Bragg's initial response, considerably less emotional, was to dispatch Patton Anderson to cover the withdrawal and to forestall any further Federal advance. Anderson's column arrived well after dark. Being unfamiliar with the ground, Anderson asked Brent to guide him into position. Brent conducted him to the open wood north of Wayne's Hill. After throwing forward a strong skirmish line, Anderson faced his columns to the front and deployed. A little before 9:00 P.M., Breckinridge appeared and ordered him to withdraw his line three hundred yards to the next belt of timber. Anderson complied, but soon discovered that he was alone. Apparently, Breckinridge had implied that he would support the Tennessean on both flanks; in reality, the Kentuckian had withdrawn his command another seven hundred yards. At 10:45 P.M., with the nearest friendly infantry eight hundred yards away, Anderson dispatched E. T. Sykes with a message to Withers that the brigade hung in the air. Withers passed this on to Bragg, who immediately called Breckinridge and Sykes to headquarters.
An aide-de-damp led Sykes through the sleet and darkness to the Murphy house, a fine mansion in the center of town. From there, Sykes was ushered into an elegantly furnished parlor, where he found Bragg with his corps and division commanders. Mudstained and weary, Sykes felt uneasy in “this galaxy of generals.” Bragg questioned him and, satisfied with the accuracy of his report, upbraided Breckinridge, who Sykes said acknowledged his error. Turning next to Hardee, he ordered McCown and Cleburne withdrawn from the west side of the river and formed behind the Kentuckian. Apparently the gathering closed amicably, although the bickering between Anderson and Breckinridge bode ill for the Army of Tennessee's command cohesion.15
Anderson's anxiety was wasted, as the Federals on the east bank had no intention of attacking. To the contrary, Rosecrans and Crittenden's primary concern was that Bragg might renew his attack. During the night, Rosecrans ordered Davis to relieve Miller and Stanley, and Crittenden added Milo Hascall's division for good measure.
While their generals tried to outguess Bragg, the soldiers of the Army of the Cumberland looked to their own comfort. With the enemy checked, William Erb and his messmates retraced their steps to the location of their abandoned supper. “By this time my chicken had been fought over twice by each army,” recalled Erb. “The cracker-box had been pierced by a score of bullets; but, when I lifted it off the kettle, my chicken…was still there, untouched and yet warm.” The little band sat down to a “glorious dinner.”
Jacob Adams of the Twenty-first Ohio went hungry, but he did find shelter. His regiment returned to the west bank late in the night to bivouac near a house long since abandoned by its owners. Rather than pass another sleepless night in the cold and rain, Adams entered the house and lay down among a group of recumbent soldiers. “They did not protest in the least,” Adams noted. He thought this peculiar, but was too tired to let it trouble him. When he awoke at dawn, after a sound sleep, he saw why they had been so accommodating: his bunkmates were corpses.
Alfred Hunter of the Eighty-second Indiana found neither food nor a dry place to sleep. West of the Nashville Turnpike, the sleet had let up at dusk. Taking advantage of the break in the storm, Hunter and his brother built a fire on an outcrop large enough to accommodate them both. After the blaze had dried the surface, they swept it clean and lay down for what they thought would be a warm, dry slumber. But the sleet returned with a vengeance, and Hunter found himself standing and cursing until dawn.
Despite the persistent rain and cold, the mood of the army was improving. The optimism Beatty had noted the night before was more general now, thanks largely to the sound thrashing handed Breckinridge. As Beatty observed, ambling among the campfires of his brigade:
There is more cheerful conversation among the men. They discuss the battle, the officers, and each other, and give us now and then a snatch of song. Officers come over from adjoining brigades, hoping to find a little whiskey, but learn, with apparent resignation and well-feigned composure, that the canteens have long been empty, that even the private flask, which officers carry with the photographs of their sweethearts, in a side pocket next to their hearts, are destitute of even the flavor of this article of prime necessity. My much-esteemed colleague of the court-martial, Colonel Hobart, stumbles up in the thick darkness to pay his respects. The sentinel, mistaking him for a private, tells him, with an oath, that this is neither the time nor place for stragglers, and orders him back to his regiment; and so the night wears on, and fifty thousand men lay upon their guns again.16
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THIS ARMY SHOULD BE PROMPTLY PUT IN RETREAT
BEN CHEATHAM and Jones Withers left the commanders’ meeting at the Murphy mansion deeply disturbed. Both had serious misgivings about remaining longer before Murfreesboro, misgivings that Bragg's unwillingness to rule out another attack and the transfer of Cleburne and McCown to the east bank (leaving Cheatham and Withers alone on the west side of Stones River with seven decimated brigades) only sharpened. And so they talked deep into the night.
