In their first few days of field service, the Sixth and Seventh Illinois Regiments were at a disadvantage, half of the men being armed with Union and Smith’s carbines for which no ammunition was available in the Department of the Gulf. During Grierson’s first engagement along the Comite River near Clinton, a battalion of the Seventh Regiment was forced into retreat because of lack of ammunition. Grierson sent a hurry call to New Orleans for 500 Sharp’s carbines.18
The bitter rivalry between Colonel Grierson and Colonel Prince finally reached the breaking point during the Port Hudson campaign, a breach which was probably aggravated by Grierson’s appointment as Brigadier-General on June 16. A few days after the regiments left Baton Rouge, Prince deliberately disobeyed orders, and personally led a battalion of the Seventh off to Thompson’s Creek to capture a pair of Confederate steamboats. Grierson overlooked this defection—after all, it was not too often that the cavalry was victorious over the navy.*
Three weeks later, however, when Prince disobeyed another order, Grierson immediately addressed an angry message to Banks’s headquarters: “Colonel Prince has not reported with his command, in obedience to orders. I would respectfully recommend that he be placed under arrest for gross disobedience of orders.”
As this message does not appear in the official records, it is probable that Grierson either changed his mind and did not send it, or that General Banks persuaded Grierson to withdraw his request. The original message, penciled on a scrap of paper, still remains in Grierson’s military file.
A few days later, on July 4, Vicksburg surrendered to Grant; and personal enmities were temporarily forgotten in the high hope that Port Hudson would also immediately capitulate. But General Franklin Gardner refused to stop the fighting. (“Old Gardner says he will hold the place as long as there is any horses and mules left to eat,” a Confederate captain had written to his wife a few days before Banks began the siege.)
Banks kept hammering away, moving his infantry trenches closer and closer until Confederate and Union lines in some places were only a few feet apart. Then, on July 7, copies of a newspaper announcing the fall of Vicksburg were tossed into the Confederate trenches. Two days later Franklin Gardner surrendered.
One of the first men Gardner asked to meet was General Grierson. “Grierson caused the surrender of Port Hudson,” Gardner said, “by cutting off communications and supplies.” The Confederate general asked several questions about the raid, and then showed Grierson a handful of conflicting telegrams. “Grierson was here; no, he was there, sixty miles away. He marched north, no, south, or again west.” Gardner then claimed that the raiders would have been trapped if his orders had been fully obeyed. “The trouble was, my men ambushed you where you did not go; they waited for you till morning while you passed by night.”19
VI
The western Confederacy was now severed; after two years of war and blockade the Mississippi was open again from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico. In the east, the broken Confederate armies of Virginia were retreating from Gettysburg. A wave of optimism swept the Union states; surely the rebels were beaten at last.
The Confederates were beaten, all right, but they did not believe they were beaten, and most of the men in the Union Army knew that the Confederates did not and would not believe they were beaten.
Grant knew the Confederates would come back and fight him hard. One of his first concerns after he took Vicksburg was the shortage of cavalry, which he needed more than ever now to deal with the swooping attacks of such avengers as General Bedford Forrest—who was already back in the Mississippi valley after capturing the entire regiment of Colonel Abel Streight in Alabama.*
General Banks also knew the Confederates had no intention of quitting the war. On orders from Washington he was planning an invasion of Texas, and one of his main deficiencies was experienced cavalry.
