IV
On the day Grierson led his men out of La Grange, the First Brigade was at less than half its strength, a normal condition for most Civil War units. The table of organization for a volunteer cavalry regiment listed twelve companies or troops consisting of a captain, two lieutenants, eight sergeants, eight corporals, two teamsters, two farriers or blacksmiths, two musicians or buglers, one saddler, one wagoner, and seventy-eight privates. Each regiment was headed by a colonel and staff of one lieutenant-colonel, three majors, a surgeon and assistant surgeon, one regimental adjutant, one regimental quartermaster, one regimental commissary, a chaplain, a sergeant-major, a quartermaster-sergeant, a commissary-sergeant, two hospital stewards, one saddler sergeant, one chief farrier.24
Grierson’s brigade at full strength should have put around 3,600 men into the field, but this would have been unprecedented, and Grierson probably considered himself fortunate to have slightly less than half of his strength present for duty, or “1,700 strong” as he described them in his official report.
They marched down that first day through the Mississippi woods cover, at the standard cavalry rate of three miles an hour, resting for five or ten minutes on the hour.
The first day’s march was almost uneventful. The Sixth Illinois took the western road, the Seventh Illinois and the Second Iowa moving down parallel on the east. In the afternoon the advance patrol of the Seventh encountered a young Mississippian in a butternut coat and jean trousers, driving an ox team. “He wore a very good looking hat,” said Sergeant Surby, “which one of the boys took a fancy to and relieved him of, leaving the poor fellow looking rather sad.”
When the Seventh’s commanding officer, Colonel Edward Prince, came up shortly afterward he halted beside the wagon. The boy was sobbing. Colonel Prince asked him what had happened, and the boy sadly told the colonel of his confiscated hat. Shaking his head, Prince pulled out his wallet and gave the boy a two-dollar greenback. The young ox driver looked pleased, evidently considering the exchange a fair bargain.
At the end of a day’s prescribed thirty-mile cavalry march, the three regiments joined to camp for the night, four miles northwest of Ripley, “on the plantation of Dr. Ellis.” As they moved into the camp area they sighted their first Confederates, six men “scouring off across a distant field.” A pursuit party dashed after them, captured three of the rebels, and brought them back for questioning by Grierson and his staff.
Commissary-sergeants ordered details to the Ellis Plantation’s smokehouses and barns to ration out food and forage to the companies, and as darkness fell, cooking fires were lighted. The weather was still perfect, the springtime sounds and smells all around them. “The sky is hardly ever perfectly clear,” Sergeant Stephen Forbes* wrote in one of his letters. “There is just haze enough to tone down the moonlight to the most beautiful dreaminess, to hide every distortion and beautify every grace of landscape. … Perhaps it seems a little strange that we should think anything about pleasant weather, we, who have come down here to kill our fellows and carry distress to families, to dislocate the country and destroy life by wholesale. For my part, I have always tried to keep myself human, to remember home and the places where the people have hearts, and charge all these which it is our fate and duty to do, to the account of a stern necessity.”25
Only a few miles to the east of the brigade’s first night encampment was the plantation of William C. Falkner. The “stern necessity” which moved young Sergeant Forbes had likewise impelled Colonel Falkner to leave his home undefended and to organize the First Mississippi Partisan Rangers, who on this day were guarding the northern approaches to Vicksburg. Falkner and his partisan rangers knew that Vicksburg must be held at all costs, but who among them could have suspected that the citadel’s security was endangered by Yankee cavalry raiding so far east as Ripley?†
* Captain Henry Forbes, commanding Company B, Seventh Illinois Volunteer Cavalry, described La Grange as follows: “It was a neat little place of about a thousand people. The yards were beautifully improved, filled with evergreens and rare shrubberies. A fine College building crowned a gentle eminence to the east of the town and a Seminary for Ladies looked across to it from the north. All is vulgar desolation now. The College and its twin buildings are used for hospitals, and the churches are all appropriated to the same uses, with many of the private dwellings. The fences are all burned, the gardens trampled, the most elegant evergreens turned into hitching posts for Yankee horses, and all this in a town where there has been no strife of contending forces. It is a natural consequence of war.”—FFL, Henry Forbes to Nettie Forbes, Jan. 24, 1863.
