The next we had were the “Grierson Thieves.”3
II
Barteau had made his move, but he wondered now, standing there on the Pontotoc-Okolona road studying the markings in the damp earth, if he had checked his opponent. On his long night ride he had crossed three roads; there was another one on his left leading directly south to Houston. And the Yankees might move on any of the four.
He summoned the state troops commanders and they conferred briefly. The four companies assembled in tighter formation on the wide turnpike and then began marching towards Pontotoc. Scouts were thrown far out in front to warn of any enemy cavalry coming down from the north. The time was approximately noon when the column stopped for feeding and watering at a road junction where a small bridge crossed a creek, five miles below Pontotoc, Barteau unaware that Grierson’s camp of the previous night was only three miles to the west of the Houston road.
Sometime during the nooning, his advance scouts galloped in from Pontotoc with the startling information that the enemy had moved west from the town early that morning, taking the road to Oxford!
Puzzled by this piece of information, Barteau immediately ordered his men to horse and rode briskly into Pontotoc. He suspected that his opponent had opened the day’s match with a gambit.
III
Between two and three o’clock in the morning of April 20, while Barteau’s regiment was moving down to the Okolona road, Grierson’s buglers were waking the Union brigade. In the depressing darkness the Yankees cursed the buglers and rolled out of their damp blankets. They stumbled about in the blackness, drunk with sleep, kicking at the dying campfires, seeking for dry pieces of wood. Within a few minutes the campsite along Chiwapa Creek was choked with smoke from a hundred wavering fires.
Horses were saddled, blankets rolled, coffee was boiling in the pots and tin cans. Companies were assembled for morning reports. The commands echoed along the creek: Prepare for inspection! Prepare for inspection!
Right—Dress! Front! After almost two years it was as automatic as breathing, each trooper standing to the left of his horse, face rigid to the front, chest on a line with the horse’s mouth, reins held with the right hand six inches from the horse’s mouth, nails downward, body erect.
As officers and sergeants moved through the formations, the proffered carbines were given only brief glances. Most of the company commanders already knew which men they would order to fall out: a trooper who had been complaining of chills and fever, another who had suffered from dysentery all during yesterday, a wretched recruit who had chafed the inside of his crotch as raw and red as fire. As soon as the men in the ranks saw which of their comrades were falling out, they guessed the purpose of the inspection. Sick, cripples, and prisoners going back to base camp!
“I gave orders to the regimental commanders,” Grierson wrote in his autobiography, “to cause a close inspection of regiments to be made with a view of selecting therefrom all men and horses any way disabled or not fit for further hard marching, in order that they might be sent back to their camp at La Grange, thus freeing the command of any encumbrance or what might become such in our onward movements.”4
From each company two or three men were ordered to step out of ranks; two or three horses laming or showing incipient saddle sores were led to one side. “When the least effective portion of the command was sent back,” said Grierson, “I inspected every man and horse in person.”5 With precision, these “least effective” men and mounts were assembled beside the road, the total assemblage numbering more than a hundred troopers from the three regiments. Platoons and squadrons were formed quickly. The dozen or so rebel prisoners were brought up and placed in position in the lengthening column. “The Quinine Brigade” some one named it, and the name caught on immediately.
Colonel Grierson, meanwhile, was finishing a letter to Brigadier-General William Sooy Smith, La Grange, Tennessee:
HEADQUARTERS FIRST CAVALRY BRIGADE
Five Miles south of Pontotoc, April 14, 1863*
GENERAL: At 3 a.m. I send an expedition, composed of the less effective portion of the command, to return by the most direct route to La Grange. Major Love, selected to take command, will hand you this. They pass through Pontotoc in the night, marching by fours, obliterating our tracks, and producing the impression that we have all returned. I have ascertained that the bridges on the Mississippi Central Railroad, over the Yockeney, at Water Valley, have never been repaired, and I thought the forces could be used to better advantage than by sending a regiment to Oxford, as they would be obliged to return to New Albany to recross the Tallahatchee. I have ordered a single scout, however, to go from Pontotoc toward Oxford, strike the railroad, and destroy the wires.
I start at 4 o’clock in the morning, and on the night of the 20th shall be 50 miles below here. Everything looks exceedingly favorable. Rest assured that I shall spare no exertion to make the expedition as effective as possible. I may possibly find an opportunity to communicate with you again in four or five days, but do not wonder if you should not hear from me in thirty days.
We have yet encountered no force except the unorganized cavalry scattered through the country. We have succeeded in killing 4 or 5, and wounding and capturing a number. The prisoners return with this expedition
Respectfully, your obedient servant,
B. H. GRIERSON,
Colonel, Commanding Cavalry Brigade6
Grierson had summoned his staff, and one may imagine that they stood around a campfire near the plantation house, drying the dampness from their wool uniforms. Major Hiram Love of the Second Iowa was there, already aware of his assignment; Lieutenant Daniel Wilt of Company L, Seventh Illinois, who was to be Love’s second in command; and Captain Jason B. Smith, who was not assigned to make the return journey but had been summoned to receive special orders concerning one of the two-pounder steel Woodruff guns.
