Never Call Retreat (7 page)

By this time Washington had grown weary of hearing commanding generals explain their excellent reasons for inaction. Early in December Halleck notified Rosecrans that the President was most impatient, and warned him: "If you remain one more week in Nashville I cannot prevent your removal." Rosecrans replied that he had wasted no time, listed the evil things that would happen if he moved prematurely, and stoutly closed: "To threats of removal or the like I must be permitted to say that I am insensible." Halleck told him that this was very well, but the President had repeatedly said that there were "imperative reasons why the enemy should be driven across the Tennessee River at the earliest possible moment." The President had not said what these reasons were, but it was important for the Federals to win a decisive victory in Tennessee and Rosecrans must go ahead and win it: "There is a pressure for you to advance much greater than you can possibly have imagined."
³

In point of fact Rosecrans put heavy pressure on himself. He was a driver, and his army was responding to him; the enlisted men were already calling him "Old Rosey," a sure sign of enthusiastic affection. They especially liked the way he inspected regiments. If he saw a soldier with worn-out shoes or a ragged coat he would tell him: "Go to your captain and demand what you need! Go to him every day until you get it! Bore him for it! Bore him in his quarters! Bore him at meal time! Bore him in bed! Don't let him rest!" Warming to his exhortation, he would explain that this demand for relief would bounce upward, through regiment, brigade, division and corps until it reached army headquarters, where "I'll see then if you don't get what you want!"

The men believed that Rosecrans worked so hard that he always stayed up until two in the morning, usually until four, sometimes all night; his aides would fall asleep in their chairs while he worked, and he would tweak their ears, pat their heads paternally, and send them to their cots. He insisted on having young men on his staff—"sandy fellows," he called them, "quick and sharp," who lacked experience and thus had no fixed habits of thought and action to overcome. From his troop commanders he demanded precision. One brigadier sent him a report on Confederate movements, opening with the sentence: "Permit me to give you the following positive information." The brigadier quickly got the report back, with the endorsement: "General Negley will please call at headquarters and explain on what grounds he rests his belief that the information within is positive." Asserting that in a moving army he could not discipline errant officers by court-martial, Rosecrans demanded and got from Secretary Stanton authority to muster out of service officers guilty of pillage, drunkenness, or misbehavior in the presence of the enemy.
⁴

Before Christmas Bragg heard that the Federals might be getting ready to retreat, and he told Wheeler to press their outposts and see what was going on. Wheeler did, and found no sign of a withdrawal; on the contrary all of Rosecrans' army was south of the Cumberland and a forward movement seemed likely. Probably the news was about what Bragg expected. Even though Forrest and Van Dorn had spoiled Grant's plans they had done no harm to Rosecrans, and the strategic picture in Tennessee was unchanged: the Federals had the initiative, and Bragg's army could do nothing but wait for the enemy to make the next move. Bragg's men were quite willing to wait; as veterans they did not care how long active campaigning might be postponed, and while they waited they were in good spirits. There was plenty to eat, for once, and plenty to wear, and the camps were healthy. On Christmas Day the weather was mild and the officers paid calls and got up horse races, while the men played games, including that now-forgotten favorite of country school yards, prisoner's base. Some of the headquarters officers planned an elaborate ball for December 26.
⁵

The ball was never held, because on the morning of December. 26 the cavalry sent word that the Yankees were on the march, heading for Murfreesboro. Rosecrans had things ready at last, twenty days' rations in the warehouses, 45,000 men organized in three commands under Major Generals George H. Thomas, Alexander McD McCook, and Thomas L. Crittenden. (Technically, these commands were known as wings; actually they were army corps, and they would be regularized as such a bit later.) On Christmas night Rosecrans had these officers, and his own staff, at headquarters for an eve-of-campaign drink and a final word. For a time he was the genial host: then, abruptly, he banged a glass down on a table and made his little speech: "We move tomorrow, gentlemen! We shall begin to skirmish probably as soon as we pass the outposts. Press them hard! Drive them out of their nests! Make them fight or run! Strike hard and fast! Give them no rest! Fight them—fight them, I say!" He pounded his open palm with his fist, while imperturbable Pap Thomas grinned at him; and as the generals left to go to their tents Rosecrans gave each man a grip of the hand and repeated: "Fight! Keep fighting! They will not stand it!"
⁶

