Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Only momentarily could Forrest bask in the glory of his Streight capture. Rome citizens had planned a feast for May 6, but he and his men had to miss it. Word came that more Federals were headed south from Tuscumbia, Alabama, and late on May 5, Forrest rode off to intercept them. Learning at Gadsden that the report was false, he then headed his men back to their base at Columbia,Tennessee. At Huntsville, Alabama, however, he had to leave them and board a train to Shelbyville. Bragg had ordered Forrest to report to him. Forrest likely did not know then that on May 7 a jealous husband had assassinated Earl Van Dorn. Bragg needed a new west wing cavalry commander.1

  Bragg greeted Forrest with surprising warmth. The Streight chase had obviously impressed the Army of Tennessee commander. That and the West Tennessee raid in December, despite the intervening Dover debacle, showed that Forrest, however unpolished, was a powerful asset. Bragg, in much public disfavor since Stones River, needed to hoard every chit he could amass. On May 8, when a delegation from Mississippi visited Jefferson Davis asking for Forrest to help counter Grant’s alarming depredations there, Bragg had rejected the idea. Forrest’s force, he said, was “not in condition.” Given Forrest’s long hard ride on the heels of Streight, he doubtless spoke the truth.

  MAJOR GENERAL EARL VAN DORN

  Bragg would never admit erring in naming Wheeler his chief of cavalry, but he tried to smooth it over. Likely knowing Forrest had vowed at Dover never again to serve under Wheeler, he offered Forrest a promotion to Van Dorn’s rank, major general.2

  It was an empty gesture—Wheeler, who had already become a major general, would still outrank him—and Forrest refused it. Another officer would be better fitted, he said. Perhaps a sarcastic allusion to Wheeler’s meteoric rise, the statement implies a determination not to agree to recognize his inferiority to the twenty-six-year-old. Also, Forrest seems to have grown, if anything, more uncomfortable in high company. Beauregard had had to press him to accept a brigadiership following Shiloh—and after consenting, he had seen some of the Confederacy’s aristocratic officers and units, such as the First Louisiana Cavalry and its colonel, flatly refuse to serve under him. He may not have cared to invite more sneers.3

  Such political maneuvering as Forrest engaged in made clear his feelings about this elite. Van Dorn had been a darling of the same upper crust that had rejected Forrest. Just prior to the Streight raid, Forrest had tried to escape his authority. Along with another Van Dorn subordinate, brigadier general and West Pointer W. H. “Red” Jackson, Forrest had urged politically powerful Brigadier General Gideon Pillow of Fort Donelson infamy to seek a cavalry command and take Forrest and Jackson with him. Now, with Van Dorn dead, Forrest suggested that Bragg give the proffered major general’s rank to Pillow. Pillow had languished in minor commands, or none, since Fort Donelson; Jefferson Davis disliked Pillow and had deprived him of duty for six months after the battle. Now, Forrest’s suggestion must have looked very like a rebuff to the Confederate command system and President Davis himself.4

  Forrest’s suggestion was of little avail. Bragg gave him Van Dorn’s job without Van Dorn’s rank. On May 16 he became Bragg’s west wing cavalry chief. Under him were divisions led by Brigadiers Red Jackson and Frank Armstrong and brigades under Brigadiers George Cosby and Francis W. Whitfield and Colonel James Starnes.

  Federal general Rosecrans at Nashville was readying a major move. Forrest soon noted some of the preparations from his Spring Hill headquarters in Middle Tennessee. He reported on June 1 that all Federal cavalry had gathered around Murfreesboro, and Nashville’s streets were being lined with ditches and sandbags. The Federals, he said, “intend to move either forward or backward.”5

  Bragg paid attention but did little.The next day, June 2, he wrote Richmond that Rosecrans was about to do “something important”—possibly “attack or . . . reinforce Grant,” who by then was besieging Vicksburg after twice unsuccessfully assaulting its trenches. Bragg asked for aid if the move turned out to be against Middle or East Tennessee and ordered a forward feint by his commanders on June 3 to develop the situation.6

