Colonel Hatch, sensing their deepening moroseness, ordered the midday halt earlier than he had originally intended. The column had covered less than ten miles, but he guessed that a few pots of coffee set to boiling while the horses were being watered would help to speed the afternoon’s march.
Some of his mounts were also showing the effects of strain, and as soon as the regiment halted near a neck of woods, he ordered a detail of twenty-five men sent out into a forest on the flank to search for concealed horses.
The brief but unhurried halt, the slackening rain, and the hot coffee improved the men’s spirits, and by the time Company E rode in some of them were laughing and joking. Company E, which had marched behind Grierson to cover his tracks, had been acting as rear guard, and its arrival was a signal for the other companies to prepare to move out.
Most of the men were already in their saddles, the advance companies turning back upon the road into the hedged lane, when Colonel Hatch heard in the distance a sudden rush of running horses and the crack of a carbine. He whirled his horse about, shouting an order to keep the column moving into the lane, and watched the first wave of the Confederate charge spinning out from the road, the lines jagged from the bad footing. Lowering his reins, he rode quickly into the lane, which he saw as excellent cover for his troops rather than a trap as his enemy Barteau was seeing it.
“Prepare to fight—on foot!”
Company H was on picket [said Sergeant Lyman B. Pierce]. They gallantly repulsed the first charge made by the rebels, and aided by Company E held the enemy in check until Hatch could form a line, which he did in the edge of timber, where his men, being covered by the trees, could command with their rifles the open field in their front, across which the enemy must advance. Our little cannon was placed in a favorable position, and did good service, notwithstanding the rebels had made their brags at a house at the edge of the field that they wanted but three minutes in which to capture it.
The rebels formed beyond rifle range, and came down on a charge. Our boys kept the cover of the trees until they were within short range, when they opened upon them such a murderous fire from their trusty revolving rifles that they were not only repulsed, but stampeded and scattered all over the wood.* The rebels acknowledged a loss of twenty-five in this skirmish, and citizens said their loss was much heavier. Owing to the completeness of our cover not a drop of Yankee blood was shed.14
As the Yankees surged out from the hedged lane, the Confederate guards assigned to the Iowans captured in the first charge also fled with the Mississippi state troops, leaving their captives free. Hatch pushed the state troops back for three miles, and “from that time until dark it was a constant skirmish.”15
At nightfall the positions of the contending forces were reversed from what they had been at the time of attack. Barteau’s Tennesseans were now between the Yankees and the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, digging in for the night, certain that they had at least won a minor victory by blocking a force which they believed to be the main column of Yankee raiders. When morning came, and with it reinforcements, they would send the invaders flying.
Colonel Hatch, however, had no intention of remaining where he was until morning. By that time scouts might bring the rebels news of Grierson’s column driving southward. “Believing it was important to divert the enemy’s cavalry from Colonel Grierson,” he later reported, “I moved slowly northward, fighting by the rear, crossing the Houlka River, and drawing their forces immediately in my rear.”16
V
Meanwhile Grierson was moving rapidly toward Starkville. Near the village of Montpelier, he halted briefly. “While seated on my horse,” he said afterward in his autobiography, “I hastily wrote with pencil a few lines to Mrs. Grierson; the note was entrusted to a scout whom I had selected to send west to the Central Railroad to cut the telegraph lines and to proceed thence by the most practicable route to La Grange, where he arrived in due time after performing the duty assigned him, mailed my letter and reported our whereabouts to General Smith.”*17
The Illinois regiments marched steadily southward, the men in the ranks silent and thoughtful under the dismal rain. They had grown accustomed to having the Iowans marching on their flank or in column with them, and the knowledge that the brigade had lost a third of its strength left them for the first few hours with a strange feeling of vulnerability. Those who had been certain ever since leaving La Grange that the fifth day would bring them to Columbus for a raid knew now that they were on a different and undoubtedly more dangerous mission.
“Various were the opinions expressed by the men as to our destination,” observed Sergeant Surby.
