The State of Jones (5 page)

But the stargazing turned to fatal horror as the artillery found its range, guided by the Yankee campfires. Messmates were just cooking their breakfasts, frying salt pork or hanging kettles of coffee to
boil by baling wire, as the shells began to keen. Seconds later explosions gouged bloody potholes in their midst. Men frantically doused the fires, and cooks and teamsters panicked and scrambled toward shelter. There was none—the artillery was also firing at the lights in the village. A shell exploded through the doorway of the Tishomingo Hotel, killing a man and wounding two more.

“The scene soon changed and you may believe was less pleasant,” Starr scribbled,

The Union’s siege guns began to return fire, the batteries opening up with such concerted force it seemed to cause the ground to shift. Lewis Phillips of the 4th Iowa “actually believed the earth to be dropping from under our feet.”

Newton had been awakened by the thunder of the artillery duel, and in this unholy noise he and the rest of the 7th Mississippi Battalion fell back under the cover of a hill to cook some rations, along with their general, Martin Green. But just as they dug into their breakfasts, Union guns found them and shellfire rained down, plowing up dirt. It would be another long, hungry, thirsty day.

As the sky brightened, Van Dorn waited for Hébert’s infantry attack to launch. But only silence came from the battlefield. Eventually,
light musket fire began to ripple from Dabney Maury’s side of the line; his skirmishers were engaged. But Hébert’s attack had not begun. He failed to respond to three separate inquiries. Van Dorn was at a loss. Where was he?

At last, at 7:00 a.m., Hébert appeared, pale, to report that he was sick and could not take the field. His inexplicable behavior was later variously rumored to be the result of drunkenness, or cowardice, but it was irrelevant. In either case, he left the Confederate assault in chaos. “I regretted to observe that my whole plan of attack was by this unfortunate delay disarranged,” Van Dorn reported, in an understatement. Van Dorn speedily revised the order of command: the next senior officer, Martin Green, would take charge of the attack.

Green was still covering his head and trying to eat under shell-fire when a message arrived informing him Hébert was ill and he was now in command of the entire division. The message left Green “hopelessly bewildered,” another officer observed. Hébert may not have been drunk or cowardly, but he was surely sloppy: he had failed to give his subordinates any information, preparation, direction, or even orders.

Green was unprepared to assume command of the division. He looked like what he was, a businessman, who at the outbreak of war operated a sawmill in Lewis County, Missouri. “A kind-hearted, unostentatious man,” Lieutenant Colonel Columbus Sykes of the 43rd Mississippi described him. He had a long, bony face, elongated further by a split, gauzy white beard. As he tried to cope with the sudden pressure of organizing five brigades comprised of several thousand men into a massive attack, he radiated uncertainty. Two hours passed as he hesitantly realigned his troops—a feat, given the flaming leaden debris that was raining down on them.

Newton and the men of the 7th Mississippi Battalion found their places in the line. They would advance across the triangle of ground formed by the two intersecting railroad lines and form the innermost muscle of the sweeping Confederate roundhouse punch, aimed at the crossroads in town. Their path would take them between two
of the largest Union gun fortifications, one named Battery Powell and the other Battery Robinett. Ahead, the men could see the Union positions, “bristling with artillery and strongly supported by infantry,” Green reported.

Green ordered the men forward. “With a wild shout,” the Mississippians leaped across a railroad cut with the rest of the brigade. A command came to charge at the “double-quick.”

It was the last order that could be heard, as at least fifty federal guns opened fire on them. The trembling thunder of artillery was joined by the shrieking, concussive outbursts of shells and the short, almost muffled
spat-spat-spat
of Springfield rifles, hammers hitting soft gunpowder, followed by the metallic raking of ramrods. “The very atmosphere seemed filled with shot, shell, grape and canister,” Gree.n reported.

