Terrible Swift Sword (7 page)

Johnson's division crumbled, abandoning its frontline batteries because there was no time to bring them into action. Hardee's tough veterans wheeled to their right and plowed into Davis's division, driving it, too, back in wild disarray. In the now chaotic camps of McCook's men, the storming Rebels snatched up food cooking in frying pans and killed Yankees still in their nightclothes inside their tents. One Union soldier was shot dead while clutching his coffeepot.
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Sheridan's division had stood its ground during the attack, but the rout of Johnson's and Davis's divisions exposed its right flank and rear. Sheridan hastily swung his division to the right, like a door on a hinge, placing it on a new line perpendicular to his initial position.

Hardee's corps surged toward the Nashville Pike, hoping to cut off Nashville, the Union operations base, from Rosecrans's army. It would be an enormous strategic accomplishment, for if Nashville then fell into Confederate hands, the way into Kentucky might be reopened for Bragg's Army of the Tennessee, possibly all the way to the Ohio River. It would expiate Bragg's indecently swift withdrawal from Kentucky after the confused Battle of Perryville three months earlier.
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McCook's two shattered divisions retreated pell-mell for three miles. The panicked troops poured through the Union regiments in the center. It was “a yelling mob, officers weeping or swearing, soldiers demoralized and shivering,” wrote Captain Henry Castle. Another observer, Henry Freeman, saw “men retiring with guns, and men without their guns; men limping, others holding up their blood-stained arms and hands. . . . . Riderless horses dashed out of the woods . . . . ran for a distance, and stopped and stared back at the tumult.”
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TWO FRESH DIVISIONS FROM Polk's corps now attacked Sheridan—Irish-born Major General Patrick Cleburne's division targeting his flank and Major General Benjamin Cheatham's division attacking frontally—to make a clean sweep of McCook's right wing. Low on ammunition, Sheridan's division slowly fell back. During a two-hour fighting retreat, Sheridan's men joined Brigadier General James Negley's division from George Thomas's center corps in new positions.

Sheridan placed Colonel George Roberts's brigade at right angles to Negley's men. The brigades of Colonel Nicholas Greusel—Sill's replacement—and Colonel Frederick Schaefer were then put at right angles to Roberts's brigade, forming an inverted “U,” with Sheridan's artillery in the center. Along the Wilkinson Pike, on a limestone ridge, amid sinkholes and rock outcrops, screened by a dense cedar brake, Sheridan faced Hardee's and Polk's advancing corps, determined to prevent them from reaching the Nashville Pike.
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WHEN ROSECRANS LEARNED THAT his right wing had been crushed by Bragg's surprise attack, he suspended the offensive against the Rebel right wing and sent two divisions from his left running to try to staunch the breakthrough. But he knew they wouldn't reach the front in time to stop the Rebels.

Informed that Sheridan's bloodied division had survived the attack and in fact occupied a strong position between the Confederates and the chaotic Union lines, Rosecrans told Sheridan that he must, at all costs, hold his position to give the rest of the Army of the Cumberland time to establish new defensive positions. Sheridan understood the import of Rosecrans's words: “It would probably require a sacrifice of my command.”
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OUTNUMBERED TWO TO ONE, Sheridan and his men hunkered down among rocks and cedar logs and made one of the great stands of the war. Hardee's corps assaulted Sheridan's right, and the Rebels “seemed . . . . present on every side.”

But Sheridan occupied a strong position, although his and Hardee's batteries lay just two hundred yards apart. The Rebels attacked, yelling, across an open field, and the Yankee gunners cut them to pieces. “Men fell around on every side like autumn leaves,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel J. J. Scales of the 30th Mississippi, “and every foot of soil over which we passed seemed [dyed] with the life blood” of his men.
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“For the first time since daylight, General Hardee was seriously checked in the turning movement he had begun,” wrote Sheridan.

The Rebels attacked a second and third time—also without success. Sheridan's division was hemorrhaging; about one-third of his men were wounded or dead,
among them another brigade commander, Colonel Roberts, followed by Roberts's replacement, Colonel Fazilo Harrington.

