How can we measure the extent to which this new and unexpected manifestation of our military power will cripple the rebels, by compelling them to divide their forces everywhere, to keep ten or fifteen thousand men guarding their railways, not knowing when or where a Grierson may come down upon them like an avenging thunderbolt?
As a matter of course, the presence of these heroes among us has created the wildest excitement.
II
After their first night of unguarded sleep in more than two weeks, the men of the Sixth and Seventh Illinois Cavalry Regiments awoke to a pleasant Sunday dawn, their camping ground shadowed by magnolias and beeches intermingled with muscadine vines. Some went off to church in Baton Rouge; others lay on their blankets watching the six-mule teams bringing in provisions and forage. “The sun is shining with a lazy sultriness out of the smoky-looking sky, and the wind is wandering around in little cool puffs. … The horses stand dozing lazily in the heat, and the men are rolling around under the shade with open shirts and bare feet, telling idle stories and swearing at the weather.”6
During this placid morning, Captain Henry Forbes of B Company suddenly broke into a raving delirium. “It was pathetically significant of the stress and strain of the long hard ride,” said his young brother, Sergeant Stephen Forbes, “that he was taken with cautious violence to the post hospital, tearing the curtains from the ambulance on the way, and swearing that we might kill him if we would but we could never take him prisoner.”7 Stephen, better than anyone present, understood the meaning of those last words.
But the rugged Captain Forbes recovered rapidly, and in a few days was writing letters home:
I have risen refreshed this morning and have thrown open my windows and opened my paper to write you a letter. I would like you to look out of this back window of Madam Wilson’s boarding house with me. There flows the ever glorious old river, broad and cloudbearing to the Gulf, and numerous odd little craft, belonging to this Frenchiest of places, cling along the shore. Across you see the huge buildings of sugar plantations as far as the eye can reach, and right here almost within reach of my arm are fig-trees full of growing fruit. The birds are particularly jubilant this morning, too, and what with the fresh breezes from the woods dripped with a little night rain, and suntempered with a light transparency of clouds, the morning is sufficiently delightful. …
I suppose there is no need of telling you of our dare-devil expedition—our neck-or-nothing ride through the heart of Dixie, as I believe among all the startling events of the immediate past, that has made its own noise and secured its own record. The facts of our having performed the greatest march in a given time on record, you understand, the thousand and one incidents of it can only be talked up. I have neither time nor strength to write them … we were the blind used to obscure the real movements by seeming to threaten the rebel sensitive points ourselves. … I was once forty-eight hours without tasting food, and we rode at one time fifty-two miles without feeding. This was thought to be doing pretty well for one little company, and indeed my officers speak of it in terms too kind to bear repetition from me. We tried to do the best we could, and there was One who covered our defenceless heads. We had one man killed and had one wounded, though he rode bravely through for fully four hundred miles bearing two severe wounds. With such men you can accomplish what you will.8
In another letter, written after he and Stephen had heard from their family in Illinois, Captain Forbes wrote:
I observe in your Grandma’s and mamma’s letter to Stephen a very considerable amount of the most delightful distress on my account because I don’t make a fuss about myself in the papers. I hadn’t thought of the matter before, but have since, and have concluded to have the daguerreotype of the seat of my unmentionables as viewed before and after the “great raid” sent to Leslie, that I may become immortal by this clever evidence of endurance and Enterprise. You see I put a capital E to that last word! Can’t help it! Enterprise is my destiny, henceforth, and I am known throughout this corps as “the man who took Enterprise” and then skedaddled.9
Meanwhile, nineteen-year-old Sergeant Stephen Forbes had dismissed the raid from his thoughts—with the sensibility of youth—and did not even mention it in his letters home until three months afterwards when the Seventh Regiment was returned to Memphis by river boat. “Sleeping under a tent for the first time since April 17,” he began. “Unspeakable luxury to have a change of clean clothes, soft bread, and milk to eat, if you buy it. Morning papers and monthlies to read.”
It was not the dashing dangerous raid that had most impressed Stephen Forbes; it was the Southland.