As Grierson gave Major Love his orders, he attempted to impress upon him that the weak detachment’s chances of getting through to La Grange in the face of the gathering enemy were long chances indeed. He handed the young officer two folded papers, one the message to General Smith, the other a short note to be mailed to his wife.
There was only a hint of a dismal gray dawn when Major Love and his detachment of 175 men, their small body of prisoners, and a string of captured horses and mules, filed out of the encampment. One of Captain Jason Smith’s two-pounder cannon, with its complement of a corporal and five men, rolled down to join the procession. Above the rattle of coffee tins and harness chains the commands came hoarsely through the dripping trees: Fours, right! March! Halt! Forward, March!
The Quinine Brigade swung away beyond the wooded camp in columns of fours as ordered by Grierson, to leave behind them imprinted on the road a false story of a reversing regiment.*
Before another hour had passed, the Second Iowa, assigned to take the advance on this day, had filed out of camp and was in marching order on the clay-packed road that pointed straight south to Houston. The Sixth and Seventh Illinois followed after them, and as soon as the horses were warmed up, the column began moving at a more rapid than usual rate. Trot commands were frequent throughout the morning, and the late noon stop for watering on Sakatouchee Creek was cut short.
As the brigade drove southward the sky remained heavy, mist blowing in the riders’ faces. The men were hunched over their saddles, eyes half-closed against the wind and wetness. They were scarcely aware of the almost continuous stretches of young corn and wheat, unbroken except by rail fences separating the fields.
By mid-afternoon a small advance patrol of the Second Iowa was in Houston, dashing about the streets and creating a clatter designed to divert the surprised citizens while the main column slipped around the town. “I had discovered that we had left the main road,” said Sergeant Surby, “and was making a new one through a wheat field of some extent; it was about six inches in height and of a beautiful green, which was a change from the mud.”7
The whe
at field itself was a change from the unvarying succession of cotton crops, the commodity upon which the Confederacy was based economically, the culture and harvesting of which had become ritualized until fixed into the fabric of slavery. But necessity brings swift changes, and now in the second growing season of the war, young wheat was standing where neither the land nor the planters had known it before. Soldiers on short rations around Vicksburg were passing a rumor around during this very month, a rumor that a large force of them would soon march north “to get as much of Tennessee as we can in order to raise more wheat and corn.”
As soon as the column was beyond Houston, the three regiments turned into the road again. Grierson was hopeful that his detour would leave the more observant informers there uncertain for a time as to whether a company, a regiment, two regiments, or a brigade had passed to the south.
The road now turned southeastward, men and horses weary of the melancholy weather, the long uneventful day, the tedious hours in the saddle. Grierson kept them moving until early twilight began to close in. On the plantation of Dr. Benjamin Kilgore, just outside the village of Clear Springs, they halted for the night, each regiment seeking high dry ground for its campsite. They were twelve miles below Houston, forty miles from the morning’s starting point.
IV
At corps headquarters in Memphis, General Stephen A. Hurlbut, who had issued the order setting Grierson’s cavalry in motion, was after four days still very much in the dark as to the fate or accomplishments of the brigade. Hurlbut, the Southerner turned Yankee, was never at a loss, however, for conjectural opinions on the activities of the various roving units of his Sixteenth Army Corps. He dispatched frequent telegraphic messages to General Grant at Milliken’s Bend and to Major-General Henry W. Halleck who was commanding the entire Union Army from Washington. Communications were never good at best in the Western theater of war, and as Memphis was then some distance from the action, perhaps Hurlbut was forced to depend upon his imagination if he was to send any messages at all.
The day after Grierson left La Grange, Hurlbut had informed General Halleck with some positiveness that the brigade would cut the Mississippi Central Railroad at Oxford, the Mobile & Ohio Railroad near Tupelo, and the Vicksburg railroad* at Chunkey River, and would then return north through Alabama.†
On this day, Hurlbut, having no news from Grierson, decided nevertheless to forward two bits of conjecture to General Grant: “My cavalry from La Grange have before this destroyed the railroad below and near Tupelo, and in the confusion may get fairly started across Alabama before they are known.” As a matter of fact, throughout their four-day march none of Grierson’s men had come within ten miles of the Mobile & Ohio, or Tupelo. Hurlbut’s second conjecture, however, would prove to be more accurate: “Grierson will cut the railroad, if he lives, at or near Chunkey Bridge, about Wednesday night or Thursday.” And then he closed his message factually and to the point: “No news here of any moment. Your obedient servant, S. A. Hurlbut.”8
V
At the same time, General Pemberton, the Yankee turned Southerner, was also in the dark as to the exact movements of Colonel Grierson’s raiders. From his headquarters in Jackson, Pemberton began issuing the first of a series of orders concerning Grierson, orders which would occupy much of his thoughts during the next two weeks, a critical fortnight for the western Confederacy, a time when the commanding general should have been free to concentrate upon blocking Grant’s Mississippi River crossing and strengthening the defenses of Vicksburg:
BRIGADIER-GENERAL RUGGLES, COLUMBUS:
I hear from several sources, but not your headquarters, that enemy is approaching Pontotoc. This is a mere raid, but should not be unmolested by you.