During ninety minutes of intensive combat, in which Rebel troops with glittering bayonets battled to within a few feet of Sheridan's lines, his 3rd Division stood off three Confederate divisions.
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There was a lull, as the two sides assessed the shocking bloodletting. Sheridan discovered that two of his three brigades had no ammunition and that the Confederates had captured the right wing's ammunition train. He would have to withdraw.

Sheridan ordered his men to fix bayonets and to counterattack if the Rebels launched an assault during the division's withdrawal. Roberts's brigade fired the last of its ammunition as Sheridan's troops slowly retreated toward the Nashville Pike, where Rosecrans's divisions from the center and left had dug in.

Under heavy fire, Sheridan's depleted division, blackened by powder, blood streaked, and bandaged, withdrew through the cedar brake. Eight guns had to be abandoned because no horses were alive to pull them—eighty lay sprawled dead on the ridge—and the gunners were unable to manhandle the guns over the rocky ground.
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At the pike, Rosecrans encountered Sheridan, his face flushed and powder smudged, swearing wonderfully as he directed the orderly withdrawal. A devout Catholic, the commanding general admonished Sheridan to watch his language. “Remember,” warned Rosecrans, “the first bullet may send you to eternity,” where Sheridan would have to answer for his profanity.

Sheridan protested that he couldn't help it. Pointing to the bloodied, powder-smudged men filing past them, he said they were all that remained of his division. Sheridan had lost 1,600 of his 4,100 men.
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THE EPIC STAND BY Sheridan's 3rd Division saved Rosecrans's army from destruction. Sheridan's and Sill's alertness and preparations during the predawn hours enabled them to repel the initial Rebel onslaught and retain unit cohesion. The sole intact division in McCook's right wing, the 3rd Division had then delayed the Rebels two hours so that the Army of the Cumberland could establish a strong defensive line along the Nashville Pike. “My division, alone and unbroken, made a gallant stand to protect the right flank of our army. . . . . My troops gave time for a rearrangement of our lines,” Sheridan proudly wrote in his battle report.

Given no time to rest, the 3rd Division obtained fresh ammunition just as four Confederate formations marched toward the pike. Rosecrans sent Sheridan's men to support General Thomas Wood's division—one of the two that Rosecrans had moved from his left wing to stop the Confederate juggernaut. It was now under attack.
“Shot and shell that came in torrents” met Sheridan's division as it took its place in the line and then helped drive off the Rebel attack. Here, Sheridan lost the last of his original brigade commanders, Colonel Schaefer.

Expecting yet another attack, Sheridan massed his troops in close formation and ordered them to hug the ground. The assault never came, but his division was heavily shelled. “The torments of this trying situation were almost unbearable,” Sheridan wrote. Twenty more men died during the bombardment.
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Sheridan joined Rosecrans as he supervised the reorganization of his line. The Rebel gunners took aim on the mounted group of officers. A round of solid shot suddenly took off the head of one of Rosecrans's staff officers, Colonel Julius Garesché, spattering blood on Rosecrans, Sheridan, and some other officers. The headless body rode on twenty paces, until the horse pulled up and the corpse slid to the ground. Even after witnessing carnage all day long, Sheridan and the other officers were horrified by the death of the dedicated twenty-one-year army veteran, described as “half mystic, half saint.”

There was no time to mourn though. “We cannot help it,” Rosecrans told his officers. “Let us push on; the battle must be won.” Rosecrans later clipped the buttons from his bloody coat and put them in an envelope labeled “Buttons I wore the day Garesché was killed.”
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The Confederate divisions now attacked the Union left, in the hope that it might be turned and the Yankees yet driven from the Nashville Pike. Bragg concentrated on a salient where a four-acre patch of dense woods rested on a slight elevation in front of cotton fields. Locals called it the Round Forest; it became known that day to Union soldiers as “Hell's Half-Acre” and to the Confederates as “The Slaughter Pen.”

