Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Then commenced one of the war’s unlikeliest ascents to fame. To the right of the bridge sat a dogtrot farmhouse. Three females, a mother and her two daughters, stood in front of it. The youngest of the three, a tall, sixteen-year-old girl, would later recall that the general rode up and told them he and his men would protect them. Then he asked, “Where are the Yankees?” Lined up just beyond the burning bridge, the woman replied. If the Confederates went farther, she warned, “they will kill the last one of you.”

  Arriving Confederates entered a field beside the farmhouse. They started shooting across the creek at the line of Federals. As the fire increased, the females ran toward their house, the sixteen-year-old arriving first. Forrest galloped up and interrupted her with a question. “Can you tell me where I can get across that creek?”

  There was an unsafe bridge two miles away, the girl said. But there was also a fairly shallow place two hundred yards from the bridge. Nobody knew about it, she added, but the family’s cows sometimes waded across there when the creek was low. If he would have a saddle put on her horse, she would show it to him. There was no time for horse saddling. “Get up here behind me,” he commanded. He rode beside a bank flanking the road, and she jumped from it onto the back of his horse.

  Her mother, scandalized, ran up out of breath. “Emma, what do you mean?”

  Forrest answered for the girl. “She’s going to show me a ford where I can get my men over. Don’t be uneasy. I’ll bring her back safe.”

  He rode into a field, the girl holding on. She guided him into a thicketed ravine out of sight of the Federals. Near its mouth, she told him they needed to dismount, or they would be seen. They left the horse and snuck through bushes along the bank, the girl ahead. When they came out beside the creek, what looked to the girl like a battle was in full fire. She heard both cannon and small arms. Forrest stepped in front of her. “I’m glad to have you for a pilot,” he said, “but I’m not going to make breastworks of you.”

  She pointed to where the cows had entered the stream and where they had exited on the far bank. Then she and Forrest crept back to the horse and rode to the house. On the way, he asked the girl her name. Emma Sansom, she said.

  By the time they reached the house, cannon fire was heavy. Forrest told Emma, her older sister, and their mother to find shelter away from the house, which was an obvious target for Federal rifles. But the firing soon stopped, and the girl again met him on her way back to the house. He asked for a lock of her hair, a common token of remembrance then, and told her he had left her a note in the house. He also said one of his bravest troopers, Robert Turner, had been killed there and was in the house. He asked if she would see to Turner’s burial in a nearby cemetery, then urged his horse toward the ford.43

  The story of Emma Sansom and her ford spread fast. Forrest first mentioned it days later to a friend operating an Atlanta newspaper, the Southern Confederacy. Other papers across the South copied it. A Union account—a postwar reminiscence by a Streight aide—scoffed. The aide claimed it was a lie, that a captured Confederate soldier named Sansom had violated his parole by showing Forrest the ford. Emma Sansom did have a brother in the Confederate army, and he had been captured at Black Creek that morning. But the girl’s help was no propagandistic fable.

  Well after the war, Emma Sansom—whose last name by then would be Johnson—would provide proof that she, not her brother, had taken Forrest to the ford. Her proof indicated that Forrest had empathized with the poor farm girl. He too had grown up on out-of-the-way subsistence homesteads. His mother, like the girl’s, had been widowed early, and he had had sisters—including his twin—who had died trying to pass to womanhood through the region’s gauntlet of fevers. Or maybe he simply identified with the Sansom girl’s frank bravery, like that which he himself had cultivated in youth. Whatever it was, something about her obviously moved Forrest.44

  Years later Emma Sansom Johnson would produce a few misspelled lines on a vertically lined sheet of account paper. No scrawl, the handwriting looked incongruously neat and, except for the spelling and grammar, educated.

