Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  Magruder decided on New Year’s Eve to mount a two-pronged attack. Artillery, infantry, and cavalry would sneak across the railroad bridge under the cover of darkness, pushing a rail-mounted eight-inch gun in front of them, and other smaller artillery pieces behind. One of the artillery teams would pass through the town and set up on Fort Point on the northern end of the island and prepare to shell the Union ships. The two rebel riverboats would attack the six gunboats anchored in the harbor. The artillery at Fort Hébert would provide supporting fire.39

  The rebels began marching at nightfall, crossed the two-mile bridge, and had moved four more miles into the town by midnight. A Union patrol reported hearing artillery wheels in the downtown market at 1:00 A.M., but no one investigated. Once the moon set after 3:00 A.M., the First Texas Artillery formed an arc two and a half miles long and opened fire on the Union gunboats and Kuhn’s Wharf.40 James Tomlinson was manning one of these positions, while James Jones was serving on the John E. Carr.41 In the predawn hours, Magruder’s troops fired the first round at the Union ships, which returned fire down Galveston’s shadowy streets. A New York Tribune reporter described the battle: “At this time it was as dark as Erebus; a black illumined only by the flash of cannon, the blasting of shell, and the quick, intermittent spark of musketry. The sounds at once horrible and indescribable, welcoming this New Year’s morning, need not be dwelt upon.”42

  Renshaw’s flagship, the Westfield, steamed out of the bay, but in the darkness it ran aground. Renshaw signaled the Harriet Lane to fire on the town.43 But just when the Union troops appeared to have gained the upper hand, the Confederate ships entered the harbor at the first peek of dawn. The surprise would have brought a quick victory if the Bayou City’s thirty-two-pounder cannon had not exploded when the soldier manning it tried to fire, killing the Company B artillery commander and two of his men.44 The Union sailors maneuvered away when Bayou City tried to ram the Harriet Lane, and they spun their pivot gun around and blasted a hole in the side of the Neptune, sinking her in shallow water. The cavalrymen aboard the rebel’s Bayou City, though, maintained withering rifle fire on the Harriet Lane, forcing her crew to seek shelter belowdecks. That gave the Bayou City a chance to ram her and for Col. Tom Green’s men to climb aboard.

  With Renshaw’s flagship still aground on Pelican Split, he could not see what was happening or issue orders. Absent direction, each federal gunboat made its own decision to stop fighting and withdraw. The rebels watched them steam away, as did the men of the Forty-second Infantry, Massachusetts Volunteers, who were sitting on Kuhn’s Wharf. Their commander surrendered when the gunboats passed out of sight. The Union navy lost more than 150 men, while the Confederacy lost 117.45

  One of the controversies of the Battle of Galveston surrounds how the two senior officers on the Harriet Lane died. While one report said rebels mortally wounded the men before they boarded the ship, another account said the Confederate commander, Maj. Leon Smith, summarily shot Cmdr. Jonathan M. Wainwright when he refused to surrender, breaching nineteenth-century etiquette. Wainwright’s second in command, Lt. Cmdr. Edward Lea, did live long enough to make it ashore, where his father, Maj. Alfred Lea, was serving as Magruder’s engineering officer. The two men had not seen each other since they had chosen opposite sides, crystallizing for a moment the truly destructive nature of civil war. Major Lea was next to his dying son, whose final words were, “My father is here.”46

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  If by chance we should have any children, I will instill in their minds the love of peace and should they want a bugle, drum or toy gun I will give them such a thrashing that they will hate the sound of any of them.

  —John W. Watkins

  The Confederate victory at Galveston shocked the Union naval command. Lt. Cmdr. Richard Law, who ordered the withdrawal following Renshaw’s death, was court-martialed. Union Rear Adm. David Farragut ordered another flotilla to retake Galveston at the first opportunity, but when Commodore Henry H. Bell led five warships to Galveston, he found that the rebels had removed the channel buoys, making it impossible for his ships to navigate the silt-filled estuary. Bell ordered his ships to lob one hundred shells at Galveston, but to little effect.1 He eventually reported to Farragut that without an army to support him, there was little chance of recapturing the city.2

  James Tomlinson’s Company K returned to the ocean side of the island, and the colonel ordered James Jones’s Company I back to Virginia Point on the mainland. The men stationed in Galveston with the First Texas Heavy Artillery never saw significant action again.

