After his proselyting activities among Chalmers’ western troops, General Gholson remained in the northeast area to complete the organization of the three proposed state regiments. Colonel Barteau, therefore, while nominally in authority, was in the awkward position of directing a body of troops with two commanding officers who might very well issue orders independently of one another. Barteau’s immediate commander, General Ruggles, decided the problem was insoluble and told Barteau that when state troops were in the field, out of courtesy to General Gholson and “to preserve concert of action,” he should yield obeisance temporarily to Gholson as commander.22
This, then, was the predicament confronting Colonel Barteau late in the afternoon of April 18, when scouts came in to his base near Verona with news of Grierson’s cavalry at the New Albany bridge. He guessed the Yankees might be heading for the state troop camps at Chesterville, to break them up before General Gholson could complete training and organization of his regiments. Barteau immediately ordered his Tennesseans to be ready to march for Chesterville before dawn. Even so patient a man as Barteau must certainly have cursed the rain, the Yankees, and the hopeless disorder of his command.
* Southwestern Confederates often called their enemies Westerners instead of Yankees. Referring to a rumor that his company might march north into Tennessee, a Mississippi captain wrote to his wife: “Our men will have to fight these Western men there and they are the best fighters they have.”—Warren Magee to Martha Magee, April 19, 1863. Journal of Mississippi History, vol. 5 (1943), p. 210.
* A “galvanized Confederate” was a captured Union soldier who for his freedom agreed to fight for the cause of the Confederacy. There were also “galvanized Yankees” fighting for the North.
BARTEAU IN PURSUIT
COLONEL GRIERSON’S SWIFTLY MOVING brigade of cavalry riding southward into eastern Mississippi was not the only diversionary force being used by General Grant in the springtime preparations for what he hoped would be the final assault on Vicksburg. By the time Grierson’s raiders reached New Albany on the 18th, four other movements were well under way. From Memphis, three infantry regiments, a battery of artillery, and two hundred cavalrymen were marching south toward General James Chalmers’ stronghold at Panola. From La Grange, General William Sooy Smith was moving 1,500 infantrymen by rail to Coldwater, with orders to engage Chalmers’ flank along the lower Tallahatchie. From Corinth, 5,000 infantrymen were marching east along the Tennessee River toward Tuscumbia. And from far up in Tennessee, Colonel Abel Streight was bringing a mounted brigade down for a raid into eastern Alabama.1
With these five long-planned and well-synchronized movements, Grant and his generals hoped not only to distract the Confederates’ attention from activities around Vicksburg but also to force them to withdraw some reserve troops from the Vicksburg-Jackson defense area. Grant was counting on the two cavalry raids to break the lines of transport for enemy troops and material, leaving the Confederates’ commanding general, John C. Pemberton, temporarily isolated from the remainder of the South.
It was evident from the orders issued by Grant during the winter that he considered Grierson’s raid as the main thrust, the feint with the punch. From his disastrous past experiences in Chalmers’ well-defended area below Memphis, the general must have known that the small forces he was sending there could do little more than keep the Confederates tied down. General Sooy Smith’s flanking expedition served only as a smokescreen to the right of Grierson’s cavalry. The expedition from Corinth was designed as a similar diversion on the left of Grierson’s drive. As for Streight’s raid into Alabama, it was calculated to keep General Bedford Forrest’s fast-riding rebels occupied far to the east, and might also do some damage to the railroads supplying Vicksburg with troops and ammunition. Streight’s raiders, however, were rated second in priority to Grierson’s men, being mounted mainly on mules and cast-off horses.
Grierson’s cavalrymen had drawn the best horses available—captured Mississippi blood stock and animals collected by the remount station in St. Louis. During the fall and winter, representatives of the quartermaster had searched throughout the western half of the Union, posting notices on the streets of every town and in the local newspapers requisitioning horses “to be not less than fifteen hands high, between five and nine years of age, of dark colors, well broken to the saddle, compactly built, and free from all defects. No mares will be received.”2
But even the best of mounts can be slowed by perverse weather, and when Colonel Grierson awoke early on Sunday morning, April 19, the sun was not shining as he had hoped. Instead, rain was still falling heavily from an unpleasant gray sky. The clay roads would be sticky, making fast movement impossible.
During breakfast with his staff, Grierson quickly fitted his strategy to the weather. He was fairly confident that no strong Confederate forces were yet massed on either his left or right, and he decided to put his men into a series of diverse movements designed to confuse the enemy as to his real intentions. “I sent a detachment eastward to communicate with Colonel Hatch,” he said in his report, “and make a demonstration toward Chesterville, where a regiment of cavalry was organizing. I also sent an expedition to New Albany, and another northwest toward King’s Bridge, to attack and destroy a portion of a regiment of cavalry organizing there under Major [Alexander H.] Chalmers. I thus sought to create the impression that the object of our advance was to break up these parties.”3
The three detachments sent out by Grierson were drawn from the Seventh Illinois. Colonel Prince selected Captain George W. Trafton, commanding G Company, to lead the raid back into New Albany, and shortly after six o’clock the men were riding north. Trafton also had a second company under his command, but the records do not give its identity.
