Moore’s brigade had ceased to exist. “Scarce an organized company came out of the conflict,” lamented Dabney Maury. That night the major of the Forty-second Alabama, who himself had been wounded in the chest, mustered only ten men present for duty. The rest, he told a staff officer from division headquarters, had been shot or captured or had straggled off. The only regiment to recross the Hatchie River intact, the Thirty-fifth Mississippi, dispersed into the woods. Their commander had been sent back to Corinth under a flag of truce to bury the dead. With no one to rally them, the leaderless Mississippians started for home. More than 300 deserted. In the brigade as a whole, only 600 officers and men were left of the 1,895 had marched on Corinth two days earlier.13
Reinforcements arrived, but bad leadership almost condemned them to Moore’s fate. Stirman’s Arkansas Sharpshooters of Phifer’s brigade came upon the field first and were blithely waved across Davis Bridge by Sterling Price, who yelled, “Boys, if there are many we will take them, and if there are but few we will take them the quicker.” The Sixth and Ninth Texas Dismounted Cavalry regiments followed closely.
The acting brigade commander, Col. Sul Ross, was across with them before he could take in the situation. Only twenty-four years old, Ross was one of the hardest fighters in the army, having been seasoned battling Comanches on the Texas frontier during college vacations.
By the time the Texans were over, the fighting on the west bank resembled frontier bushwhacking. Ross was in his element but could contribute litde; fugitives from Moore’s brigade broke up his ranks before he was able to form a battle line. Moore was among them, yelling at Ross’s men to run before the Federals trapped them. Colonel Ross hesitated, and General Maury gave the order to retreat for him. Most got back across the bridge safely, but Veatch’s Federals gathered in 100 of Ross’s men.
Ross took his men back to the bluff overlooking Davis Bridge. On the crest they lay down alongside the survivors of Moore’s brigade and Hawkins’s legion. Also on the bluff was a long line of cannon, placed there by the division chief of artillery, Maj. W. E. Burnet. While Price was foolishly enjoining the infantry to cross the river, Burnet had scouted the east bank for a good firing position. The bluff suited him, and Burnet, whom Maury praised as “one of the bravest and ablest artillery officers of our army,” massed five batteries along its crest. Burnet had the cannon charged with double canister and trained on the bridge. Then, with his artillerymen, he awaited the Federals' move.14
* * *
Something about the fighting around Davis Bridge inspired foolhardi- ness. In sweeping the enemy from the west bank of the Hatchie River, General Ord achieved a singular success: he had closed off the enemy’s line of retreat at the loss of fewer than 100 men. Ord need simply hold what he had won, and Van Dorn would be compelled to search for another crossing site farther downriver, which would consume the rest of the day. Rosecrans could use the time to close up behind Van Dorn.
Of course Ord was unaware he had struck the vanguard of a retreating army. For all he knew, the Rebels might have defeated Rosecrans and were turning to destroy the Bolivar column. In either case, however, logic dictated that Ord maintain a strong defensive position until the enemy revealed his intentions. But Ord was beyond the reach of rational thought. Like Adams, Maury, and Price before him, the Marylander lost himself to the excitement of the moment, and he told Veatch to cross the bridge and form his and Colonel Scott’s regiments in line. Ord also sent word to Jacob Lauman to press forward, intending to commit his brigade on the east bank as well. He envisioned a front twelve regiments long, with six regiments on either side of the State Line road.
The orders to Veatch and Lauman horrified Hurlbut. He remonstrated passionately with Ord; there was only a half-acre between the south side of the road and the river, hardly enough for one regiment, much less six. Hurlbut spoke with authority. Earlier in the year he had camped on the very bluff Ord hoped to take. But Ord was adamant. Not only did he ignore Hurlbut’s warning, but he also directed Bolton’s battery to shell the Rebels on the bluff from the east bank. How he expected the gunners to aim uphill through the forest, Ord failed to say.15
It was the misfortune of the Fifty-third Indiana to be nearest the bridge when Ord ordered the crossing. The Indianans started across at 11:30 A.M. in column of fours. Canister and rifle volleys ripped the regiment apart. Lt. Col. William Jones herded the men off the road by the right flank into the soggy strip beside the river. Pandemonium ensued. Gunpowder smoke dispersed slowly in the dank, humid air, cutting visibility to a few feet. Canister continued to rake the Yankee ranks. To escape it, the men dove into the river or clung to the bank, refusing to rally.
