by Jack Hurst
None of this was to be. An early-December shake-up was continuing to paralyze the western chain of command. On November 29, Bragg resigned, to be replaced by Joe Johnston. But formal resignations and news of them traveled slowly, especially behind Federal lines, and Forrest did not know these things for a while.7
Forrest first learned only that he had to scale back his hopes. On December 13, he sent his first regiment of new troops southward—unarmed and dodging opposition as they went. Five days later, he appealed to Johnston to advance two Mississippi cavalry brigades north to help him. Nearly 15,000 Federals were gathering against him, and he had 1,000 weapons for his remaining 3,500 troops. No response arrived from Johnston or Lee. Minus arms and supplies, his mobs of recruits were all but worthless. Without additional money or reinforcements, just escaping with his new units and on-the-hoof beef and pork he had gathered for his new levies would be a feat.8
He left Jackson on Christmas Eve. Most commanders in such straits might have abandoned the two hundred cattle and three hundred hogs already rounded up, but Forrest continued to drive the animals with his wagon train. To get the outnumbered and poorly armed column safely south, he divided his troopers and played tricks.To create a diversion while Colonel Tyree Bell led a detachment over the Hatchie River, he waited until nightfall, then attacked six hundred Federals with just his escort. His sixty widely spaced, loudly shouting men crashed through a cornfield’s withered, rattling stalks, bawling instructions over their shoulders to a phantom brigade and causing the Federals to retreat ten miles. At an Es-tenaula River crossing the same night, he jumped waist deep into the icy water to cut out of harness a mule thrown in by a capsizing ferryboat.9
On Christmas, he gave his troops the present of another triumphant bluff. Lining up his weaponless men alongside his few armed ones, he routed a Federal detachment.
He used the same stratagem two days later to frighten off Federal troops guarding a bridge across Wolf River. On that evening, he eluded still more Federals at Collierville by feinting toward Memphis and then, early the next morning, cutting back southward to cross the Coldwater River. On December 29 he reported to his department commander that, had he received the requested aid, he could have nearly doubled his recruits. Instead, he had had to leave behind 3,000 men not yet gathered into units.10
By now, he had learned that the department commander was no longer Joe Johnston. Johnston had gone to Georgia to lead Bragg’s erstwhile Army of Tennessee. Lackluster Leonidas Polk had taken Johnston’s place in Mississippi, and Forrest quickly negotiated more formal autonomy for a behind-the-lines command that was already autonomous in actuality. On January 13, he met with Polk and Stephen Lee, then issued a general order announcing his increased independence. The order outlined a territorial subdivision in northern Mississippi and West Tennessee to be called Forrest’s Cavalry Command. Its southern boundary ran west from Aberdeen to just north of Cleveland, Mississippi.11
Not all of his new subordinates were overjoyed. Among the displeased was Brigadier General James R. Chalmers, who had commanded the Confederate cavalry in northern Mississippi until Forrest arrived. The two had known each other, more or less, for many years—and not very congenially. By early March, Chalmers would complain to the high command that Forrest had taken his tent and given it to one of his brothers, and Forrest would try unsuccessfully to transfer Chalmers to another command—basically, for being a major annoyance. But the high command sided with Chalmers. Leonidas Polk kicked the issue to Richmond, and Richmond stayed Forrest’s hand, saying he had insufficient authority to make such a transfer.12
Chalmers was a member of the plantation elite in the region where Forrest had spent his latter teens. A South Carolina–educated Holly Springs lawyer, Chalmers had commanded Forrest at Shiloh in the ravine on the Confederate right on the evening of April 6. So small in stature that his enlisted men referred to him as “Little ’Un,” Chalmers admired Bragg and was one of his favorites, which would have commended neither Chalmers to Forrest nor vice versa. The two had antebellum history too. Chalmers’s father, a senator who owned a number of slaves, had officially approved Forrest’s appointment as DeSoto County constable in the 1840s. Both Chalmerses, father and son, had practiced law in adjoining Marshall County, where a teenaged Forrest had worked his family’s leased hill farm. Chalmers, a decade younger than Forrest, had been a gentleman; Forrest, a hired gun of the area gentry.13
