He told Jarom he’d become disoriented, that in the excitement of the attack he’d been carried along much farther than he’d planned to go.
“All these hills look pretty damn much alike,” he said, “especially after we’d climbed three of four. First thing we know, we got turned around, and here we are at suppertime not daring to light a fire. We’re scattered all to hell in these woods between this ridge and the next.”
Jarom said he knew the way back.
“But can you guide us in the dark?”
Jarom said that he could, adding that the route they’d follow would keep them mostly shielded from fire.
“But how can we move without firing a torch?”
“We’ll feel our way,” Jarom said, projecting a confidence he wasn’t sure he could keep.
This pacified Colonel Hanson, who passed an order to collect as many of the outliers as they could to quit this place forever. He ordered the men to stick close, each to follow the man ahead of him. He made provision for litters to carry those wounded who couldn’t move by their own power. As much as the terrain permitted, he put out flankers to probe the darkness and prevent an ambush. Jarom leading, they snaked along the slough and by the edge of the woods, then into the ravine back to their lines, feeling their way until the landscape seemed more familiar. At one point Jarom heard enemy pickets and spotted a huge fire along a fringe of woods. Around it they could make out figures seated on the ground, their bodies angling toward warmth. Though these men easily could have been taken or killed, Hanson had no more heart for fighting, and they crept past the fire. Along the way they found six wounded men—four of their own, two of the enemy’s. When they crossed the embrasure into their line again, Graves shook Jarom’s hand and promised to make a full report to General Buckner. At formation the next morning Buckner, a serious man whose long mustaches extended across his face like wings, called Jarom to the head of the ranks and commended him before the company for acts of exemplary valor. Groggy, in his mind still threading his way in the darkness along the slope, Jarom stepped back into the ranks, wanting nothing more than sleep.
From that moment of triumph when Jarom felt he’d earned the respect he craved, things took a turn for the worse. The Fourth Kentucky had lost sixteen men on February 13, but another enemy, the weather, deployed its forces for an assault the next morning. By dark the temperature had dropped to ten degrees, freezing the water in Jarom’s canteen. Water seeping into the rifle pits hardened to ice so that moving even a few feet became a triumph of ingenuity. During the night several of the wounded, including two who had not been lost in the valley after nightfall, froze where they lay. Dozens suffered from frostbite. There was nowhere to send them, neither hospital nor cubicle of warmth in a farmhouse, because Grant, flushed with his victory at Fort Henry, had surrounded their fortification. A chain of ironclads forestalled evacuation along or across the river.
Jarom and Patterson hunkered in their dugout, getting up to fuel the fire and stomping their shoes against the frozen ground to keep their blood circulating. Jarom could feel the cold pry its way through his underclothes, the flannel vest he’d scavenged on the field, his woolen jacket, the blanket in which he shivered. The cold knifed through to the bone, where it established little outposts of numbness in his toes and fingertips. Worse, that night the order came down not to build fires, inside the huts or out, since sharpshooters had been posted along the edge of the woods, dropping anyone who stood out against the ridgeline. There was little to do except huddle under the flimsy shelter while the generals devised some means to sever the noose that threatened to strangle them.
In the morning, orders came that they would attack to the rear of the river to open a way for a retreat to Nashville. At half past six, before light had filtered down to the frozen backwaters, Bushrod Johnson led his men out of the gullies to attack Grant’s right wing. He aimed, as Graves surmised, to run a sweep of the Wynn’s Ferry road, the one remaining route of escape to Nashville. Attacking at dawn, Johnson caught the federals off guard. After what reports later described as a “brisk little scrap,” the enemy line folded in on itself. Elated, Bushrod Johnson bragged to his superiors that he’d “busted ’em up and scattered ’em from hell to breakfast.” An hour later, Buckner punched a hole in the federals’ left wing, pushing it far enough that the Wynn’s Ferry road could be held open for several hours, long enough for most of the army to escape.
