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by Alden R. Carter


  It all came apart. Breckinridge spent two critical weeks getting his small division across the rickety rails from Louisiana to Tennessee—a task he might have left to one of his brigadiers. By the time the division reached Tennessee, he was too late to join the expedition. Without Breckinridge, Bragg was forced to issue his own proclamation to the men of Kentucky, but the Kentuckians were not in a suasible mood. Only a few hundred recruits joined the ranks, leaving the Army of Tennessee badly outnumbered when it collided with the Army of the Ohio under Major General Don Carlos Buell at Perryville. Polk was in field command of the army while Bragg installed a secessionist governor at nearby Frankfort. On October 7, Polk sent Bragg a message, suggesting that the approaching Federal force was not large and that he and Hardee should attack. Bragg approved the plan. Meanwhile, Polk and Hardee changed their opinion of the strength of the Federal force, deciding that they faced not a fraction but the main part of Buell’s army—a reality best addressed, in the opinion and experience of the Bishop and the Professor, by calling a leisurely staff meeting.

  Arriving on the scene, Bragg was horrified to find his sixteen thousand infantry facing three or four times their number. Before he could order a withdrawal, Buell attacked. Or rather, his ever-aggressive brigadier Philip H. Sheridan attacked, crossing Doctor’s Creek at the Union center and seizing the high ground beyond for his artillery. Then there was no hope of retreat unless the Yankees were first stunned into immobility, or at least caution. Bragg hurled Major General Ben Cheatham’s and Major General Simon B. Buckner’s divisions against Buell’s left while holding off the Federal center with a scant two brigades of infantry and the entire Federal right with a single brigade of cavalry. Amazingly, his tactics worked. Cheatham and Buckner crashed through the Federal left, routing McCook’s corps. Buell’s center, under the command of Charles C. Gilbert, an Old Army captain temporarily elevated to brigadier general, hunkered down to wait for developments. On the Union right, Major General Thomas L. Crittenden did precisely nothing with his nine brigades.

  The fighting on the Union left became chaotic. Sheridan’s artillery ripped into the flank of Buckner’s division, slowing the Rebel charge. Reinforced from center and rear, McCook’s brigades rallied and soon units from both armies overlapped and mixed, uniforms difficult to distinguish in the smoke. Polk mistook a hotly engaged Union regiment for one of his own and shouted to its colonel: “For the love of God, cease fire! You are mistaken! Those are your friends!”

  The bearded colonel turned. “I don’t think there can be any mistake about it. I am sure they are the enemy.”

  “Enemy?” Polk roared. “Why, I have only just left them myself. Cease firing, sir! What is your name?”

  “Colonel Shryock of the 87th Indiana. And pray, sir, who are you?”

  Polk stared at the begrimed faces of the Hoosier infantrymen turning to look on—eyes red-rimmed, hard, suspicious. But a certain flair for theater is necessary for a bishop of the Episcopal church, and Polk’s pulpit confidence did not desert him. He leaned down from his horse, shook a huge fist in the colonel’s face. “Who am I? I’ll soon show you who I am, sir! Cease firing, sir. At once!” Then whirling his horse about, he rode off into the smoke, spine itching as he imagined a hundred rifle barrels coming to bear on his broad back. He crossed into the Confederate line and without turning his head growled to the colonel in command, “They are the enemy. Kill them.” A volley ripped from the Confederate line, tearing the 87th Indiana to shreds.

  The fighting continued into the night, when finally the difficulty of distinguishing friend from foe brought it to a halt. At midnight, Bragg began withdrawing. By daylight, the army was clear. Bragg had saved it, yet he knew that Polk and Hardee would pen letters to their friends in Richmond, calling his brilliant escape yet another disgrace, another blot on the reputation of Southern arms.

  The two-hundred-mile retreat into Tennessee was an unspeakable ordeal for the army. The country was desolate, stripped of food and forage. An October snow fell, the first in anyone’s memory, and the men marched hungry, many of them barefoot, through the freezing mud. Typhoid, dysentery, scurvy, and pneumonia swept the ranks, dropping hundreds by the roadside. Bragg thought of Napoleon in Russia, of Washington at Valley Forge, of Raglan in the Crimea. He concentrated his will, drove the army south toward safety. In east Tennessee, Confederate storehouses were bulging with the fall harvest, but he was forbidden to draw rations. No, the flour, bacon, and beef were reserved for Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. He pushed his army on, knowing that he was hated by his soldiers but determined to save them. And all the time he brooded, weighed and portioned out the blame, this much for Polk, that much for Hardee, and the largest serving of all for Breckinridge. He, before all others, would pay.

