THE LAST FLICKERING OF THE GREAT FLAME
January, 1865, found General Forrest bending every energy to the
maintenance and recruiting of his force for whatever further defense
might have to be made, and the Union commander at Eastport making
careful and extensive preparation for an extended and determined
campaign as soon as the weather conditions should be favorable.
It was with great difficulty that we managed to feed ourselves and our
horses through those trying months of bleak winter.
In the ranks, where men had never shirked a duty or a danger, the sad
story of our lost cause was already forewritten in our suffering hearts;
and the hopelessness of our situation became so fixed in the soldiers’
minds that desertions became frequent; and in order to check this and
enforce discipline, our commander resorted to stern measures, to the
extent that some of the deserters were executed and their bodies
conspicuously displayed as a warning.
While crossing the bridge at Tuscaloosa, Ala., I witnessed one of these
tragic and morbid spectacles, which made a lasting impression upon my
youthful mind and embittered my heart against all wars.
Late in March the Union Army began to move southward from Eastport, and
General Forrest’s first interest was to ascertain the enemy’s plans as
far as possible.
I was with a scouting troop when we luckily intercepted and captured a
Union courier carrying the plan of the Union commander’s line of march.
This message was sent to each of the division commanders.
They were ordered to move into South Alabama in three columns, marching
parallel to each other, twenty miles apart, and to consolidate at a
point north of Selma, Ala.
We speedily sent this information to General Forrest, then in the
vicinity of Tuscaloosa, Ala.
General Wilson had 10,000 or 12,000 veteran troops of all arms, while
Forrest had about 5,000, and only half of that number were of his
veterans; but we had the advantage of being on our native heath, and our
leader had never been beaten in a single case when he was in supreme
command of all dispositions and details of the battle.
With their plans in hand, he sent General Chalmers to meet the extreme
eastern division and General Jackson to take the middle division, while
he would personally direct the movement against the western column,
nearest Tuscaloosa, in the hope of defeating it and then falling upon
the rear of the main column.
But this was not to be. When Forrest was ready for the move, he sent a
courier to the Selma garrison and to Roddy’s cavalry, with full
information of the whole plan; but the enemy captured the courier, and
General Wilson changed his plan, and Forrest never knew why until after
the war.
While our forces, ignorant of the change of plan, were separately
waiting for the three columns, we ran into Wilson’s cavalry, 8,000
strong, at Bogless Creek, a few miles north of Selma, and we had only
about 200 men, mainly the escort.
Forrest, thinking that we had run into a small force, threw us hurriedly
into line and charged the advance, and the enemy thought they had struck
the main Confederate column. We soon got into a mix-up, and they began
to overlap us in every direction. The bulk of our little band was
fighting and falling back in an effort to clear a passage, when we
discovered that the enemy was making a move to cut General Forrest off
from his troops. About ten of us went to his assistance. They had him
surrounded, and he was fighting like a lion at bay. He killed several
men--no one ever knew how many; and when he came out of the circle, he
jumped his horse straight through a cordon of mounted men and escaped
without a mark on his person.
We fled the field and fell back to Selma, Ala.
Here the Confederacy had been operating a small manufacturing plant for
making arms, and the commander had only enough men to make a thin
picket line for the protection of the plant.
When Forrest arrived, he gathered every available man and put them in
the trenches for the best possible defense.
Forrest’s plan having failed, he was in ignorance as to where his troops
were, and this gave the enemy a very dangerous advantage.
Forrest felt that if the enemy had slipped by his commanders they would
follow him up and strike him in the rear when the attack on Selma should
begin.
At any rate, it was certain that when the Union Army should reach Selma
there would be a fight of some kind, regardless of odds.
The escort took position in the trenches on the extreme left, the
weakest point, and Roddy’s troops were placed on our right. Then the
home guards and mixed multitude were strung out in a thin line along the
remainder of the works, and instructed to hold the trenches at all
hazards and never leave until they should receive orders to retire.
Of course Forrest told us that if we could hold the enemy in check for a
while, our missing troops would strike him in the rear soon, and that we
could capture or destroy the cavalry force; but, unfortunately, Forrest
was not on the outside with his troops, and the capture of our messenger
had so shifted the situation that the commanders of Forrest’s two
columns lost touch, and never knew anything about the battle until it
was all over.
On the first approach to our line the enemy seemed to have about 2,000
men, and we held them in check and pushed them back out of range; but on
the second charge they came like the locusts of Pharaoh, and that thin
line of gray did not tarry for the impact, but went, self-ordered.
Forrest held the escort company until the enemy had swarmed all around
us and cut us off from the city by way of the bridge. He then mounted
his horse and told us to follow him--that he was going out. It looked
like a desperate undertaking, but we had dared Fate so many times and
“gotten by” that we believed that our great captain would carry us out
again.
Our company was formed into a flying wedge, and began the drive toward
the southwest, so as to strike the river at its narrowest point.
We fought like demons, as the majority of us in that company had never
surrendered, and we did not now intend to do so.
I had many narrow escapes. My hat was either shot off or carried away by
a saber stroke, but I got through without a scratch. When we cleared the
cordon that had surrounded us, we plunged our horses into the river and
escaped by swimming to the opposite shore.
