The State of Jones by Sally Jenkins Read Free Book Online

roundhouse punch, aimed at the crossroads in town. Their path would take them between twoof the largest Union gun fortifications, one named Battery Powell and the other Battery Robinett. Ahead, the men could see the Union positions, “bristling with artillery and strongly supported by infantry,” Green reported.
    Green ordered the men forward. “With a wild shout,” the Mississippians leaped across a railroad cut with the rest of the brigade. A command came to charge at the “double-quick.”
    It was the last order that could be heard, as at least fifty federal guns opened fire on them. The trembling thunder of artillery was joined by the shrieking, concussive outbursts of shells and the short, almost muffled
spat-spat-spat
of Springfield rifles, hammers hitting soft gunpowder, followed by the metallic raking of ramrods. “The very atmosphere seemed filled with shot, shell, grape and canister,” Gree.n reported.
    Suddenly it seemed as if they were in a rainstorm of blood. Horses plunged and caterwauled, and men screamed incoherently. There was something about such a charge that forced the breath from men’s throats, almost reflexively, without their even knowing it. As one Mississippi soldier recorded in his diary, “I always said, if I ever went into a charge, I wouldn’t holler. But the very first time I fired off my gun, I hollered as loud as I could, and I hollered every breath until I stopped!”
    The Confederates sprinted heedlessly forward, over logs and fallen timber toward the Union lines that belched flame and smoke. “Not for a moment did they halt,” observed a horrified Union soldier watching the approaching slaughter. “Every instant death smote. It came in a hundred shapes, every shape a separate horror. Here a shell, short-fused, exploding in the thinning ranks, would rend its victims and splatter their comrades with brains, flesh and blood. Men’s heads were blown to atoms. Fragments of human flesh still quivering with life would slap other men in the face, or fall to earth to be trampled underfoot.”
    One of Newton’s oldest friends, John Harper, fell wounded in both feet. Another Jones County man, James Reddoch, was shot through the jaw.
    But the Union artillery simply couldn’t fire rapidly enough to slow the onslaught. As the rebels charged over the killing field, some Northerners flinched and broke even before their lines were struck. Horses stampeded with their limbers on, dragging heavy cannon over and crushing infantrymen. Others dodged out of the way but caught the panic of the animals and dashed to the rear through the columns. “Then a few men followed the horses,” Joseph Nelson of the 81st Ohio wrote. “Then a few more. And still more.” General Rosecrans rode among them, livid, swearing that they were “old women.”
    The Confederates overran Battery Powell and took possession of the large guns, nesting among bloody cadavers and horse carcasses. Surging just to the right of the earthworks, the 7th Mississippi Battalion roared through a line of Iowans and Illinoisans and straight on into town.
    In Corinth, they fought from house to house. Musket fire spattered against clapboards and made splinters and shards of masonry fly, until whole buildings were practically shot away. Years later, bullet holes still riddled the walls of homes. Some of the rebels, famished despite the battle howling around them, slipped into kitchens and wolfed down whatever they could find to eat, only to be set upon by Yankees. “Every one of them received either the hot lead or the cold steel,” bragged one Iowan who stumbled upon them. More than one hundred Southern men were captured after the battle, “in the bakeries and stores ,” marveled another Iowan.
    Steadily, the rebels worked their way toward the Tishomingo Hotel. The Yankees used crates and barrels on the train platforms for cover to return fire. As the action neared Rosecrans’s headquarters, his staff hastily evacuated, officers and