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

by Peter Cozzens

  Between the Sixth Texas Dismounted Cavalry and the Twenty-seventh Ohio, the fighting had been nearly hand to hand. The Texans came within eight yards of the left center companies of the Twenty-seventh before Pvt. Orrin Gould of Company G shot down the Confederate color- bearer. He ran forward to grab the flag. A Rebel officer commanded his men to “Save the colors,” at the same time firing a bullet into Gould’s chest. The Ohioan kept coming. He covered his wound with one hand and snatched up the flagstaff with the other. Gould darted back into the ranks; as the Texans retreated, he waved the colors defiantly after them. The next day Colonel Fuller paid Gould a visit in the field hospital. The young man was stretched out on a cot, clearly in great pain. But “upon seeing me, his pale face was instantly radiant with smiles and pointing to his wound, he said, ’Colonel, I don’t care for this, since I got their flag.'"32

  Not all the attacking Confederates were stopped so abniptly as the Alabamians and Texans. Following the wooded bank and shallow bed of Elam Creek, General Phifer’s Third Arkansas Dismounted Cavalry and Stirman’s Arkansas Sharpshooters had slipped around the right of the Thirty-ninth Ohio, which had turned its attention to the Texans on its left flank. The Fifteenth and Twenty-third Arkansas regiments of Moore’s brigade, along with most of the Thirty-fifth Mississippi, followed them. With General Phifer leading them on foot, hat in hand, the Arkansans and Mississippians charged across the Mobile and Ohio Railroad toward the Seventh and Fiftieth Illinois regiments of Du Bois’s brigade. The Illi- noisans were as demoralized as their comrades in Sweeny’s brigade had been, and the two regiments disintegrated into small squads, fleeing past Rosecrans’s headquarters with the enemy in close pursuit. Rosecrans hurled obscene epithets and threats their way, but no one paid him the slightest attention.33

  Phifer’s and John C. Moore’s Confederates surged around the Federal headquarters and continued toward the Tishomingo Hotel. Rosecrans let himself be carried back by the wave of fleeing Yankees, across the track of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad to the doorstep of the hotel. To the commanding general the day was lost. Some fifteen minutes earlier he had ordered the chaplain of the Fiftieth Illinois to burn his train; now he told the survivors of the regiment to apply torches to the vast commissary and quartermaster stores stockpiled near the Tishomingo Hotel. The Illinoisans continued to ignore him, and the stores stood untouched when the Confederates came charging across the tracks a few minutes later. There, in front of the Tishomingo Hotel, the Arkansans of Phifer and John C. Moore mingled with the Missourians and Mississippians of W. H. Moore for a brief, triumphant moment before the Federals rallied to repel them.

  Confederate High Tide at the Tishomingo Hotel by Keith Rocco (courtesy of the Siege and Battle of Corinth Commission, Corinth, Mississippi)

  Colonel Du Bois launched the first counterattack, against part of W. H. Moore’s brigade. Moore was shot down near the railroad depot, and Du Bois drove his men 150 yards back through town before his own ranks were convulsed by a bombardment of shot and shell from behind. Posted on the east edge of town, Battery B, Second Illinois Light Artillery, had opened a blind fire on ground they thought to be held by the Confederates. Instead they struck dozens from the brigades of Du Bois and Baldwin and almost succeeded in eliminating their division commander. “Many of our men were killed by the shell and shot. . . . Seven or eight of these passed directly over my head, and one very close . . . taking off the legs of two of my brave soldiers direcdy in front,” said Davies. “It was all up with us,” confessed Du Bois, whose men scattered to fight or mn as fheir consciences dictated.34

  Du Bois’s abortive counterattack had reversed the momentum of the battle in the town. A few minutes before 1:00 P.M. the Seventeenth Iowa completed the work. After the threat to Battery Powell was eliminated, General Sullivan turned his attention to the fighting in Corinth itself. He personally led the Seventeenth Iowa, the only one of his regiments not to have been committed to the fight for Battery Powell, up onto a low rise overlooking the streets on the northern edge of town. From there the Iowans picked off Confederates with impunity. When the left flank of W. H. Moore’s brigade—or, rather, the left side of the jumbled mass of men his brigade had become—passed out of range, Sullivan ordered the Iowans to charge into town. They struck the rear of the Rebel mass before they could recover from Du Bois’s counterpunch and the death of their commander. What remained of unit integrity disappeared. Dozens of Confederates dispersed to grab Yankee horses, which stood hitched to a fence beside the Tishomingo Hotel, and ride them to safety. Scores of Missourians and Mississippians, including the color guard of the Forty- third Mississippi, surrendered rather than run the gaundet back to their own lines.35

