On the 8th General Taylor disposed, on the right of the road to Pleasant Hill, Walker's infantry division of three brigades with two batteries; on the left, Mouton's two brigades and two batteries. As the horsemen came in from the front, they took position, dismounted, on Mouton's left. A regiment of horsemen was posted on each of the parallel roads, and cavalry with a battery held in reserve on the main road. Taylor's force amounted to 5,300 infantry, 3,000 mounted men, and 500 artillerymen; total, 8,800. Banks left Grand Ecore with an estimated force of 25,000.
As the enemy showed no disposition to advance, a forward movement of the whole line was made. On the left our forces crossed the field under a heavy fire and entered the wood, where a bloody contest ensued, which resulted in gradually turning their right, which was forced back with loss of prisoners and guns. On the right little resistance was encountered until the wood was entered. Finding that our force outflanked the opponent's left, the right brigade was kept advanced, and we swept everything before us.
His first line, consisting of all the mounted force and one division of the Thirteenth Corps, was in full flight, leaving prisoners, guns, and wagons in our hands. Two miles to the rear of the first position, the Second Division of the Federal Thirteenth Corps was brought up, but was speedily routed, losing guns and prisoners. The advance was continued. Four miles from the original position, his Nineteenth Army Corps was found drawn up on a ridge overlooking a small stream. Sharp work followed, but, as our force persisted, his fell back at nightfall. Twenty-five hundred prisoners, twenty pieces of artillery, several stands of colors, many thousands of small-arms, and two hundred and fifty wagons, were taken.
On the next morning the enemy was found about a mile in front of Pleasant Hill, which occupies a plateau a mile wide from west to east along the Mansfield road. His lines extended across the plateau from the highest ground on the west, his left, to a wooded height on the right of the Mansfield road. Winding along in front of this position was a dry gully cut by winter rains, bordered by a thick growth of young pines. This was held by his advanced infantry, his main line and guns being on the plateau. The force of General Taylor— Churchill's brigade having joined him now—amounted to twelve thousand five hundred men against eighteen thousand of General Banks, among them the fresh corps of General A. J. Smith. The action commenced about 4.30 P.M. It was the plan of General Taylor, as no offensive movement on the part of the enemy was anticipated, to turn both his flanks and subject him to a concentric fire and overwhelm him. The right was successfully turned, but our force on his left did not proceed far enough to outflank him. An obstinate contest ensued, with much confusion, and failure to execute the plan of battle. Night ended the conflict on our right, and both sides occupied their original positions. General Banks made no attempt to recover the ground from which his right and center had been driven. During the night he retreated, leaving four hundred wounded, and his dead unburied. On the next morning he was pursued twenty miles before his rear was overtaken, and on the road were found stragglers, and burning wagons and stores. Our loss in the two actions of Mansfield and Pleasant Hill was twenty-two hundred. At Pleasant Hill the loss was three guns and four hundred and twenty-six prisoners. The loss of the enemy in killed and wounded was larger than ours. We captured twenty guns and twenty-eight hundred prisoners, not including stragglers. Their campaign was defeated. In the second volume of the "Report of the Committee on the Conduct of the War," page 239, a report of Admiral Porter, dated Grand Ecore, April 14, 1864, says:
"The army here has met with a great defeat, no matter what the generals try to make of it," etc.
