FROM THE LATE FALL OF 1863 THROUGH THE FOLLOWING spring, the soldiers of the 8th Cavalry got to know the area between Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Ringgold, Georgia, perhaps better than they wanted to. They were assigned to courier duty, which meant ferrying messages and supplies, foraging, and serving as sentinels. Now and then they engaged Rebel cavalry. Travel was difficult over roads that became muddy and rutted once the winter rains set in, and they had little protection from the elements other than their rubber blankets and, for some, broad-brimmed hats.
Summerville’s 2nd Indiana followed a similar routine, and by Christmas the two cavalries were operating in tandem through north Georgia. Twice they visited the farm of Champ Ferguson, where they captured supplies that his men had confiscated from the Union Army. They caught a few Confederate stragglers and stripped them of their mounts, arms, and clothes before turning them loose. There was not much notable action, aside from one fight that earned the 8th accolades. After watching a small detachment overwhelm forces under the vaunted Confederate General Joseph Wheeler in February, Union General William Carlin wrote in a dispatch, “On arriving within 500 yards of the town, Colonel Harrison, with only 25 men, charged on the enemy and put him to a most disgraceful flight…This was the most gallant and handsome exploit of cavalry I ever witnessed. Had it occurred in the early days of the war it would have immortalized the gallant men engaged in it.”
Such encounters presaged even more intense cavalry engagements the following summer. In April and May, the 8th was furloughed, which gave the men a brief respite before the most rigorous work detail many of them would undertake during the war: A series of exhausting raids into western Georgia aimed at disrupting the lines of supply to the Confederate stronghold in Atlanta. During the raids the men would ride for days, shifting from one haunch to the other, stomachs growling, eyes caked with dust, dry-mouthed and saddle-sore, alternately anxious and bored. The raids were about as far as an organized force could get from formal warfare, which was both exciting and uniquely taxing.
In the campaign leading up to the siege of Vicksburg, Union General U.S. Grant had learned that his infantry could operate without a fixed line of supply by living off provisions confiscated from the local residents. It had been a radical concept at the time, but Grant’s success proved that it could be done. By the time the 8th and other associated troops departed on their Georgia raids, living off the land—in the most brutal way—was an established practice in the Union cavalry. But being cut off so far behind enemy lines, and meanwhile attracting the attention of Confederate troops by raiding arsenals, towns, and farms, they faced new and pressing dangers. Their most reliable lifelines proved to be their horses, which enabled them to get into and out of trouble quickly.
Horses have been used to wage war for thousands of years, and during the Civil War they were used extensively by the cavalries of both armies for reconnaissance, marches, delaying actions, and raids. Superior weapons had reduced the effectiveness of traditional cavalry charges, and during organized battles most cavalrymen, like mounted infantry, fought on foot. But during the marches and raids, the men were still likely to engage the enemy from the saddle. Horses enabled them to cover broad expanses while pursuing and eluding their enemies, and good mounts were prized for their ability to endure hunger and thirst, to remain manageable during violent encounters, and to survive long, grueling marches.
The Confederate cavalrymen were considered superior to their Northern counterparts in the early years of the war because the Rebels tended to have more personal experience with horses, having raced them for sport and grown accustomed to riding them for long distances. Rebel cavalrymen were also more familiar with the terrain they were passing through. General Sherman made no secret of his lack of confidence in his own cavalry. By the summer of 1864 they were learning the ropes, though the added mobility of a horse could become a liability if a soldier got lost, which happened fairly frequently.
During marches that lasted for weeks, often for twenty hours a day with only brief rests, the column traveled at a rate of about four miles per hour—fast enough to be “killing to horses,” as Massachusetts cavalryman Charles Adams put it. “An officer of cavalry needs to be more horse-doctor than soldier, and no one who has not tried it can realize the discouragement to Company commanders in these long and continuous marches,” Adams observed. “You are a slave to your horses…”
More than a million horses died or were killed during the war. In addition to being shot or hit by cannonballs, they broke their legs on rough terrain and died of exhaustion, infection, and disease. Aside from his gun and his own life, a cavalryman’s mount was his most valuable possession; yet, few kept the same mount from beginning to end. A few soldiers took their own horses to war, accepting the risk because they were confident of the animals’ behavior, but most, including Tolbert and Maddox, had to make do with whatever mounts the army (or unfortunate local civilians) provided. A good cavalry horse could be ridden hard, fast, and long and performed to its utmost, whether out of excitement over the chase or in blind obedience to its rider. It was not unusual for a horse to run itself to death. A good horse anticipated its rider’s needs and could respond to his shifting weight and the changing stimuli of a fight with minimal reining. Losing a good horse was a major setback, but it happened often, and cavalry soldiers had no choice but to find new mounts and press on. The heavy behind-the-scenes work was usually done by mules, which were famously durable and less finicky than horses but more temperamental, prone to kicking and biting, and averse to conflict. Horses had a steadier disposition and “under fire behaved better than men,” Billings wrote.
When horses flagged, the soldiers had two choices: To send them to the rear or to force them to continue until they dropped. “I do my best for my horses and am sorry for them;” Adams wrote, “but all war is cruel and it is my business to bring every man I can into the presence of the enemy, and so make war short. So I have but one rule, a horse must go until he can’t be spurred any further, and then the rider must get another horse as soon as he can seize on one.”
