VICKSBURG Chapter Sixty - Six

At almost exactly 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, 22 May, 1863, the first 50 volunteers of The Forlorn Hope came running out of a ravine onto the Graveyard Road 500 yards in front of the Stockade Redoubt.

Leading the way in the first group was color bearer Private Howell Gilliam Trogden, from the 8^th Missouri Infantry. William recalled being “...met by a terrific fire...so deadly that our little band was almost annihilated."

Not far behind was 22 year old Private Uriah Brown, of Company G of the 30^th Ohio. Between him and his partner they carried an 8 foot log, lifting it by handles driven into its pulp. Almost immediately the Captain running to Uriah's left was shot down, dead. A few steps later, the face of the Lieutenant to his right was reduced to a scarlet mask. Uriah kept running,

As 22 year old German born Corporal William J. Archinal, from Company “I” of the 30^th Ohio, approached the ditch, his “log” rear partner was shot down. The abrupt loss of lift threw William off balance. Momentum carried him and the log forward, across the ditch - where William hit his head on a rock and was knocked out.

As Private Brown reached the trench he and his partner threw their log across, only to discover it had been cut too short. While they tried to make sense of this, a spinning bit of metal creased William's temple. He also passed out and fell into the ditch, beneath the log he had carried.

In the second group was 23 year old Private Jacob Sanford, from the 55^th Illinois Infantry. As he ran forward he could feel and hear the minnie balls zipping through the air around his head, and pulling at his clothes. He would later find 2 holes in his hat and nine through his army blouse. Just as the ditch came into sight a ricocheting piece of grape shot hit the board he was carrying, slammed it against his ankle, tripping him up and sending him tumbling, conscious, into the trench.

Private Howell Trogden struggled to force his way up the slope, the brown loam spilling over the tops of his shoes, the national flag seemingly pulling him up the slope. Then, “A canister struck the staff a few inches above my hand and cut it half in two.” The flag snapped and toppled. Howell grabbed the shortened staff and held it aloft for an instant. Then, he added, “...they depressed their guns and a cannon ball struck the folds and carried it half away, knocking it out of my hands." Trogden fell face down into the redoubt, and slid back almost to the ditch – by now “strewn with mangled bodies, with heads and limbs blown off.”

All these men had come to the Forlorn Hope by individual paths, but perhaps none so odd as the trail of flag carrier Howell Trogden (above).  He had been born along the Deep River, among the Separate Baptists, Quakers and Wesleyans in the Piedmont of Randolph County, Confederate North Carolina. Before Howell celebrated his 20^th birthday, the staunch unionist moved north to Missouri and found work as a steamboat cabin boy. Shortly after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Howell joined Company “B”, of the American Zouaves, 8^th Missouri infantry.

In June of 1862, Holwell volunteered to carry confidential messages between General William Tecumseh Sherman and his friend, fellow Union General Schuyler Hamilton - grandson of Alexander Hamilton. But in July, while trying to sneak through Ripley, Mississippi, Howell was captured by Confederate soldiers. Howell was tried and convicted as a spy and sentenced to death. His sentence was quickly commuted, and he spent 4 months in various prison camps before being paroled in November. By winter he had been exchanged and rejoined his regiment in Tennessee.

Watching the Forlorn Hope from behind the lines, General Sherman observed, “...about half of them were shot down.” “When the survivors reached the ditch,” wrote Sherman, “they were unable to construct the bridges as too many logs had been lost along the way when their bearers were shot down....For about two hours, we had a severe and bloody battle, but at every point we were repulsed...Of the storming party 85 % were either killed or dangerously wounded, and few of them escaped without a wound of some kind.’  Inside the fort, Sargent George Powell Clark of the 36th

Mississippi recalled the Yankee soldiers "fell like grass before the reaper."

Private William Trogden would later recall, “Only three of my comrades succeeded in reaching the fort with me: Sergeant Nagle who was killed on the spot and a private from 54th regiment...shared the same fate.” And now, with the rebel minnie balls screaming an inch over his head, he taunted the rebel soldiers just 10 feet away, ‘What flag are you fighting under today, Johnny?” His unseen enemy heard the words as sheer bravado and shouting back, “You'd better surrender, Yank.” But William was as stubborn as any other North Carolina native. “Oh, no, Johnny”, he replied. “You’ll surrender first.”

Private Uriah Brown recovered conciseness to the thud of musket balls slamming into the log he had carried. What he could see of the situation was a total disaster. There were no logs for the bridges, no steps for the men carrying scaling ladders to run across. The forlorn hope had done no more than deliver a few dozen, mostly wounded, Yankees to the foot of the strongest rebel fort in the entire Vicksburg defensive line. And now they were all pinned down.

