The State of Jones (4 page)

Some Northern soldiers were repulsed by contrabands, and many had, at best, mixed feelings about them. But they were unanimous in appreciation of the fact that they relieved white men of the hardest labor. Contrabands did the most punishing work on the fortifications; they worked as diggers, drivers, haulers and did the cooking
scrubbing, and laundering. An Illinois infantryman wrote from Corinth, “Every regt has nigger teamsters and cooks which puts that many more men back in the ranks … It will make a difference in the regt of not less than 75 men that will carry guns that did not before we got niggers.”

Contrabands exposed northern soldiers to slavery firsthand and frequently caused men to revise their views of it. Some slaves came to Corinth bearing livid marks and scars inflicted by owners. But external wounds only signified one kind of physical punishment. Joseph Nelson of the 81st Ohio Infantry wrote about a revelation he received on a visit to an area plantation: “We learned of one of the beauties of slavery of which we had not previously thought. A resident here owned a large strong muscular Negro whom he stood as men do a stallion, $100 to insure a live youngster to kick, yell, and suck. Slave women were brought to him and bred, that they might reproduce their kind.”

Abolitionists and non-abolitionists alike among the soldiers were appalled by the condition many of the contrabands subsisted in. Yet their treatment by Union troops was often hardly better than that they received from Confederates, and sometimes worse. One Union soldier wrote in his diary wondering whether they were any better off. “They are quartered together in barracks, are filthy and diseased, the small pox are raging among them. If these Negroes cannot be treated better than they are, we ought to leave them with their masters, who can certainly take better care of them.”

A close-up view of slavery, combined with the heat, stale camp food, incessant work, and tension of combat, cured Northern soldiers of any romance they may have had with antebellum Mississippi and its beguilingly beautiful plantation homes. One Iowa infantryman who went into the countryside outside of Corinth came to a large manor house, where a mistress supervised two Negroes as they killed hogs. The mistress complained that the flight of slaves had forced her own daughter into the kitchen. The girl “had never washed the dishes until the Yankees had come into the country,” she bitterly informed the Northern soldiers.

By the end of September, the occupying Yankee troops had developed a sincere hostility toward their Mississippi hosts. When a Yankee transport on the Mississippi River came under sniper fire from the banks, infuriated troops leaped onto shore and burnt every single thing in sight. “All, all committed to the flames,” a Union captain reported. He added, “They have met a just retribution.”

As Van Dorn advanced on Corinth, he was convinced that the Yankees would not match the fierceness of the Southerners fighting for their home soil. But the Northern invaders were clearly in an ill temper, too.

October 3, 1862, 10:00 a.m., Corinth

Sharp musketry and the
humps
of cannon erupted as the 7th Mississippi Battalion surged through the woods in massed columns and began a slow but steady progress across a field toward the Union works. There was enough of a breeze to blow the dust and gun smoke away, so that the federals could clearly see the rebels approach; their lines were so long, it seemed they might overlap.

Newton and other men experiencing battle for the first time were stunned to realize they could actually
hear
the Minié balls flying around them. The thumb-shaped lead bullets weighed an ounce or more, and their buzzing whine gave the illusion that they could be dodged. But that was “as impossible as dodging chain lightning,” remarked an Iowa infantryman named Lewis F. Phillips, “for the savage little ‘zip’ noise they made in passing could not be made ’til they were opposite the ear and gone.” Still, some couldn’t resist ducking. When a man put his hand to his ear, you knew one had just missed.

Those who were hit likened the feeling to being struck by a club, followed by scalding water. A Minié ball almost invariably shattered a bone and at best left a large, ugly perforation in the flesh, large enough to pass a handkerchief through. Which some surgeons did, to clean the wound.

The first shell and grapeshot tore into the neat Confederate lines and left sudden gaps, as if the hand of God had swiped men away. Musket fire punched into them and dropped them. Cannonballs ploughed through the woods, shearing off tree limbs and making bark fly. To John McKee of the 2nd Iowa, the man who’d eaten grape pie for supper, the rebels “only came on the faster” in the face of the fire, their colonels in front rallying them onward.

As the 7th Mississippi Battalion pushed ahead into the open field, climbing through the abatis, two Yankee batteries on a distant hill, eight guns in all, roared to life and further cut them up. Their brigade commander, General Martin E. Green, brought up some artillery to answer, and the sound of orders rang out: “Caisson limbers forward!” Newton and the other infantrymen dropped down and hid behind logs, hugging the ground close, while for the next forty-five minutes the two sides exchanged cannon fire.

Men were injured almost randomly in the artillery duel. Hugh Carlisle of the 81st Ohio lay facedown in the dirt next to a boy named John, who lifted his head and wiped a drop of blood away from the end of his nose.

“John, are you hurt?” Carlisle asked.

“No, I scratched my face when we laid down.”

A lieutenant said, “John you’re hurt, you better go to the rear.”

“No, I’m not hurt. I can stay as long as the rest of you.”

He pushed back his cap, and more blood trickled down his head. He drew a hand across his brow, and a handful of brains came away in his hand.

“I believe I’m hurt after all,” he said. He went to the rear.