Forrest had not been long in northern Mississippi before he was reminded that in the Confederate army, despite his new major general’s rank, he was still the social inferior he had been in his youth. On February 1, Johnston wrote Polk asking for aid in returning to the Army of Tennessee 2,869 absentee infantrymen serving in Forrest’s cavalry; obviously, they included some of the soldiers Forrest had found and rerecruited behind Federal lines. Polk replied that he had sent Johnston’s letter on to Forrest but suggested that Johnston defer to a later date his attempt to repossess them. Forrest’s department was under threat of attack, Polk wrote, and an attempt to take the men after Forrest had just coaxed them back into the army would “stampede” them back out of the service.14
No record of Forrest’s reaction to Johnston’s letter has surfaced, but it can be imagined. The high command had sent him behind Federal lines to recover these men with the understanding that they would be his to command. Now that he had done it, he was ordered to give them up. He had repeatedly endured this kind of treatment under Bragg, and on February 5 he fired off a curt note to Polk implying he had had enough: “Have telegraphed General Lee to come up. Desire greatly that you meet him here. If matters are not arranged to my satisfaction I shall quit the service.”15
Johnston apparently desisted, and Forrest turned to bigger business. He reorganized his units and, on February 12 at Oxford, Mississippi, instilled discipline in his new recruits and conscripts by condemning nearly twenty deserters to death by firing squad, then reprieving them at the last moment as they stood in front of coffins, freshly dug graves, and brandished rifles.
In announcing his new fiefdom, Forrest had ordered all cavalry commanders to report their units’strength and condition. The vigor and thoroughness of his recruiting and reorganization seems to have galvanized Polk and Lee into aiding him, for in proclaiming his new command, he added that he brought to it a “full supply of arms, ammunition, and accouterments.
“There are men enough in the department, if properly organized, to drive the enemy from our soil,” he asserted. “Let us then be . . . ready for the spring campaign.”16
They were ready before spring—and had to be. The latter half of February brought an expected Union move southward from Memphis. In an attempt to link up with a Federal drive of destruction from Vicksburg to Meridian, a cavalry force of 7,000 men under Brigadier General William Sooy Smith headed from West Tennessee toward the Mobile & Ohio tracks south of Corinth, striking them around Okolona and destroying them and their surroundings as it proceeded.17
Forrest caught this Federal force at West Point, Mississippi. Racing to join a skirmish already begun by the brigade of his brother Jeffrey, he encountered a hatless, fleeing recruit. Chalmers, who was present, said Forrest leaped off his horse, dragged the recruit to the side of the road, and began beating him with a clutch of brush. Finishing, he turned his hapless victim back toward the fighting with a bracing warning: “Now, goddamn you, go back there and fight. You might as well get killed there as here, for if you ever run away again you’ll not get off so easy.”18
Forrest’s force, half the size of Smith’s, tried to trap the Federals at West Point, fifteen miles northwest of Columbus. When Smith refused to take the bait and began retreating, Forrest gave chase. He hounded the Federal column nearly fifty miles, from West Point to Pontotoc. In the forefront of the Confederate attack at Okolona, Colonel Jeffrey Forrest, the youngest Forrest sibling, took a minié ball in the throat and died in his eldest brother’s arms. Forrest spoke Jeffrey’s name several times in tears, then put the y
oung man’s hat over his face and ordered another charge. Adjutant J. P. Strange later said he feared his chief had become suicidal. Forrest charged the Federal position and drove it backward until five hundred Federals formed a battle line around a wrecked artillery piece. He then charged this position with just his sixty-man escort and a few members of Jeffrey Forrest’s brigade. He and this small group were all but surrounded, fighting hand to hand in the road, when another of his brigade commanders, Colonel Bob McCulloch, brought up his unit and, waving a bloody, bandaged hand over his head, spurred forward. “My God, men,” McCulloch shouted, “will you see them kill your general?” McCulloch’s men followed him, and the Federals retreated. By the time they did, Forrest himself had killed or wounded three of them in the road.19
This campaign’s final flourish occurred ten miles southeast of Pontotoc. There Forrest had three horses shot under him, two of them killed, and he and three hundred troopers, fighting dismounted, had to repel what he reported as “the grandest cavalry charge I ever witnessed” by the Union rear guard.20
But Smith returned to Memphis on February 26. Northwest Mississippi had been saved.