Grierson’s cavalry, therefore, even after the collapse of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, was still considered a prize by these rival department commanders, as their exchange of correspondence plainly shows: “I ask that General Grierson be sent here as soon as possible,” Grant wrote Banks on July 10. “I am very much in want of cavalry and of Grierson to command them.” Banks replied that the enemy’s cavalry would outnumber his mounted forces if he gave up Grierson. When Grant became more insistent, Banks suggested a trade: Grierson’s cavalry for a full division. Sherman was also eager to obtain Grierson for the coming assault on Jackson, Mississippi, but Grant was not too hopeful. On July 13, he informed Sherman: “I have written to Banks to send Grierson up, but do not believe he will send him.”20
During this time Colonel Prince wrote to General Banks directly, stating that he desired to have the Seventh Illinois Cavalry regiment remain with the Department of the Gulf for service in the Texas expedition. “On hearing of this,” Grierson said, “I promptly told the officers of the 7th Ill. Cavalry that if they wished to remain they had only to say so; but they unanimously requested to stay in my command and go back with me to Tennessee. General Banks, much as he wanted Cavalry, would take it in no such way, and when he learned that the proposal was made without my knowledge, Colonel Prince was promptly informed that correspondence must pass through the Headquarters of his commanding officer.”
Then at last, on July 18, the long-awaited orders came for Grierson’s raiders: “Brigadier-General B. H. Grierson, commanding cavalry, will proceed with the Sixth and Seventh Regiments of Illinois Cavalry and the First Illinois Battery, under his command to Vicksburg, and will there report to Major-General Grant for duty in the Department of the Tennessee.”21
General Banks, however, never completely gave up the idea of obtaining Grierson’s cavalry for his department. As late as August 16 he was still begging Grant to let him have Grierson and some “Western men”* for the invasion of Texas.
VII
Grierson and his men traveled up the Mississippi River to Vicksburg aboard the steamers Planet and Imperial, accompanied by two hundred Confederate officers who had been captured and paroled when Port Hudson fell. “I was warmly received by General Grant,” Grierson said, “and was invited by him to inspect the fortifications.”22
Originally Grant had planned to send the Illinois cavalry into the field with General Sherman, but the day before Grierson arrived at Vicksburg, Sherman’s army overran Jackson, Mississippi, burning the city, and sending the Confederates in full retreat eastward. Grant was agreeable, therefore, to Grierson’s strongly expressed wish to return to duty with Hurlbut’s Sixteenth Corps in Tennessee, and travel orders were issued on July 19: “General B. H. Grierson will proceed on the steamers on which his command is embarked to Memphis, Tennessee.”23
In notifying Sherman that he was not to expect Grierson’s regiments to join him, Grant said: “Grierson is very anxious to get back to Tennessee to get his troops together. By having him there, I can organize a large cavalry force under his command, to make a big raid through the eastern part of the State, or wherever required.”24 Five days later, Grierson was assigned to duty as Chief of Cavalry of the Sixteenth Army Corps.
Grant, however, did not then know of Grierson’s serious accident, an accident which occurred as he was leaving Vicksburg and would bar him from field duty for several months. “As I returned to the boat,” Grierson said, “passing down a very narrow way among the huge piles of stores at the landing, my own New Orleans gift horse kicked at the horse on which I was mounted.” Grierson was struck painfully upon the knee. As a cavalryman he was chagrined; but he had known from childhood his incompatibility for horses, and probably was not surprised. “It proved afterward the most annoying injury received during the war; the effect remaining, and weakening the knee for many months.”25
A short time later, after hobbling painfully about Memphis headquarters on crutches and attempting several times to return to field duty, he was ordered on leave to recuperate from the injury. His home town of Jacksonville, Illinois, took advantage of his enforced furlough to give him an ovation. Hi
s old concert band played Home Again for him, and his friends, who had always thought of Ben Grierson as a mild-mannered musician rather than a dashing cavalryman, delivered laudatory orations. (“There was far more in him than bugle-blowing.”)
Grierson replied with a carefully prepared speech. (“Amid all this strife we are, as a nation, making rapid strides to greatness. We are living many years in one; elements of power are being developed and changes transpiring wonderful to behold.”) And then six little girls dressed in white and wearing sashes of red, white, and blue advanced upon the stage singing a song and bearing a magnificent bouquet which they presented to the hero of Jacksonville.26
VIII
During the rapid sequence of events in that fateful summer of 1863, Sergeant Richard Surby of the Butternut Guerillas was also meeting with strange new adventures. Three days after he was wounded at Wall’s Bridge and left behind at Newman’s Plantation with Lieutenant-Colonel Blackburn, Surgeon Yule, and the four other men, a squad of Confederate cavalry from Osyka arrived with orders to remove all of them to that station. The rebels had brought along a rickety old ambulance, barely large enough to carry the wounded men.
