While the Seventh Regiment was following the Sixth out of the bivouac area, Grierson conferred with Colonel Prince, and then made his decision. He would send one company on a quick dash toward Macon, with orders to create as much attention as possible there, cutting the telegraph lines and destroying a railroad bridge if possible. He wanted a good company strongly loyal to a good captain.
The company chosen was B Company; the commander, Captain Henry Forbes.*
II
Captain Henry Clinton Forbes was a sensitive, well-read farming man who usually carried a copy of Emerson’s Conduct of Life in his saddlebag, a man subject to shifting moods of elation and despair, and who regarded the war as a great personal tragedy. He disliked military life intensely but had a high sense of duty and a sincere belief in the precepts of his times.
In 1861, after the harvests were gathered on the farms along the tier of Illinois counties adjoining Wisconsin, the young men had begun volunteering, and on a September day Henry Forbes and his younger brother Stephen went over to Cedarville to enlist in a cavalry company. The members of this company called themselves the “Winnesheaks,” and taking their own horses and some of their dogs, drifted down to Camp Butler for training. Henry Forbes, being older than most of the others, was elected captain, and the Winnesheaks became Company B of the Seventh Illinois.
Captain Forbes, who had been acting the role of father in his fatherless family, continued the same role at Camp Butler. When his boys failed to get their pay on time he lent them money; when tobacco and gloves were not issued he purchased enough for the company on his own credit, trusting the boys until pay day. When cold weather came suddenly in October and there were no blankets available, he took leave, went home, and collected blankets from all over his county. He shipped sixteen boxes of bedding down to Springfield.
After more than a year and a half, Company B had lost its share of men from disease and wounds and other men had come to take their places, but they were still the Winnesheaks at heart, one big male family with Captain Henry Forbes the paternal leader—stern, just, and kindly—his boys ready to follow him through hellfire with the fierce loyalty of a blood clan.
Now on this morning of April 22, Captain Forbes saw cantering towards him alongside the column his commander, Colonel Edward Prince. Prince turned his horse about, riding easily beside the captain, and without preliminaries began explaining the necessity for another feint toward the Mobile & Ohio. The delusion must be maintained, the colonel explained, that the Mobile & Ohio was the main object of attack. The brigade was still ninety miles from its real objective, the Vicksburg railroad, sole artery of supplies for the Confederate armies at Jackson and Vicksburg.
To mask the real purpose of the raid, would Captain Forbes undertake with his company to approach Macon, break the railroad, and cut the telegraph wires? Afterwards it was possible, though only faintly possible, that Captain Forbes might be able to rejoin the Seventh Regiment.
“What course will the brigade take after destroying the Vicksburg railroad?” asked Captain Forbes.
Colonel Prince assured the captain that he could give him no positive information as to the course the brigade would take. It seemed highly probable they would swing eastward into Alabama, retreating northward to the Federal lines. This element of uncertainty, he admitted, naturally increased the dangers challenging the commander of the detached company.
Prince offered a few suggestions, and after he had finished speaking, Forbes evidently asked permission to have three of his men return to Company B from special duties with Sergeant Surby’s Butternut Guerillas. He wanted William Buffington, Isaac Robinson, and Arthur Wood. Prince agreed to release the scouts and Forbes sent a man up column to recall them.
Before turning to gallop forward to the head of his regiment, Prince added as an afterthought: “If too strong a Confederate force should be at Macon, the Captain should try and cross the Noxubee and move toward Decatur in Newton County, by the shortest route.”3 Colonel Grierson, he explained, expected to pass through Decatur sometime during the next forty-eight hours.
