Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Sherman begged Grant to stay. He would be miserable anywhere else while the army advanced, Sherman said. And his fate could change. Hadn’t Sherman’s, after newspapers branded him “crazy”? He made Grant promise not to leave before letting him know. But if he did go, Sherman would like to have Grant’s “escort”: his personal security staff.

  Grant was surprised and moved by the appeal, a powerful proffer of friendship that he seems to have returned in kind. Grant wrote Julia on June 9 that “when I talked of going home and leaving my command here there was quite a feeling among . . . Gen. officers below me, against my going.” A few sentences later, he said that despite Sherman’s promotion to major general following Shiloh, “I have never done half justice by him.” He added three sentences on Sherman’s Shiloh heroism.

  Grant heeded Sherman’s counsel and cancelled his leave. Sherman seemed overjoyed. He said leaving would not have erased Grant’s feeling “that injustice has been done you.” He apologized for asking for Grant’s escort, which could have been construed as an attempt to gain from Grant’s fall from grace. Perhaps out of the discomfort of that, Sherman began one of the over-the-top diatribes to which his nervous nature made him subject. Grant’s Fort Donelson victory was more consequential than Saratoga in the American Revolution, he said. The “irresponsible, corrupt and malicious” press had caused everything from the war to Grant’s now controversial image. Grant’s Donelson fame had produced jealous attempts to pull him from the “pinnacle” he had attained. “By patience and silence we can . . . in due time make them feel that in defaming others they have destroyed themselves,” he said—the “we” underlining his allegiance to Grant. The mischief-making power of these “envious rivals” was waning, Sherman continued, and soon they would “drop back into the abyss of infamy they deserve.”11

  As Sherman forecast, Grant’s luck began to change—and amazingly soon.

  Halleck, having taken care not to pursue Beauregard hard enough to catch him, now turned to his passion: administration. Making the same mistake he had made after Fort Donelson and then Shiloh, he decided that he needed not to pursue but to consolidate federal gains. So he transformed his horde into occupation troops. He divided the Corinth force into its original three parts and again placed Grant in command of his old Army of the Tennessee. Despite Grant’s rank as second to Halleck in the western theater, he could have continued to be ignored had an out-of-the-way thing not happened: Major General George H. Thomas, whom Halleck had given Grant’s army, asked to return to the command of just his former division under Don Carlos Buell. Thomas thus opened the door for Grant’s return.

  This act was odd.Thomas, a career officer with presumably normal ambition, had requested reduction to leadership of one division instead of five. The mystery is complicated by the laconic personal demeanor he shared with Grant; he never explained his decision. The two men somewhat resembled each other in a few other ways too: their disinterest in showy uniforms and sartorial assertion of rank, as well as a shy and self-effacing manner and racial open-mindedness very unusual for their day. In most other respects, however, the two differed nearly as much as Grant and the era’s aristocratic ideal, Robert E. Lee.12

  Like Lee, a prewar friend of his, Thomas was actually a second-tier Tidewater Virginian born of a father who died young. He was reared on a farm worked by twelve to fifteen slaves and, like Lee, attended private school and exhibited courtliness of manner, proud high-mindedness, and a somewhat aloof reticence. At West Point, Thomas graduated twelfth, six places behind Sherman, who was his roommate, and three years ahead of Grant. In Mexico, he was promoted to captain for repeated gallantry. After that war, he stayed in the army and taught cavalry and artillery tactics at West Point, fought Indians in Texas, and served as major and fourth in command (behind Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, Lieutenant Colonel Lee, and Major William J. Hardee) in the famous US Second Cavalry. Grant and he surely knew each other, slightly, from their shared year at West Point and from serving in the same comparatively small army in Mexico, but that was as close as they ever got.13

  Some have depicted Thomas’s request for de facto demotion in June 1862 at Corinth as stemming from respect for Grant’s superior rank. That is perhaps true. Thomas, like Grant, had a stronger-than-usual sense of rectitude, and he probably had heard rumors that Grant resented being kicked upstairs and losing his army. Thomas may well have also heard by way of Grant’s former subordinates that Grant resented him for taking his old position; some of these subordinates possibly evinced loyalty to their former chief. Thomas was surely increasingly sensitive, as the Corinth force was divided back into three armies, to Grant’s superior rank, which would seem to entitle him to regain command of an again independent Army of the Tennessee. Requesting return to his own former command likely extricated Thomas from an unpleasant situation.14