29
NOVEMBER 1863-FEBRUARY 1864—GRANT AT, AND AFTER, CHATTANOOGA
“The Responsibility of Guarding
All Devolves upon Me”
Grant waited anxiously for Sherman in Chattanooga. The daring Federal strike across the Tennessee River had opened up a reliable supply line to Bridgeport, Alabama, and thence to Nashville. A week and a half later, though, the Confederates were menacing Federal gains to the north. On November 5, Bragg sent Longstreet’s 15,000 men marching past Grant to attack Burnside in Knoxville. The recent Federal conquest of East Tennessee, a longtime Lincoln priority because of the area’s predominant unionism and strategic importance, was in jeopardy. Halleck, Secretary Stanton, and President Lincoln all beseeched Grant to rescue Burnside and move on Bragg.1
Grant’s impatience for Sherman’s arrival was both military and personal. He plainly missed his loyal friend, a feeling the chill at Thomas’s headquarters would only have heightened. Grant soon found a place of his own, a secessionist mansion that he opened to nightly gatherings of his generals and their staffs. There they relieved the pressure of the siege by swapping laughs and tales from the old army. Thomas and Grant participated, although less animatedly than the others.
But the military pressure on Grant was incessant and mounting. Washington wires rife with anxiety for Burnside kept coming. On November 5, Halleck telegraphed that the insular East Tennessee geography made Burnside’s position—and even Grant’s at Chattanooga—tenuous, the opened Cracker Line notwithstanding; it forbade sending more Federal troops to either place, “lest they perish for want of supplies.” So Grant and Burnside would have to rely on each other. On November 3, Burnside himself had wired Grant that holding East Tennessee would be “hard” if the Federals in Bragg’s front did not keep the Confederates “constantly occupied.” Grant said that salvation lay in the arrival of Sherman; if he got to Chattanooga before the Confederates beset Burnside, Grant expected to drive Bragg back to “a respectful distance.” He thought Sherman would get to Bridgeport on November 9.2
But Grant had run out of time. Now, on November 5, Longstreet was reported headed for Knoxville and Burnside. Burnside had been asking for at least a demonstration in Bragg’s front to try to force Longstreet back to Chattanooga. Grant sent out scouts to verify the Longstreet move, then accepted some advice from General Baldy Smith, author of the successful plan to open the Bridgeport supply line. Smith suggested the kind of demonstration Burnside had called for. Since the Federal lines at Chattanooga were very near the Confederate trenches, and since the crowding mountains afforded no room for maneuver, Smith said Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland should just bluff a sudden rush at the Confederate right. That, Smith thought, might prompt Bragg to recall Longstreet to Chattanooga, and there could be no downside if it did not.3
Smith, though, did not know that Chattanooga’s new commander rarely took half measures when a fuller one might work. On November 7 Grant issued Thomas an order that sounded as if Grant felt the frosty Virginian had been foot-dragging. Thomas was to prepare not a demonstration but a full-scale assault for “not . . . one moment later than to-morrow morning,” November 8. Rather than the Confederate right, where Grant wanted to send Sherman, Thomas’s assault was to hit the center. And if it broke Bragg’s line, Thomas was to pursue him into northern Georgia.
Thomas and Smith were dismayed. They knew that their soldiers, whose supplies were just finally starting to come in from Bridgeport, had yet to recover from weeks of near starvation. Their long-famished horses and mules were too feeble to pull cannons and wagons, let alone sustain a pursuit if Bragg retreated. Seemingly oblivious to these obstacles, Grant said they could make the plan work by dismounting officers and taking horses and mules from ambulance teams.4
Thomas begged Smith to get the order changed. If it was not,Thomas said, he would “lose my army.” Smith suggested that he and Thomas find an alternative to the attack Grant had ordered. They rode toward Grant’s left and discovered potential for cutting off communication between the Knoxville-bound Longstreet and Bragg’s right—as well as the railroad toward Atlanta that both Bragg and Longstreet needed for supplies and possible retreat. But Thomas could not make the assault on Bragg’s right without dangerously thinning the center of his own line. To avoid that risk, they should wait for Sherman and let him make the attack. Meanwhile, Thomas’s men and animals could get a few days stronger.
