An unlucky campaign led by General Grant--Holly Springs burned up--The
first foragers--Some modern Falstaffs--Counting dead men.
In a month's time, or by November 2, 1862, the army, reorganized, our
division led by Quimby, and Grant in command of the whole force, started
on that very first disastrous campaign for the rear of Vicksburg. Grant
had some thirty thousand soldiers to march with him by way of Grand
Junction and Holly Springs, and another thirty thousand men, under
Sherman, he sent down the Mississippi River to attack Vicksburg from
another direction. We marched in mud and wind and rain till nearly
Christmas, the enemy constantly retreating before us. We made a
tremendous supply station at Holly Springs and left it in charge of a
garrison. There were supplies there for a hundred thousand men, besides
a million dollars' worth of captured cotton.
Just as we were confident of overtaking and destroying the enemy, we
were stunned by the tidings that a great column of Rebel cavalry had
dashed in behind our army. With torches and firebrands they had burned
Holly Springs to the ground, and had destroyed all the army stores.
There was not a potato or cracker or a pound of bacon left. How I
remember that dark night when Van Dorn's cavalry got behind us in the
country lanes of Mississippi! I had been started back to a hospital in
Holly Springs, for my eyes had been inflamed for days. Just as my little
freight train reached the suburb of what had been the town, the rear
guard of the enemy rode out at the other side. The morning that I
arrived there was nothing there but smoke, and ashes, and ruins, and a
smell of coal oil over all. A million dollars' worth of our army
supplies had been burned up in a night. The pretty town, too, was in
ashes, and Van Dorn's bold cavalry swung their sabers in the air and
rode away laughing. General Grant's father and mother, in the town at
the time on their way to visit their illustrious son with the advance of
the army, were captured, but politely paroled and left among the ruins.
The loss of the town was a disgrace to the North. There was a fort
there, solidly built of cotton bales and occupied by a colonel and a
thousand troops. The colonel forgot what our ancestors did with cotton
bales at New Orleans, and promptly threw up the sponge. But then Colonel
Murphy was not General Jackson. With the loss of Holly Springs and the
destruction of our base of supplies there was nothing for that whole
army of Grant's to do but to trudge its weary way back to Corinth and
Memphis, through the mud and the wind and the rain.
The tragical part of that campaign was taking place at the same moment
down by the Yazoo River, right under the guns of Vicksburg. Grant, when
he marched out of Memphis, had sent Sherman and thirty thousand men down
the river in steamboats to attack Vicksburg from one side while he
should hurry along with another thirty thousand men and pound it from
the other side. Sherman and his heroes made the awful assaults at
Chickasaw bayou we read of, never dreaming of the fiasco that had
befallen the main army at Holly Springs. Not one word of the news ever
reached him--and then in swamps and bayous his soldiers waded in water
halfway to their necks and assaulted impregnable hills and breastworks.
Two thousand men were killed or mangled to no purpose. Some of the
heroic fighting of the war was done in that Yazoo slaughter pen, and
then Sherman and his crippled army withdrew in utter failure.
Vicksburg was safe for awhile.
My own duty in that unlucky campaign with Grant had been to search the
country in the neighborhood of our camps and bivouacs for additional
supplies. Many a time, with a dozen or twenty men for guards, and a
couple of six-mule teams, we would venture miles from camp to confiscate
bacon, flour, poultry, or whatever else a soldier could eat. On my
return to the regiment with a wagon full of good things, the companies
would set up a cheer for the quartermaster sergeant. The colonel always
allowed me to choose the guards who should accompany me. Many a time our
little squad got back to camp by the skin of their teeth, chased by
guerrillas or some wandering band of Rebel cavalry. Our habit was, when
we found a plantation with something to spare on it, to post sentinels
in the lanes in every direction, while a few of us with the aid of the
negroes loaded the wagons. If all went well, the procession, followed by
the slaves we freed and took with us, went back to camp in state.
Sometimes there was indecorous haste in getting home, owing to our
sentinel firing his gun in warning of near danger. More than one of the
boys of those venturous excursions, to this day, have not yet come back
to camp.
On one of these excursions one day we were surprised by a little party
of rangers, but we took their leader captive, and with him a fine
Kentucky charger and a splendid rifle. The brigade colonel presented to
me the rifle I myself had captured, for my "bravery," he said, but the
splendid thoroughbred he took for himself. Alas! this rifle, the
testimonial of my adventure, was burned up when the Rebel cavalry took
Holly Springs. I had left it there to send North some day.
These excursions after food that I have described must have been the
forerunners of Sherman's great forage parties later, on his "march to
the sea." It was easy enough to feed an army that way, if men could be
found to take the risk. Sherman's later forage parties were so strong
that the risk was reduced to fun.
