Sultana

by Alan Huffman

  The rest of Rousseau’s men heard the shooting as they prepared to cross the ford at Ten Islands, and soon they too were fired upon from an island in the river, and their advance was halted. Fielder Jones asked Rousseau to let him take the rest of the 8th upriver to reinforce Graham, and after much deliberation Rousseau agreed. Jones and his men splashed across the ford at a safe distance from the Rebels lurking on the island and headed north. Jones was known as a fighter. He had returned to combat after recuperating from gunshot wounds to his liver, arm, and thigh, and at the battle of Stone’s River he had engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the Rebels using his pistol and sword.

  Once Rousseau’s men managed to drive the Rebels from the vicinity of the ford, they too crossed unmolested. “The passage of the river was a beautiful sight,” wrote his adjutant, Captain Thomas Williams. “The long array of horsemen winding between the green islands and taking a serpentine course across the ford—their arms flashing back the rays of the burning sun, and guidons gaily fluttering along the column, formed a bright picture, recalling the days of romance, and contrasting strongly with the stern hardships of every-day life on the duty march.”

  When the troops were reunited near Greensport, Jones and Rousseau learned that the 8th had whipped Clanton’s brigade of Rebel cavalry, killing one officer, wounding a large number, and capturing about twenty, whom Rousseau promptly paroled—again because he did not need prisoners slowing him down. The column then turned south and marched about fifteen miles into the night. The road was dry, and the column produced a cloud of dust, which made it difficult for the men to breathe. After the moon set at about 2 a.m. and it became too dark to see, Rousseau called a halt.

  The next day the raiders occupied the town of Talladega; burned the railroad depot, several train cars, and a gun factory; and captured food stocks earmarked for Atlanta. When they departed Talladega they took with them a group of liberated slaves and a few fresh horses. Private Jack Wilson, who was with the 8th Indiana, wrote that the region around Talladega was “the most beautiful and fertile portion of Alabama I have yet seen, many splendid, commodious and tastefully decorated dwellings studding the road on either side.” At every house they passed, he wrote, slaves approached them with questions, such as where they were from and what they did when it rained. Another soldier wrote, “We found the niggers everywhere to be our friends, they all have an instinctive idea that some how or other they are to be set free in spite of the terrible teachings of their masters to the contrary.” Many slaves followed the column, though they had difficulty keeping up on foot with the rapidly marching horses.

  From Talladega, Rousseau directed the column toward the state capital of Montgomery—a ruse designed to confuse the Rebels, when his actual aim was the Montgomery & West Point Railroad, west of Atlanta. It certainly confounded the local residents, many of whom fled with their valuables from the area around Montgomery, only to end up in the path of the raiders. The route now became a treasure hunt, with men discovering caches of silver and gold hastily hidden in bushes around abandoned plantation homes, but soon the men were fatigued, and over the course of the long, hot afternoon, most slumped in their saddles, staring blankly ahead. It would be two more days before the column reached the railroad, and the gambit began to pay off. By then they had forded two rivers, marched two hundred forty miles, and won a significant skirmish, and they had reached Confederate General Joseph Johnston’s lifeline to Atlanta. Once there, they set about prying loose the tracks, using fence rails as levers, and building bonfires of wooden ties to melt and twist the steel.

  The Rebels were regrouping, and as Rousseau’s men worked at their destruction near the tiny town of Chehaw, a ragtag force, including men who had lately been patients at a Confederate military hospital in Auburn, arrived by train. The Union troops easily repelled the attack. Rousseau reported forty Confederate casualties, and he captured the train. The next day his men marched all day and night, during which they were forced to navigate a zig-zag ford of the swift-flowing Tallapoosa River in the dark, and many men and horses lost their footing and nearly drowned. Once they made it across, the opposite bank was so slippery that some had to dismount and hold on to their horses’ tails and be pulled to the top. The last of the troops made it across at about two or three in the morning. This, their third major ford, would be remembered as a particularly trying episode. Ohio Colonel Douglas Hamilton later noted, “Ever after, we referred to the crossing of that river, in that night, with a shudder, for the thought of it was as unpleasant as any battle we were ever in.” Remarkably, the only casualty was a young slave who drowned when his mule was swept away by the currents. Farther down the road, the raiders encountered a Rebel company of twenty old men and boys. They killed one and captured two.