But as the morning wore on and the two regiments formed a solid column on the Starkville road, the men became occupied with the difficulties of fording numerous swollen streams. Before the stop for noon feeding, “they felt equal to any task and, notwithstanding the heavy rain that was falling, they were cheerful and enlivened the march with songs and jokes,” Surby said.
Probably the most cheerful of them all was Lieutenant-Colonel William Blackburn, who under the worst adversities which can befall a cavalryman always maintained an ebullient front. And today, full of romantic plans for his scouts, he disregarded the wretched weather and kept his beautifully maned mount galloping up and down the road in front of the column.
Had William Blackburn lived longer than the twenty-six more days which fate allotted to him, he might very well have become the “Jeb” Stuart of the Union Army, for there was an insouciant, extravagant quality in his character matching that of the brilliant Virginian. To Blackburn, the war was a merry frolic. He loved long hard rides and dashing charges, and if any member of Grierson’s raiders deserved to wear a plume in his hat, Blackburn was the man.
He was a handsome, ruddy-cheeked officer, taller and larger than most men, so that his uniform always appeared to be stretched tight across his body. One of the few surviving manuscripts in the files of the Seventh Illinois which carries Blackburn’s bold signature is indicative of his character: “Found the ‘rebs’ thick from Salem to Wolf, but in small squads and as wild as ducks; distributed the force in all directions, and had plenty of chases, a good many shots, and a few captures.”18
While he was commanding Company A, Blackburn had been attracted to a kindred spirit in his ranks, Sergeant Richard Surby. Surby was a Canadian, a hardy outdoorsman, who had left home at fifteen and made his way up and down North America, working several years for the Great Western and New York Central Railroads. In April, 1861, he was living in Edgar County, Illinois, and when the call for volunteers came he decided to join up with a cavalry company which Blackburn (then a livestock dealer) was organizing at Paris. Before they left Camp Butler, Surby had won the rank of second duty sergeant.
Richard Surby was, in his own words, “possessed of a venturesome disposition,” and it is possible that a conversation he had with Blackburn led to the organization of the scouts. In his account of the raid, he claimed credit for the plan. “Colonel Blackburn,” he added, “had full permission to organize and control the scouts; it was not long before I was ordered to report to him, and was somewhat surprised when he requested me to act as scout, and take command of a squad of men. This suited me, and without hesitation I accepted the position with thanks, fully resolved not to abuse the confidence reposed in me. I received orders to take six or eight men, proceed at once on the advance and procure citizens dress, saddles, shot guns and everything necessary for our disguise. It did not take long to do this, and by noon reported myself and men ready for duty.”19
Surby gave no details of how he procured the “Secesh” apparel; undoubtedly he and his squad confiscated the articles from farmhouses along the road to Starkville. Almost any Southern home had some parts of the Confederate war dress, which never throughout the war was uniform in cut or color. As one of John Hunt Morgan’s rebel raiders said, their clothing was uniform only in its variety. Until October, 1862, Confederate soldiers had provided their own clothi
ng in exchange for commutation, a necessary arrangement because of a lack of clothing factories in the South and one which naturally created a variegated dress. Gray was official and traditional, but more often than not the color was butternut brown, the clothing being dyed either in copperas solution or walnut hulls. Confederate soldiers often sent Union blue blouses, trousers, and overcoats home from the battlefields to have the color changed, and many a southern wife or sister had learned to make copperas dye by soaking old iron in a cask of water impregnated with salt and vinegar.
Partisan rangers, state troops, and guerillas wore an even more individualistic dress, and as the scouts hoped to pass for these irregular Confederates, the necessary disguises were fairly easy to come by. Gray slouch hats, gray shirts, butternut jeans—anything except blue would suffice.