  The other white Tomlinson boy, Will, left Galveston with the Fifth Cavalry on January 26, 1863, to prepare for deployment to Louisiana. Company B was full of Falls County men, and among them was John W. Watkins, a clerk from Bartlett’s store in Marlin. Watkins was popular with the Marlin men and they elected him sergeant major. Later, the battalion commander made him an adjutant on Col. Tom Green’s staff.3 Writing to his wife, Irene, Watkins realized that the war was not going to be short or easy:

  I wish this accursed war was over so that I could be a free man once more. You have seen the papers and have read all the news and can make your own comments, some think it is a good omen, but for myself I don’t think this war will be over for several years, and I expect to see several hard fought battles before it is over. This brigade has been complimented very highly and will be placed in front of the battle. I have a feeling or presentment or whatever you may call it that I will see it safe through and again fold you in my arms to live again in quietness and peace.4

  Along the way to Louisiana in March 1863, the regiment encountered what any military faces: poor discipline, nonsensical orders, and encounters with exotic locales and people. Watkins described court-martialing a young soldier for having sex with a mule and remarked on the beautiful plantations and women in Louisiana. The Fifth Cavalry soon settled in at Fort DeRussy—ninety miles from the Texas border—on the Red River, near Alexandria, Louisiana.5

  At the time, Union generals were considering three choices to capture territory west of the Mississippi. The first was to move up the Mississippi River from New Orleans and capture the rebel fort at Port Hudson. Capturing the city, along with Vicksburg, would cut Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas off from the rest of the Confederacy. But thousands of rebels defended Port Hudson and Vicksburg. The second option was launching amphibious landings in Texas, but the Union had attempted this before and had lost at Galveston and Sabine Pass. The final option was to fight up the Red River, which runs southeast from the Texas-Oklahoma border, across Louisiana, and empties into the Mississippi River at Simmesport.6

  Gen. Ulysses S. Grant marched his army south from Tennessee with the goal of capturing Vicksburg, and the Union command decided to attack Port Hudson with troops moving up from New Orleans. From April through June 1863, the brigade that included the Fifth Cavalry moved up and down Bayou Teche, a waterway that is parallel to the Red River, skirmishing with Union troops to draw them away from Port Hudson.7

  In late June, the Fifth Cavalry attacked a Union fort at Donaldsonville, a small town on the Mississippi between New Orleans and Port Hudson. Union troops killed the regiment’s executive officer, Maj. Denman Shannon, when he made it over a fortress wall, only to find another one on the inside, this one impregnable. A federal soldier shot him through the head. A Union officer called on the next in command to surrender, and when he refused, the Union officer shot and killed that rebel, too. By the end of the battle, only three out of eighteen officers involved in the attack had escaped without wounds. Green’s brigade lost three hundred men and failed to capture Donaldsonville.8

  At about the same time across the country in Pennsylvania, Gen. Robert E. Lee lost Gettysburg; the next day, July 4, 1863, Confederate troops defending Vicksburg surrendered to Grant after a forty-five day siege.9 The victory at Gettysburg weakened Lee’s army, and Grant’s capture of Vicksburg gave Union forces control of the Mississippi River, marking a t
urning point in the war.

  The Union general in command of troops in Louisiana, Nathaniel Banks, was then free to turn his attention to capturing Texas. He sent a flotilla of ships to capture Sabine Pass in September 1863, but the Texans repulsed the attack.10 A few months later, Banks landed Union troops at Brownsville, the Texas border town used to export cotton to European buyers in Mexico. He sent scouting teams from there northward to Corpus Christi and drove Confederate troops out of emplacements on Matagorda Island and occupied Indianola, a major port.11

  Magruder sent out a public proclamation on November 27, 1863, warning coastal Texans to remove their valuables, including their slaves, or see them destroyed by Confederate troops:

