The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

by Shelby Foote

  Although the maneuver served its purpose of keeping Rousseau and Granger from reinforcing Thomas, it failed to achieve the larger design for bagging them entirely. Forrest left with Buford’s and Jackson’s divisions as soon as Hood came up, and after three days of reducing blockhouses, burning bridges, and wrecking several miles of track, combined with Bate on December 5, some ten miles north of the objective. Next day’s reconnaissance disclosed that Murfreesboro was almost as stoutly fortified as Nashville; Fortress Rosecrans, mounting 57 guns and enclosing 200 acres of the field where Bragg had come to grief two years ago this month, was practically unassailable; especially with 9000 defenders on hand to resist the 6500 graybacks moving against it, mounted and afoot. Forrest called a halt and decided instead to lure the garrison out for a fight in the open. In this he was partly successful the following day, December 7, when a 3500-man Union column staged a sally. He posted his infantry in the path of the attackers, with orders to stand firm while he brought his cavalry down on their flank. Everything went as planned, up to the critical moment when Bate’s division — spooked no doubt by remembrance of Franklin, where its performance had been less than standard, eight days back — gave way in a panic, unspringing the trap. Forrest rode among the rattled soldiers, appealing to them to stand and fight, then cursing them for refusing to do so. He stood in the stirrups, eyes blazing, face gone red with rage, and began to lay about him with the flat of his saber, whacking the backs of the fleeing troops; to small avail. Ignoring the Wizard as best they could, the retreaters scuttled rearward beyond his grasp, even when he seized a color-bearer’s flag, whose staff afforded a longer reach, and swung it bludgeonlike until at last, perceiving that this was equally ineffective, he flung it from him in disgust. “Right comical, if it hadn’t been so serious,” one veteran was to say.

  Fortunately, the Federals did not press the issue, having just been recalled by Rousseau, and Bate was summoned back to Nashville two days later by Hood, who sent another brigade from Cheatham’s corps to replace the three that left. Down to about 4500 of all arms — half the number inside the works — Forrest had to be content with bristling to discourage sorties that might have swamped him. This he did with such success that within another two days he felt justified in sending Buford to Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, ten miles northeast of Nashville, with instructions to picket a nearby stretch of the Cumberland and thereby prevent the arrival of reinforcements by that route. Next day, December 12, with the enemy still tightly buttoned up in Fortress Rosecrans, he had the infantry begin completing the destruction of the railroad back to La Vergne, just under twenty miles away. Thus, by the employment of barely half as many troops, Hood was able to prevent an additional 9000 effectives from joining the Nashville garrison: though whether this was wise or not, under the circumstances, was quite another matter. For one thing, even longer odds obtained in the vicinity of the Tennessee capital, where he remained in confrontation with Thomas, and for another, in the showdown battle which now was imminent, it seemed likely to cost him the use of two sorely-needed cavalry divisions, together with the help of their commander, whose talents would be missed.

  Reduced as he was, by casualties and detachments, to a strength of less than 24,000 of all arms, it was no wonder one apprehensive infantryman remarked that the Confederate main line of resistance, which stretched and crooked for four miles under the frown of long-range Union guns in permanent fortifications, looked “more like the skirmish line of an investing army than of that army itself.” To make matters worse, there had not been time for the completion of such outlying installations as had been planned to strengthen the flanks of the position: particularly on the left, where three redoubts were under construction beyond the Hillsboro Pike, the western limit of Hood’s line, to blunt the force of an attack from that direction, whether end-on or oblique. Work on these began, but on the night of December 8, after a spell of deceptively mild weather, the mercury dropped to nearly twenty degrees below freezing and a cold rain quickly turned to sleet and fine-grained snow. By morning, all the trees wore glittering cut-glass armor, each twig sheathed in ice, and the earth was frozen iron hard, unpierceable even with a knife, let alone a shovel. Work stopped, perforce, and the soldiers huddled in unfinished trenches, shivering in their rags. For four days this continued. Then on the fifth — December 13, the winter solstice; Sherman had reached Savannah by now, completing his march across Georgia’s midriff, and would capture Fort McAllister before sundown — a thaw set in, relieving the rigid misery in which the besiegers had been locked, but bringing with it troubles of a different kind. The army floundered in Napoleon’s “fifth element,” unable to move forward, back, or sideways in a Sargasso Sea of mud; all transportation stalled, guns and wagons bellied axle deep, even on main-traveled roads, and no supplies arrived to relieve shortages that had developed during the four-day storm.