Then the rebels began cutting the fuses of artillery shells and rolling them down the slope. Some brave Yankees tried catching them and throwing them back. Sometimes that worked. But most of the Forlorn Hope were slashing away at the slope with their bayonets, desperately struggling to create a vertical foxhole. Three times Uriah Brown paused while slashing his own cover to drag a wounded man into the shelter of the slope, and carving them a haven. Eventually an officer ordered him to stop that and concentrate on firing at the top of the slope, to keep the rebel's heads down. That helped a little.

The first of the “follow on” regiments was the 37^th Ohio Volunteers. They had already provided six men for the Forlorn Hope group. But in the few yards the unit advanced 4 abreast, up the Graveyard Road they suffered enough casualties to convince them it was a useless assault. Sensibly they took what cover they could, and lay down on the road. 

These men were no more cowards than any other soldiers, as proven when 20 year old Chillicothe native, Private Joseph Hanks of company E, spotted one of the Forlorn Hope wounded a few yards further up the road, begging for water. Under intense fire, Hanks crawled forward, shared his canteen, and then dragged the wounded man off the field, all the while under fire.

As following regiments tried to find a way around the roadblock of the 37^th, they suffered casualties from flanking fire. None were able to approach the Stockade Redoubt. By 11:00 a.m., General Sherman had seen enough, stopped any further attacks and ordered the 37^th to withdraw. Union artillery also began to cease firing, since they ran as much risk of hitting the remnants of the Forlorn Hope as the rebels.

Meanwhile, the fierce little fight on the slope of the Stockade Redan continued. Members of the 36^th Mississippi managed to use their bayoneted muskets to extend their reach and topple the flag which Private Trogen had planted on the fort's slope. Now they were trying to use the same method to snare the flag and pull it into the fort for capture. Trogden attempted to borrow a musket and bayonet to fend them off. But the soldier he asked, Corporal Robert Cox of “K” company, of the 55^th Illinois, “... concluded to try it myself. I raised my head again about as high as the safety of the case would permit, and pushed my gun across the intervening space...gave their bayonets a swipe with mine, and dodged down just in time to escape being riddled. I did not want any more of that kind of amusement,...”

It was about now that Corporal William J. Archinal recovered conciseness. He found himself, “...lying on my face with the log across my body and showers of bullets whistling through the air and dropping all around me....I could hear the bullets striking the log in dozens. Sometime during the afternoon one of our cannon balls struck the log close to my head; the log bounded in the air and fell a little way from me, but I crawled up to it again and hugged it close.”

Private David Jones, an 18 year old in Company “D” of the 57^th Ohio, spent the afternoon under the hot Mississippi sun, deaf to the violence around him. His ears were bleeding from the explosion of a shell rolled down by the rebels. During the attack, 15 year old Private David F. Day, of Company “D” had been shot in the right wrist, and was unable to hold his musket. Yet he stayed, and used his bayonet to carve a shelter with his good hand. Corporal Robert Cox was so close to the rebels inside the fort they suggested the Yankees come on in, give up, and share dinner with with the garrison. According to Cox, “We positively declined...unless they would come out and give us a chance to see if the invitation were genuine. This they refused to do, but agreed to send a messenger. By and by it arrived in the shape of a shell, which went flying down the hill...”

At some point in the long hot close afternoon, Private Uriah Brown felt an “overwhelming desire to return” to the Federal lines. The 22 year old slid into the bloody ditch, and crawled across fifty yards of the open ground. Amazingly, the rebel snipers ignored him. Perhaps he was so covered in blood they assumed like a wounded dog, he was crawling away to die. At some point he found a little knoll which provided enough cover he could stop and catch his breath. He might continued on to safety, but he heard 2 men moaning a few yards away. Uriah crawled from his sanctuary and one at a time, pulled the men to join him behind the knoll, dressed their wounds as best he could and gave them water from his own canteen. By his survival, Private Uriah Brown, named for the Hittite dispatched to the forefront of the hottest battle, had saved five wounded men that day.

Of the 150 men who had volunteered for The Forlorn Hope, 77 would later be presented with the Congressional Medal of Honor.  Almost as many had been killed. And the day was not yet half over.

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STEALING ABRAHAM LINCOLN

STEALING ABRAHAM LINCOLN

I would say, to use the criminal vernacular, that Big Jim Kinealy went 'Chinese angle' when the 'buttons' nipped his 'boodler'.

