Ominous sounds drifted through the cedars and across the fields, warning all who cared to listen. Out on the picket line of Carlin's brigade, Sergeant Lewis Day of the One Hundred First Ohio heard troops and artillery pass by all night long. Day and his comrades relayed the information rearward. “To this day, it seems strange that no attention was given to this matter,” Day later wrote. Others recalled similar experiences. Colonel Michael Gooding of the Twenty-second Indiana, in the second line of Post's brigade, claimed to have heard the murmur of voices from the Rebel positions. Even Johnson's chief surgeon, Solon Marks, deep in the rear at the division hospital along Overall Creek, distinctly heard the rumbling of moving artillery.22
The meaning of this was clear to at least one troop commander of the Right Wing. As the sound of marching troops continued unabated across the narrow valley to his front, Brigadier General Joshua Sill grew increasingly restive until, at 2:00 A.M., his anxiety got the better of him and he turned his horse rearward in search of his division commander, West Point classmate Phil Sheridan. Sill found him asleep at his headquarters, the trunk of a large fallen tree, some distance behind Schaefer's brigade. Sheridan listened patiently as his “modest and courageous” subordinate conveyed his fear of a Confederate troop concentration against his right flank, then walked with him across the open field south of the Harding house and into the tangled forest where the Thirty-sixth Illinois and Twenty-fourth Wisconsin rested. They paused along the picket line to hear the unmistakable sounds of moving artillery and infantry, then, returning to their mounts, rode to McCook's headquarters near the Gresham house. The Right Wing commander was asleep on a bale of straw. Sheridan awoke him and, with Sill, proceeded to explain the threat as they perceived it. McCook dismissed their concerns on the grounds that Crittenden's early morning attack would put a swift end to any Confederate designs against the Union right.
Sheridan and Sill were not convinced. Back at division headquarters, the two sat on the fallen tree and continued to ponder their dilemma. Sill's agitation grew with each passing minute. To calm him, Sheridan directed the Fifteenth Missouri and Forty-fourth Illinois forward to reinforce his brigade. Steadied somewhat, Sill returned to his command to place his two newly acquired regiments in line. Sheridan watched him go, then quietly began walking from regiment to regiment, personally waking each commander and seeing that he had his men under arms long before daylight.23
Out on the extreme right the mood of indifference continued, with two minor exceptions. Lieutenant Colonel Fielder Jones of the Thirty-ninth Indiana sent forward a company-sized reconnaissance patrol at 3:00. They returned to report that they had neither seen nor heard anything. Meanwhile, Kirk had dispatched two staff officers, Captain C. P. Edsall and Lieutenant A. T. Baldwin, to check the brigade outposts. They also found only silence. The monotonous firing between the picket lines had subsided and now, at 4:00 A.M., “all the recent signs of activity in the enemy's camp were hushed. A death-like stillness prevailed in the cedars to our front.” In less than three hours it would be shattered with a fury that none who survived would ever forget.24
CHAPTER SEVEN
BOYS, THIS IS FUN
MORNING came. The darkness melted into a cold, gray mist that dampened the air and depressed the senses. At five o'clock Johnson's division was quietly awakened, and the long blue line came slowly to life as sixty-two hundred drowsy, shivering infantrymen rose from the frozen ground to build their breakfast fires and boil their coffee. It was their first opportunity to evaluate their positions by daylight, and the men of Willich's brigade may have paused a moment to inspect the surrounding countryside. Perhaps what they saw comforted them. There was ample cover to be had, a clear field of fire to the front, and a trail known locally as Gresham Lane running to the rear, should the need arise for a hasty movement in that direction. Eight yards wide as it bisected Willich's line from north to south, Gresham Lane ended at the Franklin road, which in turn followed the trace of the Union line from east to west and was bordered by a wooden fence. On the west side of Gresham Lane, in the angle where the two roads met, lay an open wood three hundred thirty square yards. Surrounding it were cleared fields, the largest extending southward some twelve hundred yards.
