Grierson was pleased with their progress in such unfavorable weather; they had covered about forty miles that day, leaving only sixty miles between them and Grand Gulf on the Mississippi River. Sometime tomorrow, however, they would pass out of the Piney Woods into more thickly settled country and could expect to meet more resistance, both from civilians and enemy soldiery. The New Orleans & Jackson Railroad was only twenty miles to the west. It would probably be guarded at certain points, but if the raiders’ arrival was unexpected they might be able to damage trestles and tracks considerably. And before reaching the railroad, they must again cross the Pearl River, a much more formidable stream here than the first place they had crossed it—above Philadelphia, three days ago.
Grierson had been informed by a captured deputy sheriff that the Pearl was unbridged. A public ferry, with a bottom large enough to float several horses at a time, was the only means of crossing. It was highly probable that this ferry was under Confederate guard, and there was no other crossing for twenty-five miles north or south. The importance of securing the Pearl River ferry at the earliest possible moment was apparent to every man on Grierson’s staff. “Though tired and sleepy, there were those who did not rest or sleep longer than to feed their horses and prepare supper. As the citizens were arming themselves, and the news [of our approach] was flying in every direction, it was a matter of life or death that Pearl River should be crossed and the New Orleans and Southern railroad reached, without any delay.”5
“After feeding,” Grierson reported laconically, “Colonel Prince, of the Seventh Illinois Cavalry, with two battalions, was sent … forward to Pearl River to secure the ferry and landing. … With the main column, I followed in about two hours.”6
III
Under the same clouds which darkened Corporal Sam Nelson’s dawn arrival at Mackadore’s Plantation, Captain Henry Forbes’s Company B struggled to wakefulness several miles to the east, on the soft lawn of Dr. Hodge’s country estate.
Sergeant Stephen Forbes had drawn the last guard detail, stationing himself against a rail fence beside the long entrance drive which led up to the house from the main road.
It was a carelessly fastened horse, however, which really kept watch for us. Becoming entangled in his halter strap, he pulled down the rail fence to which he was tied, with a crash which wakened the solitary sentinel, who had gone to sleep with his gun in his hands. … I can vouch personally for the truth of this statement, for I was the sentinel. …
After a rapid breakfast by the light of our camp fires we started for the hardest and most discouraging ride of the raid. Approaching Raleigh, we repeated in substance the exploit at Philadelphia, surprising, by a headlong charge, a company of home guards which had gathered at the village inn, breaking up their guns and taking their captain with us as a prisoner. We were now but seven or eight hours behind the regiment, and hope began to dawn, until we came to a stream swollen with recent rains. The column had crossed on a bridge, which was now a wreck of blackened timbers. Grierson had given us up for lost and was burning his bridges behind him. Five times that day we swam our horses across overflowing streams, and once were compelled to make a long detour to find a place where we could get into the water and out again.*
And then a greater danger loomed ahead of us. Some thirty or forty miles farther on was Strong river, and a few miles beyond that was the Pearl, neither of which we could hope to ford or swim; and we were losing time, by reason of the burned bridges, instead of gaining on Grierson. Some way must be found to reach him before he destroyed Strong river bridge or we were lost.7
In the hope that three men could move faster than thirty-five, Captain Forbes halted and asked for volunteers to ride on and overtake the column. Stephen urged his horse forward out of the formation, followed by two privates, John Moulding and Arthur Wood.
“You men will leave all your arms and other encumbrances,” said the captain, “excepting a pistol apiece and a few loose cartridges in your pockets.” He rode quickly down the file of the company, looking over the horses. Selecting the three freshest mounts, he ordered a quick exchange with the volunteers.
Although it was only five o’clock in the afternoon, the low clouds persistently drizzling rain would bring early darkness to hinder tracking the brigade over the winding and diverse roads. But the three volunteers waved cheerily and galloped off through the green pines.
“I never expected to see one of them again,” Captain Forbes said afterwards, “feeling sure they would be picked off as stragglers.”
