Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Fry consulted his officers. All favored surrender. When several makeshift white flags appeared around the depot perimeter, Forrest sent forward his adjutant, Captain J. P. Strange. The discussion became contracted, and Forrest strode up. When Fry asked for terms, Forrest barked one word: “unconditional.”31

  Forrest then displayed two sides of his nature in rapid succession. He returned Fry’s proffered sword, which had been in Fry’s family for two decades, and said he hoped its next use would be in a better cause. But he had hardly said that when he saw smoke coming from the depot. Too much time had elapsed for Confederate shelling to have ignited it; it was obviously a Union attempt to destroy the supplies. Forrest hurried to the depot door with his saber drawn to keep the captive Federals from rushing out. Then Adjutant Strange drew a pistol, and together they ordered the prisoners to put out the flames—or die. Forrest warned Fry that he would punish another such attempt “in the most summary manner.”32

  Forrest now had more prisoners than he could herd. At Trenton alone the Confederates gathered seven hundred captives: four hundred soldiers, many of them sick, and three hundred African Americans aiding them. Forrest would report that the Trenton captures also included “a large quantity of stores, arms, ammunition and provisions,” as well as “several hundred horses, few of which were of any value.” As usual, he counted each item captured. The additional spoil included 13 wagons and ambulances, 7 caissons, 20,000 artillery rounds, and 400,000 rounds of small arms ammunition.33

  Combined with those at Trenton, prisoners taken at Humboldt and Lexington and in the railroad wrecking around Jackson swelled Forrest’s total captured to more than half his brigade. Needing to dispose of this captive mob that would slow his pace, he paroled it—after crafting the stories its men would tell on reaching Union lines.

  Now Forrest again showed his Confederates—but not their Union prisoners—his talent for trickery. From the beginning he had paraded, rather than crept, into West Tennessee. His men told civilians they encountered that their numbers were legion—enough, one soldier told a wondering female onlooker, to put a soldier behind every tree in West Tennessee “and two or three behind the biggest ones.” Forrest also apparently sent out bogus Confederate couriers to be captured. Union general Grenville Dodge, hurrying from Corinth, reported capturing one from General George Maney, who carried a message telling Forrest to “hold” Jackson and keep Grant’s communications broken; this, of course, encouraged Federal concentration at Jackson rather than on the railroads Forrest meant to smash. Dodge also captured another supposedly sent by cavalry Colonel Philip D. Roddey in Alabama informing Forrest he was awaiting orders, suggesting that Forrest had access to other forces besides his own. All such fakery multiplied Forrest’s overall strength and threat in Union minds.34

  Now, to impress the captives he would parole at Trenton, he undertook other ruses. As his officers filled out parole papers, he had couriers ride up announcing the purported approach of Confederate commands that were not within a hundred miles. These phony dispatches asked for orders and made progress reports. Forrest’s genius for fabrication knew few bounds. Somewhere since crossing the Tennessee he had captured kettledrums, routinely used to aid the march of infantry. Any other cavalry officer doubtless would have directed that they be burned as useless. Forrest, by contrast, ordered them carried along. Now he had them beaten at various locations within the captives’ hearing as they were readied for parole. After nightfall, he ordered a detachment of dismounted cavalrymen to march into and out of sight of his campfires at different points, each appearance seeming to be that of a new infantry unit.35

  On the morning of December 21, Forrest paroled four or five hundred Tennessee prisoners, sending them out to spread their stories of a full-fledged Confederate army. Eight or nine hundred parolees hailing from farther north he sent marching toward Columbus, Kentucky, under a flag of truce. What he did with the African Americans captured at Trenton remains unspecified. Confederate policy was to return them to their masters, but he hardly had time to sort that out, operating as he was in enemy territory. Possibly he entrusted them to Confederate-sympathizing planters in the area—he did that with the unserviceable captured horses—or perhaps he turned them loose to spread more tales of his counterfeit legions. Whatever he did in that regard, he soon afterward torched the Trenton depot along with all its surplus matériel, including six hundred bales of cotton, two hundred barrels of pork, and hogsheads of tobacco that had anchored the makeshift Federal breastworks.36

  Although he had declined Fry’s sword, Forrest nevertheless departed Trenton with a new one. He appropriated for himself from the loot a handsome blade of Damascus steel. It was a model used by US Dragoons, but what he did with it illustrates his view of the conventions of armed conflict. He filed its back edge—kept dull, per army custom—to the razor-like sheen of the front one, so that he could slay and maim with a backstroke as well as a forward slash. The developers of the conventions had probably never thought of that or encountered a warrior whose bellicosity demanded every possible chance to kill and wound. A natural lefthander but ambidextrous, Forrest strapped the blade to his left side and drew it with his right hand. But he could swing it—hard—with either arm.37