This vibrant enthusiasm was for the high command. For lesser ranks there was a long hike in the mud. Bragg's army was spread out on a thirty-mile front, at right angles to the line of the Federal advance, so Rosecrans had to send his men forward in separate columns, each adjusting its march to the progress of its neighbors. It made for slow going, and alert Confederate cavalry skirmished along every rise of ground to make the going even slower. The miserable December weather was the worst handicap of all, and the Federal army needed five days to get from Nashville to Murfreesboro. Hard rain driven by cold gusty winds turned the roads into mud and soaked the marching men to the skin; when the rain stopped dense fog covered bivouacs in the dripping second-growth timber, and when more wind came in the morning to blow the fog away it brought rain again so that it was hard for anybody to cook breakfast. The Confederates were doing about as much marching as the Federals were, because Bragg's extended line had to concentrate, and they got as cold and wet and muddy; Bragg wrote feelingly, afterward, about their "seven days exposure to the inclemency of winter weather without cover and with most insufficient diet." One of his brigades dug shallow rifle pits on an exposed hillock and had to huddle there for forty-eight hours, forbidden to make fires either for warmth or for cooking, their blankets as wet as their clothing.
⁷

By December 30 the two armies were groping into close contact a few miles west and northwest of Murfreesboro, the Federals astride the turnpike that ran back to Nashville. The ground was rocky, broken by small hillocks and ridges, with scrub timber separating the brown fields; at irregular intervals there were dense thickets of cedar, wet and black under the gray sky. Across this landscape innumerable parties of skirmishers were prowling. They collided, fired at each other —often enough without doing any damage—and by these small, haphazard encounters, repeated over and over again, the two armies clumsily collected the bits of information that told each one where its enemy was. Slowly, brigade by brigade, the Federal army began to form an irregular line of battle, between three and four miles from flank to flank, facing generally toward the east. Just out of range and mostly out of sight in the woods, Bragg's army, was similarly drawn into position facing toward the west. One of Bragg's divisions lay north of the Nashville turnpike; all the rest were to the south, with the lazy meandering loops of Stone's River to the rear, between the army and its base, Murfreesboro. There were several bridges over the river, and it had numerous fords, and ordinarily it was no great barrier; with all the rain that had been coming down lately, however, it was due to rise, and if Bragg's army had to retreat in a hurry the river might be a problem.

Bragg had no intention of retreating. The strange irresolution that sometimes came over him in a time of crisis was not in evidence now; even though the Federals were on the offensive, obviously preparing to make an assault, Bragg intended to strike first, gambling that he could catch his foe off balance, throwing his full weight into one smashing blow, North of the turnpike and east of the river he had one division, more than 7000 men under Major General John C. Breckinridge, who had once been a Vice-President of the United States. These men would hold their ground, guarding the immediate approach to Murfreesboro and serving as the army's general reserve. With everybody else—close to 30,000 infantry and artillery, led by the two corps commanders, William J. Hardee and Leonidas Polk—Bragg would attack the Federal right, south of the turnpike and west of the river. He devised this plan on December 30, while the cold rain continued to beat down on the waiting armies, and ordered the assault to take place as soon as daylight came on December 31.

By strange coincidence Rosecrans had made a plan which was almost an exact duplicate of this; he too would defend with his right and attack with his left. McCook's corps had taken position opposite Hardee and Polk, the right end of his line drawn back slightly, and McCook's assignment was simply to hold his ground. Thomas was in the center and Crittenden was on the left, and they would smash at the Confederate right, Crittenden going beyond Stone's River to get at Breckinridge. This attack, like Bragg's, was to be launched at daybreak.