  So Grant was restored to his old command. The trio of armies was then dispersed to try to cover and pacify southern Tennessee and northern Mississippi and Alabama. Grant’s job was to guard the West Tennessee and northern Mississippi railroads that could bring forward supplies for moves farther southward. With Halleck in no hurry to advance, Grant’s was arguably regarded as the least important of the three commands. Major General John Pope and his Army of the Mississippi were assigned the critical rail hub of Corinth, crossing point of the Memphis & Charleston and the Mobile & Ohio tracks. Buell went east with his Army of the Ohio to try to take Chattanooga, Confederate anchor of East Tennessee and rail gateway to the Deep South. Buell also got the task of repairing and guarding the Memphis & Charleston line eastward, making the slow Buell even slower.

  Then Abraham Lincoln, desperate for eastern victories, summoned Halleck east on July 11 to command all the Federal armies. McClellan, finally forced to fight, had lost the epic June 25 to July 1 Seven Days’ Battles in front of Richmond. The president, wearying of the insolent young general’s imperious demands and incessant delays, replaced him.

  Grant meanwhile was doubly happy. Halleck, in addition to handing him back his army, had given him permission to move his headquarters to Memphis, where Julia could join him. As he did so, Grant made a sage observation. He noted that the three-fourths of white Southerners who owned no slaves were not all eager to die for this new nation few had had much voice in forming. “In my mind,” he wrote Julia, “there is no question but that this war could be ended at once if the whole Southern people could express their unbiased feeling untrammeled by leaders.... [Hostility] is kept up however by crying Abolitionist against us.”15

  14

  JUNE-JULY 13, 1862—FORREST AT MURFREESBORO

  “I Will Have Every Man Put to the Sword”

  The western Confederacy’s borders were shriveling. The losses at Fort Donelson in February and Shiloh in April, then the retreat from Corinth in May, swept away the outflanked Mississippi River bastions of Island No. 10, Fort Pillow, and Memphis. Now, in June, one of the three Federal armies from Corinth was headed for Chattanooga, threatening East Tennessee and its vital Virginia-to-Georgia railroad. One of the other two Federal armies still occupied Corinth, a hub of the Memphis & Charleston and Mississippi Central lines. The third army, Grant’s, was fanning out to the west and north along the captured tracks in West Tennessee and northern Mississippi. The outnumbered Confederates somehow had to stop the myriad Union incursions before they gutted Dixie and ended the war.1

  Consolidating his forces at Tupelo, Beauregard got an idea—perhaps from Jefferson Davis. Davis, outraged that Beauregard had failed at Shiloh and then abandoned Corinth, pelted him with insulting questions. For example, why had he not cut Federal communications and retaken Nashville?

  Beauregard sent for Forrest. The Confederate commander later explained that he had heard of the Tennessean’s dismounted fighting on Shiloh’s second day and his exploit at Fallen Timbers. He later claimed to admire Forrest’s “coolness and daring” and “determined to do all he could to increase, if possible, his sphere of usefulness.” If si
ncere, this atypical comment possibly stemmed from Beauregard’s roots in Louisiana’s socially fluid bayous and a feeling of kinship for a fiery temperament resembling his own. Then again, Beauregard may have intended his remarks—made after the war—to capitalize on Forrest’s later fame and make himself look prescient. In June 1862, he may well have seen Forrest as his most expendable cavalry officer.

  And a cavalry officer was needed elsewhere. The goad from Davis likely helped Beauregard see that a behind-the-lines strike at Union communications, or anything else that might halt the Federal onrush, had become imperative. The commander of crucial East Tennessee, Major General Edmund Kirby Smith at Knoxville, was under mounting pressure from Federals in Kentucky to his north and Don Carlos Buell’s advance toward Chattanooga to his south. Smith begged Beauregard for aid against Buell’s threat to Chattanooga.