As they talked, Cheatham and Withers found themselves in agreement on several points: that confidence in Bragg was wanting, that the troops were exhausted, and that to continue the battle was to invite disaster. Accordingly, they drafted an unorthodox letter to Bragg in which they spelled out their conviction that the army “should be promptly put in retreat.” Rather than challenge Bragg's fitness to command directly, they cast doubt on the ability of his lieutenants, asserting that only three reliable divisions remained and that, among even these, there were a number of brigades in which the soldiers lacked confidence in their commanders. In short, they wrote, “we do fear great disaster from the condition of things now existing, and think it should be averted if possible.” Cheatham and Withers delivered their recommendation to Polk, who forwarded it with his endorsement to army headquarters by staff courier.
Bragg was awakened at 2:00 A.M. After glancing briefly at the note from his bed, he snapped a reply to Polk's messenger: “Say to General Polk we shall hold our own at every hazard.”
This was not what Polk had hoped to hear. Perhaps regretting that he had not consulted with Hardee before endorsing the note, Polk wrote him at 3:00 to apprise him of its contents, his own endorsement, and Bragg's laconic reply. Hardee's response was no more encouraging. He told Lieutenant Richmond of Polk's staff that Bragg's reply had effectively closed the subject.1
That might have ended the issue, had Bragg not called Hardee and Polk to headquarters at 10:00 A.M. the following morning a changed man. Rosecrans had been reinforced, he told them, so that his army now exceeded their own by over two to one. Moreover, he asserted, the continued rain meant that Stones River would soon be a raging torrent, unfordable and capable of cutting the army in two. Perhaps, concluded Bragg, it would be wiser to withdraw than to face defeat in detail by a numerically superior enemy. Hardee and Polk agreed. At noon, Bragg issued orders for a movement of the army's trains and for the preparation of the troops for a night march.2
What had led to Bragg's change of heart? St. John Liddell offered the best explanation. Ducking into the Murphy house to escape a cold rain that fell the night of the third, the ubiquitous Liddell was surprised to find himself in Bragg's headquarters. Liddell did not hesitate, but immediately sought out Bragg to learn his intentions. Liddell found Bragg “thoughtful and hesitating.” Bragg told Liddell that the army was too tired to fight on. Liddell, still confident of victory, disagreed emphatically. Bragg switched his line of argument: Rosecrans had been heavily reinforced, he explained. Surprised, Liddell asked who had told him this. “Wheeler,” Bragg replied.
“It can't be so, for I have just come from the extreme left. I could have clearly seen the reinforcements approach, and I have seen none. Where is Rosecrans to get them from?” Liddell asked.
His logic was lost on Bragg. “It must be so. Wheeler seems assured of the fact,” Bragg sighed.
Liddell launched into an impassioned monologue: “General, don't regard his reinforcements. Even could I believe
such to be the case, everything depends on your success here. If you will throw your army between Rosecrans and Nashville, you will cut off all reinforcements. They will withdraw at the sight of your forces. Then I would fight Rosecrans to the last. I would rather bury my bones here than give up this field and our previous successes. Great results will follow this complete victory. You have Rosecrans in a close place. You have only to push him to extremities.”
To this Bragg revealed his deepest doubt: “General, I know that you will fight it out, but others will not.”
“Give the order, General, and every man will obey you,” answered Liddell.
“No, it has now become a matter of imperative necessity to withdraw. It must be done at once,” Bragg insisted.
Liddell returned to his brigade, convinced Bragg was wrong to rely so much on Wheeler's report of reinforcements. (Liddell, of course, was correct. Rosecrans had received no appreciable reinforcements.)