  Hed Quaters in Sadle

  May 2 1863

  My highest Regardes to miss Ema Sansom for hir Gallant Conduct while my posse was skirmishing with the Federals a cross Black creek near Gadesden Allabama

  N.B Forrest

  Brig Genl

  Comding N. Ala-45

  Less than a handful of unquestioned examples of Forrest’s handwriting have surfaced, but those verifiably written to friends look indistinguishable from the one inscribed to “Ema” Sansom. In the former, the letters all slant rightward at the same angle. They appear written by the same hand that inscribed the stained and aging note Mrs. Johnson presented in the 1890s to an enterprising Forrest biographer, who had taken the trouble to trace her to a small town in Texas.46

  On the afternoon of May 2, after getting his men across the Black Creek ford, Forrest chased his prey through Gadsden. By now Streight had detected the two hundred troopers Forrest had previously sent to travel on a parallel line just to Streight’s north. Fearing these Confederates were trying to get in front of him, Streight decided he would have to march his exhausted men all night. His progress was increasingly a ragtag affair. Some of his ammunition had got wet as his troops forded a creek before reaching the Black Creek bridge, and worn-out animals and men had fallen behind and into Confederate hands.

  Even the dogged Streight was losing hope. His only chance now, he thought, was to cross the Oostanaula River at Rome and fire the bridge. That should delay Forrest a day or two and give Streight time to find new mounts and allow his men to sleep.47

  While Streight agonized, Forrest’s troopers kept up their continual skirmish with the Federal rear. About 4 p.m. on May 2, Streight stopped at a plantation fifteen miles beyond Gadsden. He knew that halting would force him to fight another battle, but he had decided that his shrinking column could not march another night without food and rest. A detail fed the animals while the rest of his men got into line to await Forrest. The rear guard—becoming Streight’s front as his Federals turned to face Forrest—fell back, fighting, to the main line. The Confederates attacked the center, then the Union right. They were beaten back, but one of Streight’s best officers, Colonel Gilbert Hathaway of the Seventy-third Indiana, was killed in the fray.

  The Confederates withdrew to a ridge a half mile off, appearing to mass for an all-out charge. In gathering dusk, Streight ordered a resumption of the march and prepared another nocturnal ambush. He also sent two hundred of his best-mounted men ahead to take the bridge at Rome. Forrest’s men circumvented the ambush, but Streight kept them from passing him by moving out again. Everything now depended on reaching Rome first. If Streight could cross, then torch, the Rome bridge, he could accomplish at least part of his mission.48

  Most of the Federals were afoot now. Animals still walking were tender hoofed, sore backed, and used up. At the Chattooga River some ten miles from the Georgia border, Streight found no ferry; the men he had sent ahead to Rome had used the craft to cross an hour before, but then Confederates had found and removed it. Streight made for a bridge a few miles north. In the dark he got lost, and his men dissolved into small gangs in a maze of trails crossing a logging project. Day was dawning before he could assemble them again and cross the river. He burned that bridge and straggled on.49

  At 9 a.m. on May 3, hunger and exhaustion finally forced Streight to halt. At a plantation belonging to a Mrs. Lawrence, twenty-some miles from Rome, he heard that a large Confederate detachment had gotten around him and was nearer Rome than he was.

  Forrest soon drove in the Union pickets, and Streight had to fight again. Some of his 1,100 or so remaining Federals fell asleep under fire. Forrest’s numbers on the field were fewer than six hundred now, but they were comparatively rested, thanks to two brief stops and their commander’s innovative tactic of attacking in shifts. At the Lawrence plantation, though, he split his whole available force into three parts an
d set two to threatening Streight’s flanks while personally leading a third to menace the center. Then he sent forward a flag of truce and demanded surrender.50

  Streight conferred with his regimental commanders. By now they had learned that the men sent ahead to Rome had failed to take the Oostanaula Bridge. Confederate messengers had reached Rome first, carrying word that Streight was coming, and citizens had blockaded the bridges across both the Etowah and the Oostanaula Rivers with cotton bales. Hospitalized Confederate soldiers and all other able-bodied men and boys in the town had turned out to protect the bridges.51

  Streight’s subordinates wanted him to give up their foolhardy mission. Streight now considered it. While he did, he protested to Forrest that two Confederate artillery pieces that had just appeared were violating the truce by advancing. Forrest nodded to some of his officers, who in turn signaled the caisson drivers of the guns, the only two Confederate ones that had arrived on the field. The signal ordered the drivers to back away from the positions they had taken—but to keep moving in the background. Streight told Forrest he would surrender if shown that Forrest’s numbers were larger than his own. While they talked, the drivers of the caissons began parading the two artillery pieces in and out of distant woods. Forrest, with his back to them, studied Streight.

