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

by Peter Cozzens

  When Stanley rose and passed along to speak to others, Fuller took his place at Smith’s side. Rather awkwardly Fuller told Smith he would do anything the junior colonel wished. Would he like to have him write to his mother? Smith nodded “Yes.” Was there anyone else he wished Fuller to write? Smith “made no sign in response, but seemed hesitating about something he felt loth to drop, and kept looking at me with a steady gaze.” Fuller understood. Should he write to Smith’s fiancee? Smith smiled and nodded. With a promise to do so, Fuller returned to his command.11

  About the time Stanley and Fuller called on Smith, Rosecrans rode into Corinth to find General McPherson on hand with the five regiments Grant had ordered from Jackson, Tennessee. McPherson handed him a dispatch from Grant. Expecting victory, Grant had ordered Rosecrans to pursue Van Dorn vigorously. He reminded him that Hurlbut would be within two miles of Davis Bridge by nightfall. If Rosecrans followed Van Dorn closely, he and Hurlbut might crush the Mississippian between them. But success depended on their cooperating: “If the enemy falls back push them with all force possible and save Hurlbut who is now on the way to your relief. The Corinth and Bolivar forces must act in concert,” admonished Grant. “Hurlbut is not strong enough alone to handle the rebels without very good luck. Don’t neglect this warning. I can reinforce you no more from this on — hence you will see the vital importance of your and Hurlbut’s forces acting in conjunction.”12

  But neither Grant’s peremptory order nor the presence of five fresh regiments changed Rosecrans’s mind. He would start at dawn, with McPherson in the lead.

  Rosecrans decided to pursue along two routes. McPherson was to march initially along the Memphis road, then pick up the Columbus road and continue toward Pocahontas. The divisions of Stanley and Davies would support him. McArthur would take his brigade, Oliver’s brigade, and a squadron of cavalry out the Memphis and then the Chewalla road, also in the direction of Pocahontas. McKean was to follow him with Crocker’s brigade and the rest of the cavalry. Hamilton would trail McKean. Rosecrans told his division commanders to issue three days' rations and 100 rounds of ammunition, then bedded down for the night.13

  * * *

  Earl Van Dorn was near collapse. He had counted on victory at Corinth to erase the stigma of Pea Ridge. While his lieutenants tried to rally their men, Van Dorn searched his troubled mind for a way to save himself.14

  The troops thought mostly of what had been lost and who was to blame. Cavalryman Edwin Fay had very definite ideas on both questions. He wrote his wife angrily, “The Yankees killed a great many of our men and . . . our retreat was conducted with the greatest confusion. . . . Van Dorn was drunk all the time and Villepigue too and I expect Price too. Everybody was commander and Price did the fighting. We lost half of Price’s army killed and straggling. Such demoralization was never seen in an army before. I think the cause of the Confederacy is lost in [the] West.” Lt. Col. Hubbell of the Third Missouri agreed: “I fear the disaster will be a national one. But it certainly was at a terrible hazard we made the attack.” Missourian Ephraim Anderson pondered losses more personal. Three of his closest friends were dead. One had had his brains blown out by a grapeshot in front of Battery Powell, and the other two had fallen inside the works. Anderson’s company commander had been badly wounded, and hardly a messmate had escaped without some injury. “That night, when weary and worn, I stretched myself on a blanket, my feelings were very melancholy and depressed: the scenes and events of the day came up before me in all their dark and gloomy reality,” recalled Anderson. Dabney Maury expressed the agony of Anderson and thousands like him, when he wrote, “The utmost depression prevailed throughout the army.”15

  Blind to the dejection so evident to Hubbell and Maury, that afternoon Van Dorn concocted a plan to renew the battle.

  Assuming they would bivouac on the west bank of the Tuscumbia River—as far from the Federals as possible, Van Dorn’s generals were starded to receive, at sunset, orders to make camp at Chewalla. “Why [the army] was stopped here was to everyone an enigma,” said Major Tyler. “If retreating, and there seemed nothing else to do, we surely should have crossed the Tuscumbia River only four miles off, where our trains still reposed, if indeed, we did not continue over the Hatchie, requiring a march of only four miles more, while the bridges were yet in our possession.” When they learned why the army had halted, the generals were mortified. Van Dorn had no intention of retiring; rather, he would march rapidly south along the Mobile and Ohio Railroad to Rienzi, then double back and attack Corinth from the south.16

