The Pontotoc road, churned by the hooves of the Sixth Illinois, was now a shallow quagmire dotted with pools of yellow water. The horses occasionally slipped and stumbled in the tenacious, ankle-deep mud. Nor did the sun come forth to dry the surface; low rolling clouds swept across the sky, spraying a fine mist over the column.
It was almost mid-afternoon before the regiment halted for feeding and watering along a thick greensward near an old farmhouse. There was no sign of life about the place, and after a few minutes an unofficial searching party entered the building. The men found a keg of powder, several revolvers, and a few old United States Army muskets concealed in one of the storerooms. Because it was standard procedure to burn any building in which weapons or ammunition were found, someone set a blaze going without waiting for orders.
As soon as he saw the smoke and flames, Colonel Prince sent a fire-fighting party into action, but the house and most of its contents quickly burned to the ground. “The officers made every effort to find the guilty party,” said Sergeant Surby, “but it occurred mysteriously, no one knew anything about it.”10
Shortly after four o’clock in the afternoon, the Sixth Illinois, moving three or four miles in advance of the Seventh, began approaching Pontotoc, a county seat with a population above three thousand. Grierson expected to meet serious resistance here, and he sent the advance troops dashing toward the town to draw out the defenders’ strength. A small band of armed citizens and some of Captain Weatherall’s state troops fired a few volleys into the advance, but upon seeing the main column approaching, all except one man fled in a scattered retreat. This rebel proved to be more foolhardy than brave, firing persistently on the invaders. Some accounts give his name as Beers, others as Reno; whatever his name, he died in vain. Grierson’s raiders quickly occupied Pontotoc, surrounding the new brick courthouse and searching the more resplendent residences. They found Captain Weatherall’s temporary headquarters, capturing several prisoners and a wagon load of ammunition. The ammunition and all other military equipment in the headquarters building were destroyed.
As soon as the Seventh Illinois arrived (at a gallop, after Colonel Prince heard the firing) the Sixth Regiment assembled in marching order and moved off to the south to find a suitable campsite for the night. Shortly after they left, a searching party from the Seventh discovered a hidden Confederate Army salt depot in an old mill. Because salt was extremely scarce in the South, almost as valuable as ammunition, Major John Graham and three companies of his First Battalion were ordered to remain behind the main column and destroy the precious store, estimated in the official report as between four and five hundred bushels.*
Six miles below Pontotoc the three regiments came together again as the afternoon darkened into twilight. They camped along Chiwapa Creek on Daggett’s and Weatherall’s Plantations, the latter owned by a brother of the state troop leader who had so recently fled his headquarters in the town. Colonel Hatch brought his Second Iowa down from Poplar Springs after making his feint toward Chesterville. The Iowans had been harassed for most of the past eighteen hours by 200 or more state troops who had initiated their fighting by charging past the Yankee pickets around midnight, and had kept up desultory skirmishes through most of the day’s march.
But that night as he laid plans for an early morning boots-and-saddles call, Colonel Grierson could count the day as a lucky Sunday. Casualties were minor, he had not lost a man, and since Friday he had thrust seventy miles into enemy territory.
III
While Benjamin Grierson was growing to manhood in Youngstown, Ohio, Clark Barteau was completing his last classes in a rural school less than a hundred miles away in a farming section near Cleveland. In 1851, the same year that Grierson moved to Illinois, young Barteau entered Ohio Wesleyan University. Four years later Clark Barteau was in Hartsville, Tennessee, earning his living as principal of a boys’ academy.
On this rainy Sunday of April, 1863, as he led his Second Tennessee Regiment out of Verona north in single file along the railroad, Colonel Barteau may have reflected on the fate that had brought him there, that had brought him responsibility for the lives of the men riding silent behind him, that had brought him accountability for the fortunes of this dark corner of the Confederacy for which he felt no tie but that of the refugee for a somewhat specious sanctuary.