Benjamen F. Boyd was the Midwest’s foremost boodler, and maybe the finest engraver of counterfeit printing plates outside of the U.S. Treasury Department. Boyd’s queer fin was so good that by 1875 there were more than 300,000 examples floating about, maybe half of all five dollar notes in circulation. The treasury stopped issuing legitimate fins out of the Chicago branch entirely.

Then, in October, the Secret Service descended upon the little Mississippi river town of Fulton, Illinois and before Ben Boyd could slip across the railroad bridge to Iowa, slapped the bracelets on him right in front of his outraged wife. And that left Big Jim squarely behind the eight ball.

Big Jim owned a stable in St. Louis, but that was just his dodge. He was “a born crook” and the high pillow to hundreds of finders, passers, runners, smashers, bindle stiffs, butter and egg men and fake-a-loo artists, in short everyone and anyone who passed the queer soft on to unsuspecting marks. So with Ben doing a decade in the Joliet caboose (above) you would guess that Big Jim would to be looking for a new slant. Instead he came up with a plan that was a real bunny; he would steal the body of Abraham Lincoln, and exchange it for the live body Benjamnn Boyd - plus $200,000, just as an afterthought.

Late in January of 1876 Big Jim reached out to one of his Chicago passers, Ben Sheridan, who was looking for a vacation, after getting pinched and jumping bail.  Ben was a cool customer and played the Jasper in his fancy suit with a full beard. Big Jim figured him as the man who knew just how far he could push the bulge.

So he set Sheridan and his four man crew of goons up in a tavern in Springfield, Illinois (above), complete with a full liquor stock, and they spent a couple of months just taking the lay of the land. They played tourists at Lincoln’s tomb in the Oak Ridge Cemetery several times and it looked like an eggs-in-the-coffee job to them.

The rectangular granite monument sat atop the highest point in the cemetery. Two curving, confusing corridors met in the center of the marble monument at two rooms. In one room rested the body of Mary Todd Lincoln. In the other rested the President’s sarcophagus.

The monument itself was surrounded by tall oaks that would hide any nighttime visitors. The cemetery was two miles outside of town, the room containing the sarcophagus had but a single padlock on its gate, the groundskeeper lived elsewhere, there were no bulls on duty at night and questioning a custodian revealed that the casket itself had been sealed with simple plaster of Paris.

By the end of June things looked so Jake to Sheridan that he took a night off to relax. And that was when he stuck his foot in it. Drunk on corn in a local "can house" (above), Sheridan boasted to a chippy that on the night of July the third he was going “steal old Lincoln’s bones”. Well, the chippy called copper, which is to say she notified the local bulls, and in the morning the buttons paid a visit to Sheridan’s establishment just to let him know the caper was blown. Big Jim was not happy. He repossessed the liquor stock, locked the tavern tight and ordered the whole crew back to Chicago.

The truth was, Big Jim might have been lucky things went adrift at this point, because when John Carroll Power, the custodian, was interviewed later he described in detail the entire gang and offered the opinion that Sheridan was “of more intelligence “than all four goons “combined”, but “of exceedingly depraved morals”. Obviously Mr. Power was an observant judge of character and a powerful witness.

That fall, in the back room of The Hub, a saloon at 294 West Madison Street in Chicago, Big Jim met with his second choice of conspirators; Terrence Mullen (above), the bar owner, and a passer named Jack Hughes (below).

But Big Jim decided that this time they needed an actual resurrectionist, a man familiar with the problems of body snatching. And he was lucky enough that just such a man had recently started hanging out at The Hub, an ex-sailor and life long bundle stiff and body snatcher by the name of Louis C. Swegles. Swegles knew the right people and they seemed to know him, so Big Jim brought him into the plot, now laid on for election night, “a da-ned fine elegant time to do it”, as Jack Hughes said.

They caught the night train for Springfield and arrived at six on the morning of November seventh, and checked into the St. Charles Hotel. In their luggage they brought a can of blasting powder, a six foot fuse, a small file and a saw. They gang caught some sleep, leaving a call for 10:30 A.M. After breakfast Louis Swegles and Jack Hughs paid a visit to the monument. Hughes assured his fellows they wouldn’t need their tools to open the locked gate on the tomb. “I could fall against it and open it,” he boasted. Terry Mullen wanted to be certain, so that afternoon he stole an axe from a hardware store.

About nine o’clock that night they slipped into the looming silent monument. While Swegle held the lantern, Mullen began to saw through the padlock that Hughes had shown such disrespect for. And almost immediately the saw blade broke. Mullen was reduced to working the padlock with the file. It felt like it was going to take forever.