  Price learned of the plan at midnight. It came, he thought, from “a mind rendered desperate by misfortune.” Assembling his staff officers, all of whom agreed Van Dorn’s scheme was preposterous, Price sought out Dabney Maury. Despite his continued admiration for its author, he, too, thought the plan absurd. “My division had marched from Chewalla to attack Corinth with four thousand eight hundred muskets the day but one before,” said Maury. “We left in the approaches and the very central defenses of Corinth two thousand officers and men killed or wounded, among them were many of my ablest field and company officers.” With what was he to carry out Van Dorn’s orders? Maury wondered angrily.17

  Price and Maury convinced Van Dorn to call a council of war. Price did most of the talking. How, with two of his three divisions wrecked, did Van Dorn think he was going attack Corinth? “Van Dorn, you are the only man I ever saw who loves danger for its own sake,” Maury interjected. “When any daring enterprise is before you, you cannot adequately estimate the obstacles in your way.” Van Dorn pondered a moment, then replied, “While I do not admit the correctness of your criticism, I feel how wrong I shall be to imperil this army through my personal peculiarities, after what such a friend as you have told me they are, and I will countermand the orders and move at once on the road to Ripley.” The army would cross the Hatchie River at Davis Bridge, Van Dorn added, then turn south for the twenty-eight-mile march to Ripley.18

  Welcome as was Van Dorn’s return to reason, it appeared to have come too late. Before dawn on October 5, couriers from Wirt Adams reported the Kentuckian had clashed with Federal cavalry six miles west of Davis Bridge the day before. Following the Yankee horsemen was infantry of indeterminate strength.

  A new crisis presented itself. No one in Van Dorn’s military circle had expected a fight from behind; all assumed the only threat to be from Rosecrans. Consequendy, Van Dorn had assigned his strongest division, Lovell’s, to rear-guard duty and had placed his most depleted command, Maury’s, in the lead. There was no way to reorder the march column, so Van Dorn improvised. He ordered Armstrong and Jackson, whom he had sent to Rienzi, to rejoin the army at once. At dawn he directed Lt. Col. Edwin R. Hawkins, whose First Texas Legion guarded the supply train two miles east of Davis Bridge, to join Wirt Adams on the Hatchie River. Together they were to delay any Federal crossing until the main body came up.19

  The army marched at sunrise. Van Dorn and his staff rode with the vanguard. At 10:00 A.M. a courier from Adams told them “the enemy in heavy force is moving from Bolivar to oppose the crossing of the Hatchie.” Even as they spoke, the courier added, Adams was heavily engaged a mile west of the river. Van Dorn felt the noose tighten. As he confessed in his report, “Anticipating that the Bolivar force would move out and dispute my passage across the Hatchie Bridge I pushed rapidly out to that point in hopes of reaching and securing the bridge before their arrival, but I soon learned by couriers from Colonel Wirt Adams that I would be too late. I nevertheless pushed on with the intention of engaging the enemy until I could get my train and reserve artillery on the Boneyard road to the crossing at Crum’s Mill.”20

  Van Dorn looked to Maury to hold off the Yankees until the army was across Crum’s Bridge, which spanned the Hatchie River six miles south of Davis Bridge. “Maury, you are in for it again today,” said Van Dorn. “Push forward as rapidly as you can and occupy the heights beyond the river before the enemy can get them.”21

  With
his line of retreat in jeopardy and his options limited to one, for perhaps the first time in his military career Earl Van Dorn understood the odds against him.

  23. I Never Saw Such Slaughter

  Stephen Augustus Hurlbut was a volunteer soldier who brought to the army a talent for politics, a taste for the bottle, and a lack of ethics. A South Carolinian by birth, Hurlbut moved to Belvedere, Illinois, at age thirty and entered politics as a Democrat. Ten years later, while a state representative, he switched allegiance to the new Republican Party. Most people changed parties to combat slavery; Hurlbut did so for spoils.

  Hurlbut’s primary virtue was his ability to pick a winner. Early in Lincoln’s political career he made himself a useful, if obsequious, ally. As president, Lincoln rewarded his loyalty with a brigadier general’s commission. Hurlbut was assigned to duty in Missouri, where he embarrassed the president and himself by being frequently drunk on duty. The press pilloried him, and his political patrons in Illinois abandoned him. But Lincoln gave him a second chance, and Hurlbut fought well at Shiloh.1

  At dawn on October 4 Hurlbut led the Fourth Division of the Army of the Tennessee, 5,000 strong, out of Bolivar. He covered twenty-three miles before dark and bivouacked along Big Muddy Creek, three miles from Davis Bridge. Hurlbut’s cavalry pushed Wirt Adams’s pickets to Metamora, a hamlet along a high ridge overlooking the Davis farm and the wooded banks of the Hatchie River, at the intersection of the State Line, Ripley, and Pocahontas roads. A late afternoon counterattack drove the Yankee troopers back toward Big Muddy Creek. From Adams’s spirited defense Hurlbut guessed he would run into the Rebel army the next morning along the Hatchie River, and he cautioned his brigade commanders, Brig. Gens. Jacob Lauman and James Veatch and Col. Robert Scott, to move carefully.2

