No Better Place to Die- The Battle of Stones River

by Peter Cozzens

  It was 2:00 P.M. before Adams reported to Polk. The bishop was reluctant to commit his brigade, but orders were orders. After listening to a brief description of the terrain and enemy dispositions, Adams agreed to assault a four-gun section of the Tenth Indiana Light Artillery perched on high ground near the river that had been wreaking havoc on Butternut infantry advancing toward the Round Forest.

  “Onward they came,” recalled the commander of the Sixth Kentucky (Union), “the colors of five or six regiments advancing abreast in line of battle…on the crest of the ridge. A further view of this line was intercepted by intervening inequalities of ground and woods.” These “intervening inequalities of ground and woods” conspired with the Cowan farm and its checkerboard of fences to impede Adams's advance, much as they had Chalmers and Donelson's. Unable to continue in line of battle, the Louisiana general fed his regiments through the farmyard individually. The Thirteenth and Twentieth Louisiana Consolidated snaked through the gate, reformed in the yard, and marched by the right flank off the ridge and toward the river. The Sixteenth Louisiana went next, skirting the eastern slope of the ridge on its way up the turnpike in column of companies. The Thirtieth Alabama, having moved by the left flank to avoid the farm, rejoined the Sixteenth as it neared the Round Forest.

  With all units now clear of the Cowan farm, Adams once again deployed his brigade in line and moved on the irksome guns. The Louisianians never stood a chance. Although they swept the Fifteenth Missouri from the field, Hascall's artillery stopped them short of the forest. Cockerill, Estep, Parsons, and Cox converged their guns on the Butternuts as they stumbled over bodies and discarded equipment; simultaneously, Colonel George Wagner—until now merely a spectator as Rosecrans, Palmer, and Hascall had alternated in deploying and redeploying his regiments—saw a chance to act independently as the right flank of the Thirteenth Louisiana passed by his front. At Wagner's command the Fifteenth and Fifty-first Indiana swept forward with fixed bayonets to take the Confederates completely by surprise, and within minutes, seventy-eight Rebels fell captive. His flank turned, Adams prudently pulled his men out of range. Thirty minutes of bitter fighting had contributed nothing to Bragg's goal of turning the Union left except four hundred twenty-six more dead and wounded.

  Tragically, the slaughter was not over. As quickly as Adams cleared the field, Brigadier General John Jackson's independent brigade stepped forward. The ease with which the Federals repulsed this fourth attack was ridiculous; the accompanying slaughter was sickening, the more so for its fruitlessness. “On they came in steady column, notwithstanding the murderous fire,” Gilbert Stormont observed from the ranks of the Fifty-eighth Indiana. “We could see their men falling like leaves, but the broken ranks were filled and they held their ground with a heroism worthy of a better cause. At last they had to yield, but they retired in good order, leaving their dead on the field.” Two hundred ninety-one more irreplaceable veterans were cut down in two suicidal charges; lying among them were the commanders of all three regiments of the brigade.10

  And still more killing lay ahead. The brigades of Preston and Palmer filed into Chalmers's abandoned rifle pits as the survivors of Adams's attack began streaming rearward. Breckinridge, at the head of Palmer's column, was horrified to see his Louisianians retreating in “considerable disorder” as fast as their feet could carry them. We can only imagine his wrath, directed at Polk, who had committed the brigades before their supporting lines had forded Stones River. Polk never explained his decision, an “error so palpable…as to render an excuse for failure necessary,” in the words of an eyewitness. Although Bragg had ordained the attack, he had left its timing and execution to the bishop; certainly Polk could have waited the hour necessary to muster all four brigades, rather than commit them individually to almost certain defeat.

  Darkness began to settle on the dreary, winter landscape as Palmer and Preston dressed their ranks behind the Cowan farm. Having witnessed four assaults by single brigades dissolve before the Round Forest salient, Polk elected to deploy Palmer and Preston simultaneously on line: Preston would drive across the blood-soaked cotton field pounded flat by Chalmers, Donelson, Adams, and Jackson; Palmer, on Preston's left, was instructed to approach Hazen from the west.

