by Jack Hurst
Forrest arrived on the east bank of the Tennessee River just north of Clifton on Sunday evening. He posted scouts up and down the bank to watch for five Union gunboats that were patrolling the river, and while the bulk of his men stood out of sight in a cold and dismal rain, scouts pulled the flatboats from hiding places behind Double Island, beyond view of the main channel. Then, twenty-five at a time, the men and their horses filed onto the boats to cross a quarter mile of icy river.12
It took a long time, and they had to stay constantly on the lookout for the Federal gunboats. “Working night and day,” he would report, they “finished crossing on the 15th.”13
He ordered the flatboats sunk in a slough where they could be raised later, then led his troopers eight miles away from the river to camp for the night. The rain subsided, and the men were able to build their first fires in two frigid days and nights. They dried their clothes and cared for their horses. They were unable to dry everything, though. Most of the few firing caps they had on hand had gotten wet in the rainy river crossing, so now Forrest was worse off than ever. He had all but trapped himself behind enemy lines with much of his force out of ammunition. That day and the next, they spent in hiding. Finally, on the evening of December 16, one of his civilian connections arrived with 50,000 firing caps acquired by the agents sent ahead the previous week. He felt “great relief.”14
The intervening two days had not gone to waste. Forrest had little use for most military ritual, but he enthusiastically adopted one: inspecting his troops. It was in keeping with a habit engrained in him from youth. Going into his family’s leased fields at dawn without all the needed tools squandered daylight and energy, both as valuable as money. With him, though, an inspection was likely intended for more than the standard military purpose of making sure each man, horse, and piece of equipment was as prepared as possible. It also inventoried in Forrest’s mind every resource he could call on in the moment of crisis.15
FORREST’S WEST TENNESSE RAID: This 1863 map shows the territory Forrest covered in West Tennesse.He went from Clifton—which for some reason is here labeled “Carrollville”—to Lexington then to Jackson.From Jackson he rode north, capturing and wrecking outposts along the raiload to Union City ,Tennesse, and Hickman , Kentucky ,then turned back south along other railroad tracks to Dresden, Tennesse ,and McKenzie. He took back roads to McLemoresville and farther south to Red Mound , where he fought the Battle of Parker’s Crossroads before heading back to cross the Tennesse Rivers at Clifton.
With the firing caps distributed, Forrest was ready. Most commanders entering enemy country with inferior numbers proceed with quiet caution; not Forrest. To accomplish his daunting assignment, he had to distract, misdirect, and confuse the Federals regarding his primary task—wrecking railroads and supply depots—and Bragg could not have assigned a more perfect man. His favorite ploy on the card table or the battlefield was the bluff; the stronger you acted, the more strength and wariness your enemy would assume he needed to defeat you. The extra time the foe took gathering strength you could spend running wild all around him.
The Federals had deduced that Forrest was coming. His Murfreesboro raid had given them a far greater appreciation of his ability than that held by his Confederate peers and superiors. The Federal generals now realized that their long Mississippi-to-Kentucky rail line was vulnerable at many points to his talent for destruction. As early as December 11, the day Forrest departed Columbia, Rosecrans at Nashville, noting Forrest’s westward direction, wired Grant at Oxford, Mississippi, that railroad guards must “look out for Forrest.” The next day, Brigadier General Jeremiah Sullivan at Jackson, Tennessee, reported that Forrest was moving via Waynesboro toward the river at Savannah. Sullivan ordered “all roads obstructed,” adding, “I will try to force him south,” closer to Grant. On December 15, the day Forrest finished crossing at Clifton, General Grenville M. Dodge at Corinth wired Sullivan that he had found no Confederates at Savannah and suggested Sullivan check Clifton. That day, a Union cavalry picket near Clifton detected Forrest’s move and guessed his numbers to be “3,000 strong.” That figure grew exponentially almost overnight. On December 17, Sullivan wired Grant that an “estimated 10,000” Confederate cavalry with artillery were reported across the Tennessee.16
