River Run Red

But whether or not the Yankees thought West Tennessee worth occupying, Nathan Bedford Forrest judged it well worth raiding. He needed supplies and recruits, hoped to hector Sherman’s supply lines, and was itching to go after Fielding Hurst and his 6th Tennessee Cavalry (USA), who, for sheer savagery and cunning, had thus far proven a match for the secessionist guerrillas they harassed. According to rebel dispatches, his men “wantonly murdered” a “deformed and almost helpless” sixteen-year-old named Lee Dougherty and, after killing a cavalryman from the 16th Tennessee Cavalry, refused to permit his family the “rights of sepulture.”²

foraged upon us until we are left without any thing whatever. These troops, not content to snatch the little meat and bread—of which we always gave them a share—from our tables, took the small stock we had out of the smoke-house, plundering it of all it contained. They also took the corn and fodder which we had bought, and to crown the whole, they took the condemned stock which I had a short time before bought to replace that which the men under the command of Col. [Hurst] had stolen.

In the first week of February, Hurst galloped into Jackson with his cavalry to demand that its citizens repay him the $5,139.20 he had been required by the Union authorities at Memphis to return to a local woman named Newman whose farm his men had looted. If the people of Jackson did not come up with the money “in greenbacks or Kentucky money,” Hurst threatened, he would burn the town to the ground. Seven days later, they paid up. Around the middle of the month, Hurst’s boys captured a lieutenant and two privates from Forrest’s 19th Tennessee Cavalry in McNairy County, Tennessee, ran them into Haywood County, and apparently shot them down in cold blood.⁴

Hurst might have pleaded that he was only following orders. Ben Grierson, Hurlbut’s cavalry commander, had ordered Hurst to “scour the country well on your route and reach Memphis as soon as possible after the 1st of February. You will gather all serviceable stock on your route as heretofore directed, and subsist your command upon the country.” On January 17, General William Sooy Smith, the chief of cavalry of the Department of the Mississippi, reported to Grant that he had given Hurst “a roving commission” and directed him “to ‘grub up’ West Tennessee. I think,” he assured Grant, “he will reduce that district to order.”⁵

Hurst’s men, however, exceeded their instructions. They left one of Forrest’s men to die “after cutting off his tongue, punching out his eyes, splitting his mouth on each side to his ears, and inflicting other mutilations.” After arresting Lieutenant Willis Dodds of Colonel Newsom’s regiment at his father’s home in Henderson County, they apparently put him to death “by the most inhuman process of torture.” According to a rebel infantryman who saw his body afterward, “it was most horribly mutilated, the face having been skinned, the nose cut off, the under jaw disjointed, the privates cut off, and the body otherwise barbarously lacerated and most wantonly injured.”⁶

Outraged, Forrest demanded that Hurst and his officers give themselves up and stand trial before a Confederate tribunal for extortion and murder. When the Union command at Memphis predictably refused his demand, Forrest issued a decree denouncing Fielding Hurst and his command as outlaws “not entitled to be treated as prisoners of war falling into the hands of the forces of the Confederate States.”⁷

Promoted to lieutenant general, Forrest now commanded the Northern Cavalry Department, consisting of “all cavalry commands in West Tennessee and northern Mississippi.” His previous command had been depleted by desertions, injuries, deaths, and illnesses, but he believed that “the strength of the enemy in our front, and their merciless ravages on this portion of the Country during the past two years should furnish a sufficient appeal to men to rally at once for the defense of their homes.”⁸

Operating on home turf, Forrest’s agents assembled as many of the Western Confederacy’s disparate cavalry commands and companies and bands of guerrillas as they could round up. But Forrest’s attempts to reorganize his men were arduous. John Carroll of the 21st recalled a rumor that the Confederate army intended to arrest and return to their former regiments men who joined Forrest’s command after deserting from the infantry. The story precipitated “a regular stampede; men left in dozens until within a short time there were only 150 men present out of the 300 taken out.” Forrest was reduced to turning what had been a battalion “into one company.” After the Wizard replaced the commander of his Old Regiment with a supernumerary, its officers objected, whereupon, in Forrest’s absence, they were all arrested for mutiny. “We felt it our duty to contend for the rights of our wounded brother officer; hence the arrest for mutiny. But when Forrest returned he gave us what we asked for.”⁹