At the first break in the heavy woods cover, Captain Forbes ordered his lead squadron off the road. He was thinking of the half dozen or more partly disabled men and mounts in Company B. He would detach them to another company. He was thinking of his younger brother, Stephen, nineteen years old—Stephen to whom he had been a father since the boy was ten—of the bitter irony of Stephen’s being caught in this wild mission on his first field duty after seven months’ absence, four in rebel prisons, three in that Rhode Island hospital where Henry had gone all the long way from Illinois to see him. (The difficulties of obtaining the furlough had seemed insurmountable, but he had been bound to see if the boy was all right.) Stephen was a quiet one, but Henry had heard him say he would prefer death to being captured again.4
The last platoon of Company B turned off the muddy road, the horses pressing flank to flank as Lieutenant William McCausland and the sergeants struggled vainly to form presentably dressed lines in the boggy swamp.
Captain Forbes sat stiffly on his horse, facing the forty men. He explained briefly what was expected of Company B. He was confident that Company B could accomplish the task. If any man felt physically unable to gallop march by day and by night without rest, he might voluntarily withdraw from the expedition without prejudice on his record. If any man suspected that his mount could not perform the same task, he should report now.
Four or five men reported failing horses, but in the end it was Forbes who rode stiffly down the line, his mount splashing water at every step, and ordered several men detached. There is no record that he spoke to his brother, Stephen, who would have been sitting at attention, his elbows held out, his cavalry hat set rakishly, his solemn boy’s face probably flecked with tiny dried dots of gray mud, his eyes staring off into space like a proper trooper at attention.
They marched all day, thirty-five men of Company B and Captain Henry Forbes, trotting and galloping much of the way, straight into the eastern sun until they were near the Confederate’s picket line along the Mobile & Ohio. Somewhere below Artesia Depot, after they had moved swiftly out of the bottomlands and approached the hilly higher ground where the railroad ran, they turned south toward Macon.
Young Stephen Forbes, riding near the head of the little column, was the only one of the company who had looked upon this particular stretch of enemy country before this day. When he realized they were traveling near Artesia Depot, he must have remembered that name with dark dread.
Almost a year ago the thing had begun, somewhere around Corinth, a June day, the sun brighter than now. He had ridden right into the midst of them in the woods, the Confederates calling: “Hey, Yank!”
“What do you want?”
“Want you, Yank.”
They had taken him to a place called Baldwyn where he had talked back to their colonel, Colonel Wirt Adams, a Mississippian. Adams had roared at him, a hot-blooded rebel he was.
And then because Stephen was a message bearer they had taken him to General Bragg’s headquarters near Blackland, with Old Bragg sitting there on the porch of a house with two or three of his officers, just like in a picture.* They didn’t get a thing out of him, and neither did Beauregard’s men. They must have thought he knew something important, taking him right up to Beauregard’s headquarters. He had seen Beauregard close up, the military moustache that gave him a foreign air, his hair nearly white. Old Beauregard had looked sick to death that day.
He remembered Artesia Depot. The rebels had shuttled him and the other prisoners down there from Columbus. The guards had been decent enough fellows. It had been hotter than an oven in the freight cars under that broiling Mississippi sun, and the guards had known it would be a long time before the main line train came down the Mobile & Ohio to hook them on for the long ride to prison.
He had written some of it down later, on the twelve sheets of paper he had paid a dollar for when he was in a Mobile prison that had once b
een an old slave house. “We were marched around to the shady side of the Artesia depot,” Stephen wrote, “where with the guards ranged in front of us, we speedily became the special objects of curiosity to almost the entire population of the hamlet.”
A home guard armed with a double-barreled shotgun wanted to kill them then and there. “Kill the Yankees, damn ’em, they every one of ’em ought to be hung! I be damn if I don’t burn two or three Yankees yet before this war is over.”
The Confederate captain in charge of the prisoners forbade any more talking.