  An aide knocks hesitantly on the door, snapping Bragg’s attention back to the present. “General Breckinridge to see you, sir. He is most—” But before the aide can finish, John Cabell Breckinridge, former vice president of the United States, brushes by him to beseech his commanding officer for the life of Private Asa Lewis, 9th Kentucky Infantry, condemned to be shot to death by musketry at noon on the day after Christmas 1862, as a deserter.

  If there were a millet seed of humor in Braxton Bragg’s temperament, he might in this moment find an occasion for amused irony. But it is difficult for a man whose guts have plagued him all the fifteen years since he drank the dysenteric water of Mexico to maintain a sense of the ironic, a humor that requires at least a small separation of intellect from self and event.

  Bragg listens to Breckinridge, but his attention remains fixed on his gurgling innards. He kneads his stomach with a hand hidden below his desk while Breckinridge tells once again of Lewis’s courage at Shiloh, his soldierly conduct in camp, and how he took the unauthorized leave only to visit his recently widowed mother.

  “Attempted to take it twice, I believe,” Bragg growls.

  “True, General, but he is a good man. If his superiors had understood— if I had understood—the real circumstances, we would have granted him a furlough. But his request was mishandled. The man shouldn’t have to die for our error.”

  Bragg feels like telling Breckinridge that if he wants to confess error, he should talk to Leonidas Polk in his sacerdotal capacity while leaving the interpretation of military justice to the commanding general. He attempts to control his anger, succeeds little. “So you suggest that I should pardon every Kentucky man who, disagreeing with the decision of his officers, gives himself the right to issue his own furlough papers? Is that what you are suggesting, sir? For then I will have to give the same right to every Tennessee man, every Georgia man, every Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas man in this army. Do you think then that I shall have any army left?”

  “General, I am only asking that in this particular case—”

  “Are you aware, sir, that during our advance into Kentucky, desertion from Kentucky regiments exceeded those of all other states combined? That when Kentucky men should have been leading the march against the Federal occupiers of their home state, they were instead deserting by the hundred?”

  “But they were close to home, General. They came back in a few days. They were there for the fighting, and I understand Kentucky boys fought well at Perryville.”

  “So you would grant Kentucky men the right to decide when and where this army should fight? That while they are home, feeding themselves up and making more brats, that the army should mark time, waiting for their return?”

  A flush spreads across Breckinridge’s handsome features. “I am suggesting no such thing, General. Nor do I think it fair to criticize Kentucky men who have come south to fight for this Confederacy when they might have stayed at home and accepted an easier lot under the yoke of Yankee occupation.”

  Bragg notes the flush, knows that his own face has grown paler with his anger. “Well, sir, I found in my time in Kentucky that the majority of Kentucky men were quite content laboring under that yoke! That when we offe
red them arms and a chance to fight for their liberty, that they possessed no more fighting spirit than so many oxen.”

  Breckinridge’s flush has become a deep red. “Sir, I must protest—”

  Bragg’s fist hits the desktop. “No, sir! You must not protest! I have had protestations enough from Kentucky men. If the blood of your men is too feverish for this army, if they require too often the company of their slatterns, then they shall pay the price for that libidinous weakness before the firing squad!”

  “General! Private Lewis only wished to see his mother!”

  “Then so much the worse for her as well as for him. Your man shall be shot at noon. Now I bid you good day, sir. I have matters of greater consequence to concern me than the fate of your corn-cracker!”

  For a moment, it seems that Breckinridge will strike him. Bragg is unafraid, hoping almost, for then he will have Breckinridge summarily shot. Instead, Breckinridge exerts a stupendous effort to maintain control. “Sir, Kentucky men will never be slaves under this or any government. What you order is murder and will be so recalled!” He spins on his heel and slams out the door.