“Every few weeks a veterinary surgeon would look over the sick-list of animals, and prescribe for such as seemed worth saving or within the reach of treatment, while others would be condemned, led off, and shot,” Billings wrote. Burying dead horses was among the more loathsome tasks in camp, not only because of the stench but because the pits had to be so large and the carcasses had to be manhandled into them. Not surprisingly, dead horses were not buried on the march, and particularly after skirmishes and battles, the roads were often littered with their carcasses for miles.
The U.S. military operated its own central supply agency for replacing lost horses, and the cavalry stole others along the way. Harrison was issued nine hundred horses in the summer of 1863, but by the fall he was asking for more, and with the Confederate Army also commandeering private stock, horses and mules were increasingly hard for Southern civilians to come by. Abandoned, unhitched wagons and carriages were a common sight along rural southern roads.
Billings recalled one incident in which Rebels began shooting his army’s artillery horses, each bullet striking a horse’s flesh with a sound he described as similar to a pebble hurled into mud, yet seeming not to cause the animals much alarm. When a bullet struck a bone it made a hollow, snapping sound, and the horse promptly went down. “In cavalry service they knew their place as well as did their riders, and it was a frequent occurrence to see a horse, when his rider had been dismounted by some means, resume his place in line or column without him, seemingly not wishing to be left behind,” Billings wrote. As the eyes and ears of the army, cavalry soldiers developed specialized survival skills, and they usually had more information to work with than foot soldiers who were left in the dark between engagements and sometimes during them. But to utilize those skills, the rider and his horse had to work in concert and respond effectively to sudden changes.
Cavalrymen sometimes wore specialized boots of plain or elaborately stitched, enameled leather, which reached to the knee and were stylish and protected the riders’ legs as they rode through woods and brambles. But more often, the boots were eschewed for brogans, which were far more utilitarian on the ground. Most cavalrymen embellished their caps with the number or letter of their company and regiment, along with two crossed sabers, the cavalry emblem. New recruits wore “boiled” white cotton or loud, checked woolen shirts, leather gauntlets, and indigo jackets embellished with yellow piping, and wore an array of headgear, from floppy slouch hats to squat kepis.
Maddox and Tolbert were of average height and slight build, and perhaps fell short of the romanticized image of the lavishly costumed cavalryman, waving a sword from atop a rearing horse as the wind ruffled the plumes of his hat. Their duties, too, were usually more prosaic. Aside from random encounters with Rebels, they spent most of their time standing on picket duty, tearing up railroad tracks, and looting farms. On long marches they were more like human baggage than gallant equestrians; men sometimes fell asleep in the saddle, remaining upright only by instinctively squeezing their mounts between trembling, fatigued legs. Still, the threat of violence loomed around every curve of the road, and without warning the 8th became embroiled in one skirmish that continued for so long and with such intensity that the men ran out of ammunition, and the decision was made to charge the Confederate line rather than face capture. A Kentucky colonel who was there described it as “the most terrific, yet magnificent, charge ever witnessed.” The mounted men trampled the Confederate lines with few injuries, even though, as the officer noted, “The saber and the horses’ hooves were about our only weapon.”
As the 8th roamed rural Alabama and Georgia, the men knew little about the local geography or which enemy forces were nearby, which put them at a disadvantage even when they outnumbered the Rebels. Unlike foot soldiers, who typically fought over specific ground, or artillerymen, who operated from relatively distant, stationary positions, cavalrymen were free ranging. The last thing any of them wanted was to find himself alone, behind enemy lines, without his comrades or his horse.
SOUTH OF CHATTANOOGA, the Appalachian Mountains slowly dissolve into the red clay hills of northwest Georgia, a thin and rugged landscape that today is steadily disappearing beneath the hundred-mile sprawl of Atlanta. The landmarks of the past are falling by the wayside, and those that remain have a disenchanted look: Galleried mansions, many of them empty; forgotten cemeteries with tilting monuments and rusty, cast-iron gates; remnants of historic trace roads that no longer lead anywhere. A holdout like the Owl Rock Church, a simple clapboard structure with a mossy graveyard out back, is basically a footnote that few people read. The contemporary story is playing out across the highway from the church, where a blistering wound of cleared and flattened hills marks the beginning of yet another real-estate development.
But among the landmarks that survive is a one-lane gravel road a few miles east of what was once the town of Campbellton, which parallels the Chattahoochee River, then passes through a narrow, deep gap carved by wagon wheels and hooves, and curves blindly into the wooded bluffs. This is the spot where Romulus Tolbert’s life took a momentous turn on September 10, 1864. Tolbert would probably still recognize the road, with its narrow bed and high banks edged by forests of oaks and beech trees, though a short distance beyond, it crosses a creek on an antiquated one-lane wooden bridge and comes up hard against a towering manmade hill of dirt, which resembles a landfill but is actually the site of another new development. For now, the site of Tolbert’s wartime capture remains intact, though it is hard to imagine that it will hold out for long.
