Captain Thomas Key, an artillerist with Cleburne’s division: “The whole army this morning with steady steps bends its way northward towards the fruitful lands of the gallant Tennessee. There is now a snow storm raging. . . . The wind howls mournfully from the west.”
Captain Sam Foster, Granbury’s Texas brigade: “We left camp this morning at sun up and started for Tenn.”
Dr. D. G. Owen, surgeon with Major General John Calvin Brown’s division, Cheatham’s corps: “I think we will have a severe fight before a month. Sherman will endeavor to keep us out of Tenn. Hood intends going. That is the question before the contending armies at present.”
Sam Watkins, of Cheatham’s corps: “We walked over this floating bridge, and soon found ourselves on the Tennessee side of the Tennessee River. In driving a great herd of cattle across the pontoon, the front one got stubborn, and the others, crowding up all in one bulk, broke the line that held the pontoon and drowned many of the drove. We had beef for supper that night.”
Ralph Neal, private, 20th Tennessee Infantry: “For several days we had marched through a very poor country, and on very short rations, three sinkers per day—to those who don’t understand, a sinker is a biscuit made from unbolted wheat flour without milk, grease, salt or soda.”
Captain Joseph Boyce, Sam French’s division, Cockrell’s Missouri brigade: “We were obliged to leave behind at Tuscumbia and Florence many men who were so badly shod and clothed they could not make the march towards Nashville. Presently a snow storm set in, the first heavy snow of the season. The men set up a shout and hurrahed for Missouri. ‘This is the kind of weather we want, regular old Missouri weather. This is none of your southern rains; this is something decent.’”
Dr. Owen, surgeon: “Gen’l Cheatham issued an order for all bare-footed men to sew them up shoes out of beef hides, put the hair next to the feet & stitch them close around the feet. I saw several pairs of them & they did fine to walk around in but did not smell well after a day or two.”
Captain James L. Cooper, 20th Tennessee Regiment: “About the 22nd of this month we commenced our march from Florence into Tennessee. It was a terribly cold day and the rain as it fell froze in a hard mass on my horse’s mane. We marched through Wainesboro and in a day or two began to see evidences of the Yankees, in the dead horses and men along the road, where Forrest’s cavalry had been skirmishing with them.”
Captain Sam Foster: “Today came to Waynesboro, a very nice little town, but nearly ruined by the war. Several houses burned down, some torn down, gardens destroyed.”
Surgeon Owen, to his wife: “When this reaches you I expect to be in Mid’l Tennessee. My boots were worn out & I had to buy me a pair of old pontoon shoes from the government & they don’t suit me in this muddy weather. . . . Have you made me any shirts of your old dress yet? I would like very much to have a couple. . . . I would like very much to have something to line my grey coat with, for the lining has all torn out.”
Thomas Key: “Through the laziness of a sergeant, two wagons last night were driven into a pond, drowning one mule and near drowning a freezing negro teamster. His clothes froze on him and it was with strenuous exertion that his life was saved.”
E. T. Eggleston, Lee’s corps, artillery: “Came through some of the finest and most beautiful country I ever beheld, passed by the residence of Gen Pillow and Wm Polk, brother to the late Lt. Gen Polk, two magnificent structures.”
Sam Foster: “Came past Mount Pleasant today and strike the richest country we have seen yet—Land rich, very rich. Water good and plenty of it, and the finest timber we have ever seen. To day we pass the Polk place in Maury County. The prettiest place I have ever seen in my life.”
Chaplain Charles L. Quintard, Cheatham’s corps: “In consequence of the wretched condition of the roads and the rough weather, we had a hard time of it. I made my way with all possible speed through Mount Pleasant to Ashwood and to the house of my dear friend, General Lucius Polk.”
Over at Pulaski, about twenty-five miles northeast, John Schofield was justifiably alarmed. From the day Hood’s army began marching into Tennessee, he had gotten reports from his cavalry that the Southern commander’s intention seemed directed at getting between him and the Duck River crossing at Columbia. But Schofield wasn’t sure; he worried that Hood might be planning to swing around and attack him at or near Pulaski. Schofield’s orders from Thomas were to prepare for either possibility, and so he dawdled around Pulaski with his twenty-eight-thousand-man army for a couple of days longer than he should have, trying to divine Hood’s designs.