  While Forrest watched Rosecrans, Rosecrans eyed Forrest. Rosecrans had parried pleas from superiors to take one or the other course Bragg feared. On May 27, President Lincoln, fearing an attack on Grant’s rear as he besieged Vicksburg, wired Rosecrans to “do your utmost, short of rashness,” to see that Bragg did not leave Middle Tennessee. His foremost fear was obvious: “Where is Forrest’s headquarters?” Messages flew between Washington and Tennessee concerning Forrest. Commanders feared he had gone to Mississippi. Intelligence soon indicated that much of his command, Jackson’s division, had gone to Mississippi to aid Johnston.7

  The object of all this concern set off from Spring Hill on a June 4 reconnaissance in force to Franklin. The operation yielded only the capture of a herd of beef cattle and a heavy skirmish with the Federal garrison at Franklin. The action soon became notable in another context, though.8

  Artillery chief John Morton was absent on other duty, so on this mission, his friend Lieutenant A. Wills Gould commanded the cannons. Gould had incurred Forrest’s rage a month earlier by losing two guns at Day’s Gap during the Streight chase. At Franklin, Forrest scolded Gould again. Accusing him of timidity in carrying out orders to post his pieces atop a hill, he asked if the lieutenant was afraid. “No, General, I am only protecting my men from the sharpshooters,” Gould replied. From all accounts, Gould was just being prudent. When Morton later inquired into the matter, he found that recoil had been pushing Gould’s guns back down the hill; they had to be rolled forward after every shot. Morton apparently saw nothing timid about Gould; he several times commended his friend for bravery.9

  Forrest, it seems, just did not like Gould. Perhaps he felt locked into antagonism by his own raging remarks to and about the lieutenant after the loss of the guns at Day’s Gap. Morton wrote that the Day’s Gap loss occurred because cavalrymen assigned to support Gould fell back under hot fire, and several of the horses had been shot and fallen, tangling their harnesses so that the guns could not be moved. It is also possible that Forrest had begun fancying contempt in the eyes of all educated officers who were not overtly admiring of him. Morton plainly idolized him, but Gould, Morton’s schoolmate, was not so demonstrative. His manner tended to be quiet, and likely more so after Day’s Gap. Friends described Gould as “slow and imperturbable” but also “supersensitive.” How sensitive, Forrest would soon learn.

  Forrest ordered Gould transferred, which Gould took as disparaging of his honor. Finding Forrest lunching at the home of a friend in Columbia, the lieutenant asked to talk. Forrest said they could meet that afternoon, June 14, in the Masonic hall where the command was headquartered. Morton heard about the appointment and doubtless feared its overtones. He tried to find Forrest; he did not know his chief was at the friend’s home. Unable to locate him, Morton then rode to the artillery camp to find Gould—but Gould had already gone to see Forrest.10

  Forrest had set the meeting at the quartermaster’s office, where he had business. Gould arrived promptly, and Forrest suggested they talk outside the office, in a hallway. They began walking the hall, Gould wearing a linen duster over his uniform, Forrest toying with a half-opened pocketknife. Four young boys, having turned out to see the hero who had ridden down Streight, watched from outside on the building’s front steps.11

  Gould asked why he was being transferred. Forrest would say only that his mind was made up and Gould would no longer be in his command. Not “slow and imperturbable” now, Gould heatedly said that Forrest’s order reflected on his honor. Forrest apparently made an accusation. An onlooker heard Gould say, “That’s all false.”

  In that era, especially in the South, calling a man a liar was a provocation to fight. Forrest, pocketknife still in his hand, would have noted the outline of the pistol sagging the pocket of the lieutenant’s duster.

  Both men apparently sensed they had passed a point of no return. Forrest dodged to one side and raised a han
d by reflex, trying to access his only weapon with the other. Bringing the half-open pocketknife to his mouth, he finished opening it with his teeth and lunged toward Gould. Gould fired his pistol through the duster pocket. The ball struck Forrest in the left side at the hip. Gould pulled the pistol from the duster pocket to fire again, and Forrest pushed it away with his free hand. With the other, he drove the knife forward, striking Gould between two ribs. The lieutenant, spurting blood, yanked free. He lurched past the four boys on the steps and reeled down the stairs and up the street.12

  Forrest’s quartermaster, Major C. S. Severson, ran out behind Gould. “Stop that man!” Severson shouted into the street. “He’s shot General Forrest!”