Tolbert arrived here in the fall of 1864 after spending the summer traveling along a network of similar roads, all of which were far better known by the Rebels, who could discern the movements of Union troops using information from captured soldiers, stragglers, malingerers, and slaves. Sometimes the commanding officers of the various Union cavalries might try to throw off the Rebels by intentionally taking a wrong fork, but more often they were the ones who were confused and misled; they were a thousand miles from home, their maps were unreliable, and they tended to get bad directions.
Lieutenant Colonel Fielder Jones, who led the 8th for much of the summer either under Harrison or in his absence, lamented in one dispatch, “Owing to the extreme darkness and the carelessness of some person unknown, the column was broken and my command got lost; it was nearly daylight before we succeeded in extricating ourselves from the labyrinth of roads and reach Vining’s Station.” Brigadier General George Thomas, whose vast command of about sixty-five thousand men included two-thirds of the Union forces involved in the Atlanta campaign, wrote of traveling roads with countless unmarked intersections, through impenetrable woodlands that lent themselves to ambush. To make matters worse, Thomas wrote, he “could procure no suitable guides. All intelligent persons had left the country, or had been driven out by the enemy.”
The troops who participated in the marches carried little besides their guns. They had been required to leave their tents, blankets, and other personal possessions behind, for safekeeping and to lighten their loads, the assumption being that when supplies ran low they could steal food and forage from farms and towns along the way. For many, the summer’s forays proved to be the most grueling experience of the war, mixing the occasional rush of battle with the physical, mental, and emotional challenges of an endurance run.
The towns they passed through—places such as Vining’s Station, Smith’s Ferry, and Campbellton—were strange not only because the men were behind enemy lines but because most were eerily empty, the residents having evacuated in advance of the action. By then the South was starting to unravel, and the penetration of the Union Army so deep into Georgia, toward the rail and industrial center of Atlanta, sparked a frenzy of mass migrations. Over the course of the summer the troops torched cotton mills, depots, and foundries; they looted private homes and stores, occasionally bumping hard against the limits of wartime honor and sometimes running rough-shod over them. Literally and ethically, the raiders were all over the map. Some Union officers tried to restrain their men, to limit their pilfering to necessary supplies, but others tacitly endorsed outright theft. William Blufton Miller, the 75th Indiana infantryman who wrote of his pleasure in shooting captive Rebels, was among the thieves in the Union ranks and boasted of the jewelry he “foraged” from private homes.
But if the raids at times seemed reckless, they were deliberate. Their nexus was a June attack in which the troops of Union Major General Lovell Rousseau destroyed a mill producing Confederate contraband, after which the employees, including many women, were sent north to prison. As a result of his success, Rousseau was ordered to Selma, Alabama, to raze the Confederate ironworks there, and he took along the 8th Indiana, under Harrison’s command. Again the mission was a success, so General Sherman ordered Rousseau to undertake a more ambitious campaign—a long raid through Georgia, with twenty-five hundred “good cavalry,” to destroy the Montgomery & West Point Railroad, one of the main supply lines to Atlanta. Rousseau had been impressed by the 8th on the Selma run and so decided to take them again. This time Harrison would command several regiments, and the 8th would be led, under his direction, by Fielder Jones.
According to historian David Evans, author of Sherman’s Horsemen: Union Cavalry Operations in the Atlanta Campaign, Rousseau was a self-taught soldier, a robust, charismatic man who exerted great personal influence over his troops. He was known to hoist his hat atop the tip of his sword while urging his men on during a fight. He rarely studied maps, and he usually galloped across the field on his thoroughbred to deliver his orders himself. He was just the sort of leader the soldiers would need on a long, exhausting, and occasionally terrifying raid.
Assembling the troops proved to be a greater challenge than Rousseau expected, because so many men had fallen ill or lost their horses, but he managed to assemble more than twenty-five hundred, including Tolbert, Maddox, and about six hundred others from the 8th Indiana, in Decatur, Alabama, in early July 1864. The 8th had traveled from Nashville to Decatur by train, and the cars had been so crowded and hot that many had chosen to ride on their roofs, a decision they regretted when the clouds burst open with torrents of rain. Arriving across the Tennessee River from Decatur, the cavalrymen were subjected to typical army delays—the usual hurry-up-and-wait as Rousseau struggled to outfit and find enough horses for them. Some took the opportunity to cool off in the river. A day later they were at the depot vying for good horses and to be issued saddles, blankets, and reins. They were instructed to pack only two changes of clothes, five days of rations, minimal ammunition, and their rubberized blankets, sabers, and guns.
The actual departure from Decatur was disorganized. A herd of braying pack mules bolted and ran, and a short distance from town the column encountered Rebel bushwhackers, though everyone managed to escape uninjured. None of the enlisted men knew where they were headed. Rousseau’s adjutant, Captain Thomas Williams, later wrote that “all, however, felt that the expedition was of more than ordinary importance, and that it was intended to penetrate farther into the interior of the Confederacy than any similar expedition had reached. Hazardous it might be, but there was a smack of daring and dash about it, which was captivating, and gave to officers and men an inspiriting feeling different from that of an ordinary march.”