John Schofield was an odd sort of bird for the army. By the time he arrived in Pulaski he was thirty-three—the same age as Hood, stocky and bald-headed, with a long, full black beard and drooping mustache. Except for the actions in Missouri and the fight around Atlanta, he had not spent much time on the battlefield, and, at least according to one observer, he was not too keen on battle itself. He had started out life as the son of a traveling Baptist missionary and was engaged in the study of pre-law when, at the age of seventeen, the West Point cadet appointed from his district in Illinois dropped out of the academy, and Schofield got the vacancy. He did well enough in his studies to tutor his presentday nemesis, Sam Hood, through mathematics, and though he remained religious, managed to pick up on the way a few vices such as smoking and playing cards. While at the Point a curious event befell Schofield that would figure in his later career, particularly in the defense of Nashville. As a senior, he was nearly expelled from the academy for refusing to name the participants in an incident of horseplay that he witnessed. A court-martial was eventually ordered, and one of the members of the court was none other than George Thomas, the cavalry instructor, who voted against him. Even though he was eventually acquitted, Schofield apparently harbored a grudge against Thomas thereafter.
After graduation, Schofield served in Florida, helping to subdue the Seminole Indians, and eventually returned to West Point as an instructor. In 1857 he married the daughter of his boss at the academy, but by 1860 he had decided to get out of the army. “My taste for service in the line of the Army, if I ever had one, was gone,” he recalled. He was on the verge of resigning when he received some “timely advice” from the former secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, who gave him a prescient “hint that promotion might be better in a year or two.” When war broke out some months later, Schofield was posted to Missouri on the staff of General Nathaniel Lyon, where he was soon promoted to brigadier general, commanded the Missouri state militia, took part in the battles of Wilson’s Creek and Prairie Grove, and, ultimately, was given command of the entire Department of the Missouri. He joined Sherman’s army as it launched the Atlanta campaign.
As Hood’s men moved menacingly northward, Schofield arrived in Pulaski on November 13, took command from General Stanley the following morning, and began organizing his army. At this time the federal camps were a beehive of activity, troops arriving, and drilling, ammunition and supply trains chugging into the depot hourly from Nashville. Also, about this time, there was a certain amount of spying going on by both armies. General Stanley recorded one incident in which a “funny little fellow,” shoeless, tattered, and driving a rickety wagon containing a bale of cotton, drove into the Union camp. He was trying to sell the cotton to the federal soldiers—a common practice at that time, since they were the only ones to sell cotton to—and after completing the sale he lingered for a while, speaking with soldiers. He was about to leave when he was recognized by someone and brought to Stanley, who discovered “concealed in that old shirt a very perfect drawing of all our lines and fortifications at Pulaski.” Noting that this was a “very bright and intelligent spy,” Stanley added that he “intended to hang that fellow but in the confusion of our retreat he escaped, and I am not sorry.” On another occasion a double agent arrived at the federal camp offering to scuttle the boats of Hood’s pontoon bridge at Tuscumbia for the sum of ten thousand dollars. Terms were agreed to, and the saboteur actually
cut loose Hood’s bridge; but “as it was caught and preserved, he never claimed any reward.”
By his own account, Schofield soon became “apprehensive” that Thomas, up in Nashville, would be too “slow” to react to whatever surprises Hood had in store for him. At that point, Schofield and Thomas both believed that Hood’s army numbered up to fifty-five thousand. Before long, Schofield concluded that Thomas’s orders for him to fight Hood at Pulaski were not only wrong but “embarrassing” and began a correspondence with his commander to give himself more flexibility. This was granted, but even after he had sure information that Hood was on the march, Schofield dallied several days before coming to the realization that “Hood is nearer Columbia than I am” and frantically ordering the concentration of his forces below the Duck River at Columbia.
The fact that he got there first is remarkable, accomplished as it was by a frenzied day-and-night forced march, and even when the federal army entered the Lawrenceburg Pike, it was only a few miles ahead of Hood. Nevertheless, Schofield had won the first leg of the race for Nashville and thwarted Hood’s plan for his destruction south of the river.
