River Run Red

IN A THEATER OF WAR THAT PITTED SOUTHERNER AGAINST SOUTHERNER, each side dismissed the other as riffraff: thugs, drunkards, drifters, slackers, and assorted detrimentals who haunted the periphery of the great plantations or the back alleys and riverfronts of Southern towns; the “poor white trash” of antebellum lore. But they were wrong. Each side looked ragtag to the other, and it often was, but where each regarded its own raggedness as a badge of sacrifice and honor and its own savagery as proof of its courage, it dismissed the other side’s raggedness and savagery as evidence of ignorance and backwoods barbarity.

Though West Tennessee’s slaveholders were generally wealthier than nonslaveholders, and a higher proportion fought for the Confederacy, all classes were about equally represented on both sides. As John Milton Hubbard would discover after his 7th Tennessee Cavalry (CSA) captured the 7th Tennessee Cavalry (USA), the bluecoats “turned out to be jolly good fellows, molded much after the pattern of our own Seventh Tennessee, Confederate.” ²

The ancestry of the men who rode with Forrest was about evenly divided among English, Scottish, and Irish, with a scattering of French, German, Dutch, and Swiss. According to a survey of Tennessee’s Confederate veterans that was conducted in the early 1900s, the vast majority of Forrest’s Tennessee cavalrymen were first- or second-generation Tennesseeans, but their ancestors were no strangers to slavery. The preponderance of the Mississippians who served under Forrest had emigrated from the Carolinas, and, like the ancestors of the Wizard’s Missouri Cavalry, most of his Tennesseeans’ forebears had pressed westward from “slavery’s cradle” in Virginia, bringing their slaves along with them. Of the 137 veterans of Forrest’s regiments who listed their ancestry, only two had families that had emigrated from free states: New Jersey and Massachusetts.³

Three-quarters of Forrest’s Tennesseeans were living in the western half of the state when they enlisted.⁴ Though four of them were in their thirties in 1864, cavalry service was a young man’s game. The average trooper was a little over twenty-one years of age, and almost a quarter were eighteen and under. Though their fathers’ acreage ranged from none to 3,200, the average soldier came from a farm of some 450 acres. The median value of their property was around $13,000 ($20,000 if you include the families that claimed a net worth of over $100,000). Over 80 percent of those who rode with Forrest at Fort Pillow were the sons of farmers of one description or another, including men who also described themselves as carpenters, stock raisers, millers, overseers, a clerk, a mechanic, a trader, a tobacconist, and a justice of the peace. The nonfarmers included a preacher, a clerk, a doctor, a stage-coach driver, a lawyer, a mail carrier, and a newspaper publisher.

Newt Cannon of the 11th Tennessee Cavalry maintained that “a large percent of the Confederate army owned no slaves and were among the first to volunteer,” the implication being that they therefore could not have been fighting for slavery’s perpetuation. This is commonly claimed about the Confederate army as a whole, but it is not known how many stood to inherit slaves if the South won the war, or came from families that worked or owned slaves. Most rebels were too young to own anything, let alone slaves, and like Forrest himself, many a poor Southern boy saw slaveholding as the surest path to prosperity.⁵

Two-thirds of Forrest’s men—and almost three-quarters of those who served at Fort Pillow—came from slave-owning families averaging about 18 slaves apiece. This number is skewed somewhat by the large slaveholders scattered among their number—Jack Shaw of the 14th, for instance, claimed his family owned 300 slaves; the Witherspoon brothers of the 7th claimed 175; their comrade Billy Anthony owned 200. But even when the calculation is extended to all 201 respondents, including those whose families did not own slaves, the average number of slaves per trooper’s family came to about a dozen. Not all of the big slave owners were officers, either. Though the family of the 20th’s Lieutenant John Russell Dance owned 75 slaves, Private Willy Wade’s owned 35, Private W. T. Sutton’s owned 60, and Private Jim Monroe’s parents owned 110.⁶

The vast majority recalled that slave owners related positively to non- slave owners, and vice versa. Some large slaveholders insisted that the slave owners did all they could to help their less propertied neighbors. “There were many acts of charity,” Lieutenant Dance insisted, that “passed unknown to the world” because “the southern gentleman who helped a friend or needy young man never let it be known to the public.” Though only six disagreed to some degree, among their number were a banker, a miller, and a doctor—members of less vested professions who probably observed more such interactions than most.⁷

