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

by Peter Cozzens

  Bragg later alleged the failure of Van Dorn and Price to launch an offensive into Middle Tennessee to be a deciding factor in the collapse of the Kentucky campaign. Only Bragg knew whether he honestly believed that or was merely dissembling to mask his own errors. Bragg had done everything possible to guarantee disappointment. He left no one in charge when he quit Tupelo, never made his purpose clear to Van Dorn, and phrased most of his appeals for help to Price ambiguously.

  Unquestionably, a thrust across the Tennessee River by Van Dorn and Price in early September would have changed fundamentally the complexion of the Kentucky campaign. Strung out on the march across Middle Tennessee, Buell’s army would have been vulnerable to flank attack and defeat in detail. At a minimum the time lost in concentrating his command to oppose Van Dorn and Price most probably would have cost Buell the race to Louisville. With only raw troops and state militia to oppose him, Bragg might have realized his desideratum of taking Cincinnati. But neither Van Dorn nor Price alone was strong enough to pose a credible threat to Buell, and it took the near-annihilation of Price’s army at Iuka to bring them together. By then the chance to strike Buell a fatal blow from western Tennessee had passed.

  Price and Van Dorn wasted September working at cross purposes. Price wanted to help Bragg but righdy judged as too great the risk of Grant striking his moving column from behind and cutting his lines of supply. He simply lacked the men needed to repel a Union counter- thrust in western Tennessee.

  Van Dorn disagreed with Bragg over the wisdom of a move into Middle Tennessee, preferring instead to clear the Yankees from the Mississippi River Valley, beginning with Corinth. But Van Dorn and Price had too few troops to give an assault on Corinth a reasonable chance of success. It is axiomatic that an attacker need have at least a three-to- one advantage over his opponent. Van Dorn and Price mustered only a few hundred more men than Rosecrans. The great nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz cautioned that an attack against an able opponent in a good position was a “risky business” that should only be tried after careful reconnaissance ruled out all other options for dislodging the enemy. As John Bowen correctly charged at Van Dorn’s court-martial, the Mississippian conducted no reconnaissance and threw his tired army against a foe amply warned of his approach.6

  The abrupt collapse of Rosecrans’s outer line on October 3 suggests aggressive action by Lovell would have compelled the Federals to abandon Corinth. Only Crocker’s lone brigade stood between Lovell and the town. Had Lovell pressed on and gained Rosecrans’s rear, a Confederate victory would have been a near-certainty. Hamilton’s division on the Federal right contributed nothing to the battle, and Stanley’s brigades would have been chewed up on the march.

  Angry survivors of Maury’s and Hébert’s divisions were convinced the poor showing of Davies’s Federals on October 4 gave Lovell a second chance to turn the tide of battle. They were mistaken. Lovell’s division stood opposite three well-positioned Federal brigades and the guns of Battery Phillips. Had Lovell attacked, his division would have been mauled as badly as Maury’s.

  Without a doubt Lovell and Hébert undermined Van Dorn’s plan of battle — Lovell by his inertness the first day, and Hébert by absenting himself with a sudden illness on the second day. Charges of insubordination were warranted, but none were brought. The War Department decided the potential damage to Southern morale from a public airing of the army’s dirty laundry too great.

  In a larger sense Lovell’s and Hébert’s failings were irrelevant. Van Dorn could not have held Corinth had he won it. The 14,000 Rebels who survived the batde could never have repelled the 50,000 fresh troops Grant would have been able to muster rapidly against the town. True to character, Van Dorn had gambled everything on a long shot for glory.

  * * *

  Rosecrans’s army returned to a Corinth awash in suffering, its landscape blasted and torn. The forests were littered with broken branches and treetops lopped off by cannonballs. Unexploded shells and shell fragments lay everywhere. Fields were pounded to dust. The stench of bloated corpses permeated the town. Wounded men by the thousands lay in homes, hotels, schools, and stores. Under a flag of truce Sterling Price’s assistant medical director, Dr. J. C. Roberts, and thirty-six Southern surgeons retrieved the Rebel wounded, but the dead remained, rolled into shallow graves or left to rot where they fell. Roberts had found only one wounded Confederate under a tent or in a room. The rest were scattered on lawns or on the streets of town or were still on the batdefield. The industry of the Sanitary Commission meant wounded Federals fared better; but their agony was nonetheless intense, and scores succumbed to fever and infection.7

  No amount of care could save Pleasant Hackleman, who died in the Tishomingo Hotel on the night of October 3, a few hours after General Davies left him. General Oglesby clung to life, but no one expected him to pull through. He was moved from the hotel to a private residence, where a team of surgeons, under the supervision of the medical director of the Army of the Tennessee, Dr. John Holsten, examined his wound and pronounced it mortal. After probing without success for the bullet, they bandaged him up and waited.