“The difficulties attending organizing regiments by consolidating the odds and ends of paper commands into full regiments,” he wrote Jefferson Davis, “have caused quite a number of disaffected officers and men to run away.” By mid-February 1864, however, Forrest had at last cobbled his command together. His First Brigade—five regiments and two battalions of West Tennesseeans—was placed under the command of Brigadier General Robert Richardson, who, as a heedless and freewheeling partisan, swung in and out of Forrest’s favor. Colonel Black Bob McCulloch commanded the Second Brigade, consisting of his own 2nd Missouri Cavalry, Texas and Tennessee battalions, W. W. Faulkner’s Kentuckians, Alexander H. Chalmers’s Mississippi Battalion, and a detachment from the 2nd Arkansas Cavalry. Colonel Tyree H. Bell commanded Forrest’s Third Brigade, consisting of the Tennessee regiments of Colonels Russell, Wilson, and Barteau. And finally, Bedford’s brother, Colonel Jeffrey E. Forrest, commanded the Fourth Brigade, including Forrest’s Old Regiment, Duckworth’s Tennesseeans, and Duff’s, George’s, and McGuirk’s Mississippi regiments.¹⁰

Early in March, General Abraham Buford had joined Forrest’s command, bringing with him the remnants of three decimated Kentucky infantry regiments—some 700 veterans—who had applied to serve as mounted infantry. Richmond refused, however, to supply them with horses—two-thirds of them were still on foot—and now Buford turned to Forrest to find them mounts. Convinced that as natives of western Kentucky they would come in handy as recruiters and scouts, Forrest welcomed them into his fold.¹¹

On March 9, riding at the head of some 2,800 men, Forrest trotted forth, his “unmounted Kentuckians trudging along on foot, happy at the thought,” wrote one of Forrest’s biographers, “of having their faces turned once more to their homes, whither they were now going to replenish their wardrobes” and secure fresh mounts “to carry them henceforth with the Wizard of the Saddle.” Other brigades rode in relays; General Chalmers crossed with McCulloch’s brigade into West Tennessee near LaGrange, reaching Bolivar just as Neely’s brigade rode on from Bolivar to Sommerville.¹²

“Away we clattered for West Tennessee and Kentucky,” wrote Mercer Otey. “Ah! but those were glorious spring days, and as fine a lot of fellows,” he recalled, “as ever flashed a saber. Every man sat his steed as if he was part and parcel of the beast he strode, and it mattered little how mettlesome the nag, the rider was the master, and fit to fight mounted or dismounted.”¹³

In a region “of the most scanty and unfulfilled promise,” the little town of Union City had “struggled into an amphibious subsistence; but it had never thriven.” The town rested on land “just so much raised above the broad swamp of Northwestern Tennessee” that only “whisky, with men to drink it, and a Methodist Church South with men to people it, were possible. For many a mile around,” wrote local Union commandant Colonel George Waring, “the forest and swamps were well nigh impenetrable,” and the only roads “were wood trails leading to nowhere in particular.” The town lay at the crossing, or “union,” of two railroads, “one pointing towards Mobile and one towards Memphis.” Though neither actually reached its ostensible destination, they looked sufficiently strategic on the Union army’s maps to justify garrisoning the place with bluecoats.

Among these were the troopers of William Bradford’s 13th Tennessee Cavalry, which was busily absorbing the majority of Dyer County Unionists, most of whom hailed from an isolated northern portion of the county so loyal to the Federal government that it was known as “Blue America.” The 13th spent that fall joining the rest of the garrison in “a happy round of drills, inspections, horse-races, cockfights and poker.” Waring was so contemptuous of West Tennesseeans in general and the citizens of Union City in particular that at one point he allowed his men to confiscate all the blankets in what was left of the town and lay them across its muddy streets so they - could parade in full dress without spoiling their boots and uniforms. Union City, sneered Waring, was “not a city at all” and “‘Disunion’ would have been its fairer description.”¹⁴

