Just before reaching Louisville, the scouts made their prize haul of the day, a mail courier with official Confederate dispatches and a registered parcel of Confederate money. Lieutenant-Colonel Blackburn proudly turned them over to Colonel Grierson; and as some of the letters were in French, Blackburn brought up his French sergeant-major, Augustus Leseure, to serve as translator. The dispatches, Sergeant Surby reported, “contained some valuable information.”
As the bedraggled column approached Louisville, Grierson halted the brigade briefly, sending Major Mathew Starr with a battalion of the Sixth Regiment on a dash into the town to set up pickets while the brigade moved through. When Starr galloped into the neat little village he was surprised to find no one on the streets. He kept his men moving rapidly until they were all dismounted and strategically protected by cover.
Louisville, being on a high road, had received warning from the east of a possible Yankee raid. Almost every house was closed, some windows were boarded up. Louisville had never been invaded before and the people feared the Yankees as the conquered always fear the unknown conquerors.
The brigade moved through a silent town, deserted and still as death, and in the darkness that had come suddenly there was an eerie quality more disturbing to the Union men than the presence of the unseen Southerners hidden behind locked doors and windows. As soon as the Sixth passed through, Major John Graham’s First Battalion of the Seventh replaced Starr’s pickets.
“Major Graham will remain until the column has been gone an hour,” Grierson ordered. He did not like the looks of the town, the electric feeling of fear and hatred in the air. “Let no one leave with information of the direction we have taken, drive out any stragglers from our troops, preserve order, quiet the fears of these people.”11
Grierson gave a second order to Captain John Lynch, commanding Company E of the Sixth Regiment. Lynch and one of his corporals were to disguise themselves as rebel citizens and proceed eastward toward Macon on a reconnoitering expedition. If possible they were to cut the telegraph line along the Mobile & Ohio Railroad. Grierson could not be certain whether Captain Forbes’s company had succeeded in reaching the railroad. As he explained, he wanted everything done that could possibly be done “to prevent information of our presence from flying along the railroad to Jackson and other points.”12
If Grierson expected to find easier marching after passing through Louisville he was bitterly disappointed. “A great splashing of mud … deep and wide gullies frequently yawned by our sides, black and mysterious in the night as bottomless abysses. …”
Four miles south of the town they began a long march through another swamp. On each side of the road, dark trees towered against the sky. “The water everywhere,” said the New York Times account, “was three to four feet deep, with every few hundred yards a mire-hole in which frequently for a few moments man and horse were lost to view. The Seventh Illinois being in the rear found these holes almost impassable, from the action of the large body of cavalry which had preceded them, and they were compelled to leave drowned some twenty noble animals whose strength was not equal to such an emergency. The men so dismounted removed their saddles, placed them on some other led beast, and pushed onward cheerfully.”13
At last, after marching ten miles from Louisville in the darkness, they found dry ground around Estes Plantation. The time was after midnight; with scarcely a halt they had covered at least fifty wearying and circuitous miles. And now their prize, the end of action, the Vicksburg railroad, lay only forty miles to the south.
IV
Colonel Edward Hatch, moving northward after his escape from Lieutenant-Colonel Clark Barteau’s cavalrymen at Palo Alto, celebrated his thirty-second birthday on April 22 by raiding Okolona, which had been left undefended by the Confederates pursuing vainly in his rear. The Second Iowa had marched all night, avoiding main roads most of the way.