Now nearing his thirtieth birthday, Barteau had lived only six years of his life in the South when Fort Sumter fell. In those same years while Grierson was establishing his mercantile business on the Illinois River, Barteau was editing and publishing the Hartsville (Tennessee) Plaindealer, committing himself in its columns to states’ rights and attacking the abolitionist crusade as being based on falsehoods and fanaticism. He quit his school-teaching and began reading law. He married a Tennessean. By 1861 the Ohio Yankee was beyond compromise. He would fight for the South.
As he rode north, following the road that slanted toward a dark green line of hills to the west, time hanging as dreary as the weather, Barteau surely thought of his wife and the child as he had last seen them more than a year gone now, of the hour he had stolen from the fleeing Seventh Tennessee Cavalry Battalion (and he then only a private in the ranks) to stop by his home for a final farewell. She had been braver than he, probably less aware than he of the full meaning of the fall of Fort Donelson. And he remembered her there in the doorway, her breath steaming in the frosty February air, the child in her arms as he turned and waved for the last time, spurring his horse away in a gallop down the frozen road.11
Then had come Shiloh and it was doubly bitter in remembrance, his own brother fighting for the Union there, and the South had lost, and lost again at Corinth, the Seventh Battalion shattered in death, the living scattered through northern Alabama and Mississippi. When the men joined again at last near Fulton in Mississippi, only four skeleton companies could be assembled from the Seventh. They found three companies left of the Tennessee First Cavalry, and the seven companies (scarcely four hundred men) camped together in June. Most of the officers were dead, wounded, missing, or discredited.
Clark Barteau was more surprised than gratified when the Tennesseans elected him—a man from the ranks—to command their newly formed Second Cavalry Regiment. He was amused when his staff tried to scrounge up three more companies so that he could qualify for a full colonelcy. His title scarcely mattered; accomplishing what was necessary to return home to Tennessee was his main objective.
Undoubtedly he was pleased this morning that Captain Moses McKnight had brought Company C back from the Alabama conscripting tour in time for this skirmish. McKnight’s company was above strength, one hundred and fifteen men, almost half of them fresh from the “plow-handles, workshops and counting rooms of Middle Tennessee,”12 well mounted on horses stolen from the Yankees.
Before ten o’clock the Tennesseans were climbing directly into the hills guarding Chesterville, bivouacking three miles from the state troops’ camp. When Barteau rode up through the Chesterville pickets he found the men organized for action, although they were obviously poorly trained and armed. “Shotgun cavalry,” the Yankees had named them in derision.
Barteau was relieved to learn that General Gholson was absent, thus eliminating the delicate problem of seniority of command. Two commanding officers were present, Major W. M. Inge of the Twelfth Battalion of Mississippi State Troops, and Captain T. W. Ham, leader of an independent company. They reported wild rumors of 6,000 invading Yankees, rumors which Barteau discounted. He judged from the reports of the Yankees’ rapid approach that Colonel J. F. Smith’s First Mississippi cavalrymen were serving only as harassing skirmishers.13
Convinced now that his assumption of an attack upon the Chesterville troop rendezvous had been correct, Barteau prepared to dig in for battle. Early in the afternoon Colonel Smith’s cavalry came dashing in from the northeast with news that the Second Iowa Regiment was only five miles away. This of course was Hatch’s demonstration, as ordered by Grierson, and it served to keep Barteau’s
Second Tennessee Regiment and all the state troops waiting until after nightfall for an enemy which never appeared. Hatch had swung about and moved on to Pontotoc to join Grierson.
It was ten o’clock Sunday night before the first of Weatherall's men reached Chesterville with the news that the Yankees had raided Pontotoc. Barteau was surprised and disappointed; he had been outmaneuvered. He suspected now that the Yankees might be driving for the Mobile & Ohio Railroad which he had been defending all winter; possibly they might attack Okolona or Aberdeen where Confederate Army stores were vulnerable. Would the enemy continue southward and then turn toward the railroad? Or would they swing east immediately from Pontotoc, heading toward Verona and Aberdeen? To Barteau the latter move seemed more probable.
After conferring with Colonel Smith, Major Inge, and Captain Ham, he assembled all available mounted troops, a total strength equal to one of Grierson’s three regiments. The column moved out to the south at midnight under a starless and oppressive sky.