Like every Federal post along the Mississippi that March, Union City was in a state of understandable alarm. As Forrest’s various detachments, numbering some 6,000 men, zigzagged north out of Mississippi and up into West Tennessee, the Union command tallied up all the troops in the stripped-down garrisons along the Mississippi and determined, to its horror, that they amounted to only 2,600 men.¹⁵

a portion of them not mustered into service and commanded by officers temporarily assigned, awaiting commission. Of the white troops about one-half at the posts on the river were on duty as provost marshals’ guards and similar detached duties, leaving but a small number in condition for movement. The fortifications were in an unfinished condition, that at Cairo rendered almost useless by long neglect. Many of the guns were dismounted, or otherwise unfit for service, and the supply of ammunition deficient and defective. A body of cavalry at Paducah were not mounted, and only part of those at Union City. I had not enough mounted men within my reach for orderlies.¹⁶

After Bradford’s doomed battalion decamped for Fort Pillow, it was replaced by the troublous 7th Tennessee Cavalry (USA) under the command of the luckless forty-six-year-old Colonel Isaac Roberts Hawkins. Back in December 1862, Hawkins and his ill-trained and ill-equipped conscripts had been driven back at Trenton, Tennessee, by Forrest’s Colonel George G. Dibrell, and within three days found themselves under siege by Forrest himself. After rebel gunners prepared to fire a fourth round at Trenton’s well-fortified stockade, Hawkins and 300 of his men surrendered while the rest of his regiment, having evaded capture, fought the rebels with varying degrees of success. Eventually released and restored to command, in October 1863 Hawkins was ordered to take his veterans and his conscripts to Union City.

A month later they were sent down to LaGrange with Hurst’s 6th Tennessee Cavalry to guard the railway while Sherman consolidated his troops for the Meridian expedition. But they “behaved badly,” and Hurlbut ordered Hawkins and his men back to Memphis, where he intended to “make something of them or break them.” Hurlbut must have believed either that he had succeeded or that he could not afford to break anybody now that Sherman was siphoning off his corps, for within a few weeks he sent Hawkins and 175 troopers upriver, where they careened from post to post, recruiting another 300 Kentuckians and West Tennesseeans. Some of these men were deserters from the rebel army, but most were untested boys convinced by months of Yankee occupation that the Southern cause was lost.¹⁷

By March 20, every packet and telegraph brought fresh rumors of Forrest’s movements. He was reported at Jackson, he was at Tupelo, he was crossing by steamboat at Eastport; he was here, he was there, he was everywhere at once. Though Forrest apparently intended to attack Columbus and Paducah, and his rebel cavalry was still some sixty miles off, Hawkins feared that his undermanned and oversupplied Yankee outpost at Union City might prove an irresistible target. He sent a plea for reinforcements to Columbus twenty-six miles away, and to Cairo another twenty miles upriver, and on March 23 received a dispatch from General Mason Brayman at Cairo that on the orders of General Hurlbut, who happened at the time to be visiting from Memphis, he was on his way with some two thousand reinforcements.¹⁸

Hawkins had read Forrest right for a change. Union City did look to the Wizard of the Saddle like a sitting duck, and the sheer symmetry of sending his own 7th Tennessee Cavalry against his former captive’s 7th Tennessee Cavalry was too delicious to resist.

The 7th Tennessee Cavalry (CSA) was commanded by Colonel William Lafayette Duckworth, an oddly whittled-down fellow with a sparse cap of brilliantined hair plastered over the top of his skull, and long, overcompensating chin whiskers that reached down to the second row of brass buttons on his shad-bellied coat. Though a Tennessee Unionist would characterize him as “a notorious scoundrel” who “never had any reputation, either before the war or afterward,” Duckworth had been a country doctor and a popular Methodist preacher, professions that “had not been without value in turning him out a diplomatist.” He commanded more or less by default, for by the time he took up the reins, the 7th had passed through the hands of a string of contentious commanders.²⁰

