Confederate Wizards of the Saddle: Being Reminiscences and Observations of One Who Rode With Morgan
9781465677402
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The spring and summer of 1864 in Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia and in the Trans-Mississippi Department proved one of the most sanguinary periods of the war. During this time, Joseph E. Johnston made his superb retreat from Dalton to Atlanta, regarded by military historians as one of the ablest strategic movements of the campaigns from ’61 to ’65, and General Robert E. Lee, in his famous defensive campaign culminating in the decimation of Grant’s armies at Cold Harbor, had killed or wounded more than eighty thousand of General Grant’s followers, twenty thousand more effective men than Lee’s whole army numbered! In the Trans-Mississippi, between April and August, ’64, General Dick Taylor at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill gained glorious victories in attempting to stay the advance of General Banks into the heart of Louisiana; and Kirby Smith, Price, Shelby and Marmaduke in Arkansas still maintained a courageous front to the foe. After three years of constant fighting, their soldiers were more thoroughly inured to the hardships of war, better trained to face its dangers, and men on both sides exhibited a recklessness in facing death which marked the highest tide of courage. Early in the war the cavalry became one of the most effective arms of the agencies of the Confederates. With the vast territory in the West defended by the Confederacy, with a frontier line twenty-five hundred miles in extent, the marching speed of which mounted men are capable, the cavalry of the South, at this period, enabled them to do more, man for man, than any arm of the South’s defenders. They proved not only the best allies of the Confederate cause, but later developed some of the most renowned cavalry leaders of the world. There were many cavalry battles during the fifteen hundred and twenty days of the war—Trevilian Station, Fleetwood Hill, sometimes called “Brandy Station,” Harrisburg, Hartsville, Okolona, Murfreesboro, Shiloh, Parkers Cross Roads, Reams Station, all of which gave resplendence to the fame of the Confederate horsemen. Over and above these cavalry battles, there was Bryce’s Cross Roads, designated by the Federals as the Battle of Tishomingo Creek. Measured by losses, it stands pre-eminent; along strategic lines it is amongst the first, and counted by results to the defeated foe, it has no counterpart in any engagement fought entirely on one side by cavalry. On the Federal side, two thousand officers and men, including the wounded, were made prisoners, and more than twelve hundred dead were left on the battlefield or in close proximity thereto, if Forrest’s contemporary reports be correct. The Confederates lost a hundred and forty killed and three hundred wounded. General Forrest held the battlefield. His forces buried the dead, and his count was based upon the fullest knowledge of the tremendous mortality of this sanguinary engagement. There were differing statements concerning the casualties. The numbers here given are from men who saw the havoc on the field.