The Fourteenth Illinois crossed next and filed to the left into an open field. The extra room to maneuver meant nothing. A shower of shell and canister sent the Illinoisans reeling to the river bank as well. Behind the Illinoisans came the Twenty-fifth Indiana. In keeping with Ord’s vague orders, the Indianans filed to the right, straight into the milling mass the Fifty-third Indiana had become. In a matter of minutes the two regiments were hopelessly intermingled.
The Fifteenth Illinois negotiated Davis Bridge next. When Col. Cyrus Hall saw the regiment coming, he led his Fourteenth Illinois from the river bank to a thick forest. The Fifteenth filed to the left behind Hall’s command, changed front forward, and came up on his left. There, sheltered by trees and fallen timber, both regiments lay down and awaited orders. Back on the west bank, General Veatch watched the slaughter and, with his own Forty-sixth Illinois and Scott’s Provisional Brigade, also waited for Ord’s next command.16
It proved a foolish one. A few minutes before 1:00 P.M. Jacob Lauman rode up to Davis Bridge at the head of his brigade. Lauman’s men had run two miles to the bridge and were played out. But Ord gambled Lauman’s command on what was, to those on the east bank, obviously a lost wager. He told Lauman to leave two regiments on the west bank and cross the other two to reinforce Veatch’s troops in the pocket south of the State Line road.
The Fifty-third Illinois led the way at the double-quick time, plunging off the road into the confused swirl of blue on the far bank. Said their commander with decided understatement, “After crossing, and before I had formed in line of battle, I was met by men falling back, which staggered my men a little, but they recovered, formed in line, and commenced firing upon the enemy, who . . . soon opened a murderous fire with canister, shot, and shell, together with small arms.”
A truer picture of affairs on the Illinoisans' front came from the pen of Sgt. Mark Bassett of Company E. The company, said Bassett, came apart on the bridge. Capt. Charles Vaughan fell like a rag doll in the road, his knees crushed by canister. First Lt. Armand Pallissard shepherded the men into the tall grass. When they tried to resist, he waved his sword menacingly and yelled, “Men, stand firm; we must not lose our ground . . . .” A canister shot ripped open his chest in mid-sentence. Pallissard fell dead, and the company broke up. Capt. John McClanahan, the acting regimental commander, noticed the confusion. “Who is in command of this company?” he demanded. “All the officers are killed or wounded,” someone replied. McClanahan turned to Bassett. “Throw down that musket, take the sword off that officer and take command of the company,” he said, pointing to Pallissard’s body. Bassett and another man bent over Pallissard. Bassett watched as the soldier “turned him on his back so as to get at the belt fastening, unbuckled the belt and removed it, turned the breathless body back again on its face just as it fell a few minutes before, then removed the sword and fastenings and assisted in putting it on me. I assumed command.”
The colonel of the Twenty-eighth Illinois, Amory K. Johnson, was painfully honest about his regiment’s plight. His men stumbled into the rear rank of the Fifty-third, confessed Johnson. He tried to move them to unmask their front but fast ran out of ground. Those with a clear field of fire began to shoot. That they hit anything through the trees and brush, said Colonel Johnson, was unlikely.17
The Confederate
s, on the other hand, could hardly miss. Col. Ras Stir- man had never seen such a wealth of targets. His Arkansas Sharpshooters fired with impunity. Said Stirman, “We would allow them to approach until we could see the whites of their eyes, then without exposing ourselves in the least, we would pour volley after volley into them, cutting them down like grass. I never saw such slaughter in my life.”