  It was midway through this doleful immobilized span, with his men and horses frozen or stuck in their tracks by alternate ice and mud, that Hood apparently first became aware, in the fullest sense, of the peril to which he had exposed his troops when he took up his present position in point-blank confrontation with Thomas, whose army was not only superbly equipped and entrenched, but was also better than twice the size of his own. Earlier, when Forrest departed for Murfreesboro with the other two cavalry divisions, Chalmers had been obliged to send one of his two brigades to patrol the region between Cheatham’s right and the river, and when he reported that this reduced his strength too much for him to be able to perform that duty adequately on the left, where the distance was twice as great, Hood detached a brigade of infantry from Stewart and posted it beyond the Harding Pike, about midway between his western flank and the river below Nashville. This was not much help, really, for the unit chosen — Brigadier General Matthew Ector’s brigade of French’s division, now under its senior colonel while Ector recovered from the loss of a leg at Atlanta — was down to fewer than 700 effectives as a result of its heavy casualties at Franklin. Clearly enough, Chalmers’ horsemen had more than they could handle in both directions, especially the left, and Hood’s alarm was intensified when the ice storm halted work on the outlying redoubts he had ordered installed to provide at least a measure of security for that vulnerable flank.

  On December 8, the day the freeze set in, he issued a circular order calling for “regular and frequent roll calls … as a preventive of straggling.” He used the term as a euphemism for desertion, which had become a growing problem. Of 296 dismounted troopers reassigned to the infantry, all but 42 protested the indignity by departing without leave: a loss that far outweighed the total of 164 recruits who had joined Hood since he entered Tennessee. All too conscious of the odds he faced, the crippled leader of a crippled army implored Beauregard to forward any stray units he could lay hands on, and even appealed to the War Department to order Kirby Smith to send “two or more divisions” from the Transmississippi. This was a forlorn hope if ever there was one, and Seddon was prompt to tell him so. Besides, even if all the reinforcements he requested had been started in his direction without delay, it was altogether unlikely that they could arrive — even from North Alabama, let alone elsewhere — in time to help him meet the crisis now at hand. Two days later, midway through the ice storm, a follow-up circular warned that it was “highly probable that we will fight a battle before the close of the present year.” Corps commanders were told to look to their defenses and line of retreat; Lee, who had the center, was cautioned to “select all good points in rear of his right and left flanks, and fortify them with strong self-supporting detached works, so that, should it become necessary to withdraw either of the corps now upon his flanks, the flank thus becoming the right or left flank of the army may be in condition to be easily defended.” Furthermore, so important did Hood consider resumption of work on the outlying strongholds, all three lieutenant generals were urged to supervise their construction in person, “not leaving them either to subordinate commanders or engineer
officers.”

  He did what he could, ice-bound as he was, and three days later, while the thaw converted the sleet to slush and the frozen earth to slime, word came that Thomas had crossed his cavalry from Edgefield, over the Cumberland, to Nashville. He was massing behind his works there, spies reported, for an all-out attack on the Confederate left, where dirty and fair weather had combined to prevent completion of the vital redoubts. Hood warned Stewart to “give Chalmers such assistance as you think necessary, keeping in communication.” Next day, December 14, with the roads beginning to dry a bit, corps commanders were able to begin complying with orders to “send all their wagons, except artillery, ordnance, and ambulances, to the vicinity of Brentwood,” five miles in their rear. At the same time, previous instructions regarding the hoarding of ammunition — in limited supply because of the transportation breakdown — still applied: “Not a cartridge of any kind will be burned until further orders, unless the enemy should advance upon us.”