They slept upon the depot platform all night, waiting for a train which finally arrived at eight o’clock the next morning when they resumed their journey in the freight car. They ran until night, the train rarely moving faster than eight or ten miles an hour, “through a varied country, sometimes extremely rich, bearing corn four or five feet high, and sometimes covered with pines. Bare and hilly regions were followed by wet and swampy tracts, intersected by slow almost stagnant streams of inky-looking water which crept lazily through the masses of tangled underwood.”5
Stephen Forbes did not describe his emotions on his second venture into this same enemy country, almost a year after his capture, but he must have been pleased to be galloping so rapidly and so free, putting Artesia Depot farther behind him. Once during the afternoon the company moved in closer to the railroad than they intended. They heard the shrill, querulous little whistle, and then off through the trees saw black pine-wood smoke curling from the bellied stack as the engine racked along, its cars swaying madly over the uneven tracking.
Stephen remembered a ride on such a train; they had been transferring him from one prison to another, carrying the two books he’d bought in Mobile, the Holy Bible and Crosby’s Grammar of the Greek Language; he remembered how they had let him go into town to buy the books, a guard following him with a shotgun, and the people staring at him on the street.
He remembered the ride in the open flat car covered with canvas over a wooden frame: We were attached directly behind the engine and the road was rough and wild, and we started out at a tearing rate with the wind blowing strong in our faces. We sat as tight as we could well be packed, swaying to and fro with the motion of our shrieking, smoking engine, and with red countenances and watery eyes … making wry faces at the shower of cinders and floods of steam, while the ragged pine trees and rough hillocks flew by us with a rush as we plunged through deep cuts, rattled over bridges, and flew along through dark forests.6
While the train whistled past, Captain Forbes halted the column among the pines, the men holding their horses as motionless as possible until it disappeared with a gray-black streamer of smoke fading away across the sky.
They rode steadily southward then, halting only occasionally to unbit and water their mounts. “As we marched toward Macon,” Captain Forbes recorded, “we found ourselves in the midst of the left-hand crest of the panic-stricken overflow from the main march. As our march cut through this course diagonally, near evening we got outside it and approached Macon, and we were all alert to know whether or not the town was garrisoned. We fed and supped, threw out a little picket to the front, and, turning a fence across the road to obstruct riders, awaited developments.”7
They did not have long to wait. The company had halted on the Augustus Plantation less than three miles from Macon; about nine o’clock a young Confederate scout, John Bryson, came out from town riding a regular patrol. Concealed along the road, the Yankee pickets took him in easily and brought him immediately to Captain Forbes.
Forbes treated Bryson like one of his boys, gave him coffee and tobacco, and asked a few casual questions. “Much diplomacy was finally rewarded,” the captain said, “with a statement that a train loaded with infantry and a battery of artillery was expected any moment in Macon.”
Unknown to Captain Forbes, earlier in the evening a Macon citizen named Dinsmore had heard rumors from some of the town Negroes that a Union force was at the Augustus Plantation. As news of Grierson’s raid on Starkville had reached the Macon area during the day, Dinsmore was inclined to believe the rumors. He rode out toward the camp, tied his horse in the woods, walked to the slave quarters and asked the Negroes if the Yankees were there. The frightened slaves said they were there, all right, in the plantation house eating supper. Dinsmore hurried back to Macon, hoping to gather a force of armed citizens to attack the raiders, but as the Macon Beacon declared in its next issue: “Not ten men could be raised about Macon to attack them. At 3:00 o’clock in the morning 2,000 of our troops came up from Meridian, but they were either not informed of the presence of the Federal company or did not choose to disturb the repose of our quondam friends.” The Beacon did not explain, however, that rumors current in Macon the night of April 22 set the number of Yankees outside the town at 5,000 troops, and that it was some time afterwards before the truth was known.
Captain Forbes said that his scouts heard “a great whistling of engines” that night, and he suspected they heralded the arrival of Confederate troops reported by the rebel scout, John Bryson. “We thought it best,” he added, “to consider Macon too large a prize to be captured by thirty-six men. Had we revealed our numbers by venturing among the enemy, they would have swallowed us up as a half mouthful, but as it was, they treated our Company with the most distinguished respect. Meanwhile we accomplished what we were sent for; we kept all eyes on the Mobile & Ohio Railroad.”