  Smith needed a commander of mounted troops to reconcile cavalry colonels in southeastern Tennessee quarreling over seniority. Rich Louisiana planter John S. Scott was the ranking officer; his First Louisiana brimmed with the cream of bayou society. He, lawyer John Wharton of the Eighth Texas, and West Point–trained career soldier John Adams refused even to bivouac in the same vicinity.2

  So a staff member of Adams requested Forrest. Colonel James E. Saunders, an Alabaman in his sixties, journeyed to Mississippi to tell Beauregard about the squabbling colonels. Saunders had seen Forrest in a cavalry clash at Sacramento, Kentucky, the previous December, in which Forrest had personally killed three Federal officers in combat. Impressed by what he had seen, Saunders now urged Beauregard to send Forrest to Chattanooga to resolve the impasse.3

  Beauregard had to push Forrest to accept a new command. Having raised and outfitted his regiment at much personal expense, he hated to give it up in order to take an assignment elsewhere. Beauregard promised to send Forrest’s troops to rejoin him as soon as they could be spared. Beauregard also said he was recommending Forrest for brigadier general, which would rank him above the Chattanooga colonels. Forrest likely viewed the promotion with mixed feelings. Well aware of his lack of polish, he tended to shrink from coming into closer contact with well-educated men like those comprising the high command. Finally, though, he agreed.4

  The general-to-be was still healing. Forrest had been in the Corinth neighborhood for the brilliant evacuation that tricked Halleck. After sustaining his post-Shiloh wound—a bullet that barely missed his spine—at the hands of Sherman’s cautious pursuers, Forrest got a sixty-day leave to recuperate at home in Memphis. A scant three weeks later, though, he was back in the saddle, rejoining his regiment to settle commissary problems and, probably, expecting to participate in the next great clash of the western armies.

  But the Federal bullet was still in his right hip. When he jumped a log on his horse while reconnoitering near Corinth, the projectile moved.The pain was so intense that he ordered J. B. Cowan, his staff physician and relative by marriage, to cut it out. Unable to extract the ball on the first try, Cowan had to resort to a second. The ordeal put his patient in bed for another two weeks.5

  Forrest had convalesced in camp rather than in a Corinth hospital. The Mississippi town was overrun by Shiloh wounded who were surviving or dying in agony and filth. They occupied every building large enough to shelter more than a handful, each structure crammed with horrors and echoing with dying groans and screams from amputation rooms. Nurse Kate Cumming, a cultivated Scottish immigrant from Mobile, tended patients overflowing the Tishomingo Hotel. She found them “mutilated in every imaginable way,” emitting a collective stink that at first made her “giddy and sick.” She and other female volunteers were forced to “walk—and, when we give the men anything, kneel—in blood and water.” The drinking water around Corinth was pestilential and often deadly.6

  Forrest must have been as glad as other Confederates to abandon the Corinth area’s illness and gloom. But the destination he had committed himself to was not inviting either.

  Forrest carried with him to Chattanooga an order dated June 9 directing him to “assume command of the cavalry regiments . . . commanded respectively by Colonels Scott, Wharton, and Adams.”7 Beauregard might as well have written it in disappearing ink. When Forrest arrived in Chattanooga and gave the three colonels copies of his directive, their recalcitrance worsened. Scott refused to be commanded by this rustic junior who had been recommended for, but not yet promoted to, brigadier. And East Tennessee commander General Kirby Smith, despite having called on Beauregard for all the help he could send, may have resented that the Creole general sent him an untrained colonel whose lack of seniority only aggravated his personnel woes.8

  On July 5, Smith compromised. He ordered his Chattanooga commander, Brigadier General Henry Heth, to divide the Chattanooga cavalry between Scott and Forrest. They must cooperate, he directed, but could “act . . . on different routes.” If Heth could not split the cavalry, however, “Scott, as senior officer, must command.”