In the opinion of Meriwether Donaldson of the 12th Kentucky Cavalry, “the rich slave owners did little work of a usual character” and sustained “quite an arristocratic spirit.” In any case, to some men there did seem to be a correlation between slavery and the poor white’s prospects. Hamp Cheney of the 2nd Tennessee Cavalry believed that a poor white’s chances were poorest “where the work on the plantations was done by negroes,” but since Tennessee had fewer slaves per capita than the Deep South, and its climate “permitted white men to do a greater variety of labor, there were probably many more opportunities for a man to make and save money.” The implication was nonetheless clear: the more slaves in a county, the worse for the whites who owned none.⁸

That some of Forrest’s men did not own or stand to inherit slaves did not make them kindlier disposed to black people. Those poor whites who were materially worse off than the house slaves of wealthy masters harbored deep resentments compounded by their growing conviction that the entire war was being waged on behalf of the planter class. This at least suggests the complexity and range of the relationships between slaveholding officers and their men. Many a poor young soldier might well have envied or resented the wealth and idleness and vaunting pretensions of old-line planters whose families had owned slaves for generations. But they admired a man like Forrest as the embodiment of the promise of the slave society they were fighting for: the poor boy who had made good by the sweat of his brow and the sharpness of his wits; the canny, hardscrabble speculator who saw slavery’s road to wealth laid out before him and boldly took it, as they themselves hoped to take it if only the goddamn Yankees would get out of their way.

The cavalrymen’s education was rudimentary. There was no publicly funded education in Tennessee before the war, so it was left to communities and congregations to hire teachers and establish schools. Some teachers barely qualified. W. H. “Billy” Matthews of Maury County recalled that his first teacher was a woman who “couldent spell to Baker.” Most boys who went to country schools attended only part time. Higher education was a province of the rich, for not only could their families afford to send them to school, but their slaves’ labor freed up time to study. “Men that owned,” recalled Private J. P. Walker of Bedford County, “was in a better condition to educate there children than poor people.”⁹

Long before they joined the army, Forrest’s boys lived by a warrior’s code. When John Wyeth failed to retaliate after a playmate slapped him, his mother, a Scot from “Clan Allan,” threatened to whip him if he did not defend himself. An obstreperous patriotic strain coursed through their lineage. Johnny McMurtry of the 15th claimed that his grandfather had been drafted into the British army in Belfast and shipped over to fight Americans, whereupon he had deserted and fought alongside the rebels for seven years. John W. Carroll of the 21st recalled how his hard-drinking Irish grandfather used to thrill him with his account of the Battle of New Orleans.¹⁰

When the South issued its summons, they were eager for the fray. Forrest’s recruiters rode under gaudy versions of company banners and treated large crowds to pit barbecues of cattle, sheep, and pigs. At a single rally in the little town of Eagleville, Tennessee, Forrest collected a company of 104 men. John Weatherred was only fifteen years old when he “heard the fife and drums and speeches urging all people of the South to defend their rights, their homes and firesides from the designing Northern Yankees who wish to take our property and destroy the Constitution of the United States.” Repeatedly rejected as too young, Weatherred “imbibed the war spirit immediately,” and enlisted in the 9th shortly before his sixteenth birthday.¹¹

Many more believed themselves to have been forced into fighting by Yankee depredations. “In the spring of 1864,” recalled Bill Hight of Bedford County, “the Yankees worried us so much as my father was a full blooded Rebel” that Hight left home and joined Forrest’s cavalry. After his hometown, Columbia, Tennessee, was occupied by Yankees, Edward Perry Davis “ran away at night and went to Perry Co. and enlisted in 9th Tenn. Cav.” At Eagleville a recruit declared to Forrest that whipping the Yankees would be a “breakfast job.” “I left home,” wrote Jesse Green of the 19th, “and entered the war for three weeks, and was gone for nearly three years.” Though there was honor in being among the first to join, it took even greater courage to enlist after it became apparent that the war would drag on for years, and at tremendous cost.¹²

Forrest’s men were not all secessionists. “Some of us, though young men,” wrote John Hubbard, “had been thinking over the grave questions for some time, particularly during the exciting political canvass of the previous year. Many who admitted the abstract right of Secession but had voted against it as wrong under the circumstances, if not impracticable, were yet hoping that a wicked war would somehow be averted.” All his life, Robert Florence Street of the 10th would wonder “why men will pick up arms and shoot the life out of each other that did not aught against each other.”¹³

“I could not wholly believe with either extreme,” Henry Watterson recalled. He figured the war “could not last very long” because “the odds against the South were too great.” But on “reaching home I found myself alone. The boys were all gone to the front. The girls were—well, they were all crazy. My native country was about to be invaded. Propinquity. Sympathy. So, casting opinions to the winds, in I went on feeling. And that is how I became a rebel,” he said, “a case of ‘first endure and then embrace,’ because I soon got to be a pretty good rebel and went the limit, changing my coat as it were,” though even “with a gray jacket on my back and ready to do or die, I retained my belief that Secession was treason, that disunion was the height of folly and that the South was bound to go down in the unequal strife.”¹⁴