* A letter from General Sherman, Dec. 9, 1862, substantiated Grant’s confidence in Grierson. “Dear General: Colonel Grierson is about to start for Helena with your dispatches and I also toward Memphis. When he returns he will report to you in person. Colonel Grierson has been with me all summer and I have repeatedly written to you and spoken in his praise. He is the best cavalry officer I have yet had.”—OR, ser. I, vol. 17, pt. 2, p. 396.
* “I have seen Gen’l. Hurlbut and I must leave here on the train at 1 o’clock and my command is ordered to leave La Grange tomorrow on the expedition I spoke to you about. … will be gone probably three weeks and perhaps longer.” Benjamin Grierson to Alice Grierson, April [16] 1863. (Grierson Papers).
* Stephen Forbes became a first sergeant shortly before the beginning of the raid.
† Colonel William C. Falkner was the great-grandfather of the novelist, William Faulkner. His Civil War experiences and later adventures in railroad building along the Pontotoc Ridge traversed by Grierson’s raiders appear in fictional guise in the Colonel Sartoris episodes of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha sagas.
THE SKIRMISHES BEGIN
WHILE STARS STILL GLITTERED in the April sky, the reveille call was ringing across the plantation fields. Within a few moments the men were in motion, repetitive commands of company officers whipping across each other like echoes in the motionless morning air. Blankets were rolled in ponchos, horses were fed and saddled, and tiny breakfast fires glimmered.
Grierson’s orders for the day put Colonel Edward Prince’s Seventh Regiment in advance. Just before seven o’clock the regiment’s flankers moved out and the videttes came in, chewing on hard bread and raw bacon, snatching a tin cup of coffee before falling in. The sun was well above the eastern hills when the march commands came reverberating down through the companies, and the column moved slowly out in twos on the narrow road toward Ripley, the squadrons at forty-pace intervals. Little spurts of dust were drifting back from the horses’ hooves by the time the rear squadron had passed. Farther down, Colonel Reuben Loomis’ Sixth Illinois, Captain Jason B. Smith’s detachment of Battery K artillery, and Colonel Edward Hatch’s Second Iowa were preparing to fall in behind.1
The brigade’s long column moved slowly the first hour, the Seventh slipping cautiously into the town of Ripley at eight o’clock. Union cavalry was no novelty to the folk of this northern Mississippi town; the men of the Second Iowa had eaten cold Christmas dinners near here several weeks earlier.2 The people now watched apathetically from windows and doorways. No Confederate soldiers were in evidence and no resistance was made by the inhabitants; indeed, the only men left in the town were either convalescent or were beyond military age. Of those who had gone away to war, some would be guarding the Vicksburg bastion, others would be with Falkner’s partisan rangers or in one of the state troop encampments farther south.
The brigade rested for an hour in Ripley while Grierson and his staff conferred. They were now approaching the Confederate patrol areas, and it was Grierson’s intention to create confusion as to his strength and objectives, to prevent if possible a massing of forces which might block his real mission. Colonel Hatch was therefore ordered to march his Second Iowa east of Ripley, as if intending a direct attack on the well-guarded Mobile & Ohio Railroad twenty miles away. After proceeding four miles, however, Hatch was to turn suddenly southward
again and move rapidly along the road toward Molino, riding parallel with Grierson’s main body.3
Shortly after the Iowans moved out, the Seventh marched south toward Orizaba and New Albany, with the Sixth covering the rear. The land was still hilly, the soil rocky, but there were more farms now, greening with wheat and corn which had replaced the staple cotton of past years. The farmhouses were small, with open “dog-trot” passageways running through their centers. Clustered around them were purple lilacs in full bloom, and full-leaved pear, peach and plum trees, their small green fruits already forming, their blossoms fading on the ground.