  The Commanding General has certain information that the enemy has brought with him from five thousand to ten thousand muskets, with which to arm the slaves against their masters.… Therefore, he calls upon the citizens of Texas living in the counties bordering upon the navigable portions of the streams, and within fifty miles of the coast, to remove their able-bodied male slaves at once, at any cost and at all hazards, further into the interior, else [the commanding general] will be forced to drive them before him with his cavalry, in haste and without regard to their well-being.12

  With the war going badly, Jim Tomlinson left Tomlinson Hill and enlisted in Company C, Fourth Cavalry Regiment of the Texas State Militia in Galveston. At fifty-one, Jim was too old to ride with the self-defense units that patrolled the state, but as a planter who held a large number of slaves, he was well suited for another difficult task. Magruder assigned Jim the task of visiting large plantations and gathering slaves to serve the Confederacy. Magruder wanted to build defensive positions up and down the coast, and slaveholders were not cooperating. Jim’s job was to appeal to their patriotism, and if that failed, to forcibly take a quarter of their male slaves for military service.13

  THE RED RIVER CAMPAIGN

  As Magruder prepared for a Union invasion, the Union high command was hatching a completely different plan.14 The newly promoted General Grant ordered Banks to pull his forces off the Texas coast and march up Louisiana’s Red River and invade Texas from the east.15

  Despite thinking it was a bad idea, Banks followed orders and prepared a Red River Campaign to be fought in the Louisiana swamps.16 Banks gathered 25,000 men and a flotilla of support ships in central Louisiana and convinced the federal commander in Little Rock, Arkansas, to send 15,000 Union troops south, where they would hopefully rendezvous at Shreveport, then the headquarters for the Confederacy west of the Mississippi. Intelligence officers reported that planters had stored 150,000 bales of cotton in Shreveport and nearby Marshall and Jefferson, creating the opportunity to capture a significant prize. Under Banks’s plan, once the Union troops captured Shreveport, the combined army would march west until Texas surrendered.17

  Magruder discovered the plan in March 1864, when the massive Union army captured Alexandria, Louisiana. Confederate forces in Louisiana, under the command of Gen. Richard Taylor, son of former President Zachary Taylor, suffered from limited supplies and rampant illness and stood no chance before the well-equipped federal troops. Magruder gave Tom Green five thousand men, including the Fifth Cavalry, and ordered them to reinforce Taylor as quickly as possible. Green’s division reached the front near Natchitoches on March 29. That brought rebel forces up to eleven thousand, but this was still less than half of what the Union had in Alexandria, less than seventy-five miles from Shreveport.18

  The Union force was too large for the rebels to stop in Natchitoches, so they spent the next week falling back, slowing the Yankee advance with small skirmishes. The delaying tactics gave three Confederate divisions time to create a line just south of Mansfield, the last major town between the federal troops and Shreveport. The Confederate retreat had also forced the Union army to split into two, with one part remaining behind to protect the flotilla on the Red River while the rest marched inland toward Mansfield. When the Union troops reached the outskirts of Mansfield on April 8, the rebels outnumbered the Unionists 10,500 to 6,400. Watkins described the ensuing battle:

  We were drawn up in rear of a large farm, extending out two miles on each side of the road. We were dismounted and had just got into position, when the enemy came in sight.

  As soon as they saw us they sounded the charge, and here they came with a yell. We gave them a volley which pushed them to turn right about. Skirmishers were thrown out and soon the work of death commenced. They attempted to drive back our left wing which threw our regiment in one of the hottest places it had ever been in. We fought them until five o’clock without gaining any advantage. The boys got tired of being shot at and concluded to try the charge—everything being in readiness—over the fence we went and charged their battery.

  They became panic stricken and broke. Our boys ran them about four miles, capturing about 2,000 prisoners, 150 wagons, 50 ambulances and 20 pieces of artillery. Our loss was very heavy. Gen. Mouton was killed in the last charge. So was Capt. Shepard of Gen. Green’s staff. And many other officers.

