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

by Peter Cozzens

  Rosecrans’s didactic instructions were useless. General Stanley started hours late and became entangled with Hamilton, who had taken the wrong route. Although on the right road, Stanley retraced his steps, intending to “follow the beaten trail of the enemy and move toward the cannonading plainly heard in the west.” He set out on the Chewalla road—the route Hamilton was to have taken.

  Rosecrans disapproved Stanley’s common-sense solution: “You should have taken the road to the right, this side of Cane Creek, which keeps north of the railroad. If you are not too far advanced it would be better for you to face by the rear and do it now, as you will reach Chewalla sooner.”5

  Rosecrans’s remonstrance came too late, as Stanley had become tangled up with McKean’s wagons near Cane Creek. Stanley had no use for McKean, whom he considered a consummate failure, and his opinion of the old soldier seemed quite correct. McKean was on the right road, but he supposed himself lost; worse yet, he had taken his trains with him. Nearly a mile long, they clogged the roads and brought both divisions to an abrupt halt.

  While McKean and Stanley argued pointlessly, General Hamilton cantered up at the head of his division. It was past noon. The New Yorker had started the day full of fight but short on direction. “The enemy is completely stampeded,” he had told his men at dawn. “Their baggage, guns, equipment, provisions and ammunition are thrown away. The enemy are running like hell.” Unfortunately, Hamilton had no idea how to find them: “The division started at 7 o’clock without other instructions to me than to follow McKean’s division.”6

  Hamilton had nothing to offer now except indignation. General Davies showed up next, and the four generals adjourned to the roadside. Rather than try to break the impasse as ranking officer, Hamilton merely apprised Rosecrans of the bottleneck and waited for an answer: “Much confusion and delay occurred from want of a commander [but] I deemed myself restrained by my instructions from assuming the command so long as the march was without resistance,” said Hamilton. “Had we encountered the enemy I should not have hesitated to exercise my right of seniority in the absence of the general commanding.”7

  Rosecrans blamed McKean for the jam and scolded him for having marched with his wagons. When McKean ignored Rosecrans’s order to clear them from the road, Rosecrans reprimanded him: “Hamilton says you are waiting for orders . . . You have your orders to push ahead, follow your advance guard closely, and report frequently.”

  It was mid-afternoon before McKean moved, too late, Stanley thought, for a pursuit to amount to much: “The train accompanying the division was so long and cumbersome that any idea of making a successful pursuit must at once be dropped. . . . I will not say that my division could have overtaken and engaged the enemy, but I will say that we could have aided General McPherson.”8

  McPherson actually was doing quite well on his own. Despite the heat, his column made good time. Six miles south of Chewalla McPherson caught the sounds of Hurlbut’s fight, and he “pressed on in the most lively manner” until, at noon, his cavalry escort ran into Van Dorn’s rear guard a mile south of Chewalla. McPherson tried to give batde, but the Rebels vanished. He resumed the chase.

  The next Rebels McPherson met were under a flag of truce. Ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, but more probably to slow the Yankee pursuit, Van Dorn had sent a party of 300 men under Col. William Barry to bury the Confederate dead at Corinth. Barry tried to detain McPherson, but the Ohioan angrily demanded that he yield the road. There was fighting going on, McPherson told Barry, and only a direct order from General Rosecrans could suspend it. Barry’s party stepped aside, and the Federals pressed on.9

  Four hours later McPherson encountered the enemy rear guard arrayed on Big Hill, above Young’s Bridge on the east bank of the Tuscumbia River. This time, said McPherson, the Rebels looked ready to fight.

  The Confederates atop Big Hill were under the command of Brig. Gen. John Bowen. One of the most vocal opponents of the attack on Corinth, the Georgian now found himself responsible for the integrity of the army’s retreat. His men were fresh and they discharged their duty well. When McPherson sent forward one brigade at sunset to storm the hill, Bowen’s Confederates met the Federals with deliberate, well-aimed volleys that sent most spilling down the slope. Bowen himself led the Fifteenth Mississippi in a counterattack that cleared away the remainder. As twilight fell, Bowen crossed the Tuscumbia River at “my leisure, tore up and burned the bridge, obstructed the ford near by, and joined the division about three miles beyond.” McPherson licked his wounds and bivouacked on the east bank. Absent the rest of the army, he felt he had done all he could.10