Blackburn and Surby selected all the scouts from the Seventh Illinois, probably because they knew most of them personally. They were William Buffington, Arthur Wood, and Isaac Robinson from Company B; George Steadman from Company C; Charles Weedon and Licurgus Kelly from Company E; Samuel Nelson from Company G; and Uriah Fowler from Company H. Each man was armed with two pistols, some of them taken from Confederates already captured along the path of the raid. Four Sharp’s carbines and four shotguns and a sporting rifle were divided among them, and four scoute carried sabers.
“Riding up through the nooning bivouac of the Sixth Illinois, we excited some little curiosity,” Sergeant Surby recorded, “and sold the boys completely. They thought we were prisoners and bored us with a thousand questions. After this we went by the name of ‘The Butternut Guerillas.’”*20
As soon as they could eat a hasty lunch and meet for brief instructions from Colonel Blackburn, the scouts gave their bundled blue uniforms and their army carbines over to the care of friends in their companies, and rode out in front of the column again. Blackburn’s orders to Surby were to keep a quarter of a mile to two miles in advance, to obtain all possible information about the roads, many of which were not shown on Grierson’s small map.
The scouts were to report back regularly what they could learn of the roads’ destinations, distances and conditions, the number of streams and whether bridged or fordable, and before noon and nightfall of each day they were to search out favorable camping sites near forage and water. When talking with farmers and hunters along the way, they were to pose as members of Tennessee Confederate units.
To protect himself and his scouts from their own comrades, Sergeant Surby devised a system of simple signals and passwords which would identify them as the Butternut Guerillas, and he carefully explained these to the different advance squadrons whenever there was a change of march order.
In the middle of the afternoon of this first day of scouting, Surby was riding unobtrusively into Starkville, finding it deserted in the rain. He reported back to Colonel Blackburn that there was no evidence of enemy soldiers in or around the town, and by four o’clock the sodden column was marching in at a trot.
Few Starkville citizens had seen Yankee soldiers before this day, and although rumors of their coming had reached the town, the people were obviously surprised to see so many cavalrymen in blue.
None of the participants in the raid seems to have left any detailed accounts of the brief halt in Starkville. Grierson merely reported that they captured a mail and a quantity of Government property, which they destroyed.
The Columbus (Mississippi) Republic was more explicit:
At Starkville they robbed the inhabitants of horses, mules, negroes, jewelry and money; went into the stores and threw their contents (principally tobacco) into the street or gave it to the negroes; caught the mail boy and took the mail, robbed the postoffice, but handed back a letter from a soldier to his wife, containing $50.00, and ordered the postmaster to give it to her. Doctor Montgomery was taken prisoner and kept in camp all night, six miles from town, and allowed to return home next morning, after relieving him of his watch and other valuables. Hale & Murdock’s hat wagon, loaded with wool hats, passing through at the time was captured. They gave the hats to the negroes and took the mules. Starkville can boast of better head covering for its negroes than any other town in the state.21
Sergeant Surby had gone ahead with the scouts, and a mile or two down the Louisville road they captured two Confederate soldiers, one a lieutenant on leave from Vicksburg. The lieutenant, according to Surby, “was seated in a fine buggy with a beautiful span of iron gray horses attached; the horses Colonel Grierson assigned to the battery.”
The land lay lower now; streams were more numerous and all were overflowing their banks. For more than a mile the column floundered through a swamp, the horses belly deep in mud, a forlorn-looking column, with the water pouring from the men’s hat brims and running down their ponchos.
As darkness came on, they had to swim the horses across a rushing stream. Five miles below Starkville, Grierson ordered a halt near one of the swollen branches of Talking Warrior Creek. In the midst of a violent rainstorm, men and horses huddled together under the low-hanging trees.
* The poncho which had been adopted by the United States Army after the war with Mexico, the country of its origin, was merely a piece of enameled or oiled cotton cloth about five by four feet. It was worn over the shoulders like a serape by means of a slit in the middle through which the head was thrust. The rubber blanket which was superseding the poncho was made of muslin or light cotton cloth coated on one side with rubber. It was larger, lighter, more flexible, and had no slit in the middle to admit dampness from the ground, and could be used as a tent.
