by Jack Hurst
While Bragg wrote his slanted report, Forrest rested and reorganized his men and horses. Bragg ordered him to continue guarding the Army of Tennessee’s left wing. Some of Forrest’s troopers, meanwhile, were ordered out on an offensive foray. During the second week of January, these men braved frigid temperatures and continual sleet and snow to participate in a raid under cavalry commander Joe Wheeler. The effort captured a light gunboat and four transports on the Cumberland River northwest of Nashville and destroyed bridges by which the Federals had been hauling supplies cross-country. The weather was so punishing, though, that some of these troops suffered frostbite, and a few froze to death.4
Forrest did not accompany that Wheeler raid. Two weeks after it returned, he possibly went on leave, or tried to. That may explain his ignorance, late in the month, of the departure of a large detachment of his men on a second Wheeler raid. He apparently learned of it only when ordered to report to Bragg’s headquarters on January 26. There, he found that at least eight hundred of his troopers had already left—again in bitterly cold weather—for the Fort Donelson area. Bragg ordered Forrest to overtake the column and lead his men under Wheeler’s command.5
To have so many of his men sent on an expedition without his knowledge was bad enough, but at headquarters Forrest likely learned something else that rankled him. On January 20, Bragg recommended Wheeler for major general. It was a mere formality—Wheeler was already chief of cavalry—but for appearances’sake, Wheeler needed to outrank Forrest. So as a basis for the promotion, Bragg seized on Wheeler’s comparatively minor capture of the gunboat and four steamboats on the Cumberland. Bragg would have been better advised to cite Wheeler’s coup two days preceding the battle at Stones River, when he had completely circled the Federal army in two days and nights, destroying four hundred loaded supply wagons and capturing six hundred prisoners, plus rifles sufficient to arm a brigade. Yet it was for the gunboat and steamboats, Bragg told the Confederate Congress, that Wheeler should be rewarded with a promotion.6
News of Wheeler’s imminent elevation must have stung as Forrest rode hard northward into ominous, dreary freeze. Wheeler was brave and daring, but the raid for which Bragg recommended his promotion paled in comparison to the latest ones by Morgan and especially Forrest, whose exploits preceded the Wheeler boat captures by only days. Forrest had two icy days of riding to dwell on all this before catching up with his men at Palmyra, Tennessee, on the Cumberland. They had headed to this little town northwest of Nashville under Brigadier General John Wharton, who was also leading 2,000 men of his own. But Wheeler had caught up and taken charge by the time Forrest got there.
It was a seat-of-the-pants operation all too typical of Wheeler. He had issued orders for the raid from Bragg’s headquarters at Tullahoma and overtaken it himself on the road a few miles north of Franklin. His report says he undertook the operation “in obedience to instructions,” but he likely suggested it, since it aimed to repeat and enlarge upon his early-January steamboat captures. Bragg probably approved the idea because Morgan’s raid had just stopped all Federal trains from Louisville to Nashville. If the Confederates could now halt Nashville’s incoming river traffic as well, Bragg must have thought, they might break the Federal grip on Middle Tennessee. That was unlikely, Nashville’s depots having been filled with supplies during Morgan’s romantic interlude. But Bragg did not know that.7
Arriving at Palmyra, Forrest accosted Wheeler. He had found his men short of food, cooking utensils, and, most important, ammunition. Wondering if the rest of the command was similarly lacking, he apparently requested an inspection, which disclosed that Forrest’s men carried just fifteen rounds per man; Wharton’s, twenty.
