Terrible Swift Sword (6 page)

It would take about an hour for Alger's men to get into position. They should cheer loudly when they attacked, said Sheridan, so that the rest of the brigade could launch its assault on the enemy's main force. The element of surprise, he believed, would swing the prospects for victory in his favor.

He assigned to Alger a “thin, sallow, tawny-haired Mississippian” named Breene, whom Sheridan had used as a guide and who knew all of the backcountry roads. Sheridan did not attempt to downplay the great risk involved. It would be the sort of “quick and desperate work that is usually imposed on a forlorn hope,” he told Alger.
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Sheridan moved all 730 of his remaining men into his front line, where the fighting was steady and sharp as the Confederates pressed his brigade's left flank. An hour passed, and no cheering from Alger's men reached Sheridan's ears.

Unwilling to wait any longer, he ordered his men to attack.
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At nearly that very instant, as the 6,000 men in the opposing armies braced for a bloody collision, they heard a whistle announcing the arrival of a train in Booneville. It was a locomotive and two railcars filled with grain for the Yankees' horses. But Sheridan's men, knowing that he had earlier sent a courier requesting reinforcements, believed that reinforcements had arrived from Rienzi. They let loose a wild cheer and charged the Rebel line with abandon.

Seeing that the misperception might indeed also serve the purpose of demoralizing the Rebels, the quick-thinking Sheridan sped instructions to the train engineer to blow the whistle loudly and repeatedly. “This stratagem,” Sheridan wrote afterward, worked beautifully; the Confederate line began to disintegrate in confusion before Sheridan's small force.

This was not the doing of the train whistle alone, though. Alger's men had struck the rear of the Confederate lines just as the brigade launched its frontal attack. Either because of distance or the train whistle's shrieks, their cheering had not carried to the brigade's lines. Yet the two attacks occurred almost simultaneously, just as Sheridan had planned, and the Rebels stampeded. The Yankees pursued them for four miles.

Sheridan finally got a reply to the stream of dispatches he had been sending to headquarters without receiving any acknowledgment. The reply was an order for him to fall back.

Sheridan quickly wrote out an answer: “I have driven the enemy back and hurt them badly. I do not see any necessity of falling back.” He sent another dispatch a
short time later: “I will not want any infantry supports; I have whipped the enemy to-day.”

With just one man lost, Sheridan had defeated a much larger enemy force and killed sixty-five Rebel cavalrymen in his first battle leading an independent command.
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MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM ROSECRANS, who had succeeded Pope as Army of the Mississippi commander, issued an order complimenting Sheridan. In a telegram to Halleck, now in Washington, DC, where he was the army's commanding general, Rosecrans wrote, “More cavalry massed under such an officer would be of great use to us. Sheridan ought to be made a brigadier.”
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On July 3, Generals Gordon Granger, Horatio Wright, and Alexander Asboth added their endorsements in another dispatch to Halleck: “Brigadiers scarce; good ones scarcer. The undersigned urge the promotion of Sheridan. He is worth his weight in gold. He would not make a stampeding general.”
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Sheridan was busy patrolling the scorching-hot Mississippi woods in order to divine the intentions of Major General Braxton Bragg, the new Rebel commander in Tupelo. On July 28, a detachment from Sheridan's brigade raided Ripley and seized a cache of Confederate letters left behind by the fleeing 26th Alabama.

As he sifted through the letters, Sheridan spotted a piece of valuable intelligence: the Rebels were planning to send a large army to discourage Buell from marching on Chattanooga. He forwarded the information up the command chain. It was intelligence of “immense value,” wrote Rosecrans, who added his name to those lobbying for Sheridan's promotion.
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ON SEPTEMBER 13, HALLECK confirmed Sheridan's promotion to brigadier, effective July 1, the day of his Booneville victory. Sheridan had risen to the rank of general just weeks after being promoted from captain to colonel.

Orders arrived for Sheridan, his brigade, and the rest of Granger's division to join Buell's Army of the Ohio in Louisville. Bragg had successfully diverted Buell from his supposed designs on Chattanooga and marched into Kentucky, where his army threatened to shatter the state's shaky allegiance to the Union and lay open the entire Ohio River valley.

