Edward Hatch was one of the few genuine Yankees among these Westerners, having been born and brought up in Maine. After attending a Vermont military school for three years he went to sea, but soon found that the life of a sailor held no appeal for him. To earn a living he joined his father in a lumbering business in Pennsylvania. Early in 1854 young Hatch journeyed to the western plains, lived with the Indians for a while, engaged in logging operations along the Black River in Wisconsin. The following year he moved his family to Muscatine, Iowa, continuing as a lumberman.
In the spring of 1861 his business interests brought him to Washington, D.C., and he was there the day war was declared. When rumors of an immediate invasion of the capital began flying through the city, he joined an impromptu company of soldiers who volunteered to guard the White House and other government buildings. As soon as regular soldiers arrived and the panic died away, he hurried back to Iowa with a lieutenant’s commission in his pocket and became active in helping raise the Second Iowa Cavalry, eventually winning command of the regiment.1
Late into the night of April 20, 1863, Edward Hatch was conferring with his brigade commander, Colonel Grierson, in the plantation house of Dr. Benjamin Kilgore near the village of Clear Springs, Mississippi. From the official reports of Hatch and Grierson and from the account of Sergeant Lyman B. Pierce of the Second Iowa Regiment, it is possible to reconstruct something of what was discussed late on that Tuesday evening.
With Grierson and Hatch were Colonel Edward Prince, the ambitious commander of the Seventh Illinois, and Colonel Reuben Loomis, who had succeeded to Grierson’s old command, the Sixth Illinois. Also present were First-Major Mathew H. Starr, Lieutenant-Colonel William Blackburn, and Lieutenant Samuel L. Woodward, the brigade adjutant and close friend of Grierson.
The subjects being discussed were ones which each of them probably had thought about more than once on the day now behind them: the fact that they were entering enemy territory which no other Union troops had ever invaded, and the certainty that aroused Confederate forces in formidable numbers were gathering on all sides of them.
Grierson was of the opinion that another decoy party should be thrown off—to the east this time—a party strong enough to draw off forces which General Ruggles would be sending in pursuit from the Confederates’ base at Columbus. He wondered if a regiment armed with one of Captain Smith’s two-pounder guns might not be able to overcome the Confederate cavalry and then make a dash for the Mobile & Ohio to burn a few bridges. He believed that it might even be possible to make a quick raid on Columbus if General Ruggles was sufficiently alarmed by now to send out the greater part of his cavalry, leaving his base open.
The main objective of the brigade, Grierson reminded his officers, was to cut the Vicksburg railroad which was still more than a hundred miles to their south, a railroad which was vital to General Pemberton’s defense of the key Mississippi River fort. The principal mission of the decoy party, he added, would be to disengage the main command from the enemy pressing behind it, leaving the column free to move rapidly southward. But if the decoy party could also damage the enemy before returning to La Grange, that would be an added feather in their caps.
His staff was in general agreement that the brigade would have to throw off at least one of its three regiments if it hoped to impede the enemy as well as damage him.
But which regiment was it to be? Loomis’ Sixth Illinois? Prince’s Seventh Illinois? Or Hatch’s Second Iowa?
It is easy to imagine Grierson during these moments of suspense, seated at a table smoking a cigar, his Colton’s pocket map of the state of Mississippi spread out before him. One of his photographs of 1863 shows him sitting hunched forward, his chin resting in his long-fingered, musician’s hands.
According to an observant cavalryman who served with Edward Hatch, the Iowa colonel’s full blue eyes would “shine like meteors” when he was under excitement.2 Hatch’s eyes must have shone now as he saw Grierson looking at him. He and the other regimental commanders knew then that Grierson’s choice was to be the Second Iowa.
