These western Yankees oddly enough did not at first consider themselves to be Yankees at all. New Englanders and other eastern Unionists were Yankees; they were Westerners.* Referring to a Confederate stronghold under attack by eastern regiments, one of Grierson’s raiders said: “It is a place which can be reduced by a little determined bravery, and the Western troops would make short work of it. But these Yanks! Ah! Ah!! They had so much rather not get shot. So much rather reserve themselves to eat pumpkin pies at future Thanksgivings than to abandon themselves to death and glory on the battlefield! I would give more today for the army of Illinois than that of entire New England. They will dare more, do more, go farther, strike deeper, and then not have got up half headway, nor considered themselves acting out of their ordinary modes.”9
After eighteen months they could swagger a little, these countrymen turned soldiers. The letters and diaries10 of Grierson’s men reveal that in common with most of their comrades they had experienced the pains of severed home ties, the peculiar loneliness of young warriors, the dreams of glory, the disillusionment of reality, boredom, hunger, disease, and the suddenness of death.
They hated military routine: “There is no such a thought-killing life within the very narrow limits of my experience as this. For the mind is so entirely withdrawn from all its accustomed associations of thought and from all thought-provoking occupations, and the nature of the life we live is so well calculated to confine the thoughts within the channel of food and drink, that we lose all inclinations in that direction.”
They suffered from dysentery, diarrhea, jaundice, cholera morbus, erysipelas, colds, sore throats, and measles, and they distrusted the camp hospitals:
“What ails you?”
“Why I have been to the camp hospital.”
One of Captain Forbes’s letters describes the situation: “I have courted the favor of a very kindly physician whom we frequently visit with cases, to the utter avoidance of the regular hospital which we detest in common as we would a lazar house. I will give an instance of their behaviour there. I wished to get a portion of salts for a man who had an erysipelas. I called at the hospital, making my request, and was peremptorily denied because it was not precisely 8½ o’clock in the morning, and was deferred 24 hours. This not answering my purpose, I went on a Doctor hunt through the regiments, and succeeded at last in finding one in the 34th who was not only a M.D. but a gentleman, and procuring a special requisition from him upon the hospital stores, returned after two hours’ hard work with the requisite dose. Faugh! There are so many men here whom a little official position spoils.”
They elected their officers: “A change has been made in our company in regard to the officers, our captain having been promoted to the office of major and our first lieutenant elected to his place by the unanimous vote of nine hearty cheers … the next day our fourth sergeant, McCausland, was elected to the first lieutenancy after an animated contest. Today the only thing of any interest has been the circulation of any number of petitions for the office of fourth corporal. It was really amusing to see the eagerness with which they thrust their papers into the face of every man they met. So eager are some men for every little exaltation above their fellows.”
They rough-housed in their camps: “One evening after retiring Westgate began tickling my face with a straw. He thought it a good time to have a little fun at my expense, as I had been out on picket duty the night previous and was very tired and sleepy. … I told him that I would put him out of the tent if he did not stop, and becoming impatient I jumped up and the scuffle commenced. After a few tumbles about the tent, Westgate struck one foot among the cooking utensils and finally stepped into the water bucket, which was full of water. … He was in trouble, his foot being forced into the bucket in such a position that it was a difficult matter to extricate it. … The feet being of the largest kind used for plowing corn in Illinois, and the utensil being only the regular size, pretty near a surgical operation was necessary.”
They learned about company punishment: “Poor Hemmenway was drunk again for the second time since we came here and today he payed the penalty in stump-grubbing.”
They received Christmas packages from home: “I can never forget the luxuries we received. They were just delicious. I received a box containing a roast turkey, a number of pies, cakes, and other things too numerous to mention.”
But most of the time on the long marches, they “were very weary and hungry, having eaten nothing for twenty-four hours and marched 45 miles that day. Nor had we anything with which to appease the gnawings of hunger save a little coffee, which we hastily drank.”
They learned how to sleep anytime and anywhere: “I made a bed of corn leaves in the corner of the fence out of the reach of my inquisitive companions, the hogs.”