  John C. Moore’s and Phifer’s columns were thrown out of Corinth at about the same moment. Again it was the ever-present General Stanley who helped reverse the tide. He had posted the large and relatively fresh Fifth Minnesota Infantry in the rear of Fuller’s brigade before dawn. Now, at 1:00 P.M., he called on the Minnesotans to repel the column that had eluded the Thirty-ninth Ohio. Col. Lucius Hubbard executed the order impeccably. He faced his regiment about, from the west to the east, and moved to the edge of the town square. There he waited until the enemy had spilled into the square before giving the command to fire. “The effect was tremendous, instantaneous,” said the regimental chaplain. “The Confederates fell, staggered, turned back. The Fifth, the brandishing sword of Colonel Hubbard leading the way, hastened in pursuit. Beyond, other Union regiments, rallying from the confusion into which the Confederate charge had at first thrown them, fell in with the Fifth. The rout of the enemy was complete. The victory was ours.”36

  General Stanley was thrilled. “Should God spare me to see many battles I never expect to see a more grand sight than the battlefield presented at this moment. The enemy had commenced falling back from town and batteries before our advancing infantry. The roll of musketry and the flash of artillery was incessant as the enemy tried in vain to form line under fire.”

  From the edge of the timber, on the east side of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, a Confederate artilleryman watched the return of William H. Moore’s Missourians: “It was very discouraging indeed to see the men falling back dispirited and gloomy, but they had done their whole duty . . . in a manner for which they deserve great credit and Missourians should never cease to venerate them.”

  Also on hand to greet the survivors was General Price. It was the first time the Missourians had been bested in a charge, and Price could not credit his senses. “My God! My boys are running!” he exclaimed. Then, in a low tone, as if talking to himself, he added, “How could they do otherwise — they had no support—they are nearly all killed.”37

  22. We Must Push Them

  General Price may have whispered vague imprecations upon an unnamed culprit, but every soldier in his corps knew Mansfield Lovell was to blame for their repulse. While their comrades died by the score, Lovell’s front was cloaked in a culpable silence.

  Lovell had obeyed to the letter Van Dorn’s discretionary orders that he move cautiously until Hébert was engaged. Wrote Maj. John Tyler facetiously, “General Lovell, with scientific and skilled precision, occupied his brigades for nearly two hours in searching the woods and beating about, as duty bound by his orders.” Finally, about 9:30 A.M., the division debouched onto a ridge 600 yards northwest of Battery Phillips.

  What they saw gave Lovell’s men pause. On the horizon, said General Rust, was a strong redoubt and “long lines of infantry behind formidable- looking breastworks with abatis again in front.” The ground between them and the brigades of McArthur, Crocker, Oliver, and Mower hardly inspired hope that an assault would succeed. Recalled a Mississippi lieutenant, “The ridge on which we were had been cleared away, and there was nothing larger or better to hide behind than an occasional blade of grass, or a dead leaf.” After scanning the ground Lovell concluded to ignore Van Dorn’s order that he “move rapidly to the assault” after Green became engaged. As Major Ty
ler put it, “Finally defining the works near the Female College, [Lovell] calculated their relative strength and rested upon the conviction of his own inferiority of power. . . . An assault upon [Battery Phillips] was not in accordance with West Point tactics, and General Lovell abstained from making the .. . effort.”1

  That suited Generals Rust and Villepigue, but not Bowen. He fumed over the division’s inactivity. In plain sight a half-mile to the east, Dabney Maury’s command was being massacred before Battery Robinett. Incredibly, Lovell had disappeared from the front. Three times Bowen sent couriers importuning Lovell to return and lead the attack General Van Dorn had ordered. Lovell never responded. In frustration Bowen decided to test the Yankee lines himself. He sent sharpshooters toward the enemy, ordered the remainder of his infantry to lie down on the crest of the ridge, and then ran the four guns of the Watson (Louisiana) Artillery forward to shell Battery Phillips.

