of his cannoneers decamped out the rear end of the earthwork. Before the Confederates in the ditch realized their brief advantage, the right-wing company of the Forty-third Ohio spilled into Battery Robinett to man the cannon.21
On the northern side of Battery Robinett the full weight of the assaulting column of the Second Texas, less the few dozen men who came up against Battery Robinett with Colonel Rogers, struck the thin ranks of the Sixty-third Ohio. The Second Texas fired into the front rank of Ohioans. From the ditch beside Battery Robinett Rogers’s band contributed a volley that decimated the left-flank company of the Sixty-third. Captain Jackson’s was the next company in line. Colonel Sprague yelled at him to take the
place of the annihilated unit. “I will do it,” replied Jackson with a salute. His twenty-two men faced to the left and started for the gap. “It was like moving into dead men’s shoes, for I had seen one company carried away from there on litters, but without a moment’s hesitation we moved up,” wrote Jackson. Instantly the Ohioans were attacked from the front and flank by five times their number. So near were the Rebels that Jackson distinctly heard their commanding officer’s exhortation: “Boys, when you charge, give a good yell.” “It almost made the hair stand up on my head,” confessed the Ohioan. “The next instant the Texans began yelling like savages and rushed at us without firing.” Jackson took in the situation in an instant. “Don’t load boys; they are too close on you; let them have the bayonet.” Then, for the first and only time in his service, Jackson found himself in the midst of a hand-to-hand melee.
Fear narrowed Jackson’s focus, and he fought in an adrenaline-fed rage. Jackson squeezed off rounds from his revolver into the faces of the enemy until one Texan knocked the pistol from his hand with his musket, then swiped him across the face, cutting Jackson’s cheek to the bone. Never feeling the wound, Jackson picked up his revolver and kept on shooting until the Texans fell back into the ravine. As the blood poured down his blouse, the Ohioan surveyed his company. Of the thirty-four men he had taken into the fight, only eleven remained standing. Then Jackson glanced to the front, just as one of the Rebels turned to fire a parting shot. “I saw the fire was aimed at me and tried to avoid it, but fate willed otherwise and I fell right backwards. I was struck in the face,” said Jackson. Corporal Savely saw him fall. Jackson’s limbs quivered convulsively and the blood spurted from his face in a stream several inches high. Savely thought him dead, and someone cried, “The captain is killed!” So, too, thought Jackson: “I felt as if I had been hit with a piece of timber, so terrible was the concussion and a stunning pain went through my head. It was my impression that I would never rise, but I was not alarmed or distressed by the thought I was dying; it seemed a matter of indifference to me.”
Jackson stood up and staggered a few paces to the rear. A fallen tree blocked his progress. He was too weak to cross it. Pvt. Frank Ingmire of his company stood nearby, staring widely at nothing. “Ingmire, help me over.” “Yes,” he whispered, “let me help you across.” Ingmire offered Jackson his left hand; only then did the captain notice Ingmire’s right arm was dangling at his side, his hand dripping blood. A bullet had shattered Ingmire’s wrist. Ingmire helped Jackson over the log. The captain clung to his left arm with both hands and pleaded with Ingmire not to leave him. Jackson took a few more staggering steps before he felt his hands slip from Ingram’s arms and his knees buckle. Jackson sank to the ground, to welter unconscious in his blood until litter bearers carried him off. Two days later he awoke in a field hospital.22
Neither Jackson nor any of his men would have lived to tell their story had not Colonel Fuller and General Stanley been nearby. When the Second Texas struck the Ohioans, Fuller called the soldiers of the Eleventh Missouri to their feet. Their bayonets already were fixed. In a few moments Colonel Sprague ordered his left and center companies, less Captain Jackson’s command, to fall back. The Missourians opened their files to let the Ohioans by, then fired. They reloaded and fired again. The enemy kept coming. When the Rebels were thirty yards away, the Missourians raised a yell and charged.23
Colonel Fuller was astonished to see General Stanley with them. He had dismounted and was “rushing in between the file closers and the line of battle of the Eleventh Missouri, his arms outstretched, to touch as many men as he could reach, pushing them forward to strike the head of the rebel column. I wondered how he got there; for, only a minute or two before, he was with the Forty-third Ohio, making it hot for the rebels to the left of the battery.”
Considerations other than military led Stanley to risk his life to rally the Sixty-third Ohio. A good part of the regiment had been recruited near his old home in Wayne County, and several of the men were familiar to him. While Stanley passed among the dead and dying of the Sixty-third, a young lieutenant, who had received his promotion just a few days before, hailed him. “General, come here; I want to say good-bye; I am mortally wounded.” Stanley was incredulous: “He spoke so naturally I could not believe it, and tried to encourage him, but he died in half an hour. He was born within two miles of my home.”