We see the level, rich bottomlands, covered with swaying sugarcane; and the massive brick sugar houses, low and dark and full of ponderous machinery and with huge brick chimneys rising high into the air; fields surrounded with the wildest and gayest of hedges (just think of a fence of roses in the place of your rail abominations) groves of dark-leaved snowy-blossomed magnolias, sweet-scented enough to make one sick with delight, the most elaborate and beautiful of gardens, and oh! the acacias! so delicate and handsome, the most angelic of all the trees that God ever made I know; and the wild dark forests literally streaming with vines and draped with half-mourning veils of Spanish moss, cut by crooked, still bayous, in which “the alligator flaps his tail and the cat-fish jumps,” (rather a sudden fall, isn’t it? but I had to fall to something to get out of the sentence, and I haven’t got out of it yet.)
And the wide, cool plantation-houses, where the opulent old planters bring up their fiery sons and delicate daughters in dignified idleness, stocked with splendid libraries and ringing with grand, rich music from heavy pianos from which dainty fingers will give you Dixie, the Southern Marsellaise, and the Bonnie Blue Flag with infinite spirit, and once in a while, away back in the dark woods, an old musty house, the residence of some gloomy tyrant or ruined speculator, where the stocks and handcuffs lying about hint at a small history which we won’t interfere with if we are at all nervous. All this we see down here. …
Let me see, I have never written you a word of the “famous raid,” have I? But I guess that is just as well; I suppose that you have heard of it in some way, and I am heartily sick of it.10
III
On May 5, after three days of rest in Baton Rouge, Colonel Grierson, Colonel Prince, Major Mathew Starr, Lieutenant Samuel Woodward, and two unidentified privates boarded a steamboat for New Orleans. Grierson’s main object in going was “to have the battery of little ‘Woodruff Guns’ repaired, there being no means available at Baton Rouge. The wheels of the gun carriages had all been broken to pieces coming through from La Grange.” But he was also interested in a visit to the paymaster of the Department of the Gulf; the brigade was several months behind in pay and few of the officers or men had any money with which to celebrate the success of the raid. Grierson had small hope of persuading the Gulf to pay off Tennessee men, but he intended to make a try.
The boat trip was quiet and pleasant. Grierson enjoyed the May sun and the river breeze, sweet-smelling from masses of blossoms lining the fences of the river-front plantations. The New Orleans wharves were exciting—great stacks of grain in sacks, piles of cotton bales covered with canvas as protection against the sudden drizzling spring rains. Paddle-wheelers and ocean steamships were loading and unloading; six-mule teams and drags and carts rattled over the round cobblestones, the drivers cracking whips; and everywhere were the roustabouts, singing and shouting.
Grierson and his staff in Baton Rouge. Presumably Colonel Edward Prince and Colonel Reuben Loomis are in this photograph. Some authorities have identified the officer with his chin in his hand as Grierson; others believe Grierson to be the man seated on the right.
Grierson’s raiders arriving in Baton Rouge, as depicted by a Harper’s Weekly artist. “The illustrated newspapers of New York,” said Colonel Grierson, “pictured us riding trimly and daintily in, as if carpet soldiers on dress parade.” In reality the paraders’ un
iforms were tattered and dust-covered; the horses were lame, and loaded with miscellaneous plunder.
Camp of Grierson’s raiders in Baton Rouge, described by one of them as “a most delightful spot, shaded by the magnolia, whose long green leaves encircle a beautiful white flower, which fills the air with its rich perfume.”