  By eleven the next morning, a Sunday, they reached the town of Dadeville. Fearing an ambush, the 8th Indiana charged onto the square and down the side streets, capturing a handful of Rebels. They also unhitched horses and mules from buggies and wagons transporting women and children to church, then went to work tearing up the tracks again. In their zeal they nearly burned the entire town. First, sparks from their bonfires ignited the depot, and the fire threatened to engulf a nearby hotel and several commercial buildings. Horses tied to fences and hitching rails began to stamp and whinny, and a few broke loose and galloped away, troopers chasing after them. Men began frantically gathering up guns and ammo that were imperiled by the spreading flames. Eventually the blaze was contained, but the effort to fight it sapped the men of what little strength they had left. No doubt some wondered why Rousseau bothered to put out the fire, anyway.

  The presence of Rousseau’s raiders was now widely known. Church and plantation bells raised the alarm, and Confederate cavalry troops began to descend on the area from as far away as Mississippi—on foot, on horseback, by boats and trains. Remarkably, as Evans wrote, “Rousseau’s men were only vaguely aware of the widespread consternation and confusion they were creating.” Still, this much was clear: The work of destroying the railroads was complicated by the necessity of defense. General Sherman had warned Rousseau that the point of the raids was destruction, not engaging the Rebels, and Rousseau was concerned that holding the enemy at bay was diverting too much manpower from the task. According to Evans, Rousseau confessed during a moment of weakness, “I shouldn’t have got into this affair. I’m very much afraid this isn’t judicious.”

  When his forces arrived at Auburn on July 18, the men and horses were seriously fatigued. The marching was stressful and exhausting, and the raiders’ chief task—destroying the railroads—was hot, dangerous, and backbreaking. They were perennially short of food and water and exposed to both the blazing sun and occasional thunderstorms. It was not as if they were unused to being exposed, but now they were at large for an indefinite period of time, without even tents. Further complicating matters, more Confederate troops, bolstered by local volunteer forces, were arriving from all directions.

  Faced with the Rebels’ renewed strength, Rousseau decided to withdraw, believing his efforts had achieved the desired result. In addition to railroad tracks and telegraph lines, his men had destroyed a Confederate locomotive and several train cars, thirteen depots and warehouses, two gun factories, an iron works, a conscript camp, more than a thousand bales of cotton, several tons of tobacco, at least four wagons, and huge quantities of military supplies. They had also commandeered about three hundred slaves, as many horses, and four hundred mules. And they had done it while losing very few men. Though the Confederate Army repaired and reopened the railroad a little over a month later, there was no discounting the damage done. If nothing else, the Union cavalry now knew what it could do.

  The 8th Indiana led the returning column as a regimental band played, of all songs, “Dixie.” The men plodded along until 2 a.m., stopped for two short hours, and then took up the march again. They halted briefly at noon the next day to rest and forage for supplies, and then continued into the night. After another brief
rest they resumed marching at 5 a.m. and did not stop until they encountered pickets from General George Stoneman’s cavalry about three miles north of Villa Rica, Georgia, where they were finally safe within Union lines. They entered camp triumphantly, standing in their stirrups, holding their hats aloft, and cheering themselves.

  The jubilation was short lived. After traveling more than four hundred bone-rattling miles, the men were informed that they were scheduled to embark upon another raid—disappointing news, to say the least. As Fielder Jones cheerlessly noted in a later dispatch, “We had just returned from the long and fatiguing Rousseau expedition, and both men and animals were sadly jaded.”