  Two civilian doctors supervising a Columbia hospital were walking together near the Masonic hall. They heard Severson’s shout and saw a man crossing the street with blood gushing onto his duster. “My God, it’s Willis [sic] Gould,” exclaimed Luke Ridley of Murfreesboro. Ridley and the other physician, James Wilkes of Columbia, hurried to Gould and helped him into a tailor shop. They put him on a table to try to stop the bleeding, and Ridley hurried to the hospital for instruments. The four boys from the Masonic building had followed Gould, and now a crowd gathered. They saw Wilkes roll Gould’s shirt up to his armpit to reveal a stab wound to the ribs. With every breath, “the blood would spurt out, often spattering us boys,” one recalled. The boys could not move because of the press of the crowd. Wilkes tried to slow the bleeding with his hands until Ridley could arrive with medical equipment.13

  The doctor waited for his colleague in vain; his patient’s violent encounter was not over. Forrest had hurried out of the Masonic hall into the office of another physician, L. P. Yandell, who took a quick look and told Forrest to get to the hospital. The wound was near the intestines, Yandell said, and—with summer heat already setting in—could be fatal. Forrest rebuckled his pants and headed for the street, vowing not to spend his last energies in a bed while his assailant still breathed. “No damn man will kill me and live,” he raged leaving the doctor’s office.14

  Colonel Lee Bullock, the provost marshal, met Forrest on the street. He told him there was no need to pursue; Gould’s wound looked fatal. Forrest ordered him out of the way: “I am mortally wounded and will kill the man who shot me.”15

  This was the Forrest of the battlefield, unbridled and terrible. He grabbed two pistols, one from a Confederate officer and one from a holster on a horse at a hitching post in front of the doctor’s office. He was heading down an alley when he saw the crowd at the tailor shop. Entering its front door with a pistol in each hand, he shouted, “Look out! Look out!” to get the crowd out of his line of fire. The mob shied and Gould, all too aware of the prospect of doom, lunged off the table, again bloodying the boys. He dived out the back door as Forrest fired. The bullet hit a wall outside and ricocheted into the leg of a soldier. But Gould’s strength was spurting away. He fell in a patch of high weeds behind the store. Forrest, furious, had run back out the front door and now came down an alley beside the shop. Arriving at the patch of weeds, he nudged a motionless Gould with his foot. “You have killed him, General!” onlookers said.16

  “Damn him, he has killed me,” Forrest said.17

  He went back into the shop and told Wilkes to follow him. The doctor demurred, saying his first obligation was to his patient. Forrest cursed and let him know that, by God, he had another patient now. Going out the door, they met Ridley coming from the hospital, and Forrest ordered both of them into a buggy. He then got in under his own power. The vehicle picked up a third physician, a Dr. Sam Frierson, on the way to the home of a Confederate officer, Colonel William Galloway. The four young witnesses to the violence, unwilling to miss anything else, hung onto the back of the buggy. At the Galloway home, the doctors tried to help Forrest upstairs, but he pulled away and went up on his own, apparently infuriated that amid a war he could die so needlessly.18

  Then he learned he would not die. The trio of doctors examined him and said the ball, having passed around the pelvic bone into what one of the boys—who later became a local historian—later delicately termed the “large muscles of the hip,” had inflicted little more than a flesh wound. The projectile could be cut out, they said, and prepared to do it.

  Forrest’s manner changed mercurially. His selfish behavior—or perhaps his disclosure of his dread of death—now seemed to appall him. “It’s just a little pistol ball; let it alone!” he roared. He ordered Ridley to hasten to his victim. If Gould was still alive, Ridley was to take him to the Nelson House Hotel and give him every comfort, at Forrest’s expense. Ridley hurried to obey and found that one of Forrest’s staff members had already taken Gould to the hotel. Wilkes and Frierson, meanwhile, treated Forrest.19

  Gould lingered for a few days. One story has it that he asked to see Forrest and, when the general was helped to his bedside, requested forgiveness, saying he was thankful that if one of them had to die, it was him, so that Forrest would be “spared to the country.” By this account, Forrest forgave Gould and said he regretted that his wound was mortal. Both men’s declarations have been characterized as tearful. 20