  “I seen him all the time we was talking looking over my shoulder and counting the guns,” Forrest later told Confederate General Dabney H. Maury.

  “Name of God!” he said Streight exclaimed after a few moments. “How many guns have you got? There’s fifteen I’ve counted already.”

  Forrest recalled that he himself glanced backward. “I reckon that’s all that has kept up,” he casually replied.52

  Minutes later, Streight surrendered. He handed the arms of more than 1,000 Federals to a few hundred Confederates before discovering the humiliating truth.53

  23

  MAY 1-18, 1863—GRANT FROM PORT GIBSON TO BIG BLACK RIVER

  “Men Who Know No Defeat and

  Are Not Willing to Learn What It Is”

  The Confederate high command thought Grant had given up. He had pushed most of his ironclads and transport boats past the Vicksburg cannons and had scant means of getting them back. To Major General Dabney H. Maury, commanding in Mobile, and fellow Confederates ranging from Pemberton in Vicksburg to Robert E. Lee in Virginia, the effort appeared harmless. They assumed his boats were headed down the Mississippi to join those based in New Orleans. His army, with radically weakened lines of supply and little means of returning to Memphis, would likely follow the boats down the west side of the river, his foes thought. No West Point mind could conceive of all but abandoning one’s base to launch an offensive.1

  With the threat to Vicksburg apparently subsiding, in early May the Confederacy seemed to get a second wind. Beauregard was holding off army-navy foes at Charleston; Confederate forces in Louisiana and Arkansas were holding their ground; Forrest had just destroyed Streight’s drive into Georgia; and, most noticeably, at Chancellorsville, Virginia, Lee and Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson were delivering a May 4 body blow to Federal general Fighting Joe Hooker’s Army of the Potomac. The Lee-Jackson gambit, not Grant’s, appeared to be the successful dare of long odds; mid-battle, Jackson pulled his whole army away from Lee’s on an end run that smashed and whipped Hooker—but at awful cost: the life of Jackson himself, mortally wounded by friendly fire.

  Unknowingly, the Confederates had discounted their most fearsome opponent. Grant’s humble roots and manner, as well as his reputation as a sot, led even most of his associates to miss his capabilities as a soldier. A few, though, knew differently. Before another year passed, Grant’s cousin by marriage, Confederate general James Longstreet, would say as much to Virginians looking down their noses at the Ohioan. “Do you know Grant? Well, I do. I was with him for three years at West Point, I was present at his wedding, I served in the same army with him in Mexico . . . that man will fight us every day and every hour until the end of this war.”2

  And now Grant was getting into the best position to battle them. If that position also entailed the worst risk, so be it. Since even before West Point, where his sole standout achievement was setting a horse-jumping record that stood for decades, he had relished making long vaults on faith. After graduation, he remained in top form. He showed it off during the overland late-April trek from Milliken’s Bend to New Carthage—accompanied by a small mounted escort and his twelve-year-old son, Fred. Fred later recalled that when they came to a narrow bridge over a slough and everybody else awaited a turn on the structure, Fred’s father turned his horse aside and “made one of his daring leaps” to the opposite bank. This leaper was no blithe youth assuming himself invincible. He was a man of forty hard years who remained uncowed.3

  There was another reason the Confederates could not imagine Grant meant to attack from Vicksburg’s south side. Never in history had anybody attempted an amphibious operation of such size.

  But that was not all. Grant made it seem as if he were focused elsewhere. While he got all his men, ammunition, and other supplies down the road from New Carthage to Hard Times Landing on the Louisiana side, he created diversions. He had ordered Colonel Benjamin Grierson’s cavalry south from Memphis to cut Vicksburg’s eastward rail lines, and with Van Dorn gone north to Bragg, Grierson rampaged all but unopposed through the heart of Mississippi from April 17 to May 2. In addition, three shorter expeditions—under General William Sooy Smith and Colonels Edward Hatch and George Bryant—sowed confusion at various points near Grierson’s path. All these raids helped keep Pemberton from concentrating his forces at Vicksburg.