Stephen and his two companions kept their horses moving steadily, following the trail marked by the passing regiments, the tall pines closing out all the world except the narrow road ahead. Just before darkness closed in they saw a group of saddled horses down in the woods. No riders were in sight. “We listened for shots as we hurried by,” said Stephen, “but they did not come.”
Suddenly the pines broke away and the hoof marks they were following vanished in a grassy field. “Puzzled at first, we presently suspected a countermarch, and following the trail back through the thickening dusk about half a mile, we found where it branched off to the left. If we had been a little later we should have been completely lost. Black night now fell, with drizzling rain, and we dismounted now and then to make sure, by feeling the road, that we were still on the track of the regiments.”8
Once or twice Stephen thought he heard voices and marching horses ahead, but when he dashed forward in the solid blackness, his mount sliding and stumbling on the slippery clay surface of the road, he found nothing but the bitter frustration of one who pursues a mirage.
Then he was sure, coming down into bottomland with the smell of rotting mud and a sluggish river, and his companions heard the voices, too, and the nickering horses, and they saw a lantern flickering like a yellow firefly far down in the trees.
They spurred their tired horses into an extra burst of speed.
“Halt! Who comes there?” The voice came out of a Mississippi canebrake, but to Stephen Forbes’s ears it was sweet—for it rang with the clean, hard tones of the Northern cornlands.
Ignoring the command, he and his two companions did not slacken their speed, but answered the challenger as they rode by with a shout: “Company B!”
A moment of silence, and the pickets responded with a cheer. “Company B has come back!”
“The cheer,” said Stephen Forbes, “was caught up by the rear company, it ran down the column, cheer upon cheer, faster than our horses could run.”
They reached Grierson just as the colonel was turning his horse onto the Strong River bridge. “Company B has come back!” some one shouted in the darkness.
Pulling his reins up tight, Stephen halted beside Grierson. “Captain Forbes presents his compliments, and begs to be allowed to burn his bridges for himself!”9
It is easy to picture that dramatic moment—the drenched and mud-stained nineteen-year-old sergeant sitting erect upon his spent horse, the colonel grinning at him through his black, spade-shaped beard.
Grierson assured Sergeant Forbes that the bridge-burning detail for Strong River would be augmented into a guard detachment to await the arrival of B Company. He congratulated the messengers on their speedy ride. Half an hour later and the bridge would have been in flames. He asked after Captain Forbes’s health, and the outcome of the Macon venture. When Stephen informed him of the long march to Enterprise, Grierson was astonished that they had been able to overtake the main column.
The colonel would have liked to hear more details of Company B’s adventures, but time was pressing. He ordered Sergeant Forbes and his two companions to remain with the Strong River guard, and then turned his horse back upon the bridge, moving with the column towards the more formidable Pearl River. As the hoofbeats rumbled in uneven measures over the muddy planking, Grierson was probably wondering if the raiders’ luck and good timing had held long enough for Prince to secure the ferry.
IV
Colonel Grierson would
have been gratified to know that the raiders’ luck had held for his detached Iowa regiment under Colonel Hatch, which had finally returned to the base at La Grange.