On their first night in camp, a private who had been given the unenviable task of leading a troublesome pack mule (and who had trouble keeping up with the column as a result) arrived late. The men heard him swearing at the mule, then call out, “Cap Boyer, what will I do with this mule?” Seeing an opening, a soldier called out a response that was later described as a suggestion for what he might do with the mule, to which the private answered in kind. Mule jokes were legion in the army, often a sort of verbal crotch grab, as in, I got your mule right here. After this particular exchange, laughter and cheers echoed through the darkness of the ridge. As one soldier recalled, “we just made those jack-oak bushes tremble with our noise.” Soon a regimental band played on the lawn of the plantation house where Rousseau made his headquarters, “Taps” was sounded, and the men bedded down beneath the stars.
At dawn the next day, Rousseau surveyed his troops and noticed that some had brought tents and blankets, despite his prohibition, and that the 8th Indiana was overburdened with ammunition. It was important to travel light on a raid; the Roman army had good reason for calling military gear impedimenta. Rousseau ordered his army’s extra baggage and munitions loaded into wagons and sent back to Decatur. The men began moving out at 5:30 a.m., with the 8th in the lead. The morning was quiet until about eight o’clock, when the column flushed out a few Rebel scouts, whom they fired upon but who got away. Soon the terrain grew steeper, and the going became rough. The soldiers, now powdered with dust, managed to confiscate a few horses, mules, and supplies of food from bewildered farmers along the way and to capture a Confederate soldier on furlough. Hearing of the capture, Rousseau rode up in a commandeered carriage and told the man he would be hanged as a spy, though he eventually let him go. The 8th captured a few more Rebel soldiers later that day in a mountaintop village, but they were released, too. Rousseau did not want to be slowed down by prisoners.
The first day’s march covered about fifteen miles; the second, thirty. If there had been any doubt, it was now obvious that the raid was going to be rigorous. Each morning the troops that led the column the previous day moved to the rear, giving everyone a chance to be first to encounter the enemy. At one point on the third day, Rousseau moved ahead to check on the advance guard of the column, and in his absence a group of soldiers began vandalizing farmhouses and hauling away valuable nonessential items. Coming upon one such scene, Fielder Jones, of the 8th, approached the farmer and his family, who were watching in dismay from their porch. An elderly woman was at that moment shouting at the looters, and Jones intervened and apologized for their behavior. When he mentioned that he was from Indiana, the woman told him she had a son there. In a strange coincidence, Jones knew the man, and so he offered to provide the family a letter so that they might receive provisions from the army in Decatur. The family politely declined, saying it would cause trouble with their neighbors.
Late in the afternoon the column began threading its way through a mountain gap, and night fell before they emerged on the other side. As they pressed on under a sliver of moon they found the road descending so steeply that at times they had to dismount and lead their horses. The wagon brakes squealed. The guns were unlimbered and belayed down the slope. At 11 p.m. they finally halted and fell asleep on the ground without unsaddling their horses. They were under way again at 6 a.m., stiff and sore, riding into a valley that glistened with dew, and continued on until they reached the town of Ashville, where Rousseau stopped to have the horses’ shoes inspected. As the farriers did their work some of the soldiers ate or dozed. Others looted the local post office and freed prisoners from the jail. Rousseau accompanied a group that broke into the newspaper office, where they printed general orders for conduct of the march, instructing the men to take good care of their horses and prohibiting them from straggling or entering private houses. They then set about altering the news for the next day’s paper, which had already been typeset. The front page article now carried the headline “Distinguished Arrival” and reported, “Maj. Gen. L.H. Rousseau of U.S. Army, paid our town the honor of a visit this morning, accompanied by many of his friends and admirers. The General looks well and hearty. It is not known at present how long he will sojourn in our midst.”
The troops rode out of Ashville in the early afternoon and by sundown had reached the Coosa River at Greensport, where they saw two steamboats chugging upstream, just out of range of their guns. Crossing the river, which was deep and about three hundred yards wide, turned out to be one of the major challenges of Rousseau’s raid. While the 8th Indiana waited on the bank, Confederate guerillas attacked the far end of the column and shot two men, one of whom, Captain William Curl of Princeton, Indiana, was the first Union cavalryman killed on the raid. While waiting to cross, Rousseau concluded that three hundred or so of his horses were no longer fit for service, and he organized a group of sick or injured men to be diverted to the Union garrison at Claysville, forty miles to the north.
As night fell the men watered their horses, cooked supper, and prepared to camp. Some picked blackberries in the moonlight. At about 10 p.m., Major Thomas Graham, whose forces included the 8th, was ordered to cross the now-darkened river with plans to camp on the other side and, after daylight, move four miles downstream to cover the crossing of the rest of the command at the Ten Islands ford. Tolbert and Maddox, along with four companies of the 8th, saddled up. At the landing they met an officer and two soaked scouts, who had retrieved a ferry boat from the far bank. The remainder of Rousseau’s raiders, including the other companies of the 8th, then led by Fielder Jones, moved on to the Ten Islands ford.
The ferry could carry only ten or twelve men and horses at a time, and the first group to reach the far side learned from scouts that the Rebels were already close by. The four companies of the 8th took cover near a group of cotton warehouses while the rest crossed with the wagons and mules. Once everyone was across, they settled in for a nervous night. There were no fires, and the men spoke in whispers, listening to the rustling of cornstalks for any indication that the Rebels were on the move. They slept on their arms.