More by chance than design, Willich's brigade was deployed so as to avail itself of the natural cover. In line behind the split-rail fence, fronting south, were the reserve companies of the Thirty-ninth and Thirty-second Indiana; the remainder of both regiments were on brigade picket duty seven hundred yards to the south. Next came the Forty-ninth Ohio. It lay within the wood, the regimental front some thirty yards north of the Franklin road. Formed in double column and closed in mass, the Eighty-ninth Illinois rested behind the Ohioans. Willich had placed his remaining units so as to protect the brigade flank: on the western edge of the wood, perpendicular to the Forty-ninth, was the Fifteenth Ohio; wedged between the Buckeye State regiments was Battery A, First Ohio, four of its six guns trained westward.
Arrayed along a narrow belt of timber on Willich's left were the four front-line regiments of Kirk's brigade. Their alignment was flawed. Only the Thirty-fourth Illinois, on the brigade right just north of the Franklin road, had a clear field of fire; the remaining three regiments of infantry—the Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth Indiana and Seventy-seventh Pennsylvania—found themselves locked within the dense cedar brake, their visibility restricted to the line of trees and underbrush to their immediate front. Why Kirk took no action to advance his line is perplexing. That it could be done without bringing on an engagement had already been demonstrated: Kirk's pickets had advanced to the glade's edge without encountering a single Rebel. What's more, Kirk had been ordered into position early in the afternoon the day before, leaving ample daylight for such adjustments. But Kirk, like his division and corps commanders, continued to display a singular lack of concern for preparedness, and the brigade remained as it had been.1
It was now half past five. Breakfast fires burned heartily. Huddled in small groups, the men sipped coffee and discussed the chances of battle being joined before the day's end. Officers handled their units as though they were a reserve posted safely in the rear, rather than a dangerously exposed army flank resting within seven hundred yards of the enemy. As the minutes passed and the silence remained unbroken, the sense of peril seems actually to have diminished. Unable to find water during the night, Captain Warren Edgarton of Battery E, First Ohio, released half a battery of horses five hundred yards to the rear at daylight to a recently discovered stream. At his campsite near the Gresham house, McCook enjoyed a leisurely shave. Lieutenant J. H. Woodward, continuing his informal inspection of the Federal right, encountered Willich at breakfast. Woodward dismounted to join him. He found the Prussian relaxed and jovial. “They are so quiet out there that I guess they are all no more here,” was Willich's reply to a dispatch from Johnson reminding him to have his men up and at arms before daybreak. “His whole manner impressed me with the feeling that he had no apprehension of an attack upon his front,” recalled Woodward.
Willich should have known better. At fifty-two he was among the eldest and most experienced officers in the Army of the Cumberland. His military education had begun in 1822 when at the age of twelve the Koenigsberg, Prussia, native entered the academy at Potsdam; six years later he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the royal artillery. Willich's unabashedly republican sentiments assured the failure of his military career: thirteen years passed before his promotion to captain; his attempted resignation five years later met with a transfer to a lonely outpost in Pomerania. But the Prussian perservered. He continued submitting his resignation until he was at last court-martialed and discharged from the army. Joining the revolutionists, Willich rose to corps command before defeat at the battle of Candarn caused him to flee to Switzerland. In 1853 Willich arrived penniless on the eastern shore of the United States; within five years he had risen to editorship of a leading German language newspaper in Cincinnati. At the outbreak of the Civil War the indomit
able Prussian joined the Ninth Ohio as a private. His talents were quickly recognized, and he was given a brigade command shortly after Shiloh.
Finishing his breakfast, Willich left Woodward and rode rearward to confer with Johnson. On his way he met Colonel William Gibson of the Forty-ninth Ohio. The two talked briefly. Willich remarked that he would be absent from the front, and that if anything were to occur beyond the picket line, the Thirty-ninth and Thirty-second Indiana's reserve companies should be advanced to its support. Gibson acknowledged the order, and Willich continued on his way.2
Out on the picket line all was quiet. Perched atop split-rail fences or reclining against cedars, the sentinels gazed absently into the twilight. And then, at 6:22 A.M., they saw it.
Emerging from the gray fog was a wall of Butternut: forty-four hundred men of McCown's division, mostly battle-hardened Texans and Arkansans arrayed in a long double line with the division of Pat Cleburne trailing five hundred yards to the rear.