Duckworth knew the territory. Two years earlier he and the 7th had actually defended Union City against a Yankee attack, and soon afterward covered the rebel garrison’s evacuation of Fort Pillow. Whatever his reputation or training, he was about to pull off the biggest coup of Forrest’s second West Tennessee campaign and one of the war’s most audacious bluffs. The Wizard sent Duckworth and his cavalry off to Union City with a taunt. “You damn boys have been bragging you could whip half a dozen Yankees,” he declared, standing in his stirrups. “You are the 7th Tennessee Rebs,” he said. “The 7th Tennessee Yanks are at Union City. I am going to send you there to clean them up. If you don’t,” he snarled over his shoulder, reining his horse around, “never come back here.”²¹

As Duckworth led his force of about four hundred men out of camp, some of his men began to have second thoughts. “Maybe we’ve been talking too strong,” William Witherspoon remembered one of Duckworth’s troopers saying. “But Forrest has called our hands. If they fight, we have a job on our shoulders. We are in for it, and with any showing will clean them up.” So on they rode, their ranks swelled slightly by men from Forrest’s Old Regiment and seventy-five of Faulkner’s men whom they encountered en route, though Unionist guerrillas apparently somewhat reduced their numbers by taking potshots from the surrounding woods.²²

Convinced that Forrest was on his way, by four in the afternoon of March 23 Hawkins had sent scouts out to watch for him. Captain James H. Odlin, Brayman’s chief of staff, arrived from Columbus to confer with Hawkins, rescue an idle locomotive and nine freight cars loaded with government and railroad property, and bring back some 150 contraband railway workers who had recently completed the line to Columbus.

Hawkins told him “that the ferries on the Obion had been destroyed,” Odlin testified, “and that scouts whom he had expected in the day before had not returned; that he supposed that they were captured, or that it was impossible for them to get across the Obion.” But after encountering Duckworth’s advance column near Jacksonville, his scouts did manage to gallop back late that night and alert Colonel Hawkins. Doubling his pickets and keeping several of his companies saddled all night, Hawkins braced for an attack by what he now believed to be Forrest’s entire force.²³

At three in the morning, a courier rode in to report that Hawkins’s pickets had been surrounded on the road to Dresden by a rebel force equipped with artillery. Captain Odlin told Hawkins “that I must leave,” for his orders were to save the contrabands and the trainload of Federal and railway property lying idle at the junction. Hawkins asked him how many reinforcements he could send up, for though “he thought he could hold the place with his regiment if he had some artillery,” he could not “contend against artillery without he had some himself.”

Odlin replied that though he would “immediately push forward reenforcements,” they would have to come all the way from Cairo, because the garrison at Columbus comprised “only 1,100 men in all”—the returns show 998 regulars—all but 100 of them black troops “who had never been in a fight.” Odlin later claimed that he cautioned Hawkins not to disgrace the command by retreating “without having seen the enemy.” Before falling back to Columbus, Hawkins “must have a skirmish with them,” Odlin said, “and feel their strength” lest the alarm prove false “or he found that he had fallen back before a small number of men.”²⁴

Odlin chugged out of Union City with his trainload of stores and contrabands, racing across a trestle minutes after Duckworth’s men had put it to the torch. Hawkins apparently ordered his men to put several of the town’s buildings to the torch to deny the rebels cover. Duckworth and his men had expected to find Union City unfortified, but by the light from the ensuing conflagration they found to their dismay that not only was Union City surrounded by an abatis of fallen trees; the garrison was entrenched in a new seventy-square-yard redoubt surrounded by ten-foot walls topped with logs perforated every few yards by portholes.²⁵

After some intense skirmishing, Hawkins’s skirmishers fled into the fort, leaving behind two dead and several wounded. Captain Thomas Gray took up a position at a breastwork his men had erected on the eastern side of the redoubt. “As soon as it was light enough to see,” recalled Captain John W. Beattie, “we found the rebels were all around our camp.” Captain P. K. Parsons, most of whose men were on picket duty, ventured out to try to find them, only to discover that Duckworth had the garrison surrounded.²⁶

At about 5:30 a.m. the rebels, mounted on horseback, charged on all sides, shrieking and firing away with their carbines. But as Duckworth quickly learned, it does not pay to attack an entrenched fortification on horseback. Before his men got very far, the “Galvanized Yankees” of Hawkins’s command opened fire through their portholes, hurling them back “with but little difficulty.” Duckworth’s men dismounted and had somewhat better luck on foot; Faulkner’s Kentuckians, for example, managed to scramble to within twenty-five yards of the work. But Hawkins’s sharpshooters inflicted “considerable loss,” severely wounding the Kentuckians’ lieutenant colonel, W. D. Lannom, and bringing the assault to a halt. “After that,” recalled Captain Gray, the Union garrison was “very exultant, and ready to meet the rebels anywhere.”²⁷