  Sherman mounted the longest decoy. On April 29, he took ten regiments on ten transport steamers along with an armada of mortar vessels and eight gunboats that remained north of Vicksburg—two ironclads, four tinclads, and two timberclads—and moved them back northward past Chickasaw Bluffs, scene of his December trouncing, to the farthest end of the Vicksburg defenses: Haynes Bluff, twelve miles northeast of the city. Grant had told Sherman that a demonstration there would be good, because it would pull major Confederate attention away from Grant’s crossing of the Mississippi some thirty land miles downstream. But Grant said he hated to order Sherman even to feint an assault, lest the Northern public see it as another repulse.

  Sherman improvised. On April 30, instead of attacking, he acted as though he had Grant’s whole army with him and was preparing to. He had the gunboats and mortar craft bombard the bluffs as if softening them up preliminary to landing the infantrymen from the transports. The Confederates on the bluffs held their positions rather than move southward, but not because of Sherman so much as the suspicions of the Vicksburg ground commander, Major General Carter Stevenson; Stevenson feared that Grant’s troops at Hard Times might be the diversion. On his way north on April 28, Sherman had seen Confederate scouts crossing from the bluff city to the Louisiana side of the Mississippi “to see what we are about.” They would not discover much, he assured Grant, because they could not get where they needed to. The river had flooded their only road to Richmond, Louisiana, midway point of the roundabout wagon route on which elements of Grant’s army were still moving to New Carthage.4

  The Federals kept moving farther south, seeking the best landing site on the opposite bank. Those already at New Carthage slogged along the riverside levee to Hard Times Landing. On April 29, more than thirty miles downstream from Sherman’s position at Chickasaw Bluffs, Admiral Porter’s seven ironclads launched a marathon bombardment at Grand Gulf, Mississippi, opposite Hard Times. They passed back and forth in front of that bluff-crowning town, slugging it out with the towering fortified Confederate artillery for six hours. Confederate brigadier general John S. Bowen, the West Point–trained Grand Gulf commander, saw a half dozen troop-crammed Union transports hovering on the Mississippi’s far bank.5

  But the transports did not attempt to cross, even when the Confederate artillery hushed. The ironclads had taken a licking. They lost e
ighteen sailors killed and fifty-seven wounded. Grant correctly suspected that the firing had not ceased because the Confederate guns had been destroyed. As he had learned all too well at Fort Donelson, gunboats forced to fire at a target well above them could not elevate their shots skillfully enough to ensure hitting it. He reported to Halleck that the boats had proved entirely unable to silence the enemy guns. He was right. The Confederates had only stopped firing because of a temporary shortage of shells. Their casualties were just three men killed and “12 or 15 wounded,” Bowen reported.6

  The Northern public would allow him just one assault, Grant figured, and this was not the place to make it. Crossing troops at Grand Gulf in the unarmed barges, even with gunboat escort, could be suicide. Numerically, the enemy was far inferior; Bowen had just 4,000 men at Grand Gulf. Yet 4,000, behind dug-in cannon, might drown Grant’s amphibious assault before it made landfall.7

  So Grant moved farther south that same day. In a tactic he would later use to bludgeon Robert E. Lee, he forced the Confederates to keep spreading their lines ever wider and thinner to protect their flanks. He ran past the Grand Gulf guns as he had those at Vicksburg and Warrenton. Disembarking his men and marching them farther down the Mississippi’s west bank, he had the gunboats launch another attack after dark while his transports slipped past in the din. He intended to land them ten more miles downriver at Rodney, Mississippi—at first. But during the night of April 29, a Union cavalry patrol on the Louisiana side procured the aid of a slave who told them of a better landing spot. Halfway between Grand Gulf and Rodney, the man said, the village of Bruinsburg offered a good, shorter road leading toward Port Gibson and Grand Gulf.8