Reinforcements were sent out from Jackson, and Forrest disappeared. The next day our entire command marched about fifteen miles eastwardly in the direction of the Tennessee river. It was doubtless supposed by our commanding general that the Confederates had retreated in that direction, but he was mistaken. Forrest had simply whipped around Jackson, struck the railroad a few miles north thereof, and then had continued north up the road, capturing and destroying as he went. On the succeeding day, December 21st, we all marched back to Jackson, and my regiment went into camp on a bleak, muddy hillside in the suburbs of the town, and there we remained until December 29th, when we were sent to Carroll Station, about eight miles north of Jackson.
I well remember how gloomy I felt on the morning of that Christmas Day at Jackson, Tennessee. I was then only a little over nineteen years of age. I had been in the army nearly a year, lacking just a few days, and every day of that time, except a furlough of two days granted at our camp of instruction before we left Illinois for the front, had been passed with the regiment in camp and field.
Christmas morning my thoughts naturally turned to the little old log cabin in the backwoods of western Illinois, and I couldn't help thinking about the nice Christmas dinner that I knew the folks at home would sit down to on that day.
There would be a great chicken pot pie, with its savory crust and a superabundance of light, puffy dumplings; delicious light, hot biscuits; a big ball of our own home-made butter, yellow as gold; broad slices of juicy ham, the product of hogs of our own fattening, and home cured with hickory-wood smoke; fresh eggs from the barn in reckless profusion, fried in the ham gravy; mealy Irish potatoes, baked in their jackets; coffee with cream about half an inch thick; apple butter and crab apple preserves; a big plate of wild honey in the comb; and winding up with a thick wedge of mince pie that mother knew so well how to make—such mince pie, in fact, as was made only in those days, and is now as extinct as the dodo. And when I turned from these musings upon the bill of fare they would have at home to contemplate the dreary realities of my own possible dinner for the day—my oyster can full of coffee and a quarter ration of hardtack and sow-belly comprised the menu. If the eyes of some old soldier should light upon these lines, and he should thereupon feel disposed to curl his lip with unutterable scorn and say: "This fellow was a milksop and ought to have been fed on Christian Commission and Sanitary goods, and put to sleep at night with a warm rock at his feet;"—I can only say in extenuation that the soldier whose feelings I have been trying to describe was only a boy—and, boys, you probably know how it was yourselves during the first year of your army life. But, after all, the soldier had a Christmas dinner that day, and it is of that I have started out to speak.
Several years ago my old army letters, which had been so carefully kept and cherished for all these many years, passed from the keeping of those to whom they had been addressed, back into the possession of him who penned them, and now, after the lapse of fifty-four years, one of these old letters, written to my father, shall re-tell the story of this Christmas dinner.
"Jackson, Tennessee,
December 27, 1862.
"Mr. J. O. Stillwell,
"Otter Creek, Illinois.
"I wrote you a short and hasty letter the fore part of this week to let you know that I was all right, and giving you a brief account of our late ups and downs, but I doubt if you have received it. The cars have not been running since we came back to Jackson from our march after Forrest. The talk in camp is that the rebs have utterly destroyed the railroad north of here clean to the Mississippi river, and that they have also broken it in various places and damaged it badly south of here between Bolivar and Grand Junction. I have no idea when this letter will reach you, but will write it anyhow, and trust to luck and Uncle Sam to get it through in course of time.
"We are now in camp on a muddy hillside in the outskirts of Jackson. I think the spot where we are must have been a cavalry camp last summer. Lots of corn cobs are scattered on the ground, old scraps of harness leather, and such other truck as accumulates where horses are kept standing around. When we left Bolivar we were in considerable of a hurry, with no time to primp or comb our hair, and neither did we bring our tents along, so we are just living out of doors now, and "boarding at Sprawl's." There is plenty of wood, though, to make fires, and we have jayhawked enough planks and boards to lie on to keep us out of the mud, so we just curl up at night in our blankets with all our clothes on, and manage to get along fairly well. Our worst trouble now is the lack of grub. The destruction of the railroad has cut off our supplies, and there is no telling just exactly how long it may be before it will be fixed and in running order again, so they have been compelled, I suppose, to cut down our rations. We get half rations of coffee, and quarter rations of hardtack and bacon. What we call small rations, such as Yankee beans, rice, and split peas, are played out; at least, we don't get any. The hardtack is so precious now that the orderly sergeant no longer knocks a box open and lets every man help himself, but he stands right over the box and counts the number of tacks he gives to every man. I never thought I'd see the day when army hardtack would be in such demand that they'd have to be counted out to the soldiers as if they were money, but that's what's the matter now. And that ain't all. The boys will stand around until the box is emptied, and then they will pick up the fragments that have fallen to the ground in the divide, and scrape off the mud with their knives, and eat the little pieces, and glad to get them. Now and then, to help out the sow-belly, we get quarter rations of fresh beef from the carcass of a Tennessee steer that the quartermaster manages to lay hands on somehow. But it's awful poor beef, lean, slimy, skinny and stringy. The boys say that one can throw a piece up against a tree, and it will just stick there and quiver and twitch for all the world like one of those blue-bellied lizards at home will do when you knock him off a fence rail with a stick.
"I just wish that old Forrest, who is the cause of about all this trouble, had to go without anything to eat until he was so weak that he would have to be fed with a spoon. Maybe after he had been hungry real good for a while he'd know how it feels himself, and would let our railroads alone.