From the moment of arrival, all quiet and privacy ended. “Many persons were shouting: ‘Hurrah for Illinois!’ I innocently asked what all the fuss was about. I did not then have the least idea it was on account of our arrival or about myself and the officers who were with me.” They rode in carriages to the St. Charles hotel. “I was ‘captured’ by citizens, gun-boats, schoolchildren, photographists,* reporters, and everybody in general.”11
Waiting in the hotel rotunda was the band of the Forty-seventh Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, and as soon as Grierson and his party arrived, a serenade began. “It is to be questioned,” the New York Times correspondent reported, “if the rotunda of the St. Charles ever exhibited such a scene of uproarious loyalty as it presented on that occasion. … By 9 o’clock P.M., when the band woke up the echoes of the long corridor of the St. Charles with the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ immense numbers had filled the spacious entrance portico.”12
One of Grierson’s enthusiastic admirers was George Hepworth, a chaplain from New England. “I rushed out to the St. Charles,” wrote Hepworth. “I cried out ‘Eureka!’ and rushed hither and thither until I found the hero, whom I grasped by the hand as though he had been my brother.”13
Captain John L. Swift of the New Orleans command was present to welcome Grierson and his party, and he climbed upon one of the St. Charles’s marble tables to introduce the heroes to the crowd. Colonel Grierson also “diffidently got upon the table, amid deafening shouts of applause, that seemed as if they would never cease; the circular gallery up in the dome, being filled with ladies, waving scarfs and handkerchiefs, and joining in the loud chorus of praise and welcome.”14
Grierson had expected no reception such as this. He was not prepared to speak, and according to the newspaper reports said only a few words, thanking the crowd and then giving all credit for the success of the raid to his officers and men.
Next day, Grierson visited the New Orleans paymaster’s office and discovered that as a hero it was no trouble at all to collect several months’ back pay which he had been unable to obtain from his own department before his last furlough home. He immediately wrote a jubilant letter to his wife, enclosing $500 and telling her of the New Orleans reception.*
Believing that all official ceremonies were over, he took a leisurely sight-seeing trip around the city, bought some presents to be sent to his family, and returned to the hotel. There a committee was waiting to inform him that the citizens of New Orleans would be honored that evening to present him with a gift—a horse. “A noble bay,” said the New Orleans Era of May 7, “a very beauty of a horse, not too large, compactly built, sleek and with limbs and body displaying such perfect lines of beauty from the point of his nose to the tip of his tail, as would have rejoiced the heart of a sculptor to look upon.”
Grierson accepted graciously, of course. His feelings about horses he kept to himself. Always the reluctant cavalryman, he trusted no horse, and from his first sight of the magnificent bay he suspected that no good would come of that spirited beast.
Colonel Prince in his usual secondary role (which he the more resented now that Grierson had become so suddenly a hero) was given a saddle and bridle, richly trimmed with gold lace.
This second reception drew a larger crowd than the first, long lines of people extending down Canal Street. After the usual introductory speech, the Forty-seventh Massachusetts Infantry band played Hail to the Chief, and then two little girls dressed in white, each carrying a flag in one hand and a bouquet of magnolias in the other, were lifted up to the speaker’s stand beside Grierson to present their offerings. “The colonel stood bowing all the time,” reported the New Orleans Era, “and we imagined he would much rather at that moment have been facing Stuart’s Black Horse cavalry, or John Morgan’s guerillas.”
Forewarned, Grierson had written his speech this time, and it is still preserved, filled with the rousing patriotic phrases of 1863. Its most significant sentence is one in which he refers to his command as being from the West, rather than from the North.15
Grierson and his party stayed three more days in New Orleans, enjoying their fame and glory. Then, on May 9, he wrote his wife that he would be leaving for Baton Rouge at five o’clock P.M. on the steamer Sally Robinson. “Early in the week,” he continued, “I presume we will endeavor to form a junction with the forces of General Grant, who are now said to occupy Port Gibson and Grand Gulf. We may go through Louisiana on the west side of the Mississippi, or may go north from Baton Rouge, passing near the line of the railroad from Port Hudson to Clinton. We will endeavor to select the best possible route, to inflict the most injury to the rebels. We have had a very pleasant visit here. I take my fine horse and equipments with me to Baton Rouge.”
IV
“Grierson’s cavalry,” said General Grant in an urgent message to General Banks on May 10, “would be of immense service to me now, and if at all practicable for him to join me, I would like to have him do it at once.”16 With his main army across the Mississippi River, Grant was cutting loose from his base at Grand Gulf and starting his land drive for Vicksburg. He needed all the cavalry he could get.