Grant felt the danger and began trying to spring the West Tennessee trap Forrest appeared to have entered. On December 18, Grant asked the navy at Cairo for more gunboats to prevent Forrest from recrossing the Tennessee; in his request, he said Forrest’s force, reported to number between 5,000 and 10,000 men, was nearing the Union base at Jackson. But Grant did not wait for the gunboats. He directed Dodge at Corinth to entrain troops to Jackson and, together with those already there, to attack and drive Forrest back across the river. “Move to-night,” he commanded. He also ordered Colonel William Lowe from Fort Henry, on the Tennessee near the Kentucky-Tennessee border, to come south on the river’s west bank and prevent Forrest from bringing any more troops across. Lowe, leading 1,500 men, was also to attack the Forrest force already in West Tennessee at once, in conjunction with the Federals from Jackson. Grant informed Sullivan of all these orders and wrote, “I expect to get a good account from Jackson to-morrow.”17
He did not. The next day brought bad news followed by a dead telegraph. At Lexington, Tennessee, Forrest had beaten and captured Sullivan’s chief of cavalry, Colonel Robert Ingersoll, taking 148 members of Ingersoll’s Eleventh Illinois Cavalry and two pieces of artillery. Sullivan managed to report, before the wire died, that he himself had held off the Confederates six miles from Jackson.18
Forrest by then had been riding hard. Moving toward Jackson fifty miles from Clifton, he had skirmished with Union scouts on December 17. The next afternoon he had run into Ingersoll’s cavalry and pushed a company of Federals across a bridge over Beech Creek east of Lexington. Members of the Second West Tennessee Cavalry, comprising two hundred of Ingersoll’s seven hundred men, formed for battle on the stream’s west side. They were supported by two cannon of the Fourteenth Indiana Battery, which opened up and scattered their pursuers. When the Confederates attempted to position a cannon, Ingersoll reported, the Federal artillery knocked it off its wheels.19
If so, the cannon was quickly repaired. Commanding the gun Ingersoll claimed to have disabled was the “tallow-faced boy,” John Morton. Before leaving Columbia, Morton had approached Forrest again and asked if, since his ten men as yet had no cannons, they might have muskets. Until additional artillery was captured, he thought they might ride with Colonel James Starnes’s Fourth Tennessee, one of the consolidated units Forrest had formed after his return to Middle Tennessee from Kentucky in the fall. Forrest had no extra muskets. Thanks to Bragg, he did not have even enough for his cavalrymen. He frowned, then ordered Captain Freeman to lend the youth two of his half dozen field pieces. Forrest told Morton to take the two guns and join Starnes in the advance.
Morton was thus supporting Starnes’s Fourth Tennessee in Forrest’s vanguard as it approached the Beech Creek Bridge. Forrest sent twenty men forward to drive back the Federal pickets. Ingersoll’s Federals, now shooting from the creek’s other side, had disabled the bridge by removing most of the cross-planking after they crossed, and Morton rode onto its east end to assess the repair required to get his battery across. His horse shied to one side in the Federal fire and stepped on the end of a plank. The board flipped, catapulting horse and rider into the steep-banked stream. After comrades rushed to pull them out, the Confederates planked the bridge with nearby fence rails. In twenty minutes they were clattering across.20
With Starnes’s men crossing Beech Creek, Forrest groped for Ingersoll’s retreat route. He left Starnes to drive the Federals from their position at the creek and galloped more than two-thirds of his force—Colonel George Dibrell’s Eighth Tennessee, Colonel Jacob B. Biffle’s Ninth, and Captain Frank Gurley’s four companies of the Fourth Alabama—to the right and down the so-called Lower Road toward Lexington.