The mid-morning sun was hot and the sky was filling with white swollen clouds. As beautiful as they were, the weather-wise troopers regarded them warily.
Occasionally the order “Trot, March!” came down the column, not so much to expedite progress as to relieve both horses and men of the continual motion and fatigue of the same muscles. The trots were short ones and the squad leaders were soon shouting, “Walk, March.”
About four miles out of Ripley a patrol of eight Confederates appeared suddenly, firing upon the Seventh’s advance party, but the cavalrymen in butternut uniforms were too far away to endanger their targets. The Yankee advance squadron moved off at a gallop, firing vainly in return. Suspecting an ambush, they halted and waited for Colonel Prince and the main body to come up. Grierson was back with the Sixth, and Prince decided to make a precautionary move. If patrols were operating in the neighborhood, he wondered if larger forces might not be below, probably on the Tallahatchie River twelve miles away. The river was fordable in places, if the fords were not too well defended, and there was a bridge at New Albany. He decided to send one battalion ahead on a forced march, avoiding the villages, with orders to take and hold the bridge.
The assignment went to Major John M. Graham’s First Battalion.4 The men rode off at a gallop, with all the precision of professional cavalrymen, and but for their exuberant grins and unmilitary cheers, the casual observer might never have suspected that only eighteen months earlier these men had left their midwestern farms, their schoolrooms, offices, or country stores, to take up for the first time the strange and unknown trade of soldiering.
II
Benjamin Henry Grierson, commanding these amateur soldiers, had learned what military science he knew from a cavalry drill manual. As a boy he had served a few weeks with an Ohio militia company, but this could scarcely be considered military training. “During muster days,” he wrote in his unpublished autobiography, “the men worked systematically to get the officers drunk, and the maneuver usually wound up by marching to the tow path of the canal, where sooner or later they managed to charge upon and plunge the officers into the water to sober them.”5
Wiry like most Scotch-Irishmen, Grierson was a gangling man, his swarthy, scar-marked face surrounded by rich black hair and a beard worn in the downspreading spade shape of the times. He was a musician with a profound distrust of horses, and he would have much preferred leading an orchestra instead of a brigade of wild-riding cavalrymen. At thirteen, when his family lived in Youngstown, Ohio, after moving there from Pittsburgh where he was born, July 8, 1826, he had organized his first concert band. Before he left Ohio for Illinois in 1851 he was composing and arranging music for bands and orchestras. He liked to play old Scotch and Irish ballads on a flute or guitar, but when the music was a rousing march he preferred drums.
After completing the local school courses in Youngstown, he had wanted to go to college, and petitioned his congressman for a West Point scholarship. He won the appointment but his mother talked him out of accepting it by convincing him that he was born to be a musician.
Although life on the Illinois frontier in 1851 offered little opportunity for musicians, Grierson liked the rolling, wooded hills of Morgan County. He set himself up as a music teacher in the pleasant little village of Jacksonville, and began organizing amateur bands there and in neighboring towns. To demonstrate what he could do, he took his Jacksonville band to Springfield in the summer of 1852, and the Illinois State Register complimented the musicians as follows: “Grierson’s Band of Jacksonville was unique in that the members played by the card instead of their own conception of what each particular piece of music ought to have been.”6
One day in 1854 while he was teaching in Springfield, he encountered by chance his childhood sweetheart, Alice Kirk. He followed her back to Ohio, married her, and they returned to Jacksonville.
After a year of struggling to support a family on the meager income of a music teacher, Grierson decided to go into business with an old friend, John Wallihan. The partners established a general merchandise store in Meredosia, a town twenty miles west of Jacksonville on the Illinois River, which in those days of poor highways was the main artery of commerce from St. Louis up through the heart of the state.