Lying in wait were two hundred Alabama cavalrymen under the command of Brigadier General James Holt Clanton, who had received word of Rousseau’s advance from Ashville that afternoon. Clanton, a tall, muscular man who had served in the Mexican War and in the Alabama legislature, was variously described as gallant, rash, and “a perfect demon in appearance when aroused.” Though his men were dramatically outnumbered, he decided to attack at dawn.
At 5 a.m., Graham led his four companies of the 8th down the road from the ferry crossing, and soon those who had been left behind heard the crackle of gunfire and scrambled onto their horses. Clanton’s men had attacked the 8th about half a mile from the river, with the Rebel general himself charging around a curve of the road, pistol in hand, leading the 6th Alabama on foot. Clanton’s clothes were riddled by bullets from the Yankee guns, but he somehow escaped injury. His men were not so fortunate, and they proved no match for the 8th Indiana’s repeating rifles. Those who were not shot soon broke and ran. Several were captured, including one who lingered, kneeling over the body of a friend. It was an almost bloodless triumph for the 8th, with the only serious casualty a private named John Matz, of Tolbert’s company. He had foolishly worn a Confederate hat that he had pilfered the day before and was shot in the face by not-so-friendly fire.
The rest of Rousseau’s men heard the shooting as they prepared to cross the ford at Ten Islands, and soon they too were fired upon from an island in the river, and their advance was halted. Fielder Jones asked Rousseau to let him take the rest of the 8th upriver to reinforce Graham, and after much deliberation Rousseau agreed. Jones and his men splashed across the ford at a safe distance from the Rebels lurking on the island and headed north. Jones was known as a fighter. He had returned to combat after recuperating from gunshot wounds to his liver, arm, and thigh, and at the battle of Stone’s River he had engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the Rebels using his pistol and sword.
Once Rousseau’s men managed to drive the Rebels from the vicinity of the ford, they too crossed unmolested. “The passage of the river was a beautiful sight,” wrote his adjutant, Captain Thomas Williams. “The long array of horsemen winding between the green islands and taking a serpentine course across the ford—their arms flashing back the rays of the burning sun, and guidons gaily fluttering along the column, formed a bright picture, recalling the days of romance, and contrasting strongly with the stern hardships of every-day life on the duty march.”
When the troops were reunited near Greensport, Jones and Rousseau learned that the 8th had whipped Clanton’s brigade of Rebel cavalry, killing one officer, wounding a large number, and capturing about twenty, whom Rousseau promptly paroled—again because he did not need prisoners slowing him down. The column then turned south and marched about fifteen miles into the night. The road was dry, and the column produced a cloud of dust, which made it difficult for the men to breathe. After the moon set at about 2 a.m. and it became too dark to see, Rousseau called a halt.
The next day the raiders occupied the town of Talladega; burned the railroad depot, several train cars, and a gun factory; and captured food stocks earmarked for Atlanta. When they departed Talladega they took with them a group of liberated slaves and a few fresh horses. Private Jack Wilson, who was with the 8th Indiana, wrote that the region around Talladega was “the most beautiful and fertile portion of Alabama I have yet seen, many splendid, commodious and tastefully decorated dwellings studding the road on either side.” At every house they passed, he wrote, slaves approached them with questions, such as where they were from and what they did when it rained. Another soldier wrote, “We found the niggers everywhere to be our friends, they all have an instinctive idea that some how or other they are to be set free in spite of the terrible teachings of their masters to the contrary.” Many slaves followed the column, though they had difficulty keeping up on foot with the rapidly marching horses.
From Talladega, Rousseau directed the column toward the state capital of Montgomery—a ruse designed to confuse the Rebels, when his actual aim was the Montgomery & West Point Railroad, west of Atlanta. It certainly confounded the local residents, many of whom fled with their valuables from the area around Montgomery, only to end up in the path of the raiders. The route now became a treasure hunt, with men discovering caches of silver and gold hastily hidden in bushes around abandoned plantation homes, but soon the men were fatigued, and over the course of the long, hot afternoon, most slumped in their saddles, staring blankly ahead. It would be two more days before the column reached the railroad, and the gambit began to pay off. By then they had forded two rivers, marched two hundred forty miles, and won a significant skirmish, and they had reached Confederate General Joseph Johnston’s lifeline to Atlanta. Once there, they set about prying loose the tracks, using fence rails as levers, and building bonfires of wooden ties to melt and twist the steel.
The Rebels were regrouping, and as Rousseau’s men worked at their destruction near the tiny town of Chehaw, a ragtag force, including men who had lately been patients at a Confederate military hospital in Auburn, arrived by train. The Union troops easily repelled the attack. Rousseau reported forty Confederate casualties, and he captured the train. The next day his men marched all day and night, during which they were forced to navigate a zig-zag ford of the swift-flowing Tallapoosa River in the dark, and many men and horses lost their footing and nearly drowned. Once they made it across, the opposite bank was so slippery that some had to dismount and hold on to their horses’ tails and be pulled to the top. The last of the troops made it across at about two or three in the morning. This, their third major ford, would be remembered as a particularly trying episode. Ohio Colonel Douglas Hamilton later noted, “Ever after, we referred to the crossing of that river, in that night, with a shudder, for the thought of it was as unpleasant as any battle we were ever in.” Remarkably, the only casualty was a young slave who drowned when his mule was swept away by the currents. Farther down the road, the raiders encountered a Rebel company of twenty old men and boys. They killed one and captured two.