The frustrated Confederates sullenly hunkered down. Private William Witherspoon reported that he and his comrades crawled on all fours among the fallen timbers of Union City’s abatis, trying to get a bead on Hawkins’s men as they popped their heads above the breastworks out of “curiosity or something else.” When a head did appear, recalled Witherspoon, “a dozen or more rifles would bang away and the owner of that head be put out of service.” But in fact they managed to kill only one of Hawkins’s men—a sergeant—and wounded no others, and in two subsequent assaults—one from the northwest, the other from the northeast—Duckworth suffered considerable losses and gained no ground.²⁸

A jubilant Captain Gray declared to Hawkins that the rebels were defeated and would “either leave the field or assemble and make a consolidated charge.” As Captain Beattie’s sharpshooters continued to fire on Duckworth’s battered cavalry, “a great many of our men lay down inside of our works and went to sleep, as they felt altogether easy about the matter.”²⁹

Another attacker might have given up the battle as lost. But not William Lafayette Duckworth. The old buzzard was one of Forrest’s most attentive students and had learned from the Wizard that backwoods cunning could be as effective a weapon as artillery. Though war meant fighting, as Forrest was supposed to have said, and fighting meant killing, he had taught his subordinates that it was better still if you could win without fighting, and that took tricks.

After Duckworth’s fourth futile assault on Union City’s bulwark, the two sides spent an hour and a half exchanging potshots. The Federals “were all in good spirits,” recalled Captain Gray, and were firing from their portholes when a delegation of rebel officers abruptly rode into view, bearing a flag of truce. Gray alerted Hawkins and rode out to meet the rebels, calling the delegation to a halt a couple of hundred yards from the breastworks.

“They said they wished to see the commander of the forces there,” Gray testified. “I told them I had notified him, and he would be there in a moment.” As they waited, the rebels did not like the way Gray was peering around at the rebels in the abatis and ordered him placed under arrest. “I demanded their right to order me under arrest under a flag of truce, and told them I had as much right to look around as they had.” Just then Hawkins turned up and accepted a piece of paper from the rebel couriers and rode back to the breastworks with Captain Gray.

“As soon as I got back,” Gray recalled, “I made it my business to go around inside the breastworks to get a view of the rebel troops. They were there upon stumps and logs, and every place where they could see”; nevertheless, Gray and his men “were satisfied they were whipped.” The Union men “were just as cool and quiet as you ever saw men,” recalled Parsons: “not a bit excited, but talking and laughing.”

I have your garrison completely surrounded, and demand an unconditional surrender of your forces. If you comply with the demand, you are promised the treatment due to prisoners of war, according to usages in civilized warfare. If you persist in a defense, you must take the consequences.

By order of

N. B. Forrest, Major General.

This implication that Forrest himself was in command of the assault on Union City was intended by Duckworth to rattle Hawkins. But the rest of the demand’s wording would echo in Forrest’s subsequent demands at Paducah and Fort Pillow, and as such provide some of the most damning evidence of premeditation in the carnage at Fort Pillow three weeks later. Treatment according to the rules of “civilized warfare” is not a negotiating point but should obtain whether or not a garrison puts up resistance. But unless the note was intended merely as a bluff, it betrayed the belief of Forrest and his officers—Abraham Buford was about to make a similar threat at Columbus, Kentucky, though solely against the garrison’s blacks—that fair treatment could be conditioned upon a foe’s surrender and withheld if an enemy refused.³⁰

The wording at Union City, however, was Duckworth’s, not Forrest’s. The general was nowhere near; his signature was a forgery. But to spare himself and his men the ignominy of returning to Forrest in defeat, Duckworth had invoked the Wizard’s ghost. The only artillery pieces Duckworth could muster were the dummy guns his black servants and laborers were erecting from logs and wagon wheels just within range of Hawkins’s telescope. His only reinforcements were the phantom regiments Duckworth had instructed his buglers and black horse holders to greet out of the garrison’s view with blaring tattoos and loud, celebratory shouts.