  Bowen’s purpose was laudable, but he had gravely miscalculated the Federal strength. The guns of the Watson Artillery fired their first rounds. Before the crews rammed home a second charge, Battery Phillips and College Hill erupted with the flash of a dozen cannon. Said a Mississippian who lay nearby, “In less than five minutes there was scarcely a man, horse, gun carriage, or caisson left of the outfit.” Fifty infantrymen were also hit before Bowen pulled his command off the ridge. “There was no complaint when orders to fall back were passed along the line,” quipped Mississippian I. E. Hirsh.

  Not all Bowen’s men shared Private Hirsh’s lightness of conscience. Gazing upon Battery Phillips, Lieutenant Holmes of the Twenty-second Mississippi was ashamed of his unit’s inaction: “We unexpectedly stopped under a hill to be protected from the shells of this fort. . . . Here we stayed, not daring to advance one foot, till General Price failed in his attack on Fort Robinett, and we, of course, had failed too, for outside of the skirmishers not a volley had been fired by our whole division.”2

  * * *

  Under the blistering rays of a midday sun the survivors of the attacks on Batteries Powell and Robinett retreated into the woods northwest of Corinth. An Iowa Yankee watched them melt away: “With no guns and coats and hats gone a scattering few reach the timber and escape from the jaws of death. . . . I could not help but pity these poor fellows who thus went into certain and sure destruction here. They had been cut to pieces in the most intense meaning of that term. Such bravery has never been excelled on any field as in the useless assaults on Robinett.”3

  Van Dorn conceded the contest at noon: “Exhausted from loss of sleep, wearied from hard marching and fighting, companies and regiments without officers, our troops — let no one censure them—gave way. The day was lost.”4

  Van Dorn could not have rallied the men had he tried. Lovell’s division excepted, the army was wrecked. What remained of Dabney Maury’s division had been transformed into a unit of silent but studied insubordination. “Our men fell back in disorder, but sullenly,” Maury wrote. “I saw no man running, but all attempts to reform them under the heavy fire of the enemy, now in possession again of their artillery, were in vain. They marched towards the timber in a walk, each man taking his own route and refusing to make any effort to renew the attack.”

  Capt. James Greene of the Eighth Wisconsin watched the histrionics of Rebel regimental and brigade officers unwilling to accept defeat. Some managed to get their men into line, but that was the extent of their success. Said Greene, “Again and again they formed their lines and advanced to the edge of the woods, but their men would go no further. Officers swore, and appealed to them to go in just once more; but they had enough.”

  Van Dorn and Price watched the proceedings from the Memphis road. Van Dorn, said Maury, “looked upon the thousands of men streaming past him with a mingled expression of sorrow and pity.” Sterling Price was devastated. He “looked on the disorder of his darling troops with unmitigated anguish,” Maury remembered. “The big tears coursed down the old man’s bronzed face, and I have never witnessed such a picture of mute despair and grief as his countenance wore when he looked upon the utter defeat of those magnificent troops.”5

  It took an unexpected stirring in the Federal ranks to rouse the generals to action. Yankee skirmishers had swarmed into the field between the lines, amid resounding cheers from their comrades behind the breastworks. Fearful of a counterattack against his broken division, Maury appealed to Van Dorn for help. The Mississippian, in turn, called on Lovell to cover a general withdrawal. At 2:00 P.M. Lovell pulled Rust and Bowen out of range and inserted Villepigue’s brigade between Maury’s mob and the Federals. Villepigue formed astride the Memphis road, 1,000 yards from Battery Robinett. “These troops were in fine order, they had done no fighting,” sneered Maury. Behind them the army streamed over the Chewalla road in retreat.6

  * * *

  Van Dorn and Maury overestimated their enemy. Pursuit was the last thing on the minds of most Yankee soldiers or their generals. Like their enemy, the Federals had endured two days of no food, little sleep, and devitalizing tension. “When the excitement of battle was over,” said General Stanley, “they lay down exhausted on the ground.”