* Grierson described this deception in his Record of Services: “It had lately rained, and the freshest tracks pointing backwards, led the enemy when they examined the trail three hours afterward, to believe that the whole command had marched eastward from Clear Springs toward Columbus.”—RS, p. 103.
* Hatch’s First and Second Battalions were armed with Colt’s Revolving rifles, and he had trained these men like infantrymen. As Sergeant Pierce said, they figured “less in dashing exploits, but did more hard fighting.” The Third Battalion armed with sabers and carbines did most of the charging for the regiment.
* Grierson’s note to his wife was as follows: “April 21, 1863, from Clear Springs, 12 m. So. or E. of S. of Houston. All well April 21st. Tuesday 6 o’clock a.m.—Montpelier, 7 o’clock. 16 mi. from Houston, about 18 miles to Starkville. All O. K.”
* “Butternuts” had become a nickname for rebel soldiers because of the color of their uniforms. In this very year of 1863 sympathizers for the Confederacy in the North began wearing butternut emblems to indicate their preference for the Southern cause.—Illinois State Journal, May 8, 1863.
A MISSION FOR CAPTAIN FORBES
“THE MOST RELIABLE INTELLIGENCE we receive,” said Henry Forbes, “is through Negro slaves.”1
From Negroes who had attached themselves to the brigade at Starkville, Grierson learned of the location of a large tannery and leather factory, and as he surveyed the soggy condition of his camping site by lantern light, he decided that he might as well put a battalion to work on that factory. Most of the horses, he knew, required a few hours’ rest; the men needed rest, too, but they would be miserable bivouacked in the rain and this miasmic swamp in which it was impossible to build fires to smoke away the mosquitoes. He believed that all except the weariest of his troopers would as soon be having some excitement as lying there in the dark letting the insects bite into them.
Grierson chose Major John Graham’s First Battalion of the Seventh Illinois to make the five-mile march to the tannery. Within a few minutes, Graham’s battalion was saddling up to start a nightmare ride through almost total darkness, swimming bayous, wading swamps, and dodging overhanging tree limbs. They found the tannery exactly where the Negroes said it would be, a pine-board building recently enlarged by the Confederate government. A lantern was burning in one of the unglazed windows.
Major Graham’s men quietly surrounded the factory. One platoo
n dismounted and rushed the section lighted by the lantern. A startled Confederate quartermaster, and a group of workmen checking supplies for shipment to the quartermaster’s headquarters at Port Hudson, surrendered without resistance.
Graham made a quick inspection of the tannery and was surprised at the quantity of boots, shoes, saddles, and bridles already packed and marked for shipment to Vicksburg. He ordered his men to fire the building, and as soon as it was in full blaze they turned back to rejoin the brigade, taking the rebel quartermaster with them.2
At dawn the Sixth Illinois began moving out to ride advance for the day, the men considerably cheered to find the skies clearing. The night had indeed been a miserable one of mud, mosquitoes, and the continual throbbing of deep-throated bullfrogs. Some of the men had slept on fence rails, as described by Private Henry Eby of the Seventh: “Three or four rails were used under me with some rubbish on top of them. My saddle for a pillow, rubber blanket for a cover, and hat over my face. This rail bed kept my body out of the water.”
Grierson, too, was relieved to see that the rain had finally stopped, but he knew that progress over the route to Louisville would be slow and tortuous because of the flooding. He also knew that by now the Confederate command would be learning of his passage through Starkville and would recognize Hatch’s movement toward West Point as only a part of the main Union column. The rebel telegraph lines would be busy this morning with orders and counterorders setting Confederate troops in motion to stop the invaders.
And where would the rebels expect him to strike? Grierson studied his pocket map and found the place he wanted the rebels to believe he was driving for; it was the town of Macon on the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, thirty miles to the southeast. Grierson reasoned that if he could convince the enemy that Macon was his objective, he would be free for at least another day to drive on unhampered into the heart of Mississippi.