Born to Battle

At the sound of heavy firing, Colonel George Maney, the officer General Johnston had sent to the ford that morning, ordered Forrest to cross to the Lick’s northwest bank. Maney gave similar orders to his five First Tennessee Infantry companies and to Colonel D. H. Cummings’s Nineteenth Tennessee.

Forrest could only guess at what was happening farther northwest. During the morning, the Confederate left and right had driven forward more than a mile, pounding the Federal line into a horseshoe. The Union center—a ragtag collection of men from McClernand’s, Sherman’s, Prentiss’s, Hurlbut’s and William Wallace’s commands who had not run for the river—hung on at the thicket-shrouded Sunken Road.

Confederate mistakes, hunger, and weariness aided the defenders. General Beauregard’s plan, which spread Bragg’s, Hardee’s, Polk’s, and Breckinridge’s troops in successive waves across the whole front, guaranteed that the farther each line penetrated these woods, thickets, bogs, and areas of human resistance, the more it became mixed with the other lines. Control dissolved. The four corps commanders divided up portions of the front to regain their ability to supervise, but this took time. That was hardly the only problem. Their troops’ haversacks had been emptied of rations the previous day, and many were sleep deprived from the nightmare march from Corinth and incessant picket duty. Famished and frazzled, they stopped to eat at the cook fires and tents of the overrun camps, giving the Federals time to regroup.²

More than a mile to the right rear, Forrest grew impatient. Time passed. Distant battle thunder increased. About 11 a.m., Maney sent him to recheck for evidence of Buell at cavalry stations southward on the Hamburg road. While he was gone, Maney decided Buell would not land at Hamburg, then exercised the discretion Johnston had given him. He marched to the fighting, taking his five companies of the First Tennessee and leaving the Nineteenth and Forrest’s cavalry at the ford “to carry out their instructions existing before my presence with them.” When Forrest returned, the Nineteenth, too, had vanished.³

Forrest became agitated. His mood could not have been helped by the arrival and quick departure of another unit. Beauregard had sent the Georgia Mountain Dragoons to the ford area for duty with Colonel Wirt Adams’s cavalry regiment. A Major Brewster of General Breckinridge’s staff had tried to guide the Dragoons across unfamiliar ground. The trek had taken them five miles. When they arrived and found that the Adams unit had left, Brewster seems to have wearied of guide duty. He suggested to the ranking Dragoon, Captain Isaac Avery, that the Georgians stay with Forrest. Avery refused; instead, he reported, he “proceeded at a hard gallop to the field” to overtake Adams. His brusque tone suggests he preferred the leadership of Adams—a distinguished Mississippi legislator, banker, and planter—to that of the comparatively unpolished Forrest.⁴

Avery’s appearance at the ford was just one of many signs of concern about the Confederate right that morning. At 4 a.m., more than an hour before the Confederates began their attack, General Bragg had sent scouts to locate the Federal left. When they reported that it far overlapped the Confederate right, the high command sent more muscle in that direction, toward the Tennessee River. By around 10:00, Johnston and Beauregard had ordered several infantry brigades there.⁵

After the Georgia cavalry departed, Forrest again checked down the Hamburg Road. He also sent a courier after Maney to protest the unceremonious departure when it remained unknown whether Buell was coming from Hamburg. Maney was a Nashville attorney, a kind of man with whom Forrest had never felt very brotherly. He plainly had taken umbrage now at Maney’s seeming disregard. As soon as Forrest returned from again finding no Federals, he ordered his horsemen formed for battle and made them an abrupt speech.

“Do you know what it means? It means that our friends and brothers are falling by hundreds at the hands of the enemy—and we are here guarding a damn creek! We did not enter the service for such work, and the reputation of this regiment does not justify our commanding officer in leaving us here while we are needed elsewhere. Let’s go and help them. What do you say?”