By 1858 Grierson was an active partisan for Abraham Lincoln, composing several songs for his political campaigns. “Lincoln was at Meredosia during the [1858] campaign,” Grierson said, “and stopped at my house the night after making a speech. After the speaking was over and Mr. Lincoln had retired, I went back to the building in which the meeting took place to assist in quieting a disturbance which might otherwise have arisen.”
Meanwhile, Grierson’s merchandise business failed to prosper. “We sold too much on credit,” he said, “and were virtually left without a dollar.” In the late autumn of 1860 he took his growing family back to Jacksonville, to try music once again as a means of livelihood. “I’ve often wondered since why I spent five years of my life in Meredosia.”
A few months later the war came. Shortly after Lincoln issued his call for volunteers in April, 1861, Grierson accompanied a volunteer infantry company from Jacksonville to Cairo. His first military duty was to serve as an aide to General Benjamin Prentiss with the nominal rank of lieutenant. But he received no pay. For five months he lived on borrowed funds, awaiting a permanent assignment, only to be offered at last a major’s rank in the only service he wished to avoid—the cavalry.
Ben Grierson’s distrust of horses dated from an accident which occurred when he was eight years old. A supposedly friendly pony had kicked him in the face, splitting his forehead and mangling one cheek. For two months he was blinded, and he carried the scars to his grave. It is not surprising that he avoided all chances of going into the war burdened with cavalrymen and their skittish mounts. He countered the army’s offer with a request to be transferred—anywhere to avoid cavalry service. But the commanding general of the Western Department, Henry W. Halleck—later general-in-chief of the Union Army—flatly refused Grierson’s request for transfer. “General Halleck,” Grierson said, “jocularly remarked that I looked active and wiry enough to make a good cavalryman.”
And so in December, 1861, Major Benjamin H. Grierson reported for duty with the Sixth Illinois Cavalry Regiment encamped for the winter at Shawneetown, Illinois. He may have distrusted horses but he knew how to ride and drill, and when five captains under him complained that one of them should have had his rank, he offered to surrender it “to anyone for whom the officers and men might signify their preference.” He won the election and a few months later also won the regimental command and the rank of colonel.
During a spring and summer of chasing guerillas in Tennessee and some hard riding and fighting under General William T. Sherman in northern Mississippi, the official dispatches began referring to the Sixth Illinois as Grierson’s Cavalry.
III
Throughout the war the three regiments comprising Grierson’s brigade had campaigned in approximately the same areas. The two Illinois regiments were both mustered in the late summer of 1861 at Camp Butler, where the men spent their first days lying under the trees, cracking nuts, eating wild grapes, pitching quoits, and sitting around campfires. While the regiments were being formed from the volunteer companies, they began drilling on foot and on horseback, and learned how to burnish their boots and saddles for dress parades.
; The Second Iowa was organized at Camp McClellan in August, 1861, and after training at Benton Barracks, St. Louis, had moved into the Bird’s Point skirmishes with the Illinois regiments and had also been active in the land operations leading to the capture of Island Number Ten. The Iowans quickly established themselves as saber experts by employing one Herr Graupner, a German fencing master, to teach them the art. Graupner charged the officers five dollars and the enlisted men two dollars and a half, guaranteeing that his graduates would win all saber duels over amateur swordsmen. While at Charleston, Missouri, the versatile Iowans also captured a printing press, and to while away the time published a newspaper called the Charleston Independent.7
The Seventh Illinois and the Second Iowa joined in the siege of Corinth and the battles around Iuka, while the Sixth was left behind to pursue guerillas in west Tennessee. All three had been separately active in Grant’s central Mississippi campaigns which the Confederates had thwarted in the late autumn of 1862. When winter set in, the three regiments had come together at La Grange, but it was a winter of little rest for them. Colonel Robert V. Richardson’s partisan rangers kept the Tennessee hills in a state of bloody turmoil—the Sixth lost almost an entire company to his band8—the same Colonel Richardson who would haunt them again before this raid was done, three hundred miles to the south.