It was by now the 26th of November. The Confederate army had been marching for almost a week by parallel mud-rutted routes. After crossing the Tennessee, they moved simultaneously north, with Cheatham’s corps on the right via the Waynesboro road; A. P. Stewart’s corps, with much of the artillery and baggage wagons, by way of the crushed-stone, or “macadamized,” Lawrenceburg Pike; and Lee’s corps in between on country roads. By the time they all converged near Mount Pleasant, they had come sixty miles and were less than half a day’s march from their immediate objective, Columbia. Trouble was, of course, that because of bad weather, John Schofield’s federal army had beaten them there.
As Hood’s division began to set up opposite the Union army, things began to assume a festive air. At Hamilton Place, the mansion of General Lucius Polk, Chaplain Quintard recorded, “All day long there was a constant stream of visitors. . . . General Hood and [the exiled Tennessee] Governor [Isham] Harris came early in the day, as did General Cheatham. Then came General John C. Brown, General [Randall L.] Gibson, General [William Brimage] Bate, handsome Frank Armstrong, and General [Edward C.] Walthall. . . . I offered a special prayer of Thanksgiving to God for our return to Tennessee.”
The hospitality of the Polks and Pillows and other gentry of Columbia turned into an extended fete for the Confederate officers as they waited for the battle to develop. There were dinner parties, serenading, and bands playing and much welcoming and gaiety. The elegance of the surroundings deeply impressed even one Union soldier who had passed by just ahead of the Confederates on his way into the town proper. “The well-kept farms and spacious lawns, with long, straight lanes bordered with trees, leading up to the handsome mansions, gave us the impression of peace and comfort. But,” he added, “how quickly there was to be a change.”
At this stage of the game, Hood was supremely confident. He had lost the race to Columbia but still had under him a superior army and the superb divisions of Forrest’s cavalry to throw against Schofield’s outnumbered command. That he was vigorous in spirit is undoubted, but in health there were questions. He had recovered from the loss of his arm—or the use of it—but carried it in a sling. And the leg still caused him trouble; amputated so close to the hip, it must have been excruciatingly painful even after a year. Everywhere he walked he used crutches, and to mount a horse he needed the assistance of aides and had to be strapped into the saddle. He used at least two artificial legs—one of hardwood and the other of cork. Mary Chesnut, without identifying which one, recorded, “The Charlottesville leg is much better looking than the French one.” The result was that Hood simply could not perform some of the duties of a healthy commanding general, such as dashing rapidly to observe the action or traversing rough terrain or moving rapidly as a situation changed. Furthermore, his mutilations were bound to have produced some lingering emotional trauma, though to what extent remained anybody’s guess.
The catalyst in Hood’s advance against Nashville was the cavalry corps of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest’s exploits had become legendary by this time; his raids into Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi had frustrated many a Union commander’s plan of operations. “The wizard,” as Forrest had become known in the South—“the devil” in the North—was sent ahead of Hood’s army with his six thousand troopers to clear the path of federal cavalry, and this he did in spectacular fashion.
Forrest was a forty-year-old Tennessean who had become a successful planter before the war and in his younger days in Memphis was a slave trader. Unlike J. E. B. Stuart and Joe Wheeler, the other two Confederate cavalry corps commanders east of the Mississippi, Forrest had not attended West Point; in fact, he had no formal military training of any kind. He enlisted as a private in the Tennessee cavalry in 1861 but was quickly commissioned and given a regimental command, where he proved to be a soldier of remarkable ingenuity, smuggling arms and supplies for his new regiment from under the very noses of Union forces in Kentucky. He was also a man of daring and schemes and almost unimaginable courage. After the battle of Shiloh, as Sherman’s men attempted to pursue the Confederates, Forrest turned on them with a vengeance and drove them back. In his fury, at one point he outraced his own men to charge a line of federal foot soldiers and found himself surrounded. As the blue-coated enemy closed in, shouting, “Kill him!” Forrest demonically struck out with saber in one hand and blazing pistol in the other, until one man stuck the barrel of his rifle against his side and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet tearing into his back. Enraged, Forrest reached down and snatched one of his tormentors by the collar and hoisted him up behind him on the horse; then, employing this ill-fated passenger as a shield, he galloped through the mass of seething guns and bayonets back to his own lines, where he unceremoniously dumped the amazed enemy soldier on the ground.
