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the round forest holding the union left Rosecrans’s final defense line had thus far proven impenetrable. The center and right had hurled back repeated Confederate assaults along the Nashville Pike. Yet one sector remained untested—the Federal left held by Palmer’s division. Cruft’s brigade, with Grose’s regiments in support, formed along McFadden’s Lane, and to their left Hazen’s brigade anchored the juncture of the pike and railroad at the Round Forest. George Wagner’s brigade of Wood’s division extended Hazen’s left to the river. The question remained: would Bragg strike this sector or continue his swing around the Union right on the Nashville Pike? The Federals would soon have their answer. . . . . The far right of Withers’s division, the brigade of thirty-one-year-old Brigadier General James Chalmers, a former Holly Springs attorney, was the pivot of Bragg’s grand turning movement. For two days the 2,000 Mississippians huddled behind their slight log-and-rail breastworks in the cold and rain, yet Polk boasted “not a murmur of discontent” could be heard. At 10:00 the old “Pensacola Brigade,” as the press referred to it, received the order to move out. The troops surged across an 800-yard-wide field south of the destroyed Cowan House.1 As the brigade approached the house, it split, the 7th, 41st, and 10th Mississippi and Garrity’s Alabama Battery veering left, the last with a section on each flank. They would be tangling with Cruft’s brigade, the 2nd Kentucky and 31st Indiana on the front line, supported by the six guns of Battery B, 1st Ohio Artillery, and the enfilade fire of Battery B, Kentucky 154 battle of stones river Artillery, 300 yards south of Cruft. Positioned in front of the cedar woods, the Federals quickly tore down the rails along McFadden’s Lane and fashioned a stone wall from rocks. The 10th Mississippi took cover in the ruins and outhouses of the Cowan House and opened a long-distance fire. The 7th and 41st Mississippi drew such a blistering fire out in the open that the men broke to the rear. In attempting to rally the 7th, a bullet struck thirty-eight-year-old Yale law graduate Colonel William H. Bishop in the thigh. Chalmers was likewise struck in the head by a shell fragment, and carried senseless from the field. A forty-one-year-old Harvard law graduate , Colonel Thomas H. White, assumed command. The 41st Mississippi attempted a second sortie, approaching to within a hundred yards (sixty according to Confederate reports), before planting their colors and hitting the ground. By 10:30 they could take no more, and the graycoats staggered back in squads and companies. The Mississippians left a carpet of 376 casualties in their rear—nearly a quarter of their strength. Garrity’s battery alone sustained 21 killed and wounded, and twenty horses lay dead. Chalmers had only three shredded regiments to show for his e≠orts.2 In the midst of the melee, Cruft ordered his second line, the 90th Ohio and 1st Kentucky, to replace his first line, now out of ammunition. The exchange went remarkably well under the circumstances, but then Cruft strangely directed the 1st Kentucky to attack. Exactly what he had in mind is not known; he owned up to it only in a second report, but even then he gave no explanation. Perhaps he wished to take advantage of Chalmers’s disorganized state. Perhaps, as has been suggested, he wished to buy time for Negley’s division on his right, which was about to break. The Kentuckians ’ brazen sortie came to within 40 to 50 yards of the section of Garrity’s battery near the Cown House, when Colonel David A. Enyart, sporting a beard that stretched to his heart, glanced to his right and saw Rebel infantry sweeping past his flank. He immediately ordered his regiment back to the fence line along McFadden Lane.3 As the fighting raged, Daniel S. Donelson’s Tennessee brigade came forward and occupied the log-and-rail breastworks vacated by Chalmers. At age sixty-two, Donelson, the former private secretary to Andrew Jackson, was the oldest brigadier in Bragg’s army. The heavy thud of bullets could be heard everywhere—the overshooting of Cruft’s troops. The men from the Volunteer State soon discovered that even stray bullets could have a deadly e≠ect—the 8th Tennessee lost 15 to 20 men killed and...

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