  Hazen narrates what followed: “The battle had hushed, and the dreadful splendor of this advance can only be conceived, as all my description must fall vastly short. His right was even with my left, his left was lost in the distance. He advanced steadily, and, as it seemed, certainly to victory. I sent back all my remaining staff successively to ask for support, and braced up my own lines as perfectly as possible.”

  Hazen, perhaps overwrought from having withstood so many attacks, was unduly concerned. There were, by this time, more Federal units on hand than could be squeezed into the front line; moreover, Hascall had replaced three of the most jaded regiments—the Second Missouri, Fiftieth Indiana, and Twenty-sixth Ohio—with the Sixth Kentucky, Fortieth Indiana, and Twenty-third Kentucky.

  Palmer and Preston's assault, when it came, was repulsed so handily that some Federals wondered whether it really represented a serious effort at taking the Round Forest. J. B. Palmer marched his Tennesseans into the cedars west of the Cowan farm correctly but, contrary to orders, they never came out. Palmer attributed his failure to emerge from the wood to Preston's inability to drive home the assault from the front—with Preston stopped so far short of his objective, Palmer saw no reason to sacrifice his command. So, after a loss of just two men killed and twenty wounded, Palmer instructed his men to bivouac for the night alongside what remained of Stewart and Coltart's brigades.

  Palmer may have had a point, although it is unclear whether Preston abandoned his attack before Palmer could initiate his flanking movement or as a result of the Tennessean's inactivity. In either case, Preston was justified in desisting as he did; certainly the sight of nearly one thousand dead or wounded strewn over just four acres was enough to give the general and his men pause as they neared the Cowan farm. Any notion Preston may have had of continuing forward he abandoned as his lines became snagged in the farmyard. The Federal artillery, accustomed to a turkey shoot as each Confederate brigade struggled among the outbuildings and picket fences, opened on the hapless Butternuts. Preston watched for a moment as his command “fell into a confusion under a crashing fire” and three of four staff officers went down around him, then decided to put a halt to the charade. Grabbing the colors of the Fourth Florida, he galloped over the rows of cotton and into the wood. Raising a cheer, the Floridians followed him “with enthusiasm.” Companies E, F, H, and K of the Sixtieth North Carolina heeded their example and entered the cedars after them, stopping only long enough to pluck bits of cotton from the few dried stalks left standing to stuff in their ears and dull the roar of the Union artillery. Only Company A, separated from the regiment near the farm, and the Twentieth Tennessee dared to challenge the Federal infantry. Hazen ordered his units to wait until the Butternuts were within one hundred yards, “when a single fire from my men was sufficient to disperse this portion of his line.” After taking a handful of prisoners from among careless Union skirmishers, the Tennesseans scampered to the protection of a neck of wood along the river bank.

  Although they repelled this final attempt to carry the Round Forest handily, the Federals had suffered. Cobb's Kentucky battery, reinforced by a section of the Washington Artillery, had torn large gaps in the Federal lines with well-directed fire from atop Wayne's Hill. In fact, one of Cobb's rounds almost robbed the Army of the Cumberland of its commander. While riding by Sheridan's reserve column on the way to the Round Forest, a solid shot flew past Rosecrans, sparing the general but decapitating his closest friend in the army, Julius Garesche. Rosecrans, his overcoat spattered with Garesche's brains, winced a moment, then regained his composure enough to turn to Sheridan and mutter something to the effect that good men must die in battle.

  Good men must die, but William Preston was not going to have any unnecessary blood on
his hands. Reflecting on the day's action as his men settled down for the night amid the naked oak and damp limestone outcrops, the Kentuckian had no cause to regret his decision to terminate the assault. “I lost a tenth of my command in the engagement,” he wrote after the battle, “and if I had hammered away like Adams would probably have lost half.” Regrettably, Bragg and Polk had been of a different mind.11

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WE LAID TO REST POOR BOYS GONE

  A heavy mist rolled over the battlefield. Above, a waxing moon drifted in and out of the clouds; below, the ground—churned to paste by thousands of feet—began to freeze as the temperature plummeted. The “dismal groans and cries of the wounded and dying,” punctuated by the rumbling of ambulances, replaced the crash of musketry and the roar of artillery.