  Maj. Gen. Stephen A. Hurlbut (Library of Congress)

  Veatch set off at 8:00 A.M. on Sunday, October 5, a warm and sunny morning. The way forward was horrible. Deep hollows and ravines bisected the road, and dense thickets and woods impeded maneuver off it. Veatch lacked a cavalry screen, as Hurlbut had diverted his cavalry to the left of the State Line road in order to take Adams’s troopers, whom Hurlbut presumed to be on the Metamora heights, in the flank. Expecting trouble, Veatch deployed his lead regiment, the Twenty-fifth Indiana, across the road and pushed a two-gun section of Capt. William Bolton’s Battery L, Second Illinois Light Artillery, behind it.

  Hurlbut lost the chance to direct the coming battle to General Ord, who arrived from Bolivar just as the Twenty-fifth Indiana set out. Rather insouciantly, Ord approved of Hurlbut’s arrangements and allowed Veatch to continue.3

  For 800 yards Veatch’s Indianans traipsed through a tangle of underbrush and vines without encountering a single Rebel. Not until they reached the Robinson farm, two miles west of the Hatchie River, did they run into opposition. There several dozen pickets from Wirt Adams’s cavalry had taken shelter, and they clung to the farm so tenaciously that Veatch thought he had run into enemy infantry. Captain Bolton came forward to shell the place. Six rounds sufficed to set the farm ablaze and scatter the Rebels. The Twenty-fifth Indiana surged over the knoll until Veatch stopped the Hoosiers in order to add the Forty-sixth Illinois and the Fourteenth Illinois to the front line for the last leg of the march.4

  At Davis Bridge, Wirt Adams prepared for the Federal onslaught. Excitement got the better of him, and Adams parceled out his forces recklessly. Hoping their presence on the west bank would slow the Yankee skirmishers then spilling over the Metamora ridge, Adams threw Lt. Col. E. R. Hawkins’s First Texas Legion, 360 strong, across Davis Bridge. His own skirmishers spread out on their right, in the huge Davis field, and peppered the Federals.5

  The Confederates would have done better to stay on the east bank, where terrain made common cause with defenders to create an almost impregnable barrier to a lodgement. The Hatchie twisted and turned in a tortuous and baffling course near Davis Bridge, and maneuvering room on the east bank was at a premium. Three hundred yards north of the bridge the river bent sharply from the southwest to the south. Just south of the bridge its green and sullen waters again changed course, twisting abruptly to the east. The State Line road paralleled the Hatchie along this stretch, with only a half-acre between the road and the river bank. Badly overgrown with weeds and blackberry bushes, the road here was more a trail than a true thoroughfare.

  Five hundred yards east of Davis Bridge the ground rose from spongy bottomland to a steep, timbered bluff—a position of great natural strength dominating Davis Bridge. Taken together, the bluff and the river banks formed the boundaries of a twenty-two-acre killing zone of scrub pine, sassafras, wildflowers, and clinging vines into which any force crossing the Hatchie would be channeled.

  Dabney Maury had no time to ponder the terrain. General Van Dorn had charged him with occupying the Metamora ridge before the Yankees could carry it, and he personally led J. C. Moore’s brigade and Captain Dawson’s St. Louis Artillery across the rickety, rotten timbers of Davis Bridge, close on the heels of the First Texas Legion. Fatigue, a lack of water, and the morning heat had caused scores to fall out of the ranks, so that Moore had only 300 men with him when he crossed the bridge. Maury and Moore rode ahead, unaware the Yankees were on the reverse slope of the Metamora ridge.6

  Maury’s display impressed the Yankees. Remembered an Indianan, “When we got upon the hill, we could see the Rebels crossing the Hatchie River on the bridge. They were about one-half mile away. The ground between us was clear, it being a farm. They were crossing their troops and forming a line of battle and running some artillery over and getting them into position.” To some it looked as if the Rebels would never stop coming. “An awfully majestic sight was now afforded us,” said Ulinoisan James Dugan. “We could see thousands of ’Butternuts' file right and left, and take up their position in the margin of the woods on the opposite side of a field from us, preparatory to a series of brilliant movements, that they considered sure to result in our discomfiture.” Dugan wildly overcounted the enemy. No more than 1,100 dismounted troopers and tired infantrymen faced Veatch, who had arrayed his entire brigade along the heights in a three-quarter-mile battle line.7