  Forrest doubtless balked. He had not given up his own regiment and ridden all the way across northern Alabama to have his promised ascendancy ignored. Smith reconsidered. The next day, July 6, the he retracted his order and told Heth to send Scott’s regiment north to Kingston to replace the unit there, the First Georgia. That regiment—whose colonel, J. J. Morrison, was junior to Forrest—was ordered to join Forrest “without delay.” Smith also instructed Heth to prepare the Eighth Texas, a small Kentucky detachment, and the Second Georgia, a new unit only recently arrived in Chattanooga, “to go to Middle Tennessee under Colonel Forrest.”9

  It was a motley crew. Only the Eighth Texas impressed Forrest. He had charged with some of the Texans at Fallen Timbers, and their commander, Colonel Wharton, by consenting to serve under him, at least apparently preferred him to Scott.

  Forrest got moving. On July 7, just a day after Kirby Smith’s second order, Federal troops reported large numbers of Confederate cavalry under leaders including Forrest on the road forty to sixty miles northwest of Chattanooga. Forrest’s troops already had crossed one mountain range and were astride a second. The Union commanders worried that these Confederates might be heading for the Louisville-Nashville rail line, its important station at Wartrace, or possibly even farther north, toward the large Federal camp at Murfreesboro.10

  Forrest may not yet have been certain of his target himself. No dispatch from Kirby Smith or Heth identifies one, and a letter written by Tennessee governor Isham G. Harris soon afterward says the governor and antebellum Nashville congressman Andrew Ewing were at Altamont and Beersheba Springs, just northwest of Chattanooga, “planning the Forrest raid”—an indication that Forrest was, for the moment, operating without specific instructions.11

  The Federals, by contrast, were soon excellently informed of Forrest’s target. They learned its exact location on July 10, and their source could not have been unlikelier. On that date, in one of the war’s odder incidents, wily Confederate colonel John Hunt Morgan—beginning a raid into Kentucky—personally dictated a bogus telegram to Union authorities in Louisville reporting that Forrest had attacked Murfreesboro that day, routing Federal forces, and was moving on Nashville “in concert with” Morgan. The eloquent profanity with which Forrest might have reacted, had he learned of Morgan’s spur-of-the-moment wire, can only be imagined. By then, Murfreesboro had in fact become his long ride’s destination.12

  Surely Morgan would never have sent the telegram had he known how close to the truth it was. Most Confederates knew only that Forrest was headed far behind enemy lines. And Forrest’s fellow officers at Chattanooga shook their heads. One told another that letting the untrained Tennessean lead largely untried troops behind the lines was “rash . . . and likely to lead to disaster.”

  Had they known Forrest’s object, his doubters could only have shaken their heads harder. Sitting thirty miles southeast of Nashville and seventy northwest of Chattanooga, Murfreesboro had been under Federal occupation for more than four months and was becoming a major supply depot for Buell’
s Chattanooga drive. The Union’s Murfreesboro garrison was about the size of Forrest’s force, and Federals in Nashville to the north and Wartrace fifteen miles to the south were well able to reinforce it rapidly by rail.13

  Confederate planners had scouted the risks. During those early days of July, Murfreesboro resident John Spence, a fifty-two-year-old businessman, saw or heard of lone strangers “in citizen garb, strolling through the woods” around town. Residents thought these visitors belonged to the cavalry of Lieutenant Colonel James W. Starnes, an antebellum Tennessee physician whose unit had been rumored to be active around nearby McMinnville.

  If challenged by a Federal, such a stranger would say he was seeking a cow or pig that had wandered from his farm. The occupying Federal, hailing from Minnesota or Michigan or Pennsylvania, and thus having no strong local connections, would have no way of knowing the self-described farmer was not local and no longer even a farmer. Thus, out-of-uniform Confederate cavalrymen learned the number of Federals at Murfreesboro and where they were camped.14

  Locals generally sympathized with the Confederate spies. Federal soldiers made life unpleasant for civilians. Apparently because of escalating Federal reprisals, John Spence, initially a strong antisecessionist, had become a Confederate adherent. According to him, daily Federal forage trains into the countryside took whatever they wanted. The trains’mounted guards often returned with stolen chickens and turkeys swinging from their saddles. The foragers, Spence said, often persuaded blacks “to run off” to the Federal camps, and significant numbers of slaves were doing so. Owners could get them back only by taking an oath of Union allegiance.