Wheeler was doubtless surprised. He later claimed to have ordered the troops out “with a full complement of ammunition.” He refused to blame any of his subordinates for the deficiency, but the fault may have been Wharton’s. General Wharton was the erstwhile colonel of the Eighth Texas Cavalry and a prewar Houston lawyer. Bragg had designated him one of the Army of Tennessee’s “regular” cavalry commanders, along with Wheeler’s fellow West Pointers John Pegram and Abraham Buford. Wheeler reported that “they,” seemingly meaning Wharton and his staff, tried to collect the needed ammunition until receiving the order to march, then apparently thought they should set out rather than wait any longer. Wharton, if it was his decision, likely presumed they would be able to resupply themselves from a captured Federal transport vessel.8
But no vessel appeared. The Federals had discovered the Confederate presence along the Cumberland and halted boat traffic. The dearth of supplies now asserted itself. Forage for 2,800 mounts was scarce around Palmyra. The north side of the river might have been more favorable, but the Federals had destroyed all ferry craft. Wheeler faced two choices: return to headquarters empty-handed from a 150-mile foray or attack something else. He settled on Dover, the fortified town adjacent to now abandoned Fort Donelson. It lay twenty miles northwest of Palmyra on the same side of the Cumberland, and local sources assured Wheeler it would be an easy capture. “After maturely considering the matter, we concluded that nothing could be lost by attack upon the garrison at Dover,” he reported, rather offhandedly.9
MAJOR GENERAL JOSEPH WHEELER
Who “we” was, Wheeler did not say. From all other accounts, Forrest argued against the idea. He secretly told two staff officers that if he were killed in the battle, he wanted them to inform posterity he had opposed it. On the other hand, Wharton, now a Bragg “regular” after earlier service under Forrest, may have sided with Wheeler. Six months earlier, Forrest had voiced hot displeasure with Wharton at Murfreesboro after Wharton, wounded early in the battle, had withdrawn many of his Texans from the fight. Some of Wharton’s resentment may have lingered, because he, like Forrest, had a temper. Two years later, he would be shot to death by a fellow Confederate officer in Houston after Wharton, unarmed, slapped the officer and called him a liar.10
Forrest would have had good reasons to oppose the attack. The Confederates’ ammunition supply was low. The Dover garrison was fortified. Wheeler’s force was a hundred miles behind Federal lines. If they took Dover, they did not have supplies enough to hold it against gunboats plying the Cumberland and the nearly 2,000 Federals twelve miles west at Fort Henry. They would have to block the Fort Henry Road just to protect their own rear while attacking. Unless the fort surrendered without a fight, they would have to exhaust their ammunition in an assault and march away several hundred prisoners with little or no means of controlling them. None of these considerations dissuaded Wheeler.
The Confederates approached Dover on February 3. On the way, they captured most members of a Union cavalry detachment, but four escaped to warn the Federal garrison that the Confederates were coming.11
Forrest came northward up the River Road, down which he had escaped the Fort Donelson surrender almost exactly a year earlier. Wharton took a more westerly path, likely the Forge Road, from which he could also reach and block the most direct road to Fort Henry. Dover sat atop a hill overlooking the Cumberland. The Federals had abandoned Fort Donelson, atop the next hill a mile north, likely because defending both it and the town required too many men. Around Dover they had dug trenches and gun emplacements, but surrounding ridges offered points from which enterprising enemy artillerists might pound the town’s defenses with plunging and enfilading fire.
The Confederates pushed Federal skirmishers into Dover’s entrenchments around 1 p.m. The attackers were in position by 1:30, and Wheeler sent the Dover commander an ultimatum signed by all three generals, doubtless to emphasize and exaggerate his strength of numbers. The note refined Forrest’s Murfreesboro threat of annihilation by asserting that if the Federals refused surrender, they must “abide the consequences.” It also bluffed larger numbers by describing Forrest and Wharton as each commanding a division. The one-sentence reply of the Federal commander, Colonel Abner Harding of the Eighty-third Illinois Infantry, sounded a bit equivocal but was negativ
e. Harding declined to surrender his forces “without an effort to defend them.”12
The Confederates opened with cannons they hauled up the higher ridges to the east, south, and west of town. They then heavily shelled a Federal battery at the eastern end of the Federal rifle pits, their hot fire giving no hint that their supply of shells, like that of their small arms, was short: about fifty per gun.