Grierson was as eager to join Grant as Grant was to have him, but he was now under Banks’s command, and Banks seemed reluctant to issue orders returning the Illinois regiments to their proper department. Three weeks after arriving in Baton Rouge, Grierson was still waiting. “I remained here another day to write my official report,” he informed his wife on May 21. “It will be ten days or more before I can give it to General Grant, and should I march through the country to join him, as I expect, I will have another report to make by that time.”
Two days later, Captain Henry Forbes, now fully recovered, said in one of his letters home: “Just how long we shall remain here before proceeding to rejoin the army of General Grant, I don’t know. We have waited already for some time, but Colonel Grierson will do what is prudent. He is a great fellow.”
On May 25 Grant again politely reminded Banks: “Colonel Grierson would be of immense value to me now. If he has not already started, will you be kind enough to order him here immediately? He should come up the Louisiana shore to avoid delay.”
Banks’s reply was to agree with Grant that Colonel Grierson’s cavalry was of great importance. “He has rendered us great service,” he said, “and his immediate departure will entirely cripple us.”17
Thus did Grierson, who had escaped capture by the Confederates during his daring raid, now find himself a captive of a rival department of the Union Army.
His men, however, did not seem to mind their enforced stay in Baton Rouge. They had no money, but the restaurant and saloon keepers pampered them for the first few days with free food and drinks. “On finding themselves such privileged characters,” Grierson commented, “it was not strange they should indulge in some skylarking.” They engaged in such pranks as seizing the Provost Marshal’s office and locking that worthy official outside. They took over a saloon, chasing the proprietor, and served each other drinks. The saloon-keeper protested to the Provost Marshal, but the harassed officer replied: “It’s no use to try to do anything with those terrible raiders.” And he recommended that the man shut up his shop. But when the rambunctious cavalrymen created a disturbance in an ice cream parlor, the marshal decided the mischief-making was getting out of hand. He made a stern-faced entrance into the place only to receive a charge of gas from one of the soda founts hidden behind a door.
The Illinois boys were fascinated by the Negro street criers of Baton Rouge who went about the city carrying advertising banners, ringing bells, and crying out announcements of sales, auctions, and entertainments. One afternoon a group from the Se
venth Regiment prepared a sign advertising a free band concert in Magnolia Grove by Grierson’s raiders, and sent a crier through the streets ringing bells and inviting the citizens to attend. That evening when a crowd gathered at the Grove, everyone flatly denied any knowledge of a concert. How could they present a concert with no musical instruments other than the trumpeters’ bugles and the colonel’s jew’s-harp?
“All this disorder was but the effervescence of a few days,” Grierson said. It was ended by an order from General Banks directing Colonel B. H. Grierson to take command of the First Cavalry Brigade attached to the Department of the Gulf’s Fourth Division, such brigade to consist of the Sixth and Seventh Illinois Cavalry, the Second Massachusetts Cavalry, the First Louisiana Cavalry, and the Fourth Wisconsin Mounted Infantry. Grierson’s orders were to clear out and guard the approaches to Port Hudson, while Banks marched his infantry in to surround that formidable river fort.
And so was ended, temporarily, Grierson’s hopes of rejoining General Grant and the Department of the Tennessee.
V
June, 1863, was the month of decision in the Civil War. In that month General Grant smashed the armies of General Pemberton and moved forward to squeeze Vicksburg into the surrender of July 4. Far away to the east, the armies of General Robert E. Lee were marching up the Allegheny valleys toward Gettysburg and destruction. And down at Port Hudson—the Confederacy’s last blockade point on the Mississippi—General Banks was pressing a relentless siege against General Franklin Gardner’s stubborn defenders.
Grierson’s raiders played an important role in the Port Hudson siege. They marched and fought along some of the roads over which they had galloped to escape Pemberton’s pursuing cavalry on the last days of the raid. They battled some of these same rebel forces—Miles’s Legion and Wirt Adams’ wild riders.