They learned what not to do, the hard way: “I then pulled off my fine cavalry boots and set them up near the fire, in order that they might dry out, and then retired. When I arose in the morning and took hold of my boots I found them brittle in some parts, having been scorched by the fire during the night. When putting them on they broke, so that they were ruined.”
They hated the rain and cold: “I am sitting cooped up in my tent, looking out upon a prospect of black puddly ground and shivering horses, a grey dripping sky, and down the hillside, through the sombre pines, a valley of misty smoke.”
And detested the mud: “The earth is supposed to have been in a plastic state at its creation, and I am inclined to think it will be again before long, from the looks of my boots. … We stamp the mud from our feet as we retire, sleep on the reeking ground, and get up into a nice little mud puddle about two feet in diameter. Next in the progress of events we breakfast off our box and go up on a mud-mixing tour up to the General’s headquarters.”
They wrote letters full of homesickness to their loved ones in the north: “I am down here in the dark pine groves, and the earth is brown, but you dwell in the white land, and the soft carpet of the snow is under your feet. I am old and brown with care, and the rain drips sullenly out of my sky, but you are in the beams of sunshine, and the year is young and bright around you. … I have not had a letter from home since the battle—and I have carried these freshest remembrances until they seem like perished roses, sweet but dead. … I send you a blossom of the ‘wild purple magnolia,’ indigenous to this climate.”
They fraternized with the families of the enemy: “It is most enticingly pleasant to step into a neat, well-kept house tempting with books and bright eyes, and music with the tinkling of a guitar or a piano, but the distrust and suspicion with which all soldiers are regarded, and for which God knows they give more than cause enough, deprives a decent mind of all enjoyment or ease. This is what makes the hardship of soldiering.”
They went to church with the conquered: “It is Sunday afternoon and I have been church going, listening to the old tunes grown strange through long disuse, hearing the Bible themes, the words of prayer resounding through the lift of an old time-worn church, and the clear, almost complaining voices of women mingling with the strong soldier chorus of the strangers in their sanctuary.”
Most of them had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and were disillusioned on seeing their first freed slaves: “Mrs. Stowe’s Negroes are not here.”
They lost their dreams of glory: “I recollect well how I used to imagine myself riding boldly over the hills and coming suddenly upon the enemy and blazing away at them with my revolver, when at least three men were to tumble down, of course, and then riding gaily back with a very picturesque stream of blood running down my left shoulder, never my right; when, after a few days of graceful bandaging, I would be all right and eager for another one, and have the honor of carrying rebel lead in my body to the grave. We have just discharged one man from the company for carrying a ball in his lung, for it would get to sinking down sometimes and make it rather hard work for him to breathe, and, would you believe it, he didn’t act a bit more graceful nor enthusiastic than if he had had the as
thma.”
Although it would not have been difficult for a cavalryman to quit this war and go home, scarcely a deserter is listed on the rosters of the three regiments of Grierson’s brigade. And when their volunteer services ended, a large percentage of them re-enlisted as veterans. Those who were not killed or captured or did not die of disease remained with their regiments until they were mustered out late in 1865.
IV
While Major Graham’s First Battalion was riding full speed for the Tallahatchie bridge at New Albany, Colonel Hatch and his Second Iowans, having completed their four-mile feint toward the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, were turning south toward Molino. Near Molino the Iowans’ advance squadron was sighted by mounted scouts from Colonel J. F. Smith’s First Mississippi Regiment of state troops, a home guard organization based at Chesterville, twelve miles south. Smith’s regiment was made up mainly of farmers and townsmen of the area who for various reasons were considered exempt from conscription in the regular Confederate Army. Although the regiment’s duty strength was around 350 men, only one company was in the field near Molino. Unable to give the Iowans a battle with the small force at his command, Colonel Smith sent warning of the invasion back to Chesterville and proceeded to delay Hatch as best he could. These Confederates, of course, had no knowledge of Grierson’s two other regiments moving south along the New Albany road only seven or eight miles to the west. And Hatch, uncertain of his opponents’ strength, moved so cautiously that he marched only five miles below Molino during the afternoon, harassed continually by the skirmishing Confederates. He crossed the upper branches of the Tallahatchie late in the day, posted double videttes, and camped for the night. The sky was thickening and the weather smelled of rain.11
Major Graham’s First Battalion of the Seventh Illinois, meanwhile, had ridden uninterrupted to within sight of the Tallahatchie bridge, where, as Colonel Prince had suspected, Confederate pickets were stationed. The guards opened fire on Graham’s galloping lines. Surprised by the sudden appearance of blue uniforms, the pickets had no time to burn the bridge. Some of them began ripping up the loose planking, but the cavalry charge was moving too rapidly for them. The Confederates jumped on their horses and attempted a hasty flight, but Graham’s onrush swept up four prisoners.