Luck had run out during the march, however, for ten of the Iowans, an unusually low number considering their two hard fights and the persistent enemy skirmishers hindering their advance on the march south and dogging their rear and flanks on the return north. Six of the unlucky ten had been captured in the Palo Alto fighting; three had been wounded. The tenth was Hatch’s orderly, Charles Ellsthorp. When the regiment came within fifteen miles of La Grange, the colonel sent Ellsthorp ahead with a message to the Federal picket line. “On his return,” said Sergeant Lyman Pierce, “he was mortally wounded by a ball from a squirrel rifle in the hands of a guerrilla, who stole up to the roadside for the purpose of committing the murder.”10
The Iowans had captured fifty-one Confederates, and in his report Colonel Hatch estimated they had killed or wounded not less than one hundred of the enemy. They captured 300 shotguns and rifles, and 200 horses and mules. “I left camp with 70 rounds of ammunition, and had 10 on reaching it,” he said. “The fight at Palo Alto, and diverting the enemy from Colonel Grierson has undoubtedly given him thirty-six hours’ start.”11
On this same day, General Pemberton acknowledged the damage done by Hatch’s cavalrymen by claiming a victory over them and then immediately pleading for more help in a telegram to General Johnston in Tennessee:
All mounted men are actively engaged endeavoring to intercept enemy; none stationary. Enemy, who were at Okolona, driven back. Defeated them at Birmingham, killing some twenty and wounding many others. Have no cavalry of any importance to operate against the Newton Station party; am mounting some infantry. Hope to intercept them. These raids cannot be prevented unless I can have more mounted men.”12
General John Adams at Lake Station was in turn pleading for more men from Pemberton. He reported the enemy raiders, 800 strong, were fifteen miles south of him and he expected them to attack either Forest or Lake momentarily. He could not defend both stations without another regiment.
Adams’ fairly accurate estimate of Grierson’s location, however, was passed over by Pemberton, who was still peeved with Adams because of the latter’s “all-is-lost” telegram to General Buckner. Pemberton was inclined instead to accept yesterday’s reports from Enterprise, placing Grierson’s raiders in that vicinity.
In fact, Pemberton was so confident on this unusually calm Sunday that Grierson was somewhere in eastern Mississippi, attempting to slip back to the north, that he wired General Chalmers a repeat of the order sent on Friday (and then amended on Saturday): “Move with all your cavalry and light artillery via Oxford, to Okolona, to intercept force of enemy.”13
At the hour of this order, Grierson’s raiders were only thirty miles south of Pemberton’s own headquarters in Jackson, almost 200 miles from Okolona!
Captain Forbes’s bluff at Enterprise had indeed thrown a blind across the eyes of the Confederates, and at the same time had raised the raiders’ wonderful timing and luck to the quality of high magic*
* The usual haversack rations for a day, according to Private Henry Eby of the Seventh Illinois, consisted of “a quantity of the genuine, indispensable, hard-as-a-rock-Uncle-Sam-hardtack, sometimes animated hardtack, a slice of bacon, sometimes animated; a small package of browned coffee, a small quantity of sugar tied up in paper and tucked away in a corner.”—Henry H. Eby, Observations of an Illinois Boy in Battle, Camp and Prisons, Mendota, Ill., 1910, p. 69.
* It is probable that this detour prevented an encounter with Captain R. C. Love’s Confederate cavalry, also pursuing Grierson over these same roads.
* Lieutenant Thomas W. Lippincott, Company I, Sixth Illinois Cavalry, was convinced that Grierson performed his magic with a daily timetable of combined operations, and possibly a secret communications system, with General Grant. Many years after the raid he wrote to Grierson as follows: “Major Starr rode much by my side at the head of Company ‘I’ and several times he told me Grant was going to do so and so today. He never told me what he was going to do tomorrow or at any future day it was always today. … I knew if he knew it he must have got it from you and it impressed me deeply … I conclude … that you knew … the data [of Grant’s plans] before you started and that you depended on information obtained through rebel sources to inform you of the success or failure of each. …”
Grierson replied that “no one knew my plans any more than they did those of Gen. Grant—nor did each of us have predetermined or definite detailed plans before starting on our hazardous undertakings.”—T. W. Lippincott to B. H. Grierson, March 6 and March 24, 1886; B. H. Grierson to T. W. Lippincott, March 13, 1886 (Grierson Papers).
ACROSS THE PEARL TO HAZLEHURST
IT WOULD BE INTERESTING to know the thoughts of thirty-year-old Colonel Edward Prince as he led his battalions through darkness toward the Pearl River ferry. Was Prince resentful of Grierson’s order sending him forward to secure the ferry? Or had he volunteered for this assignment, as the New York Times later reported after interviewing him? Did he feel that his regiment, the Seventh, was bearing the brunt of the entire raid, drawing all the dangerous missions while Grierson’s old regiment, the Sixth, was always kept back in reserve? Or was his growing bitterness toward Grierson only a personal matter, the envy of an officer forced by circumstances to take orders from an equal in rank?
