One Drop in a Sea of Blue: The Liberators of the Ninth Minnesota

Chapter Fifteen: With Smith's Guerrillas

Revenge In the summer and fall of , the Ninth Minnesota, though sadly reduced, continued to do its part to win the War of the Rebellion. At Memphis in late June, while most of its prisoners were being introduced to the culture of Andersonville, the regiment itself gladly found a home in Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson Smith’s “Right Wing of the Sixteenth Army Corps, Army of the Tennessee.” The crusty forty-nine-year-old regular, veteran of the Vicksburg Campaign, the Meridian Raid, and the ill-fated Red River expedition, was perhaps the finest Union combat leader in the western theater. His longranging , hard-fighting westerners proudly bore the moniker “Smith’s Guerrillas ,” earned on the Red River when snooty eastern troops derided them as “gorillas, coarse, uncouth, ill-dressed braggarts and chicken thieves.” The Ninth Minnesota joined the First Division’s Second Brigade, which Colonel Wilkin now commanded. It was known as the “Eagle” Brigade because of “Old Abe,” the Eighth Wisconsin’s famed bald eagle mascot. Brigadier General Joseph A. (“Fighting Joe”) Mower, in charge of the First Division, gallantly led the brigade in numerous battles from  to early . The Second Brigade also included the Forty-Seventh Illinois, Fifth Minnesota (temporarily a small detachment until its veterans returned from furlough), Eleventh Missouri, and Second Iowa Light Battery. The Seventh Minnesota and Tenth Minnesota joined the other brigades, giving the First Division a Minnesota character unmatched in the entire army.1 On July  Smith headed into Mississippi with fourteen thousand men. The object again was to find Forrest and “whip him if possible” but “at all events to hold him where he was and prevent him from moving upon the  chapter fifteen ‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ With Smith’s Guerrillas communications of Major General Sherman.” Marsh’s Ninth Minnesota went into the field with fifteen officers and three hundred men, including fourteen liberators (Company C: acting First Sergeant Merchant, Felch, Hartley, McCain, Padden, Stewart, and Williams; Company K: Buck, Fenstermacher, Heilmann, Jansen, Mickel, Pike, and Raymond). The expedition camped the first night at Davis’s Mills on Wolf Creek, where Wilkin fought on June , and the next day followed the road linking Salem and Ripley. They soon discovered evidence of the terrible retreat the month before, including the unburied bodies of some of their comrades. A fence post on one farm brazenly displayed a human skull, and a woman there foolhardily taunted passing troops that her pigs had dined on Yankee corpses. “Vengeance was swift and predictable.” On July  Ripley “was nearly all burned down, the negroes [U.S. Colored Troops] marched through the streets with a brand of fire in one hand and a gun in the other.” Some soldiers, including from the Ninth Minnesota , honored the kindness previously afforded their wounded and protected several homes. Nevertheless, the pillaging and destruction of goods such as cotton far exceeded anything done on the prior visit.2 Smith turned southwest. In extremely warm but dusty and very dry conditions , David Felch, a newcomer to Mississippi, sighed that the temperature was “hot enough to roast eggs in the sand.” Many fell out, but Smith carefully collected the stragglers. The Rebels noticed another signal difference from With Smith’s Guerrillas  Andrew Jackson Smith feckless Sam Sturgis when Smith kept his force well in hand and gave Forrest no opening to exploit. By July  Smith reached Pontotoc, twenty-eight miles southwest of Brice’s Crossroads, from where he menaced the Mobile & Ohio Railroad at Okolona, twenty-five miles southeast of Pontotoc. Lieutenant General Stephen Dill Lee, the top Rebel commander, was all set to fight between Pontotoc and Okolona, but Smith surprised him on July  by slipping east through “rough and timbered” terrain toward Tupelo, nineteen miles distant. Grierson’s cavalry pushed ahead, followed by the wagon train closely protected by the infantry. Forrest scrambled his forces to strike the rear of the column and its flank.3 In just one of several sharp actions that afternoon, General Buford caught up with the head of Mower’s division as it passed a crossroads east of Coonewah Creek, about seven miles from Tupelo. He rashly thrust two dismounted regiments through the timber to seize the wagons, saying, “Boys, do not kill the mules, but turn them down this way.” Colonel Barteau’s Second Tennessee Cavalry “furiously assailed” Colonel McMillen’s First Brigade, while to his left Colonel Russell’s Fifteenth Tennessee Cavalry hastened to...