  The only other Federal commander who rightfully could claim to have spent the day productively was John McArthur. He marched far beyond the Cane Creek snarl before noon and would have passed McPherson had he not allowed himself to be detained by Colonel Barry and his detail. McArthur waited three hours for instructions from Rosecrans, who saw through the artifice and told McArthur to dismiss the Southerners with the promise their dead and wounded would be cared for properly. Just south of Chewalla McArthur ran into the rear of McPherson’s division, which had come over from the Columbus road. He ceded the way and followed McPherson in close support, bivouacking with him on the Tuscumbia River.11

  Everyone else came up short. Stanley went into camp two miles west of the Tuscumbia River. Hamilton bivouacked four miles short of the river. McKean settled in near Hamilton, and Davies made camp behind Stanley. The troops were thirsty and tired, but morale was high. Dispirited Rebels had surrendered by the score, and abandoned wagons, artillery carriages, and camp equipment—sure signs of an army near collapse — littered the road.

  Although he had hoped for more, General Rosecrans had done little to accelerate the chase. Hectoring notes to McKean from Corinth were no substitute for the commanding general’s presence at the front. Rosecrans had been too far away to exercise control over the pursuit. Had he been with one of the march columns, the Ohioan might have both resolved the botdeneck at Cane Creek and dismissed Colonel Barry in a matter of minutes.12

  Puling telegrams to Grant during the day hinted at Rosecrans’s fumbling. At noon Rosecrans exhorted Grant to have Hurlbut attack at once. “Where is Hurlbut?” he demanded. “Now is his time to pitch in.” Later in the day Rosecrans confessed the Rebels had gotten a three-hour jump on him, the army having started late “through errors.” At dusk Grant read a summary of the day’s sorry efforts: “Leading divisions arrived at Chewalla. No news from McPherson since noon. Progress very slow. McKean in the way. Order us forage at once or our animals will starve.” Grant pocketed the message and made a mental note to recommend McPherson’s promotion to major general “above others who may be promoted for the late batdes,” a thinly veiled swipe at Rosecrans’s stumbling division commanders. Though he said nothing then, Grant’s opinion of their leader was fast declining.13

  * * *

  Sterling Price was at Crum’s Mill, watching the army wagon train roll uneasily over Armstrong’s makeshift bridge. The afternoon receded, and a chill caused by more than the early autumn twilight gripped the general and his soldiers. The woods were weird; a spirit of inevitable doom, heralded by the drum roll of Yankee cannon, marched through the countryside. Hope was at a premium. Everyone knew the army was hemmed in, their only way out a few planks laid over a dam, their only guide through the dark woods a young farmer from Chewalla.14

  “Shall that night ever be forgotten?" mused a Mississippi private. “Will its vivid impressions ever be erased? Dust like a heavy impenetrable fog obscuring our comrades an arm’s length was constandy stirred from the ashy soil. Burning, overturned wagons wrought lurid ghosts in dusty gleams through the forest. This is the darkest gloom that has ever been mine in struggling for freedom.”15

  With the army’s fate riding on a rickety bridge, general’s braid was worth less than a teamster’s lash, and Price played wagon master and chief engineer. After each wagon passed, Price examined the bridge for damage. Th
e strain told on him. To distract himself, Price helped with repairs. “Every few minutes something was knocked to pieces about the hastily constructed bridge,” said Ephraim Anderson, whose brigade reached Crum’s Mill at 9:00 P.M. “As we passed over, a wagon knocked down some of the puncheons, and the general, standing on the opposite bank, immediately called out for some of the boys to halt and assist in righting them. Several of us volunteered immediately, and replaced the slabs, and the general, himself, assisted in throwing the heavy rocks upon them, to hold them in place. His whole soul seemed to be in the work, and when it was done, he straightened himself from his stooping posture, remarking, ’Well done, boys—now stand back and let the train pass.'” Price kept at it all night. For his toils, he grew in the estimation of the army.16

