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Chapter 6. Flanking Bragg
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CHAPTER 6 Flanking Bragg Another battlefield, still and quiet in the gentle rain. The smoke gone, the noise-the gut-wrenching, teeth-clenching roar of artillery, musketry, the sounds of thousands of men marching, running, falling, yelling, swearing, praying-all gone too. Now only the rain, falling softly in the pools of blood on the ground and on the rocks and on the bodies, the dead, each frozen in his last moment. Here, one with a leg shot off; over there, one who took a round of grape full in the chest; still another with his head blown off-a shell to the face, he never knew what hit him. Healing rain too on the hospitals-some tents, some houses or churches, but some in the open air with the groaning, pitiable men with grisly piles of filthy amputated limbs, mounds several feet high, in full view. But some of the men in the hospitals were dead; the nurses took some time to move out the ones who didn't make it. But it was over, for now anyway; the Confederates were gone. The Fifteenth Kentucky was returning to the cedars to bury its dead. Not bad, this time, at least not compared to the bloodbath at Perryville. Only ten men were dead in all; but one of them was Colonel Forman-the "boy colonel," they had called him. With another field officer lost, the papers back in Louisville were suggesting that this regiment was somehow cursed. Smith Bayne of Company F was dead as well, one of the senior remaining captains until this battle, after so many of the original company officers had resigned over the past few months. His men carefully wrapped his body in a blanket; like Forman, Bayne's body would be returned home for burial. But for the others, a soldier's burial on the field. The men dug a trench in the thicket as others wrapped the bodies in blankets. Then the dead were laid side by side in the trench, a mass regimental grave. Once the deed was done, a board or the top from a box of hardtack, a name 118 Flanking Bragg 119 and unit rudely scratched into the wood, would do for a headstone. Then, back to camp outside of town on the Salem turnpike. Some of the Kentuckians wandered the hospitals over the next few days, looking for the thirty wounded men of the regiment. Twenty-three more from the Fifteenth Kentucky had been captured in the retreat out of the cedars; some of them were wounded too, but they would have to ride out their wounds in Confederate prisons, at least for a while.! Candles burned late in the camp of the Fifteenth Kentucky in the first weeks ofJanuary as the officers talked about political developments back home. Newspapers filtered into the Federal camps, and the army learned that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, promised in September , had been finally issued on the first day of the new year. The slaves of Kentucky were not affected, although Lincoln had made it pretty clear that he thought slavery was dying everywhere; now, with the Confederate states' slaves freed, assuming they were ever whipped once and for all, the omission of Kentucky and the other border states from the sweep of the Proclamation was an empty concession for Lincoln -everybody knew slavery could never endure in just a few border states. Riding through the camps of his army, spread in a semicircle around Murfreesboro, Rosecrans saw a good deal that needed to be done before the advance could be resumed. First on the agenda was a matter of reorganization that Rosecrans had had in mind for several weeks. Rosecrans believed that the organization of the army into wings had failed; on January 7, he asked the War Department to create three corps under the commands of Generals Thomas, Crittenden, and McCook.2 While he waited for men and supplies, Rosecrans decided to carefully explore the territory in front of him to see what Bragg might be up to. His scouts had told him that a large Confederate force-it was Polk's corps-was at Shelbyville, not far to the south. Rosecrans told Thomas to nose around a bit, so John Beatty's brigade was ordered to march to Salem, four miles southwest of camp, pushing a Single regiment south to Middleton, about halfway between Shelbyville and Murfreesboro. A second brigade would march toward Versailles, just southwest of Salem , and then...