And when the Sixth Regiment dashed up the oak-timbered hill into the Confederate training camp, they found only a few guards and convalescents who surrendered without a fight. General Pemberton’s message of the previous day addressed to Major M. R. Clark, commanding the camp, had been obeyed to the letter. More than a hundred unarmed conscripts had been sent back into the Piney Woods to protect them from being captured and paroled.
Even so, after all the prisoners were corralled into the main street under heavy guard, they totaled 216. Adjutants George Root and Samuel Woodward must have been dismayed as they faced the prospect of laboriously writing out by hand so large a number of the tediously worded statements to be signed by each prisoner. But in this war a parole was almost as effective against an enemy soldier as a bullet, and Grierson ordered that the task be completed if the brigade had to remain in Brookhaven until dark.*
While Adjutants Root and Woodward were preparing papers for the long lines of prisoners, Captain John Lynch took two companies a short distance down the railroad track to burn several sections of trestlework. Other companies from the Sixth Regiment destroyed the deserted training camp. In Brookhaven the Seventh Regiment fired the railroad station, a dozen freight cars, and a small bridge.
As had occurred two days before at Hazlehurst, flames from the burning railroad station threatened to spread to nearby dwellings, and the raiders once again had to turn firefighters. “Our own soldiers,” said Sergeant Stephen Forbes, who was in charge of one of the fire squads, “climbed to the roofs of the houses and kept them wet by pouring water over them until the fire had burned down.”9
When this excitement was ended and it was apparent that the scrivening adjutants were not nearly finished with their wearisome parole business, Lieutenant-Colonel William Blackburn decided to treat his First Battalion—which had led the charge into Brookhaven—to a hotel dinner. Blackburn paid for the meal with his thick roll of confiscated Confederate money, and Sergeant Surby, who was a special guest with the other Butternut Guerillas, reported that the landlord expressed a wish that the Yankees would come every day “if they all acted like ‘we’uns’ did.”10
It is probable that the raiders found some genuine Union sentiment in Brookhaven, a town founded by a Massachusetts Yankee some years before the war, and which would later form a new county around itself as county seat in 1870, a county which the Brookhaven citizens successfully insisted should be named Lincoln for President Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times account of the Brookhaven raid reported that “the people were much terrified by the idea that the whole town would be burned, but when they found all private property perfectly undisturbed, they seemed to entertain a very different opinion of the Yankees to what they did only a few hours previously.”11
III
“As we rolled into Hazlehurst,” reported Colonel Robert Richardson, “a citizen approached us in an excited manner, and said 1,000 Yankees were within a quarter of a mile of the place, approaching it. I did not much believe the report, but, as a measure of precaution, I ordered the train to be run back on the road about a mile. I then ordered the men to form on each side of the railroad, and 20 horses to be taken from the train, and sent out a scout in the direction of the reported advance of the enemy. The scouts returned in a half hour, and reported the enemy not to be found as reported.”
At the time Colonel Richardson was directing this exploratory movement, Grierson’s raiders were about twenty miles to his south approaching Brookhaven. It is more than likely that the rumor of the one thousand Yankees was a garbled warning passed along from some fleeing citizen who had seen Grierson’s column during its zigzag turnabout from Union Church.
Richardson’s information, however, placed Grierson several miles west on the road to Natchez, and he was not inclined to accept rumors counter to this. “I availed myself of every resource to get information as to the position and direction of the enemy,” he said. “He was reported to have been that Tuesday morning at Union Church, and to have engaged Col. Wirt Adams’ command there. … So far as I could judge, he was leaving the line of the railroad and was going to Natchez. … It seemed that the proper direction for me to go … was Union Church.”
And so as Grierson’s raiders were charging into Brookhaven twenty miles south, Colonel Richardson completed feeding his horses and ordered his Mississippi mounted troops to march westward for Union Church.
“I got there at 9 o’clock that night,” Richardson continued, “and learned that the enemy had left there at 8 o’clock in the morning for Brookhaven, and that Colonel Adams had camped the previous night within 3 or 4 miles of the enemy, but had gone that morning toward Fayette, believing that the enemy intended to go to Natchez.”