The Confederates had been reinforced further. Simultaneous with Lauman’s appearance on the east bank, Cabell’s brigade came onto the bluff beside Ross. Cabell had just 550 men, but the natural strength of the position more than compensated for his meager numbers. As the Arkansans opened a rapid fire from the crest, Cabell’s sole worry was that he would run out of cartridges before the Yankees broke off the fight.18
With four regiments huddled helplessly on a half-acre of ground, facing slow but certain annihilation, General Ord at last awoke to his error. But rather than recall them, he started across himself, determined to rally at least the Fifty-third Illinois. A blast of canister denied him the chance, and he toppled onto the bridge with an iron ball in his leg.19
Command again was Hurlbut’s. The South Carolinian acted swiftly and wisely. Judging that the regiments on the east bank would suffer as greatly trying to recross Davis Bridge as they had charging over it, he elected not to recall them. But Hurlbut had no intention of reinforcing failure. Leaving the crowd south of the State Line road temporarily to its fate, Hurlbut ordered every available regiment across the river to the north side. By extending the line the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Illinois had begun, Hurlbut hoped to outflank the Confederates.20
The results were mixed. General Veatch moved the Forty-sixth Illinois and the two regiments of Scott’s Provisional Brigade to the east bank at 3:00 P.M., extending the line northward by several hundred yards. But Lauman misunderstood Hurlbut’s orders, and he personally led the Thirty- second Illinois into the deadly pocket south of the road, where four regiments were vying for the chance to be obliterated first. In his eagerness to lead the Thirty-second, Lauman neglected his second regiment, the Third Iowa. Commanded by a captain, the Iowans stumbled across the bridge with no idea where to deploy. Fifty-seven men and half the officers were cut down crossing. In their haste to clear the bridge, the Iowans ran into the rear rank of the Twenty-fifth Indiana. Capt. Matthew Trumbull reacted well: “I saw no way to extricate the regiment but by planting the colors in the middle of the road and ordering the men to rally to them and form a new line of battle. This was promptly done, nearly every man springing to his place.”
Trumbull fairly appraised his men’s response. The Confederate fire had fallen off to almost nothing. With no one shooting at them, the Yankees south of the road came out from beneath the river bank and rallied easily to their colors. For the first time since crossing three hours earlier, regimental officers were able to assemble something approximating a line of battle. Availing themselves of the lull, Veatch and Lauman set their commands in motion toward the bluff shortly after 3:00 P.M. Hurlbut was thrilled: “It is among the proudest moments of my life when I remember how promptly the several regiments disengaged themselves from their temporary confusion and extended to the left, and with what a will they bent themselves to conquer the hill.” Hurlbut neglected to mention the agony their muddle had inflicted. Behind the advancing lines, heaped on the bridge, strewn along the road, or clustered in the half-acre-wide thicket south of it, were more than 500 dead and wounded Yankees.21
24. Van Dorn Has Done It, Sure Enough
Earl Van Dorn passed the afternoon of October 5 in an agony of his own making. In a few short hours he had been driven from the notion of again attacking Corinth to improvising a way to save his army. His train of nearly 500 wagons and most of his infantry lay in the fork of the Tus- cumbia and Hatchie Rivers. Neither was fordable. The nearest bridge over the Hatchie River—Davis Bridge—was already in Federal hands, and Young’s Bridge over the Tuscumbia lay in Rosecrans’s path. Van Dorn’s only hope was to hold the enemy on the far banks of both rivers while Armstrong’s cavalry secured an alternate crossing site along the Hatchie.
Ironically, that morning Van Dorn had ordered Armstrong to destroy the very bridge that looked now to be his only path of escape. Spanning the Hatchie River six miles south of Davis Bridge near a gristmill, Cram’s Bridge was small and rickety but sturdy enough to support infantry and wagons. It was reached by way of the Boneyard road, an overgrown, back- country trail that branched off from the State Line road two miles east of Davis Bridge. From there the Boneyard road ran southwest, over the Hatchie River at Cram’s Bridge and on to the Ripley and Pocahontas road, which it bisected eight miles south of Metamora.