  On December 21, the day after the raid on Trenton, Forrest pushed on north toward Union City, another rail hub. On the way, he destroyed more than twenty miles of Mobile & Ohio track, further decimating the connection between Grant’s left wing at Corinth and its Columbus, Kentucky, supply source. At Rutherford Station he captured two Union companies; at Kenton Station, he took a colonel of the One Hundred Nineteenth Illinois plus twenty-two men left in a hospital.38

  At Trenton, a 430-man cavalry battalion under Colonel T. Alonzo Napier had joined the Confederates. Forrest’s swelled ranks, magnified by his tricks into a pseudo-horde, threw the lower Midwest into paranoiac convulsions as they approached the Kentucky border. Brigadier General Thomas A. Davies, commanding 5,000 Federals at Columbus, Kentucky, first heard that General Sullivan had ordered the Union City garrison to Jackson, then that Humboldt, Trenton, and Rutherford had fallen. On this intelligence he ordered the two companies at Kenton to retreat to Columbus. Cut off from Grant, Davies wired Halleck in Washington for instructions. Davies claimed to have reliable information that Forrest had 7,000 cavalry plus ten field guns and a backing of heavy infantry. Halleck in three different wires ordered him “to hold Columbus at all hazards.”

  As Forrest gobbled up the wounded and sick men left at the Rutherford and Kenton stations north of Trenton on December 22, Federal consternation descended into terror. Davies tried to save as much matériel as he could from the marauding Confederates. He loaded the mountains of supplies at Columbus onto troop transport steamers and sent them to Memphis. With Forrest reported heading for Hickman just north of the Kentucky border, Davies withdrew the 150-man Hickman garrison, then sent the gunboat Fair Play racing to the town to save its heavy artillery. The gunboat scared off Confederates trying to mount two sixty-four-pounder Union cannon, and Davies dispatched a regiment “to roll the guns into the river.” He believed the Federal base at Island No. 10 in the Mississippi between Columbus and Memphis, with all its armament and ammunition, was in direst danger, so he ordered the guns there dismantled and rendered useless.39

  The Confederates at Hickman were indeed Forrest’s. Most of his command was still in northwest Tennessee, wrecking bridges and long trestles across fifteen swampy miles between the northern and southern forks of the Obion River. Not all of his command, though. On the night of December 23—from Union City, Tennessee, some fifteen miles south—he sent forty men to within twelve miles of Columbus at Moscow, Kentucky, just east of Hickman. Using a typical Forrest tactic, the detachment routed a party of entrenched Federals by yelling for phantom artillery to be brought up and trained on the Union position. The Federals quickly decamped toward Columbus while the Confederates destroyed the Moscow railroad bridge.40

  By then, Forrest had capt
ured Union City with more trickery. On the morning of December 22, he heard that a Federal force 10,000 strong had left Jackson heading east to block his routes back to the Tennessee River. But, as at Murfreesboro, he had not come here to do half a job. The Mobile & Ohio tracks divided at Union City, one set running northeast to Paducah and the other north to Columbus, and their junction was too good a target to ignore. Ninety-four Federals had just arrived there from Columbus, sent down by General Davies, when Forrest approached with four hundred Confederates. Marching less than five minutes ahead of them was their drove of nine hundred, Columbus-headed parolees.

  Forrest seems to have used the prisoners wisely. He later claimed the Federals first took them for Confederates, multiplying the size of his force in their eyes. By contrast, the Federal commander, Captain Samuel Logan of the Fifty-fourth Illinois, reported that Forrest advanced the prisoners under a flag of truce and, while doing so, surrounded the Union force with his cavalry and artillery. Either way, Forrest ordered his artillery advanced and shells rammed home; then he demanded an immediate, unconditional surrender. Logan estimated Forrest’s strength at 1,500 and deemed it “folly” to resist. He gave up without firing a shot.41

  Three days later, on a dreary Christmas morning in a hard rain, Forrest left Union City and at last turned southeast, back toward Clifton. But he was determined to make even his escape productive, laying waste to more bridges and trestles along the Northwestern Railroad to McKenzie. Late on December 26, his column reached Dresden, Tennessee, and camped there overnight. Pushing on toward McKenzie the next morning, he sent Biffle’s Ninth Tennessee south to harry a Union column reported heading belatedly to Dresden to cut him off. His main force—burdened with his artillery, more captives, and a wagon train of captured supplies—continued southward. He aimed to elude larger Federal troops to attack one more large Union supply depot, Bethel Station on the Mobile & Ohio south of Jackson.