Finally the padlock fell apart and the three then prepared to attack the sarcophagus itself. Mullen wanted to use a sledge hammer but Swegles pointed to the copper dowels that were all that held the lid on. Having removed the lid (the open sarcophagus, above) they slid the President’s cedar covered lead coffin out. Swegles handed the lantern to Hughes and slipped back outside to bring the wagon up to the service door.

After waiting a few moments for Swegles to reappear, Hughes and Mullen decided it would be better if they waited outside. They were standing under an oak tree a hundred feet away from the service door when they heard the crack of a gunshot echoing from inside the monument. Being experienced thieves, they ran for it. Outside the cemetery walls they boarded the last streetcar for the night bound for downtown Springfield, and heard more shots and shouting behind them. Hughes and Mullen did not return to their hotel, but split up and made their separate ways out of Springfield on foot.

By November 9th Mullen was back in Chicago, tending bar at the Hub as if nothing had happened. Two days later Swegles reappeared with a harrowing tale of having escaped the bulls by the skin of his teeth. A week afterward Hughes showed as well. They were all thinking themselves very lucky to have escaped the Bulls.

But just as Mullen and Hughes started to ask themselves what had gone wrong, that was when the bulls swept them up. Both Hughes and Mullen were arrested and transported back to Springfield. Swegles was not arrested because he had been a stoolie for the Treasury bulls from the very beginning. From the second he had been asked to join the scheme, the bulls had been kept apace at every step of the way. Swegles had not gone for the wagon, he and alerted the bulls waiting in tomb to make the arrest. But instead they had ended up fighting a gun battle with each other in the dark. And Big Jim? Well, he never liked to be close to the actual crime, and immediately made himself scarce. The last he was heard of, Big Jim was heading for New Mexico territory.

Oddly enough there was no law in Illinois against grave robbing, so Hughes and Mullen were convicted only of the theft of Lincoln’s coffin, value set at $75.00. They were sentenced to one year each at hard labor and then disappeared from the pages of history. Big Jim would be convicted in 1880 of a land fraud in New Mexico Territory, and end up serving his time in the Joliet prison, the same institution once occupied by his onetime printer, Ben Boyd.

As for the corpse of President Abraham Lincoln, the unwilling player in this farce, Mr. Power had him secretly reburied in the basement of the tomb. And there he resided in obscurity in his own tomb until 1901 when Lincoln's son, Robert, had his father's coffin reburied. But this time it was placed inside a steel cage, lowered into a new 10 foot vault dug into the Illinois soil, into which was poured several tons of concrete and then the original stone sarcophagus was placed on top of it all, making it very unlikely anyone would ever try to steal Lincoln's corpse, ever again.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Sixty - Five

The artillery crescendo gave the game away. As the hands on thousands of watches clicked over to 10:00 am on Thursday, 22 May, 1863 - another of those heavy humid Mississippi mornings – dozens of gunners along the 3 mile long battle line waited for that final tick to pull their lanyards one last time. It was natural, to want to deliver one last blow against the enemy before the defenseless infantry came came out into the open. But after hours of shot and shell, the hiccup in the rhythm of the bombardment, followed by the thunder of so many cannon in unison, betrayed the attacker's intent. Without bidding, the men of the 36^th Mississippi occupied the firing step of the redoubt and half cocked their muskets. Now it would be their courage and iron and powder against a forlorn hope.

Ulysses Grant (above)  had decided even before the second failure of 19 May that he would try again, but a harder blow this time. On Tuesday Grant had been able to bring 15,000 men against the rebel lines. Now he could use the combined strength of 40,000 men, and the entire artillery reserves of the Army of the Tennessee. With an hour long bombardment to prepare the way, Grant meant to capture Vicksburg on 21 May, before the rebels in his rear, under General Joe Johnston, had time to assemble a new army.

That plan changed after Grant was recognized by the reserves and wounded of Sherman's XV Corps. As he rode through their ranks after the failed assault the men chanted, “Hard tack, hard tack, hard tack, hard tack”. The veterans were not showing affection for the ubiquitous barely palatable biscuit, also known as “molar breakers” and “worm castles”. 

Instead, the chanting troops were advising their general that after two weeks of more marching and foraging than fighting, they were willing to storm this rebel city, but they would need full bellies and a full ration of ammunition. It was the genius of Grant that he heard his soldiers, took their advice, and delayed his second assault until 22 May.

The wagons which now trundled up the new road from the Johnson Plantation on Chickasaw Bayou, were loaded with food – for every soldier 20 ounces of pork or beef, 16 ounces of hard tack, and 1 ounce of desiccated mixed vegetables or potatoes. 

And for every 100 men, 8 quarts of beans or peas, 10 pounds of hominy, 8 pounds of roasted coffee beans, 10 lbs of sugar and 1 quart of vinegar. Not until every regiment had received three day's rations, was the emphases shifted back to ammunition.