  Oglesby was still alive at dawn. The bleeding had stopped, and he was breathing a little easier. As hope for his recovery grew, Dr. Holsten telegraphed Grant to ask that Silas Trowbridge, a brigade surgeon on duty at Bethel, Tennessee, be permitted to come to Corinth to attend to Oglesby. Grant agreed but warned Trowbridge that enemy cavalry marauded the railroad between Bethel and Corinth, and he had no cavalry to spare for an escort. Trowbridge left Bethel with an assistant surgeon at once.8

  Grant acceded to Holsten’s request because of presidential pressure. When Lincoln telegraphed Grant after Corinth, he expressed more concern for Oglesby’s well-being than for the state of the army. “I congratulate you and all concerned on your recent battles and victories—How does it all sum up?” the President began. “I especially regret the death of General Hackleman; and am very anxious to know the condition of General Oglesby, who is an intimate personal friend.”9 Trowbridge himself had a deeper reason for going. Oglesby had been his patient and friend before the war, when Trowbridge was in private practice in Decatur, Illinois.

  The way to Corinth proved clear, and Trowbridge reached town on the evening of October 6. His portly friend sat painfully in a rocking chair, “pale, haggard, and in much distress, incapable of lying down, with a pulse of 136 per minute . . . expectorating small quantities of arterial and much larger amounts of venous blood . . . skin bathed in a cold perspiration, excretions from the kidneys and bowels almost suspended.”

  As Trowbridge gently probed the wound, careful not to disturb the perforated lung, Oglesby asked him what he thought of his chances. Trowbridge recited a medical axiom: if the patient survived the initial shock and loss of blood, there was a good possibility of saving him. Oglesby thanked Trowbridge for the first hopeful words he had heard, then fell into a deep, morphine-induced sleep.

  The next morning Trowbridge consulted with Dr. Holsten, whose preferred treatment horrified the Illinois physician. Assuming Oglesby would die, Holsten had decided to ply him with liberal doses of opium, beef soup, and Catawba wine to ease his suffering. Trowbridge remonstrated sharply: “I told him I had hope of the recovery of General Oglesby . . . and that it was my duty . . . to treat the case with an eye [to] that result. I further told him that I could not adopt his views, and begged his pardon for not accepting those of men so much my senior in years and experience. But that I could see no chance for a recovery with opium sickness and a stomach crammed with beef-steak and the heaviest wine known to surgeons.”

  Holsten stormed off to Oglesby’s room and began talking with the general. Trowbridge followed and yanked Holsten aside. Was he recommending the patient prepare for death? Holsten said he was. Trowbridge nearly struck him: “I peremptorily forbid his doing so, and only succeeded in preventing him by assuring him that in case he did so I should prefer charges against him.”

  Ho
lsten left the house, complaining to all who cared to listen that Trowbridge was an ignorant “upstart.” Left at last with his patient, Trowbridge stopped the wine, opium, and morphine and started Oglesby on a guarded diet. The general lost weight and became jaundiced, but the wound healed. His wife and sister joined him. They and Trowbridge removed Oglesby from Corinth, with its “unwholesome and disgusting odors,” and from the pernicious presence of Dr. Holsten. After a brief stop at Jackson, Tennessee, where Grant came to the train station to congratulate Oglesby on his improved condition, they continued on to Decatur. Oglesby recovered to serve two terms as governor of Illinois, then went on to the United States Senate. “And [he] now,” wrote Trowbridge in 1873, “holds a much better mortgage on a long and especially useful life than Dr. Holsten.”10

  * * *

  Capt. Isaac Jackson awoke with a start. For two days he had lain unconscious, given up for dead by the surgeons. “When I aroused from my stupor, I could scarcely recollect what had happened. Both eyes were swelled completely shut from the wound, and although it was day time, I supposed it was night.” Jackson’s first thought was of his men. Corporal Harrison was at his bedside. “How are my men,” Jackson asked hurriedly. “The company is badly cut up, captain,” confessed Harrison. “For God’s sake tell me who were killed,” Jackson begged. Harrison recited the roll of the dead. Jackson thought he had named the entire company. “As soon as I got the news of how terribly my men had suffered, actually a feeling of gladness came over me that I had been wounded and had something to suffer.”