  MCCOOK’S RAID WAS LARGELY a disaster. Sherman had decided to send Edward McCook, by now a brigadier general, and Colonel Harrison west of Atlanta, and Generals Kenner Garrard and George Stoneman east, with plans to rendezvous south of the city on the Macon & Western Railroad after they had destroyed railroad and telegraph wires and cut off General John Bell Hood’s avenues of retreat. Things did not go exactly as planned. After accomplishing the destruction east of Atlanta, Stoneman wanted to liberate Andersonville prison, and Sherman agreed to let him try, but only as a secondary goal. Stoneman made a unilateral decision to undertake the attempted raid, with disastrous results. Confederate General Wheeler sent three brigades after Stoneman and captured him and many of his men. The officers ended up in the nearby Camp Oglethorpe prison, and the enlisted men were marched to the dreaded Andersonville stockade.

  While Stoneman was on his way to prison, the companies of the 8th Indiana under Fielder Jones, which included Tolbert and Maddox, and which had been reduced by sickness and exhaustion to four hundred men, got lost. When they finally caught up with the rest of the regiment under Colonel Harrison, they rendezvoused with McCook, who was not the inspirational leader Rousseau had been. In April 1864, after getting his commission as brigadier general, McCook had written, “I am so tired of taking my share of this fight in little skirmishes and scouting parties that I would cheerfully risk the lives of and wind of the few anatomical steeds I have left for the purpose of getting my proportion of the glory, if there is any for the cavalry, in this campaign.” Not surprisingly, McCook’s mounts took a beating. Eighteen pack mules dropped dead in their harnesses during the twenty-six-mile trek from Turner’s Ferry to Campbellton alone. And on his beleaguered horses rode equally vulnerable men.

  To make matters worse, McCook’s raiders were hampered by inferior equipment supplied them by opportunistic government contractors. In a survival situation, such details mattered: A soldier could die if his reins broke or his saddle slipped. The saddles, McCook wrote in one dispatch, were “utterly worthless. The rawhide covering upon the saddle-trees is green, part of the wood green, and the whole construction imperfect…This fraud that is being practiced upon the Government by either Government contractors or Government inspectors, or both, is certainly sufficiently gross in its character to demand prompt investigation. The frauds of a set of unscrupulous speculators are rendering one of the most important and efficient arms of the service a burden instead of a benefit.” Here, then, was another disturbing survival lesson: A soldier’s life could be imperiled not only by inept officers but by greedy contractors counting their wartime profits in distant cities.

  The Rebels were meanwhile marshalling their forces again. Confederate General L.S. Ross reported on August 1 that he had tracked down and engaged a group of Yankees near the Owl Rock Church: “About noon we came upon the trail of the foe clearly defined by smoking ashes of burned wagons and the sad havoc and destruction of property everywhere visible, and the eagerness of all to overtake and chastise the insolent despoiler was increased two fold.”

  After crossing a pontoon bridge downriver from Campbellton on July 28, McCook reported that his men encountered Confederate snipers at “every hill on the road.” Leaving troops behind to distract the Rebels, he moved toward Palmetto, where he found and destroyed a commissary wagon train and killed at least four hundred Confederate mules. Some accounts put the number of slaughtered mules even higher, but however many it was, running sabers through hundreds of mules must have been grisly and sad. From there the men pushed on to Lovejoy’s Station, on the Macon & Western Railroad, where they cut the telegraph lines; burned the depot and the water tower; and destroyed cotton bales, stores of tobacco, bacon, lard, salt, and ordnance, and a mile of track. Harrison’s men reached Lovejoy’s Station later the same day and also began tearing up the tracks. Confused by Stoneman’s no-show, McCook eventually gave up on him and headed west.

  There was also confusion over McCook’s intended route, and the column made slow progress because of the bounty of their raids, occasional Rebel attacks, and the fact that the men had not bedded down for sixty hours. Reaching Newnan, the exhausted soldiers happened upon Rebel cavalry preparing to depart by train for Atlanta, who fired upon them from the train windows and nearby cellar doors and rooftops. “Yonder comes the Yanks now,” one surprised Rebel shouted over the wail of the locomotive. The 8th Indiana was outnumbered ten to one and fled after exchanging a few shots, then returned with reinforcements, at which point they were met by the similarly reinforced Rebels, under Generals Wheeler and Ross, the latter of whom reported, “Friends and foes were mixed up in the struggle, without regard to order or organization, and frequent hand-to-hand encounters were the consequence. Many instances of capture and recaptures occurred during the day, the victor one moment becoming a captive to his prisoner the next.” Ross proudly proclaimed the capture of nearly six hundred Union soldiers and flags from the 2nd Indiana and the 8th Iowa, the latter of which raised the white flag of surrender. He also reported capturing numerous pieces of artillery, ambulances, horses, and arms—none of which, notably, were mentioned in the Union dispatches. Eventually the 8th fled, leaving behind its beloved Colonel Harrison, who was separated from his command and found himself alone, without his horse. Unable to run because his calves were cramped from exertion, he was cornered by the Rebels and, like Stoneman, ended up in prison in Macon.