  Veatch’s artillery served him well. Dawson’s Confederate battery had unlimbered west of the Davis house on a hogback, square in the middle of the field. The Rebels opened fire first, but their aim was bad. Most of their missiles burst harmlessly behind the Metamora ridge. Hurlbut’s chief of artillery, Maj. Charles Campbell, saw to it the Federal return fire was more exact. At a range of 750 yards he opened on the head of Moore’s column with two batteries. The first shot spattered sand on General Maury, who knew a losing proposition when he saw it. He commanded Moore’s brigade to file off the road and take cover in a skirt of trees lining a wisp of a creek called Burr’s Branch. Moore brought his left into contact with the right flank of Hawkins’s Texans.8

  After Moore disappeared into the timber, the Yankee batteries trained their guns on Dawson’s exposed cannon. For forty-five minutes they pounded the Missouri battery, eviscerating horses and smashing limbers and caissons. Dawson kept up a valiant but pointless fire that emptied his ammunition chests but hurt few Federals.9

  Generals Ord and Hurlbut watched the artillery duel intendy. When, a few minutes after 9:00 A.M., Dawson’s fire weakened, Ord commanded Veatch and Scott to fix bayonets and attack. The Federal cannon ceased firing, and the Northerners swept off the ridge, running and yelling. They leapt ditches, climbed fences, and shoved through brambles and hedges to close with the enemy. The sheer weight of Federal numbers overwhelmed Moore and Hawkins, and their efforts at resisting proved worse than futile. The Fifty-third Indiana struck hardest, crashing into the angle formed by the junction of Hawkins’s right flank and Moore’s left. Hawkins tried to fall back, but in the confusion his First Texas Legion broke apart. Hawkins guided half the legion to the bridge in fair order. His senior captain got away with most of the rest, but seventy-five Texans fell captive.

  MAP 1
1. Ord Advances on Davis Bridge, October5, 9:00 A.M.

  The defection of the First Texas Legion doomed Dawson’s battery. With no ammunition left and too few horses to pull their pieces, the Missourians abandoned all but one gun to the Fifty-third Indiana.10

  North of the State Line road, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Illinois regiments completed the destruction of Moore’s brigade. When Moore changed front to contend with the Twenty-fifth and Fifty-third Indiana regiments, which had edged around his left flank after Hawkins withdrew, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth slipped into a field of tall corn beyond his right. There they paused, aimed, and fired. Moore was stunned: “We had not fired more than two or three rounds before a perfect shower of balls was poured into our right flank from the direction of the corn field.” The Illinoisans raised a cheer and charged past Moore’s flank for the river. “We now saw that we must either fall back or be surrounded,” said Moore, who gave the order to retreat.

  It came too late. The Yankees had a head start, and they blanketed the bridge with deliberate volleys. Moore’s men scattered. Some threw aside their rifle-muskets and plunged into the river, where dozens drowned. A few ran the gauntlet of Yankee fire and recrossed Davis Bridge, but most chose surrender. “As for my part I was so hot and tired that I didn’t care about trying to swim with my clothes on and risk getting shot in the back,” said Arkansan Albert McCollom, “so of course I surrendered.” McCollom had plenty of company. Bunched into a river bend north of the bridge, 200 Rebels were, as one Confederate officer put it, “gobbled up.” Scores more were tracked down in the tall grass and trees near the river.11

  The Federals had a field day. William Garner and Charles Rafesnyder of the Fourteenth Illinois were told by their company commander to escort six prisoners back to Metamora. After the captain walked away, Garner remarked to his partner, “Charley, haven’t we the power to take care of more prisoners than the captain has assigned us?” “I believe we could,” agreed Rafesnyder. “Well, then, let’s follow down the river and I think we’ll find some of them hidden under the bank,” said Garner. Combing the bank, they found a Rebel crouched under some bushes at the water’s edge. Garner raised his rifle-musket and barked at the man to give up. The brush stirred, and the Southerner came out. The brush stirred again, and again. More Southerners stood up and showed themselves, until Garner and Rafesnyder found themselves surrounded by two captains, three lieutenants, and thirty-two armed soldiers. Garner got in the first word. “Boys, you are in a tight place, and I am sorry, yes, very sorry for you. The woods are filled with our scouting parties. There is no escape for you. Now, I will give you your choice, which is to surrender to me, and I will take you back to Metamora, where you shall be well treated and have plenty to eat and drink, or you can shoot us down and take the consequences when our men capture you, for capture you they will.” Garner’s bluster—and the promise of food — carried the day. The Rebel officers conferred, then told their men to stack their arms and get in line. Garner gave the command “Forward, march,” and he and Rafesnyder led their company of captives down the State Line road.12