Ingersoll di
scovered the move. He realized that some of the West Tennessee cavalry he had assigned to torch another creek bridge on the Lower Road had failed to do it. Leaving a few men at Beech Creek, he withdrew his guns and most of two other regiments, the Eleventh Illinois and the Fifth Ohio, to a ridge on the Lower Road. He also dispatched many of the Second West Tennessee horsemen to the Lower Road to delay Forrest. But Forrest arrived at the ridge at nearly the same time Ingersoll did. “The enemy were pouring in on all directions,” Ingersoll reported.21
Forrest had ordered Gurley’s four veteran Alabama companies to take the lead and charge the first Federals they saw. Occupying the foe with Gurley’s men, he now formed the rest of his troops and led an assault against the Federal left. The Union line broke under his onslaught, and he changed direction to his own left, feeling for the Federal flank. There he put to flight the horsemen of the Second West Tennessee. Ordered to oppose his advance down the Lower Road, they “did not fire a single gun,” Ingersoll reported, and Forrest’s flank attack scattered them. Ingersoll reported that they withdrew chaotically, running and pursued, and would not obey his order to halt. The green Fifth Ohio, having never been drilled or shot at, also fled.22
Of the Federal resistance, the section of Indiana cannons and the Eleventh Illinois Infantry alone remained. The climax was brief, the defenders far outnumbered but stubborn. The Illinoisans charged and twice drove the Confederates from the Union guns. The Indiana artillerists stayed at their posts—some dying there—as Gurley’s men surged into their very faces. An Alabama private, the first of Gurley’s men to reach the cannons, was touching one of them when it fired, cutting him in half. But then it was over, the surviving Indianans captured along with their guns. Lieutenant Morton swiftly appropriated two of their three-inch steel-rifled Rodman cannon.23
Starnes’s and Dibrell’s men had galloped off after the fleeing Federals. They pursued through Lexington and kept going all the afternoon and evening of December 18. After nightfall, Dibrell reached the Jackson suburbs, twenty-five miles from the initial skirmish at Beech Creek. On the roads east of town, Forrest ordered his troopers to drive Federal pickets into the cannon-studded works surrounding Jackson, a regional Union base. He did not have numbers enough to attack, but the Federals did not know it. Ingersoll’s fugitives were spreading reports of hordes of Confederate cavalry, infantry, and artillery massing around Jackson. Parts of the Eighth, Twelfth, and Fourteenth Iowa, heading home from Corinth on a Christmas furlough, were hurried off a train at Jackson and ordered to defend “to the last extremity” the supply-filled depot. If overwhelmed, they were to “blow up the buildings and retire to the court-house.”24
Having hemmed the Jackson Federals into their perimeter, Forrest meant to keep them there. That night, he built fake campfires at Spring Creek, four miles from town. Then he sent night-riding parties to slash Federal communications north and south.
He ordered Dibrell to circle eight miles north, cut telegraph wire, and capture Carroll Station on the Mobile & Ohio; that would block the arrival of any Union reinforcements from Columbus, Kentucky. He sent Colonel A. A. Russell of the Fourth Alabama sweeping around to Jackson’s south side, destroying bridges on Mobile & Ohio tracks connecting Jackson with Grant’s left wing at Corinth. Major N. N. Cox’s Second Battalion got a similar assignment on the Tennessee & Ohio, which ran through Bolivar to Grant’s headquarters at Oxford, Mississippi.25
On December 19, the Confederates rampaged around Jackson. Dibrell, delayed by ignorant guides, just missed capturing a train at the Carroll Station. His advance arrived in time to fire into the cars as they rolled past. He did not leave empty-handed, though. He charged the stockade at the station and captured 101 occupants, plus rifles, ammunition, and tents. The Confederates with flintlocks swapped their arms for better Federal ones. They stacked the flintlocks inside the stockade, with other supplies too heavy to remove, and torched the structure. They then tore up tracks and rejoined Forrest at Spring Creek near dawn on December 20. The forays south and southwest were also productive. Cox’s men hushed Grant’s telegraph wire.26
While Dibrell, Russell, and Cox raided around the city, Forrest had menaced Jackson itself. At his direction, some four hundred men of Colonel Biffle’s Ninth Tennessee, two companies of Kentuckians under Colonel T. G. Woodward, and two of Captain Freeman’s guns advanced toward the town on the morning of December 19.
The Federals inside the city could only wonder at what was happening outside. The raids were islanding Jackson, and the Federals were more than nervous. Brigadier General Jeremiah Sullivan had already wired Grant, on the evening of December 18, that Confederate numbers were reported at 10,000 to 20,000, with more crossing the Tennessee River.The following morning, Sullivan heard that Carroll Station had been burned and its men captured—and that bridges had been torched twelve miles south on the Mobile & Ohio toward Corinth, with “a large force” crossing those tracks to head for the more southwesterly rail line to Bolivar and Oxford.