By eleven the next morning, a Sunday, they reached the town of Dadeville. Fearing an ambush, the 8th Indiana charged onto the square and down the side streets, capturing a handful of Rebels. They also unhitched horses and mules from buggies and wagons transporting women and children to church, then went to work tearing up the tracks again. In their zeal they nearly burned the entire town. First, sparks from their bonfires ignited the depot, and the fire threatened to engulf a nearby hotel and several commercial buildings. Horses tied to fences and hitching rails began to stamp and whinny, and a few broke loose and galloped away, troopers chasing after them. Men began frantically gathering up guns and ammo that were imperiled by the spreading flames. Eventually the blaze was contained, but the effort to fight it sapped the men of what little strength they had left. No doubt some wondered why Rousseau bothered to put out the fire, anyway.
The presence of Rousseau’s raiders was now widely known. Church and plantation bells raised the alarm, and Confederate cavalry troops began to descend on the area from as far away as Mississippi—on foot, on horseback, by boats and trains. Remarkably, as Evans wrote, “Rousseau’s men were only vaguely aware of the widespread consternation and confusion they were creating.” Still, this much was clear: The work of destroying the railroads was complicated by the necessity of defense. General Sherman had warned Rousseau that the point of the raids was destruction, not engaging the Rebels, and Rousseau was concerned that holding the enemy at bay was diverting too much manpower from the task. According to Evans, Rousseau confessed during a moment of weakness, “I shouldn’t have got into this affair. I’m very much afraid this isn’t judicious.”
When his forces arrived at Auburn on July 18, the men and horses were seriously fatigued. The marching was stressful and exhausting, and the raiders’ chief task—destroying the railroads—was hot, dangerous, and backbreaking. They were perennially short of food and water and exposed to both the blazing sun and occasional thunderstorms. It was not as if they were unused to being exposed, but now they were at large for an indefinite period of time, without even tents. Further complicating matters, more Confederate troops, bolstered by local volunteer forces, were arriving from all directions.
Faced with the Rebels’ renewed strength, Rousseau decided to withdraw, believing his efforts had achieved the desired result. In addition to railroad tracks and telegraph lines, his men had destroyed a Confederate locomotive and several train cars, thirteen depots and warehouses, two gun factories, an iron works, a conscript camp, more than a thousand bales of cotton, several tons of tobacco, at least four wagons, and huge quantities of military supplies. They had also commandeered about three hundred slaves, as many horses, and four hundred mules. And they had done it while losing very few men. Though the Confederate Army repaired and reopened the railroad a little over a month later, there was no discounting the damage done. If nothing else, the Union cavalry now knew what it could do.
The 8th Indiana led the returning column as a regimental band played, of all songs, “Dixie.” The men plodded along until 2 a.m., stopped for two short hours, and then took up the march again. They halted briefly at noon the next day to rest and forage for supplies, and then continued into the night. After another brief rest they resumed marching at 5 a.m. and did not stop until they encountered pickets from General George Stoneman’s cavalry about three miles north of Villa Rica, Georgia, where they were finally safe within Union lines. They entered camp triumphantly, standing in their stirrups, holding their hats aloft, and cheering themselves.
The jubilation was short lived. After traveling more than four hundred bone-rattling miles, the men were informed that they were scheduled to embark upon another raid—disappointing news, to say the least. As Fielder Jones cheerlessly noted in a later dispatch, “We had just returned from the long and fatiguing Rousseau expedition, and both men and animals were sadly jaded.”
MCCOOK’S RAID WAS LARGELY a disaster. Sherman had decided to send Edward McCook, by now a brigadier general, and Colonel Harrison west of Atlanta, and Generals Kenner Garrard and George Stoneman east, with plans to rendezvous south of the city on the Macon & Western Railroad after they had destroyed railroad and telegraph wires and cut off General John Bell Hood’s avenues of retreat. Things did not go exactly as planned. After accomplishing the destruction east of Atlanta, Stoneman wanted to liberate Andersonville prison, and Sherman agreed to let him try, but only as a secondary goal. Stoneman made a unilateral decision to undertake the attempted raid, with disastrous results. Confederate General Wheeler sent three brigades after Stoneman and captured him and many of his men. The officers ended up in the nearby Camp Oglethorpe prison, and the enlisted men were marched to the dreaded Andersonville stockade.
While Stoneman was on his way to prison, the companies of the 8th Indiana under Fielder Jones, which included Tolbert and Maddox, and which had been reduced by sickness and exhaustion to four hundred men, got lost. When they finally caught up with the rest of the regiment under Colonel Harrison, they rendezvoused with McCook, who was not the inspirational leader Rousseau had been. In April 1864, after getting his commission as brigadier general, McCook had written, “I am so tired of taking my share of this fight in little skirmishes and scouting parties that I would cheerfully risk the lives of and wind of the few anatomical steeds I have left for the purpose of getting my proportion of the glory, if there is any for the cavalry, in this campaign.” Not surprisingly, McCook’s mounts took a beating. Eighteen pack mules dropped dead in their harnesses during the twenty-six-mile trek from Turner’s Ferry to Campbellton alone. And on his beleaguered horses rode equally vulnerable men.