As they moved slowly back over the five miles into New Albany, a driving rain pelted into their faces, soaked around the collar openings of the ponchos, gradually saturating their blouses and shirts. The hooves of their floundering horses splattered them with daubs of adhesive, orange-colored mud.
During the night a small force of Mississippi state troops had collected in New Albany, and when they sighted Trafton’s two companies more than a hundred rebels moved out to give battle. Some of the Confederates were unmounted. Trafton charged, his men firing and then drawing sabers, driving the state troops back through the town and inflicting several casualties.
On this particular Sunday, Grierson’s men remained for only a short time in New Albany, but they visited the town again some months later (during another campaign) when their activities were graphically chronicled by Elizabeth Jane Beach, wife of New Albany’s only physician, Dr. Asahel Beach.
To young Mrs. Beach, Grierson’s Yankees were in no sense romantic cavaliers; they were deadly and recurrent molesters of her home and security, as she explained in a letter to her parents in Georgia:
I have the same old tale to write, the Yankees have been here again. They camped here on the Tallahatchie. We heard they were coming before they got here, so the men all put out, of course, with their stock.
My house, garden, & orchard, were thronged with them all the time, toating off corn & fodder, chickens, vegetables, cooking utensils, and every thing they could find, searching my house over & over. I had a great many nice young chickens, just large enough to fry, they caught them all. I have now five old hens, that is my amount of chickens. They took every thing they could find that we had to eat. Things that I could not hide, such as chickens, vegetables, shoats and milk, but I had every thing else hid, even to my salt & lard, and they did not happen to find it. I believe I have told you where my hiding place is, over the piazza, the planks are sawed out and placed in again, so that it can’t be discovered by looking at it.4
By the end of the first day of the Yankee encampment in New Albany, Elizabeth Beach was in a mood of high indignation. She decided to visit Benjamin Grierson, who had set up headquarters in the town house of James Hill.
I talked with Grierson about
half an hour. He treated me very politely, but I don’t think he has much feeling. You ought to have seen how grand him and his staff looked. There were five of them, him and his adjutant, sergeon and two others. They were sitting in Mrs. Hill’s passage dressed into fits, with three or four bottles of champaign and boxes of segars setting around them.
Grierson asked Mrs. Beach several questions about her husband. She told him that he was a physician and had gone away in order to save his horse, that he had already lost four horses to the Yankees and could not afford to lose another one.
“Has he a fine horse now?” asked Grierson.
“Yes,” replied Mrs. Beach. “He could not practice medicine on a sorry horse, and good horses are scarce in this country now. He got him a good one and went off to keep you Yankees from getting him.”
“Oh,” said Grierson, “he had as well stayed at home. We would not bother him nor his horse either.”
“I know better than that,” the doctor’s wife retorted. “He has been taken once, and his horse every time.”
The interview was concluded when Mrs. Beach asked Grierson to place a guard at her house.
I told him that his men were searching all over my house and tearing up every thing. Told him that they had already got all I had to eat, that I only asked protection that night for myself and children. He said certainly he would send me a guard, and if I would treat him right he would protect me until they left. So he sent one of his body guard, and we rested quietly that night. I treated him very kindly, made him a good pallet in the passage and we were not bothered with any other Yankees that night.
But not long after the guard left, more of Grierson’s soldiers, in a looting mood, visited the Beach home. “All day working like ants, all over the house up stairs and down, in every hole and corner, searching & peeping everywhere.” They finally found Elizabeth Beach’s secret hiding place:
One rascal went up in the corner and in stooping to put his hand under the floor, put it against the planks, and they slipped a little, he pulled them off, and says, by george, boys here is the place, they just ripped the planks off and in they went. One says run down and guard the door, don’t let another fellow come up here, we’ll divide the things amongst us. I had in there, meat, flour, sugar, coffee, molasses, lard & salt, all of Asa’s good clothes, Sarah’s, mine and the childrens. We all had new shoes in there that we had not worn, in a pillow case. They pulled them all out and looked at them. I stood over them and as they would pull out the shoes & clothes, I would grab them and tell them that they could not have them, but everytime they came to anything of Asa’s they would take it. Took his over coat, a pair of new blue jeans pants, three pair of summer pants, all his drawers except the ones he had on, one shirt, a new silk handkerchief. So you know he is very near without clothes.
Before the Yankees departed New Albany they “took every solitary thing I had, except one jar of lard and my salt. There was not even a grain of corn on the place to make hominy after they were gone. They treated Mr. Hill in the same manner, took and killed nearly every thing he had. Every one of his negroes went with them, there is not a negro on his place large nor small.”5
Looting of civilian property was a problem confronting the officers of both armies in the Civil War. Troops raiding into enemy country were usually under orders to destroy everything which might be used by the opposing army, and the line between war materiel and civilian property grew more and more indistinct as the war lengthened. Because the Confederacy was, for the most part, the invaded area, Southern citizens were the principal sufferers, being forced in effect to support two armies.
