The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (115 page)

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Having accomplished Buell’s repulse without the firing of a shot on either side—except in his rear, when Forrest and Morgan were on the rampage—Bragg now turned his mind to larger prospects, involving nothing less than the upset and reversal of the entire military situation in the enormous theater lying between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, the Ohio and the Gulf of Mexico.

The actual movement which placed him in a position to accomplish this design had been undertaken as the result of a decision reached on the spur of a moment in late July: specifically, the anniversary of Manassas. Before that, he had spent a month reorganizing and refitting the army he inherited when Beauregard left Tupelo for what he thought would be a ten-day convalescence. It had been no easy job. After the long retreat, the troops were badly in need of almost everything, including rest. What they needed most, however, was discipline; or so Bragg told “the brave men of Shiloh and of Elkhorn” in an address issued on June 27, the date of his official appointment to command the Army of the Mississippi.

“I enter hopefully on my duties,” he declared. “But, soldiers, to secure the legitimate results of all your heavy sacrifices which have brought this army together, to infuse that unity and cohesion essential for a resolute resistance to the wicked invasion of our country, and to give to serried ranks force, impetus, and direction for driving the invader beyond our borders, be assured discipline at all times and obedience to the orders of your officers on all points, as a sacred duty, an act of patriotism, is an absolute necessity.” Great events were impending. “A few more days of needful preparation and organization and I shall give your banners to the breeze … with the confident trust that you will gain additional honors to those you have already won on other fields.” After much that was turgid, he ended grimly: “But be prepared to undergo privation and labor with cheerfulness and alacrity.”

Cheerfulness was by no means a primary characteristic of this sixth among the Confederacy’s full generals; dyspepsia and migraine had made him short-tempered and disputatious all his life. In the old army there was a story that in his younger days, as a lieutenant commanding one of several companies at a post where he was also serving as quartermaster, he had submitted a requisition for supplies, then as quartermaster had declined by indorsement to fill it. As company commander he resubmitted the requisition, giving additional reasons for his needs, but as quartermaster he persisted in denial. Having reached this impasse, he referred the matter to the post commandant, who took one look at the correspondence and threw up his hands: “My God, Mr Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarreling with yourself!” Other stories were less humorous: as for instance that one of his soldiers had attempted to assassinate him not long after the Mexican War by exploding a 12-pound shell under his cot. When the smoke cleared away, the cot was reduced to tatters and kindling, but Bragg himself emerged without a scratch.

He had left the army in 1856 for a civilian career, not in his native North Carolina but as a sugar planter and commissioner of swamp lands in Louisiana. With the coming of the present war—which he believed had been brought on by such ill-advised political measures as the extension of “universal suffrage”—he had sustained his former reputation as a disciplinarian and a fighter by whipping his Gulf Coast command rapidly into a state of efficiency and leading it aggressively at Shiloh. There, he said in his report immediately afterwards, the army had been given “a valuable lesson, by which we should profit—never on a battlefield to lose a moment’s time, but leaving the killed, wounded, and spoils to those whose special business it is to care for them, to press on with every available man, giving a panic-stricken and retreating foe no time to rally, and reaping all the benefits of success never complete until every enemy is killed, wounded, or captured.”

He was now in a position, with the approval of the authorities in
Richmond, to give this precept large-scale application. After informing him on June 29 that his department had been “extended so as to embrace that part of Louisiana east of the Mississippi, the entire states of Mississippi and Alabama, and the portion of Georgia and Florida west of the Chattahoochee and Apalachicola Rivers,” Secretary Randolph not only authorized an offensive, but urged him to “Strike the moment an opportunity offers.” That was what Bragg had already told his soldiers he intended to do, as soon as he had completed the reorganization-in-progress. However, this was attended by many difficulties. One problem, beyond the need for restoring (or, Bragg would say, injecting) discipline, was the army’s health. The troops had brought their Corinth ailments with them; including the men from the Transmississippi, the July 1 “aggregate present” of 61,561 was reduced to 45,393 by deduction of those who were sick or in arrest or on extra duty. Healthier conditions at Tupelo, plus the absence of strain—the nearest bluecoat was two days off—would restore a good part of these 16,000 soldiers to the ranks. More serious, as Bragg saw it, was the shortage of competent high-ranking officers. Van Dorn was gone, transferred to Vicksburg in mid-June when Davis and Farragut threatened the city from above and below; Breckinridge went with him, taking 6000 troops to oppose a landing by the men from Butler, and Hindman was detached at the same time to raise an army in Arkansas. Polk having been relieved of his corps and named second in command of the whole, Hardee and Price were the only experienced major generals left in direct charge of troops. The rest, Bragg told Richmond, including most of the brigadiers in the sweeping indictment, were “in my judgment unsuited for their responsible positions”; were, in fact, “only incumbrances, and would be better out of the way.”

Despite these shortcomings—and despite the fact that the War Department increased his difficulties by not allowing him to consolidate under-strength regiments bled white at Shiloh, then further reduced to skeletons by pestilence at Corinth—he kept his army hard at work, convinced that this was the sovereign remedy for injured health as well as for injured discipline. In compensation for long hours of drill he issued new uniforms and better rations, both of which had an additional salutary effect. New problems were dealt with as they arose, including an upsurge of desertion. He met it harshly. “Almost every day we would hear a discharge of musketry, and knew that some poor trembling wretch had bid farewell to mortal things here below,” one soldier afterwards recalled. The effectiveness of such executions was increased, Bragg believed, by lining up the condemned man’s former comrades to watch him pay for his crime. It worked; desertion decreased; but at a price. “We were crushed,” the same observer added bitterly. “Bragg, so the soldiers thought, was the machine that did it.… He loved to crush the spirit of his men. The more of a hangdog look they had about them
the better was General Bragg pleased. Not a single soldier in the whole army ever loved or respected him.”