IV
About the same time, almost 200 miles to the southwest in his Jackson headquarters, Confederate General John C. Pemberton was reading the last of the day’s numerous messages which with each passing hour had brought more ominous intelligences from all points of the compass. Responsible for the defense of Mississippi and the key point of Vicksburg, General Pemberton was dividing his attention among a number of problems: movements of Grant’s forces across the river; operations of enemy gunboats along the river; slowness of Confederate rail transportation; shortage of artillery ammunition; lack of co-operation from the governor of Mississippi; and the need for more troops, particularly good cavalry, since General Forrest had been transferred to General Joseph E. Johnston’s command in Tennessee.
On April 10 Pemberton had telegraphed Richmond headquarters that he needed more cavalry in northern Mississippi, especially in the northeast where a large amount of the Vicksburg army’s food and other supplies originated. But Richmond had not responded.
And now ten days later, seventy-two hours after Grierson’s brigade had left La Grange, Pemberton received the first news of the concerted enemy movements driving south from several points along the Tennessee border. He was worried by the heavy force of Union cavalry reported coming down the eastern edge of Mississippi.
Pemberton knew he was in trouble, and he immediately called for help from the nearest quarter. He dispatched a telegram to General Johnston, asking for a cavalry raid from Johnston’s department against the Yankee forces on the Tallahatchie. “The enemy,” he concluded, “are endeavoring to compel a diversion of my troops to Northern Mississippi.”14 And such a diversion, Pemberton knew, could prove fatal to the defense of Vicksburg, the key that Lincoln wanted in his pocket.
* Only a few weeks before this incident, a Mississippi soldier stationed below Vicksburg was writing to his wife, who wanted to slaughter her hogs but had no salt left to preserve the meat: “If there was any chance to get salt here I would try and send you some, but there is none here.”—Warren Magee to Martha Magee, December 4, 1862. Journal of Mississippi History, vol. 5, 1943, p. 207.
GRIERSON’S GAMBIT
FROM MIDNIGHT SUNDAY UNTIL the dawn of Monday, Lieutenant-Colonel Clark Barteau’s mixed regiment marched southeastward to Garman’s Mills. At 8:30 in the morning the advance troop was astride the Pontotoc-Okolona turnpike, eight miles north of Okolona, in the midst of endless fields of young corn. Two years ago only cotton plants would have been growing here, but since the beginning of the war the rich valleys along the Mississippi-Alabama border had been transformed quickly into grain fields.
Colonel Barteau rode forward, dismounted, and read the imprints in the road’s receptive surface. No cavalry troops had passed since the rain.
As were his comrades and his foes, Barteau was involved in a series of deadly games played by many players who moved by certain rules of warfare mixed with the romantic trappings of medieval chivalry. For example, Barteau’s Second Tennessee Cavalry this morning was without the services of one of its best non-commissioned officers, Sergeant Richard Hancock, who would later write the regiment’s history. Sergeant Hancock was not ill, nor wounded, nor on leave, nor a captive. He was a paroled prisoner, having been captured while on a scout to the north during the winter. He had sworn to his enemy that he would engage in no further fighting until an exchange had been arranged for a Union soldier of equal rank who had also been captured.*
For the time being Sergeant Hancock was a free man, free to go where he pleased, to do anything he wanted except participate in the war. His opponents knew that Sergeant Hancock would no more violate his parole than one of King Arthur’s knights would have broken a vow. “I went back to camp several times while I was a paroled prisoner,” the sergeant recorded in his diary. “However, I spent most of the time among my relatives in Alabama.”
And here was Barteau, needing every good man he could muster in his attempt to thwart the enemy. His companies were depleted of non-commissioned officers while Sergeant Hancock, lonesome for his comrades, was perhaps loafing around the headquarters camp at Verona with his parole in his pocket. But by the rules of the game Sergeant Hancock was out of the fighting for another month: “Being notified May 22nd that I was exchanged, I started to camp the 23rd.”1 Both the sergeant and his colonel would doubtless have preferred death to the dishonor of re-entering the action before that proper day.