Major General Sherman decided to use the extra day to prepare his corps for the renewed assault on the Stockade Redoubt (above).  It stood astride the Graveyard Road, the primary northern route into Vicksburg. Now the men knew what they faced – the 8 food deep and 8 feet wide ditch filled with abatis, and then the 17 foot slope before they could even come to gripes with the enemy. And being innovative men, they invented a way of avoiding the ditch.

That Wednesday morning, each of the 15 regiments in General Sherman's Corp was asked to provided 10 volunteers. The response spoke well for the spirit of the Army. Without knowing the risk they were being asked to take, double the number needed stepped forward. It allowed Sherman (above) to eliminate married men from the mission. But Sherman expressed his true feelings when he labeled the storming parties as “The Forlorn Hope”.

Preparations continued during the afternoon of 21 May, drilling nail holes and driving metal handles into the backs of 25 fresh cut 9 to 10 foot logs. After nightfall, the men dragged the logs out into the 500 yards of open ground in front of the rebel redoubt. After covering them with dirt and debris, they were left.

Come 10:00 a.m., 50 men with their rifles slung across their backs, would break out of cover and run like hell to the logs. Two men to each log, the volunteers would grab the handles and carry the burdens forward before throwing them across the trench. They would be followed by another 50 volunteers, who would be carrying boards pierced with nails. That afternoon it had been determined there only one ready source of planks, and that was the house in which General Grant was sleeping. So the general would drink his morning coffee on Thursday, 22 May while watching the house around him being dismantled.

The second wave of volunteers would run to the ditch, and jam the nails of the boards into the pre-drilled holes in the logs, thus forming foot bridges. The final 50 volunteers would be carrying scaling ladders. They would race across the bridges and lay the ladders against the redoubts' slope. The following assault troops would then cross the bridges, climb the ladders and capture the redoubt. Or so went the plan.

A mile to the south, 34 year old Major General James Birdseye McPherson's XVII Corp would be making a similar assault on the Great Redout. And about a mile further south of that the XIII Corps under 51 year old politician Major General John Alexander McClaerend would be attacking the Railroad Redoubt. It was hoped that if the rebel line was pressed in unison, it would break somewhere. Anywhere.

Wednesday evening, Grant informed Admiral Porter of the pending assault, and asked if the ironclads along the river could help by shelling the enemy water batteries from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. Porter assigned the ships Benton, Tuscumbria, Carondelet and Mound City to pound the river batteries.

Inside the Stockade Redout, the confident veterans of the 36^th Mississippi knew something was coming. But the only element of their defense which caused them worry was their commander, 30 year old Colonel William Wallace Witherspoon. There could be no doubt that he was a southern patriot. When the war broke out, William had just begun his career as a lawyer in the little town of Napoleon, where the Arkansas river joined the Mississippi. Still, he immediately enlisted in the 1^st Arkansas mounted infantry, as a private.

Less than a month after the battle of Bull Run, in August of 1861, a 12,000 man rebel army was camped along Wilson's Creek, preparing to fall on the 6,000 isolated Union troops in Springfield, Missouri. The Union commander, Brigadier General Nathanial Lyon, decided to strike first, and on 10 August, caught the rebels still in their tents. After a bloody morning, the Yankees were forced to retreat, but the attack, which cost Lyon his life (above), so damaged the rebels there were unable to follow up their victory, which saved Missouri for the Federal Union. One of the 1,300 rebel casualties was private William Witherspoon.

William (above)  was wounded so severely, he was discharged. But in March of 1862 he re-enlisted as a Lieutenant in the 36^th Mississippi Infantry. Over the next year he earned a reputation as so “harsh, overbearing and tyrannical” that his men stuck him with the vulgar sexual nickname “Pewter Spoon” Then at Iuka, Corinth and Chickasaw Bayou, he showed himself to also be a brave and “brilliant” combat commander. Whether he was drinking for self medication or addiction, did not matter much to his men, or his commanders, and he was twice charged with being drunk on duty.

That Thursday, promptly at 10:00 a.m., Colonel Witherspoon steadied his men as the last of the Yankee shells landed harmlessly on the face of the Redoubt. Then with a cheer, the forlorn hope appeared, running out from the shelter of the trees. 

The Mississippi boys did not wait for orders, but opened up at once. Sergeant George Powell Clarke, company “C” of the 36^th, said, “A withering fire of musketry, grape, canister and shells greeted them as they came in sight, and men fell like grass before the reaper…Here, now, the eye witness could have seen war in all its awful sublimity and grandeur.”

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