Sergeant Lyman Pierce later wrote:
We soon entered a large swamp through which we traveled by an obscure path, guided by a negro until we struck the river. … Here Hatch found some flood-wood lodged against a fallen tree; with this he constructed a rude foot-bridge, and we unsaddled our horses and each trooper carried his saddle across the bridge on his back. The bank on the side from which the horses must enter was about six feet above the stream and very nearly perpendicular. Three or four troopers would seize each horse and throw him into the stream, when they would, by the aid of long poles, compel him to swim to the opposite bank, where two men stood hip deep in water to aid him up the bank. In this way the entire command was crossed in safety, between the hours of 10 o’clock P.M., and 3 o’clock A.M., of as dark a night as I ever experienced. Large bonfires were built on each bank to expel the darkness. The cannon was taken to pieces and hauled across by means of a rope. As soon as the column was all over, we saddled up and moved out. …
We moved towards Okolona, where the rebels had eight pieces of artillery, but so completely had Hatch fooled them as to the objective point of his march, that the enemy, … had been all despatched to various points to oppose us, and now that we were rapidly nearing Okolona, they were obliged to run their cannon South [on railroad flat cars] for safety.
We charged into the town just before sunset, where we burned thirty-barracks filled with Confederate British stamped cotton. This done we moved five miles out of town and camped for the night on a wealthy plantation, which afforded everything we needed both for animals and men.14
V
Lieutenant-Colonel Clark Barteau had not yet abandoned hope of defeating or capturing Colonel Hatch’s Second Iowans, who had so skillfully evaded his trap in the lane near Palo Alto. But the sun was up on the morning of April 22 long before Lieutenant-Colonel Smith, Major Inge, and Captain Ham had reassembled their scattered state troops. And then about the time Barteau was preparing to give the march orders, Lieutenant-Colonel James Cunningham and his Second Alabama Cavalry came trotting up the road from West Point.
To further delay action, the old recurring question of command authority now arose. Cunningham, believing that he outranked Barteau, expressed a desire to assume command of the pursuit. Barteau stubbornly declined to yield, claiming that General Ruggles had assigned him field responsibility for all Confederate cavalry in northeast Mississippi. In a report to headquarters he later censured Cunningham for not remaining at Okolona to defend the Confederate Army stores and barracks, as well as for his tardiness in coming up from West Point.
After some wrangling, the column finally moved out along Hatch’s trail to Buena Vista. Here Barteau divided his forces. He sent the state troops northwest along the swamp-circling road to Okolona, on a long chance they might come around upon the enemy’s front. Then taking the seasoned Second Tennessee and Second Alabama Regiments, he attempted to overtake Hatch by following him across the Sakatouchee and its flooded swampland toward Okolona.
But Barteau was not so fortunate as Hatch. His guide became lost in the darkness and the two regiments floundered in the mud for hours. When they finally struck high ground, about eight miles from Okolona, the men and mounts were completely exhausted. Barteau called a halt until morning. He may have guessed that he was already too late to save Okolona.15
VI
During the forty-eight hours after Grierson’s brigade was positively located at Pontotoc, with its strength fairly accurately estimated at 2,000 troops, the Jackson headquarters of the Confederate commander, General John C. Pemberton, received several contradictory official reports and numerous unofficial panicky rumors of the Yankee cavalry raid.
Already annoyed by the failure of General Ruggles’ cavalry to halt the raid, Pemberton was now becoming genuinely alarmed by the widespread reports of civilian panic south of Pontotoc. He was particularly concerned over the security of Confederate stores and ammunition which he was depending upon to sustain a long summer campaign against Grant’s army.
On April 22 he received two unwelcome messages, one informing him that the enemy had rea
ched Starkville, the other from Ruggles reporting Barteau’s fight with the enemy at Palo Alto. Ruggles ended his telegram with a question: “Can you send troops from Grenada to effect a diversion?”16
Pemberton dared not spare troops from Grenada, the strong-point of Vicksburg’s northern defense ring, but he remembered that General Abraham Buford’s infantry brigade, en route from Alabama to reinforce Vicksburg, was bivouacked somewhere near Meridian. Pemberton also recalled that he had attached to his Jackson headquarters a hard-bitten North Carolinian, Major-General William W. Loring, who had lost most of his troops by transfer to the Vicksburg district. He decided to send Loring to Meridian, with orders to take command of all troops in that area and to take action against the dangerous Union cavalry raid, part of which apparently had eluded Ruggles’ forces.*
Pemberton telegraphed Buford at Meridian, informing him that Loring was en route to take command. “If the enemy is advancing,” he added, “move without wagons, by rail, within striking distance of him.”17
Later in the day Pemberton received reports of a heavy force of enemy troops approaching Macon. (This was Captain Forbes and his thirty-five men of Company B.) Pemberton immediately decided, as Grierson had hoped he would, that the Starkville raiders had turned toward Macon. Having no reply from Buford, Pemberton sent a second urgent telegram, addressed to Commanding Officer of Troops, Meridian:
Proceed with all troops now at Meridian up Mobile & Ohio Railroad to such point as you may meet with enemy, and cooperate with General Ruggles. General Loring will be in command of all the troops. Exercise great discretion, and gain all information as you advance. On reaching Macon, ascertain the state of affairs in that vicinity.18
These orders, of course, set in motion during the night of April 22 the Confederate troops which kept Captain Forbes from venturing into Macon.