Ordering his men to dismount, the major prepared for a defensive battle which never came. He set some of his men to replacing the torn flooring for the use of the main column, but the main column never came that way, either. Colonel Grierson decided to use the ford three miles upstream, halting briefly for watering and feeding.12
It was late afternoon by the time the rear guard left New Albany, “a small place composed of a few dry-goods stores, whose stock needed replenishing; also some fine residences; altogether a pleasantly situated country town.”13 The march was slowed deliberately for Colonel Hatch’s benefit, but no word came from him. As they moved southeastward along the Pontotoc road, the sky ahead of them towered with thunderheads quivering with tiny flashes of lightning. The two days of good cavalry weather were coming to an end.
Five miles below New Albany they halted for the night along a small stream “on the plantation of Mr. Sloan,” a few miles short of the standard day’s thirty miles. Rain clouds were thickening with the coming of darkness, and Grierson ordered his men to prepare for the rough weather immediately ahead. As soon as their horses were unsaddled and picketed, some of the troopers began erecting little shelters of fence rails and ponchos. Others collected dry brush for beds. They used their saddles for pillows, rolling up in blankets, and as Sergeant Stephen Forbes described it, lay with their faces “under the ponchos, listening to the patter of soft rain overhead.” The unlucky ones were assigned to vidette duty.
In his Record of Services, printed privately for his family, Grierson gave a detailed account—which reads like a comic opera—of his experiences that evening with the plantation owner, Sloan. “As usual,” Grierson said, “we demanded the keys of smokehouses and barns, food for men and horses. Mr. Sloan wanted in a small way to resist where resistance was of course impossible; would not give up his keys until the locks were broken. When he saw his stores issued out, he was completely beside himself; alternately was going to cut my throat, and desirous of having his own throat cut.” Grierson tried to calm the emotional planter and had almost succeeded when Sloan discovered a squad of cavalrymen driving up his horses and mules which he had believed were safely hidden in the woods. “He fairly foamed,” said Grierson, “and for the fiftieth time demanded that we take him out and cut his throat and be done with it.”
Grierson loved acting; he had written and acted in several comic operas while teaching music at Jacksonville. He now turned and winked at his orderly, a huge, athletic, and heavily bearded man. “Mr. Sloan is very desirous of having his throat cut,” he said solemnly. “Take him out in the field and cut his throat, and be done with it.” The orderly, falling into the spirit of the play, immediately responded by taking out his large hunting knife with one hand and seizing Mr. Sloan’s collar with the other.
