The State of Jones by Sally Jenkins Read Free Book Online Page A

contrabands alike almost rioting in alarm at the approach of the Southerners. “There was one of the greatest stampedes of teams, teamsters, non combatants and Negroes that I ever saw,” Edward Dean of the 4th Wisconsin wrote in his diary. “There were all of our Army wagons with teams hitched up, loose horses and mules and Negroes huddled close together, and they began to run and shout; then they seemed to befrantic with fear. The noise could be plainly heard above the din of battle.”
    But the Southerners had outrun their means. Just as they reached the train crossroads, their brigade leader, Colonel W. H. Moore of the 43rd Mississippi, was shot down. Alone and unsupported in the town, against the entire Federal reserves, the rebels began to run out of ammunition. Yankees, mostly Iowans and Illinoisans, now counterattacked: light artillery poured shot into the melee, shells whizzing over the heads and backs of the soldiers, while Iowa sharpshooters from a nearby low rise picked off men in gray. In the face of such an array of fire, the Confederates wavered, and then began to fall back.
    “Our lines melted under their fire like snow in thaw,” reported a rebel captain.
    With no choice but to retreat men did so frantically, companies dissolving into fragments. Some of them grabbed at bridles of Yankee horses that were hitched in front of the Tishomingo and swung themselves into the saddles. But whether on horseback or on foot, the retreat was more perilous than the advance. “No description is adequate to picture the gauntlet of death that these fugitives ran,” an Iowan reported. “Very few reached the timber
alive …
they had been
cut to pieces
in the most intense meaning of that term.”
    All around, the same was happening to other rebel brigades. Just down the line, Confederates assailed Battery Robinett, the largest of the Union gun fortresses, with catastrophic results. Robinett was a stout earthen and log redan near the Memphis and Charleston rail line, with three Parrott guns atop it, masked by two enormous oak trees.
    Almost 1,900 rebels attacked the battery three times, led by Colonel William P. Rogers of the 2nd Texas, astride his horse. On the third charge, the rebels screamed through a shallow ravine and came up the steep bank at a dead run. At fifty yards, the Yankees sprang up and fired, mowing them down in hundreds. The rebels still reached the base of the battery, where they clustered in a ditchat the foot of the bulwark and climbed upward in a hand-to-hand, musket-swinging death struggle. Men used their bayonets “like pitch forks,” and stabbed each other through. Rogers spurred his black mare up the incline, but “he had no more than straightened up until he was full of bullet holes,” according to one Iowan. He toppled backward into the ditch. In just a few minutes, 272 Southerners fell, killed or wounded around Robinett.
    It was all over before noon. “My God, my boys are running!” Sterling Price cried, as the men retreated to the tree lines and railroad cuts, the same ones they had charged out of with a yell just two hours earlier.
    Soon, the army was in full retreat. Some men ran heedlessly, others ignored orders and dropped to the ground exhausted, sitting where they were, sullenly, with their backs against tree trunks, to be taken prisoners later by Yankees. Others collapsed to their hands and knees and retched. It was a common occurrence after a charge and repulse: often men were ill from slaughter. A Mississippi private remembered that after one foray, he “‘vomited like a very dog’ & … threw myself [down] completely prostrated, upon the ground, panting with the white slime running from my mouth.”
    As the Confederates withdrew back into the heavy woods, Union soldiers surveyed fields blanketed with casualties. “There was hardly a spot for a hundred acres but what there lay the dead of the Secesh,” observed Alonzo Courtney of the 63rd Ohio. At Batteries Powell and