CHAPTER XI
WEST TENNESSEE
FTER coming out of the campaign of Kentucky, the cavalry forces were employed to harass the enemy; and after the lapse of nearly sixty years, it is exhilarating to my imagination to recall the wondrous part played by General Forrest and his comparatively small command in that great game of life and death.
While Morgan’s command was striking the key points of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad to hamper the supply lines of Rosecrans at Nashville, Forrest was performing the same service against the Mobile and Ohio and the Memphis and Charleston, the supply lines of the enemy at Corinth, Miss.
Leaving Chattanooga late in November, he hurried to West Tennessee, crossing the Tennessee River at Clifton and pushing hurriedly on to the Mobile and Ohio Railroad line. In rapid succession he engaged and captured the garrisons of Jackson, Humboldt, Trenton, and Spring Creek, with large supplies of arms and food.
In the same campaign we captured the garrison of Lexington, Tenn., and, incidentally, Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, who in later years became the great outstanding orator of the nation and its most brilliant agnostic, or free religious thinker.
On account of the smallness of his command, General Forrest could only hope to succeed by rapidity of movement; and this necessitated the destruction of all captured property and the paroling of all prisoners.
Only a commander of genius and boldness could have coped with such a situation as confronted Forrest. The territory in which he operated was in the hands of the enemy, both lines of railroad controlled and guarded by the Union armies. On the east was the Tennessee River, deep and cold, and, ever hovering on its turbulent waters, a fleet of gunboats, such as had carried terror to Henry and Donelson and Shiloh.
Thus hemmed within the encircling barriers of the Tennessee, the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the army of Grant, this fearless Murat of the Confederacy moved at will, a veritable flying scourge of death and destruction, while the surprised and startled enemy made hasty and widespread preparation for his capture; but the reincarnated spirit of the Cavaliers rode as they reckoned, and, as in the movements of all truly great commanders, the unexpected happened.
At a place called “Parker Cross-Roads,” opposite and west of Clifton, on the Tennessee, the Union Army had a division of infantry and artillery about to be reinforced by a brigade then on its way from Union City by the Mobile and Ohio Railroad.