All afternoon, Bragg sent waves of Rebels against the Union brigades packed shoulder to shoulder under cover in the cedars, from which they raked the attackers with sheeting musket fire. Fifty Yankee guns, arrayed hub to hub, stood on higher ground near the forest and poured down shot, shell, and canister at nearly point-blank range. The din was so terrific—”equal to the falls of Niagara,” wrote John Magee, a Mississippi artillery captain—that the charging Rebels stopped to pick cotton and stuff it into their ears. The concentrated Yankee firepower broke every attack. “Men were swept down by hundreds—trees, shrubs, and everything was torn up, cut off, or shivered,” said Magee. J. Morgan Smith's 32nd Alabama went into action with 280 men and left the field with 58.

One massive attack might have swept aside the Union defenders, but the Rebel brigades were sent in piecemeal—just as Bragg and Polk had ruinously done at Shiloh. At 4:30 p.m., after ten hours of carnage, the Rebels could attack no more; lack of rest and food had caught up with them.

But Bragg's army had driven back the Yankees along a two-mile arc and could rightfully claim a hard-won victory for the day. Sheridan, while justifiably pleased with his division, was “sorely disappointed at the general result.”
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THAT NIGHT, NEW YEAR'S Eve, in a cabin where rain drummed on the roof, Rosecrans polled his three corps commanders and some other generals about whether to stay or to withdraw to Nashville and leave the field to Bragg. There was no consensus; while the corps commanders appeared to favor remaining on the field, they pledged to support Rosecrans's decision. With some staff officers, the commanding general left the meeting to inspect the lines and ponder the options. He returned to the cabin with his decision: the Army of the Cumberland would not retreat. “Prepare to fight or die,” he told his generals.

That night, the two armies camped a half mile apart. No fires were permitted. “As I walked along . . . . watching the men sitting on the rocks and cold ground shivering from frost, I could not help but think how little the people at home know of the suffering of the soldier,” observed Colonel Hans Heg.

About 14,000 dead and wounded men from both armies were scattered over a six-square-mile area on this bitterly cold New Year's Eve; many died, frozen to the ground in their own blood, as the year 1863 was born.

Under an unofficial armistice, Union and Confederate squads ventured out to bury the dead and bring in the wounded, who were laid in rows, irrespective of their allegiance, between warming fires. At the field hospitals of both armies and in makeshift hospitals in churches in nearby Murfreesboro, the overworked surgeons amputated limbs, tossing “the quivering flesh into a pile.”

At daybreak on New Year's Day 1863, Sheridan's division was busy building breastworks of stone and logs. Within the hour, the Rebels attacked, but the Union troops easily repulsed them, and did so again several hours later. The skirmishing ebbed. Neither army left the field.
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BRAGG CLAIMED VICTORY, BUT when Rosecrans did not withdraw as expected, the Confederate general grew uneasy. On January 2, he ordered an attack across Stones River against a hill on the Union left flank, which had not been tested on December 31. Major General John Breckenridge, whose division would lead the attack, objected. Union troops dug in on a hill behind his objective would cut the Confederates to pieces, the former US vice president predicted. Bragg instructed Breckenridge to attack anyway. The assault was scheduled for 4 p.m., late enough in the day, Bragg calculated, to forestall the possibility of a Union counterattack.

It went just as Breckenridge had feared. Rosecrans's troops closely watched the Rebel preparations, and they were ready when Breckenridge attacked. His five brigades stormed the hill in rain and sleet and easily—too easily, it turned out—
drove away Brigadier General Horatio Van Cleve's division. Then, fifty-eight Union guns on the crest and at the base of the second hill opened fire, decimating the Rebel troops. Yankee infantrymen counterattacked and reclaimed the hill. Just 2,800 of Breckenridge's 4,500 troops recrossed the river alive and unwounded.

When the shooting stopped, hungry Union soldiers cut steaks from horses that Confederate cannonballs had mowed down like ten pins on the Murfreesboro Pike and cooked them over fires.

During the night of January 3, Bragg's Army of the Tennessee withdrew from its position straddling the river and marched south through Murfreesboro. By ceding the battlefield, Bragg had conceded victory to Rosecrans, such as it was. Union losses at Stones River totaled nearly 13,000 of the 44,000 troops in the field; about 12,000 of Bragg's 37,000 effectives were killed, wounded, or captured.
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