VICKSBURG Chapter Seven

 

Ohio businessman Lucius Bliss Wing had a very rude awakening. It was just after dawn on 20 December, 1862, in the bustling Union occupied Mississippi railroad town of Holly Springs. Shouting from the street outside and the pop, pop, pop of gunfire drew the 50 year old cotton merchant from his rented bed and to the window. As he wrote to his wife, Mary, "The street outside was filled with Texas cavalry, real wild butternut colored fellows, yelling like Indians." His roommate exclaimed, "Wing, we're gobbled, by God!"

The idea for the Holly Springs attack had originated with 33 year old  Lieutenant Colonel John Summerfield Griffith (above), commander of the 6th Texas Cavalry Regiment.  In mid-December the asthmatic officer wrote a letter to his new commanding officer: "If you will fit up an expedition, comprising three or four thousand men, and give us Major General Earl Van Dorn...we will penetrate to the rear of the enemy, capture Holly Springs... and perhaps, force him to retreat...if not, we can certainly force more of the enemy to remain in their rear..." 

In fact, Lieutenant General John Clifford Pemberton had already asked his neighboring commander in Tennessee, Major General Braxton Bragg, to dispatch his cavalry under Brigadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest, to raid against Grant's supply line. Now, having heard of Griffith's idea, he summoned Major General Earl "Buck" Van Dorn to Jackson.

Major General Van Dorn (above) and the man who had just replaced him, Lieutenant General John Pemberton,  found reason for agreement.  They both understood that as long as the Federal host outnumbered the rebels in central Mississippi it was inevitable that Jackson would fall. And that meant the Pearl River Bridge would also fall.  With the loss of that railroad connection with the rest of the Confederacy, it meant that Vicksburg was as good as lost as well. With the loss of the last connection to the Trans-Mississippi confederacy, any practical hope for the survival of the Confederacy as an independent nation was also lost. 

Both men understood the only hope the Confederacy had was to make any Federal victory in Mississippi so expensive and time consuming as to be politically unacceptable. In short, the only military option was to delay the outcome, and while doing so avoid losing the war.  Specifically, Grant  had to be delayed.  And the best chance of doing that was to destroy the Federal supply depot in Holly Springs.

Van Dorn returned to Grenada and within 24 hours offered his plan - a cavalry raid to destroy as much of the food, ammunition and equipment stored at Holly Springs as possible. He would take three brigades of cavalry. Colonel Griffith would command 1,500 Texas men. The 1,200 Tennesseans of the second brigade would be led by 27 year old Colonel William Hicks "Red" Jackson. And 37 year old Lieutenant Colonel Robert "White Headed Bob" Allan McCulloch  would lead a third brigade of 800 men from Missouri, Mississippi and Arkansas. 

On 15 December, Jackson and McCulloch's units arrived in Grenada, where they were joined the Texas Brigade. Rations were issued and each trooper was given 60 rounds of ammo. But the intended target of the raid was a closely guarded secret.  They set out before dawn on Tuesday, 16 December, heading west, and in an Herculean effort covered 50 miles that first rainy march, reaching Houston, Mississippi, about noon on Thursday.  They were now beyond the Federal left flank.

Van Dorn allowed his men and horses a few hours of rest, and then drove them due north 25 miles to the crossroads town of Pontotoc, Mississippi. The population here were thrill by the return of Confederate troops, displaying "extravagant demonstrations of joy" on 18 December. And it was here that the entire raid came close to failure.

Unbeknown to the rebels, they were spotted in Pontotoc by scouts (above) from two regiments of Federal Cavalry (above) - the 7th Illinois and the 2nd Iowa - returning from a raid against the Mobile and Ohio Railroad around Tupelo Mississippi. There was no contact and no shooting, and the information was not passed up the chain of command until after the Federal Cavalry had returned to their lines outside of Water Valley.   

That night Van Dorn's men slept in "chilling, drenching rainstorm".  The cold morning of the 19th "... the horses' hooves kicked up clods of frosty earth...". Many of the troopers wore as many as six shirts beneath their coats. The exhausted men had not had a hot meal for 24 hours  "Yet their officers noted that their spirits were remarkably high." They pushed through the flooding roads 27 miles north to New Albany, on the Tallahatchie River. The raiding party was now less than 20 miles from Holly Springs.

That morning , 19 December, word of the substantial rebel raiding party spotted near Pontotoc finally reached Grant's headquarters in Oxford. Immediately warnings were telegraphed to federal outposts throughout northern Mississippi, in particular to 35  year old Colonel Robert Creigthton  Murphy (above), of the 8th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, defending the supply depot at Holly Springs.