In his autobiography Grierson said the reason he selected Hatch for this disengaging operation was that “his horses, on account of the hard and constant work they had been performing, were not in my judgment as suitable as those of the Seventh Illinois Cavalry, nor were the officers and men so well known to me at that time as those of the Seventh Illinois which was from my own state.”3
Grierson’s orders to Hatch were “to proceed to the Mobile and Ohio Railroad in the vicinity of West Point, and destroy the road and wires; thence move south, destroying the railroad and all public property as far south, if possible, as Macon; thence across the railroad, making a circuit northward; if practicable, take Columbus and destroy all Government works in that place, and again strike the railroad south of Okolona, and, destroying it, return to La Grange by the most practicable route.”4
He added that he would like to have the Iowa regiment follow the main column along part of its route to Starkville, to cover the Sixth and Seventh’s tracks by a reverse movement such as Major Love had made that morning. He explained that he planned to spread his forces out, cutting across country on back trails as an added measure of concealment while Hatch was deliberately attracting the attention of the pursuing enemy. Grierson also stated that he would like to attach Assistant-Surgeon Erastus D. Yule of the Second Iowa to the Seventh Illinois, as the latter regiment lacked a surgeon and was dependent upon the services of a veterinarian.
During that late night meeting, Grierson talked with Lieutenant-Colonel Blackburn, bringing up a subject which had been discussed between them on the march during the day—the need for better scouting now that they were entering unknown territory. Blackburn was enthusiastic. He had found a good man to lead the scouts, the quartermaster-sergeant of the Seventh Illinois, a former private in Blackburn’s old company. Richard Surby was his name, one of the older men, around thirty years of age. He had been a railroad worker, had traveled extensively, knew the South, and could do a fair imitation of the Southern drawl.
Grierson indicated he would leave the organization of the scouts in Blackburn’s hands; he wanted them out front tomorrow for the march to Starkville. Both officers agreed the scouts should discard their regulation uniforms and wear some sort of Confederate costumes, irregular pieced-out uniforms such as the shotgun guerillas usually wore. It would be dangerous if the men were caught and identified as Union soldiers; they would probably be shot as spies. Grierson wanted that fact impressed upon the scouts, and insisted that each man in the group should enter voluntarily upon the hazardous duty.5
Sometime during the conference, Hatch requested permission to move his regiment out of camp at three o’clock the following morning. Grierson either did not hear the request or forgot about it. The brigade had been bugled out before three o’clock on the last morning; men and horses had showed signs of it all afternoon. Grierson had in mind a start soon after dawn, with the men well rested for the hard-riding, exhausting day ahead of them. Hatch was thinking of the dangers which his men must meet alone. Perhaps it was body and bone weariness that led to the misunderstanding between Hatch and Grierson as to the time of the next morning’s march. At any rate, before he retired for the night Colonel Hatch advised his regimental officers of the morrow’s plans, reminding them that reveille should be sounded at three o’clock in the morning. But no similar orders appear to have been given the two Illinois regiments.
II
As was his custom, Colonel Hatch visited the Iowa camp before taking breakfast, finding the men huddled around the few surviving fires, warming their coffee and bacon and vainly attempting to dry their soggy uniforms. He bade his assistant surgeon, Erastus Yule, farewell. (On Grierson’s order, Yule was transferring to duty with the Seventh Illinois, but like Hatch, the surgeon was not destined to see the end of this raid.)
Because of the misunderstanding over time of departure, Hatch waited almost three hours before the buglers finally
got the Illinois regiments from under their poncho covers. The leisureliness in the Illinois camps annoyed Hatch. He could not march until the Illinois men marched. “For some reason unknown to me,” he later recorded in his report, “the column did not move until 7 A.M.”6 This delay, as Hatch was to discover before the day was ended, would make it impossible for him to execute Grierson’s orders.
Not long after the column passed through the sleeping village of Clear Springs, Hatch halted his regiment and ordered Company E to move a short distance along the trail taken by Grierson. He sent with this patrol the mounted two-pounder gun which had been assigned to his regiment.