Barteau could not have speculated deeply upon the ironies of the contest in which he was involved, being too close to the scenes and the actions. But irony was there in his own history. It was there in the person of Grant whose wife was a slaveholder when the war began, while he was now fighting to end slavery. And in the record of Sherman who hated war, and had tried to stop his Southern friends from war by detailing its horrors, red-bearded Sherman who was head of a Louisiana military school and often boasted that he had more friends in the South than in the North, who wept when Louisiana seceded. Sherman, the war-hater, now before Vicksburg preparing to make his name the epitome of the war and the scourge of the South.
And Pemberton, the Pennsylvania rebel who held the fate of the southwestern Confederacy in his hands, a Northerner fighting for a Southern principle. And Yankee General Hurlbut, Grierson’s commander, a Carolinian with family ties in the heart of the Confederacy. And Tennessee-born Farragut, bringing his gunboats up the Mississippi to help Grant deal the death blow, Farragut whose home was in Virginia. And Josiah Gorgas, another Pennsylvanian, but now Confederate ordnance chief, who scarcely slept these days for keeping munitions and weapons flowing toward Vicksburg.
The irony was there in the suspense between actions as reported by Captain Henry Forbes of the Seventh Illinois: “I received thirteen paroled cavalry the other day at the hands of Lt. Col. Kelly of the rebel cavalry who came to our lines with them. The boys all said they were treated with distinguished kindness, and really they parted, when the Col. rode away with his escort, with many good wishes shouted out, as if they were brothers and not enemies.”2
It was there in the respect the invaders held for the women of their opponents, the proud Southern women who took no part in the fighting but who, like heroines of their favorite novelist, Sir Walter Scott, figuratively sat in pennanted pavilions beside the jousting fields urging their men to battle without quarter.
I have been very busy for the past two or three weeks [wrote Miss Cordelia Scales of Oakland Plantation] preparing for some tableaux and charades which came off yester week. We had a great deal of fun & everyone seemed to enjoy it so much. It was some of my own getting up. I will tell you some scenes we had. I opened the exercises by singing “The Volunteer” on the guitar. A Volunteer was standing by me dressed in all his regimentals. He was an officer. Some one said he lost his heart that night & I wont say who to. I know mine is gone. The song is a new one sent by a gentleman friend of mine from New Orleans. …
I wish you could see me now with my hair parted on the side with my black velvet zouave on & pisto
l by my side & riding my fine colt, Beula. I know you would take me for a Guerilla. I never ride or walk now without my pistol. Quite warlike, you see. …
I met with an old schoolmate of Dabney’s [her brother] from Anapolis, his name was Meriman. I liked him as well as I could a Yankee; & surprising to say he was a gentleman. I remarked to him one night that it seemed to be the policy of the Yankee government to send one or two gentlemen with every regiment to let it be known that there were some gentlemen in the north, and Col. Gilmore was present & he seemed to take it all to himself & commence to thank me for considering him one, when I turned to him & said you need not think that I consider that you fill the bill Col., that remains to be seen hereafter. You ought to have seen how blank he looked; all the officers laughed at him so much. They had a large flag waving in our grove & you could not see anything but blue coats & tents. The Col. made the band come up & play Dixie for me. …
The next day Captain Flynn came up; he asked me if I knew what he came for. I told him no; he then said it was to beg a great favor of me & he hoped I would be so kind as to grant it, that he wanted me to sing “My Maryland” for him. At first I thanked him & told him I did not play for Federal officers but Pa said I must that Capt. Flynn had kept us from starving & had been so kind to us so I consented. He was so much pleased with it that he got me to write the words off for him. I put a little Confederate flag at the top of it & wrote under it “no northern hand shall rule this land.” He sent it on North to his wife. I wish you could have seen the parting between Capt. Flynn & myself, the Major & him & a good many officers came up to tell me goodbye & the Major was saying he was going to reduce the South to starvation and then send us north. I said to him I had rather starve to death in the South than be a beggar in the North, Major. Capt. Flynn jumped up, caught me by the hand & said “Miss Scales, You are a whole-souled Rebel & I admire you so much for it. I do wish I could stay here and protect you while our army is retreating. I’d fight for you, God knows I would.” That sounds strange for a Yankee, don’t it?