  4

  Thomas intended to do just that: advance: but he was determined not to do so, despite prods and threats from his Washington and City Point superiors, until he felt that his army was in condition to accomplish the annihilation Hood had been inviting ever since he took up his present position, in front of the Tennessee capital, two weeks back. Numerically, the blue force assembled to oppose him had reached that stage before the end of the first week; Thomas by then had gathered 71,842 soldiers under his command, “present for duty, equipped.” Of these, 9000 were at Murfreesboro and about the same number were garrison troops, two thirds of them posted at Nashville and the other third at such outlying points as Johnsonville and Chattanooga, whose complements had been stripped to skeleton proportions. The rest — some 54,000 of all arms — were available as a striking force, and that was the use their commander had in mind to make of them as soon as he judged the time was ripe. A. J. Smith’s 12,000 arrived by transport from Missouri while the battle raged at Franklin, and next morning Schofield marched in with his own 10,000 and Stanley’s 14,000 survivors, now under Wood. Steedman came by rail from Chattanooga, that day and the next, with 6000 more, including a number of veterans who had returned from re-enlistment furloughs too late to march with Sherman to the sea. Finally there was the cavalry, 12,000 strong, though more than a third lacked horses and the others were badly frazzled after a week of contesting Hood’s advance from Duck River to the Harpeth and beyond.

  This necessity for resting and refitting his weary troopers, while trying to find mounts for the 4000 Wilson had had to leave behind when he rode out to join Schofield at Columbia, was the principal cause of delay, at least at the outset. In response to a pair of wires from Grant, December 2, urging him to “move out of Nashville with all your army and force the enemy to retire or fight upon ground of your own choosing,” Thomas stressed his need for “a cavalry force sufficient to contend with Forrest,” who had “at least 12,000” veteran horsemen. That was close to twice the Wizard’s actual strength, and roughly six times the number he left with Hood when he departed for Murfreesboro next morning; but Thomas accepted the estimate as a figure to be matched, or at any rate approximated, before he undertook Hood’s destruction. His main problem, even with all of Kentucky at his back, was the procurement of remounts, which were in short supply after more than three years of a war that had been about as hard on horses as it was on men, and broke them down at an even faster rate. Some measure of his difficulty was shown by the response George D. Prentice, the Union-loyal editor of the Louisville Courier, received when he complained to Military Governor Andrew Johnson about the use to which the army had put a $5000 investment he had made in cotton down in Nashville. The bales had been commandeered for installation as part of the capital fortifications; he wanted them back, he wrote Johnson, with something less expensive put in their place. But there was nothing the Vice President-elect could do for him in the matter, having himself just had a fine team of carriage horses seized for conversion to cavalry mounts. Others suffered similar deprivations, including a traveling circus, whose bareback riders were left poised in mid-air, so to speak, and the city’s streetcar line, which had to suspend operations throughout the crisis for lack of mules to draw its cars. All within reach, of whatever crowbait description, were sent across the Cumberland to Edgefield, where Wilson was reorganizing and getting his troopers in shape for their share in the deferred offensive against the rebels intrenched southward, in plain view from Capitol Hill and the high-sited forts that rimmed the city in that direction.

  All this required time, however, and time was the one thing his superiors did not consider he, or they, could afford at the present critical juncture; especially Grant. Halleck kept warning Thomas that their chief was losing patience, but the Virginian’s files contained by then a sheaf of dispatches that made only too clear the City Point general’s feelings in that regard. “You will now suffer incalculable injury upon your railroads if Hood is not speedily disposed of. Put forth, therefore, every possible exertion.” “Hood should be attacked where he is. Time strengthens him, in all probability, as much as it does you.” “Attack Hood at once, and wait no longer for a remount of your cavalry. There is great danger of delay resulting in a campaign back to the Ohio River.” “Why not attack at once? By all means avoid the contingency of a foot race to see which, you or Hood, can beat to the Ohio.” Thus Grant fumed through the first week of the Tennessee stalemate. Thomas’s replies, over that same span — in which he spoke of his “crippled condition” and promised to move out, first, “in a few days,” then within “less than a week,” and finally by December 7, “if I can perfect my arrangements” — only goaded his chief into greater exasperation. Moreover, Halleck by now was warning that continued inaction might lead to his removal. Thomas replied that he regretted Grant’s “dissatisfaction at my delay in attacking the enemy. I feel conscious that I have done everything in my power.… If he should order me to be relieved I will submit without a murmur.” That was on December 9, and he closed with a weather report that seemed to him to rule out, at least for the present, any further talk of an advance. “A terrible storm of freezing rain has come on since daylight, which will render an attack impossible until it breaks.”