The Louisiana Brigadier could not mask his disappointment: “When I went back to my command, some of the men familiarly called out to me, ‘What's up now, General?’ I answered impatiently, ‘Ask General Bragg.’ They saw the hidden meaning and said, ‘Well, boys, retreat again. All our hard fighting thrown away, as usual.’”
The Confederate retreat began at 10:00 P.M. Breckinridge led the way through mud nine inches deep down the Nashville Turnpike. Withers followed an hour later. At 11:30 Bragg and his staff left Murfreesboro, bound for Shelbyville on the Duck River, ostensibly the objective of the withdrawal. Cheatham abandoned his position at 1:00 A.M., and Cleburne and McCown cleared Murfreesboro at dawn.
The retreat was a nightmare of suffering. It rained incessantly, the temperature hovered about freezing, and rations were short. The Sixth Kentucky received food only after it had marched eighteen miles on 4 January, and then was issued simply six ounces of flour. “We had no cooking utensils and nothing but this flour,” Squire Bush wrote disgustedly in his diary. “Our rations gave out at breakfast,” remembered Johnny Green. “The roads are terrific. Time and time again we had to march through liquid much which came way above our knees.”
Gervis Grainger's plight during the withdrawal was typical. Grainger had forded Stones River under fire twice on 2 January, stood on the skirmish line in the same wet clothes until 2:00 A.M. the following morning, passed the day without food, crossed the river again after dark, and marched eight miles before dawn. By the time his regiment halted at noon, Grainger was spent. He fell asleep on a log, only to awaken sick and chilled. Too weak to keep up with the regiment, Grainger was given permission to march at will. He found a horse and rode until he collapsed with pneumonia. A passing ambulance carried Grainger to Wartrace, and from there he was taken by train to Chattanooga, where he eventually recovered.
Compounding the misery of the soldiers was the lack of a clearly defined destination. Bragg initially directed a concentration along the Duck River, near Shelbyville. But on 5 January, just as the army made camp outside of town, he shifted the line of defense to the Elk River. As crossing sites had not been reconnoitered in advance, Bragg dispatched his chief engineer, S. W. Steeler, to report on the fords near Estell Mill, meanwhile halting the army near Tullahoma. Steele replied through Polk that only one of the two fords was adequate; the others would require repairs by sappers and miners. Again Bragg vacillated. Two days later, he returned to the Duck River as the objective of the withdrawal. Polk would occupy Shelbyville, and Hardee would make camp south of the river at Tullahoma. Colonel Brent, normally an apologist for the general, was shaken by Bragg's irresolution. While he praised Bragg's desire to hold as much of Tennessee as possible, he wished the general had settled on the Duck River line before leaving Murfreesboro. “The movement so far to the rear has had a bad effect on the troops and the public mind,” he admitted. “Spirits bad. Matters look gloomy.”
Spirits were bad indeed. Most of Bragg's lieutenants, believing as he did that Rosecrans had been reinforced, approved of the retreat. But the common soldier, knowing only that he had fought well and had bested Billy Yank more often than not, was confused and angry. “I can't see for my life why Bragg left Murfreesboro after whipping them so badly,” one private wrote his family from Tullahoma. “We have completely demoralized the Yankee army. There is no doubt but that the Yankees were badly whipped. General Bragg has…lost the confidence of the army and many think that there was no reason for the retreat from Murfreesboro, and that he will in consequence be removed,” another confided to his wife, adding that “the retreat has caused much alarm in this section, and many persons are preparing to leave with their Negroes.”3
The Army of the Cumberland had been hurt badly, so badly that Rosecrans never seriously contemplated a pursuit. Joe Wheeler, left behind to cover the withdrawal, was surprised to find the “enemy pickets…in the same position that they were when we changed our lines.” Not until late in the afternoon of 4 January did Rosecrans make his first tentative forward movement, edging Stanley's brigade along the railroad and turnpike toward town as far as the north bank of Stones River. As Stanley encountered nothing more than a handful of cavalry, Rosecrans advanced a battalion of Pioneers to rebuild the demolished trestle over the river.