“I was not in favor of seccession,” recalled George Washington Brown of the 3rd, “but I wished to go with my State.” “My sympathies naturally went out to the Southern people,” wrote John Carroll, “not that I owned any property in slaves [though in fact he stood to inherit a few], but I naturally loved the Sunny South together with all her institutions, then as now; whether right or wrong, was no question with me.”¹⁵

Some of Forrest’s boys opposed slavery. Bill Mays of Dyer County had grown up with slavery. But he “had not studied the subject of one man owning another” until he drove his father’s hogs down to Mississippi, where slave owners “would bring out their negroes to [do the] killing,” he said. “That was a big day with the negroes eating the scraps. I remember one day while they were killing hogs, a big gate fell on one of the little negroes about five or six, and killed it. The overseer told two of the negro men to go and bury it. They picked it up and went off somewhere, was not gone but a little while.” That night the overseer declared that “in a short time the negroes would all be free,” and told Mays that “he did not think from what he had seen that God would suffer it much longer.”¹⁶

Badly wounded at Perryville, John Carroll of the 27th Tennessee Infantry limped home to Henderson County on a crutch to raise a new company of mounted volunteers. “We had many difficulties,” he recalled. “We had no arms except occasionally a flint-lock shotgun that we could pick up. We went along, enrolled whom we could and let them remain at home. This enrollment was secretly carried on until such a time as we could get men enough to organize a company.” By the summer of 1863, Carroll had formed a company of the 21st with “men enough to start South but no arms or ammunition.” ¹⁸

After the Confederate army’s reorganization in 1862, about a thousand infantrymen joined Forrest’s command. At one point 654 deserting foot soldiers were found on his rolls. Forrest was promptly ordered to arrest them all and have them sent back to their commands “under proper guard.” But in the end only 97 returned, and Forrest’s recruiters continued to range far and wide, to the outrage of the Confederacy’s high command. Officers as well as men bristled at the inequities of the conscription law. “There is dissatisfaction in camps to some extent about the conscription, the way it is carried on,” wrote John Crutchfield of the 20th. “I do not know what I will do. I can tell you one thing. I am under military arrest for not bringing in Conscripts. I will not march any man before me on foot unless they will make all go: that is, take the rich as well as the poor.”¹⁹

Slogging along the roadsides, splashed with the mud or choking in the dust kicked up by cavalry horses as they trotted past, rebel foot soldiers might have envied Forrest’s troopers their mode of transportation. But the men of Forrest’s cavalry experienced the worst of both services, fighting on foot and employing their mounts only to race from one battle to another or pursue a retreating foe. Forrest conceived of his fighters not as dragoons “who fought indifferently on foot or horseback,” nor as cavalry who fought only mounted and with sabers. “We was mounted infantry,” recalled J. P. Wilson, “armed with long guns.”²⁰

They sure looked tough. Most of them were “slender-built men” and, since many were former infantrymen, not as short as professional cavalry tended to be. From weeks without bathing, hunkered around campfires, especially in the winter months, they became “smoked”: so blackened by soot and dust that from a distance they appeared to some Union soldiers like black troops in rebel uniforms. “I look like a border ruffian now,” wrote a rebel trooper, “with a black hat & a black plume in it—a red shirt, military pants & horseman’s boots—with large Spanish spurs and a beard all over my face.”²¹

Some cavalrymen received a full allotment of clothing when they joined up. Others brought clothes from home. “My wife and mother made all the clothes I wore,” wrote John Brownlow of the 19th. “For winter wear they would mix white and black wool to geather, card, spin, and weave them a long overcoat. They were very comfortable and looked real well. I was verry proud of them.” But for the rest, recalled S. P. Driver of the 7th, “clothing was our greatest want.”²²

Many of Forrest’s men wore captured Yankee uniforms. “We had the Yank prisoners out on the field burying some of there dead,” John Rabb wrote after a battle. “The hogs got a holt of some of the Yankey dead before the fight was over.” Nevertheless, he managed to strip the corpses of “a big Yank over coat and a sack Yank cote” plus “two pare of wollen pants and pleanty of drawers” and a “good pare of boots and pleanty of mony.”²³

Taylor’s comrade John Brownlow recalled that by the time of the Battle of Nashville nearly all of Forrest’s men would wear “yanky over coates or oil cloth.” The result was that “we got considerably mixed up.” But before long, recalled George Baskerville of the 12th, “the blue was changed but definitely to brown.” And not just from wear and tear, either, for they usually dyed their captured Union uniforms “at the first stop.”²⁴