Heading out to find Forrest in the morning, Sullivan ran into Biffle and Woodward as they approached Jackson. Freeman’s guns drove the Federals back into their defenses, and the skirmish continued until late afternoon. Then the Thirty-ninth and Twenty-seventh Ohio arrived by train from Oxford before the Confederates could damage that route, and at about 3 p.m. Sullivan sent six Union regiments against the Confederates. These Federals claimed to have driven the Confederates back before camping for the night six miles out of Jackson.27
Forrest’s withdrawal may have resulted as much from his own decision as from Sullivan’s counterattack. He needed to be tearing up more rails and burning more train stations before the Federals could combine. He had been informed that reinforcements Grant sent from Oxford and ordered from elsewhere had increased Jackson’s defenders to at least 9,000, so Forrest pulled back and headed toward his mission’s primary objective: the rails and stations denuded by the Union consolidation at Jackson. His first objects were Humboldt, a crossing nineteen miles to the north-northwest, and Trenton a dozen miles beyond.
Early on December 20, he issued orders toward that end. Colonel Russell’s Fourth Alabama would protect the rear at Spring Creek. Dibrell would destroy a railroad bridge between Humboldt and Jackson. Starnes would attack Humboldt. Biffle would circle to the north side of Trenton, the main Federal base between Jackson and Columbus, and threaten it from the rear. Then Forrest, his escort, and Cox’s Second Tennessee Cavalry Battalion would dash into the town.28
The smaller raids yielded varied, although generally favorable, results. Dibrell’s attempt to destroy the blockhouse and trestles between Humboldt and Jackson failed. The structures were surrounded by creeks and a swamp, stymieing Morton’s guns. Starnes’s attack on Humboldt fared better. His 750 men burned a trestle bridge and the depot and stockade there and took more than a hundred prisoners, most of them wounded or sick; Humboldt’s Union garrison, except for the ill and convalescing men, had been withdrawn to Jackson a day or two earlier. The Confederates did not hold the town for long, but they made their short visit memorable. Union colonel George P. Ihrie arrived in the area just at nightfall and reported that with three companies of Federals he attacked and retook Humboldt, causing the Confederates to flee toward Trenton and “forget some of their plunder.” They did not forget much. The booty they made away with included four caissons, the accompanying horses, 500 stands of rifles, and 300,000 rounds of ammunition.29
Forrest’s attack on Trenton, while Biffle prevented a Federal retreat up the railroad, was much more of a rout, despite the Union commander’s stubborn defense. Colonel Jacob Fry of the Sixty-first Illinois had seen his once-strong position cannibalized by superiors concentrating on defending Jackson. When Forrest’s entry into West Tennessee was first noised, Fry had selected a hill overlooking the depot and thrown up enough earthworks and rifle pits, he thought, to accommodate 1,500 troops. He had then had to abandon these defenses. On December 18 Sullivan had called Fry’s five hundred able-bodied troop
s to Jackson, leaving Fry with only convalescents.
Fry had given rifles to the ambulatory ill, then ordered the little platform of the Trenton train station barricaded with cotton bales and hogsheads of tobacco. Off a train coming through from Columbus to Jackson, he snatched another twenty men returning from hospitals. On the morning of December 20, he had heard that Forrest’s whole force was camped twenty miles away at Spring Creek. Fry’s men, ill and all, numbered 250. Fry did not know it, but Forrest’s own force numbered little more—just 275. The Confederates, however, looked like more. They included Freeman’s six cannons and some wagonloads of captured materiél. In addition, Biffle’s 400 men were positioned as a blocking force north of the town. Fry telegraphed his situation to Jackson. Then the wire went dead. Nonetheless, he thought he could hold out against anything but artillery.30
At noon on December 20, scouts reported Forrest within a few miles and closing fast. Fry put sharpshooters atop a brick building across the street from the depot and more in a building commanding another street. Around 3 p.m. Forrest galloped into town in two columns. His personally led escort of sixty men came from Fry’s right, with Major Cox’s 160-man battalion arriving from the left. A Federal fusillade killed two Confederates and wounded seven more, and Forrest drew back two hundred yards to the southeast. He then dismounted his men and put them in houses as sharpshooters.
Sure he was surrounded, Fry expected a charge from all sides and thought he could handle it—until he saw his nightmare: artillery. The Confederates positioned six cannon on the heights overlooking the town, two within his new earthworks. They fired sixteen shells, one into the ammunition-filled depot, and Fry decided Forrest could level “stockade, depot, and all in thirty minutes.”