Richardson fed his horses, allowed his men two hours’ rest, and then grimly set out for Brookhaven, an impetuous but tenacious hound after a clever fox. He had played this game before with Grierson, in Tennessee, and was not to be put off the scent by one sly maneuver. Before leaving Union Church, he sent a courier to Colonel Wirt Adams, “advising him of my design to follow the enemy, and advising him to shape his march so as to join me near Liberty.”12
As for Colonel Adams, he had waited patiently in his carefully planned ambush below Fayette until midafternoon. At last he learned the bitter truth: Grierson had slipped away that morning in the direction of Brookhaven. Unaware that Grant’s massed armies were preparing to attack Grand Gulf, which his cavalry was assigned to defend, and without waiting for orders, Adams telegraphed Pemberton from Fayette: “Shall now march to intercept [enemy’s] movement toward Baton Rouge.”13 Adams’ regiment, in full force again, marched that night along a parallel road south of the route taken by Richardson’s troops. Had Grierson stayed in his camp near Brookhaven for another twenty-four hours, the two Confederate forces probably would have ended the raid right there.
Far to the south along the Louisiana line, other Confederate troops were also marching to intercept the raiders. General Franklin Gardner, annoyed by the recurring escapes of the Yankee raiders approaching so boldly from the north, decided to send a formidable force out from his Port Hudson command. He ordered Colonel W. R. Miles to march his famed Louisiana Legion to Clinton, Louisiana, and await further orders. Miles’s Legion boasted a duty strength of 2,000 infantry, 300 cavalry, and a battery of artillery.*
Gardner’s other pursuit force, Major James De Baun’s Ninth Louisiana Partisan Rangers, meanwhile had arrived at Woodville, Mississippi, early in the afternoon. With only twenty miles separating De Baun’s rangers at Woodville and Miles’s Legion at Clinton, the escape roads from Mississippi to the Union lines at Baton Rouge were fairly well covered by the largest force yet assembled to block Grierson’s raiders.
IV
It was on this day that Grierson’s commander in La Grange, General William Sooy Smith, first learned of the successful raid upon Newton Station. Smith’s informant, a spy who had come in from Jackson, led the general to believe that Grierson was fighting his way back to the north along the same route he had taken south, and Smith wired General Hurlbut in Memphis, suggesting that a relief force be sent down to aid the raiders’ return.
Hurlbut immediately ordered three cavalry regiments to move toward Okolona, and then sent a message to General Grant informing him of Grierson’s successful strike against the Vicksburg railroad.
All that day, from a tugboat in the Mississippi River, Grant had been watching Admiral Porter’s seven ironclad gunboats cannonading the Grand Gulf defenses high above the river. Early in the morning the fleet had knocked out the two lower batteries mounting small guns, but the big ones on the highest promontory resisted obstinately, even though Porter pushed one of his boats to within a hundred yards of the hillside and dropped shells within the parapets.
By noon Grant knew that he had underestimated the strength of his enemy. The besieged Confederates were not only holding firm, they were returning shell for shell. Porter’s ironclad boats were still afloat but their armor was riddled. The
fleet’s casualties were growing heavier by the hour.
“During this time,” Grant said, “I had about 10,000 troops on board transports and in barges alongside ready to land them and carry the place by storm the moment the batteries bearing on the river were silenced, so as to make the landing practicable.”
Perhaps it was the sight of this massed army of river-borne Yankees which inspired the gunners in the Grand Gulf batteries to withstand the continuous cannonading. At 1:30 P.M., after five hours of futile bombardment, Admiral Porter gave the signal to withdraw; the Confederate batteries had proved too much for the gunboats.