They were marvelous horsemen. “War suits them,” said Sherman of the gray riders. “The rascals are brave, fine riders and dangerous subjects in every sense.” In fact, in his judgment, they were “the best cavalry in the world.” “The boy of the old South learned to ride and to shoot almost as soon as he learned to walk,” wrote John Wyeth. “I began to ride when I was only four years old, and at ten was the possessor of my own horse and gun.” Often slaves taught children how to ride.²⁵

Wyeth recalled that he and his men were trained to swing “head downward” on either side of their horses at a full gallop “to pick up any object from the ground.” They were equally adept at mounting their horses, “and from either side I could mount or leap entirely over my horse, and vault into the saddle from behind, with my pistol buckled around the waist, by placing my two hands on the horse’s rump.”²⁶

Forrest’s own feats of horsemanship were legendary. At the Battle of Thompson’s Station, Forrest’s horse Roderick, which used to follow the general around like a hound, was struck three times. At last Forrest switched mounts, but hearing the roar of battle, Roderick charged back to rejoin the general, jumping three fences before a fourth wound finally brought him down. When, near Rossville, Georgia, a minié ball severed an artery in his horse’s neck, Forrest plugged the hole with his index finger and continued galloping after the Federals. After his enemy had fled, he finally removed his finger, whereupon the horse collapsed and died. In an engagement at Pontotoc, Mississippi, two horses were killed under him, one by a spray of bullets that shattered the general’s saddle but left him miraculously unharmed. That same day another round wounded his third mount, King Phillip, who, with his ears back and his teeth bared, charged anything clad in blue.²⁷

At Vicksburg, Forrest’s men had to feed their horses “on mulberry leaves and the long moss which hangs from the trees in that section of the country.” “In times of stress, when food was scarce and Fanny was hungry,” wrote Wyeth, “I have often shared with her the roasting-ears of corn issued to me as my rations.” Horses often took more lead than their riders. “My poor horse,” wrote L. B. Giles of the 8th Texas Cavalry, “who received some of the lead intended for his master, and yet had no personal interest in the row, had five bullet wounds.” All their lives Forrest’s men would be haunted by the cries of wounded horses stranded on the field of battle.²⁸

The troopers’ first weapons were whatever rifles, pistols, knives and swords their families could provide. “We were armed with such shot guns and pistols as we could get at home,” wrote Newt Cannon of the 11th. All of J. D. Hughes’s comrades in Company A of the 2nd provided their own horses, uniforms, and weapons: muzzle loaders and double-barreled shotguns. “Alas! the god of war never beheld such a wonderful collection of antique weapons,” wrote a Mississippian. “There were guns with only a vent, to be fired with a live coal, guns without ramrods, barrels without stocks, stocks without barrels, guns without cocks, cocks without pans”: what he called a “beggarly array of trash.”²⁹

Forrest’s handpicked escort, perhaps alone among the Wizard’s troopers, carried sabers, and would employ them most notably in hand-to-hand fighting at Memphis. Forrest himself appropriated a Yankee sword of Damascus steel and sharpened both edges so he could slash at his foe with - every sweep of his arm. It proved a formidable weapon. In the heat of battle at Okolona, Mississippi, he almost entirely severed the head of a Federal officer with a single stroke. But it did not take Forrest long to figure out that though flashing sabers made an impressive display, for men on horseback, pistols were far more effective.³⁰

“At the beginning,” wrote Giles, “the possession of a good pistol was a requisite for enlistment. If a man died or was killed his comrades kept his pistol. When a prisoner of the enemy’s cavalry was taken this part of his outfit was added to the general stock, so that after a few months most, if not all, had two weapons of this kind, and some even tried to carry three or four.”³¹

Forrest’s men captured Yankee arms with the same alacrity with which they seized horses and uniforms. “Our necessities,” wrote H. C. Coles of the 4th Tennessee, “were principally supplied by our foes.” “Sometimes, on the eve of a battle,” wrote Dabney Maury, Forrest would turn and address the convalescents and liberated prisoners he accumulated on his raids. “I have no arms for you yet,” he would tell them, “but fall in here behind, and you shall have plenty of good Yankee arms presently.”³²

They performed almost every kind of military duty. “In the cavalry we are always actively engaged in some kind of an enterprise,” wrote Given Campbell, “burning trains, obtaining army supplies, capturing boats, tearing up rail roads, fighting Yankees on land & gunboats on water.” When asked for his observations during the war, Bob McCalister of the 11th replied, “The experance of a cavalry man is some what complicated: hear today, gone tomorrow, most always on the go, either running too or from the foe, and having to hustle. There was but little time for observations.” Besides, a cavalryman was not much interested in observations anyway, “as he had more serious matters to contemplate.”³³

