Work for Giants

E. Parson Thomas

Description

During the summer of 1864 a Union column, commanded by Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson Smith, set out from Tennessee with a goal that had proven impossible in all prior attempts - to find and defeat the cavalry under the command of Confederate major general Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest's cavalry was the greatest threat to the long supply line feeding Sherman's armies as they advanced on Atlanta. Smith marched at the head of his "gorillas," veteran soldiers who were fresh from the Red River Campaign. Aside from diverting Confederate attention away from Sherman, Smith's orders were to destroy Southern railroads and confront Forrest in Mississippi. Just weeks earlier, a similar Union expedition had met with disaster at the Battle of Brice's Crossroads, perhaps the greatest victory of Forrest's military career.Joined by reinforcements led by Lt. Gen. Stephen Dill Lee, Forrest and his men were confident and their morale had never been higher. However, for two weeks, Smith outmarched, outfought, and outmaneuvered the team of Lee and Forrest. In three days of bitter fighting, culminating in the battle at Harrisburg, the Confederates suffered a staggering defeat. Forrest's corps was devastated. He and his men would recover but would never regain their earlier strength, nor would they ever again prove a serious threat to veteran Union infantry.Work for Giants focuses on the details of this overlooked campaign and the efforts, postbattle and postwar, to minimize the outcome and consequences of an important Union victory. Parson draws heavily from previously untapped diaries, letters and journals, and eyewitness accounts, bringing to life the oppressive heat, cruel depredations, and brutal combat the soldiers encountered, and the stoic humor they used to endure them.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• United States of America
• History of the Americas
• American Civil War
• États-Unis
• Guerre de Sécession

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 10 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612778686
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Work for Giants
CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS AND STRATEGIES
B RIAN S. W ILLS, SERIES EDITOR
Richmond Must Fall: The Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, October 1864 HAMPTON NEWSOME
Work for Giants: The Campaign and Battle of Tupelo/Harrisburg, Mississippi, June–July 1864 THOMAS E. PARSON
Work for Giants
The Campaign and Battle of Tupelo/Harrisburg, Mississippi, June–July 1864

