CORINTH AGAIN THE CENTER
With the fall of Donelson, the Confederate line was broken at the
center; and Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, then in command of all the
Confederate forces of Tennessee and Kentucky, evacuated Columbus and
Bowling Green and withdrew his army to the Memphis and Charleston
Railroad, establishing a new line of defense, with Tennessee and
Kentucky, thus early in the struggle, practically in the hands of the
enemy.
Through Tennessee, North Alabama, and North Mississippi I returned to
Corinth, which place had become the headquarters of General Johnston.
The capture of Henry and Donelson constituted a severe blow to the
Confederacy. A vast, rich territory and a splendid army had been lost,
and the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers opened to the Union forces.
To hold the line of the Southwestern defense, already pushed back to the
very margin of the great Mississippi Valley, and to protect the railroad
of communication and transportation between the East and the West (the
Memphis and Charleston), General Johnston began mobilization at Corinth,
with the purpose not only to defend, but to counter attack as soon as
possible. It developed early in March that the Union forces were seeking
an outlet up the Tennessee to some point from which the new Confederate
line could be attacked.
With a few companies I was sent to Eastport, then the head of navigation
on the Tennessee River, to scout and watch for the expected landing of
the Union army. Soon came the gunboats Lexington and Tyler, invested
with a silent terror, wrought by superstitious fear, more awful than
their guns. It was only with a closer knowledge that this unwarranted
fear vanished. Later in the war we captured one of these monsters at
this point with loaded battery, and still later Forrest captured three
gunboats and ran a whole flotilla of this class off the river with
Morton’s and Rice’s field batteries.
At this time there lived at Eastport a man named Hill who had been a
steamboat pilot, and he had a son just about my age; so by arrangement I
dressed in one of the suits of his son and went with Mr. Hill to the
landing. As we were the only persons present, three officers came ashore
and asked Hill many questions about the Southern soldiers. They did not
notice me on account of my age and unsophisticated dress; but I was
using my eyes for all they were worth, and afterwards, with Mr. Hill’s
assistance, I was able to give a fairly good description of the floating
terrors. They were old wooden transports armored with railroad irons and
with small iron above the water line and pilot house.
After this episode, the force at Iuka sent a battery of field pieces to
Chickasaw Bluff, just above Eastport, from which position they had a
clear view down the river to the first bend, about four miles.
The commander made up a detail from our company to keep watch at
Eastport for the next appearance of the gunboats. On the river bank was
an old elevator topped with a tower by which grain and produce could be
loaded and unloaded into steamboats. We used this old building as a
watch tower at night, and during the day we were stationed on the high
bluff, two of us watching together. One night my companion and I had
been discussing the probability of being able to discern the approach of
a gunboat, as they concealed all lights and muffled the exhaust of their
engines. In the darkness and the silence our conversation turned to idle
fancies. To the soldier actually engaged in war death seems ever near,
and, with the mind so attuned, it is but a step from the natural to the
supernatural. My companion had asked me if I believed in ghosts, or in
the appearance on earth of the spirits of the dead. I told him that from
the old slaves of my father I had imbibed the superstitious fear of
ghosts, or, as they called them, “hants;” but that as I had grown
older, my mind had been disabused of the hair-raising philosophy of
headless men and white-sheeted women. “Then,” said he, “I will tell you
a story of this place.”
As a solemn and somewhat uncanny prelude to his story, he slowly
repeated the couplet,
“Into the sea, out of the sea,
All that is mine comes back to me;”
and continued: “In the year 1845 a steamboat captain named Moore was
running on the Tennessee between Eastport, Miss., and Paducah, Ky. His
wife had been lost in a river disaster; but he had a daughter, beautiful
and accomplished, whose rearing had been the pressing care of his lonely
life. After her school days, the young lady spent much of her time on
her father’s boat and with friends here at Eastport. The pride of her
father’s heart and with many admirers, she was ‘the observed of all
observers’ at all the balls and other social functions so frequent on
the boat which was the center of life for this lonely section. It soon
developed, as is nearly always the case, that the young man who won her
heart was not her father’s choice among her many suitors.
“When the young lovers could not reconcile the father to their promised
marriage, they stole away from the boat on a dark night when the river
was at high stage, climbed to the top of this old tower, lashed
themselves together, and jumped into the raging waters; and it is said
that to this day, when the river runs high and the moon is gone and the
clouds curtain the stars, the spirits of those long-gone lovers return
to the base of this tower and struggle again with the engulfing waves,
and wild sounds rise from the rushing waters as if a man had moaned and
a woman shrieked.”
As he finished his blood-curdling story, there was an unearthly scream
in the loft above us, and we executed a retreat out of that old
building, which for prompt action and swift movement would have
commanded the admiration of Napoleon or Stonewall Jackson, even though
our courage as soldiers had gone to pieces upon the phantom of
superstition.
We had disturbed the slumber or meditation of a screech owl, and with
one shrill whistle he had hustled us from our post of duty more hastily
than could have been done by all the “Yankee” gunboats on the river.
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