To make matters worse, McCook’s raiders were hampered by inferior equipment supplied them by opportunistic government contractors. In a survival situation, such details mattered: A soldier could die if his reins broke or his saddle slipped. The saddles, McCook wrote in one dispatch, were “utterly worthless. The rawhide covering upon the saddle-trees is green, part of the wood green, and the whole construction imperfect…This fraud that is being practiced upon the Government by either Government contractors or Government inspectors, or both, is certainly sufficiently gross in its character to demand prompt investigation. The frauds of a set of unscrupulous speculators are rendering one of the most important and efficient arms of the service a burden instead of a benefit.” Here, then, was another disturbing survival lesson: A soldier’s life could be imperiled not only by inept officers but by greedy contractors counting their wartime profits in distant cities.
The Rebels were meanwhile marshalling their forces again. Confederate General L.S. Ross reported on August 1 that he had tracked down and engaged a group of Yankees near the Owl Rock Church: “About noon we came upon the trail of the foe clearly defined by smoking ashes of burned wagons and the sad havoc and destruction of property everywhere visible, and the eagerness of all to overtake and chastise the insolent despoiler was increased two fold.”
After crossing a pontoon bridge downriver from Campbellton on July 28, McCook reported that his men encountered Confederate snipers at “every hill on the road.” Leaving troops behind to distract the Rebels, he moved toward Palmetto, where he found and destroyed a commissary wagon train and killed at least four hundred Confederate mules. Some accounts put the number of slaughtered mules even higher, but however many it was, running sabers through hundreds of mules must have been grisly and sad. From there the men pushed on to Lovejoy’s Station, on the Macon & Western Railroad, where they cut the telegraph lines; burned the depot and the water tower; and destroyed cotton bales, stores of tobacco, bacon, lard, salt, and ordnance, and a mile of track. Harrison’s men reached Lovejoy’s Station later the same day and also began tearing up the tracks. Confused by Stoneman’s no-show, McCook eventually gave up on him and headed west.
There was also confusion over McCook’s intended route, and the column made slow progress because of the bounty of their raids, occasional Rebel attacks, and the fact that the men had not bedded down for sixty hours. Reaching Newnan, the exhausted soldiers happened upon Rebel cavalry preparing to depart by train for Atlanta, who fired upon them from the train windows and nearby cellar doors and rooftops. “Yonder comes the Yanks now,” one surprised Rebel shouted over the wail of the locomotive. The 8th Indiana was outnumbered ten to one and fled after exchanging a few shots, then returned with reinforcements, at which point they were met by the similarly reinforced Rebels, under Generals Wheeler and Ross, the latter of whom reported, “Friends and foes were mixed up in the struggle, without regard to order or organization, and frequent hand-to-hand encounters were the consequence. Many instances of capture and recaptures occurred during the day, the victor one moment becoming a captive to his prisoner the next.” Ross proudly proclaimed the capture of nearly six hundred Union soldiers and flags from the 2nd Indiana and the 8th Iowa, the latter of which raised the white flag of surrender. He also reported capturing numerous pieces of artillery, ambulances, horses, and arms—none of which, notably, were mentioned in the Union dispatches. Eventually the 8th fled, leaving behind its beloved Colonel Harrison, who was separated from his command and found himself alone, without his horse. Unable to run because his calves were cramped from exertion, he was cornered by the Rebels and, like Stoneman, ended up in prison in Macon.
After fleeing Newnan, the 8th was again surrounded by a superior Rebel force, and Colonel Fielder Jones called for a withdrawal. Amid the confusion, his mule trains and led horses stampeded, and once he managed to restore order and reclaim his troops, the men lost their way. One of his officers reported finding “an obscure road, but he could not ascertain where it led to.” Jones decided to follow it anyway. They soon ran up against a solid line of Rebels, at which point McCook, in command of the overall Union force, seems to have lost his nerve. “What shall we do? What shall we do?” he asked one of his officers, who told him contemptuously that he should fight. McCook ordered the officer to take command and “do the best you can.” The 8th attempted to cover the rear and left flank of the column, but to no avail. As Rebel reinforcements continued to arrive McCook reportedly told his officers, “We must get out of this!” but his men were determined to fight, if only to prevent being captured. For no obvious reason, someone let loose the mules and horses, and there was a stampede. When some semblance of order was restored, Jones led the 8th in a charge of the Confederate lines and later reported, “We moved out at a brisk trot, and so well were our forces in hand, and so sudden the movement, that nearly one-half the Eighth Indiana got through the lines without receiving a single shot, and, although the remainder of the column ran the gauntlet of a heavy fire of musketry, yet, strange to say, but 1 man was wounded, although the enemy was in some places near enough to almost touch the horses.”