Suddenly it seemed as if they were in a rainstorm of blood. Horses plunged and caterwauled, and men screamed incoherently. There was something about such a charge that forced the breath from men’s throats, almost reflexively, without their even knowing it. As one Mississippi soldier recorded in his diary, “I always said, if I ever went into a charge, I wouldn’t holler. But the very first time I fired off my gun, I hollered as loud as I could, and I hollered every breath until I stopped!”

The Confederates sprinted heedlessly forward, over logs and fallen timber toward the Union lines that belched flame and smoke. “Not for a moment did they halt,” observed a horrified Union soldier watching the approaching slaughter. “Every instant death smote. It came in a hundred shapes, every shape a separate horror. Here a shell, short-fused, exploding in the thinning ranks, would rend its victims and splatter their comrades with brains, flesh and blood. Men’s heads were blown to atoms. Fragments of human flesh still quivering with life would slap other men in the face, or fall to earth to be trampled underfoot.”

One of Newton’s oldest friends, John Harper, fell wounded in both feet. Another Jones County man, James Reddoch, was shot through the jaw.

But the Union artillery simply couldn’t fire rapidly enough to slow the onslaught. As the rebels charged over the killing field, some Northerners flinched and broke even before their lines were struck. Horses stampeded with their limbers on, dragging heavy cannon over and crushing infantrymen. Others dodged out of the way but caught the panic of the animals and dashed to the rear through the columns. “Then a few men followed the horses,” Joseph Nelson of the 81st Ohio wrote. “Then a few more. And still more.” General Rosecrans rode among them, livid, swearing that they were “old women.”

The Confederates overran Battery Powell and took possession of the large guns, nesting among bloody cadavers and horse carcasses. Surging just to the right of the earthworks, the 7th Mississippi Battalion roared through a line of Iowans and Illinoisans and straight on into town.

In Corinth, they fought from house to house. Musket fire spattered against clapboards and made splinters and shards of masonry fly, until whole buildings were practically shot away. Years later, bullet holes still riddled the walls of homes. Some of the rebels, famished despite the battle howling around them, slipped into kitchens and wolfed down whatever they could find to eat, only to be set upon by Yankees. “Every one of them received either the hot lead or the cold steel,” bragged one Iowan who stumbled upon them. More than one hundred Southern men were captured after the battle, “in the
bakeries
and
stores
,” marveled another Iowan.

Steadily, the rebels worked their way toward the Tishomingo Hotel. The Yankees used crates and barrels on the train platforms for cover to return fire. As the action neared Rosecrans’s headquarters, his staff hastily evacuated, officers and contrabands alike almost rioting in alarm at the approach of the Southerners. “There was one of the greatest stampedes of teams, teamsters, non combatants and Negroes that I ever saw,” Edward Dean of the 4th Wisconsin wrote in his diary. “There were all of our Army wagons with teams hitched up, loose horses and mules and Negroes huddled close together, and they began to run and shout; then they seemed to be
frantic with fear. The noise could be plainly heard above the din of battle.”

But the Southerners had outrun their means. Just as they reached the train crossroads, their brigade leader, Colonel W. H. Moore of the 43rd Mississippi, was shot down. Alone and unsupported in the town, against the entire Federal reserves, the rebels began to run out of ammunition. Yankees, mostly Iowans and Illinoisans, now counterattacked: light artillery poured shot into the melee, shells whizzing over the heads and backs of the soldiers, while Iowa sharpshooters from a nearby low rise picked off men in gray. In the face of such an array of fire, the Confederates wavered, and then began to fall back.

“Our lines melted under their fire like snow in thaw,” reported a rebel captain.

With no choice but to retreat men did so frantically, companies dissolving into fragments. Some of them grabbed at bridles of Yankee horses that were hitched in front of the Tishomingo and swung themselves into the saddles. But whether on horseback or on foot, the retreat was more perilous than the advance. “No description is adequate to picture the gauntlet of death that these fugitives ran,” an Iowan reported. “Very few reached the timber
alive …
they had been
cut to pieces
in the most intense meaning of that term.”