Here Forrest gathered the few of us that were left, and we made our way
out in the direction of Gainesville, Ala. We had lost a number of the
escort in the fight--some were killed, some were drowned in the river,
and some were wounded and surrendered. Among the captured were my two
brothers and a young man who afterwards became my brother-in-law, R. P.
Elgin.
After we were safely on the way to Gainesville, I told General Forrest
that it seemed to me that the war was over, and that I was going to my
father’s house. He and family were then refugeeing in the flat-woods of
Pontotoc County. With but few words, the General admitted the gravity of
the situation, and told me to go on to my father.
I first stopped at Okolona, Miss., where I was treated with great
deference and kindness by the same slave boy who had nursed me when I
was wounded.
From Okolona I went to my father and remained until June, 1865.
From Pontotoc County I rode back to Corinth, secured employment, sold my
horse for $150 in greenbacks, and started my first savings account, from
which I afterwards started a business of my own.
On my return to Corinth, I had found the town garrisoned by a troop of
negro soldiers.
The whole prospect was a picture of desolation, as this town and
vicinity had been under the very heel of war for four long, weary years;
but nature had not forsaken the landscape entirely, for it was carpeted
with grass and clover and wild flowers--a beautiful winding sheet for
the dead hopes and prospects of the buoyant boys who had marched away
from this place under the Southern battle flag.
There were practically no domestic animals to trespass on the fields and
meadows; but while the husbandman had forsaken his gardens and vineyards
to kill his own kind, the unmolested birds and wild animals native to
this clime had restored God’s original paradise and were living in happy
groups and families upon the lands which ungrateful man had deserted.
Three years after my return from the war I was married to Miss Juliette
Elgin, of Huntsville, Ala., a beautiful and petite young lady of 118
pounds. She is with me yet; and whatever changes time may have wrought
upon her appearance to other eyes, with the eyes of memory I behold her
still, and the mental and spiritual graces of her youth have only
ripened with the years.
To this union were born two daughters, Luella and Lucille, to increase
our responsibilities and brighten our home. To train and educate them
became the prime purpose of our lives, and in their welfare and
happiness we submerged our personal ambitions.
Now that they have homes and family responsibilities of their own, our
fireside has lost them; but in their happiness we find our recompense,
and this humble record of sacred memories is affectionately dedicated to
their sons.
In drawing to a close this record of memories, I trust that I may be
pardoned for a brief indulgence of recollections which cannot be of
interest to any save my own people and, perchance, my comrades of the
sixties.
I was born at Jacinto, in the pine-embowered hills of Tishomingo County,
Miss., and a good portion of my war service was happily given to
guarding that sacred land which had nourished my joyous childhood.
With the tear-dimmed vision of retrospection, I ever behold that happy
spot--its orchards, its meadows, its wild flowers and sparkling waters.
Especially do I stand again with expectant thirst at the cold spout
spring that gushed from the hill--eternal wonder of nature that sings on
to the centuries to mock the fleeting vanity of our short lives. The
trees and vines that shadowed my rest or my play or refreshed me with
their luscious fruits can never fade. The fragrance of the wild grape’s
high-hanging bloom comes to me across the vanished years, and, with it,
the flavor of the muscadine wrapped within its leathery skin. And as I
dwell upon these fragments of youth’s vanished paradise, I hear again
the sad, sweet song of Tishomingo’s pines--the same that sang to the
Chickasaw Indians before the white man came.
That county, which was the world of my young and impressionable life,
seemed to me to hold all that was necessary to human happiness. Its
territory was equal to the State of Rhode Island, and three rivers were
born within its borders--the Tombigbee, the Hatchie, and the Tuscumbia.
Even to my unsophisticated mind there was something in the grandeur and
the freedom of the place that spoke of things beyond the senses of the
body. Like all the Indian countries, it had its mysterious landmarks
and its sad and beautiful legends of the wars and loves and tragedies of
the wild, savage, brave people whose crude road to God was through the
“happy hunting ground.”
My boyish imagination deeply colored with the glory and the romance of
those vague traditions, I have stood, in the shadow of moonlit nights,
and watched the dark heads of the pines nodding to the sky, and thought
that, perchance, their whispered song was the echoed sigh of the
vanquished red man brooding, in spirit, above the land he had so loved.
Another scene that flutters through my memory like a fantastic dream is
the darkening forest of the evening twilight hour, alive with uncounted
thousands of wild pigeons, turning the silent woods into a Babel of
musical chatter as they gathered to rest in their sylvan lodge.
These all have flown away on the wings of time, as utterly as the great
herds of the buffalo have vanished from the plains of the West, and, so
far as I know, not a single bird of this species is left in our
country.
For some strange reason the God of nature has permitted spoiled man to
waste the myriad wonders of the virgin woods, until only the rivers, the
springs, and the eternal sky are left of the glory that was.
In melancholy recollection of all the people and all the things beloved
that are gone from that small, though great, green country of my early
life, I salute thee, O Tishomingo of sacred memories!
This reverie may be meaningless to the majority of my readers; but if
this, my heart’s humble tribute to the remembered beauty of my native
land shall meet the eye of a single companion of those blissful days and
enchanting scenes, _he_ will understand and the others will forgive.
[Illustration: text decoration]