  Those wounded left on the field who survived the night have handed down chilling tales of suffering. Joseph Teeter of the Thirty-fourth Illinois, among the first struck during McCown's dawn assault, fell on a cluster of small bushes near the Franklin road. Too weak to move, he lay facedown across the shrubbery, alternately losing and regaining consciousness, for three days until Federal ambulance stewards spotted him. Captain Womack of the Sixteenth Tennessee fared better. He lay in the cotton field where he had fallen only until dark, when his brothers crept forward to retrieve him. They carried him to a private residence in Murfreesboro, where he began a long convalescence. Corporal Hannaford of the Sixth Ohio, who had crawled away from his regiment in search of a quiet place to die, found himself still very much alive as the fighting sputtered out. Now aware that he had a chance for survival, Hannaford fashioned a signal flag from a knit sleeping cap and a stick in the hope of drawing attention to his plight. But no ambulance details came within hailing distance, and the Ohioan soon gave up in despair. As the minutes passed, the sky darkened, and the air grew colder. Hannaford realized that his chances of surviving a night in the open were slim; if the ambulance corps would not come to him, he would seek them out. Hannaford struggled to his feet, then started rearward:

  Reluctantly leaving my blanket, my haversack, and canteen, as a prize for some fortunate rebel, I wandered away back toward our lines. Across those corn and cotton fields again, now strewn with the dead and wounded—our own blue and the rebel gray mingled together—heedless alike of the piteous calls and prayers from every side for the assistance I could not give, and of the perils of shot and shell whistling past me; and at last I reached the turnpike, faint and exhausted. A little further down I came to a little, low log-cabin, with its strip of red flannel fluttering before it to indicate its present use, its two small rooms crowded hours before with the wounded and dying, and scores more sitting or lying around smoking fires on the outside. Ambulances were coming and going, freighted with their precious burden of maimed and helpless humanity; and still the wounded were accumulating constantly.

  I remember the almost hopeless weariness with which I sat down before the fire to wait my turn for removal, when a familiar voice called me. It was one of my own company, who had escaped this morning's ordeal of fire by a fortunate detail of a few weeks before on the “Pioneer Corps,” and whose kindness to me in this hour shall have an abiding place in my remembrance. He took off my cartridge-box, of which I had in vain tried to unburden myself, cleared for me a better place by the fire, rolled up a barrel for me to rest against, and as soon as possible procured me a seat in an ambulance; then, with such feeble thanks as I had strength to give him, we were driven off.

  The road was blockaded with troops and confused masses of artillery, ammunition trains, and ambulances; and stragglers, singly or in fragmentary squads, skulked about everywhere. The afternoon was waning fast, when we finally reached the field-hospital of our division, which had been established the day before about five miles back from Murfreesborough. It was a motley collection of tents—hospital, Sibley, wall, bell, flies, any thing, indeed, that could be found and made to afford shelter—pitched in a promiscuous heap in a large, open meadow, sloping up from the turnpike off to the left. No one could direct us to the hospital of the Sixth Ohio, and I was little able to go farther; so a place was presently made for me among our comrades of the Ninetieth, where I found needful care and rest at last.

  Others tried to follow Hannaford's example, but with considerably less success. Fellow Ohioan John Rennard of the Fifteenth, shot in the thigh while trying to cross the fence near the Smith farm, watched as the Confederates turned the house into a makeshift hospital. As the farm lay only two hundred yards away, Rennard was certain he could drag himself to it. “My feet were toward it, and I found I must get around with my head towards it,” he remembered. “I drew up my sound leg, anchored my heel in a horse track, and made the effort. But I might as well have tried to crawl away with my body chained to the rock of Gibralter.” Rennard collapsed, exhausted. About noon, a group of Confederates stopped to talk with him. “One of them asked if I was cold. I asked him if he did not see my teeth chattering.” The sympathetic Rebel gathered some discarded blankets, placed Rennard gently upon them, and then offered the Ohioan a sip of whiskey from his canteen. Rennard thanked his Butternut benefactor and, a bit warmer now, prepared for a night on the field.1

  There were many similar instances of kindness shown the wounded that night, as Colonel William Blake of the Ninth Indiana noted approvingly: “Before twilight I sent details to collect and bury my dead. A mutual truce was granted, in which the soldiers of both sides, without arms, gathered their fallen comrades without interruption. The fierce acerbity of the deadly strife had given place to the mutual expression of kindness and regard.”