All around, the same was happening to other rebel brigades. Just down the line, Confederates assailed Battery Robinett, the largest of the Union gun fortresses, with catastrophic results. Robinett was a stout earthen and log redan near the Memphis and Charleston rail line, with three Parrott guns atop it, masked by two enormous oak trees.

Almost 1,900 rebels attacked the battery three times, led by Colonel William P. Rogers of the 2nd Texas, astride his horse. On the third charge, the rebels screamed through a shallow ravine and came up the steep bank at a dead run. At fifty yards, the Yankees sprang up and fired, mowing them down in hundreds. The rebels still reached the base of the battery, where they clustered in a ditch
at the foot of the bulwark and climbed upward in a hand-to-hand, musket-swinging death struggle. Men used their bayonets “like pitch forks,” and stabbed each other through. Rogers spurred his black mare up the incline, but “he had no more than straightened up until he was full of bullet holes,” according to one Iowan. He toppled backward into the ditch. In just a few minutes, 272 Southerners fell, killed or wounded around Robinett.

It was all over before noon. “My God, my boys are running!” Sterling Price cried, as the men retreated to the tree lines and railroad cuts, the same ones they had charged out of with a yell just two hours earlier.

Soon, the army was in full retreat. Some men ran heedlessly, others ignored orders and dropped to the ground exhausted, sitting where they were, sullenly, with their backs against tree trunks, to be taken prisoners later by Yankees. Others collapsed to their hands and knees and retched. It was a common occurrence after a charge and repulse: often men were ill from slaughter. A Mississippi private remembered that after one foray, he “‘vomited like a very dog’ & … threw myself [down] completely prostrated, upon the ground, panting with the white slime running from my mouth.”

As the Confederates withdrew back into the heavy woods, Union soldiers surveyed fields blanketed with casualties. “There was hardly a spot for a hundred acres but what there lay the dead of the Secesh,” observed Alonzo Courtney of the 63rd Ohio. At Batteries Powell and Robinett, bodies lay crumpled, heaped, and tangled together on the ramparts, arms thrown over legs, legs over hips.

In the ditch before Robinett, Union soldiers found the corpse of Rogers. They propped him up for a photo, his eyes open and staring at the sky, his beard and face blacked with powder, his coat torn open, and his sleeves pushed up, businesslike, to his elbows. A young Iowa infantryman counted fifty-four other forms in the ditch with Rogers, including a regimental chaplain, a boy no older than fifteen, and Rogers’s horse.

Soldiers wandering the fields came across odd, spectral images. A
conical shell was embedded in the center of one of the huge oak trees sheltering Robinett; it had almost passed through the trunk, but not quite, its point just showing on the other side. In some sun-baked parts of the battlefield, bodies had turned black from the heat and gunpowder.

In another place, someone had lifted a stiff-dead Union soldier and braced him against a tree, his gun in hand, as at parade rest.

October 11, 1862, Holly Springs, Mississippi

The bloodied, beaten Confederates’
trail away from Corinth could be followed by their discarded gear: gray coats, blankets, guns, canteens, knapsacks, broken wagons. To one federal, there was “evidence of great demoralization, in the way their arms and equipment were strewn upon the road. More and more was to be seen as we advanced. Finally their wagons were abandoned and much commissary stores were left, until one might think that everything they had” was thrown away. Troops patrolling through the surrounding thickets came across Southerners who simply sat, still, staring into space, and refused to move.

Van Dorn, distraught with the epic extent of his failure and frantic to recover, considered turning around and trying another assault. His generals furiously argued him out of it. Price thought Van Dorn was almost crazed, his mind “rendered desperate by misfortune,” and Maury accused him of loving danger for its own sake. As it was, the army was hard-pressed to recross the Hatchie River without getting cut off. Only the slowness of Rosecrans’s pursuit allowed them to get away, and not before another 452 men were lost. The rebels worked desperately to lay planks over an old dam, and from there, they slogged disconsolately through rain, back toward their headquarters at Holly Springs.