In the first year of the conflict, the Union military leaders were strict in enforcing regulations against plundering privately owned property. They felt that they might win over a portion of the rebels to the Union cause if property rights were carefully respected. On one occasion, during the early Tennessee campaigns, while Company C of the Seventh Illinois was serving as an escort troop for General Grant, the general discovered that some of the men had killed and dressed a hog belonging to a rebel farmer. He halted the column and rode out of ranks immediately.
“Where did you procure that hog?”
“Foraged it, sir.”
“Men, don’t you know that kind of work is strictly against orders?”
Private Henry Eby, who witnessed the incident, reported that Grant lectured the men severely, as a father would talk to his erring sons, and then ordered a sergeant to put them under guard and report them to headquarters.
“I often felt grieved for people in the South,” Eby continued, “when their stock, grain and fences were appropriated for the use of the army. … I can remember when orders were given to the soldiers allowing them to take only the top rail off a fence for fuel, but each rail in turn became a top rail and in a few minutes the whole fence would disappear.”6
Sergeant Stephen Forbes also expressed his disapproval of the wholesale looting done by some of his comrades:
The column halted for a few moments in front of the dwelling of a poor widow said by all her neighbors to be loyal to our cause, and immediately her yard and house were filled by a crowd of thieves (I cannot call them soldiers, for shame) who instantly appropriated everything they could carry. Some attacked her poultry, chasing the chickens and geese through her very house, and stones and clubs flew in all directions. Others butchered her hogs and splitting them in two, buckled them on their saddles, still warm and dripping with blood. Others took fence rails and burst in the doors of her smokehouse and granary, and in a few moments every morsel of sustenance which a hard year’s work had brought her had disappeared as if before a pack of ravening wolves. The poor lone woman wrung her hands and cried in an agony of despair and terror, and prayed to God to help her, while her children sobbed and screamed in a perfect frenzy of fear.
A soldier in rear of me said: “I don’t hardly like to see the boys go down on poor folks that way.”
“Damn them,” said I, so full of indignant rage that everything looked white. “I wish that every one of the wretches might be hung in chains and burned to death.”7
On another occasion, young Forbes was more philosophical:
This is the most disagreeable part of a soldier’s duty, for taking the all of a defenceless citizen when the women cry and the men turn pale, appropriating the last horse of a poor old woman, and driving off a man’s team from before his plow, certainly seems to be tolerably small work for a soldier, but then what is all war but one monstrous evil by the use of which we hope to overcome a much greater, and so long as it tends to subdue the rebellion I suppose that the means are justified by the end.8
II
While Captain Trafton’s expedition was dispersing the rebels gathered in New Albany, two other companies moved off to the northwest toward King’s Bridge in search of Weatherall’s and Chalmers’ regiments. Under a grove of dripping trees they found the enemy camp, several tents and lean-to’s deserted in the rain, the damp bedding left unrolled on the ground. The Mississippians had fled, evidently before dawn; the charred cooking fires of the previous night were rain-soaked.
The Yankees set fire to everything that would burn and scouts took up the trail of the scattering enemy. They captured four rear-guard rebels, but otherwise the chase through the muddy bottomlands along the Tallahatchie was a fruitless one. Colonel Prince had ordered them to rejoin the main command by ten o’clock, and they were forced to turn back to the Pontotoc road.
At the same time, Grierson’s third detachment—also two companies—proceeded eastward under orders to communicate with Colonel Hatch’s Iowans and instruct him to make a demonstration toward Chesterville, the Mississippi state troops rendezvous point. This expedition was also ordered to search out a horse herd, reported by one of the prisoners as being hidden in a thicket a few miles from the road. They moved off under a cover of woods, the drenched trees dousing them with sudden showers of collected raindrops.
As the Confederates
were believed to be in strength somewhere between the Pontotoc road and the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, the expedition to the east moved cautiously. Scouts were kept well forward at long rifle range to draw the fire of any ambuscade. Wherever the terrain made it advisable, extra flankers were thrown out, riding at rifle range from the sides of the column and abreast of it, to keep the column at security with a margin of time to form a front in any direction before an attack could be precipitated upon it. When any suspicious noise was heard in the thick brush along the way, a platoon would be dismounted and sent forward in a line abreast, the men fifty feet or more apart.9
They found only a few horses but they did reach Colonel Hatch’s advance guard, and the orders from Grierson to demonstrate toward Chesterville were passed on to the commander. The two companies then swung about hastily, riding back to rejoin the main command at Sloan’s Plantation. They were the last of the three expeditions to return to camp, and by the time they struck the Pontotoc road, the rain had stopped.
Meanwhile, the Sixth Illinois, after a leisurely Sunday morning breakfast and prayer service, had moved out toward Pontotoc, Grierson riding with his old regiment. The six companies of the Seventh, which had also remained in camp, were waiting with mounts saddled, and as soon as the three diversionary parties reported in, Colonel Prince ordered the regiment to move south after Grierson.