True or false, all this was rather beside the point as far as Bragg was concerned. He was not out after love or respect; he was after results, and he got them. On July 12 he informed the Adjutant General that the time since his last report, forwarded to Richmond when he assumed official command two weeks before, “has been diligently applied to organization, discipline, and instruction, with a very marked improvement. The health and general tone of the troops, too, exhibits results no less gratifying. Our condition for service is good and has reached a culminating point under the defective skeleton organization.”

He was ready to strike. The question was, where? In what direction? Grant’s army, considerably larger than his own and occupying strong positions under Sherman and Rosecrans at Memphis and Corinth, seemed practically unassailable; besides which, Bragg told Richmond, “A long and disastrous drouth, threatening destruction to the grain crop, continues here and renders any move [into North Mississippi] impracticable for want of water.” As for Buell, his lateral advance had been so slow and apparently so uncertain that for a long time the Confederates had found it impossible to determine his objective. It might be Chattanooga—in that case, Bragg had already sent a 3000-man brigade of infantry to reinforce the troops in East Tennessee—or it might be Atlanta, depending on what direction he took after crossing the river at Bridgeport. Whichever it was, Bragg decided in mid-July to give him all the trouble he could by sending two brigades of cavalry, under Colonel Joseph Wheeler and Brigadier General Frank Armstrong, to harass his lines of supply and communication in West Tennessee and North Alabama.

They had excellent models for their work, commanders who had already given cavalry operations—and, indeed the war itself—a new dimension, based on their proof that sizeable bodies of hard-riding men could not only strike and create havoc deep in the enemy’s rear, Jeb Stuart-style, but could stay there to strike again and again, spreading the havoc over hundreds of miles and wearing out their would-be pursuers by causing them to converge repeatedly on thin air. By now the whole Confederate West was ringing with praise for Morgan and Forrest: particularly the former, whose exploits had surrounded him with the aura of a legend. A tall, white-faced, handsome, cold-eyed man, soft-spoken and always neatly dressed in conservative but obviously expensive clothes—fine gray broadcloth, fire-gilt buttons, richly polished boots, and spotless linen—he knew the effectiveness of reticence, yet he could be flamboyant on occasion. “Kentuckians!” he exhorted in a broadside struck off at Glasgow and distributed on his sweep through the Bluegrass, “I have come to liberate you from the hands of your oppressors.” Calling for volunteer recruits, “fifty thousand of Kentucky’s bravest
sons,” and implying thereby that he would take only the bravest, he broke into verse:

He was seldom flamboyant, however, except for a purpose. For example, he carried with him a telegrapher, a wire-tap expert who, though he would sometimes chat waggishly with enemy operators—once he even went so far as to complain directly to Washington, in Morgan’s name, about the inferior grade of mules being furnished Buell’s army—not only intercepted messages that kept his chief informed of the Federal efforts to surround him, but also sent out false instructions that turned the converging blue columns off his trail. Such devices yielded profits. Leaving Knoxville on July 4 with fewer than 900 men, he made a thousand-mile swing through Middle Tennessee and Kentucky, in the course of which he captured seventeen towns, together with tons of Union supplies, paroled nearly 1200 regular army prisoners, and dispersed about 1500 home-guarders, all at a cost of less than 90 casualties, and returned before the end of the month with an additional 300 volunteers picked up along the way. Two weeks later he was back again. Lest it be thought that he was merely a hit-and-run sort of soldier, after wrecking the Gallatin tunnel he turned on his pursuer—Brigadier General R. W. Johnson, a West Pointer and fellow-Kentuckian, whom Buell had assigned the task of intercepting the raiders with an equal force—and whipped him soundly, breaking up his command and capturing the general and his staff.

Forrest was a different sort of man; different in method, that is, if not in results. Recuperating in Memphis from his Fallen Timbers wound—the ball had lodged against his spine and was removed in the field a week later, without the benefit of an anesthetic—he put a recruiting notice in the local paper, calling for “able-bodied men … with good horse and gun. I wish none but those who desire to be actively engaged.… Come on, boys, if you want a heap of fun and to kill some Yankees.” When he returned to Corinth, shortly before the evacuation, Beauregard sent him to Chattanooga with orders to weld the scattered East Tennessee cavalry units into a brigade. He arrived in late June, assembled his men, and, believing active duty the best possible training for a green command, crossed the Tennessee River on July 9 to camp the following night atop Cumberland Mountain, deep in enemy territory. At dawn Sunday, three mornings later and ninety roundabout miles away, civilian hostages held in the Murfreesboro jail—several were under sentence of death, in retaliation for the bushwhacking of Union soldiers on or near their farms—heard what one of them later called “a
Strange noise like the roar of an approaching storm.” It was hoofbeats: Forrest’s 1400 troopers were pounding up the turnpike. Two regiments of infantry, one from Michigan, one from Minnesota, each with a section of artillery and cavalry support—their combined strength was about the same as Forrest’s, except that he had no guns—were camped on opposite sides of town, with detachments guarding the jail and the courthouse, in which the brigade supplies were stored. Quickly the town was taken, along with the Federal commanding general, and fire-fights broke out on the outskirts, where the blue infantry prepared to defend its camps. Once the hostages had been freed and the captured goods packed for removal along with the prisoners already taken, some of the raiders, believing the alarm had spread to other Union garrisons by now, suggested withdrawal. But Forrest would have none of that. “I didn’t come here to make half a job of it,” he said, influenced perhaps by the fact that today was his forty-first birthday; “I’m going to have them all.”