Before leaving Mississippi, Sheridan was presented with a new horse by Captain Campbell of the 2nd Michigan. The jet-black, three-year-old gelding stood seventeen hands high and was said to possess extraordinary stamina.

Sheridan named the horse Rienzi, for the Mississippi town near Booneville where he had recently skirmished with the Rebels. For the rest of the war, Sheridan would ride Rienzi in every campaign and battle. Henry Greiner, Sheridan's lifelong friend, wrote that its “favorite gait was a swinging pace from which she [
sic
] would go if
urged by word, or the bridge rein into a rack, or canter, always with the ease of a cradle and the grace of an antelope.”
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SHERIDAN WAS IN CORINTH to entrain with his brigade for Kentucky when he encountered Major General Ulysses Grant, who was disconsolately watching some of his best troops ship out. Grant was unhappy to see Sheridan's brigade leaving too. “He was much hurt at the inconsiderate way in which his command was being depleted,” Sheridan wrote.

Sheridan was eager to go to Kentucky, because he knew he would see action there. He made it clear to Grant—”somewhat emphatically, I fear”—that he did not want him to attempt to keep Sheridan's unit in Mississippi.

Grant later wrote that while he was sorry to see Sheridan leave, “his departure was probably fortunate, for he rendered distinguished service in his new field.”
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SEPTEMBER 1862–SEPTEMBER 1863

DECEMBER 3I, 1862, 2 A.M.–STONES RIVER, TENNESSEE—Cold rain had soaked the central Tennessee woods all day long, but it had finally stopped when Phil Sheridan was awakened from a brief slumber in his tent. Sheridan sat on the edge of his cot, fully awake, studying the worried face of his 1st Brigade commander, Brigadier General Joshua Sill, his former West Point roommate and friend.

Hours earlier, just after nightfall, the regimental bands had serenaded the 43,000 men of the Army of the Cumberland with “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia.” The Southern bands in the 37,000-man Army of the Tennessee barely a quarter mile away, in a cedar grove on the other side of an open cotton field, had riposted with “Dixie” and “Bonnie Blue Flag.”

Then a band had struck up “Home Sweet Home.” All the musicians, Yankee and Rebel alike, had joined in, with soldiers on both sides singing along, many of them choking up over the words “There's no place like home.”
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Methodical and precise as always, Sheridan had met with his three brigade commanders to review the offensive planned for just after dawn on the far left of the Union line. Sheridan's 3rd Division and the two other divisions of Major General Alexander McCook's right wing were to play only a peripheral role, while the left wing, led by Major General Thomas L. Crittenden, folded back Braxton Bragg's right and got behind the Rebel center. At the same time, Major General George Thomas, commanding the Union center, would attack the Confederate center, sandwiching the Rebels between him and Crittenden.
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It had all sounded reasonable enough in the orders issued by Major General William Rosecrans, the Army of the Cumberland's commander. Sheridan planned to have his men up and ready for action by daybreak.

What no one in Rosecrans's army knew was that Bragg had made an identical battle plan—to strike the Union right with his left wing. Bragg's assault was planned for about the same time as Rosecrans's attack. If Bragg and Rosecrans attacked simultaneously, in theory they might twirl around like two dancers. In practice, something entirely different would occur.
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In Sheridan's tent, Sill told Sheridan that Confederate infantry and artillery had been moving along his front all night long. He believed that Bragg was massing troops for an attack on the Union right—the sector where no offensive action was planned that morning. Sheridan rode with Sill to the lines and listened. After a few minutes, he told Sill that General McCook needed to be informed.
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At McCook's headquarters, Sheridan and Sill awakened their commander and described the incessant rumble of artillery and the tramp of infantry that they had heard along their front. Clearly, they expected to receive orders to ready their men for a possible Rebel assault.