Rosecrans was more confident the next day. At dawn, he directed Negley to occupy Murfreesboro with Stanley's brigade. While Morton continued work on the trestle, Negley crossed downstream and entered the town. There was no sign of Bragg's army. Wheeler had disappeared during the night to a new delaying position three miles below Murfreesboro astride the Manchester Pike. The way to Murfreesboro clear, Negley hastened to cross the remainder of his division. By 9:00 A.M. Miller had joined Stanley in Murfreesboro, and Federal cavalry was feeling its way toward Shelbyville and Manchester. A handful of Rebel stragglers surrendered to the troopers who, after a brief clash with Wheeler, were content to return to Murfreesboro.4
Meanwhile, on the battlefield, the disagreeable task of interring the hundreds of still-unburied dead went on. In many cases, identification was impossible; bloated and discolored after five days on the field, numerous Federal corpses were found almost naked, their coats, shoes, blouses, and trousers stripped off by poorly clad Confederates.
But as distasteful as the duty was, many soldiers, anxious to learn the fate of missing comrades, volunteered to assist the burial details. A few found friends and relatives, given up for dead, still alive. One infantryman from the Thirty-fourth Illinois discovered his brother resting on the second floor of a Murfreesboro residence. Some considerate troops from the Second Arkansas had carried the wounded Illinoisan to the rear, where he was loaded into a wagon and taken into town. There he passed three days with no medical care and only a canteen of water and an ear of corn. When his brother removed his trousers for him, they were so stiff with blood that, placed on the floor, they stood “as readily as two pieces of stovepipe would have done.”
Most were less fortunate than the brother of the wounded Illinoisan. Hoping to find his friend and former neighbor William Nash among the wounded, John Russell of the Twenty-first Illinois obtained permission from his brigade commander to accompany a burial detail. But Nash was dead. A bullet had cut through his chest during the retreat of 31 December, killing him instantly. Gathering up the body, Russell carried it into a wood a short distance from where the burial detail was rolling the regimental dead into a common grave. There he buried it. Russell scratched his friend's name and unit on a board, drove it into the frozen ground, and returned to his bivouac to write the dead man's family.
Not searching for anyone in particular but merely curious, Thomas Dornblaser of the Seventh Pennsylvania Cavalry visited the Confederate hospitals in Murfreesboro. Riding into town, the Pennsylvanian found most homes and all the churches filled with wounded. Dornblaser wandered into one such makeshift hospital, only to be momentarily driven back by the stench of open wounds. But his curiosity overcame his revulsion. “We sat down beside a poor fellow, shot through from breast to back,” Dornblaser rec
alled, noting every detail of the man's suffering with a morbid exactness. “A minie ball made a ghastly wound in his breast and lungs, from which the air was escaping at every breath. He was fully conscious that he had less than twenty-four hours to live.”
Conditions were little better in the Federal field hospitals. By 5 January, Corporal Hannaford felt well enough to sit and study his surroundings. All around him men were dying. In the cot opposite him, a soldier writhed as blood gushed from his nose, mouth, and a hole in his throat. Less fortunate than Hannaford, he had been struck in the carotid artery. While a surgeon was summoned, a nurse held the man upright to prevent him from drowning in his own blood; “but his endeavors, I saw, were hopeless. In less than five minutes the nurse was supporting only a drooping corpse.” The scene impressed Hannaford deeply. For days he replayed the soldier's final moments in his mind; “wounded in much the same spot, how soon might not the end of earth come so to me?”
One wonders how Hannaford and others like him would have felt, had they known that no such agony or nightmares troubled their leaders. Whiskey, the demigod of the officer corps, inured them to the suffering. Returning from a ride over the battlefield, John Beatty ran across Rousseau, McCook, and Crittenden, all of whom had been drinking heavily. Crittenden was the most drunk. As the party rode toward Rousseau's tent, where more liquor awaited them, the Left Wing commander, “in a voice far from melodious,” entertained all who cared to listen with a rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” “Evidently the lion had left the chieftain's heart, and the lamb had entered and taken possession,” quipped Beatty.5
Perhaps the Ohioan was too hard on his superiors. Although what they had accomplished fell considerably short of a decisive victory, they at least had avoided defeat at a time when the Union could scarcely have borne another setback.
No Better Place to Die- The Battle of Stones River Page 25