  Hardly anyone spoke well of Van Dorn, whose contribution to the crossing was limited to an admonition to Price to make haste. Rumors were rife that Van Dorn had been drunk at Corinth and that he had come unhinged on the retreat. Few trusted him to lead the army to safety. Thad Welch, the regimental wag of the Second Missouri, gave voice to the sentiment of most. On the march to Iuka Welch had said his motto was “victory or crippled.” On the way to Corinth it had sunk to “victory or death.” As the regiment shuffled along toward Crum’s Mill, with the boom of Federal artillery echoing behind them, someone asked Welch what his motto was now. “Motto now,” he growled, “there’s no motto for this place — I can only say, we all thought Van Dorn had played hell at Elkhorn, and now he has done it, sure enough.”17

  Price saw the last of the army across the Hatchie at 1:00 A.M. on October 6. Once over, there was no pause. “No time for order in marching, no time to wait for the trains to stretch out into the road and to follow it then in twos,” said a Texan. “We fell into the road pell-mell, and moved in any style we wished to, in among the wagons, or any way just so we moved along and kept out of the way of those behind us.”18

  Toward dawn the moon disappeared behind a scud of clouds. A warm rain tattooed the marching soldiers, easing their thirst and settling the dust. The army turned off the Boneyard road at daybreak and onto the Ripley and Pocahontas road. Well into the afternoon the men trudged on, too frightened to stop and too hungry to keep in ranks. They spread across the countryside by the hundreds in search of food. Farms were ransacked, but the plunder was meager. The occasional head of beef went fast, “the hungry men cutting the flesh from the carcass before the hide was off.” Texan Sam Barron counted himself lucky. He had found a small pile of cornmeal spilled from a commissary wagon. Barron scooped it into a castoff cup, along with a generous portion of dirt, stirred in some river water, and warmed the mixture. “Surely it was the most delicious piece of bread I have ever tasted, even to this day,” he wrote two decades later.19

  Bread was scarce—nonexistent in the stores of Maury’s division. Potatoes saved the army. The men foraged for them, and their commanders bought them wholesale from farmers along the way. “I never had seen such fine potatoes before,” said Texan Joe Scott. “I scratched up as many as my haversack would hold and made my way back to the main line, where the army had stopped to feed the artillery horses. Someone had killed a cow, and my messmates had secured a small piece and without any salt were boiling it. We made a hearty meal of what was before us.”

  Most made do with potatoes, and then not always cooked. Lt. Col. Frank Montgomery of the First Mississippi Cavalry eagerly took a raw sweet potato that was offered him and at once regretted his voracity: “I was very hungry and I began on it as I rode along, but the first thing I knew I was choking, and would have choked if I had not had some water in my canteen. It took me a long time to eat that potato, but I at last got through with it. If any of my readers have never tried to eat a cold sweet potato and see how hard it is to swallow it, I recommend [they] try it.”20

  Potatoes and pursuing Federals could propel the army just so far, and that evening, seven miles north of Ripley, Van Dorn had to grant a respite. Willie Tunnard studied his companions as they sank to the ground. They were “in a terrible condition. Worn out with fatigue, sick, ragged, filthy, and covered with vermin, it was not strange that even their brave spirits should give way under the accumulated disasters, sufferings, and hardships which had so rapidly befallen them.”21

  * * *

  Rosecrans left Corinth shortly before midnight on October 5. He was, as he told McKean, “coming out to Chewalla with a carload of water. . . . Baggage, I understand, has interfered with your progress, which certainly has not been remarkable.” The Ohioan made the rounds of his generals' camps. He roused McPherson at 3:00 A.M. with orders to “push the enemy as soon as it is light.” McKean he sent packing to Corinth with the wagons, and McArthur at last assumed formal command of the division.22

  The Federals were on the road before 8:00 A.M., marching toward Crum’s Mill past the flotsam of a broken army. “I have never seen such a stampede in all my life,” said an Iowan. “Everything imaginable was strewn along the road—tents, bake ovens, corn meal, fresh beef, and many other things; some of their supplies they burned to keep from falling into our hands.” Too tired to keep on, Rebels came in freely. Said Iowan Cyrus Boyd, “All along the roadside under the bushes, in the hollows, and behind logs the panting fugitives were found, glad to surrender. Glad to do anything to save all they had left and that was their lives. They all agreed in saying that no such terrible calamity had ever overtaken them in the west as the battle of the fourth.”23

  The pursuit was slow. An hour was lost to repairing Young’s Bridge, a second to clearing felled trees from the Boneyard road, and four more to replacing the bridge over the Crum’s Mill dam, which the Rebels had dismantled. Again in the lead, McPherson bivouacked for the night at Jones- borough, five miles west of the Hatchie River.

