Whip and Spur

by George E. Waring

On one occasion, at Union City, word was brought in that a flag of truce from Faulkner had arrived at our picket line, and I rode out for a parley over a trifling matter of an exchange of prisoners. The officer in charge of the flag, with the company escorting him, had originally come from our neighborhood and had belonged to Merryweather’s “band.” As Max trotted up to their bivouac, he was greeted with cries of recognition, and a lieutenant of the company was kind enough to warn me that I had shown them a stronger inducement than they had hitherto had to make an attack on our position; for, since Frank Moore had captured the horse I rode, they had determined to regain him at any risk. Happily, this laudable wish was never fulfilled, and Max remained, in spite of the devices they may have laid for his recapture.

During the five months of our stay at this post, we made some hard scouts in a hard country, and we held a good part of West Tennessee under strict surveillance, but the most memorable feature of all our scouting was generally the welcome dismounting under the wide eaves of our own house; not, I hope, that we had grown effeminate, but a week’s tramp through the woods of West Tennessee offers little that memory can cherish, and prepares one for a sensation on the near approach of comfort.

But five months of such life is enough, and I was not sorry when the order came that I must go for a soldier again.

Sherman was about to advance eastward from Vicksburg, destroy the lines of railroad by which Forrest received supplies from the fertile prairie region of Northern Mississippi, and strike the Rebellion in the pit of its stomach. A. J. was to take all my infantry down the river, and the cavalry was to move to Colliersville, on the line of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, and join a considerable cavalry force gathering there under Sooy Smith and Grierson; thence we were to move southeasterly through Mississippi, to engage Forrest’s forces and to meet Sherman’s army at the crossing of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad at Meridian.

We lay in camp more than a week, ready to move, but awaiting orders. The country (a very wet one) was frozen hard and covered with snow. Our order to march and the thaw came together, on the 22d of January. We were to cross the Obion River (and bottom) at Sharp’s Ferry, twenty-three miles southwest of our camp. The command consisted of the Fourth Missouri (with a battery), Second New Jersey, Seventh Indiana, Nineteenth Pennsylvania, and Frank Moore’s Battalion of the Second Illinois; in all about twenty-five hundred well-mounted men present for duty. The roads were deep with mud and slush, and every creek was “out of its banks” with the thaw. We reached the ferry only at nightfall of the 23d, over roads that had hourly grown deeper and more difficult. Two regiments had crossed, through floating ice (eight horses at a trip), by a rope-ferry, and at nine o’clock in the evening, under a full moon and a summer temperature, I crossed with staff and escort. The river was already so swollen that we landed in two feet of water, and still it was rising.

Our camp was fixed five miles away on the upland. The first mile was only wet and nasty, and the trail not hard to follow. Then we came to the “back slough,” thirty feet wide, four feet deep, and still covered with four inches of ice. Those who had gone before had broken a track through this, and swept the fragments of ice forward until near the shore they were packed in for a width of ten feet or more, and to the full depth of the water. I can make no stronger statement than that we all got through safely, only wet to the skin. How it was done I do not pretend to know. Some went in one way and some in another. All I can assert is that my stalwart old Max, when he found himself standing, belly deep, in broken ice, settled quietly on his haunches and took my two hundred pounds with one spring on to dry land four feet higher than his starting-point, and twelve feet away,—but then, Max always was a marvel. Guy, who carried Ike, scrambled over the top of the broken ice as only he or a cat could do. The others fared variously. All were drenched, and some were hurt, but all got to the shore at last. Then came the hour-long tug to get my ambulance through with its store of tent-hold goods and we started for our remaining four miles. The trail, even of cavalry, is not easily followed by moonlight when covered with half a foot of water, and we lost our way; reaching camp, after fourteen miles of hard travel, at four o’clock in the morning.

The river was still rising rapidly, and word was brought that Kargé, with more than half the brigade, would have to make a détour of fifty miles and cross the Three Forks of the Obion far to the eastward, joining us some days later, near Jackson. So we idled on, marching a few miles each day, camping early, cooking the fat of the land for our evening meal, cultivating the questionable friendship of the Rebel population by forced contributions of subsistence, and leading, on the whole, a peaceful, unlaborious, and charming picnic life. Finally, taking Kargé again under our wing, we pushed on, resolutely and rapidly, over flooded swamps, across deep, rapid rivers, and through hostile towns, to our rendezvous; whence, under the command of two generals, and as part of an army of eight thousand well-mounted cavalry and light artillery, and all in light marching order, we started for our more serious work.

The chief in command was a young and handsome, but slightly nervous individual, who eschewed the vanities of uniform, and had about himself and his horse no evidence of his military character that could not be unbuckled and dropped with his sword-belt in case of impending capture. He was vacillating in his orders, and a little anxious in his demeanor, but he had shown himself cool and clear-headed under fire, and seemed resolutely bent on the destruction of the last vestige of Forrest’s troublesome army. It would be tedious to tell all the adventures of our forward expedition; how we marched in three columns over different roads, each for himself, and with only a vague notion where and how we should meet, and how we should support each other. As it afterward proved, the details of the order of march had been given to the commanders of the other brigades, while I had been forgotten; so that the whole advance was vexed with cross-purposes and with the evidences of a hidden misunderstanding. The contretemps that thus came about were annoying, and, in one instance, came near being serious: as we were going into camp at Prairie Station, my advance reported having come in sight of the camp-fires of the enemy; a skirmish-line was sent forward, and only on the eve of engaging did they discover that we were approaching Hepburn’s Brigade, of our column, which had reached the same point by another road.

The first days of our march in Mississippi were through Tippah County, as rough, hopeless, God-forsaken a country as was ever seen outside of Southern Missouri. Its hills were steep, its mud was deep, its houses and farms were poor, its facilities for the subsistence of a protecting army like ours were of the most meagre description, and its streams delayed us long with their torrents of bottomless muddy water, fast swelling from the thaw that had unlocked the snow of all the deep-buried hills and morasses of their upper waters. We built ferry-boats and swamped them, built bridges and broke them, and slowly and painfully, horse by horse, transferred the command across the nasty riverbeds. Tippah Creek detained us and kept us hard at work all day and all night, and we reached the Tallahatchee at New Albany barely in time to ford our last man across before it rose to an impassable depth. And then for two days we pressed forward, in company with the whole column, through the rough, rocky, and wooded country, reaching Okolona only at nightfall.

Here we struck the marvellous prairie region of Northeastern Mississippi, literally a land flowing with milk and honey. An interminable, fertile, rolling prairie lay before us in every direction. The stern rule of the Confederacy had compelled the planters to offset every small field of cotton with a wide area of corn, until the region had become known as the granary of the Southern army. Not only must every land-owner devote his broadest fields to the cultivation of the much-needed cereal, but one tenth of all his crop must be stacked for public use in cribs at the side of the railroad.