The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (187 page)

For the next two days he handled Smith in much the same fashion. After driving the rear-guard Federals through West Point, he came upon them again, three miles beyond the town, stoutly posted along a timbered ridge approachable only by a narrow causeway. His solution was to send one regiment galloping wide around the enemy flank, with orders to strike the rear, while the others dismounted to attack in front. Admittedly, this was a lot to ask of green troops, but Forrest employed a method of persuasion quite different from the one he had used a while ago on the panicked conscript. “Come on, boys!” he roared, and led the way, thus setting an example which caused one of his men to recall, years later, that “his immediate presence seemed to inspire everyone with his terrible energy, more like that of a piece of
powerful steam machinery than of a human being.” So led, they drove the bluecoats from the ridge, then remounted and continued the pursuit until nightfall, when their commander called a halt, midway between West Point and Okolona, in a hastily abandoned bivouac area, stocked not only with rations and forage, but also with wood for the still-burning campfires. While the graybacks bedded down and slept beside the cozy warmth provided by their foes, Smith kept his main body plodding northward and did not stop until well past midnight, within four miles of Okolona. Burdened with captured stock and runaway slaves, and weary as they were from their long march—since sunup, they had covered better than twice the distance they had managed on any one of the other nine days since they left Collierville—his men got a late start next morning. By that time Forrest, who had had his troopers up and on the go by dawn, well rested and unencumbered, had closed the ten-mile gap and was snapping again at the tail and flanks of the blue column.

Smith was learning, as Streight had learned before him, that it could be even more dangerous to run from the Tennessean than it was to stand and fight him. However, instead of turning on him with all he had, he dropped off a couple of regiments just beyond Okolona and a full brigade at Ivey’s Hill, five miles farther along on the road to Pontotoc, still intent on saving his train and protecting the Negroes in his charge. After a running fight through the town, hard on the heels of the rear guard, the gray pursuers came upon the first of these two prepared positions and were brought to a halt by fire from the superior Federal weapons. At this point Forrest arrived. “Where is the enemy’s whole position?” he asked Colonel Tyree Bell, whose brigade had the lead this morning. “You see it, General,” Bell replied, and added: “They are preparing to charge.” “Then we will charge them,” Forrest said: and did. The result was a blue rout. Five guns were abandoned shortly thereafter by an artillery lieutenant who complained hotly in his report that his battery had been forced off the road and into a ditch by Union troopers who overtook him “in perfect confusion,” hallooing: “Go ahead, or we’ll be killed!” The chase continued to Ivey’s Hill, where the defenders, allowed more time to get set, gave a considerably better account of themselves. Opening ranks to let the fugitives through, they took under well-aimed fire the two brigades advancing toward them across the prairie. At the first volley the commanders of both were shot, one in the hand, the other through the throat. The second of these was Jeffrey Forrest, and though the general reached him immediately after he fell—this youngest of his five brothers, posthumously born and sixteen years his junior, whom he had raised as a son and made into a soldier—he found him dead. He remained bent over him for a minute or two, then rose and ordered
his bugler to sound the charge. The fighting that followed was savage and hand-to-hand. Within the next hour, Forrest had two horses killed under him and accounted in person for three enemy soldiers, shot or sabered.

Thus assailed, the Federals once more fell back to try another stand in a position ten miles from Pontotoc; which was also lost, along with another gun, but which at any rate ended the relentless chase that had begun two days ago, nearly fifty miles away, below West Point. “Owing to the broken down and exhausted condition of men and horses, and being almost out of ammunition,” Forrest presently reported, “I was compelled to stop pursuit.” Smith was unaware of this, however, and kept going even harder than before. Judging the rebel strength by Forrest’s aggressiveness, he believed that Stephen Lee had arrived to join the chase, though in point of fact he now had nothing on his trial but the “rabble of state troops” he had brushed aside when he passed this way the week before, headed in the opposite direction. In Pontotoc by midnight, he resumed the march at 3 a.m. and cleared New Albany that afternoon, February 23, destroying in his rear the bridges across the Tallahatchie. All next day he kept moving, unwilling to risk another stand, and rode at last into Collierville on the 25th, having covered in five days the same distance he had required ten days to cover while going south. Not even then did he call a halt, however; he kept going all the following day, through Germantown to Memphis, there ending at last what one brigade commander described as “a weary, disheartened, almost panic-stricken flight, in the greatest disorder and confusion.”