  Notwithstanding the delays, Rosecrans’s mood lifted during the day. His energy returned, and the Ohioan once again managed affairs with characteristic dispatch. He ordered 30,000 rations to Chewalla and eighty wagonloads to meet his advance. To ease congestion on the Boneyard road, he rerouted Hamilton’s division to Rienzi. His messages to Grant were crisp and certain. At noon he wired, “The enemy are totally routed, throwing everything away. We are following sharply.” At 6:30 P.M. he wrote from Crum’s Bridge that the enemy seemed to be “aiming for Holly Springs. Bridge built; part of the troops across; we shall pursue them.” Rosecrans closed with a request for orders.24

  Grant had none to give. “You will avail yourself of every advantage and capture and destroy the Rebel army to the utmost of your power. . . . All news received cheering and all parts of the army have behaved nobly.” Rosecrans retired for the night, ready to push the pursuit hard the next morning.25

  Grant had been less than candid with Rosecrans. His breezy recital of cheering news and noble actions belied the truth concerning Hurlbut, whom Rosecrans counted on to aid him in the chase. After the fight at Davis Bridge, Hurlbut had counted his division too badly cut up to do more. In his report Hurlbut checked off his reasons for bowing out from the pursuit: “The total want of transportation, the loss of battery horses, the shortness of provisions, and the paramount necessity of burying my dead, taking care of my wounded, and securing the prisoners and captured munitions of war prevented my pursuing.”

  All were good arguments, but the real reason Hurlbut stopped was personal: he was too drunk to do otherwise. Perhaps the horrendous losses on the Hatchie led him back to the bottle; in any event, by sunset on October 5 Hurlbut was in a fog. His most aggressive act that evening was to get between an angry teamster and the horse he was beating. The teamster knocked Hurlbut down with a punch to the jaw. The general got up and staggered to his tent.26

  * * *

  Despite the disorder in his ranks, Van Dorn was able to stay a step ahead of the Federals. Ironically, Lovell’s division had become the glue holding the army together. At each report of the enemy’s approach, Lovell faced his command to the rear and made ready to do batde. The men stood to the task, b
ut the false alarms eroded morale. After they were called out at 3:00 A.M. on October 7, seven miles north of Ripley, to battle another rumor, Lovell’s soldiers began to slip from the ranks, having decided to conduct their own personal retreat.27

  While Lovell marched and countermarched on the outskirts of Ripley, Van Dorn groped for a way to extricate his fast-shrinking army. It was evident he could not remain at Ripley; at their present rate of march the Yankees would reach the town in two days, and Van Dorn knew his troops were in no condition to oppose them. Van Dorn settled on Holly Springs, a railroad town thirty miles west of Ripley, as the army’s sanctuary.

  Holly Springs had much to recommend it. A small Confederate force, around which the army could regroup, garrisoned the place, and a supply of rations had been gathered there. Neighboring farms had been spared the ravages of marching armies. Crops were in, and gristmills stood ready to make bread rations. More importantly, Holly Springs was the northernmost stop on the strategic Mississippi Central Railroad, which passed within forty miles of Vicksburg. Control of Holly Springs offered the best forward defense of the Mississippi River citadel.

  Appropriate marching orders went out at midnight on October 6. A strong guard was posted in Ripley to prevent stragglers from lingering, and the army passed through after daybreak. Hunger proved a stronger master than their generals, and troops by the thousands dispersed to beg food from frightened citizens. Said a townsperson, “We were awakened at one o’clock with the heavy tread of cavalry and baggage wagons on their retreat, and by morning the town was full of soldiers, some wounded, all famished and begging for something to eat, if but a piece of bread . . . . All that miserable morning we were cooking to feed the famished men.” The last Confederate left Ripley at sunset. Over the road and through farms and forests they traipsed “in small squads, making their way toward Holly Springs,” said Willie Tunnard. “They were worn out with fatigue, sadly depressed, almost demoralized.”28