Shortly after receiving the nagging note from Forrest, Maney learned that Beauregard had ordered all units forward into the fight. Soon, another message arrived: the Nineteenth Tennessee and Forrest’s cavalry were moving up behind him.⁶

Forrest pushed his troopers into a gallop up the Savannah road. They had gone a mile, maybe more, when they came to a fork. To the left, in the direction of the loudest firing, a road ran westward from Pittsburg Landing to the town of Purdy. Forrest turned onto it looking for Maney, wishing to report for further duty—likely coolly—to his most recent immediate superior.

But he could not. Maney had found his own immediate commander, Brigadier Frank Cheatham, who had rushed him into battle. Maney led a brigade charge against Federal batteries pounding the Confederate right-center from the left side of Benjamin M. Prentiss’s retreating line. Maney’s charge had just been bloodily repulsed when Forrest arrived a little past 2 p.m. He found himself and his men targeted by the Federal batteries Maney’s charge had not dislodged.

Forrest apparently suggested to Cheatham a joint charge across the field. The general, a Tennessee planter and Mexican War veteran whose brother was mayor of Nashville, likely regarded this suggestion from an unbloodied colonel as presumptuous after the vain attempt just concluded. Cheatham said no. Forrest protested that his men could not stay where they were, under heavy fire. If Forrest charged, Cheatham replied, he would do it under his own orders.

Forrest and his men galloped toward the eastern end of the Hornet’s Nest, which the Federals already had stoutly defended against piecemeal Confederate assaults. His troopers passed unharmed through two artillery volleys before a third killed three of them and four horses with one cannonball. But Forrest kept on, assailing Union brigadier Jacob Lauman’s brigade of Stephen A. Hurlbut’s division at the point where Hurlbut’s right connected with Prentiss. To Forrest’s own right, the Twenty-sixth Alabama Infantry wanted to advance, and “the gallant Colonel Forrest offered his support,” the Alabamans’ commander would report. But underbrush slowed or halted Forrest’s horses. The infantrymen went on to grab some spiked, abandoned Ohio cannons before heavy fire forced them back into a field. Forrest withdrew into the same field.⁸

As Forrest had charged the Hornet’s Nest, the Confederates incurred a hard loss farther to the right. General Albert Sidney Johnston—rallying reluctant Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas units—had already had a boot sole ripped loose by one bullet and sustained wounds by shrapnel in the hip and another bullet in the thigh. His horse had been bloodied. Most important, he had taken another shot he may not have noticed. It cut an artery in a leg numbed by an old dueling wound. Having sent his surgeon off to care for wounded men of both sides in an adjacent hollow, the Confederate western commander fell and quickly bled to death.⁹

Forrest did not stay long in the field with the Twenty-sixth Alabama. Major Gilbert Rambaut, a Forrest commissary officer, would recall that his colonel got orders to screen a battery and move it up—likely to the left, into the front line of cannon gathering to blast Prentiss out of the Sunken Road. The troopers then “rested for a while.” Probably between 4 and 5 p.m., “there came an order from our right to bring on the cavalry.”¹⁰

The Hornet’s Nest defense was collapsing. Hammered by fifty-three cannon massed in two positions, the long Union line that had hung on for six hours through several piecemeal assaults at various points finally contracted around the Sunken Road and broke. By then, attacks right and left had pushed the ends of the salient back so far that they nearly met. Under a charge on the center led by George Maney, some Federals inside the salient began pulling back. Others hung on, and still others turned to sprint to escape the closing trap. Most of the sprinters got crowded into an area soon known as Hell’s Hollow.¹¹

The extent of the carnage was unprecedented in America. The advancing attackers could hardly step on earth, rather than fallen comrades, as they swarmed over the ground in front of the Sunken Road. At the road and past it, most of the corpses were Union. Around this time a ball entered the right side of the head of Federal division commander and Fort Donelson veteran Brigadier General William H. L. Wallace, who was commanding here. It exited his left eye. He lived, in and out of consciousness and delirium, for four days.