“By his captures,” wrote Forrest’s commander of artillery, “the Federal Government supplied him with guns and artillery and more ordnance, commissary, and quartermaster’s stores than he could use.” But his men would have begged to differ, for theirs was a war of extreme privation. “We were exposed to all the hardships possible under Bedford Forest,” recalled M. B. Dinwiddie of the 20th: “scant clothing, and most of time half rashings.” For J. W. Shankle of the 16th, it was a “life of hardships: poorly clad and oftimes went 3 and 4 days without anything to eat.”³⁴

“Camp life was unpleasant,” remembered William James Sutton, who served with the 16th. In the camp of the 7th Tennessee Cavalry “the men and horses all camped together and the odor and filth were not agreeable.” There were often “no ditches around our tents,” recalled Lieutenant William Frazier of the 10th, “so the rain run all over the ground under our tents. So we could stand or sit up all the night, or lie down in mud as we choose.”³⁵

“I want to say that when I was with Forrest that I never slept in a tent,” declared Archie Hughes of the 9th. “His command had no tents, as they had no use for them” because “they were in the saddle all the time.” George Baskerville of the 12th could recall only a single month when he and his comrades stayed in camp long enough to put up tents. Usually the best they could do was erect “sleeping places out of little poles” and cover them with oilcloths.³⁶

They did not “mind so much the rains of summer-time,” Wyeth recalled, “but the winter rains, the sleet, the snow, and the biting wind made us think of home and wish ‘the cruel war was over.’” Jack Dunavant of the 1st remembered going to sleep on the ground one night and awaking next morning “covered up in snow.” They improvised elaborate systems for keeping warm. “For want of bedding in bitter coald weather wee would build a big fire,” recalled Bob Bowden of the 3rd, “sit around telling yarns until fire burn down. Then we would throw the hot ashes over the ground, then dig it up, and I spread one blanket on the ground.” All but one of them lay down, and then the last man would throw a blanket over them. “He would pile some tops over them, then they would let him root up” in the middle of the others.³⁷

Another enemy of sleep was lice. “The bite is like that of no other insect that live on human flesh or blood,” Jack Claiborne of the 8th Texas recalled; “it sets the body on fire.” Many nights Claiborne noticed that sleeping men were “continually in motion and are kept warm by these body lice companions.” Their hardships made them especially vulnerable to disease. Bad water was usually the culprit. One soldier stationed in Mississippi described having to drink water that was “thick enough to bear the weight of an ordinary hat and warmer than milk just milked from a cow.” “We drink Cistern water which is said to be the healthiest, though it is a well-defined case ‘of animal nature’ [being] literally alive with wiggle tails and various tribes of smaller animalculae, which gambol about under your nose quite lively whilst you take a drink.”³⁸

Forrest’s men probably got less sleep and under worse conditions than just about any other soldiers in the war. Before electricity, Americans averaged ten hours of sleep per day, but Forrest’s men slept in fitful stages of four or five hours at the most, and though some learned how to doze in the saddle, the long-term effects on their bodies and psyches were severe, not only impairing their coordination and judgment, but inducing everything from chronic irritability and depression to paranoia and other psychoses.³⁹

Though the 8th Texas Rangers were “eager to get into a fight, going through wet and cold, marching day & night,” measles and pneumonia “thinned the companys down so that each company could not send more than fifty or sixty on a scout.” Three weeks after joining the 21st, Jim Pearce came down with typhoid while on a “recruiting raid,” as he called it. Some illnesses were not the direct result of conditions in camp. “There is a good deal of sickness in our company,” wrote Lieutenant Hugh Black of the 6th Regiment of Florida Volunteers from Knoxville, Tennessee, “but nothing serious. The most of the diseases is caused from our boys visiting the women to much.”⁴⁰

“Our ambulance facilities were so poor,” recalled Newt Cannon of the 11th, “that many were left when they were shot down.” The 4th often had to leave an ailing Jack Vaughan behind, but he proudly told his grandchildren that “as soon as he would get better he began to make his way back to his command and stayed to the last.”⁴¹

They lived for the most part on what they called “hard eats.” “I have eaten raw corn—green pumpkins and most anything else on these raids,” recalled Lee Billingsley of the 2nd. “Our rations were poor,” wrote John Bell of the 21st; “musty corn meal, and bacon and beef when we could get it.” “At one time,” wrote Jesse Green of the 19th, “I went two nights and one day with out a bite to eat. At the Chickamauga fight Billie Ham and I were brought a piece of old cornpone, and our stomachs were so weak we - couldn’t eat it.” “Some of the boys indulged in the rare dish of a rodent, well cooked in a hollow log and that without taking off his epidermis or taking out his internal viscera,” recalled Charlie Rice of the 7th. Though he himself “did not indulge in the above,” he did enjoy a “bucket full of steak” cut from a mule that had been killed in battle. Bad food inflicted bouts of severe diarrhea—a particular misery for men in the saddle.⁴²