His loss in men had not been great (it amounted to 388 in all, including 155 missing, as compared to a total of 144 for his opponent—a disparity which Forrest, as the attacker, could only account for by “the fact that we kept so close to them that the enemy overshot our men”) but the cost in horseflesh had been cruel. Smith returned with no more than 2200 riders who could be described as adequately mounted; the other 4800 were either on foot or astride horses no longer fit for service in the field. A corresponding loss in cavalry morale, so lately on the rise in all the Union armies, was indicated by an unhappy colonel’s remark that “the expedition filled every man connected with it with a burning shame.” Nor was that by any means the worst of it from the northern point of view. The worst was still to come, resulting not so much from Federal losses as from Confederate gains. Practically overnight, by this victory over twice their number—and the capture, in the process, of six guns and several stands of colors—Forrest’s green recruits had acquired a considerable measure of that fierce pride which in time would enable their commander to prevail against even longer odds and for much larger stakes. Already
he was preparing to go over to the offensive, beginning with a return to West Tennessee and the accomplishment there of a great deal more than the mere enlargement of his now veteran division.

Though Sherman had been doubtful of Smith’s competence from the start, deeming him “too mistrustful of himself for a leader against Forrest,” this took none of the sting from his censure of his fellow Ohioan for “allowing General Forrest to head him off and defeat him with an inferior force.” But that was later, after he learned the gloomy particulars of the cavalry excursion, and in any case he had waited for Smith no longer than it took him to wipe the appointed meeting place off the map. By the time the frazzled horsemen returned to Memphis, Sherman had recrossed the Pearl and gone into bivouac at Canton, north of Jackson, still with no knowledge of what, if anything, had happened to the mounted column, which in fact had begun its retreat from West Point on the day he ended his five-day stay in Meridian and abandoned his proposed advance on Selma.

Not that he considered his own part in the campaign anything less than “successful in the highest degree,” both on the outward march and the return, which he made along a different route, twenty-odd miles to the north, so as to avoid the grainless, cowless, hogless trail his twelve brigades of infantry had blazed while slogging eastward. “My movement to Meridian stampeded all Alabama,” he informed Halleck three days later, on February 29. “Polk retreated across the Tombigbee and left me to smash things at pleasure, and I think it is well done.… We broke absolutely and effectually a full hundred miles of railroad … and made a swath of desolation fifty miles broad across the State of Mississippi which the present generation will not forget.” After listing his spoils, which included “some 500 prisoners, a good many refugee families, and about ten miles of negroes,” he announced that the destruction he had wrought “makes it simply impossible for the enemy to risk anything but light cavalry this side of Pearl River; consequently, I can reduce the garrisons of Memphis, Vicksburg, and Natchez to mere guards, and, in fact, it will set free 15,000 men for other duty. I could have gone on to Mobile or over to Selma,” he added, “but without other concurrent operations it would have been unwise.” Privately, however, in a companion letter to his wife, he confessed his regret that Smith’s nonarrival had prevented him from applying what his foes were calling “the Sherman torch” to Alabama. “As it was,” he chuckled, for he always enjoyed a small joke on the clergy, “I scared the bishop out of his senses.”