Convinced now that it was impracticable to take Grand Gulf directly from the river, Grant quickly adopted his alternate plan of landing in the swamps below. As soon as the sun was down over the Louisiana marshes, he sent the gunboats back to make a vigorous night attack, and while the guns set off a din of cannonading and drew the fire of the batteries, he slipped his troop-laden barges past the blockade to De Shroon’s Plantation, four miles below Grand Gulf on the west side of the river. Grant’s final act of this frustrating day was to send a confident message to General-in-Chief H. W. Halleck in Washington: “A landing will be effected on the east bank of the river tomorrow. I feel that the battle is now more than half won.”14
Only fifty miles to the east of this scene of portentous events, Colonel Grierson also under cover of darkness was marching out of Brookhaven. Although he was moving south, following the railroad into the flats of Bogue Chitto Creek, he had not yet abandoned his original plan of swinging west to Grand Gulf. If only some news of Grant’s movements would come! No one he had talked with in Brookhaven, however, had heard the slightest rumor of an attack along the river.
Grierson did not care to travel too far south as yet, and after a leisurely march he ordered the column halted eight miles below Brookhaven, at Gill’s Plantation.
For the first time in forty hours, the men of Trafton’s battalion removed saddles from their horses and sprawled on the ground for sleep. Could it have been possible for them to know that two strong columns of Confederate cavalry under Colonels Adams and Richardson were converging upon them from only twenty miles to the west, it is doubtful if these men would have wasted a moment of wakefulness in apprehension of the morrow.
* Richardson was accused of pocketing fines and bounties collected from conscripts, and of using strong-arm recruiting methods. On March 6, General Joseph E. Johnston telegraphed Richmond: “One R. V. Richardson, claiming to have authority of the War Department to raise partisan rangers in Mississippi and West Tennessee, is accused of great oppression. If he has any authority, I respectfully recommend that it be withdrawn.”—OR, ser. I, vol. 24, pt. 3, p. 654.
* A few months later, Colonel Grierson would not have bothered to parole anyone. Already, in the spring of 1863, the parole and prisoner exchange cartel between the Union and the Confederate governments was beginning to disintegrate. The Federal government had been reluctant in the first place to enter into a written agreement with the South, for fear the action would appear to be recognition of the Confederacy as a legitimate government.
One of the first difficulties to arise concerned paroled Confederates whom the Yankees wanted to use in the far West to guard camps or fight Indians—“galvanized Yankees” they were called. A second difficulty arose over the apparent willingness of many conscripted Union soldiers to welcome capture so that they could be paroled and returned home. Then in December, 1862, President Jefferson Davis, enraged over General Benjamin Butler’s activities around New Orleans, had declared Butler an outlaw and proclaimed officially that all of Butler’s officers were to be considered criminals subject to execution and not eligible for parole. The Union Army countered this action by treating partisan rangers, such as Colonel Robert Richardson, in the same manner. Two of Colonel Richardson’s officers were captured in January, 1863, and put on trial for murder, arson, and robbery. Richardson’s subsequent protest to the Union authorities is an indication of the bitterness developing over the parole question:
“This pretended trial of Bass and Scarborough is one of the many gross and wanton violations of the military law of nations. If this proceeding is not immediately stopped and these men treated as prisoners of war or if they are punished capitally or cruelly treated as prisoners of war I will retaliate tenfold … U. S. officers and soldiers have been stealing negroes, horses, mules, money &c.; they have plundered houses, broken open bureau drawers, searched the person of ladies and insulted women; they have burnt houses and assassinated unoffending men, women and children all over the land, and yet when they have been captured although we had every reason to avenge these injuries they have been promptly paroled except when necessary to retaliate. No unusual trials have been resorted to scare prisoners and extort from them the oath of allegiance to a belligerent government. Your command has pillaged my own premises and grossly insulted my wife and very nearly shot one of my children and have threatened to burn my houses. I wish to notify you and your command that if I can get hold of the demons who have perpetrated these acts or who shall perpetrate them again, or who shall order or execute these threats, I will not treat them as prisoners of war but as outlaws and enemies of mankind.”
General Grant, recognizing the fact that the North outnumbered the South two to one in manpower, was always opposed to the parole system, and when he went east after the fall of Vicksburg to command the armies driving on Richmond, he forbade further exchange of prisoners altogether.—OR, ser. II, vol. 4, p. 267; OR, ser. II, vol. 5, pp. 158–59.