  Bragg stares after him, feels a fresh stab in his guts—downward this time, through the bowels to his sphincter. He grits his teeth, rises carefully, makes for the latrine behind the house.

  At noon, Lewis is shot. Bragg hears the volley from his office, does not look up from his letter to his wife.

  CHAPTER 3

  Midmorning Friday

  December 26, 1862

  South of Nashville

  The Army of the Cumberland marches in three columns of roughly fifteen thousand men each, the length of each column extending some fourteen miles from advance scouts and skirmishers to the last wagon, ambulance, and camp follower. On the left, Crittenden’s corps advances toward Lavergne on the Murfreesboro Pike. In the center, McCook’s corps takes the Nolensville Pike toward Nolensville and the village of Triune beyond. Thomas’s corps, temporarily on the right wing, follows the Franklin and Wilson pikes south to Old Liberty Road, where it will turn east, crossing McCook’s rear to take up its accustomed position at the army’s center.

  THE ARMY TRUDGES south in the rain, the roads turning quickly to mud beneath the thousands of feet, wheels, and hooves. The roads cut across low ridges and streamy bottoms, a land of patchy woodlands, untilled fields, and thick cedar brakes. Eighteen months of war have stripped the land of human habitation, leaving only blackened chimneys sentinel against gray skies. This is bitter country, and the army moves warily, expecting trouble.

  Stanley’s cavalry is supposed to screen the advance, but none are in position at daylight as the infantry files onto the roads. So the army plunges ahead with little idea of what is in front of it. Leading McCook’s march, Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis, namesake but unrelated to the Confederate president, deploys his headquarters escort, a single company of Illinois cavalry, to scout the roads ahead. Five miles north of Nolensville, they drive in a Confederate outpost, pursuing the Rebel troopers to the edge of town before drawing rein in the face of a strong line of dismounted cavalry.

  Davis hurries his division forward, intent on the honor of winning the first battle of the campaign. At thirty-three, Davis is a hard-eyed professional, his handsome features elongated by aggressive chin whiskers. He is not West Point but up through the ranks of the Old Army on hard work and ambition. He is resentful, quarrelsome, touchy: a disposition that puts him almost constantly at odds with his superiors. Those who cross Davis should beware. Before Perryville, Davis argued with his superior, Major General William “Bull” Nelson. Nelson made the error of cuffing Davis, who promptly borrowed a pistol, chased the bigger man, and shot him to death. Only the army’s desperate need for experienced brigadiers keeps Davis in the field pending a court-martial that Rosecrans has postponed indefinitely.

  Davis deploys a battle line left and right of the road and sends it forward at the double-quick. The Rebels immediately fall back, mount, and retreat. Davis gives his men a short rest at Nolensville and then pushes on toward Triune in the early afternoon.

  A half dozen miles to the east, Rosecrans’s staff tops a brown rise, the general in the lead, Garesché next, the rest fanning out behind in approximate order of seniority. Garesché cannot remember being so happy, his fatigue of the night before replaced at dawn by an immense elation as the army clattered into action. It will take time for the multitude of pieces to synchronize, to steady into rhythm, for this is not an oiled and steaming machine but an agglomeration of men, flags, rifle-muskets, mule teams, wagons, cannons, cavalry mounts, sabers, and on and on in a cacophonous profusion of the animate and inanimate. Sometimes, though it is his job to understand its every organizational nuance, he cannot comprehend the whole of it. Yet here it is, sloshing south in the rain, with each mile finding its gigantic internal rhythm, becoming like unto… . Garesché pauses, meditates. Certainly not a machine, for its purposefulness, its very animation in existing, must argue against likening it to anything of mere wheels, belts, pulleys, and gears. No, it is far more than a machine, far more than anything of the physical world. Like unto Faith, he thinks, and the thought pleases him. Faith, the most militant of the virtues. The virtue in armor, sword uplifted, reflecting the Light.

  Ahead Rosecrans draws rein, lifts his field glasses. I must share the simile with him, Garesché thinks. But not now. Now he needs no distraction from what he must do. He halts beside Rosecrans, leans forward, hands on the saddle pommel to ease his back, watches the blue column coiling along the valley floor, its head lost to sight in the low clouds and mist lying on the ridge beyond.