  Jackson recovered. Surgeons had left the minie bullet in his head so as not to destroy the right eye, on the off chance Jackson survived. His sight was permanently impaired, and the optic nerve pained Jackson intermittently; but the wound healed without disfiguring him. Jackson returned to the Sixty-third Ohio, closing the war as its colonel.11

  * * *

  Five months after Corinth Sterling Price got his wish—in part. On February 27, 1863, General Pemberton issued orders relieving Price of duty in Mississippi and directing him to report to Edmund Kirby Smith in the trans-Mississippi department. Two weeks later Price crossed the Mississippi River with his staff and a small cavalry escort. He reported for duty at Little Rock, Arkansas.

  His Missourians never came. Price had warned Richmond they would all desert or mutiny after his departure. Few deserted, and none mutinied. The Missourians wanted to go home, but not through Arkansas, the scene of so much suffering. Remaining with Pemberton the Missourians fought gallandy until the surrender of Vicksburg. They were captured, exchanged, and fought with the Army of Tennessee from Adanta to Franklin. In April 1865 the last remnant of Price’s Missouri division, 400 men, surrendered at Mobile.12

  * * *

  Earl Van Dorn was a broken man. Stripped of senior command, he became reckless in his whoring. Van Dorn regained a measure of dignity in December 1862 when he surprised everyone by leading his new cavalry command on a successful raid against Grant’s supply depot at Holly Springs. At dawn on December 20 Van Dorn and his troopers thundered into Holly Springs at a full gallop, yelling and shooting, the way Van Dorn liked it. They rode over the sleeping Federal infantry, capturing all but 130 defenders. Van Dorn’s simple report of the most stunning triumph of his career, stripped of the conceit and overblown verbiage common to his correspondence, reflected a tired, chastened man: “I surprised the enemy at this place at daylight this morning, burned up all the quartermaster’s stores, cotton . . . an immense amount; burned up many trains; took a great many arms and about 1,500 prisoners. I presume the value of stores would amount to $1,500,000.”13

  Van Dorn’s raid paralyzed Grant. To protect his remaining bases of supply, Grant broke off his land advance on Vicksburg and retired to Memphis. Van Dorn had accomplished with three brigades of cavalry what he had failed to do with an army: severely disrupt Union operations in Mississippi.

  For a time Van Dorn’s star shined. In January 1863 Joseph Johnston transferred him to Tennessee along with 6,000 cavalrymen to raid the lines of communication of General Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland. Organizing his command into two mounted divisions, Van Dorn started from Tupelo in the dead of winter. It was late February before he reached Tennessee. Rosecrans had bested Bragg at Stones River and was in control of Middle Tennessee. All Bragg could do was harass him with cavalry. Van Dorn accepted the duty, cutting a swath of victories across the Union rear that badly damaged Rosecrans’s supply network.

  With the coming of spring, Van Dorn’s spirits lifted. “I am a soldier,” he wrote his sister after his mounted forays, “and my soul swells up and tells me that I am worthy to lead the armies of my country.”