Rice Graves, returning with orders, instructed the battery to direct its guns beyond the point along the road where the Second Kentucky had made its attack. Jarom and the others wheeled the nine-pounder around to a position where its dark muzzle aligned with a tongue of trees beyond the advance on the ferry road. From his nest above the low ground Jarom watched the even ranks of the Second Kentucky, three rows of them. The pale morning sun caught the gray of their backs and glinted from whatever metal was exposed. They marched in perfect order two hundred yards across a field toward Grant’s army secreted in the woods. He watched as the line seemed to buckle under the first fire, ranks closing in perfect order to fill the gaps where those in front went down. Jarom expected the command to return fire, but Hanson held back as his first rank approached the timber, their battle flag clearly visible in the smudges of smoke rising from the brush along the woodline. The troops did not return fire until they came within forty yards of the woods. Then they rushed into the dark mesh of trees, where the firing grew more intense. From a distance, the din reminded Jarom of a bonfire crackling through meshes of sticks. Looking back along the route at their march, Jarom saw a spoor of dead and wounded soldiers, a straggler or two trailing off toward the high ground in the cautious and crouching way of skulkers and survivors.
Graves gave commands to fire the nine-pounder. Touched off, the muzzle erupted with a deafening blast; the jolt of the barrel as it recoiled called for constant alertness lest it break an arm or knock the wind from their lungs. Jarom’s part was to ram home the charge, stepping out from the bore after setting the charge and ball, packing the powder and shot for maximum compression. As he raised the rammer time after time, he devised a kind of rhythm that made the movements of the crew steps an elaborate dance of precision and elegance in which each partner, like a practiced waltzer, grew accustomed to the others’ cues and gestures.
Moving from gun to gun, Graves personally directed the fire, sometimes elevating or lowering the muzzle to sight along a more favorable line, sometimes igniting the fuse himself. Hatless, he zipped about giving orders, his look of intense concentration setting a tone of high seriousness they all adopted in firing. Flushed red as a pepper, he ordered the crews to land shells twenty yards into the woods, then forty yards, then sixty, following the invisible foe as it presumably pulled back under the advance. His prompts were not so much visual as auditory, possessing as he did an uncanny sense of where the shot would most lethally fall. After a time, he ordered the crews to change their charges to canister and grape, elevating or lowering the fire wherever he imagined blue clusters. The firing raked blindly into the woods as hail might perforate the leaves of a tree. When the gun came to rest, Jarom and his gunmates again cupped their hands along its curvature for warmth.
Even before Hanson’s men entered the woods, the firing transformed the verticals to wreckage, reminding Jarom of a timber stand he’d once seen after a bouncing tornado had touched down. Trees in one small area had been felled as though struck by a giant mallet, a few feet from those that stood perfectly intact. Along the fringes of the woods, few trees remained unbroken and whole. Where fire had been most concentrated, the ground resembled a hayfield through which a swath had been mowed, not cut but bludgeoned as with a dull scythe that battered and bent everything it couldn’t cut. But among the mangled trees lay humans. The advance ground everything in its path to splinters, the dead lying in ragged windrows. Despite his ability to detach himself from what appeared so remote and minute, despite the abstract quality of so wide a panorama, the spectacle left Jarom shak
ing. He felt a constriction in his throat and an uneasiness in his bowels that made him think he would vomit.
During the early moments when those defending the woods clashed with those entering, a sober young man named Estin Polk was reassigned to swab the bore of Jarom’s nine-pounder. He was a native of Warren County, and Jarom knew the family name and even had talked with him about acquaintances they had in common. Polk’s people were farmers, owning a boundary of poor land in the knobby region of the county. He told Jarom his parents were poor, never had a stone. He told him that though there was no public school in his section, when he could he had attended a nearby academy where he had learned his letters and received his call to enter the Baptist ministry. Pious and shy among his comrades, he had been stuck with the moniker of Parson Polk, a name he accepted with a semblance of pride. Jarom had asked why he did not strike back at the scoffers.