Smith and Thomas returned to headquarters, where Smith exploited his cachet with Grant. He told Grant that they should indeed attack, as Grant wanted. But instead of an assault on the center by Thomas, the more promising ploy was a lunge from their left against the north end of Missionary Ridge. The prize there was a hill beneath which tunneled the Chattanooga & Cleveland Railroad. Capturing that would turn Bragg’s right flank and cut his retreat route. Smith then used a magic word in suggesting who should command the leftward lunge: Sherman.
Thomas, perhaps loath to be seen accepting another’s plan rather than advancing his own, now suddenly second-guessed Smith. He said the attack should come from the Union right at Lookout Mountain. He added, to Grant’s visible irritation, that his animals were in such condition that he could not move one cannon. Thomas’s nay-saying, along with Smith’s championing of Sherman and the agreement of War Department representative Charles Dana, probably ensured Grant’s approval of Smith’s plan. He specified, though, that Sherman too must also endorse it.5
But disappointment loomed. Grant would be dealing with subordinates of schizophrenic mind-set and ambiguous motivation. Thomas’s skepticism and the glory-greed of Joe Hooker were challenges still to be reckoned with as well. Most problematic of all, however, would be the dazed distraction of Sherman himself.
Grant’s demeanor brightened when Sherman arrived by steamboat from Bridgeport, Alabama, ahead of his army on November 14. The closeness between Grant and the redheaded general, one of Thomas’s best friends at West Point, surely gave Thomas pause. Grant relinquished both his chair and his shell of reserve as Sherman entered the parlor of Grant’s headquarters. Grant handed him a cigar and, in playful parody of courtesy, his seat.
“Take the chair of honor, Sherman.”
“The chair of honor? Oh, no! That belongs to you, general.”
“I don’t forget, Sherman, to give proper respect to age.”
Sherman laughed. “Well, then, if you put it on that ground, I accept.”6
Grant and Sherman’s rapport, even their appearance, differed sharply from those of other West Pointers at headquarters. Their dress was careless, their talk informal and direct. In contrast to the buttoned-up image consciousness of Thomas and his staff, they were western: rougher-mannered and straighter-talking men whose victories were pushing them upward in the Union army.7
They got down to work. It was obvious that Grant had given S
herman every detail of the plan, and Sherman had digested each. Grant turned to Thomas only for simple information about the advantages and drawbacks of the area; Sherman, by contrast, was a fount of opinions that Grant appeared to value. This all likely irked Thomas, not least because his knowledge of Sherman was probably more extensive than any other general’s in the army. They had roomed together at West Point, and in 1861 Thomas had been second in command during Sherman’s nervous breakdown, or whatever it was, in Kentucky.8
The deference Grant showed Sherman in this three-way tête-à-tête likely confirmed suspicions of their closeness that Thomas would have had for at least a week—especially after Grant had said Sherman must agree with Smith’s attack plan.
The joviality that marked Sherman’s demeanor on arrival would be short-lived. As in Kentucky in the fall of 1861, when he had imagined himself surrounded by phantom Confederate hosts, the redheaded general was seeing apparitions. This time they were not Confederate. His dead son haunted him. He blamed himself for the nine-year-old’s death. He had, after all, directed that the family rendezvous with him in Mississippi, where the boy had contracted the typhoid fever that killed him.
“Everywhere I see poor little Willie,” he wrote Ellen Sherman.9
Grant, by contrast, was waxing confident in dispatches to superiors and subordinates in early November. Privately, he was less sanguine. A letter he wrote Julia on November 14 indicates that Thomas’s attitude had cast a pall over Grant at Chattanooga, even after the opening of the Cracker Line. It was the day Sherman arrived, and even that happy event did not seem to raise Grant’s spirits. His language in the letter is uncharacteristically self-doubting and almost a little self-pitying: the enemy was “threatening Memphis, Corinth, East Tennessee & Chattanooga: and the responsibility of guarding all, to a great extent, devolves upon me,” he wrote. Nonetheless, he was optimistic that “if not failed by any officer in immediate command” at vital Chattanooga, within three weeks the national military situation would be better than at any time since the onset of war. If not, “no fault shall rest upon me.”10