Rising at the first hint of dawn, they had formed ranks quietly and without breakfast—or for that matter any sustenance at all, save a small but well-received ration of whiskey. “Be quiet—get your men in line—see that their guns are in order—let there be no talking or laughing,” were the commands whispered along the ranks. All equipment except haversacks and canteens was shed. A nervous tension gripped the men as the final preparations were made. Two days of inactivity, of lying still in the cold and dampness, had taxed their patience to the limit. Any movement was welcome. “When the orders came that the command would move forward,” recalled Colonel M. F. Locke of the Tenth Texas, “it was difficult to restrain the expression of joy…manifested by the men at the opportunity being presented upon an open field…of relieving ourselves from this unhappy condition.” McNair brought forward his right-flank regiment one hundred fifty yards to correct his alignment. McCown ordered skirmishers shaken out fifty paces in advance of the main body. A final command not to fire until ordered was issued, and the Butternut ranks rose to their feet and surged forward.
On they came with deliberate and measured steps. Brigadier General James Rains's brigade occupied the left, the dismounted Texas cavalrymen of M. D. Ector held the center, and the dilatory McNair was on the right. A spattering of musketry finally rattled from the dazed Union picket line, startling Willich and Johnson, who had been talking at division headquarters, but drawing no response from the advancing Confederate wave, now within two hundred yards of Kirk's lines. After frantically calling back his horses from the rear, Edgarton opened on Ector with a volley of canister. With that the Texan ordered his men forward at the double quick, and the Union picket line disintegrated.
Among the first to fall was young John Gorgas of Company A, Thirty-fourth Illinois. Abandoning his post on the picket line at the first sign of the approaching Confederates, Gorgas was running rearward when struck in the hip by a minie ball. But his desire to escape the Rebels was greater than the pain, and he continued despite being hit by a second round that pierced the left side of his neck. A call from behind of “halt, you Yankee” caused him to look over his shoulder in time to catch the ball in the side that finally knocked him down. Miraculously, Gorgas survived.
Ector was now closing fast, and Edgarton's horses still had not returned. Faced with the imminent loss of his artillery, Kirk turned to Major Alexander Dysart and ordered him and his Thirty-fourth Illinois into the cornfield to meet the enemy and buy time for Edgarton. It was a gallant but fruitless gesture: the hopelessly outnumbered Thirty-fourth pushed forward just seventy-five yards before a volley from the Tenth Texas halted it. That was enough to convince Dysart—who had already lost his stomach for the obviously uneven fight—to order a withdrawal back to Edgarton's battery. His men reached it to find that “everything was confusion”; nevertheless, they made a stand around the guns. Five blueclad color-bearers fell before Locke's Texans finally seized the standard and the Thirty-fourth collapsed. Left without infantry support, the Ohio artillerymen could manage only one more volley of canister before the Confederates surged past the guns. The entire battery fell, but it was a prize dearly won: the Thirtieth Arkansas lost seven of ten company commanders in the initial advance and the highly regarded Colonel J. C. Burks was mortally wounded in the final rush. Hiding his wound, he continued at the head of his regiment until, weak from loss of blood, he tumbled from his mount and died.
Only five minutes had passed since the opening volley, yet everywhere Kirk's line was crumbling. Kirk himself was down, struck in the thigh by a minie ball. Captured as his brigade abandoned the field, the Illinois brigadier would be exchanged the following year and taken to his home in Sterling, where he would linger for seven months before dying from the effects of his wound.
Brigade command now passed to Colonel Dodge, but it was an empty honor. Dodge could only watch helplessly as McNair, moving by the left flank, slammed into the Thirtieth and Twenty-ninth Indiana. Neither regiment gave a good account of itself. Lieutenant Colonel Orin Hurd withdrew his men as soon as the picket line was hit, despite having lost only two men from his reserve companies. Captain John Lavender of the Fourth Arkansas vividly recalled the collapse of the Thirtieth Indiana: “The line…raised a yell and charged the Feds like a storm taking them completely by surprise…. Their coffee pots was on the fire frying their meal, guns in stacks.” The Twenty-ninth fared little better. Although the Hoosiers tried to hold their ground and engage McNair, they found their field of fire—such as it was in the dense thicket—blocked by the regiment's own skirmishers. Not until McNair's infantry was within twenty yards were the men of the Twenty-ninth able to deliver a volley. Although well-directed, it produced “no visible effect.” By this time Ector had gained their rear, and Dodge ordered a retreat.