  But Forrest now had to outwit nature and topography as well as Federals. At dusk on December 28, another cold and sleeting day, he was a few miles south of McKenzie near the lower end of the Obion bottoms. There he found all usable bridges destroyed. The enemy and Forrest’s own work of area-wide destruction had left him only a long, rotting structure in a swamp on a seldom-taken road to McLemoresville. He put his tired troopers to carpentry work, reinforcing punky planks and timbers with newly cut support logs forked at the top end to cradle and brace the timbers. He himself wielded an axe. Well after dark, with the shoring up completed, the cavalry clattered over, and Forrest himself drove the first wagon across to show that their handiwork had done the job. It had not. The next two wagons slid off the sleet-slick, wobbling span into the frigid swamp. Much of his command despaired of saving the wagons and guns, but Forrest plied his usual stress-induced profanity and assigned twenty men to each team of horses and fifty to each cannon. He ordered the deeper points of the swamp chocked with timber and even sacks of prized flour and coffee from his plunder wagons. The cold, muddy troopers got the guns and vehicles dragged to the east bank of the Obion’s south fork by 3 a.m. Forrest then moved them on four more miles to McLemoresville before stopping to rest and feed.42

  While his men rested on the morning of December 29, many Federals were obeying Grant’s order to get between Forrest and the Tennessee River. These included three brigades from Jackson and the 1,500 men coming south from Fort Henry. The bulk of General Dodge’s Union force from Mississippi, minus cavalry, had returned there on December 23 on urgent orders from Grant—because Grant had suffered another smash to his supply lines on December 20. On that day, the same on which Forrest took Trenton, General Earl Van Dorn raided and burned Grant’s Mississippi supply base at Holly Springs. Dodge’s cavalry still roved south and east of Lexington, however, and gunboats still prowled the Tennessee. As Forrest fought mud in the Obion bottoms, a brigade from Jackson commanded by Colonel Cyrus Dunham passed just five miles south of him on the road from Trenton to Huntingdon. Not knowing Forrest was near, Dunham passed on.43

  Federal forces of significant size were not all Forrest had to worry about. As at Clifton, he was again nearing territory where Confederate sympathies were scarce. Such pockets dotted the Confederacy and were plentiful in Tennessee. The Tennessee River’s banks from Kentucky to Alabama bristled with hills tended by poor farmers unfriendly to slavery and its proponents. Around Huntingdon, some ten miles east of McLemoresville, such supporters welcomed Federal troops rushing north from Mississippi without “shelter, rations, and cooking utensils.” Residents feted them with impressive quantities of pork, cornmeal, and similar sustenance.44

  Forrest’s mud-begrimed troopers were not so lucky. He rested them briefly at McLemoresville, but by mid-morning on December 29, his scouts reported thousands of Federals at Huntingdon. These were two of the three Jackson-based brigades of General Jeremiah Sullivan—Cyrus Dunham’s and another led by Colonel John Fuller. Hearing the Federals had vacated Lexington under the impression that he was headed for the river east of Huntingdon or farther north, Forrest rode back toward Clifton, where he had originally crossed. In continual rain he took a rolling, muddy back road that struck the Huntingdon-Lexington highway at Parker’s Crossroads, fourteen miles south of Huntingdon.45

  Forrest’s men and animals were exhausted, and he gave them a day off on December 30 amid the gathering danger. He sent out his brother, Captain Bill Forrest, to scout northward on the Huntingdon-Lexington highway. Bill led a small company of so-called Independents informally known as the “Forty Thieves,” a hard group of unenlisted and unpaid civilian guerrillas who, living off their plunder of unionists and the kindness of secession sympathizers, merited the attitude Bragg took toward Forrest’s whole command. That evening the Thieves met the vanguard of Colonel Dunham’s Federal brigade. This was the unit that had passed south of Forrest, heading east from Trenton to Huntingdon the day before, while Forrest’s men were still in the Obion bottoms. The Thieves encountered them at Clarksburg, nine miles south of Huntingdon, but sixty-five troopers of the Eighteenth Illinois Mounted Infantry dismounted and bested the Thieves, who left three of their number dead on the field. Dunham’s whole brigade moved south from Huntingdon that evening and bivouacked at Clarksburg for the night, and Bill Forrest sent a courier reporting this fact to his brother. Bill’s elder sibling sent back orders to delay Dunham as long as possible and report often. Meanwhile, he let most of his men rest through the night.46