Hawkins asked his officers “what they thought best to be done.” “When he asked me about it,” recalled Beattie, “I told him that if they had artillery they could whip us; but if they had no artillery we could fight them till hell froze over.” After all, if the rebels had guns, why had they not fired them by now? The battle so far had been “a rebel defeat,” and if Captain Odlin’s word could be counted on, reinforcements were due to arrive from Cairo at any moment.³¹

Poor Hawkins was no poker player. “If they have artillery, and we renew the fight,” he groaned, “like enough they will kill every man of us they got.” Believing “it would save a great many lives if we would surrender,” he rode out to negotiate the garrison’s capitulation. Captain Beattie rode by his side, still trying to talk Hawkins out of surrendering even as they approached the rebel flag of truce. “We have the rebels whipped,” he insisted.³²

Unpersuaded, Hawkins demanded to meet with Forrest himself, but Duckworth coolly replied with another forgery. “I am not in the habit of meeting officers inferior to myself in rank,” it said, “but I will send Col. Duckworth, who is your equal in rank, and who is authorized to arrange terms and conditions with you.”

When Duckworth trotted up to deliver the note, Hawkins pleaded for more time to confer with his officers, whereupon Duckworth granted him fifteen minutes more but added grimly that his gunners were itching to blow up the Yankees and leave not even “a greasy spot.”³³

By now more of his officers claimed to have spotted rebel artillery aimed in the garrison’s direction. “We agreed then he should make the surrender,” Beattie testified, “on condition that we should be paroled there, without being taken away from the place, and each one allowed to keep his private property, and the officers allowed to keep their fire-arms.” Beattie insisted that Hawkins’s officers understood that the colonel would only “surrender on those conditions; and if they did not accept them, then we were to fight them as long as a man was left.” But Duckworth had thoroughly rattled Hawkins, and at 11:00 a.m., Hawkins fell for his bluff, riding back out and agreeing to surrender.³⁴

No immediate announcement was made to the men watching from the breastworks, but they knew what it meant when Hawkins returned from his parley in the company of a rebel officer. Stunned, outraged, Gray himself hastily “hid a couple of revolvers and some other things I had; I did not know whether I should ever find them again or not.” Every one of his men “tried to hide his stuff. Some broke their guns, and all were denouncing Colonel Hawkins as a coward, in surrendering them without cause.”

“Some said that the colonel was half rebel, anyway,” recalled Gray; “others said that he was a little cowardly, and surrendered to an imaginary foe.”³⁵ “The next thing I knew,” recalled Beattie, “there was an order came there for us to march our men out and lay down their arms.” “Curses loud and deep,” recalled Gray, “came from every squad of our boys, whose coolness & bravery had fairly won a victory.” As they marched, many of them weeping, out of the fort, Hawkins’s men stacked their busted rifles before the colonel’s headquarters and watched as Duckworth’s men “piled into our camp and cleaned out everything”; and “what they could not carry off they burned.” Though Duckworth agreed to permit Hawkins’s men to keep their personal property, only Hawkins’s officers were allowed to ride their horses as their men marched past a gloating Colonel Duckworth and his staff.³⁶

Duckworth’s black laborers and horse holders, who had had a hand in constructing the phony artillery, were “jubilant over this ruse and were yelling, ‘Here’s your artillery! Toot! Toot! Toot!’ with all their thumbs stuck over their ears, working the hand like a mule’s ear.” Thus the 7th Tennessee Cavalry (USA) began to comprehend the totality of its disgrace. Hawkins had surrendered a well-fortified, well-armed, and defiant garrison to a vastly outnumbered foe whose only cannon were logs and whose commander was not the great Forrest but a scraggly nonentity named Duckworth.³⁷

Nor was that all, for at the very hour of Hawkins’s surrender, General Mason Brayman and his reinforcements were riding to their rescue. Brayman would claim to have brought 2,000 troops with him, though how he managed to scrounge up so many soldiers is a mystery, for in his testimony he claimed that as of March 20 he could muster only 231 men. In any case, after disembarking at Columbus, they had ridden the newly laid rails to the northern end of the charred trestle, only to be informed that the garrison had surrendered, whereupon, instead of attempting a rescue, Brayman ordered the locomotive to reverse direction and returned to Cairo.³⁸