But McCook was unconcerned. In just five hours, he told them, the Rebels would be too busy trying to fend off Crittenden's attack on their own right to attempt an attack on the Union right. McCook was confident that Sheridan's division and his corps's two other divisions, commanded by Brigadier Generals R. W. Johnson and Jefferson C. Davis, could handle anything the Confederates threw at him. There was no need for further measures, said McCook. He sent Sheridan and Sill away.
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MCCOOK HAD NOT ALLAYED their concerns. Sheridan decided to ready his 5,000-man division, at least, in case the Confederates confounded McCook's expectations by attacking the Union right.

Sheridan awakened his regimental commanders and gave each the same message: feed your men and have them in battle formation before daylight. He sent two reserve regiments to reinforce Sill's brigade.
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The 3rd Division was under arms and standing in ranks when the camps of Generals Davis and Johnson were just stirring to life. Across the valley, in the enemy camp in the black cedar grove opposite Sheridan's division, where there had been cheerful fires and band music hours before, followed by the sound of marching men, an unnatural hush reigned.

 

IN THE CREPUSCULAR PREDAWN light, a fog arose from the soaked ground that lay between the armies. It thickened with dawn's approach.

And then, at 7:15, before the Union left wing's scheduled attack on Bragg's right flank, there emerged from the fog two long, dense battle lines of butternut troops, incongruously heralded by a wave of flushed jackrabbits that scampered over the cotton fields. Eerily silent, the Rebels advanced steadily, with a firm tread, colors flying, the dark host conducting itself “as if on the parade ground.”

Advancing upon Sheridan's men was Major General J. M. Withers's division of Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk's corps; to Sheridan's right, Lieutenant General William Hardee's 10,000-man corps was tidally surging toward Davis's and Johnson's camps, where the troops were unconcernedly making coffee and breakfast. The Rebels had risen early and gotten ready for action without any sustenance except whiskey, to fortify them for the daredevil feat of charging an armed enemy across open ground.
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As Sheridan's men watched from good defensive positions amid jumbled rock slabs and thick-growing cedars riddled with holes and fissures, the Rebels lowered their bayonets. When they were about one hundred yards away, they began jogging toward the Union lines with their keening cry.

Three of Sheridan's batteries shredded the Confederate column, but it did not stop. Fifty yards from Sheridan's lines, Colonel Francis Sherman, who commanded the 88th Illinois in Sill's brigade, ordered his infantrymen to fire, aiming low. They rose to one knee and loosed a volley from their charged muskets. The Rebels wavered, as though they had met a strong wind, and then resumed their double-quick-time approach.

Reloading, Sherman's men riddled the Rebel column with a second volley. Some of the Confederates flung themselves to the ground and tried to fire back. Sherman ordered a counterattack, and the bluecoats repulsed the Rebels—but not for long, and not without heavy loss. Among those killed was General Sill, shot in the head while leading his men.

Withers attacked twice more, failing to break Sheridan's lines both times. Sheridan “was everywhere present in the thickest of the battle,” wrote Sherman. His men recognized him at a glance, with his uniform coat buttoned to his throat and his trademark flat-brimmed hat clamped on his distinctive bullet-shaped head.

As nearly 20,000 Rebel troops crashed into the right wing's three divisions, Sheridan prowled his lines, shouting encouragement. On this day, as would always be the case during combat, Sheridan was energy incarnate; a newspaper correspondent wrote that he was “more than magnetic, he was electric.”
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WHILE SHERIDAN'S DIVISION WAS repelling the first Confederate attacks by Withers's troops, Hardee's onslaught caught Johnson's division of McCook's right wing completely unprepared. When the Rebels struck, the Yankees were shaving, boiling coffee, and cooking bacon. Their arms were stacked and unloaded.

Hardee's corps slammed into them before they could react; a Rebel private compared the Confederates' swooping attack to “a whirl-a-gust of woodpeckers in a hail storm.” For some of McCook's veterans, the overwhelming assault bore a nightmarish resemblance to Hardee's triumphant attack at Shiloh nine months earlier—as on this day, it had come in the early morning and from the south. Some of them even shouted, “Shiloh!”
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