  General Rosecrans sank down with them. Confederate cavalry probes south of town momentarily convinced him the attacks on Batteries Powell and Robinett had been but a prelude to greater efforts against his flanks, and he scrambled to meet the threat. Rosecrans told Hamilton to regroup and watch for an attack from the east, and he had McArthur reconnoiter the Kossuth road to look for Confederates southwest of Corinth. At 2:00 P.M., faint from fatigue, Rosecrans sought the shade of a tree.7

  Three distant explosions calmed his fears. To his staff the Ohioan remarked that Van Dorn must be blowing up his ammunition wagons, a sure sign of a retreat. “We must push them,” Rosecrans added vaguely. But apart from sending Sullivan to skirmish with the fleeing Confederates, Rosecrans let Van Dorn alone. Not until 6:00 P.M., when Sullivan reported the enemy well on his way toward Chewalla, did Rosecrans rouse himself. In the company of his escort and staff he rode into the forest beyond Battery Robinett. Satisfied Van Dorn indeed had gone, Rosecrans returned to address the troops.

  The battle had been won, he announced. After two days of battle and two sleepless nights of marching, the men should “replenish their cartridge boxes, haversacks, and stomachs, take an early sleep, and start in pursuit by daylight.”8

  Most welcomed Rosecrans’s words. But some soldiers, able to look beyond their exhaustion, questioned the wisdom of allowing Van Dorn to steal nearly a day’s march. Lt. William McCord of the Sixty-fourth Illinois wondered why McKean’s division, which had done no real fighting the second day, was not sent after the enemy at once. So, too, did Colonel Chetlain. Sgt. Charles Hubert of the Fiftieth Illinois had the same thought. Had McKean or Hamilton moved out immediately, “a rich reward would have resulted. But,” he lamented, “a contrary course was adopted, and thus a breathing spell was given to the broken and disheartened Rebels.”

  Some started out spontaneously after the enemy, and they were richly rewarded for their enterprise. Said Lieutenant McCord, “Squads of soldiers from our lines without orders did rush forward and made prisoners of large number of the enemy, in some instances one man capturing from five to twenty and in another instance twenty men capturing three hundred.” Among those the Federals ran into as they started after the enemy was Joseph Mower. He had sustained a flesh wound in the back of the neck before surrendering. In their haste to depart, his captors neglected to post a guard on him, and he slipped away.9

  The Aftermath of Battle, Battery Robinett by Keith Rocco

  Sleep came hard that evening. The dead lay in windrows among the living, and under the hot sun their bodies decomposed quickly. The stench was horrible. Commissary whiskey was ladled out liberally to keep the men from vomiting. Before Batteries Powell and Robinett the scene was particularly gruesome. Recalled a Federal, “The mangled bodies of living and dead before those forts should be seen, if one would have any adequate i
dea of them; heads carried off so that no trace of them could be found — so with limbs — others having all the flesh torn off the bones, leaving them white and bare.” Col. Augustus Chetlain rode to Battery Robinett with a party of officers from Davies’s division. Climbing the parapet, they counted thirty-six Rebels in one pile near the ditch.10

  An instant of joy relieved the sorrow around Battery Robinett. Word reached Colonel Fuller that Smith had regained consciousness and that the surgeons had pronounced the wound not mortal. “I jumped upon a fallen tree in rear of the Forty-third Ohio and sang out to them that Colonel Smith was not killed, but would recover,” Fuller said. “This was repeated by Swayne and others, and the cheer which followed, taken up by the men of other regiments also, would have gladdened Kirby’s heart.”

  Fuller and Stanley rushed to Smith’s bedside. They found him awake but too badly shot up in the mouth to speak. Smith offered a smile and a salute from his cot. Stanley sat down beside him. Smith motioned his desire to write something. Fuller handed him his memorandum book and a pencil. Smith scratched out a question: “How did my regiment behave?” Stanley took the notebook from him and began to write a reply before a quizzical look from the wounded colonel reminded Stanley and Fuller he could hear well enough, and Stanley answered, “Most gallantly.” “This seemed to please Smith gready, and he at once acknowledged it with one of his graceful salutes,” said Fuller.