Homegrown Yankees: Tennessee's Union Cavalry in the Civil War

5. Out of Murfreesboro

1. Stanley, Memoirs, 130–31, 143–44; Dubose, Wheeler, 174; Starr, Union Cavalry, 3:208–10; Hagerman, American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare, 209, 210. 2. E. B. Long and Barbara Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 (New York, 1971), 311–67. CHAPTER 5 Out of Murfreesboro F ollowing Stones River, General Bragg at Tullahoma spread his front twenty miles south of Murfreesboro along a railroad branch running west from Wartrace to Shelbyville. With cavalry on his flanks as well as providing couriers, pickets, and scouts, his infantry protected four passes through the Highland Rim. General Rosecrans remained at Murfreesboro, 220 miles from his Louisville supply base. Despite prodding by their superiors during the spring, the generals remained stationary for almost six months. Washington politicians joked of Rosecrans’s having “a spring vegetable garden at Murfreesboro .” In truth Rosecrans spent much of his time pleading for more horses and mules to forage the countryside. Both armies sent detachments seeking information as well as more mounts, food, and fodder.1 From January to mid-June 1863, numerous expeditions, reconnaissance missions, and skirmishes occurred within thirty miles of Murfreesboro, some even farther away. At least nine expeditions and nine reconnaissance patrols including cavalry marched out of Murfreesboro, usually east toward Liberty or west toward Franklin. The Federals often searched for horses and fodder as well as for the enemy. Of approximately fifty skirmishes, half happened east toward Liberty and others occurred mostly along picket lines to the west or south of Murfreesboro. Almost a third originated with Confederate cavalry incursions stretching as far west as Fort Donelson and as far east as Gallatin. Altogether each side suffered about three thousand casualties.2 88 Middle Tennessee and Beyond 3. Weatherbee, 5th Tennessee, 15–24; TICW, 1:330; ORS, 65:497, 501; John Fitch, Annals of the Army of the Cumberland (Philadelphia, 1863), 214; RAGT, 442. 4. Stokes to Johnson, Jan. 19, 1863, PAJ, 6:124. During the first half of 1863, Stokes’s 5th Tennessee served in battalions led by Lt. Col. Robert Galbraith and Maj. John Murphy, in one or two companies or a small squad, or acted as individual scouts or spies. From March until June Galbraith’s battalion encamped at Murfreesboro and Murphy’s at Carthage on the Cumberland River. Detachments from each generally fought east of Murfreesboro and south of Carthage at such places as Bradyville, Milton, and Liberty . They also foraged and impressed horses in the same vicinity. According to John Fitch, the earliest historian of the Army of the Cumberland, Stokes’s regiment “rendered important service, particularly by furnishing a large proportion of the guides and scouts necessary for the various expeditions that [were] continually sent into the adjacent country.”3 From his sick bed in January 1863, Stokes still complained about Henry Newberry. Rosecrans had detached the lieutenant to serve as his chief of couriers . As such Newberry used one of the former congressman’s companies as couriers and other members of the regiment as orderlies. Twice the colonel threatened to resign rather than “submit [to] such a man.” That same month, in the regiment’s election of a major, Stokes charged one of the candidates, Capt. Eli G. Fleming of Company F, with being absent without leave when the officer visited his family in Warren County. Convinced that he lost the election because of the colonel, the enraged young captain shot Stokes in the leg during a heated exchange. Fleming was summarily arrested, court-martialed, and given the death penalty. Because of Fleming’s sterling record as a scout and officer, however, Rosecrans, who considered him a “daring, active, and efficient officer,” shocked the colonel by reducing the captain’s sentence to a court-martial. Later the Warren County soldier resumed his former activities as guide and scout for other regiments in the army.4 In early March Colonel Stokes faced a court-martial trial himself at Nashville on charges made by Newberry and other young officers of the 5th Tennessee . Although Rosecrans agreed with them that Stokes had “a spirit of harshness and tyranny, not at all conducive to discipline,” he was acquitted. Actually the colonel was lenient with enlisted men, being “in the habit,” for example, “of giving the boys leave to go home & make arrangements for their families.” On March 12 the Nashville City Council, as a sign of support, presented Stokes Out...