  William Erb of the Nineteenth Ohio volunteered for one such detail. At midnight, he and a companion passed through their picket line. “Gliding from tree to tree, and much of the way creeping,” they evaded the enemy and reached the position their regiment had occupied that afternoon. “We found no one alive…. Peering through the darkness, we saw our line of battle plainly marked with dead bodies.” The Ohioans picked their way carefully through the line of corpses, at every turn recognizing the faces of friends: “At one place, near the right of the line, we saw two lying side by side, with another on top of the two. Then at right angles to these, was another with his head close up to his ‘breastworks.’ It was plain to us. The first three had been killed and the last had been mortally wounded, and, unable to get away, he had built a little barricade of his dead comrades and had lain down behind them to die.”

  A party of Confederates, approaching from the opposite direction, shook them back to the world of the living. Concealing themselves among the dead, they waited in silence until it became clear that the Rebels too were on a mission of mercy. Erb spoke first. “Hello, Johnny,” he whispered. “Hello, Yank,” came the reply. The two parties talked briefly—Erb learned that his comrade had been taken to an enemy field hospital—then returned to the work at hand. Erb and his companion passed from body to body, identifying the dead and straightening their stiffened limbs until, their work done, they bade farewell to the Confederates and returned safely to their bivouac.

  Other details were less fortunate in their chance encounters with the enemy. Some, such as that of the Thirty-eighth Indiana, were captured “while in the act of giving water to the wounded” and shipped to prison camps; others, such as that of the Fifteenth United States, convinced their captors to release them by citing the informal truce that both picket lines had agreed upon.

  Not all the soldiers who gave succor to the wounded were members of organized details. Many, moved by the “groans and cries of strong men stricken,” felt compelled to do whatever they could to ease the suffering. John Magee of Smith's Mississippi battery, riding over the field in search of harnesses, was so overwhelmed by the panorama of agony that he dismounted to build fires for as many as he could. For some, his efforts came too late: “Many, many were chilled to death already that might have been saved could they but have had attendance. I could not repress a few falling tears.”2r />
  Of course, there was no guarantee that those taken to hospitals would fare any better in the long run—there were simply too many wounded and too few surgeons. Sergeant James Maxwell of the Thirty-fourth Alabama, detailed as a hospital nurse throughout the battle, recalled: “We had no leisure, night or day. The house was filled by wounded and kept filled. As fast as one would die and be carried to his grave, another was put in his place.” Solon Marks, operating behind enemy lines at the General Smith plantation, frankly acknowledged the inadequacy of the care provided: “Many limbs were severed from bodies, not with the expectation of saving life, but to relieve the sufferer from an offensive mass and render his last hours more comfortable.” Corporal Hannaford, resting in the hospital tent of the Ninetieth Ohio, watched in silence as the surgeon made his rounds, until at last his turn came.

  “A very narrow escape, young man,” the surgeon remarked after examining Hannaford's neck wound.

  “A bad wound, doctor, I know; but if I do well, very well, is it possible for me to get through?”

  “If you were at home, I should not hesitate to say yes; but here in an army hospital, you know, the case is different. It is more than I should like to promise.”

  Ira Owen of the Seventy-fourth Ohio, shot in the leg, has left perhaps the most moving description of the plight of the wounded that night. Carried to a hospital near Stewart's Creek, Owen watched as orderlies brought in a steady stream of mangled soldiers:

  It was impossible to supply all the wounded with tents. Rails were hauled and thrown in piles…and large fires built. The wounded were brought and lain by these fires. Men were wounded in every conceivable way, some with their arms shot off, some wounded in the body, some in the head. It was heart-rending to hear their cries and groans. One poor fellow who was near me was wounded in the head. He grew delirious during the night, and would very frequently call his mother…. The poor fellow died before morning with no mother near, to soothe him in his dying moments, or wipe the cold sweat from off his brow. I saw the surgeons amputate limbs, then throw the quivering flesh into a pile. Every once in a while a man would stretch himself out and die. Next morning rows of men were laid out side by side for the soldiers’ burial.