  He also passed news of this to Grant. “I had nearly completed my preparations to attack the enemy tomorrow morning, but a terrible storm of freezing rain has come on today, which will make it impossible for our men to fight to any advantage. I am, therefore, compelled to wait for the storm to break and make the attempt immediately after.” And he added: “Major General Halleck informs me that you are very much dissatisfied with my delay in attacking. I can only say I have done all in my power to prepare, and if you should deem it necessary to relieve me I shall submit without a murmur.” Alas, the reply he received that night was, if anything, even more chill and grudging than the others. “I have as much confidence in your conducting a battle rightly as I have in any other officer,” Grant informed the Rock of Chickamauga, “but it has seemed to me that you have been slow, and I have had no explanation of affairs to convince me otherwise.… I telegraphed to suspend the order relieving you until we should hear further. I hope most sincerely that there will be no necessity for repeating the order, and that the facts will show that you have been right all the time.”

  Thomas was hard put to comprehend how Grant, five hundred miles away in front of Richmond — stalemated himself, not for a week but for the past six months — could presume to say what was practicable for a conglomerate army, so hastily and recently assembled under a man who was a stranger to more than half its members. However, his chief of staff, Brigadier General William Whipple, an old-line West Pointer, had a theory that someone hereabouts was “using the wires to undermine his commander” in Washington or City Point or both. At first he suspected Andrew Johnson, but on being informed that the governor was too brusque and aboveboard for such tactics, he shifted to Schofield as a likelier candidate for the Judas role. Sure enough, a prowling staffer
picked up at the telegraph office the original of a recent message from the New Yorker to Grant: “Many officers here are of the opinion that General Thomas is certainly slow in his movements.” Thomas read it with considerable surprise, then turned to James Steedman, who was with him at the time. “Steedman, can it be possible that Schofield would send such a telegram?” Steedman, whose share in the glory of Chickamauga had been second only to his chief’s, replied that he must surely be familiar with his own general’s writing. Thomas put on his glasses and examined the message carefully. “Yes, it is General Schofield’s handwriting,” he admitted, and asked, puzzled: “Why does he send such telegrams?” Steedman smiled at the Virginian’s guileless nature, uncorrupted by twenty-four years of exposure to army politics. “General Thomas,” he presently asked, “who is next in command to you in case of removal?” Thomas hung fire for a moment. “Oh, I see,” he said at last, and shook his head at what he saw.

  In point of fact, there was more behind Grant’s exasperation, and a good deal more had come of it, than Thomas or anyone else in Tennessee had any way of knowing. Prodded by Stanton, who translated Lincoln’s trepidation into sneers at “the McClellan and Rosecrans strategy of do nothing and let the rebels raid the country,” Grant said later, in confirmation of earlier testimony by his aide: “I was never so anxious during the war as at that time.” Indeed, under pressure of this anxiety, he lost his accustomed military balance. His fret, of course, was not only for Slow Trot Thomas, out in Nashville; it was also for Sherman, who had not yet emerged from his trans-Georgia tunnel, and for Butler, who continued to resist being hurried down the coast to Wilmington. Worst of all, he saw the possibility of the war being turned around just at the moment when he believed it was practically won. “If I had been in Hood’s place,” he afterwards declared, “I would have gone to Louisville and on north until I came to Chicago.” Taking counsel of his fears, he had told Halleck on December 8: “If Thomas has not struck yet, he ought to be ordered to hand over the command to Schofield.” Old Brains replied that if this was what Grant wanted he would have to issue orders to that effect. “The responsibility, however, will be yours, as no one here, so far as I am informed, wishes General Thomas’s removal.” Grant drew back: “I would not say relieve him until I hear further from him.” But there was no let-up in the telegraphic goading. “If you delay attack longer,” he wired the Virginian on December 11, three days into the ice storm, “the mortifying spectacle will be witnessed of a rebel army moving for the Ohio River, and you will be forced to act, accepting such weather as you find.… Delay no longer for weather or reinforcements.”