  Rosecrans shifts the cold butt of the cigar in his teeth. “It’s an awesome sight, an army on the move, isn’t it, Garesché?”

  “Yes, General. It is indeed.”

  “Ah, here’s Crittenden.” He points to a party of horsemen cutting through a break in the column and cantering toward the rise.

  Garesché cranes, can barely make out the guidon of a major general and must lift his field glasses to pick out the lean form of Crittenden. Rosecrans, whose sight and hearing seem to become preternaturally sharp when he is in action, does not bother with his field glasses. “Tom looks satisfied. Things must be going well up ahead. We’ll listen to his report and then ride over to see McCook.”

  “I believe, General, that we agreed that you should establish a new headquarters before it is much later in the day. As it is, we have messages chasing us all over the field.”

  Rosecrans grimaces. “You know, Julius, I sometimes think I would have lived a happier life in the time of the crusades. No wig-wag, no telegraph. Armies small enough for a general to command with a battle cry and an uplifted sword. A damned sight more convenient, eh?”

  Garesché smiles. “Yes, General. I can easily imagine you in armor.”

  Rosecrans looks at him sharply and then laughs. “Yes, that would be a picture. Well, better me than all the runty generals we have in this war. Beauregard, Joe Johnston, old Useless. I could smite them all a pretty good lick.”

  Coming within hailing distance, Crittenden calls “Good afternoon, General.”

  “Good afternoon, Tom. How do you see it?”

  “We scared off some Reb cavalry up the road a ways. Wheeler’s boys, according to a prisoner. They’ve fallen back toward Lavergne.”

  “Good. Very good. Now listen, Tom. I want you to push across that little creek north of Lavergne by dark. For some reason it’s called Hurricane Creek, though God knows why this far from the sea. Come first light, we’ll advance on the village itself.”

  Rosecrans begins explaining his plan for the morrow. Garesché half listens, watching as two officers break away from the column below and come trotting toward the rise. He recognizes Colonel William B. Hazen, commander of one of Crittenden’s brigades. Garesché smiles: Bill Hazen no doubt needs an opportunity to vent the latest of his sulfurous complaints. He gestures Goddard to take his place near the generals and rides down to meet Haze
n.

  Hazen is indeed angry, but Garesché can hardly remember a time when Hazen was not angry about something. “Julius, that damned cavalry of ours was out of position half the morning! They just now broke up that Reb outpost up ahead, and they should have done that hours ago. And they are doing better than McCook’s! I haven’t seen a one of his yet, and they should have been in touch with our right flank all day. Which means we don’t know where the hell his left flank is and whether we’re covering it, or he’s covering ours, or if half the damn Reb army is in between. Now, just what in the hell is—”

  Garesché holds up a hand. “Now, Bill. Remember your manners.”

  Hazen looks confused, then glances at the young lieutenant sitting a small sorrel a pace behind him. “Oh, yes. You insist on knowing everyone, don’t you? This is Bierce, my topographical officer.”

  Garesché touches his horse’s flank, moves forward to extend a hand. “Julius Garesché, your colonel’s devoted and very patient friend.”

  The young officer looks surprised by the familiarity, hides it well. He salutes quickly, takes the hand. “Ambrose Bierce, Colonel.”

  Garesché turns back to Hazen. “Bill, I hope someday you command an army, but I doubt if your stomach will last so long. We know about the cavalry situation, and General Rosecrans had me speak to General Stanley. I’m sure that tomorrow morning the cavalry will be mounted and moving while your men are still boiling coffee. As far as McCook’s flank goes, I’m sure he has that well in mind and well in hand. By tomorrow, General Thomas’s corps will be back in the center, certainly in time to present a solid front to any Confederate attack.”

  Hazen seems mollified at the mention of Thomas, attempts a more reasonable tone. “Julius, I wish I didn’t have to go on complaining, but this Pioneer Brigade General Rosecrans has devised… . My God, I don’t have a man left who knows how to swing an ax or lay a corduroy because they’re all in the damned Pioneer Brigade, wherever it is. And in this mud, we’ve got to have men who know how to do those things. Otherwise, we’re going to have a hell of a time getting all the guns and wagons up.”

 

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