They slaughtered so many animals along their way that it haunted some of them long after the war. Returning home from the war, Sam Martin of the 12th would plunge into a delirium in which he was convinced that “the house top was covered with men dressed in cowhides literally covering me with cow hair.” At last he fled the house and doused himself in his father’s cow pond, and later ascribed his nightmarish vision to the beef bones he had gnawed while campaigning with Forrest.⁴³

Some men took to the life. “As to camp life sleeping, eating etc.,” recalled Marc Crump of the 2nd, “ I enjoyed it all except prison life and battle.” “We were a jolly set,” Andy McCleary declared, “and would sometimes joke or play pranks on each other while the fight was going on.” “We lived pretty hard,” wrote R. W. Michie of the 19th, “but the boys of my age enjoyed it.” “Forrest’s Command,” bragged Solomon Brantley of the 7th Tennessee Cavalry, “was a fighting Piece of Machinery.”⁴⁴

Bobby Rogers of the 7th boasted that Forrest “was hunting yanks all the time and was capturing and killing yanks all the time, and I was in every little fight that Forest [got] up.” “A man who can show that he was with Forrest the last year and a half of the war is no ordinary man,” wrote Lieutenant James Dinkins of Chalmers’s staff. “You can depend on that.”⁴⁵

Considering the peculiar hardships and perils of serving under Forrest, however, it is no wonder that desertions from his command were legion. But there were other dynamics at work. First among them was the nature of the Western rebels themselves and the cavalry in particular. It was the Southerner’s individualism and autonomy to which secessionist agitators and rebel recruiters had appealed. Like their ancestors in the Continental army, they saw themselves as citizen soldiers, and many of them never entirely comprehended what regular military service required. Fighting for their independence, many refused to accept that the Confederacy had any more right to order them around than the Yankees had. L. B. Giles’s description of Terry’s Texas Rangers could apply in varying degrees to all of Forrest’s regiments. “From the standpoint of the martinet,” he wrote, “our organization - could hardly be called a regiment.” One general called it a “damned armed mob.” “Volunteers we began,” wrote a comrade, “volunteers we remained to the end.”⁴⁶

Punishments for desertion were meted out haphazardly and at times indulgently by officers who dared not risk alienating men who were often more loyal to each other than they were to the cause. Officers rarely imposed capital punishment until after the fall of Vicksburg, when rebel volunteers learned in battle the necessity of loyalty and steadfastness. Thereafter, squads were sent out to round up deserters, many with orders to execute them on the spot. In 1863 authorities throughout the Confederacy were directed to cooperate in the capture and arrest of shirkers, stragglers, and deserters. Though the Confederacy offered to pay their captors five dollars per deserter, what passed for West Tennessee’s civil authorities often extended their protection to shirkers and their families.⁴⁷

During the war, Forrest was often seen “with a pack of hounds following him,” and there is substantial evidence that he and his men employed them to hunt down deserters. When deserters were rounded up, many merely took the first opportunity that presented itself to desert again. “Unless one were inherently loyal,” wrote a Mississippian, “no amount of persuasion, intimidation, and punishment meted out by the loyal against him contained any lasting efficacy.”⁴⁸

Part of the problem was the anomalous status of Tennessee and Kentucky. “The people of Tennessee were very greatly dissatisfied at the loss of their capitol city,” Nashville, in 1862, “and the destruction of the property and supplies,” wrote Jack Claiborne of Terry’s Texas Rangers. “Many of the army were Tennesseans, and they were hard to handle.” During the retreat to Corinth “not a few quit the ranks when their homes, families and kindred were left behind.” Forrest complained that his Kentuckians kept slipping through his fingers, “for, though they would flock to General Johnson’s standard upon his appearance in the State, as soon as he turned southward, they would scatter to attach themselves to roving bands of guerillas, jayhawkers, and plunderers who preyed upon the people.” Texans fled across the Rio Grande to Mexico. Some Mississippians complained of what they called “Haystack Secessionists”: men who professed rebel sympathies but did whatever they could to stay close to home. “There are men enough at home today, who belong to the army,” wrote Frank Montgomery of the 1st Mississippi Cavalry, “to drive the Yankees from the south, and gain our independence, without help from any quarter. But they will not come out and cannot be driven out. They basely prefer to dodge about the swamps like runaway negroes, and try to save their miserable lives.”⁴⁹