Sergeant Lyman B. Pierce, the Second Iowa’s regimental color bearer, has described the thoroughness of Hatch’s attempts to conceal from the enemy all evidences of Grierson’s departure for Starkville. “This patrol,” he said, “returned in columns of fours, thus obliterating all the outward bound tracks. The cannon was turned in the road in four different places, thus making their tracks correspond with the four pieces of artillery which Grierson had with the expedition. The object of this was to deceive the rebels, who were following us, into the belief that the entire column had taken the Columbus road.”7
III
Thirteen miles to the north, Colonel Barteau’s Confederate cavalrymen were moving also, a strong advance guard well out in front, the men alert for the enemy whose signs of passage were still plain on the washed road.
Most of the men of the Second Tennessee wore Union issue ponchos,* taken individually in raids against the Yankees during the past year. They were proud of these captured ponchos, guarding them jealously when not in use, although the Union Army already considered them outmoded and was beginning to issue rubber blankets as improved replacements.
The Mississippi state troops accompanying Barteau’s Tennesseans had yet to experience either a raid or a battle, and therefore possessed no captured ponchos. Some of these men, however, had wrapped their shoulders with pieces of oilcloth. (“Please send me an oilcloth to sleep upon and throw around me when it rains,” a Mississippi soldier wrote to his family in 1862.8) Because the poncho did not keep a steady rain from leaking around the wearer’s collar and saturating his blouse, and was not waterproof as a ground cover, the state troopers lucky enough to possess the undignified strips of oilcloth were probably as dry or drier than the proud wearers of the ponchos.
Weather and ponchos and oilcloths were all forgotten shortly before eleven o’clock that morning, when the Confederate column rode into Dr. Kilgore’s Plantation and heard from the Negroes, still poking around in the debris of Grierson’s campsite, that the enemy rear guard had marched out scarcely two hours earlier.
Barteau immediately sent his advance patrol out on the gallop, the main column following at a trot. Half an hour later the advance sighted about twenty Yankees, Hatch’s rear guard, and charged them with such suddenness that the Iowans fled, scattering across country in the direction of the Starkville road. As soon as Barteau came up to this point (it was the place where Hatch had covered Grierson’s tracks) he dismounted and studied the hoof markings.
On the previous day Barteau had not been misled by the stratagem of Major Love’s reverse tracking. However, the movements of Love’s “Quinine Brigade” had at no time offered any threat to the Mobile & Ohio Railroad which the Second Tennessee, after months of patrolling, had come to consider the primary transportation artery of the Confederacy. But this morning as Barteau and his officers studied the numerous hoofprints of Hatch’s regiment, and particularly the four reversing wheel marks of the two-pounder cannon, they were quickly convinced that the main column of the Yankee raid had finally turned toward their valued railroad.
Had Barteau not been thinking solely of the Mobile & Ohio and of the security of Columbus beyond it, had he taken time to search more thoroughly a few hundred yards to the south and west, he would have found the tracks of twice as many horses, scattered by single platoons, with the curves of the iron shoe markings turned toward another railroad, one much more vital to the Confederates’ cause. But it never entered Barteau’s mind that any Yankee cavalry force would dare to ride the hundred perilous miles south to that other railroad—the idea was a fantastic one—and the few tracks which he and his men did see heading away to the south he dismissed as belonging to the rear guard which his advance party had scattered as his column had come up to them.*
Once he had made up his mind, Barteau did not hesitate. He set his column moving rapidly in pursuit of Hatch down the eight miles of muddy road to Palo Alto, convinced that at last he had the main column of the tricky Federals trapped for good and all.
Shortly after twelve o’clock the rain slackened, and Barteau was probably wondering if he should halt his column for a midday bivouac. But suddenly, as they approached the wooded ridge before Palo Alto, a carbine cracked somewhere ahead.
“Trot, march! Gallop, march!”
As his horse lunged over the top of a rise in the road, Barteau saw them, the dark column of the enemy, moving slowly into a lane a mile away, their picket troop straggling behind in a yet unformed rear guard company.
“To the charge!” The bugle was going and the flying horses’ hooves were splattering mud as the Tennesseans spread out in ragged platoon lines, the animals faltering and slithering on the gummy earth. In a matter of minutes they swept around the rear guard, the squadron of Iowans staring at their captors in stunned surprise as they were forced to dismount and drop their arms.