III
During the morning of April 22, Captain Forbes’s Company B and Colonel Grierson’s main column were moving in directions almost opposite, Forbes marching eastward while Grierson was swinging westward along the Whitefield road to avoid the direct but impassable trail which cut across six flooding creeks, headwaters of the Noxubee.
Even this extended route was extremely difficult in the low, swampy bottoms. According to Grierson, they marched “for miles belly-deep in water, so that no road was discernible.”8
Surby’s Butternut Guerillas, operating without William Buffington, Isaac Robinson, and Arthur Wood, who had gone with Captain Forbes to Macon, found no difficulty in persuading the inhabitants of this insulated back country that they were Confederate soldiers. Indeed, many of the people accepted the mud-camouflaged main column as a rebel troop. Isolated by the floods, they had heard nothing of a Yankee raid. Once when the column passed a schoolhouse, the teacher called recess and the children raced out to the roadside, cheering the muddy horsemen for loyal Confederates.*
The scouts, growing more expert in their assigned duties, gained the favor of the countrymen and easily located several droves of mules and horses, including some of the finest Mississippi racing stock. Surby would leave one scout to inform Colonel Blackburn, and when the column came up Blackburn would send a squad out into the woods to find the animals. They would sometimes bring in as many as twenty-five horses and mules at a time. Broken-down mounts could now be cut loose from the column, and the herd of led horses was rapidly improved in quality.
Late in the morning Surby and three of his men were passing a large plantation house.
My attention was suddenly attracted by a motion made at one of the windows. I gave the order to halt; no sooner done than the front door flew open and three lovely looking females dressed in white appeared at the opening, their faces beaming with smiles, and in a voice soft and sweet invited us to dismount and come in. … Various were the questions asked about the “Yanks” all of which we could answer satisfactorily; they informed us their father and brothers were in the Confederate Army.
One of the boys complained of being hungry; no sooner said than one of the ladies ran into the house, and soon returned with two black servants following, loaded down with eatables; we had to accept half a ham, that would make a hungry man laugh; biscuits, sweet cakes, fried sausage, and peach pie, all in abundance were pressed upon us, while one of the young ladies plucked some roses and presenting one to each bade us adieu, with many blessings and much success in our “holy cause”; on my
way back I met a company of the Sixth Illinois, and cautioned them to still deceive the “ladies,” and I presume it was some time ere they learned how bad they had been sold.9
Later, when they approached another plantation house, Surby and his men walked right into a pair of rebel soldiers home on furlough. In their Secesh clothing the scouts were immediately accepted as comrades by the two Confederates, who invited them into the house. When Surby announced that some Yankees were coming, the two rebels excitedly called to their Negro servants to saddle horses for flight.
Having told them that we would accompany them some distance [Surby wrote], the demijohn was brought out, glasses placed upon the table, and a cordial invitation given to help ourselves to some “old rye,” which invitation a soldier never refuses. … We started out, the young men armed with shotguns, eight negroes following with fourteen mules and six fine horses. It was about one and a half miles to the road, upon which the column was advancing, and in the direction that we were going; when about half way I had a curiosity to examine their guns, which they seemed proud to exhibit; making a motion to one of my men he followed suit, thus we had them disarmed.10
The Confederates joined in the laughter that followed. It was a good joke, they had been careless, but they were old soldiers, they didn’t fool easily. “We soon came in sight of the column,” Surby continued, “when our Confederate friends ‘smelt a rat,’ and with downcast countenances became uncommunicative. Shortly after this we passed through Whitefield, a small place of little importance.”
Southward to Louisville the road was little more than a crooking trail through gloomy cypress trees, flooded in one place for six miles, the water standing motionless, oily black, and forbidding.
Captain Jason Smith was having trouble with his four field pieces. To keep his ammunition dry he ordered it removed from the caissons and packed on horses. One of the gun carriages collapsed; the crew dismantled it, lashed the 140-pound gun barrel to a mule’s back, and slogged on.