Pemberton then informed General Ruggles that reinforcements en route to Vicksburg were being diverted to co-operate with him, and that General Loring would be in command of all troops of the expedition. The harassed commanding general concluded his day’s occupation with the Grierson raid by sending a telegram to General Joseph E. Johnston in Tennessee, a call for help similar to the one he had sent three days earlier: “Heavy raids are making from Tennessee deep into the State. … Cavalry indispensable to meet these raids. … Could you not make a demonstration with a cavalry force in their rear?”19
But nowhere in all the day’s official messages of the Confederate command does there appear to be any intimation of what Grierson’s real objective was, any comprehension of the grave danger facing Vicksburg’s vital rail line. In fact, Pemberton’s disposition of the Meridian troops actually weakened the defense of the Vicksburg railroad, favoring the much less important Mobile & Ohio road. Perhaps because of the very audacity of the action, neither Pemberton nor any of his field officers could admit the possibility on Wednesday April 22 that two regiments of Union cavalry were then only a long day’s march from Vicksburg’s lifeline.
* The New York Times (May 18, 1863) account of this incident states that Grierson first decided to send two scouts to Macon, and that Private Post of the Second Iowa and Private Parker of the Sixth Illinois volunteered, then “backed out at last from the perilous undertaking.” Neither Surby nor the Forbes accounts mention any such plan, or the reluctant volunteers. Furthermore, the Second Iowa was no longer with Grierson when the column came opposite Macon, and no Private Post is listed on that regiment’s rosters.
* Stephen Forbes’s full description of General Braxton Bragg: “He is a tall, slim man, rather awkward in his appearance, has dark eyes not quite black, wears a short black goatee and grey hair, has a face rather impatient and irate in expression, a little inclined to be contemptuous, and conveys a general impression of a man who would require a great deal more of others than of himself.”—FFL, Stephen Forbes’s prison journal, June, 1862.
* “They flocked to the roadside, hurrahing for Beauregard, Van Dorn, and the Confederacy. One little girl thought she recognized one of the men, and running up asked where John was, and if her uncle was along.”—Grierson’s Record of Services, 1863.
* General William W. Loring had won some fame early in the war by attempting to seize New Mexico for the Confederacy. Engaged in fighting the Apaches there in 1860, he had accumulated quantities of military supplies in the various forts, had built up a staff of pro-Southern officers and troops. Unionists, however, discovered his plans, and he was forced to resign his commission in the United States Army and leave the department before he was able to act.
THE SCOUTS CAPTURE A BRIDGE
BOOTS AND SADDLES WAS sounding for the men of the Sixth and Seventh Illinois Cavalry Regiments, camped around Estes Plantation. The lucky ones had gotten four hours of sleep. Weather-conscious after the past few days, they examined the thin clouds stretched like gauze across a pale morning sky. Then, while waiting for coffee to boil, they scraped dried mud with their knives from boots and uniforms.
Captain Jason Smith was attempting to put his collapsed two-pounder gun back into operation. Stripping one of the plantation’s buggies of its frame and wheels, he mounted the gun on this substitute carriage, fastening it down with blocks and leather straps. A crowd gathered to watch, exchanging jibes with the batterymen.
