The Boy of Battle Ford and the Man

CHAPTER IXb

78 THE BOY OF BATTLE F'ORD ceived by the offers of satisfaction by projects that were incapable of doing more than to delude and destroy. I abhorred every opiate, for the longing life, that I had ever tasted. I did not dread futue punishment. I dreaded future nothingness. I had loved life and everything in nature that was innocentthe air, the water, the land, the plants and trees; the birds and animals and the people. I craved to live forever. I dreaded not hardship nor labor nor losses. Standing there alone in the anguish of my heart I cried out, "Oh,that I did know (hat Christianity is what honest Christians believe it is. Then I could be happy all the rest of my life. There IS nothing else the afternoon took the cars for Colliersville , fifty miles away, as a start in the disastrous expedition into Mississippi under S. D. Sturgis. I'll copy an article published in the Harrisburg Chronicle in December, 1891, when we were encouraging the voters to keep saloons out of that City, which they did for twelve years at once: Whisky the Cause of the Guutowu Defeat. I take up my pen to narrate an experience which many thousands of us had at one time during the war of the great rebellion ; an experience of so sad a nature that not one who participated in it can forget the event while -he shall remain conworth living for, seeing that all must go scious of anything in this world. Howhence forever." In that minute of despair I seemed to get some relief. Of course, I had no confidence that my earnest wish for such knowledge would ever. be gratified. If I had thought one time in that direction, since the reading of the testament in Lake Providence ten months previous, I have no remembrance of it. Ten days later my mind was exercised in a divine direction again, for a minute only. I said nothing about my desires to anyoHe, for I knew of no one I could believe unless that on'e could show me so that I could understand. I was utterly without hope except during the few days I might live on the earth. It was only from a sense of duty and the desire to help save the Union and the remote possibility that something might come to pass to my benefit, that I could act in my norll1al easy and lively manner. CHAPTER IX. I'VAS sent with another squad of our company to the north of the city at midnight, as an attack on the lines was . expected any hour. But before noon the next day, June 1, we were relieved, and in ever much space I could command in your paper, I should be able but feebly to express the horrors of that event; much less shall I be able to give a proper detail of it in one column. It was the complete overthrow of the Union army under General S. D. Sturgis, near Guntown, Mississippi , on the tenth day of June, 1864. That old slave auctioneer and sly fox of Fort Pillow massacre notoriety, N. B. Forrest, was in command of the rebel forces. I should not, after a lapse of more than twenty-seven years, call the attention of your readers to the incident but for the fact that "whisky did it." No one among us ever heard of Sturgis until we were marching in his command, and each one of us soon learned to be sorry he was ever born. His very name when we first heard it sounded suspiciously' in our ears, and for more than twenty-seven years it has been more nauseous to the souls of the still-living victims of his meanness than even the effluvia from the stomach of the whisky bloat, or the nasty mess of India berries and swollen tobacco plugs in the bottoms of the barrels of "bust head" whisky we used to see. THE BOY OF BATTLE FORD 79 On June 1, 1864, an expedition started out from Memphis, Tennessee, to operate against the rebel army under the aforesaid Forrest. Said expedition was composed of the 4th Missouri, lid New Jersey, 19th Pennsylvania, 7th, 8th and 9th Illinois , 7th Indiana, 6th IOwa ana 10th Kansas cavalry regiments, and the 84th Iowa mounted infantry, under command of the cavalry general, B. H.Grierson, the 9th Minnesota, the 81st, 95th, 10Sth, 113th, 114th, and 120th Illinois...