“Now began a hubbub. Mrs. Sloan—who all along had been more self-possessed than her husband … began to scream in chorus with the servants.” She begged Colonel Grierson to pay no attention to what her husband said, and far down the long hall through which the orderly was walking him, Sloan’s voice came roaring back in a hasty plea for his life. The scene ended quietly with Grierson promising to leave some tired horses in exchange for Sloan’s fresh stock.14
Major Graham’s four prisoners, the only profitable return from his dashing capture of the Tallahatchie bridge, proved to be talkative and informative. Two of them were from a state troop regiment, an unofficial unit headed by one Captain Weatherall and composed of a group of men who appeared to be unwilling to serve in the regular Confederate Army, but were hell-for-leather to chase any Yankees who might appear in their home counties. The other two were regulars from Lieutenant-Colonel Clark R. Barteau’s Second Tennessee Cavalry. From these prisoners Grierson learned that Major Alexander Chalmers and a detachment of the Eighteenth Mississippi Cavalry were camped at King’s Bridge, a few miles to the northwest, that a small horse herd was hidden in some bottomlands a few miles to the east, and that Colonel Barteau was probably less than twenty miles away with four or five hundred regulars and about the same number of state troops at his disposal.15
V
Lieutenant-Colonel Clark Russell Barteau, commanding the Confederate’s Second Tennessee Cavalry, was a man harassed both by his Union enemies and his Confederate friends. Following the disasters of Shiloh and Corinth in 1862, he and his Tennesseans had withdrawn to northeast Mississippi to heal their wounds, reorganize, re-outfit, and become a part of Brigadier-General Daniel Ruggles’ First Military District, headquarters at Columbus. Revenge was naturally a strong motivating force among the men of his regiment, and they had spent the winter raiding northward, with headquarters base at Okolona. They had also kept the Mobile & Ohio tracks protected between Okolona and Verona.16
Before winter ended, however, the regiment was “miserably armed and deficient in numbers, with not even ammunition sufficient for a skirmish.” The men had also suffered a severe epidemic of measles. The plight of Barteau’s stubborn cavalrymen won the sympathy of General Ruggles, and early in March, 1863, he begged General John C. Pemberton, commanding the Department of Mississippi, to supply the Tennesseans with “good serviceable arms, and 50 cartridges per man.”17 Pemberton grudgingly relinquished some of his precious Vicksburg material, and with the coming of spring more Tennesseans filtered south through the Yankee lines to increase Barteau’s duty strength.
Scarcely two weeks before Grierson’s brigade rode south out of La Grange, Colonel Barteau’s abilities as a cavalry commander were recognized in an order giving him command of all Confederate mounted troops in the northern portion of General Ruggles’ district.18 It was Barteau’s responsibility, therefore, to intercept and turn back any Union raid moving south into eastern Mississippi.
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Barteau was well aware that his position was an unenviable one, for he was caught among three forces—the contending Union Army, the contentious Mississippi state authority represented by Governor John Pettus and Major-General Samuel Gholson, and the regular Confederate military authority represented by General Pemberton.
Although Mississippi had contributed as large a share of soldiers to the Confederacy as any southern state, most of them had marched away to Virginia in the early months of the war. As soon as the first Union armies began invading the state from the north, and others began coming up the river from captured New Orleans, Mississippians lost all enthusiasm for military service outside their state borders. They could see no logic in traveling to Virginia or even to middle Tennessee to fight Yankees when there were plenty of Yankees to fight right on the front lawns of their best plantations.19
When President Jefferson Davis removed Mississippi’s hero, Earl Van Dorn, from command of the Department of Mississippi in October, 1862, and sent John C. Pemberton to direct the defense of Vicksburg, the state’s leaders were deeply offended. They may have lost confidence in Van Dorn’s abilities as a military commander, but they had wanted General Joseph Johnston instead of Pemberton. And although they knew that Pemberton had given up his life’s career in the United States Army to join the Confederacy, he was regarded with suspicion. Pemberton might be an ardent believer in states’ rights, but he was also a Pennsylvania Yankee, little better than a “galvanized Confederate.”*20
By the spring of 1863, the Confederacy’s tightening conscription laws were garnering but few soldiers in Mississippi. To insure that Mississippians would remain to fight Yankees in Mississippi, the state legislature authorized Governor Pettus to raise state troops, independent of the Confederate Army.
And so during the early spring, Major-General Gholson, whose home was in northeastern Mississippi, set out with the backing of the governor to muster three regiments of cavalry for state service. He soon had Pemberton’s command in an uproar. General James R. Chalmers, directing the defenses below Memphis, complained with some bitterness that Gholson was ordering sorely needed partisan rangers out of his western district into the eastern district, among them Weatherall’s cavalry and J. F. Smith’s cavalry.21 As most of the men in these organizations lived in northeastern Mississippi, General Gholson had little trouble persuading them to return to patrol their home counties. If it was right and proper to fight for one’s state before one’s country—they may have reasoned—then perhaps it was right to fight for one’s county before one’s state.