By the time Colonel Grierson ordered the Seventh to lead out, Smith’s men had a horse hitched between the buggy shafts. An odd-looking weapon, the captain allowed, but he judged it would stand up under a few charges.
Colonel Grierson had been studying his map again. If the weather held good, the brigade should be entering the Pearl River valley by mid-morning, should reach the flooded stream before noon. Grierson was worried about the bridge, estimating from the size of the river and its tributaries that a crossing under flood might be impossible. If news of the raid had swept ahead of them, the bridge certainly would be heavily guarded, might already have been destroyed. And should the Pearl River crossing be blocked, even for a few hours, the delay would give the Confederates time to assemble troops along the Vicksburg railroad and might prove disastrous to his mission.
He ordered Lieutenant-Colonel Blackburn to send the scouts forward on the double with instructions to use extra caution in approaching the bridge. If the bridge was unguarded they were to secure it immediately. But if it was heavily guarded, that information should be brought back at once to the main column.
The Butternut Guerillas galloped away over a narrow road running through thinly settled country. As they neared Pearl River the trail dropped into thickly wooded bottoms, and Sergeant Surby slowed the pace. About two miles from the bridge, Surby took a short lead over his seven scouts. A few moments later as he rounded a curve, he saw an old man approaching on a mule. The two riders watched each other closely as they approached, both halting simultaneously opposite. A few yards to the rear the Butternut Guerillas held up, spreading out across the road.
“We passed the time of day and entered into conversation,” Surby wrote afterwards. “The old man informed me that a picket was stationed at the bridge, composed of citizens, numbering five in all, his son being one of the party; all were armed with shotguns. They had torn up several planks from the center of the bridge, and had placed combustibles on it ready to ignite at our approach.”
Surby then asked the old man his name and place of residence, and when they were given, the sergeant drew paper and pencil from inside his shirt and wrote down the information. This frightened the old man; he began to babble: “Gentlemen, gentlemen, you are not what you seem to be, you certainly are Yankees, for we got news in Philadelphia last night that you all were coming this way.”
Resolved to frighten the old man into an unconditional surrender of the bridge, Surby replied quickly: “It lies in your power to save your buildings from the torch, to save your own life, and probably that of your son, by saving the bridge.”
Trembling with fear, the old man said that he was confident of saving the bridge but could not promise the
surrender of his friends. “The bridge is the important point,” Surby told him. He ordered the man to return to the pickets and advise them to surrender and accept paroles; if they damaged the bridge, the old man’s house and barns would be destroyed.
The Butternut Guerillas rode forward with their captive to within three hundred yards of the bridge, descending into low bottomland considerably flooded. Through a screen of brush they could see the bridge, a long, narrow structure set high on a solid trestlework, with guard rails running along the sides. The long rails were broken in several places, and the muddy waters of the Pearl boiled furiously around the supports, tugging at the river debris collecting against them. It was obvious that no horseman could safely ford that crossing. The bridge must be captured.
Remaining in concealment, Surby sent the old man ahead to bargain with the Confederate pickets. “I impatiently followed the figure of the old man with my eye,” Surby wrote in his account. “When within a dozen yards of the bridge, he halted, and commenced telling his errand; but ere he was hardly half through, I could perceive some signs of uneasiness on the side of his listeners; they all at once jumped upon their horses and away they went. We then advanced to the bridge, replaced the planks, found two shotguns, that they had left in their flight, and leaving one man to wait for the column and turn the old man over to the Colonel, I proceeded with the rest to Philadelphia.”1
Surby suspected that the rebel pickets might return with reinforcements, but if such was their plan they were too late in acting. As the scouts moved out of the Pearl River bottoms, however, they quickly met signs of the recent passage of the five pickets. The scattered farmhouses appeared closed and deserted; occasionally they would see a man hurrying off, mounted or on foot, across a distant field.