After passing through the Confederate lines, the men hurried on, burning bridges behind them. At the New River, Jones was forced to leave many of his precious horses behind. “Several attempts were made to swim the animals, but they were so thoroughly exhausted that the attempt had to be abandoned,” he reported. Soon after daylight his troops were again attacked by Confederate cavalry, and Jones was “compelled to leave 15 men, about 200 horses and mules in his hands. The most of the animals were unserviceable.” He escaped with the Rebels in close pursuit. Many of his dismounted men were exhausted and barefoot and could not keep up, so he ordered them to break off from the column and hide in the mountains while the rest advanced toward Rome, Georgia. “I must say that the physical powers of the men were pushed to the very verge of human endurance,” Jones later observed. “Five days and nights of almost constant duty in the saddle, added to the fourteen days’ rapid marching with Rousseau, would shake even the most robust constitution. Men fell asleep on their horses, and the most persistent efforts of their officers could not keep them awake.”
The column arrived in Marietta, Georgia, on August 3. Jones reported one hundred of his men killed, wounded, or missing and said that three regimental doctors had “voluntarily remained in the hands of the enemy to care for our wounded.” No doubt many of the soldiers wished they had left well enough alone after Rousseau’s raids. This time there were no self-congratulatory cheers, and some of the soldiers were reduced to riding cows back to camp, where one of them collapsed and died of exhaustion.
It took the Rebels only two weeks to repair the damage to the railroad. By then the 8th was on the road again, on yet another raid, this time under General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick, whom Sherman described as “a hell of a damned fool.” The routine was becoming familiar: Another inept general, another series of towns and dangerous roads, another set of tracks to destroy. At Jonesboro, the challenge was compounded by darkness and rain. “Everything calculated to confuse men we had here to contend with—an utter ignorance of the formation of the ground, the darkness of the night, with heavy rain, and the only information of the enemy’s position was gained by receiving his volleys of fire,” Jones wrote. Forced to withdraw, they marched on, continually skirmishing with the Rebels. On and on it went. Like McCook’s raid, Kilpatrick’s raid proved to be nothing to write home about, unless to decry his ineptitude.
When he reported back to General Sherman, Kilpatrick exaggerated the accomplishments of his raid, claiming he had destroyed the Macon & Western railroad—though even as he spoke, a Rebel locomotive could be heard chugging into Atlanta along the line. The raids did have the effect of preoccupying Confederate forces, who might otherwise have helped defend Atlanta against the Union infantry and artillery. The former included the 22nd Indiana, in which Tolbert’s brothers Silas and Daniel fought. Notably, the officer commanding the 22nd fired off a dispatch requesting that several of his men be cited for bravery and heroic conduct, including one whom he identified only as “Tolbert.”
On September 2, the isolated and besieged Rebel garrison in Atlanta surrendered, and the largest Confederate industrial and rail center in the deep South fell into Union hands. The aggressively amoral William Blufton Miller observed, “It was a grand sight from our camp to look down on the burning city.” At that point, Silas Tolbert was camped just outside Atlanta with the 22nd Indiana. Daniel Tolbert had been hospitalized with a gunshot wound to his left hand, which would result in the loss of three fingers and his discharge from the army.
Though the news of Atlanta’s fall caused elation in the Union ranks, it was not as if Romulus Tolbert, Maddox, Summerville, and the rest of the cavalrymen in the area could let down their guard. There were plenty of Rebels still out there, and they were more desperate now. About forty-five hundred Confederate troops under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest continued to assail the Union supply lines after the fall of Atlanta, and occasionally they overtook Union outposts and captured Union soldiers on patrol. Most of General Hood’s army had escaped, leaving an estimated forty thousand Rebels at large.
Jones and his men continued to roam the countryside, building a succession of barricades along rural roads and camping behind them at night. When they again arrived at the Owl Rock Church, they were relieved to find that the baggage and camp equipment they had left behind two months before had been shipped south and caught up with them, though for Tolbert, his possessions would be of only temporary use.
The Owl Rock Church was to be the last stop of Tolbert’s military career. On September 10, he departed the church in his newly issued uniform on a patrol of fifty 8th Indiana cavalrymen led by Major Graham, headed toward Campbellton. As they rounded the blind curve about a mile east of Campbellton they came face to face with Rebel cavalry. Before any of them had time to think, they were being fired upon. Tolbert wheeled to escape, glancing over his shoulder, and took one bullet in the back and another in the neck. Blood splattered his new uniform and ran from the corners of his mouth. The first bullet, a ball from a Navy revolver, entered behind his left ear, passed through his mouth, and lodged in the opposite side of his jaw. The second passed cleanly through his shoulder. About half of his patrol managed to get away and raced back toward the Owl Rock Church. Three of the men, including James Taylor, Tolbert’s boyhood friend from Saluda, were killed. Twenty-two others were captured, eight of whom were wounded.
Tolbert was now gravely wounded and depended for his survival on a group of highly agitated enemy soldiers, sweating in their wool uniforms on a hot September day, who moments before had wanted him dead. He had also lost his horse.
When Graham delivered the news to the men back at the Owl Rock Church, Maddox was no doubt particularly disheartened. He was now separated for the first time from the friend who had accompanied him into the army, through his sickness, and along hundreds of miles of inscrutable, dangerous roads. He had no way of knowing whether or when he would see him again.