Two years ago, sitting in his comfortable law office in Quincy, Illinois, Edward Prince probably would have laughed at anyone who might have suggested that he would make a good cavalry officer. But now, was he not proving his abilities as a leader by driving ahead of the brigade through black and disagreeable weather toward what might well be the most dangerous undertaking of the raid?
Prince must have known that some of his junior officers distrusted him, disliked his imperious demeanor which sometimes broke through his outwardly easy-going manner. But none of them had been as successful in civil life as he, not even Grierson who had failed in business, some said because he spent too much time tinkling away on a piano or blowing a tin horn. Prince may have wondered if Grierson would end up the same way in military service; Grierson didn’t seem to give a continental damn for cavalry drill or tactics.
Edward Prince had been zealous in studying cavalry tactics, so adept at mastering the intricate maneuvers of drill that in the early weeks of the war the Governor of Illinois appointed him Cavalry Drill Master at Camp Butler, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Perhaps Prince resented the fact that it was Grierson who had recommended him for his full colonelcy, “out of respect for his education, ingenuity and resolution,” Grierson had said. But Prince did not know that some of his classmates at law college had warned Grierson against him: “I was informed by some of Prince’s college class mates that sooner or later his meanness would be shown.”1
It is possible only to conjecture as to the causes that aroused Colonel Prince’s jealousy of his commander; the next few days and weeks would reveal the emotion in full flower.
On this April night, Prince’s thoughts came back to the present when he smelled suddenly the stench of stagnant mud that was the Pearl lowlands, and almost at the same time saw in the cloud-ridden sky a faint touch of dawn. He could hear one of the scouts returning the advance guard’s challenge up ahead, and waited impatiently for the man to approach and report.
The ferry, said the scout, was tied up on the opposite side of the river; he had found no evidence of enemy soldiers on this side. Prince immediately passed an order back through his companies: Advance as quietly as possible. If the ferry was across the river, the rebel guard would be there, and he hoped to capture the boat without arousing them. He would have to act quickly before daylight revealed the raiders’ presence.
Prince pressed his horse forward to ride with the advance; they turned a bend in the muddy, down-sweeping road. In front of them lay the river—flat, sleek, and blacker than the ragged rim of trees and the sq
uare, box-like house of the ferryman on the opposite bank.
It might be possible for a man on a powerful horse to swim across, Prince thought, and he called for a volunteer. Private William Douer of I Company rode up out of the darkness. Prince told him to swim across and steal the ferryboat.
Private Douer spurred his big horse down the muddy slope; a second later, horse and rider splashed into the deep water, the swift current grasping and swirling them downstream before the animal could begin to swim. It was too much river, and Douer had to turn back.
At that moment, across the stream, a lantern light suddenly appeared in the ferryman’s house. Prince watched it anxiously, a yellow diffused glow in the drizzle of rain, moving jerkily along the shore. Then a voice came from across the river: “You-all want across?”
Prince wondered if he could imitate that Dixie inflection. He megaphoned his hands. “First Regiment, Alabama Cavalry from Mobile!” he shouted. And to put the man on the defensive he added: “It’s harder to wake up you ferrymen than it is to catch the damned conscripts!”2
The ferryman shouted back a muffled apology, and in a minute the cavalrymen heard the splashing of a pole. The flat-bottomed boat came up suddenly out of the river. A Negro leaped ashore, spinning a heavy rope around a stake thrusting out one side of the landing.
Only twenty-four horses and men could be crossed at one time, and Prince anxiously watched the sky brightening as two platoons of I Company went over on the first trip. He had no information concerning the strength of the Confederate guard across the river, and he was afraid he might arouse suspicion if he questioned the ferryman too closely.