  After fleeing Newnan, the 8th was again surrounded by a superior Rebel force, and Colonel Fielder Jones called for a withdrawal. Amid the confusion, his mule trains and led horses stampeded, and once he managed to restore order and reclaim his troops, the men lost their way. One of his officers reported finding “an obscure road, but he could not ascertain where it led to.” Jones decided to follow it anyway. They soon ran up against a solid line of Rebels, at which point McCook, in command of the overall Union force, seems to have lost his nerve. “What shall we do? What shall we do?” he asked one of his officers, who told him contemptuously that he should fight. McCook ordered the officer to take command and “do the best you can.” The 8th attempted to cover the rear and left flank of the column, but to no avail. As Rebel reinforcements continued to arrive McCook reportedly told his officers, “We must get out of this!” but his men were determined to fight, if only to prevent being captured. For no obvious reason, someone let loose the mules and horses, and there was a stampede. When some semblance of order was restored, Jones led the 8th in a charge of the Confederate lines and later reported, “We moved out at a brisk trot, and so well were our forces in hand, and so sudden the movement, that nearly one-half the Eighth Indiana got through the lines without receiving a single shot, and, although the remainder of the column ran the gauntlet of a heavy fire of musketry, yet, strange to say, but 1 man was wounded, although the enemy was in some places near enough to almost touch the horses.”

  After passing through the Confederate lines, the men hurried on, burning bridges behind them. At the New River, Jones was forced to leave many of his precious horses behind. “Several attempts were made to swim the animals, but they were so thoroughly exhausted that the attempt had to be abandoned,” he reported. Soon after daylight his troops were again attacked by Confederate cavalry, and Jones was “compelled to leave 15 men, about 200 horses and mules in his hands. The most of the animals were unserv
iceable.” He escaped with the Rebels in close pursuit. Many of his dismounted men were exhausted and barefoot and could not keep up, so he ordered them to break off from the column and hide in the mountains while the rest advanced toward Rome, Georgia. “I must say that the physical powers of the men were pushed to the very verge of human endurance,” Jones later observed. “Five days and nights of almost constant duty in the saddle, added to the fourteen days’ rapid marching with Rousseau, would shake even the most robust constitution. Men fell asleep on their horses, and the most persistent efforts of their officers could not keep them awake.”

  The column arrived in Marietta, Georgia, on August 3. Jones reported one hundred of his men killed, wounded, or missing and said that three regimental doctors had “voluntarily remained in the hands of the enemy to care for our wounded.” No doubt many of the soldiers wished they had left well enough alone after Rousseau’s raids. This time there were no self-congratulatory cheers, and some of the soldiers were reduced to riding cows back to camp, where one of them collapsed and died of exhaustion.

  It took the Rebels only two weeks to repair the damage to the railroad. By then the 8th was on the road again, on yet another raid, this time under General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick, whom Sherman described as “a hell of a damned fool.” The routine was becoming familiar: Another inept general, another series of towns and dangerous roads, another set of tracks to destroy. At Jonesboro, the challenge was compounded by darkness and rain. “Everything calculated to confuse men we had here to contend with—an utter ignorance of the formation of the ground, the darkness of the night, with heavy rain, and the only information of the enemy’s position was gained by receiving his volleys of fire,” Jones wrote. Forced to withdraw, they marched on, continually skirmishing with the Rebels. On and on it went. Like McCook’s raid, Kilpatrick’s raid proved to be nothing to write home about, unless to decry his ineptitude.