To the untrained student General Bragg’s orders bordered on cruelty, and Forrest fiercely resented in his heart the great wrong thus inflicted upon him. He was proud, brave and profoundly patriotic, and no man in the South was more deeply attached to the Southern cause than he. For awhile he brooded over this injustice, but he loved his country too much to falter or hesitate even if he felt and believed that this treatment was indefensible. General Bragg, to him it appeared, had sent him upon the most dangerous mission of the war, and as if to render the task doubly hazardous, had taken from him the men he so much needed for the work he was required to do, and had given him instead men whose inexperience and lack of drill and discipline would render his success full of uncertainty and well-nigh impossible.
He was commanded to undertake and possibly to force the passage of the Tennessee River, when it was swollen by the winter rains, and without even the semblance of a pontoon bridge, he was expected to cross his men, horses, artillery and supplies as best he could. He was either to construct ferry boats, or raise those that had been sunken to hide them from Federal eyes; to search in the creeks or thickets for a few skiffs, or to fashion them from the boards he might pick up in a country already impoverished by the ravages of war. He was to cross the river in face of a vigilant and expectant foe whose garrisons were ordered to be upon the alert for his coming; and were a long time before urged to watch for the presence of the man whose fear was in every heart and whose desperate courage and resistless onslaught had made him a very terror to the peace and quiet of those who were to prevent his coming, or expected to punish his appearance in the country, the holding of which was an essential to the safety of their operations on the Mississippi River below Memphis. Thereafter, he was to move into a region filled with large Federal garrisons, all thoroughly armed, very many times more numerous than his own force, and to ride over roads softened by the winter rains, which by the travel of his horses and guns, were churned into slush, reaching above the knees of the animals, and through which his artillery could only be drawn at an average speed of less than a walk. The conditions of these highways would not only disspirit his followers, but subject them to such physical strain as would possibly render them unable to perform the duties that the campaign necessitated.
He had eighteen hundred troops and four guns. Baggage was reduced to a minimum. Marching westward from Columbia, Tennessee, he reached a place called Clifton, on the Tennessee River. An old, leaky ferryboat, “a tub,” raised from the bottom of the stream where it had been sunk to save it from Federal destruction; a hastily constructed similar craft made from hewed logs, and a half dozen skiffs, were his only means of transportation across the deep stream. The boats were either rotten or leaky, and all dangerous. Horses and mules were driven into the stream and forced to swim, while the men with their saddles, blankets, frying pans, guns, cannon caissons and ammunition wagons, were with the constant fear of Federal gunboats, Federal cavalry and infantry ever in their minds and with constant apprehension of resistance, as speedily as possible, under these adverse conditions, ferried to the western bank of the swollen river.
Only a great soldier and a great leader could have maintained his own equanimity with such adverse surroundings, or could have kept his followers under control with destruction every moment staring them in the face. On the shore, now on the western bank, now in the turgid waters, again on the eastern side, he calmly directed every movement, and his presence gave his followers hope when hope seemed absurd, and imbued them with a sublime courage they themselves could not fathom or understand. That he was there quieted every impulse to fear, and that his eye was upon them spurred every man to the noblest endeavors. Before him, every thought of cowardice became a retreating fugitive, and his example taught every trooper in the brigade that no foe was invincible and no task impossible. Morgan and his men crossing the Cumberland to reach Hartsville, Wheeler and his men forcing a passage of the Tennessee to destroy Rosecrans’ trains, were full of sublime heroism, but Forrest’s passage of the Tennessee River at Clifton, on December 16th and 17th, 1862, will long live as one of the most persistently courageous achievements of cavalry in any age or war.
The strain on man and beast was almost unbearable. Forrest had with him many officers as brave as he but less experienced; but Starnes, Dibrell, Russell, Jeffrey Forrest, Freeman, Morton, Biffle, Woodward, William M. Forrest, Cox, Gurley and many others in this command held up the hands of their beloved leader and aided him in giving even the humblest private a spirit of devotion that made every man who wore the gray jacket an intrepid hero, and a soldier who was without fear, even unto death.
Scouts above and below, ever vigilant, watched for coming gunboats. Pickets, hastily sent out on the western side of the stream, guarded every road that led to the ferry, and eager eyes, quickened by impending danger, scanned every hilltop and watched every avenue of approach. Two nights and a day were consumed in this arduous undertaking. The gunboats could not safely travel at night and Forrest availed himself of this to further his difficult work. He was crossing, with most inadequate means, the fifth largest stream in the United States. The distance from shore to shore was more than half a mile, the current was rapid, and while poling flatboats is a slow and tedious process by day, by night the difficulties were much enhanced. Forrest and his men successfully defied and overcame these natural obstacles, and by the morning of the 17th his men and equipments were all over, the boats were poled back to the western shore, sunk, committed to the care of a few guards, who protested at being left behind for what they esteemed an inglorious task, and with a questioning gaze, Forrest looked across the stream, wondering if he could later repass its currents, and with a wave of his sword, launched forth on his hazardous mission. Aligning his small command, he bade them go forward, not doubting that even with such odds against him, fate would lend a helping hand and safely bring him back from sure yet unknown dangers and fierce battles to his own, again.
This tremendous task accomplished and his scattered forces united, he marched eight miles to Lexington, Henderson County, and encamped for a little while, to allow his wet, hungry and tired soldiers to dry their clothes, inspect their guns, and to relieve their minds as well as their bodies of the great strain to which they had been subjected in the extraordinary and eventful experiences of the past forty-eight hours.
On examination, it was found that the greater part of the ammunition, in crossing the Tennessee River, had become wet and consequently unserviceable, and while this loss of the slight supply of ammunition which had been assigned to his command was being considered, a blockade-runner who had been sent through the lines, appeared with fifty thousand caps.
Forrest had sent forward his agents to secure this supply of ammunition. Already the Federals had had warning of Forrest’s coming, and he had barely advanced a mile until he had encountered squadrons of the Federal force moving along the same road to check his farther advance. Prepared or unprepared, Forrest had come to fight. He viciously assailed the Federals and quickly captured or routed one, a Federal Tennessee regiment, and the other the 11th Regiment of Illinois Volunteers, in which last Robert G. Ingersoll became a Confederate prisoner.
Refreshed and strengthened by Federal supplies, and new and better mounts, he pursued the fugitives furiously, and three days after crossing the river reached Jackson, Tennessee (fifty miles away). He had rested only a day, and his march was never without opposition from his foe.