The last day of 1862 came in cold and windy after a wet night. The sky was beginning to clear, although a mist was drifting up from the river valley, and Rosecrans, Crittenden and their staff officers stood chatting behind the Federal left. Out of sight in the surrounding woods, Federal soldiers were working with damp bits of wood to make smoky little fires to boil coffee. As soon as they finished breakfast the battle would begin; some of Crittenden's men were already starting to ford the river. Then, far to the southward, there was a rolling, crackling noise, snapping and sputtering and sounding (as one of the headquarters men remembered it) for all the world like a cane brake on fire. It grew louder, spreading to right and left across sodden fields and woods that the commanding general could not see, and it was punctuated by salvos of artillery fire which overlapped and became a pounding unbroken roar, an ominous bass for the rising treble of the musketry. The uproar came nearer, and there was the far-off sound of the falsetto Confederate battle cry. Down the lanes that led back from McCook's rear came ambulances and supply wagons, rocking and careening as panicky teamsters flogged their horses. Fugitive infantrymen began to appear, singly, then in disorganized squads, finally in a confused broken flood. All chance for a Federal offensive vanished. McCook's entire army corps had been routed, and unless Rosecrans could form a new line and find men who could hold it he might lose his whole army.

Bragg had planned better and moved faster, and his men had not waited for breakfast. Hardee's corps had been posted far beyond McCook's flank, and when his brigades charged, wheeled toward the right and struck the end of McCook's line, that line broke into fragments. Running back to find new defensive positions the Federal brigades lost contact with one another; the Confederates came in a division at a time, each unit striking with crushing force, and whenever a Federal unit formed to make a stand it was flanked, crumpled, and driven back. One of McCook's divisions led by a black-haired, bandy-legged young general named Phil Sheridan swung back like a gate in a gale of wind, rallied, and for a time held on valiantly, a mile away from its original position, facing toward what had been the Federal rear an hour earlier. Then Bishop Polk began driving his men in beside Hardee's, Sheridan's line gave way, and Rosecrans was desperately pulling men over from the extreme left to save the day.

The fresh levies and the remnants of the ones that had been routed began to form up, late in the morning, on or near the Nashville turnpike. That fact measures the extent of the disaster; at daybreak this had been a safe roadway, slanting back on a long diagonal from the army's center to behind its left, and troops that had been posted to attack toward the east were now trying to beat off an onslaught from the southwest and west. Rosecrans' tortured army was bent far back on itself, like a jackknife with its blade nearly closed. If the Confederates could break the Federal grip anywhere on the turnpike the blade would snap shut and the Union army would be gone.

At the angle in the line—the place where the knife blade joined the handle—there was a four-acre patch of trees known as the Round Forest, and by the middle of the morning it was the most important spot on the battlefield. Hardee's men had driven their foes in a huge semicircle and were fighting within musket shot of the pike, but the Federal line had stiffened at last and these Confederates, who had had fearful losses, could do no more. Now Bishop Polk ordered an all-out attack on the Round Forest, which Thomas and Crittenden had packed with infantry backed by a powerful array of artillery—Thomas had been building up a row of guns ever since the battle started, in preparation for this moment of crisis—and the noise of combat became unendurable, so that charging men paused in the fields to pluck cotton from the open bolls and stuff it in their ears. Federals who lay in line of battle northwest of the woods were amazed to see dozens of rabbits, driven wholly out of their wits by the uproar, scampering along the line and trying to crawl under the prostrate soldiers for shelter. Someone remembered that distracted flocks of little birds kept circling over the woods while the fighting was going on.

Spearhead of the attack on the Round Forest was a brigade of Mississippi troops under Brigadier General James R. Chalmers. These were the lads who had huddled for two days in damp rifle pits, unable to build fires, soaked and half frozen; the order to attack struck them as a positive relief, and they swung forward to expend on the hated Yankees the fury generated by forty-eight hours of misery. They charged on the run but the Federal musketry tore them apart; they re-formed, came on again, were broken by artillery fire, General Chalmers was shot down, some regiments lost half a dozen color bearers in rapid succession—and at last the survivors, completely fought out, went back to their rifle pits. A Tennessee brigade charged beside them and captured two batteries, but the Yankee line remained unbroken. By an extremely narrow margin the Federals kept the Round Forest.