On April 21st General Banks retreated from Grand Ecore to Alexandria, harassed by a small cavalry force. A large part of our forces had been taken by General E. K. Smith to follow General Steele. On April 28th Porter's fleet was lying above the falls, then impassable, and Banks's army was in and around Alexandria behind earthworks. On May 13th both escaped from Alexandria, and on May 19th Banks crossed the Atchafalaya, and the campaign closed at the place where it began. Porter was able to extricate his eight ironclads and two wooden gunboats by building a dam with transports, as shown in the adjoining cut. General Banks boasted that the army obtained ten thousand bales of cotton, to which Admiral Porter added five thousand more as collected by the navy. This was the compensation reported for the loss of many lives, much public property, and a total defeat. Even for the booty as well as for the escape of their fleet, they were probably indebted to the unfortunate withdrawal of a large part of Taylor's force, as mentioned above.[104]
On April 12, 1864, an attack was made by two brigades of General N. B. Forrest's force, under Brigadier-General J. R. Chalmers, upon Fort Pillow. This was an earthwork on a bluff on the east side of the Mississippi, at the mouth of Coal Creek. It was garrisoned by four hundred men and six pieces of artillery. General Chalmers promptly gained possession of the outer works and drove the garrison to their main fortifications. The fort was crescent-shaped, the parapet eight feet in height and four feet across the top, surrounded by a ditch six feet deep and twelve feet in width. About this time General Forrest arrived and soon ordered his forces to move up. The brigade of Bell, on the northeast, advanced until it gained a position in which the men were sheltered by the conformation of the ground, which was intersected by a ravine. The other brigade, under McCulloch, carried the intrenchments on the highest part of the ridge, immediately in front of the southeastern face of the fort, and occupied a cluster of cabins on its southern face and about sixty yards from it. The line of investment was now short and complete, within an average distance of one hundred yards. It extended from Coal Creek on the north, which was impassable, to the river-bank south of the fort. In the rear were numerous sharpshooters, well posted on commanding ridges, to pick off the garrison whenever they exposed themselves. At the same time, our forces were so placed that the artillery could not be brought to bear upon them with much effect except by a fatal exposure of the gunners. During all this time a gunboat in the river kept up a continuous fire in all directions, but without effect. General Forrest, confident of his ability to take the fort by assault, which it seemed must be perfectly apparent to the garrison, and desiring to prevent further loss of life, sent a demand for an unconditional surrender, with the assurance that they should be treated as prisoners of war. The answer was written with a pencil on a slip of paper, "Negotiations will not attain the desired object." Meantime, three boats were seen to approach, the foremost of which was apparently loaded with troops, and, as an hour's time had been asked for to communicate with the officers of the gunboat, it seemed to be a pretext to gain time for reënforcements. General Forrest, understanding also that the enemy doubted his presence and had pronounced the demand to be a trick, declared himself, and demanded an answer within twenty minutes whether the commander would fight or surrender. Meanwhile, the foremost boat indicated an intention to land, but a few shots caused her to withdraw to the other side of the river, along which they all passed up. The answer from the fort was a positive refusal to surrender. Three companies on the left were now placed in an old rifle-pit and almost in the rear of the fort, and on the right a portion of Barton's regiment of Bell's brigade was also under the bluff and in the rear of the fort.
On the signal, the works were carried without a halt. As the troops poured into the fortification the enemy retreated toward the river, arms in hand and firing back, and their colors flying, doubtless expecting the gunboats to shell us away from the bluff and protect them until they could be taken off or reënforced. As they descended the bank an enfilading and deadly fire was poured in upon them from right and left by the forces in rear of the fort, of whose presence they were ignorant. To this was now added the destructive fire of the regiments that had stormed the fort. Fortunately some of our men cut down the flag, and the firing ceased. Our loss was twenty killed and sixty wounded. Of the enemy two hundred and twenty-eight were buried that evening and quite a number next day. We captured six pieces of artillery and about three hundred and fifty stand of small-arms. The gunboat escaped up the river.
[Footnote 102: I. Stoddard Johnston, "Southern Historical Society
Papers," June, 1879, p. 258, et seq.]
[Footnote 103: "I had often seen delicate ladies who had been plundered, insulted, ind rendered desolate by the acts of our most atrocious enemies, and, while they did not call for it, yet in the anguished expressions of their features while narrating their misfortunes, there was a mute appeal to every manly sentiment of my bosom for retribution, which I could no longer withstand. On my passage through the lower Valley into Maryland, a lady had said to me, with tears in her eyes: 'Our lot is a hard one, and we see no peace; but there are a few green spots in our lives, and they are when the Confederate soldiers come along and we can do something far them.' May God defend and bless these noble women of the Valley, who so often ministered to the wounded, sick, and dying Confederate soldiers, and gave their last morsel of bread to the hungry! They bore with heroic courage the privations, sufferings, persecutions, and dangers to which the war, which was constantly waged in their midst, exposed them, and upon no portion of the Southern people did the disasters, which finally befell our army and country, fall with more crushing effect than on them.">[