Not all of them were “skulkers,” however; many were “true soldiers, debilitated from disease or wounds.” “I was never discharged,” recalled Jim Hinson of the 10th. Sent home on furlough to recruit horses, he “got cut off from my command and could not get back without being in danger of capture.” Others made it a practice to desert the Confederate units that had conscripted them, join the Union army, and, after obtaining transportation to a particular theater of the war, slip off to join the Confederate units of their choice. One hundred out of 130 Mississippians the Union army conscripted escaped to join Forrest’s command.⁵⁰

On January 3, 1863, Brigadier General James Madison Tuttle would report that “large numbers of Forrest’s unarmed conscripts are escaping. Most of them work their way Home, But some of them come in & say they want to go Home on any terms. Say they were forced &c.” “I am sorry to say a great many have deserted,” wrote a trooper of the 1st Mississippi. “I saw a poor fellow shot for desertion a short time ago. He belonged to the brigade, and was shot in presence of it, but I fear it has failed to check the evil.”⁵¹

M. B. Dinwiddie of the 20th recalled that “quite a number” of his company deserted: “so much so that Forest had to have two shot, laid them by the road side, labeled in large letters, ‘The fate of a deserter.’” “Forrest had a standing order to shoot any man who ran,” wrote Wyeth, “and himself set the example on more than one occasion.” At Pulaski, Forrest had three of his soldiers shot for spending the night in their nearby homes. A member of the 8th Texas Cavalry deplored Forrest’s summary executions. “On two or three occasions the Rangers were the observers of the shooting of men for offenses, and they failed to see the justice of the proceedings from their idea of the matter, and while little was said or heard from them, it was notorious that they did not have that respect for a general who shot his men to death, that they did for men who obtained more and better fighting by some other system.”⁵²

Forrest once ordered his men to execute nineteen West Tennessee levies caught in the act of deserting. “Their coffins were made, their graves dug and the culprits advised to make their peace with their Maker and the world,” recalled R. R. Hancock of the 22nd Tennessee Cavalry. “Bell’s Brigade, mounting and moving out into a large field, was formed in line on three sides of a square, while the culprits, blindfolded and seated on their coffins, occupied the center of the other side of the square.” But just as the firing squad was about to shoot, a staff officer came rushing up to address the culprits.

“General Forrest,” he said, “has requested me to say to you that it was unpleasant to him to shed blood in this manner, and that, through the petitions of the clergy, the prominent citizens and ladies of Oxford and your officers, if you will now promise to make good and faithful soldiers he would pardon you.”

“He bitterly hated a coward,” wrote Tully Brown, who served with Forrest as an artillerist, “and I tell you, a man had to be a most dastardly coward to play the coward act in Bedford Forrest’s command. He might escape the Federal musketry by his cowardice, but he ran into something very much worse”: the Wizard himself. “He would shoot him down in a minute. I saw him whip a soldier like a dog at West Point for running from his line, and I have never heard such talk as he gave; it blistered worse than the cane he was using.”⁵⁴

Captain F. G. Terry of the 8th Kentucky Cavalry recalled the grief of his comrade Captain James Powell over the fate of his only son, a seventeen-year-old civilian named Gee Powell, whom Forrest executed. The killing had its origin in a collision between Forrest and the 3rd Kentucky Cavalry, members of which had recently attacked Forrest’s guardhouse at West Point, Mississippi, to release some comrades the general had imprisoned “for some misdemeanor.” The killing “was an outrage,” Terry declared, “without law or excuse, and done in a frenzy.” J. F. Rickman of the 28th Mississippi put it plainly. “Forrest was cruel,” he said.⁵⁵

From the first, Bill Sutton of the 16th “had fears of defeat. I served with Gen. Bedford Forrest Cavalry command and was under fire twenty-six times. We were usually outnumbered, hence we suffered defeat more often than victory.” As early as 1862, Captain Given Campbell of the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry had seen so much combat that he believed he had been “born to die by the hand of the country’s enemies.” He wrote that his fiancée and his family were “the only bonds which tie me to life, and if they should end unhappily broken,” he would carry his life “on my sword point, for I am becoming reckless & I had almost said desperate. I have been deeply stung by thorns through my family,” for the Unionists had “insulted my mother & sisters & murdered my friends.”⁵⁶

The few comforts Forrest’s men could rely upon were provided by the slaves who accompanied them into the war. “My father sent with me as body guard a negro boy of my age who had been considered my servant since my birth,” recalled John Russell Dance of the 8th. “He was eager to go and stayed with me where possible” and remained “very faithful in all my hardship during the war.”⁵⁷