Only the Seventy-seventh Pennsylvania remained on the field. Having moved laterally by the left flank in order to engage the Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth Indiana with superior firepower, McNair was able to bring only his right-flank regiment, the First Arkansas, to bear on the Pennsylvanians. In one of the morning's few equal contests, the Seventy-seventh bested the Arkansans, driving them through the cornfields and back onto the narrow stream west of the Widow Smith house. The Pennsylvanians continued their pursuit until, isolated by the retreat of the Thirtieth Indiana, they too withdrew, falling back one hundred fifty yards to join Post's brigade.3
With Kirk swept from the field, McCown turned his attention to Willich. The first indication Willich's infantrymen had of the impending onslaught was the sound of rapid firing from Kirk's front that came “while we were blowing our coffee cool enough to drink,” recalled a veteran of the Fifteenth Ohio. Colonel Gibson, in temporary command of the brigade in Willich's absence, heard the firing too; glancing at his watch, he noted the hour as 6:25. He sent a staff officer after Willich and then prepared to receive the attack.
Gibson's troops were no more ready for battle than Kirk's had been. Although the Confederates were sweeping down on them from the southeast, four of the five Union regiments fronted southward, leaving their flanks exposed to an oblique attack. And like the cannoneers of Kirk's brigade, the men of Battery A, First Ohio, had unhitched the horses from their limbers; when the attack came, the drivers were grazing them in the field west of their position. But it was the disintegration of Kirk that really made the defeat of Willich inevitable: even with these liabilities of position and preparedness, Willich may have been able to offer a respectable challenge to McCown's Rebels had it not been for the refugees from Kirk's shattered regiments streaming through his lines and obscuring the fields of fire of his infantry.
The Thirty-ninth and Thirty-second Indiana, hit first, were swept from the field as much by the weight of Kirk's panicked soldiers as by the Confederates. On the picket line when Ector struck his regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Fielder Jones looked back to see his reserve companies melt away as the pursuing Texans interposed themselves between his pickets and the brigade main body. The pickets of the Thirty-second Indiana found
themselves in a similar predicament as Lieutenant Colonel Frank Erdelmeyer was unable to draw them in or assemble his seven remaining companies before they too were stampeded.
The Forty-ninth Ohio collapsed next. The Ohioans’ rifles were stacked and empty when Ector struck, and he swept them aside with ease while Rains gained their rear. “Oh such a sight I never want to see again,” Private James Cole confessed to a friend after the battle. “Just think…men running every way and no one knew where to go but to try and get out of danger.”
While Ector's left rolled up the Forty-ninth Ohio, his right confronted the Eighty-ninth Illinois. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Hotchkiss had had his men lie down while the shattered regiments passed through his ranks, and so was ready for the Confederates. Rising up, the soldiers of the Eighty-ninth delivered a volley that temporarily halted the Rebels, now within fifty yards. A spirited exchange followed before Hotchkiss—having no orders and seeing the brigade crumble around his regiment—reluctantly directed a withdrawal by the right flank.
Hotchkiss had received no orders because the brigade was without a commander: Gibson had been dismounted and isolated from his staff; Willich had returned from division headquarters only to fall captive—in his haste to rally his troops the excited Prussian had blundered into the midst of Ector's Texans.
Only the Fifteenth Ohio remained to put up a stand that was as comical as it was brief. Through a series of intricate maneuvers better suited to the parade ground, its commander tried to bring the regiment around to face the attacking Rebels. Having stepped a few paces forward, the men were attempting a countermarch when they were greeted by the stunned and bleeding survivors of the Forty-ninth Ohio. Ranks intermingled, the Confederates surged past their flanks, and the retreat began. “We stood to deliver our fire and say good morning, then took to our heels and ran,” gibed Private Robert Stewart.4
No Better Place to Die- The Battle of Stones River Page 11