Stanley gave the closest thing to an order the Eleventh Missouri received. As they swarmed past his horse, he clapped his hands and yelled to the Missourians, “Go in boys, go in, they are running, go in, go in.”24
The charge of the Eleventh Missouri broke the momentum of the Texans' attack. They gave way stubbornly, killing or wounding sixty-three Missourians before quitting the field. As the Texans stumbled back into the ravine, the Missourians wheeled to the left to challenge Colonel Rogers’s band before Battery Robinett. Private McKinstry saw them coming: “Before giving the situation a thought, I immediately raised my gun and fired full into the breast of a Federal sergeant, who was in front of the column, and only a short distance from us.”25
Captain Foster saw the futility of further resistance. “Cease firing, men! Cease firing!” he screamed while waving a white handkerchief. Colonel Rogers also judged surrender the only alternative to certain death. He bent down in the saddle and grabbed a ramrod from Pvt. T. B. Arnold of the Thirty-fifth Mississippi. To it he tied his handkerchief. In the smoke and confusion the Federals either did not see it or misunderstood his gesture. The entire Eleventh Missouri let go a volley into Rogers’s fast-dwindling band. “Oh, we were butchered like dogs,” mourned Lieutenant Labruzan. He escaped the volley by bending low in the ditch. Less fortunate was Private McKinstry. A minie ball crashed through his left hip, spinning him halfway around. Another tore through his right shoulder, the impact spinning him back to the front. A third bullet crushed his left shoulder, and he dropped his rifle. “I looked, and lo! every one of the fifteen men who were standing with me had fallen in a heap.” The survivors broke for the safety of the timber 300 yards to the rear. Although bleeding profusely from three wounds, McKinstry stumbled off before the Federals could capture him. Miraculously, after laying on his back unable to move for three months, he recovered in time to fight at Lookout Mountain.26
Among the dead was Colonel Rogers. The volley that killed him may have come from the Sixty-third Ohio. Colonel Sprague had re-formed a few dozen of his men and with them joined the charge of the Eleventh Missouri. As they came around the side of Battery Robinett, Sprague said he noticed “a man on horseback, leading the charge in a most gallant manner.” What he apparently failed to notice was Rogers’s white token of surrender. Sprague jumped forward. He shook the shoulders of several of his men and shouted at them to shoot the man on horseback. They did, and horse and rider collapsed beside a large stump, a few yards in front of one of the embrasures of Battery Robinett. Rogers had been hit at least seven times at such close range that his body armor was useless.27
Captain Foster survived the volley. “Boys, you had better get away from here,” he yelled, then started for the rear with Lieutenant Labruzan. A second Federal volley ripped the air, and a cannon in the redan belched a blast of canister. Lieutenant Labruzan dove behind a large stump. Foster was less fortunate. Recalled Labruzan, “Just then I saw poor Foster throw up his hands, and saying ’Oh, my God!' jumped about two feet from the ground, falling on his face. The top of his head seemed to cave in, and the blood spouted straight up several feet. I could see men falling as they attempted to run, some of their heads torn to pieces and some with blood streaming from their backs. It was horrible.”
Labruzan tried to feign death, but the Yankees found him out. “Our boys . . . all around me were surrendering . . . . I was compelled to do so, as a rascal threatened to shoot me. I had to give up my sword to him. He demanded my watch also and took it; but I appealed to an officer and got it back. I had no means of defending myself. For the first time in many years, I cried to see our br
ave men slaughtered so,” said the Alabamian. “I have never felt so bad in all my life.”28
That any of the attackers survived was miraculous. The better part of five regiments had poured a converging fire on them. While the Eleventh Missouri raked their left, the Forty-seventh Illinois delivered a plunging fire into their right from near Battery Williams. Part of Colonel Sprague’s Sixty-third Ohio contributed to the slaughter, as did the right companies of the Forty-third Ohio and part of the Twenty-seventh Ohio. Even the Regular infantrymen who manned the guns in Battery Williams, when they found the fields of fire of their cannon blocked, had picked up their rifle-muskets to join in the killing.29
North of Battery Robinett the fighting had been just as desperate. There the Sixth and Ninth Texas Dismounted Cavalry regiments fought point-blank with the Twenty-seventh Ohio. “There were numbers of men knocked down with fists and butts of muskets and trampled to death,” averred an Ohioan. Col. Lawrence “Sul” Ross of the Sixth Texas was thrown from his white mare when the frightened horse bolted, giving rise to a rumor he had been killed. Ross was unhurt, but his regiment was decimated. After Ross went down, Maj. Robert White yelled at the men to fall back any way they could. A cannonball sliced off the hind legs of his horse, and White fell hard. Those of his Texans who got away did so on their hands and knees.30
Pvt. H. S. Halbert was trying to escape when his friend Jerome Kerr stopped him. Kerr’s right shoulder was ripped open, and he begged Halbert to take off his belt and cartridge box to ease his burden. Halbert began to remove them, but the tongue of the belt buckle would not slip out of the buckle hole. While he tried to work it loose, a squad of Yankees opened fire from twenty yards. “I could do nothing further for Jerome, as the crisis was so pressing that everyone had to provide for his own safety,” lamented Halbert. “There was a log lying near us, I suppose four feet off. In a few hurried words I told Jerome I could do nothing further for him, but to throw himself down behind this log, where he could be protected from bullets, and there would be some chance of saving his life. I there left him and made my own retreat the best I could,” Halbert told Kerr’s father. “We were at that time exposed to such a terrible fire, that I am satisfied that Jerome was shot down before I got six feet from him, and before he had time to get to the log.”31
The Darkest Days of the War- the Battles of Iuka and Corinth Page 32