  Only his family agreed. The long-coveted promotion to lieutenant general never came, and Van Dorn resigned himself to the job before him. Heartsick and bitter, on April i he wrote Emily an epiphany of his woes. They must not hope for his promotion; the stigma of Corinth was too great, he began. But he had been right to attack Corinth, Van Dorn reassured her. Reverting to ornate and frenzied prose, he told her “the attack on Corinth was the best thing I ever did in my life — if it had been successful I would have been pronounced the most brilliant General of the war. . . . I was not wounded in spirit by the powerful ’vox populi' at all—only when falsehood assailed my private character, and made me the butt of malignant archery in my own native state — expelling me after weary watchfulness and long mental pain for them from his soil.”14

  Van Dorn’s passions were too great to confine to rhetorical outbursts. The time between raids passed slowly; to alleviate the tedium, said a member of Van Dorn’s command, “the officers from the general down, found time for sport and amusement amongst the generally wealthy and hospitable citizens.” Van Dorn went too far, and accusations of philandering and corruption reappeared. The Chattanooga Rebel said his drunken and licentious carrying-on had cost him the confidence of the people of Tennessee. While Van Dorn was a cadet at West Point, his strong libido was cause for good-natured teasing by his class-mates. The young Mississippian “was very sentimental and always in love with someone,” remembered John Pope. But untethered passions in an army commander could have tragic results, and Van Dorn’s officers worried about his fondness for women.15

  Of particular interest to Van Dorn was Jessie Peters, the vivacious, twenty-five-year-old wife of Dr. George Peters, a middle-aged physician of some standing. She made Van Dorn’s acquaintance during his lengthy stay at Spring Hill, Tennessee. Local gossips whispered that the Mississippian had his eye on Jessie, and a hostile journalist wrote that Van Dorn and Mrs. Peters often went riding in her carriage.

  The rumors reached Dr. Peters, and he returned to Spring Hill to investigate. The doctor found the little town buzzing with talk of the affair. For three weeks he listened with increasing fury to tales of Van Dorn’s lechery. When he caught a servant passing a note from Van Dorn to his wife, Peters exploded with an ultimatum: “I distincdy told him,” the doctor later wrote, “I would blow his brains out if he ever entered the premise again.” The same went for Van Dorn, if he ever set foot in the Peters’s yard.

  Perhaps convinced his threat was enough, Dr. Peters left for Nashville on business. When he returned several days later, meddlesome townspeople told Peters that Van Dorn had visited his wife every night while he was away.

  The doctor set a trap. Feigning a trip to Shelbyville, he hid in the house and waited. In the early hours of May 6, as Peters told it, he caught Van Dorn “where I expected to find him.” Peters confronted him at gunpoint. Van Dorn bade him shoot. Concerned for his wife’s honor, Peters offered to spare Van Dorn’s life in exchange for a signed statement exonerating his wife of unseemly conduct.

  The next morning the doctor called at Van Dorn’s headquarters. Peters claimed he came to pick up the promised statement. A sentry at headquarters said the doctor had come to ask Van Dorn for a pass through the lines. Whatever the pretext, Dr. Peters was armed and angry. Words were exchanged. Peters said Van
Dorn dismissed him scornfully. The doctor threatened to shoot the general if he did not start writing. “You damned cowardly dog,” Van Dorn purportedly replied, “take that door, or I will kick you out of it.” Peters snapped. He drew a derringer and shot Van Dorn in the left side of his head. The Mississippian was dead before he fell. Peters escaped through the lines.16

  The press bludgeoned Van Dorn in death as it had in life. “Van Dorn has been recognized for years as a rake, a most wicked libertine — and especially of late. If he had led a virtuous life, he would not have died—unwept, unhonored and unsung,” scolded the Fayetteville Observer. “The country has sustained no loss in the death of Van Dorn. He was unfit to live, let alone having charge of such important trusts as he had.”

  The Nashville Dispatch was equally unforgiving. Said its Richmond correspondent: “My informant tells me that [Van Dorn] had degraded the cause, and disgusted everyone by his inattention to his duties and his constant devotion to the ladies . . . . He was never at his post when he ought to be. He was either tied to a woman’s apron strings or heated with wine.”

  There was no compassion forthcoming from the army, either. “General Van Dorn was killed yesterday for tampering with a fellow’s wife,” a sergeant wrote home. “If that be the case he was served right.”17

  Earl Van Dorn died on May 7, 1863. His last, best chance for glory perished seven months earlier on the battlefield of Corinth.

  APPENDIX

  The Opposing Forces at the Battle of Iuka

  The following list was assembled from The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. With respect to officer casualties, (k) signifies killed, (mw) mortally wounded, (w) wounded, and (c) captured.

  Union Forces

  ARMY OF THE MISSISSIPPI

  Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans