When Colonel Wirt Adams, following Richardson down the Jackson railroad, learned of the Wall’s Bridge fight, he turned his column westward at Magnolia, hoping to get on Grierson’s rear. Late in the afternoon Adams’ regiment passed over Wall’s Bridge and the colonel stopped long enough at Newman’s Plantation to interview Lieutenant-Colonel Blackburn, who was still conscious. In his next message to General Pemberton, Colonel Adams was careful to record that the wounded Yankee officer had assured him that the raiders’ plans to march on to the Mississippi River and join Grant had been thwarted by Adams’ strong defense at Union Church. Upon leaving Newman’s Plantation, Adams began a night march in pursuit of Grierson over the same route the raiders were traveling.
A few hours after Adams departed, Colonel W. R. Miles moving east from Clinton toward Osyka also arrived at Wall’s Bridge. Miles visited the wounded Yankees at Newman’s Plantation, a meeting that was recorded by Sergeant Surby. “I could plainly see the column [Miles’s Legion] from my window as it moved along,” he said. “It consisted of about three hundred cavalry, two thousand infantry, and one battery of artillery—four and six pound rifled guns. They felt confident of capturing the ‘Yanks’ and did not appear to be in any hurry, stating that a force had been sent out from Port Hudson, and that they would intercept our forces when they attempted to cross the Amite River. … We were visited by the Colonel [Miles] while his command was passing. He informed us that he had instructed the nurses that they should pay every attention to the wounded. He treated us with kindness, and I shall never forget his kind manner and venerable form.”20
Less confident than these subordinates in the field, and overwhelmed by more ominous intelligences of Grant’s successful river crossing at Bruinsburg, General Pemberton on this day abandoned all hope of capturing Grierson’s raiders. Realizing at last that Grant’s army was the real danger and that all available cavalry would be needed in the efforts to stop him, he dispatched an order to Colonel Robert V. Richardson: “Instead of pursuing Grierson farther, your command will return in direction of Port Gibson, to operate against enemy there. If you can communicate with Colonel Wirt Adams, tell him same thing.”21
* When Colonel Grierson reached the bridge, Blackburn said to him: “Onward, Colonel, whip the rebels. Onward and save your command, don’t mind me.”—Grierson’s manuscript autobiography, p. 430.
* From the diary, later recovered, Surby wrote his account of the raid. Cornelius Griffin had come to Illinois with him from the east, and they had joined up the same day in Lieutenant-Colonel Blackburn’s original cavalry company at Paris, Illinois.
† Private Rees M. Hughes and Bugler William Roy, of Company G. Hughes died of his wounds, but Roy later recovered.
THE LAST LONG MARCH: WILLIAMS’ BRIDGE TO BATON ROUGE
FROM THE TIME THEY crossed Williams’ Bridge on the Amite River at midnight, through the twelve hours until noon of Saturday, May 2, Grierson’s 900 fatigued and hungry raiders dared not risk their luck by halting to eat or rest.
Baton Rouge, their goal and sanctuary, still lay thirty miles away, and even a short delaying fight now might give the enemy time to bring up forces too formidable to outrun or defeat, might undo all their clever feints and long hard marches. And so they rode on through the night under the ghostly moss-hung trees, past shadows of plantation houses and sugar mills. Sleep was now the enemy. Fifteen days and nights of riding—with nerves and muscles always taut, with rest measured out by minutes—began to react now that the excitement and danger of the bridge was past. They knew that all streams remaining between them and Baton Rouge were fordable; they believed they had outrun the larger forces of the enemy. They could endure the pangs of hunger, but sleep and weariness were irresistible numbing foes. Some of the men pulled off the road, tying each others legs beneath the saddles, resuming march slumped forward with heads resting in their horses’ manes.
Captain Henry Forbes and the troopers of Company B were assigned to rear guard duty on the long night ride southwestward across the bayou country, charged not only with keeping alert themselves but also with preventing the men in the column from straggling.
Men by the score were riding sound asleep in the saddles. The horses, excessively tired and hungry, would stray out of the road and thrust their noses to the earth in hopes of finding something to eat. The men, when addressed, would remain silent and motionless until a blow across the thigh or shoulders should awaken them, when it would be found that each supposed himself still riding with his company, which might perhaps be a mile ahead.
We found several men who had either fallen from their horses or dismounted and dropped on the ground, dead with sleep. Nothing short of a beating with the flat of a saber would awaken some of them. In several instances they begged to be allowed to sleep, saying they would run all risk of capture on the morrow. Two or three did escape our vigilance, and were captured the next afternoon.1
At dawn the column was approaching Sandy Creek, and Grierson ordered a halt while the scouts crossed the narrow bridge to reconnoiter. Sighting an enemy camp 200 yards beyond the bridge, they crept forward until they discovered two Negroes building the morning cooking fires. No sentinels were in evidence.
As soon as they reported back to Grierson, he ordered Lieutenant-Colonel Loomis to send two companies of the Sixth forward to make the attack, the remainder of the regiment to bring up the rear. Captain Samuel Marshall of H Company dismounted his men, and they crossed the bridge silently with carbines at ready. When H Company was within a hundred yards of the camp, Captain John Lynch led E Company, mounted, in a thundering charge across the bridge. Both companies swept through the long rows of tents, yelling and firing off carbines and pistols.
But most of the tents were empty. Captain Marshall and Captain Lynch flushed out less than forty men, mostly convalescents, those left behind of Lieutenant-Colonel C. C. Wilbourn’s regiment of Mississippi state troops. Grierson was much amused to learn that the regiment had departed only twenty-four hours earlier on orders from General Franklin Gardner to march to Osyka and assist in the interception of the raiders. “Having destroyed the camp,” said Grierson, “consisting of about one hundred and fifty tents, a large quantity of ammunition, guns, public and private stores, books, papers, and public documents, I immediately took the road to Baton Rouge.”2
While the Sixth was engaged in destroying the Sandy Creek camp, the Seventh Regiment moved on to take the advance. The sun was already hot in another cloudless morning sky; the road running across level land occasionally twisted to avoid slashes and bayous filled with sluggish, chocolate-brown water. When they passed through woodlands, the road became a tunnel with streamers of gray-green Spanish moss above their heads, and on either side impenetrable twisting masses of blackberry briers, brambles, and vines. In the more open country they saw scattered fan-leaved palmettos moving under the warm breeze like playing fountains.
The sugar plantations were all of a pattern, fields greening rapidly in the May heat, white, two-storied plantation houses with fluted columns and broad galleries, slave quarters of un-painted frame or logs with mud chimneys, surrounded by tiny vegetable patches—and the sugar mills beyond with their rows of huge blackened kettles.
They saw few white men this morning, but the Negroes were everywhere, waiting and watching for them along the fences, standing and waving from the slave quarters. That mysterious communication system of the slaves, running from plantation to plantation, had brought the news of Grierson’s raiders long before their white masters even suspected the enemy’s presence in the countryside.
Several Negroes ran forward with little gifts or bouquets of pink carnations to press upon “the Yanks come to free the black folks.” Some of them wanted to join the column, greeting their liberators in a strange mixture of English and Cajun French, bowing and grinning as they lifted their wide-brimmed palmetto hats.
Throughout the raid, a few slaves from time to time had attached themselves to the column, but most of them h
ad been unable to keep up with the swift pace of the cavalrymen. This morning as the raiders neared Baton Rouge, more and more Negroes deserted their quarters on the sugar plantations and began to form a procession in the drifting yellow dust at the rear of the column. They rode in crude wagons, some stuffed with feather beds, wagons drawn by mules, horses, oxen, sometimes a horse and a mule, or an ox and a mule, the animals hitched to the shafts with ropes, chains, or rawhide.
Not all the slaves, however, trusted the Yankees; some had run away into the woods to hide until the column passed. T. H. Bowman, one of Wirt Adams’ cavalrymen, recorded the story of Uncle Billy, a slave who had become a Methodist circuit rider for his people: “Them poor white trash, dressed in blue, come here. I axed ’em in, and told ’em I was a minister of the gospel, but law, chile, that never done a bit of good. They stole Mary’s chickens and some of my pigs, and was jist getting off de premises, when, fore God! old Selim whickered, and dem blasted rascals broke down de do’ of de smokehouse and tuk my pony.”3
II
Between eight and nine o’clock in the morning the first platoon of the Seventh Regiment’s Company A, riding advance for the column, saw a mounted Confederate officer enter the road about 200 yards ahead of them. They shouted a halt command, but the rebel replied with a few quick shots from his long-barreled revolver and sped on down the road. In a few moments he overtook Corporal Sam Nelson and the scouts dressed in their butternut disguises. As he galloped up to them, he shouted: “Get out of here, boys! The road’s full of Yankees in our rear!”
The scouts, revolvers already drawn, surrounded him quickly. “That’s right, Mister, and you’re right among them now.”4 They had captured Lieutenant Joseph Hinson of Miles’s Legion. Lieutenant Hinson had heard the firing from Sandy Creek as he was approaching there at dawn, and admitted to his captors that he was on his way to warn the picket-post on the Comite River, the last defense post between Grierson’s column and Baton Rouge. The raiders’ luck, their advantage of surprise, still held.*5
Three miles farther on, Sam Nelson proved that he was an able replacement for Sergeant Richard Surby. Stopping at a farmhouse to obtain information concerning the size of the picket at the Comite River crossing, he discovered that another rebel lieutenant was inside enjoying a late breakfast. Nelson’s “Presbyterian deacon” manner and his soft, hesitant speech soon won him an invitation to join the lieutenant and three ladies at the table. As he had eaten very little for twenty-four hours, the scout did not have to pretend hunger, and in a few moments he and the young Confederate officer were conversing like old friends. Nelson learned that only one rebel company was stationed on the Comite and that there was no bridge, but the water was low enough for cavalry to ford it.
When he finished eating, Nelson arose and without ceremony informed the lieutenant that he was a prisoner.
“I am an officer, sir!” replied the lieutenant with sudden indignity. “You have nothing to do with me, if you are a conscripting officer.”6
Sam Nelson, stammering and hesitating over every word, was not able to convince the lieutenant that he had been captured by a “live Yankee” until Company A arrived and halted outside on the road.
After reporting his information on the Comite guard to Colonel Grierson, Nelson went forward again with orders to locate the exact position of the Confederate camp. The Butternut Guerillas met with no trouble whatsoever, as the camp was on the east side of the Comite and the pickets were kept on the west side, facing Baton Rouge where the enemy was supposed to be. The Comite bottoms were thickly wooded and the scouts were able to approach within three hundred yards of the camp without being seen.
Arthur Wood volunteered to go in alone for a closer inspection, but Wood had no sooner disappeared than a Confederate soldier, coming up from the stream, accidentally discovered the waiting scouts.
“How’re you, boys,” the rebel greeted them cordially. “Did you come to relieve us?”
Nelson nodded, hastily swallowing his word of surprise. “That’s right. Our company’ll be up in a few minutes.”
“Well, it’s about time you come. We been here four days now and are clean out of rations.”7
As soon as Wood returned, Nelson invited their welcoming host to accompany them back down the road to meet the “relief company.”
III
After listening to the reports of Corporal Nelson and Arthur Wood, Colonel Grierson decided to send the First Battalion of the Seventh on a charge into the Comite camp. Company A moved out on the flank through a cane field, while the Butternut Guerillas and Companies D, E, and I went in directly on the road. The attack was a complete surprise, the thundering hoofbeats and the first volleys from the raiders creating a panicky flight among the Confederates, who left their shotguns, camp kettles, rifles, old blankets, coats and hats scattered in every direction. Loose horses stampeded through the brush.
Captain William Ashmead of Company I dismounted his men and sent them in pursuit of stragglers. One private from this company discovered sixteen rebels hiding in a washed-out cavern under the river bank. Forty-two prisoners were captured, but several escaped, among them the commanding officer, Captain B. F. Bryan, who climbed a tree and concealed himself among the leaves and Spanish moss until the Yankees departed.
“I was surprised by a body of the enemy, under command of Colonel Grierson, numbering upward of 1,000 men,” Captain Bryan reported later. “They made a dash and surrounded me on all sides before I was aware that they were other than our own troops, their advanced guard being dressed in citizens’ garb. Indeed, I could not think it possible that an enemy could approach my camp without my being notified in ample time to be prepared to meet them. … Most of my men being on picket, and having only about 30 of them immediately in camp, there was no possible chance of my making a stand.”8
While the Seventh Regiment was completing destruction of Captain Bryan’s camp and rounding up the prisoners, Grierson ordered the Sixth to ford the Comite and take the advance. The column was now only nine miles from Baton Rouge; they had broken through the last outpost station of the enemy.
They marched three miles west of the Comite and halted near the first large plantation house, turning off the road on high ground dotted with palmettos and patches of sedge grass. The hot sun, the continuous marching, the lack of food, were all telling heavily upon the horses. And the men, believing that their enemies now lay far behind them, were nodding in their saddles again. The regiments were ordered to fall out, feed, and rest.
“So tired they were,” observed Grierson, “they scarcely waited for food, before every man save two or three was in a profound slumber.” To keep himself awake Grierson entered the plantation house, wandered into the parlor and began playing upon a piano which he found there. “I astonished the occupants by sitting down and playing upon a piano which I found in the parlor and in that manner I managed to keep awake, while my soldiers were enjoying themselves by relaxation, sleep and quiet rest.”
What music did Grierson play at his moment of triumph? Might it have been Life Let Us Cherish, the first piece of music he had learned—when he was twelve years old—worked out laboriously on a large yellow box-wood flute while he sat upright in the middle of his bed? Or was it, as one of his friends back in Jacksonville, Illinois, suggested later, The Bold Soldier Boy?
He did tell of his thoughts while he was there, playing the piano: “Only six miles then to Baton Rouge and four miles would bring us inside of the lines guarded by the soldiers of the Union. Think of the great relief to the overtaxed mind and nerves. I felt that we had nobly accomplished the work assigned to us and no wonder that I felt musical; who would not under like circumstances?”
He did not become so absorbed in his music and his thoughts that he forgot his cavalrymen; in his autobiography he told of how he interrupted his playing to order his adjutant, Lieutenant Woodward, to “wake up a couple of orderlies and place them on each flank of the command” as guards.
An hour or so
after these pickets were sent out, one of them came riding up to the plantation house where Grierson was still playing on the piano. A Confederate force, the trooper reported excitedly, was approaching from the west! With skirmish lines out.
Grierson took one look at the dust cloud of the oncoming cavalry column, smiled, and shook his head. His Illinois boys had been looking for rebels so long they could not recognize Union cavalry when they saw it! “Feeling confident that no enemy could come against us from that direction,” he wrote, “I rode out alone to meet the troops without waking up my command.”9
IV
When Colonel Grierson had ordered his brigade to halt beside the plantation six miles outside Baton Rouge, neither he nor anyone else had observed that one of the colonel’s orderlies had continued riding on down the road toward the Union-held city. Nor had the orderly been aware of his digression, being sound asleep in his saddle. And if he did occasionally slip sideways or slump forward and come awake over the next two or three miles, he must have adjusted himself to the horse’s movements without bothering to open his eyes and so discover that he was riding alone.*
His first moment of wakefulness came on a rough challenge from either a Massachusetts or a New York infantry private, on picket duty along the Baton Rouge outer defense line.
Both the picket and the orderly stared at each other for a moment with mutual distrust. The orderly, still only half awake, then identified himself as a soldier of the Sixth Illinois Cavalry Regiment, Colonel Grierson’s brigade. The picket, his carbine at ready, insisted he had never heard of such a command; there were no Illinois boys in Baton Rouge; they were New York and Massachusetts boys. But the orderly insisted he had come from La Grange, Tennessee; he said there were two regiments of Illinois cavalry a short piece back down the road, certainly no more than a few miles; he guessed he’d fallen asleep and gone ahead of the column. Still skeptical, the picket hustled him back to a lieutenant, but the lieutenant did not believe the story either. He suspected it was a rebel trick to draw the Union troops out to ambush, and passed the man on to General Augur.