J.C. PEMBERTON.9
Ruggles by no means had been idle, but he was sufficiently impressed by the scolding tone of his commander’s message to begin issuing reports. He explained that he had just returned to Columbus from a hurried inspection trip to Verona and Chesterville. He informed Pemberton that the Yankees had reached Pontotoc on the previous evening, but he offered no guesses as to where they might be now.
As soon as Ruggles had learned that the Second Tennessee was in pursuit of the invaders, he had dispatched the Second Alabama Cavalry under Lieutenant-Colonel James Cunningham to Okolona for the support of Barteau in the event the enemy turned toward Columbus. In his first telegraphic report back to Ruggles, Colonel Cunningham estimated the Yankees’ strength at 6,000. “I have just learned from our scouts,” Cunningham added, “that the enemy passed down the road leading to Houston to-day and will probably reach that place to-night. Colonel Barteau is in their rear, in pursuit of them.”10
Ruggles immediately forwarded this message verbatim to Pemberton’s headquarters. Having had considerable experience with scouts and knowing their propensities for exaggerating enemy numbers, Ruggles revised the figure in a telegram of his own to 3,000 federal soldiers.
Later in the day Ruggles received a dispatch from Captain F. Ingate, a quartermaster stationed at Okolona, also forwarding it to Pemberton: “Reliable scout reports enemy about 2,000 strong, with five mounted howitzers, on Houston road … Negroes report hearing them say they were going to the Southern road [the Vicksburg railroad] or Grenada.”11
Other intelligence reports received during the day from the vicinity of Pontotoc led Ruggles to accept the estimates of 2,000 enemy cavalrymen and four field guns as a fairly accurate one, and he so informed Pemberton in his final message of the day.
Pemberton was now well apprised of the strength of the thrust into northeastern Mississippi, but he could no longer be certain whether it was a “mere raid,” and, if so, what mission the raiders were attempting to perform, or whether his scattered Confederate forces in that area could intercept and turn back the swift-moving Yankee cavalrymen.
He did not know that by the day’s end Lieutenant-Colonel Barteau’s men had marched sixty-eight miles from their midnight starting point at Chesterville.
Barteau had lost valuable time at Pontotoc while he was making certain that the force which had marched west toward Oxford at dawn could have been no more than two companies. His suspicions that the movement was a ruse devised by his opponent to draw him off pursuit of the main body were confirmed by a reconnaissance party which followed the enemy tracks two miles west of Pontotoc. At that point it was discovered that the Yankees had turned north up a secondary road to New Albany, heading back for their Tennessee base.
Dismissing any temptation to follow this warm trail, Barteau immediately ordered pursuit of the main enemy force down the Houston road. Grierson, however, was now ten hours ahead of Barteau, and by day’s end the Confederates and their horses, punished by almost twenty-four hours of continuous marching, were forced to halt a mile and a half north of Houston. They camped in battle formation, not knowing that they were thirteen miles from the Yankees below the town, and even if the two wearied forces had been close enough to battle each other on that dreary Monday evening, neither could have offered the other much of a fight.
* Under the parole and prisoner exchange cartel between the Union and Confederate governments, it was agreed that prisoners would be exchanged man for man and rank for rank, officers to be exchanged for an equivalent of soldiers, a general being worth sixty enlisted men, a colonel fifteen men, a lieutenant four men, a sergeant two men, etc. Any excess of prisoners were to be paroled and sent home not to engage in further military activities until exchanged. “Surplus prisoners not exchanged shall not be permitted to take up arms again, nor to serve as military police or constabulary force in any fort, garrison, or field work held by either of the respective parties, nor as guards of prisoners, depots or stores, nor to discharge any duty usually performed by soldiers, until exchanged under the provisions of this cartel.”—OR, ser. II, vol. 4, p. 267.
* Although this letter is dated April 14 in the OR, it actually was written on April 20, 1863.
* “The sending them by night through Pontotoc was
a good ruse,” Grierson said afterwards. “Making all the ‘spread’ they could, the people of Pontotoc believed and reported the whole column returned.”—Record of Services, 1863, pp. 102–103.
* “Vicksburg railroad is used as an identifying phrase, not as the name of the road. In 1863 the line was known as the Vicksburg & Jackson Railroad as far east as Jackson, and as the Southern Railroad beyond that point. The name has varied through the years.
† Hurlbut had no official reason for communicating directly with the general-in-chief. Such reports properly should have been routed through Grant’s headquarters, but since Grant was isolated far down the river, Hurlbut took it upon himself to keep General Halleck informed directly of activities involving the Sixteenth Army Corps.
THE BUTTERNUT GUERILLAS
HAD COLONEL GRIERSON’S TRAIN from Memphis to La Grange arrived three hours later on the night of April 16, Colonel Edward Hatch, commanding the Second Iowa Cavalry Regiment, would have been commander of the entire brigade which was now raiding deep into Mississippi. This narrow twist of fate, plus the fact that he was the only officer in the brigade whose record showed any kind of military training, might have irked a less disciplined soldier than the ambitious thirty-two-year-old lumber merchant of Muscatine, Iowa.