  Forrest now knew that, to make it back to safety, he would have to fight his largest battle since crossing the Tennessee. Because he had sent detachments under Biffle and Starnes off toward Trenton and Huntingdon to prevent Federal pursuers from reaching his position, Forrest had about 2,000 men with him. Still, his force equaled or surpassed the numbers of either Dunham at Clarksburg or the brigade remaining at Huntingdon with Sullivan, commanded by Fuller. Forrest determined to hit the two Union colonels piecemeal.47

  Dunham, like Forrest, knew where his opponent was. Each expected to fight the other around the crossroads at the farm of a family named Parker, where the byroad Forrest was traveling intersected the Huntingdon-Lexington highway less than a mile north of the community of Red Mound. But Dunham made an unfortunate assumption. He took it for granted that Forrest was trying only to escape the converging Federal armies via Lexington to Clifton and the river. He sent word back to Sullivan at Huntingdon that Forrest had 8,000 men and twelve guns and that he, Dunham, would try to “force a fight out of him.” If he really meant to do that, he had to have assumed that Forrest was very frightened. Even so, Dunham obviously needed and expected help from Huntingdon.48

  At 4 a.m. on December 31, Forrest ordered his men into their saddles to head for Parker’s. A mile away, he could hear small arms and artillery fire and knew Dunham had reached the intersection first. Dunham was chasing Confederate pickets from the timber and outbuildings around a house belonging to a Dr. Williams northwest of the crossroads.

  At about 10 a.m., Forrest formed for battle
. He dismounted Russell’s Fourth Alabama and Dibrell’s Eighth Tennessee and sent them forward as skirmishers, then hurried a second band of scouts to Clarksburg, six miles north on the Huntingdon-Lexington Road. He expected these to join Bill Forrest to delay, and warn of, more Federals coming down the road.49

  He rushed up his guns to challenge Dunham’s. He led one, a twelve-pounder supervised by Sergeant Nat Baxter Jr., a half mile forward. Dismounting, he walked to the top of a low hill and showed Baxter where to set up. The site was daunting. Baxter saw a thick battle line of Federals four hundred yards off with only a hundred or two Confederate skirmishers scattered in trees and fence rows between it and his gun. Behind him were only two or three hundred friendly cavalry.50

  At Forrest’s order, Baxter opened fire. Dunham had seen Dibrell’s skirmishers deploying behind the little hill’s crest, and he had pulled his own men back to their regiment in the cover of the Williams house. The rest of Forrest’s artillery, five more cannons directly commanded by Captain Freeman and two by Lieutenant Morton, spread out left of Baxter and joined in the barrage. They challenged Dunham’s three guns, part of the Seventh Wisconsin.

  The resulting duel was intense but brief. Baxter’s gun dismounted one of the Wisconsin cannons, killing or disabling its horses. Troops of the Fiftieth Indiana withdrew the piece under the heavy Confederate fire. With his guns largely ineffective—perhaps because they had gone into the fight with little ammunition—Dunham ordered his cannoneers to cease firing and his forces there to withdraw to his main column at the crossroads.51

  The crossroads was not far enough, as it turned out. Forrest departed from conventional military theory by using artillery the way he used infantry, taking its cannons as close to the enemy as he took the rifles of his dismounted cavalrymen. He pursued a retreating foe with cannons as well as horsemen, and that happened now as Freeman’s six guns and Morton’s two kept on the heels of the withdrawing Federals. So, finding himself still hammered by Forrest’s cannons, Dunham withdrew farther, to a ridge a half mile south of Parker’s. Seeing the Confederates descend on the crossroads, he sent two companies of the Fiftieth Indiana back to impede them. The Indianans moved up and opened fire, then fell back in the face of the comparative horde of oncoming Confederates. Continuing to push, Forrest drove forward with the cannons and his dismounted cavalrymen front and center. Two or three hundred troopers on horseback, divided equally, guarded his flanks. The new Confederate battle line near the crossroads put Morton’s two guns in the middle, with three each of Freeman’s to Morton’s right and left. All were a few strides in front of the dismounted cavalrymen, six hundred yards from the Federals.52