  Another story says no such reconciliation occurred. Whatever happened, Forrest seems to have been ashamed and regretful of the incident. He afterward maintained that he “never wanted to kill anybody” except a wartime enemy of his country.21

  The wound from Gould, Forrest’s second of the war, kept him from the saddle for twelve days. Had he been mobile during that time, Bragg might have known more about a massive push that Rosecrans’s Federals began against his army on June 24.22

  Once again, the Federals appeared to fear Forrest more than Bragg valued him. In downpours of rain, a heavy Union column started south from Murfreesboro, threatening to separate Forrest at Spring Hill from the rest of Bragg’s army. As they arrayed their troops, Federal commanders wired each other trying to ascertain his whereabouts.

  The Murfreesboro move was a diversion. The primary Federal drive was southeast, around the Confederate right, to try to flank Bragg out of Middle Tennessee.The coordinated movements bewildered Bragg, headquartered at Shelbyville. He began falling back on June 26 in heavy rain, barely ahead of the enemy feinting southward from Murfreesboro.

  Wheeler had only a small force with which to guard Bragg’s long wagon train as it slipped and slid southeastward toward Tullahoma, so he ordered Forrest to join him on the Murfreesboro-Shelbyville highway. Forrest and his men had to breast driving rain and wade water and mud to get there. They arrived on the afternoon of June 27, by which time Federal cavalry under Major General David Stanley had chased Wheeler’s outnumbered horsemen—Bragg’s rear guard—past Forrest’s front and across the Duck River into Shelbyville.23

  Forrest sent Wheeler word to hold the Duck River Bridge, and Wheeler tried. He had just four hundred cavalrymen and two cannon, and Stanley’s cavalry finally overran them. Wheeler and sixty troopers who had not fled or been captured jumped their horses twenty feet into the Duck and swam through hails of gunfire. Fewer than half made it. Meanwhile, assuming from the sound of the fighting that the bridge had fallen, Forrest took another route west and south of Shelbyville. He did not send word to Wheeler or know that Wheeler had defended the bridge for him so heroically.24

  The Army of Tennessee had to resort to all but full flight to elude Rosecrans. Bragg headed for the Cumberland Mountains and Chattanooga beyond, his cavalry waging a running fight to keep his flanks free. Forrest’s retreat, too, was almost headlong. At the railroad town of Cowan, from which Forrest’s wife had hailed, he ran head-on into his growing legend. He was retreating at a gallop through town when a local woman denounced him.

  “You great big coward, you, why don’t you turn and fight instead of running like a cur?” she screamed. “If old Bedford Forrest was here, he’d make you fight!”25

  The “coward” apparently loped on toward Chattanooga without replying.

  25

  MAY 19-JULY 3, 1863—GRANT
AT VICKSBURG

  “The Enemy Are in Our Grasp”

  Staggering after their humiliating stampede across the Big Black River, Major General John Pemberton’s Confederate remnant limped back into Vicksburg on the night of May 17. Two days later, Grant ordered an assault. The effort was piecemeal, underequipped, and ill planned. Grant launched it because he and virtually all his subordinates believed the Confederates to be so demoralized that any offensive would drive them to quit.1

  The Federals were wrong. Commanded so wretchedly in the crushing defeats at Champion Hill and Big Black River, Pemberton’s troops were not so dependent on his nerve and sagacity once they were again behind Vicksburg’s ramparts. Battle-hardened, they stiffened within their impregnable defenses that included trench-backed ramparts studded with nine mini-fortresses: multisided redoubts, spearhead-shaped redans, three-sided lunettes, and jutting salients. Boasting some 125 cannons, these fanned out to cover the seven major avenues of entry into the city: six roads as well as the Southern Railroad of Mississippi, the formal name of the tracks to Jackson.2

  On May 19, Grant launched the assault he and his generals vainly hoped would induce the surrender of all this. His three corps semicircled a nine-mile Confederate front running from the Yazoo City Road along the Mississippi north of the city to the Warrenton Road along the Mississippi to its south. Only Sherman, who had possessed himself of the bluffs on the Federal right—which he had so disastrously attacked back in December—was close enough to the trenches to move in at the 2 p.m. starting time. Sherman so expected to see immediate white flags that his men did not even carry ladders to climb the enemy parapets.