  The next morning, the rebels formed a line at Pleasant Hill and skirmished with the Union troops throughout the day. Then at 4:00 P.M., the rebels marched one thousand yards toward the Union forces, who were dug into rifle pits. Initially, the Union troops repulsed the attack, but when the rebels attacked a second time, the Union line broke and the men fled in retreat as night fell. General Green’s troops pursued the Union forces the next morning and captured more than one thousand prisoners.19

  In a report sent to the Union secretary of war after the battle, Banks described an overwhelming Confederate army that attacked his forces while his men were still on the march. He described chaos on the roads as Union supply trains blocked the retreating soldiers. His forces were finally able to turn and fight at Pleasant Hill after a New York infantry unit slowed the rebel advance.20 Union forces lost more than one thousand men at the Battle of Pleasant Hill, while twelve hundred rebels were killed or wounded.

  Nevertheless Taylor, the Confederate commander, was determined to cut off the Union retreat. On April 12, he ordered Green’s cavalry and a small battery of artillery to engage Union forces at Blair’s Landing, where low water in the river had slowed the Union gunboats. A two-hour artillery duel commenced. Marlin’s Company B arrived too late, Watkins explained: “We went through the swamp and when in a few miles of our destination, we came upon an impassable bayou, which prevented us from getting into the fight. Gen. Green made the fight and was killed. Thus fell one of our best generals. He was in front of his men standing on the bank of the river, not over 100 yards from the enemy.”21

  Taylor called Green’s death a “public calamity,” and it knocked the rebels back on their heels, but they continued pursuing the Union forces down the Red River. When low water grounded Union ships, the rebels destroyed them, and in one case, they forced the Union to destroy its own ironclad. On April 27, 1864, Watkins exaggerated the Fifth Cavalry’s victories, but he became emotional when describing the terror wrought by an army in retreat:

  I am getting tired of it and would be glad to have an honorable peace. And should we ever again enjoy peace, and if by chance we should have any children I will instill in their minds the love of peace and should they want a bugle, drum or toy gun I will give them such a thrashing that they will hate the sound of any of them. But I know that all this will be forgotten and if we were to be again imposed upon, we would be as ready to dig up the hatchet and again go into war. But what misery it entails upon a country.

  [Union troops] laid waste the country from Natchitoches to Alexandria. In some places there is not a house standing for 10 miles. In one instance they set a house on fire while the lady and her children were in it. This lady ran out of her house and came screaming into our lines amid thousands of bullets, with a little child in her arms and two that could just run about following her.

  I could mention many instances where they have set houses on fire while women and children
were in them without giving them a chance of getting anything out.22

  Banks headed for Simmesport, where he intended to cross the Atchafalaya River and make good his escape from the Red River basin. Taylor, though outnumbered, wanted to cause as much damage as possible to the retreating Yankees and ordered the Fifth Cavalry to harass the Union’s rear guard.23

  A bottleneck at the bridge over the Atchafalaya slowed the Union retreat, giving the Texas cavalry a chance on May 18 to drive in the Union pickets near Norwood’s Plantation on Yellow Bayou. The Union troops alerted Gen. Joseph Mower, who spun his rear guard around to attack. It was extremely hot and sunny when the battle began at about 3:00 P.M. Company B was ordered to flank Mower’s forces on the left, but he had two brigades in reserve to repulse it. Mower ordered his artillery to open fire on the attacking rebels and then had his infantry charge them.24 Watkins described Company B at the center of the fiercest fighting:

  Most of the cavalry were dismounted and formed in line of battle. They had to move through a field 1,000 yards wide with nothing to protect our men. The enemy were on the opposite side of the timber. Our men moved up sending a very heavy fire and when in 200 yards charged two batteries which had been playing on our men. They got up to 30 yards of the batteries and drove the gunners away when the whole Yankee army raised up out of the weeds and brush and opened such a heavy fire upon our men that they were compelled to fall back, which they did in quick time.

  But alas, we lost some brave men—William Tomlinson was killed in the retreat. Horace Young was wounded in the left arm between the elbow and wrist, one bone broken. John Norwood flesh wound in the leg. Jerry Pinson lost his right leg, taken off at the knee. William McCarroll knocked down with a shell but is up and about. This is all the men you know.