It was Polk he meant, of course, and he was right; the bishop had indeed been frightened, not only for Meridian, Demopolis, and Selma, but also for Mobile, a greater prize than any of those others in his care. His fears for the Confederacy’s only remaining Gulf port east
of the Mississippi had been enlarged in late January when Farragut—who had just returned from a New York holiday, taken while the
Hartford
was being refitted in the Brooklyn Navy Yard—appeared before the place with a squadron of multigunned warships, evidently intending to launch another of his all-out attacks, not one of which had ever failed with him on hand to see that it was pressed to the required extremity. In point of fact, the admiral was only there to heighten Polk’s fears for the loss of the port and to discourage him from drawing reinforcements from its garrison when Sherman began his march. There was no need to attack; he accomplished his purpose merely by his month-long presence, just outside the bay, and gained in the process much valuable information which he would put to substantial use when he came back again, not for a feint or diversion, but in earnest. As a result, when Sherman set out from Vicksburg in early February, Polk was convinced that his goal was Mobile and that what was intended was a combined assault, by land and water, designed to remove that vital port from the list of the South’s assets in continuing its struggle to maintain its national existence. Outnumbered two to one, or worse, the bishop called loudly on Richmond for assistance, and Richmond passed his appeal to Johnston, the only possible source for reinforcements in a hurry. Whereupon there was staged in North Georgia a grim comedy involving a balking contest between the two commanders, blue and gray.

Johnson protested for all he was worth. In the first place, he did not believe the proposed reinforcements could reach Polk in time to head off Sherman; and what was more he was convinced that any substantial reduction of his already outnumbered force, which was being required to maintain a position that had “neither intrinsic strength nor strategic advantage,” would not only expose Atlanta to capture by the blue mass in his front, but would also be likely to result in the destruction of what would remain of the army charged with its defense. This chilling presentation to the government of a choice between losing one or the other of two of its principal cities had the effect of delaying, though not of forestalling, a peremptory order requiring the immediate detachment of Hardee’s corps to Polk for the purpose of covering Mobile. Received on February 16, the order began to be carried out four days later—by coincidence, on the day Sherman began his return march from Meridian—when the three divisions boarded the cars at Dalton for the long ride to Demopolis. Arriving next day they found they were unneeded; Sherman had withdrawn. Polk put them promptly back aboard the cars to rejoin Johnston, who by now was sending up distress signals of his own. His worst fears had been realized; Thomas was advancing. The Union-loyal Virginian had also received peremptory orders, and he too had delayed their execution. Instructed on February 14 to make a “formidable reconnaissance” of
Johnston’s position, he took a week to get ready, then started forward from Ringgold on the eighth day, February 22, two days after Hardee departed with the divisions under Cheatham, Walker, and Cleburne. Grant’s hope was that Thomas would catch his adversary off balance and thus be able to drive him back from Rocky Face Ridge and beyond Dalton, in order to “get possession of the place and hold it as a step toward a spring campaign.”

With three of his seven divisions 350 roundabout miles away, Johnston was something worse than merely off balance when Thomas moved against him. Palmer’s corps made the opening thrust at Tunnel Hill. Formerly occupied by Cleburne, this western spur of Rocky Face Ridge was now held only by Wheeler, whose horse artillery raised such a clatter that the bluecoats were discouraged from attacking until the following day, February 24. By then the rebel troopers had fallen back through Buzzard Roost Gap to cover the flanks of the infantry disposed along the ridge. Thomas probed the passes on the 25th, making some progress against the wide-spread defenders—especially at Dug Gap, immediately southwest of Dalton—but when Palmer launched a coordinated assault next morning he found that Hardee’s three divisions, having completed their round-trip journey to Demopolis, were in position on the ridge; Cleburne, in fact, was on the flank of the flankers. Accordingly, Thomas withdrew as he had come, returning to Ringgold on the same day Sooy Smith rode back into Memphis and Sherman descended on Canton. His “formidable reconnaissance” had cost him 345 casualties and had failed in its larger purpose of seizing Dalton “as a step toward a spring campaign”; but he, like Farragut outside Mobile, had learned much that would be useful when he returned in earnest. As for Johnston, he was agreeably surprised. He had expected to be thrown into precipitate retreat; whereas his men had not only maintained the integrity of a position which he declared had “little to recommend it,” but had inflicted better than twice the 167 casualties they suffered. Even more heartening than the bare tactical result was the contrast between the army’s present frame of mind, here on Rocky Face Ridge, and the one that had been evidenced a dozen weeks ago on Missionary Ridge. Unquestionably its spirit had been lifted: perhaps indeed a bit too much, at least in one respect, to suit Old Joe. For in congratulating his troops on their work, he was critical of the artillery officers for having “exhibited a childish eagerness to discharge their pieces.”