“Such men we call Hellfire Christians,” he’d said. “When the ground starts shaking and the ground opens to reveal the burning pit, they are first to drag themselves forward for absolution. When the pit closes, they will go back to their unrepentant ways. I am not the Word. I am only the bringer of His Word.”
After each discharge of their piece, Estin Polk was assigned to swab out the leavings of the shot to prevent debris from accumulating and causing the muzzle to explode. Closest to the cannon’s eruptions, he had dark rings around his eyes and complained to Jarom after several detonations that the smoke shortened his breath. Patterson, no friend to religion, ragged him without stint, gibing him about getting singed if he drew too close to what he now called “the devil’s trumpet.”
Jarom thought Polk was decent enough and held no strong opinion on the existence of a deity, never having given the matter much thought. Though religion was a fever with Polk, he kept accounts of his spiritual struggles to himself. From what Jarom observed, Polk did not hang about and gossip with his messmates. He kept pretty much to himself except on Sunday afternoons when he conducted a kind of Bible society. Other days he spent his free time with his nose in the Testaments, a batch of bound sermons, or one of the American Tract Society pocketbooks that circulated around the camp. No exhorter to salvation, he delighted in quietly poring over Scripture and practicing unstinting good works.
“He’ll read that Bible to tatters,” Patterson said.
Because many in the regiment lacked skills to put pen to paper, Polk often took down their messages home. To his credit, though never known to sample strong drink or utter a profane word, he neither scorned nor scolded those who did. No ranter, he ministered by example. At camp meetings, it was said that he was prayerful and when the need arose would willingly act as chaplain and read words over the wounded or dead. His favorite hymns, he once mentioned to Jarom, were “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand” and “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.”
On the slavery question he held strong views. “The Southern Confederacy,” he declared to Jarom, “must humble itself, must renounce slavery and seek genuine spiritual redemption among Christ’s company through individuals leading the Christian life.” Jarom decided that Estin for his own peace of mind could countenance no middle ground. Estin, Jarom believed, knew that his stance on slavery was scorned by fire-eaters in the regiment, but he was tolerated because he performed his duties as a soldier with the same diligence and efficiency as his ministry, his work contributing to loosing storms of shot upon his fellow mortals. He had never skipped a roll call or complained about rations of tainted pork and inedible bread as the others did. Whenever Jarom saw him about camp or at his post, he was clean-shaven, having scraped his jaw with a straight razor and whatever softener he could concoct to cure the whiskers—precious portions of hand soap or even dollops of lard. Jarom attributed this obsession with cleanliness to a desire not to encounter his Maker looking less than his best.
Estin’s death raised more questions about the nature of the divine than ever his preachments did. During the cannonade, as he rammed a charge down the muzzle, his head and back exposed through the embrasure, he was struck in the nape of the neck by what Rice Graves later reckoned was a spent bullet.
“It was as though God had tapped him,” Patterson said, “wanting to get his attention.”
This freak shot descended out of the sky almost providentially and thumped against his upper spine, scarcely penetrating the skin but killing him instantly. Without a sound he reeled and dropped to his knees in a parody of prayer, pitching against the gun carriage and almost into Jarom’s lap. The bullet had traveled so slowly that it might have been dodged had he seen it coming. Examining him, Rice Graves found a raspberry bruise at the base of his brainpan, the head nodded to one side abnormally.
“The rain surely doesn’t trouble itself much,” Patterson said, “about who it falls on.”
He and Jarom eased the body off to a place where they wouldn’t have to see him until they laid him in the common pit dug for the ones who had fallen that day. There was no time for words at his burial.
Despite Hanson’s temporary success in rolling up the road, it was General Pillow’s attack that finally opened a route to evacuate the fort.
Overrunning General McClernand’s encampment, Pillow captured six guns and put two thousand federals out of the battle. Since the defenders of Donelson had no food to feed the prisoners, Pillow had paroled them, exacting a pledge not to take up arms again under penalty of being shot if captured. All the ground within the immediate vicinity of Jarom’s battery was under Confederate control again, and the federals had not had sufficient time to organize a counterattack. Jarom noted that even the wind seemed to cooperate, trees in the distance along the road coming to view again as smoke was swept from the hillside. An acrid smell of burning sulfur had worked its way into Jarom’s clothes and blankets, inflaming his eyes. All the cannoneers appeared tearful.