Harding’s six hundred men were outnumbered more than four to one, but most of his nine companies occupied a ravine just west of Dover, out of the cannon fire. The Confederate shells played havoc with the Federal artillery, though. Lieutenant Morton zeroed in on a thirty-two-pounder siege gun supported by field artillery in the yard of the courthouse. A keystone of the Federal defenses, the thirty-two-pounder was mounted on a swivel carriage so that it could be turned in whatever direction was needed. The Confederates hurled “storms of iron hail” on it, Harding reported. He added that his guns, most of them under the immediate command of a lieutenant colonel named Smith, suffered such severe loss of men and horses that he had trouble withdrawing them.13
Amid the shelling, Wheeler ordered an attack on foot. He had accompanied Forrest’s column, so he issued the order to Forrest, then turned to ride to Wharton. Suddenly, while Wharton was massing his larger force south and west of the Federal position in anticipation of Wheeler’s directive to move forward, Harding ordered a cannon and a supporting infantry company to leave the east end of his rifle pits and reinforce troops in a cemetery on the town’s west side. To get there, the gun had to hurry a short distance north beside the river, then turn into a street running uphill past the courthouse. Harding also transferred another gun from the southwest corner of his lines to the courthouse. All this movement likely precipitated what happened next.14
Wheeler had hardly turned to leave Forrest and go to Wharton when Forrest disobeyed Wheeler’s order. Harding had just moved the two guns—one from the rifle pits to the cemetery and the other from the southwest trenches to the courthouse—when, he reported, “the enemy made demonstrations for a charge along the low ground near the river.” Seeing this, Harding ordered a gun at the courthouse toward the river to try to stop the incipient assault. At that moment Forrest, “thinking the enemy were leaving the place, and being anxious to rush in quickly,” ordered the troopers Wheeler had just ordered dismounted to remount and charge, Wheeler reported. But the Federal fire was so intense that the charge was beaten back.15
The hurried simultaneous movements of Union guns and troops along and toward the river had doubtless looked like an attempt to flee. Knowing his men had little ammunition and believing Wheeler’s plan foolhardy, Forrest would have wanted to exploit any opportunity. Whatever specifically prompted his charge, he aimed to cut off the presumed retreat and then follow the intercepted Federals as they rushed back into their fortifications. His first charge had failed, but not for long. The Confederates “soon rallied,” Harding reported. “Led on by Forrest himself, they again moved forward in a solid, motley mass.”
This time Forrest and his men got into Dover itself and galloped up a street. Harding reported that they came from the south, “filling the whole open space with mounted men and the air with yells of triumph.” But their presumption of victory was short-lived. Harding’s men double-loaded the courthouse siege gun with canister and, Harding reported, tore “one man to atoms and two horses, within 10 feet of the muzzle.” Harding then ordered his infantry out of their protective ravine to the southwest. They came running to meet the enemy at the crest of the ridge with a volley from their three hundred Springfield rifles. That and the siege gun’s canister perforated the Confederate ranks and silenced the rebel yell. The Federals then mopped up with fixed bayonets, capturing some forty prisoners.16
Forrest had gone down, his horse shot beneath him. His men, thinking he had been killed, fled. He followed them back to their original position, hurrying there on foot. Then he reissued Wheeler’s original order to dismount and led the men in another attack. He himself remained mounted and had another horse killed under him as they again got into the town. They ran Union sharpshooters from some houses on the east side and took those positions themselves. Here, Wheeler reported, they could fire down on the enemy. Wharton’s men had meanwhile driven the Federals into their fortifications on the town’s west side. The Confederates overran a battery there, “killing and wounding many of the enemy, and capturing prisoners, small-arms . . . munitions and stores,” Wheeler reported. By sundown, the Federal siege gun and other Federal artillery had been spiked and abandoned to Wharton’s men. Yet the Confederates quit firing, confusing Harding and his Federals.17
“We lay there in breathless suspense, expecting a last but possibly a successful charge of the enemy,” Harding reported, “but determined to fight it to the bitter end.”18
Almost from the fight’s beginning, various Confederate regimental commanders had reported to Wheeler that they were out of ammunition. By nightfall, all of them were. Most of the Federals were in nearly the same fix, but they had a fresh supply in their rifle pits beside the river. Three dug-in companies that were all but cut off from the rest of the garrison held this cache. To resupply themselves, several Federal companies suddenly vaulted out of their fortifications in the gathering dusk and raced down to the rifle pits. Their accompanying yell, Harding reported, “sent the rebels running in every direction.”19
The Federal rush back to the trenches containing the ammunition appeared to Forrest’s Confederates to be headed somewhere else: toward where a fourth of Forrest’s men held his troops’ horses. Fearing a Union attempt to stampede or capture their mounts, Forrest’s men fled the houses in town and ran back to try to protect them, Wheeler reported. Forrest, once back there, then mounted up his men and withdrew from the battle. Had he not withdrawn, Wheeler wrote, “the garrison would have surrendered in a very few minutes.”20
Wheeler was either intentionally ignoring his own errors or revealing a markedly illogical mind. The Confederate troopers did outnumber Harding’s men about five to one, and the Federals had lost their artillery and been all but driven from their primary positions. But they also had just refilled their cartridge boxes. If Harding’s six hundred remaining troops had been about to surrender, perhaps an advance by Wharton’s 2,000 men coming from the south and west could have compelled it. But Harding’s men were not intending to surrender, and Wharton’s cartridge boxes, like Forrest’s, were empty.