* A Confederate Legion was an oversized regiment developed by a popular leader whose men refused to be transferred to any other organization. Basil Duke of Morgan’s cavalry described the Legion as “something between a regiment and a brigade with all of a hybrid’s vague awkwardness of conformation.”—Basil Duke, History of Morgan’s Cavalry, Cincinnati, 1867, p. 81.
THE TRAP BEGINS TO CLOSE
BEFORE DAWN ADMIRAL PORTER’S gunboats were out in front of Grand Gulf, resuming their cannonading of the previous day. During the first few minutes of the bombardment one of the boats slipped away almost unnoticed and steamed four miles down river to De Shroon’s Plantation. Massed around the willow-framed river landing at De Shroon’s was the fleet of transports and barges which only a few hours earlier had passed the Grand Gulf batteries under cover of darkness.
While the single gunboat stood by, three divisions of General John McClernand’s corps completed re-embarkation on the barges, and the river crossing began, two hours later than General Grant had ordered.
Taking the lead, the low-slung convoy gunboat churned the Mississippi waters into a trail of foamy waves that slapped against the transports and barges behind. The men crowded against the low railings on the sides of the barges facing the shore upon which the landing must be made; they were generally silent, the unreal morning already filled with sound—the splashing of the river, the conflicting rhythms of the chugging twin-stacked transports, and the far-away booming echoes of Porter’s fleet noisily distracting the attention of Grand Gulf’s defenders.
The convoy gunboat began slanting eastward, the transports and barges following course in file. The deserted Mississippi bank loomed closer. When they came within a mile of the mouth of Bayou Pierre, the gunboat increased speed, swung into the front of the river village of Bruinsburg, and began lobbing shells at random into this unfortified area. The transports drifted past, so close to land that birds could be seen and heard among the heavy-leaved trees. A few minutes later the first men were wading ashore. Grant had not won his foothold on dry hard ground yet, but he had made his landing unopposed.1
Fifty miles to the southeast in the heart of southern Mississippi, Colonel Grierson was watching the dawn of the fourteenth day of his raid, unaware of this historic landing. Had he known of it he would have turned his column in that direction at once, fighting his way through if necessary to join General Grant in what every Union soldier in the west ha
d long hoped would be the final campaign for Vicksburg.
Last evening Grierson had questioned his host, a plantation owner named Gill, but Mr. Gill had heard nothing of any fight with the Yankees along the Mississippi River. Now, as Grierson prepared to give his morning march orders, the plantation owner was talking with a group of the raiders who had just finished feeding and saddling their horses: “Well, boys, I can’t say I have anything against you. You haven’t taken anything of mine except a little corn for your horses, and that you are welcome to. I’ve been hearing about you from all over the country. You’re doing the boldest thing ever done. But you’ll be trapped, though”—and he shook a finger at them—“you’ll be trapped, mark me.”2
A few minutes later, Surby and his scouts rode out with instructions to reconnoiter south along the New Orleans railroad. Grierson’s plan for the morning was to move slowly southward, burning trestlework and doing as much damage to the track as possible. Sometime today he would decide whether to cut back and dodge to the northeast for another attempt to find Grant’s landing place, or whether to risk the long dangerous ride for Baton Rouge.
In the middle of the morning the column reached a small village bearing the name of the creek which the railroad followed south—Bogue Chitto. Grierson rode forward and ordered the Sixth Regiment to burn the railroad depot and eight freight cars on the switch track beside it. When Captain Joseph Herring came up with the Seventh Regiment’s advance company, the colonel sent him down the line to destroy a section of trestlework which could be seen from the village. Within an hour a wide swirling cloud of smoke marked the destruction of several hundred feet of bridges and trestlework, and the raiders were marching south again. Grierson could now take some satisfaction from the fact that even if he should not be successful in extricating his brigade from the enemy’s country, at least he had dealt heavy blows to two railroads. Transportation between Jackson and the supply bases of southern Mississippi and Louisiana would surely be interrupted for weeks.*