Surgeon Yule protested strongly, declaring that it was impossible to move any of the wounded except Sergeant Surby. The Confederates finally agreed to leave Lieutenant-Colonel Blackburn, Private Hughes, and Bugler Roy at the plantation, but they insisted that the surgeon and the two volunteer nurses, Sergeant Leseure and Private Douglas, must go to Osyka with Surby.
As soon as he learned he would be leaving, Sergeant Surby dug down into the pile of unginned cotton which served as his bed and retrieved his pocket knife, a breast pin which bore a miniature picture of his wife, and twenty-five hundred dollars in Confederate money, all carefully concealed the day he was brought there. Trusting the wife of the plantation owner more than the rebel cavalrymen, Surby gave her his knife and pin and a large part of the money.*
He was then loaded into the ambulance. Surgeon Yule, Sergeant Leseure and Private Douglas were ordered to accompany the escort on foot, “which made them puff, on an eleven mile march, they not being used to infantry tactics.” They arrived at Osyka about six o’clock that evening. “I was surprised,” Surby said, “to hear and see the rebel Colonel Richardson, from Tennessee, who took particular delight in heaping abuse upon the Sixth and Seventh cavalry, by saying everything that was mean and unbecoming a gentleman.”
Meanwhile Surgeon Yule had persuaded the Confederate authorities to permit him and Sergeant Leseure to return to Newman’s Plantation to attend Lieutenant-Colonel Blackburn and the two wounded troopers. Private Douglas, however, was retained, to be sent with the next prisoner shipment to Richmond.
Surby was put aboard the first train north, his destination a convalescent hospital at Magnolia. En route, his boots were stolen from beneath his cot. But he found the Magnolia hospital a pleasant, leisurely place, the food scanty but well-cooked—“corn-bread, molasses, mush, sassafras tea, and almost invariably the leg of a goose for breakfast, baked, no dressing, sometimes tender as a spring chicken, then again tough enough to make a good whip-cracker; however my appetite was sufficient for all I could get.”
One day while reading the Jackson (Mississippi) Appeal, he was startled to come across an account of his own death in a story recounting events of Grierson’s raid. This did not worry Surby nearly as much as another news dispatch claiming that a Texas cavalry regiment had defeated Grierson’s command, wounding the colonel and capturing him and nearly all of his men. He decided philosophically that the latter story might be as grossly exaggerated as the first.
Unable to learn any news of Lieutenant-Colonel Blackburn and his comrades, he finally arranged to employ a man to journey to Newman’s Plantation, which was only twenty miles from Magnolia. The messenger brought back bad news. Blackburn and Hughes had died of their wounds; Surgeon Yule and Sergeant Leseure were at Osyka awaiting transportation to a Confederate prison.
After recovering from his wound, Surby was taken on a ten-day journey across the Confederacy to Libby Prison in Richmond. He was exchanged almost immediately, returned to his home in Illinois a few weeks, and then rejoined his regiment in Tennessee, October 13th, 1863.27
Sergeant Surby and most of his comrades of Grierson’s raid fought through two more years of war, a war which they had helped to decide in the spring of 1863, but which dragged on bitterly to surrender in April 1865 and then into long months of reconstruction duty in the vanquished and disrupted Southland. The Sixth and Seventh Illinois Cavalry Regiments were not mustered out of service until late in November, 1865, seven months after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.
During the last years of the war the raiders did not often see General Grierson; after his promotion they served directly under their old friend of the raid, Colonel Edward Hatch of Iowa. They engaged in several fights and battles, were twice badly beaten by the rebel cavalryman they most respected, Nathan Bedford Forrest. But when Sherman began his famous march to the sea in the spring of 1864, the Sixth and Seventh Illinois Regiments—back in the field with Grierson—successfully kept Forrest off Sherman’s rear by a long diversionary drive deep into Mississippi.