As he galloped forward, Barteau studied the landscape, a fallow field, beyond it a church, a neck of woods, and the long lane into which the surprised Yankee column was moving, a lane bordered on one side by a high rail fence thickly webbed with brush and young white-trunked oaks, on the other by a hedgerow. Barteau immediately saw the lane as a trap in which to box the Yankees. Already they were dismounting and firing on the first wave of the Confederate charge. He ordered the men bugled back (“Rally by fours!”) and called up his officers. He sent Major George Morton with four companies of the Second Tennessee in a swinging dash around the lane to its far end, with orders to hold while the remaining Confederates attacked the enemy rear.
Major Morton performed his task perfectly, but the Confederates could not get at the Yankees in their thick cover, and the Yankees would not come out of the lane to fight. After skirmishing for almost two hours, Barteau finally decided to try different tactics, as he later reported: “I placed Smith’s regiment and Ham’s four companies immediately in his [Hatch’s] front, dismounted, and, protected by the church, a small number of trees, and the brow of a slight eminence. I gave instructions that should the enemy advance on them to reserve their fire until he should arrive close enough to make it destructive and deadly, and to hold the position until a charge should be made fully in his rear; that I would move the Second Tennessee and Major Inge’s battalion around to his rear and make the charge as soon as possible.”9
Barteau may have forgotten that few of the state troops had been under fire before. He may have underestimated the frightening effects of the two-pounder cannon which Colonel Hatch had moved into firing position within the hedged lane. At any rate, before Barteau’s charge was well under way the Yankees burst out upon Smith’s and Ham’s troops, who “retreated in the utmost disorder, although everything was done which could have been by these two officers to make them stand.”10
Sergeant George Hager of Barteau’s Company B said later that the attack on Hatch’s Iowa cavalry “would have been complete and we would have captured his whole command, had not a battalion of Mississippi state troops which had joined us on the march given way in disorder on one side as we charged on the other. We had him forced between two hedges with only one outlet, but as it was we gave him a lively chase.”11
At the moment that Colonel Hatch opened up with the two-pounder cannon, Lieutenant-Colonel James Cunningham was leading his Second Alabama Cavalry slowly northwest from West Point, less than ten miles from Palo Alto. Cunningham
had just received a scout’s report from Sparta, informing him that Yankee cavalry was raiding in that vicinity, and when he heard the cannonading he erroneously assumed that the battle sounds came from Sparta instead of Palo Alto. As Sparta was a half day’s march from his position, he decided to stop for a noon bivouac.
Thus the confusion which Grierson had hoped to create by throwing off Hatch’s Second Iowans to the east was working to the Union raiders’ advantage. Cunningham’s informer had seen Grierson’s men near Sparta and the Alabama officer had no way of knowing that Hatch’s regiment was closer at hand. If, instead of halting for noon feeding, the Second Alabama cavalrymen had galloped forward to Palo Alto with their three pieces of artillery to reinforce Barteau’s men, Colonel Edward Hatch’s predicament would have been grave indeed.12
IV
A view of the Palo Alto fight from the Union side is necessary to complete the story, and a Southern newspaper furnishes an interesting sidelight on the mood of Hatch’s Iowans immediately before they were attacked. “At one house,” reported the Richmond (Virginia) Examiner, “a portion stopped and called for milk. This was handed them in fine cut-glass goblets, which, after they drank the milk, they dashed to pieces on the ground.”13
Whether or not this long-range report was accurate in detail, there is no doubt that by high noon of Tuesday, April 21, most of the men of the Second Iowa were in a fit mood to smash cut-glass goblets. They resented being cut loose from the exhilarating mission of the main column; they were still grumbling over being roused out of their wet blankets into a wetter darkness at three o’clock in the morning. Their breakfasts had been scanty, their coffee cold, and then they had sat their mounts until dawn waiting for the sluggish Illinois regiments to start marching.