Six miles away at Union City, Hawkins’s men tore at their blankets and clothing with knives to prevent the rebels from using them, and hastily buried their regimental flag. But a rebel dug it up and claimed it as a trophy. When a captive officer tried to buy it back, pleading that his sister had sewn it, the trooper refused.³⁹

Not all the rebels were so scornful. One of Duckworth’s troopers called Colonel Hawkins “a God damned coward,” but conceded that “he had good men.” “These men of the Seventh Tennessee, Federal, bore up manfully,” recalled John Milton Hubbard, and after “talking with many of the officers and men I concluded that their chagrin would have been amusing, if it had not been pathetic,” for Hawkins had given them up when there was not “an effective Confederate cannon in West Tennessee, and Forrest was well on his way to Paducah.”⁴¹

The rebels did not provide their prisoners with anything to eat “until the second night, when they gave them about an ounce of fat bacon each,” and a few men received a little bread. The rebels carried away “300 horses, a few mules, 500 pistols and sabres, and some $60,000 in cash.” The prisoners “were marched two days in muddy, rainy weather without a mouthful of food,” and all the “money, watches & pocket knives which could be found on the persons of the prisoners were officially taken on the 26th while at Trenton,” though several had been robbed “privately by their guards” a day or two before, and all along the way they were divested of “blankets, overcoats & other clothing.” At Trenton the rebels “marched the men up in front of the court-house, passed them in one at a time and searched them, taking boots, hats, coats, blankets, and money from them. There were a great many of our men who had new boots, and the rebels would take the new boots and give them their old ones, and so they exchanged hats and blankets.”⁴²

Several dozen managed to escape before the rebels counted their prisoners, including Gray, Beattie, and Hawkins’s son, as they “were not guarded very closely.” Furious, Forrest would order his men to shoot all the prisoners if another escaped, and in the meantime the rebels made Colonel Hawkins and the other officers walk in ankle-deep mud while his men confiscated their clothes, blankets, and saddlebags. Hawkins protested repeatedly, reminding Duckworth that he had agreed to allow his prisoners to keep their personal property. Though Duckworth solemnly promised that he was keeping strict accounts, the captive regiment’s possessions were never returned. By the time the captives staggered four by four into Humboldt, Hawkins’s condition was so pathetic that a citizen handed him two pairs of socks and a handkerchief.⁴³

“Some five hundred Tennesseans, who had been captured by Forrest, arrived among us,” an Andersonville inmate wrote of the 7th’s influx on the morning of April 22, 1864. Most of them were “hatless, bootless, and shoeless, without coats, pants and blankets,” he said, and

wholly destitute of cups, plates, spoons, and dishes of every kind as well as of all means of purchasing them; they having been stripped of these things by their captors. In their destitute condition they were turned into the stockade and left to shift for themselves in the best manner they could. To borrow cups of the fellow-prisoners was an impossibility, for no one could be expected to lend what, if it were not returned, would insure his own destruction, particularly when the borrower was an utter stranger. There was nothing left for them but to bake their raw meal and bacon upon stones and chips, eat it without moisture, and afterward to go to the brook like beasts to quench their thirst.

Hawkins’s surrender cost his regiment many more lives than it saved. The 7th Tennessee Cavalry would suffer the fourth highest number of prison fatalities of any Union regiment. Two out of three of its troopers never returned home. According to the historian Peggy Scott Holley, “Two hundred and seven died at Andersonville, sixteen at Millen, twelve at Savannah, ten at Mobile, seven at Florence,” eight in the postwar explosion of the steamboat Sultana, “four at Charleston, seventeen in northern hospitals, seven en route to and from various prisons or hospitals, two on furlough, and one at an unknown place.” And that accounts for only those soldiers whose records survive. Some would die of the aftereffects of their imprisonment, while others lived the rest of their lives disabled by their months of unspeakable incarceration in the pestilential prisons of the South.⁴⁴