In late summer of 1864, the volunteers’ three-year enlistment periods ended and they were all free to go home. A majority, however, re-enlisted as veterans for the duration, many receiving long-deserved promotions. They also were issued better cavalry equipment and weapons, such as the highly prized Spencer carbines which fired seven shots and could be loaded with two motions of a lever.
Before the fighting ended, the Sixth Regiment lost two commanders, Lieutenant-Colonel Reuben Loomis, killed November 2, 1863, and his successor, Colonel Mathew Starr also killed, in October, 1864, when General Forrest made a sudden dawn attack on the regiment’s camp near Memphis.
Colonel Prince of the Seventh Regiment chose to be mustered out at the end of his three-year enlistment in October, 1864. Embittered by events following the raid, Prince had lost much of his early popularity with his officers and men, some threatening not to re-enlist if he continued as commanding officer. Major John Graham succeeded Prince as colonel of the Seventh, and Captain Henry Forbes of the famed Company B became second in command with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.
Young Stephen Forbes followed his brother as Company B’s captain, and in his journal, faithfully kept to the end of his service, he left a sensitive record of the death of a land he had come to love. Stephen Forbes was fascinated by the Gothic horrors of the events in which he was involved, by the sudden dissolution of a human civilization symbolized in the deserted old houses with the smell of a dead time already upon them:
“The old houses, so dark and solemn, where the windows were gone and doors rusted open and floors sunken and stairways tipped away and chimneys leaning away as if weary with standing erect so long, and with door-sills decayed and fireplaces scowling black, and roofs spotted with moss-tufts, and clapboards rattling loose, what scenes of horror or mystery or tales of love or agony could not the imagination call up from their death-haunted interiors.”28
And when his regiment for the last time broke camp at La Grange—the once lovely village which after so many months seemed like home to him and his comrades—the young captain recorded their final leave-taking, an eloquent farewell to the old Southland in its last tragic weeks of dying:
When we left La Grange, we evacuated the place entirely. It looked miserably dreary. I rode through the streets after everything had left, and the long lines of dark, empty houses that looked through the open doors and windows as if they were opening their mouths to show the blackness and confusion of their interiors, with no living thing moving, save one solitary refugee woman, worn and dreary, who sat in the doorway of a large house without a window or a door, gazing down the street quietly and as if nothing under heaven could especially interest her, and three little black children playing slowly on the sidewalk, made me feel as if I was moving along the veins of some dead body
looking in at the holes where were once the eyes, and into the great shell where seethed the brain, and this dark cavity where throbbed the heart, now all dry and pulseless and black.
So I put spurs to my horse and fled, the clatter of his hoofs echoing loudly back as I left the desolation behind me.29
* “I have sat for my likeness here—have some photographs taken small and also large—one of the large photographs will be sent to you by the artist who took them. … I will enclose you one in this letter—of the small ones.” Benjamin Grierson to Alice Grierson, May 9, 1863 (Grierson Papers).
* “May 6, 1863. My dear Alice, I like Byron have had to wake up in morning and find myself famous. Since I have been here it has been one continuous ovation. I have received 4 months pay today and enclosed you will find draft on New York for $500.”—(Grierson Papers, 1863)
* Forty years afterwards (April 28, 1904) Colonel Prince wrote an account of this incident for the National Tribune, a publication for veterans: “I found out that there would be a chance to capture two steamboats which were partially under the guns of Port Hudson, in a bayou called Alligator Bayou, into which Thompson’s Creek emptied. I had made some efforts to get permission to try and capture these boats from Colonel Grierson, commanding the brigade, but he was averse to it and I got an order over his head from General Banks and I was careful not to tell Colonel Grierson anything about it until I could get well under way on the road … but having asked General Banks to send me a section of artillery (two pieces) when this section came through the camp Colonel Grierson found out that I had started off to capture the boats and sent a detail of his command with an order to me.”