I copy from my diary here (1862):
"Now the enemy is in front of us. He is on our flank and all around us.
It is dangerous to venture a mile from camp alone. In fact, orders are
strict for every man and every officer to stay close to his regiment day
or night.
"On all the plantations along our way in this campaign there are signs
of war. The cotton gins, the fences, the barns, are all gone,--burned by
raiders of both armies, who have scouted through this same country time
and again. The weather is often gloomy; the fenceless fields are brown
and naked; the big houses left standing on the plantations look lone and
desolate. There is no song of birds. The army wagons, in long trains,
and the soldiers in great strung-out columns of blue, go over the soft
ground across the fields, along what once was lanes and country roads,
almost in silence. Here and there a skirmish of musketry at some creek
crossing or at some wood is the only noise heard. This state of
Mississippi, like the whole South, sees the desolation of war. But the
big, white, lone houses on the deserted lawns, with their low verandas
about them, are not wholly unoccupied. Though the arms-bearing men of
the country are every one in the army fighting us, the women and the
children and the slaves are still at home. These slaves desert their
mistresses and come into the Union camps at night by hundreds, bearing
their bundles on their heads and their pickaninnies under their arms.
"As Rebel cavalry bands are rioting all around us, the strictest orders
are given about leaving camp. But those who slipped away without leave
the oftenest were themselves officers. Numbers of these went off almost
nightly, to pay their devoirs to ladies whom they happened to admire at
neighboring plantations. These women, glad enough of the compliments of
the Federal officers, let it be very clearly understood that they were
nevertheless true-blue Rebels. Things as to the war were simply glossed
over in conversation, and both the lady and the officer sometimes had a
delightful evening, even if the delight on the officer's part was in
violation of duty. Sometimes these visits led to ridiculous
terminations. War is not all tragedy."
Again I copy from the journal of that December:
"The other night three of the officers of our brigade, Captain H---- and
Lieutenants D---- and O---- got themselves into a pretty mess by leaving
camp to visit at a plantation. The laughable facts are these: We had
stopped two or three days, to mend bridges over the Yocona River.
General Grant had asked our brigade commander to report the names of
three officers for promotion. Captain H---- and two lieutenants were
selected. Among the private soldiers these men were not regarded as
deserving honor. On the contrary, they were looked upon as common
braggarts. Some politician at home, probably, had moved the wires for
their promotion. As it happened, these three officers were the worst
offenders of all, as to leaving camp without orders for the purpose of
visiting Rebel ladies at neighboring plantations. Some of the staff
heard of this and determined to unmask them. Some Rebel uniforms were
secured from prisoners in our hands, and one dark night when the captain
and his friends were away from camp at the home of a Mrs. S----,
visiting, a dozen of us in disguise were sent to surround the house.
Instantly there was a cry among the women of "guerrillas!"
"Confederates!" "Confederates!" "Friends!" and a bonny blue Rebel flag
was waved in the doorway. We were indeed a desperate-looking lot, but
the women met the supposed Rebel guerrillas almost with embraces. The
captain and his two lieutenants we pulled from under the bed by their
heels, and threatened them with instant death. The women begged us only
not to kill them in the house. The officers, on their knees, pleaded for
their lives. It was agreed that they should simply give up their swords,
be paroled, and allowed to return to camp. At headquarters the next
morning, in explanation of the loss of their swords, they told a
wonderful and Falstaffian tale of being overwhelmed by Van Dorn's
guerrillas the night before, and of their miraculous escape to camp.
That moment they were confronted with their surrendered swords and their
signatures to their paroles. There was a fine collapse at headquarters
that morning. The names of the three gentlemen were sent to General
Grant the same day, I understand. But not for promotion."
I had a little taste of life in the hospital that December. My eyes got
worse. For a little time I was in a fine private home in Holly Springs,
for the town, after its burning by Van Dorn, had been retaken by us.
Every room in the house had its floors filled with the sick and the
dying of both armies. Long years after that, while on shipboard
returning from Europe, I made by chance the acquaintance of Mrs. Kate
Sherwood Bonner, the authoress, who as a girl had lived in Holly
Springs. We talked of the war times, and it transpired that the mansion
where I had witnessed such distressful scenes among the dead and dying
was her father's home.
I saw General Grant's father and mother there in Holly Springs daily. At
the capture of the town they had been taken as stated, and released, the
father on parole.
I was now sent to Memphis, as I was still in hospital. The hospital here
was in the old Overton Hotel, which was crowded with hundreds of
wounded. The room used as a dead house was filled every night. It was
across the court and below my own room. I could see the corpses
distinctly, as the window was left open. It was my habit, a strange one,
when I awoke in the morning, to look over and count the corpses of men
who had been carried in there while I had been sleeping. It seems now a
ghastly business enough.