Armstrong had executed Van Dorn’s order too rapidly. By the time the sounds of batde rolled up the river from Davis Bridge, troopers from the Seventh Tennessee Cavalry had yanked up the floor planks and ignited the supports of Crum’s Bridge. “With a soldier’s instinct,” said General Maury gratefully, Armstrong “understood at once the condition of affairs. He sent a courier to Van Dorn to say that he might turn the train and army into the Boneyard road, and he would have the bridge repaired by the time they would reach it.”
Armstrong was as quick to rebuild as he had been to demolish. Beside the burning frame of Crum’s Bridge he erected a temporary bridge of cast-off logs and puncheons atop an old dam and smoothed the steep river banks leading up to it. Armstrong had logs piled in great heaps, to be ignited after dark to guide the army to the crossing site.
Maury withdrew from Davis Bridge at 3:00 P.M., after Armstrong informed him the dam bridge was ready. His retreat was unmolested, as Hurlbut’s Federals were too disorganized to give chase. Maury passed the 1,200 soldiers left to him through Martin Green’s Missourians, who had formed behind him. By 6:00 P.M. all were well on their way toward Crum’s Bridge.1
For six hours Maury had withstood assaults by an enemy four times his number. He had inflicted 570 casualties at a cost primarily of the 300 men from Moore’s brigade captured on the west bank of the Hatchie. Federal fire had struck few. Only seven men were killed and twenty-two wounded in Ross’s brigade. Cabell had lost just two killed and eight wounded, a “thing unprecedented, considering the obstinacy of the fight,” averred the Virginian. Most importantly, Maury had saved an army that Van Dorn had been ready to gamble away the night before.2
* * *
General Grant awoke October 5 with high hopes for the destruction of the Rebel army. He found no fault with Rosecrans for delaying the pursuit— “two days' hard fighting without rest probably had so fatigued the troops as to make earlier pursuit impossible,” Grant wrote—but he expected great things of the Ohioan once he got started. At 8:00 A.M. he wired Halleck that Rosecrans was well on his way, and after news of the Davis Bridge fight reached him, Grant added, “At this distance everything looks most favorable and I cannot see how the enemy are to escape without losing everything but their small arms. I have strained everything to take into the fight an adequate force and to get them to the right place.”3
Far removed from the fighting, Grant might easily entertain false expectations for the army at Corinth. But Rosecrans, who awoke to the stench of rotting flesh and lingering gun smoke, had to face squarely difficulties Grant blithely dismissed. His army was still exhausted; one night’s fitful sleep on the field of battle did not change that. Horses were weak for want of forage. Sunday, October 5, had dawned as hot and dry as the day before. A thick carpet of dust covered the roads leading out of town. Streams and creeks were dry, and wells were empty. The soldiers would have no drinking water but that which they could carry in their canteens. Stanley neatly summed up the condition of the army that morning: “The heat was excessive and the men were worn out; they had narrowly escaped a most terrible defeat, and no one was anxious to crowd their late antagonists.”4 Not even McPherson, it seemed. He took literally Rosecrans’s orders of the night before that he was to be prepared to move, and so he did nothing until Rosecrans accosted him just before
sunrise.
“Why are you not under way?" Rosecrans demanded excitedly. McPherson handed him his written orders. Rosecrans told him to march, and McPherson started out. Colonel Ducat was disgusted: “Most men breathing the air of pursuit . . . would have moved at the first streak of dawn on such orders as McPherson already had.”
To forestall further delays, Rosecrans drew up an elaborate special order for his division commanders that expanded gready on the movement orders of the night before. Covering everything from interdivisional communications to march intervals, the order enjoined the generals to march rapidly: “The attention of leaders of columns in pursuit is called to the well-known principle of war that it is safe to pursue a flying enemy with a greatly inferior force, and they will take care, while conducting their advance with caution to guard against ambuscade, to push the enemy with vigor and firmness.” For the time being, Rosecrans would remain in Corinth to coordinate the chase and keep in contact with Grant.
The Darkest Days of the War- the Battles of Iuka and Corinth Page 35