Though the stage was set to wedge the Confederate defenders between Grant and Nashville, the opportunity dissipated as quickly as the smoke when Pillow inexplicably ordered a retreat, this at a time when everyone was anxious, as Patterson put it, to fly the coop. It was common knowledge among everyone in the army that Grant was receiving reinforcements by the hour and that the strength of the Confederate army was declining, with no realistic hope of any relief. It was also clear to everyone except the generals that the opportunity to break the ring must be seized before it too was lost. Soon, everyone heard Pillow’s order. Perplexed, angry, they knew that on that single decision rested the chances of winning or losing the campaign—the whole game, as Patterson said.
Buckner, a scrapper less concerned with caution than honor, protested the order, but Floyd, a politician who had no military experience, went along with Pillow, an act his troops regarded as amounting to rank cowardice. As Jarom interpreted it, in one almost treasonous stroke the defenders of Donelson without a fight had forfeited everything they’d gained, and giving up under any circumstances went against his grain. So, without any cost in blood, Grant’s eager newcomers quickly retook the ground they had lost, placing his troops in a suitable posture to attack at first light. In less than an hour, the mood of jubilation of the army turned to gloom. Colonel Hanson, who had made deliverance possible, cupped his face in his hands and cried.
“ ‘The privates win the fights,’ ” Patterson said, quoting the old saw, “ ‘and the generals lose the battles.’ ”
As if anything could be worse, the generals who had bungled the victory with their decision to surrender withdrew themselves from humiliation by deserting during the night. Before absconding, General Floyd said he feared surrender because he might be hanged as a traitor, having served as secretary of war under President Buchanan. This had the effect of raising the suspicion that he was indeed still in the employ of the government and thus welcomed the chance to give up fifteen thousand armed rebels. At the very least, Floyd had suffered a loss of nerve. Both Floyd and Pillow protested that they feared what might happen if they fell into Union hands. What they really
feared, according to Patterson, was becoming the first Confederate generals of the war to surrender their troops. They might be jailed, they might be hanged. Taking a few of his Virginia regiments with him, Floyd escaped on a steamboat still at its berth by the riverfront. Leaving less conspicuously, Pillow simply rowed across the Cumberland in a skiff under cover of night.
That left Buckner, the man who by rights and talent should originally have been senior commander, to negotiate a surrender he’d never wanted to make. The story passed through the ranks that before giving up the army, he had sent a message to Grant, his friend from West Point, asking terms of surrender. Grant, out to make a reputation, replied that the terms were immediate and unconditional surrender as he proposed to attack immediately. So much for friendship. Buckner was left with no recourse but to hoist white flags above the rifle pits on February 12, 1862. With this act he surrendered over twelve thousand men and forty guns, all irreplaceable. Great stores of provisions stockpiled for the winter, which he had refused to destroy, also fell into federal hands.
Jarom, soon to be a prisoner, felt some encouragement in the act of one little-known commander, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Stating simply that he had no stomach for surrender and that he hadn’t come up from Hernando, Mississippi, to be placed in captivity, he escaped sometime during the night, leading his ragtag cavalry through swamps that rose to the skirts of their saddles. Jarom and his comrades found themselves with no choice but to swallow a bitter pill. Their captors split those who surrendered into two groups—one made up of officers, the other of enlisted men. Officers were sent to Camp Chase in Ohio, the rest, including Jarom and Patterson, to Camp Morton near Indianapolis, farther north than Jarom had ever been. Boarding a captured steamboat named the Dr. Kane, Jarom and a boatload of other private soldiers floated down the Cumberland to the Ohio and upriver to the Falls at Louisville, then traveled by train and later marched overland to Camp Morton.
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