Other blacks made their way into Confederate camps to hire themselves out to officers. Chalmers fretted about the number of blacks who followed his men, and in September 1863 directed that “no negroes will be permitted to remain with this command” except for “one servant for each officer, one teamster for each wagon or ambulance, & four cooks & four washermen for each company. Each negro will be furnished with a pass to be approved by the Regimental or Battalion commander,” and all others were “sent out of camp at once.”⁵⁸

In looking back, wrote Mercer Otey, “it seems strange that officers in the army, at a time when they were barely existing on a third of a pound of bacon a day and a little corn meal, should have decreased their slender store by sharing it with servants.” But their store would have been a good deal more slender if they had not had slaves to steal for them. They served as foragers, cooks, body servants, launderers, grooms, horse holders in battle, teamsters, orderlies. Otey was “amazed at the fidelity of our slaves during the trying times of those days, surrounded as they were by temptations and inducements to abandon us.”⁵⁹

“I had with me a favorite servant, whose name was Jake Jones,” recalled Frank Montgomery of the 1st Mississippi. “I had purchased Jake Jones a year or two before the war, for a house-servant and carriage-driver, and he was a very bright boy, though without education of any kind.” Montgomery kept Jones with him for many months, “but so many of my negroes had gone to the federals before the end of that year, leaving only a few old men and boys and women and children, that I determined to send him home and take a younger boy.” Montgomery told Jones “that if the south was conquered in the war he would be free; if the south was successful and he was faithful to his trust I would give him his freedom.” Jones was “faithful to the end,” but after the war “he fell into bad habits, drinking and using that horrible drug, morphine, and one night murdered a negro woman.”⁶⁰

Some servants actually fought alongside their masters. At the Battle of Brandy Station two body servants picked up some discarded weapons and joined in the rebel charge, capturing a “Yankee Negro” and bringing him back to the Confederate camp to act as their servant. An armed slave belonging to Captain Thomas Buchanan of Stewart’s 15th Tennessee Cavalry reportedly fought alongside his master in a number of engagements. After the war, ninety-one black Tennesseeans and their families applied for pensions for service in the Confederate cavalry; at least one of them, Thornton Forrest, was Forrest’s slave.⁶¹

A slave named Luke, who had served through the war as John Andrew Wilson’s slave, asked for a parole when his former master, the colonel of the 24th, surrendered to a Yankee officer in Columbia, Mississippi. “Luke, you don’t need one,” said Wilson. “You never been a soldier.”

At least seventeen black applicants for Confederate pensions were present at the Battle of Fort Pillow. A good many joined Confederate units because eventually they might lead them to the Yankees, to whom they intended to escape. Others who expected to be treated with at least a measure of gratitude and respect for sticking by their masters soon ran off in disgust. At one rebel encampment near Milton, Tennessee, George L. Knox noticed that by the middle of 1863 the whites “were very rough, swearing and cursing at every Negro they thought would be glad to leave them to go to the Yankees,” he wrote. “If a rebel soldier saw a colored man have on a good hat, and he had an old one, he would drive up and take it off his head, throw his old hat at him, and gallop away. After one month’s experience in the rebel army I left it.”⁶³

When someone questioned the righteousness of the Confederate cause, however, Forrest and his men could point to their loyal servants. If slavery was so cruel, they asked, what about old Dan over there, shining Lieutenant Humphrey’s boots? Or Isaac, laying out Lieutenant Blake’s bedroll? What about the Reverend Cox’s man Allen, setting up for evening prayer? Or good old Thornton ladling out stew to his master (and half brother), Lieutenant Felen? Remember how Henry Love, that “most intelligent” Negro, led Captain Alexander’s horses hundreds of miles home after his master was captured? Remember how, at Shiloh, the mighty slave Fielding carried young Rennolds off the battlefield on his back? And that same day, didn’t Elias, a boy but seventeen years old, carry Sergeant Daniel off the field when he was wounded and subsequently nurse him back to health? Recalled William Witherspoon of the 7th Tennessee Cavalry, “In the four years of conflict, all over the South the Negro—then a slave—although Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation made him free, was loyal to his master and family. The fact being so universal we can not honor and love too much our old time, before-the-war negroes, and that we certainly do.”⁶⁴

Of course, almost 179,000 “old time, before-the-war negroes” joined the Union army, 20,133 of them credited to Tennessee and almost 24,000 to Kentucky. But the rebels refused to believe that these taunting, arrogant Negroes the Yankees had contaminated with their lies and promises were the same stock as their own loyal servants. It wouldn’t be the good Negroes standing up there along the ramparts at Fort Pillow, mooning the rebels, cursing them, threatening them with rifles and cannon. The good Negroes rode with Forrest. The blue-clad blacks had to be the castoffs: the troublous bucks that always took a whipping before they would settle down to work, the dregs their fathers sold downriver.