Prentiss now saw that further resistance invited annihilation. He urged his men to surrender. White flags appeared in front of Confederate infantry commanders on the attackers’ right, and they sent for various cavalry in the area to take the droves of prisoners to the rear. In the left-center, where Forrest now was, resistance continued a few minutes longer before Prentiss handed his sword to a subordinate of General Polk. Polk ordered the cavalry to pursue “such of the enemy as were fleeing.”¹²

Forrest pushed his troopers into a gallop northeastward. Union troops dropped their weapons as the horsemen perforated their dissolving lines, but the Confederates kept going to the Union rear, getting between the Federals and the Tennessee River. Confederate cavalry had headed off a large body of the Hornet’s Nest’s escaping defenders. “From the number of men who had surrendered,” Major Rambaut would remember, “I was of the impression that our forces had captured the whole army.”¹³

According to Prentiss, who was among them, the captives numbered 2,200, including many wounded. On the right, cavalry started them toward the rear, where Alabama infantrymen were to march them to Corinth.¹⁴

The mopping-up process took irreplaceable time that the Confederates would soon need. Rambaut remembers that firing ceased on Forrest’s part of the field for “probably two hours.” While likely exaggerated, Rambaut’s memory illustrates that the lull was prolonged.

Forrest apparently left to others the job of rounding up unresisting captives and rushed on looking for further damage to do farther on. His and some other cavalry—Rambaut among them—hurried to the bank of the Tennessee south of Pittsburg Landing. Rambaut recalled crawling to the river’s edge and looking over to see two Federal gunboats that had been firing at an unseen enemy one hundred feet above them. The sailors and their officers pressed into the boats’ bows, trying to discern what was happening up there.¹⁵

To his left, toward Pittsburg Landing, Forrest noticed something else: the Union defense between him and the landing was all but nonexistent. He took his men in that direction and, according to Rambaut, soon caught sight, from the heights to the south of the landing, of the chaos in the Union rear—“wagons, horses and artillery in the river and crowding the banks, while the men were endeavoring to escape by climbing up the sides of the transports.” Forrest began skirmishing and sent a message back to Polk that a strong and fast advance on the right would drive the Federals into the river.¹⁶

This window of opportunity, if it was one, closed. Near 6 p.m., Bragg, commanding on the right, ordered the move that Forrest had requested of Polk perhaps as much as an hour earlier: a charge by the 4,000 or so Confederates on Bragg’s part of the field “to drive the enemy into the river,” in the words of General James Chalmers. General Jones Withers, even though some of his units had yet to receive ammunition, sent his whole division forward into a deep ravine, the ammunition-less advancing with fixed bayonets. Above stood the final hill, from atop which they could charge down onto Pittsburg Landing with its milling thousands of Union fugitives.

But it was no go. “In attempting to mount the last ridge,” Chalmers reported, “we were met by a fire from a whole line protected by infantry and assisted by shells from the gunboats.” Forty-one cannon aided by infantry units—the Sixth Iowa, for one—had rushed in from the collapsing Union lines for a last stand along the road leading down to the river. The thrown-together mass now erupted in thunderous flame. Bragg and Withers sent for help and ordered Withers’s men forward into the hail of Federal lead. But Polk, to the left, ordered the troops in the ravine to retreat in his direction, away from the river, to avoid the concentrated fire. Chalmers apparently missed this order: “Our men struggled vainly to ascend the hill, which was very steep, making charge after charge without success.”¹⁷

Forrest, too, was in the ravine. Polk had already ordered the cavalry to comparative cover there. But Forrest’s men, now dismounted, joined Chalmers, whose brigade was in its sixth head-on clash of the day and still struggling to comply with Bragg’s now obsolete order to advance. But the Confederates were “too much exhausted to storm the batteries on the hill,” Chalmers reported, although they “continued to fight until night closed hostilities on both sides.” Beauregard ordered them to camp beyond easy range of gunboat fire.¹⁸

Forrest was alarmed, and not just that the victory had not been finalized. He looked around in vain for Willie. His fifteen-year-old son and the boy’s two young companions had been with him all day—until now.¹⁹