Thomas E. Parson
Foreword by Timothy B. Smith
The Kent State University Press
Kent, Ohio
© 2014 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-60635-222-9
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
18   17   16   15   14      5   4   3   2   1
To Charlie, my mother and friend 1934–2012
What does a soldier know about war?
I went into the army a light-hearted boy, with a face as smooth as a girl’s and hair as brown as my beautiful mother’s. I fought through more than a score of battles and romped through more than a hundred frolics. I had the rollicking time of my life and came home stronger than an athlete, with robust health builded to last the rest of my life. And my mother, her brown hair silvered with the days of my soldiering, held me in her arms and counted the years of her longing and watching with kisses. When she lifted her dear face I saw the story of my marches and battles written there in lines of anguish. If a mother should write her story of war, she would pluck a white hair from her temple, and dip the living stylus into the chalice of her tears, to write the diary of the days upon her heart.
What does a soldier know about war?
—Pvt. Robert J. Burdette, The Drums of the 47 th
Contents
Foreword by Timothy B. Smith
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 The Gorillas
2 A Pair of Raids
3 A Third Raid
4 Stretched to the Limit
5 A Gathering Army
6 Watching and Waiting
7 Marching South
8 Pontotoc
9 Pinson’s Hill
10 The Road to Tupelo
11 Bertram’s Shop and the Camargo Crossroads
12 Harrisburg
13 Opening Moves
14 “A Medley of Blunders”
15 “Endurance Had Reached a Limit”
16 “Who Will Care for Mother Now?”
17 The Federal Withdrawal
18 Old Town Creek
19 Return to Memphis
20 Victory or Defeat?
21 A Second Battle
Appendix: Order of Battle
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
I first met Tom Parson fifteen years ago, when he and I both arrived at Shiloh National Military Park about the same time. Since then I have come to know him as a jack of all trades. He is probably one of only a few people—and certainly the only person I know—who can run the engine room of a mighty warship, maintain a national cemetery, and write good history.
Indeed, Tom is one of our unsung national heroes, having served in and retired as a chief petty officer from the United States Navy, where he manned the engine rooms in the bowels of many a ship. His performance of duty in a changing world at the end of the Cold War as well as in more recent conflicts, including his wartime service in the Gulf War, deserves our thanks. But Tom is also mindful of other veterans who came before him, particularly those who gave the “last full measure of devotion” for our nation. The manner in which he oversaw and groomed the Shiloh National Cemetery in his many years of service there is evidence of this and is similarly commendable.
It is through Tom’s love and study of history, however, that I have come to know him best. As an avid Civil War historian who wrote his first book on the California Hundred of the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry while still aboard ship, Tom and I have spent many hours studying, debating, and discussing the war, particularly Shiloh and Corinth. As next-door neighbors for many years, living in park housing behind the visitor center at Shiloh, we’ve had many opportunities to tramp the battlefield and learn together. And in his new interpretive work at the Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center (still under the Shiloh National Military Park), he has similarly immersed himself in the history of that town and campaign. Tom has put his historical skills to work in other writings, including this book as well as numerous articles for such publications as Blue and Gray . The National Park Service is fortunate to have Tom in its stable of historians.
Similarly, my association with the Tupelo campaign has had a trajectory comparable to my friendship with Tom, mostly emanating from my association with its history. Growing up in Mississippi, and for a time living near Tupelo itself, I often passed the marked battlefield and urbanized actual sites and wondered what it must have been like then. As I developed into a historian and came to have more than an inquisitive interest in Mississippi’s Civil War heritage, I came to appreciate the importance of the summer 1864 raids into the state. And when I learned that I had a great-great-great-grandfather as a first lieutenant in the 6th Mississippi Cavalry at Tupelo, my interest became even more acute.
Yet, I learned little of the battle or campaign, simply because there was pitifully little written on it. The standard source then, and indeed until now, was Ed Bearss’s Forrest at Brice’s Cross Roads , which was very well done. Still, that book was written in the 1970s, and Tupelo was included among other raids, such as the more famous Brice’s Cross Roads effort. Tupelo has long deserved a solid, modern, academic treatment in and of itself.
Thus, my excitement grew when I learned my good friend Tom Parson had decided to work on a book on the battle that had so long intrigued me. The result has been worth the wait, and this book definitely meets all expectations. Putting the summer 1864 Union raids into north Mississippi in the correct military context while describing the action in a gripping narrative, Tom has produced what will become the standard work on the battle. I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about a battle and campaign that so little is known about but that held so much importance at the time, and I am positive that readers of Work for Giants will come away with the same feeling.
Timothy B. Smith
University of Tennessee at Martin
Preface
This book started as a simple research project that I hoped would someday evolve into a magazine article. It turned into something more and is actually at the very heart of my study of the war. I have lived in Corinth for most of the last decade and have developed a passion for studying that part of the war that extends for about a hundred miles in every direction from my home. It began with my work at Shiloh and later extended to Corinth and then to the battlefields of Iuka, Holly Springs, Brice’s Crossroads, Memphis, Britton Lane, Davis Bridge, Davis Mills, and Parker’s Crossroads, as well as a couple dozen lesser sites.
I suppose it started a long time ago when a wise historian, George Reaves, reminded me that “Shiloh was not fought in a vacuum.” I had become so intent on my studies of a single battle I had lost sight of the bigger picture. He encouraged me to broaden my horizons, and I did. Eventually I realized just what it was he was trying to tell an excited young fanatic with tunnel vision. I began to see how far-flung events in one theater of the war could decide outcomes in another. Like how a campaign in Georgia could lead to a pair of battles in north Mississippi.
When the battles of Brice’s Crossroads and Tupelo/Harrisburg are broken down to the fundamentals of strategy, they are nearly identical in design. Neither had the specific goal of killing Nathan B. Forrest, nor was it in the plan of either to capture territory or even destroy the rich agricultural heartland known as the Black Prairie. The ultimate goal of each campaign was simply to keep Forrest’s cavalry away from the Tennessee railroad supplying William T. Sherman’s armies in north Georgia.
The first attempt to keep Forrest in Mississippi was made by Samuel Sturgis, a raid that resulted in the disastrous Union defeat at Brice’s Crossroads. Despite a series of bad decisions on his own part, as well as being out-generalled by Forrest, Sturgis still managed to achieve his primary goal. There were few people at the time who would voice the opinion that Sturgis’s campaign had been a success, but, in the larger scope of the war, it had been: Forrest remained in Mississippi.
By the spring of 1864, the war in the West was not going to be won or lost in Mississippi, not with the major armies fighting north of Atlanta. But the success or failure of the primary armies could be affected by the lesser activities in outlying districts. Forrest’s spectacular victory over Sturgis did nothing to add to the Confederate war effort, but the very fact that it kept Forrest in Mississippi ensured that Sherman’s tenuous supply line remained undisturbed, at least in the short term.
Sherman realized that his supply system remained threatened as long as Forrest was free to move through the area at will. Forrest’s superior officer, Stephen D. Lee, was under enormous pressure to send the famed cavalry leader on the very type of expedition Sherman feared. Unknown to the Union general, he had an ally of sorts in Confederate president Jefferson Davis. In the face of all military logic, Davis steadfastly refused to allow Forrest to leave Mississippi. His decision was based less on military priorities and more on stubbornness and the intense disregard he harbored against political rivals and anyone who questioned his authority. Had Sherman known of Davis’s insistence on keeping Forrest in Mississippi, it is possible he would have never bothered to send another raid into the state.
It was more fate than planning that placed A. J. Smith and two veteran divisions in Memphis on the eve of Sturgis’s defeat. They had arrived fresh from the Red River campaign and were truly in the right place at the right time. Yet, it was Smith’s careful planning that paved the way for his e