Instead of occupying the cusp of victory, the Confederates stood on the brink of disaster. Wheeler admitted that his entire command was out of ammunition but said Wharton occupied the west side of Dover and “had a secure position not more than 90 yards from the main rifle-pits of the enemy.” How Wharton could have further improved that position without ammunition (cavalrymen did not carry bayonets), he did not explain. Neither did he say how Forrest could have capitalized on his position in the houses, no matter how good it was, with empty cartridge boxes. The ammunition problem, meanwhile, was made exponentially worse by developments on other fronts. Advance elements of Federal reinforcements from the west had already attacked Confederates blocking the Fort Henry Road. More Federal aid was coming up the Cumberland on gunboats alerted by steamboats on which Harding had sent away the town’s women and children before the battle.21
Wheeler’s report also neglects to mention the battle’s humiliating end. Harding noted that Union detachments kept firing until 8 p.m., when the Confederates requested a cessation. “They sent in a flag of truce, again demanding the surrender of the post, telling us that they had not brought into action more than half of their forces,” Harding wrote.
“We declined. . . . They then left.”22
Later that night, the three Confederate generals thawed out in a roadside cabin. They were in a hamlet called Yellow Creek Furnace four miles out of Dover and well off the river. In the distance, they heard gunboats shelling the darkness along the Cumberland banks. Forrest, bruised and aching from his horse falls, had ov
erturned a cane-bottom chair and lay on the floor on a rainproof coat, his head raised by the chair’s back. His booted feet warmed on the hearth, where Wharton sat. Wheeler was composing and dictating the report he would send to Bragg.23
The document underestimated the Confederate killed and wounded at about one hundred and bloated the Federal loss to “equal to ours.” Actually, Forrest alone lost two hundred and Wharton an additional sixty. Colonel William W. Lowe of the Fifth Iowa Cavalry, commanding the Fort Henry–Fort Donelson district, reported that the next day the Federals found 135 dead Confederates on the field and made prisoners of 50 wounded. In stark contrast, Harding reported the Federal loss as just thirteen killed, fifty-one wounded, and forty-six captured.24
Now, as Wheeler wrote his version of the story, a voice outside the cabin asked for Forrest. He rose from the floor and went into the freezing night. There a staff member, Charles W. Anderson, sat still mounted, nearly frozen to his saddle. Anderson had headed a detachment left behind to bring off a caisson and shells captured by Wharton, along with ambulatory wounded. They had done it under gunboat fire, which proved harmless. Forrest helped Anderson down from his horse and led him inside. He strode to a bed where two other officers lay, jerked their blankets off, and ordered them out. Then Forrest gave Anderson the officers’ place in the bed and returned to his spot on the floor.
Anderson watched and listened as the generals discussed Wheeler’s report. Wharton began talking about the situation on his side of Dover during one of Forrest’s charges. He said his men went forward at the signal, but most gave way under “severe” Federal fire. As they fell back, he noticed the Federals in his front running across to the defenses’ opposite side to deal with Forrest. Under all the Federal fire, Wharton said, Forrest “must have suffered severely.”