With this kind of cavalryman pointing the way, Hood need not have worried, and, in fact, he was able to march his entire army by the outmatched federal cavalry under General James Wilson unmolested. One Union general described the federal cavalry as being driven by Forrest “like a herd in a stampede.”
When James Wilson took over command of the federal cavalry of the Army of the Tennessee that same month, he found it in chaos. On paper, he had nearly twenty-five thousand troopers, but, as Hood set out across the Tennessee, he had only about five thousand effectives. The rest were scattered all over the department, many without mounts. Wilson immediately sought and received an order from Secretary of War Stanton to impress from any local citizens living below the Ohio River all horses and mules needed for the campaign. As he later recorded, “All street-car and livery stable horses, and private carriage and saddle horses were seized,” and “within seven days . . . seven thousand horses were obtained in middle and western Kentucky and our mounted force was thereby increased to twelve thousand.” They even confiscated the carriage horses of U.S. Vice President Andrew Johnson, as well as those of a traveling circus.
Wilson was a twenty-seven-year-old Illinois native who graduated sixth in his West Point class. He was sent west as an engineer to do land surveying for the army and continued in the Engineer Corps after the war broke out until 1863, when he became an inspector general on the staff of Grant. Then, from May through September of 1864 he was sent east in command of a cavalry division under Phil Sheridan in Virginia, until he was appointed major general and shipped back west to take over Thomas’s cavalry. What Wilson saw when he arrived at Nashville was deeply disturbing. Years later he was to say, “It is no slander now to say that the mounted service was looked upon as both futile and discreditable.”
Wilson was just setting about to reorganize the cavalry when Hood invaded Tennessee. He arrived at Columbia in time, to his chagrin, to witness Croxton’s brigade retreating wildly through the streets before the determined Forrest and his men. He was also astounded to see at the head of one of his “better” regiments “
a well mounted and well clad woman, riding with the field and staff as though she belonged there.” When he inquired who the woman was, he was informed, “Oh, that is Mrs. Colonel Smith commanding the Eighth Michigan Cavalry,” a further explanation being that the lady had been with the regiment for some time and “seemed to be quite at home.”
After issuing an order relieving Mrs. Colonel Smith from further duties with the 8th Michigan Cavalry, Wilson set about posting his brigades to protect the Duck River fords from a crossing by Hood, while the Union infantry dug entrenchments in front of Columbia and Schofield looked in vain for reinforcements from Thomas, up in Nashville.
As the two armies lay opposite each other at Columbia, Schofield was in a further stew because of a faulty communications arrangement with Thomas. It seemed the War Department did not trust anyone except the telegraphic corps with the cipher to encode and decode telegraphic messages—not even Schofield or, for that matter, Grant himself—and, as the general reported, “The work was so badly done that it took from eight to forty-eight hours in sending or delivering a despatch. The fact is,” Schofield grumbled, “I was not only without any appropriate orders or instructions nearly all the time, but also without any timely information from General Thomas to guide my action.” Not knowing what to do—or so he said—Schofield withdrew his army through the town and across the Duck River, establishing a line with the river to his front instead of his back, and began raising breastworks again, or, in his words, “inviting attack.” This at least would fulfill the part of his mission that he understood included delaying Hood wherever possible until A. J. Smith and the Sixteenth Corps arrived at Nashville from the north.
Hood, meantime, had calculated a scheme for Schofield’s unraveling, and on November 27, following one of the gala fetes at the Warfield mansion, the headquarters he occupied on the Pulaski Pike, he held a council of war with his generals during which he laid out his intentions. Later that night, as a snowstorm raged outside, he revealed these designs confidentially to Chaplain Quintard: “Hood detailed to me his plan of taking Nashville & calling for volunteers to storm the key of the works about the city.” The army, Hood said, “will press forward with all possible speed” and “will beat the enemy to Nashville or make him go there double quick.”
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