Murphy's 1,600 men was divided in three. Half of his infantry was camped near the railroad depot, and

the rest were billeted in town, around the court house square. There were also six companies of cavalry camped out at the fairgrounds. Despite the warning from Grant's Headquarters, none of the units were put upon alert, and some of the officers had even begun their Christmas celebrations ahead of time. 

At dawn on 20 December, 1862, the rebel cavalry came into town in three columns. The first swamped the infantry around the depot. 

The second rode straight into through town and caught the cavalry in camp, while the third column attacked the infantry which had formed up in the court house square. Wrote one rebel colonel, "“We struck the camp like a thunderbolt....we had literally ridden over them.”  The fight, what little there was of it, was over by 8:00am. Of the 1,500 man garrison few if any were killed or wounded, and only 130 blue clad cavalry men avoided capture 

The rebels captured three freight trains, waiting to be unloaded, and warehouses filled with all the sinews of war: 5,000 rifles, 2,000 pistols, 100,000 uniforms, 5,000 barrels of foodstuffs and $600,000 worth of miscellaneous supplies.  And in the old Confederate Armory the federals had established an entire 2,000 bed hospital with a million dollars of medical supplies.  They also destroyed all telegraph equipment in town, ripping up the lines for a half mile in all directions. Grant was now cut off from communication with the outside world, including Washington. 

Civilian Lucius Wing described what the rebels did after they had outfitted themselves and burdened their horses with Yankee excesses.  They "... put fire to the Depot, Engine House, Government Stores, and a train of H3 cars standing on the track....(and) burned everything to the ground.... Immense piles of stores and forage, such as Hay, corn, oats...Beef and Pork, Rice, Molasses Whiskey boxes of clothing, Hospital stores ie. “went up” in one grand conflagration."

"Twelve Hundred Bales of (seized) cotton waiting shipment...were set on fire and contributed...to this scene of magnificent horror....At three o'clock the arsenal was fired and soon blew up with a most awful explosion. It broke most of the glass in town...."  In all, during their 10 hours in Holly Springs Van Dorn's men destroyed some $44,259,000 in federal supplies at today's prices.

Mr. Wing said that "....by five o’clock the entire rebel force had melted away into the woods from which they came, leaving a shattered town, hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, and thousands of bewildered, demoralized, and weaponless Union soldiers...".  They also left behind the "blundering" Colonel Robert Creigthton  Murphy.. He complained "I have done all in my power - in truth, my force was inadequate".  Grant disagreed. Murphy was arrested, and then simply dismissed from the service for "cowardly and disgraceful conduct".

At the same time, Confederate Brigadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest (above), had unwillingly set out from Clifton, Tennessee with 1,800 badly armed inexperienced men and four cannon, 

Over the next two weeks his troopers covered an average of 20 miles day, fought three battles, daily skirmishes, destroyed 50 bridges on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, and so broke up the trestle work the road was useless as a federal supply line for the rest of the war. They also captured or killed 2,500 federal soldiers, captured or disabled 10 pieces of artillery, captured 50 wagons and horse teams, 10,000 weapons, a million rounds of ammunition, 1,800 blankets and knapsacks. Even without the Holly Springs raid, Grant would have suffered supply problems. With the raid, Grant's position was untenable.

The federal army was immediately put on half rations, and began to retreat back to Le Grange. Years later, in his memoriers, Grant remembered how the citizens of Oxford appeared in his office. "They came with broad smiles on their faces indicating intense joy, to ask what I was going to do now without any (food) for my soldiers to eat. I told them I was not disturbed; that I had already sent troops and wagons to collect all the food and forage they could find fifteen miles on each side of the road. Countenances soon changed, and so did the inquiry. The next was, “What are WE to do?”

Earlier, on Saturday, 6 December, 1862, to lighten the pressure on his quartermasters, Grant ordered his cavalry regiments to form special units to search for "rations and forage..." A journalist for the Chicago Times reported, “Trains of wagons, heavily guarded, were sent out by (the) scores...and stripped the country of all food...Mills were erected, grain ground, fat stock driven in and slaughtered by thousands, and abundant supplies obtained.” Now, after the Holly Springs raid, Grant ordered all of his men to forage from the Mississippi countryside.

One man assigned to such a column, Private Charles W. Wills out of Illinois noted that, “ Every house within ten miles of the army is visited about five times a day by our soldiers and the (rebel) guerrillas...There is more stealing in one day here than the whole United States suffered in a year before the war.”  Grant would write later, "I was amazed at the quantity of supplies the country afforded. It showed that we could have subsisted off the country for two months...." instead of two weeks...".  Grant noted, "This taught me a lesson."  

But still he had to retreat. Because on 20 December, just about the same moment Van Dorn's troopers were riding into Holly Springs, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman was sailing away from the Memphis docks with 32,000 men - about a third of  the entire Federal army -  who were now off the board, unaware of Grant's dilemma and out of communications with the rest of the world as well.

- 30 -