Shelling did freakish things. An Ohioan lucked out when a shell struck the visor of his cap, knocking him into a daze and turning half his face black, but leaving him otherwise unhurt. Two Iowa companies were lying under a tree when a cannonball blasted into it and sailed clear through the center of the trunk, showering them with splinters but sparing their lives.

As Newton and the men of the 7th Mississippi Battalion hugged
the ground under the artillery fire, the outfit’s lieutenant colonel, James Terral, organized a charge against the Union batteries that had them pinned. He collected a group of men from Jones and surrounding counties and led them in a rush toward the gun barrels. The men scrambled over obstacles of every kind—fencing, heavy timber, and thick brush—under fire.

As the rebels came on, the Yankees cut the fuses down progressively, until shells exploded just three-fourths of a second after leaving the mouth of the cannon. Still Terral urged the Mississippians on. The officer, on horseback, surged twenty yards ahead of his men—straight into a blast of fire. A ruddy-cheeked, sleepy-lidded boy from Jasper County named William Denson Evans watched as Terral was rag-dolled by bullets and fell from his horse.

Evans reached Terral and lifted him up. “Knock them off of their guns, boys, for I cain’t do any more,” Terral said.

Evans helped carry Terral to the rear. “He was shot all to peaces,” Evans wrote. “Boath leges were broke boath arms was broke and 4 or five bullits were shot in his boddy.”

Evans himself lost his left eye and was wounded in the arm, but “we done what he told us to do and spiked the big guns.”

The Yankees would fight, fall back, regroup, and reinforce. The 7th Mississippi Battalion advanced only a few yards at a time. “We would fight them in one position until flanked then take another, only to repeat the operation,” recorded Hugh Carlisle of the 81st Ohio. After hours of continuous fighting, all that lay between the rebels and Corinth was a last semicircle of earthen batteries. But by then the Yankees were “trebled by reinforcements,” observed the rebel commanders, and not only did they have fresh men, they had food and water. The rebels, though they were within six hundred yards of the town, had gone several hours without anything to eat or drink and were utterly played out.

As sundown came, their firing diminished, then ceased altogether. Van Dorn watched the light fade with regret: “One hour more of daylight and victory would have soothed our grief for the loss of the gallant dead who sleep on that lost but not dishonored field,” he
insisted. But he also had to admit that the ten-mile march, lack of water, difficulty of getting into the battle through forests of undergrowth, and the resistance of the enemy had been more than his men could overcome in a single day.

The men of the 7th Battalion had fought for eight hours in ninety-to one-hundred-degree heat, with scarcely a drop of liquid. The hands of their brigade commander, General Martin E. Green, were black with gunpowder. Soldiers sank down on one knee, supporting themselves on their rifle butts. As the sun set, a chill set in, and men who had been soaked in their own sweat all day were suddenly cold.

For the first time, Newton and the other orderlies could ferry the wounded to the field hospital without being shelled. The orderlies stanched blood and applied emergency bandages from out of knapsacks, and helped load men into the ambulance, a covered, horse-drawn, four-wheeled wagon with a hinged rear gate that could be lowered for the most severely injured.

Newton sorted through the bodies, listening for moans and looking for writhing movement. The swampy battlefield attracted the attention of hogs, scavenging for food. Newton had heard numerous reports of hogs eating the guts out of men. He knew what was happening when a hog lifted its head from a body and revealed a crimson muzzle. If the man’s eyes were filled with blood, then peace would come soon. Once a hog made a meal out of a man, there was little Newton or anyone else could do to keep him alive.

The survivors were lifted onto the rickety wagon and carried back to the field hospital. Newton assisted Dr. John M. Baylis, another wealthy officer from back home who was the battalion surgeon, as he worked frantically, examining and dressing wounds, digging out Minié balls with forceps, stitching up flesh with silk thread, and amputating countless limbs. There was no such thing as antiseptic, and it never occurred to anyone to wash his hands or scrub under his nails. Surgeons ran their dirty index fingers and bloody implements in and out of wounds, which almost invariably suppurated.

The key to a successful amputation hinged on doing it quickly
to prevent shock and excessive bleeding. But inexperienced battle surgeons like Baylis, not knowing this, often prolonged the process and sometimes stopped sawing to gaze at the twitching nerves and muscles. The soldiers were remarkable in their restraint. To scream was considered cowardly and dishonorable. Those who sobbed were usually delirious in their pleas for help. The severed arms and legs were stacked against the side of the barn like firewood. The limbs signified the pain and suffering of a war that Newton had opposed from the outset, and they must have made the pretty, abstract words of the Van Dorns and Maurys sound not only hollow, but obscene.

Conditions were just as horrifying for the Union wounded at the Tishomingo Hotel, where nurses in aprons seemed to Hugh Carlisle of the 81st Ohio to be “colored in blood from their necks to their hems.” Carlisle was fortunate; a Minié ball had struck his bayonet before ricocheting into his thigh. His bayonet was bent into a circle, but his thighbone was undamaged. A surgeon fingered the wound, stuffed some cloth into it, and poured cold water on it. It was all the treatment he got—three days later, he would pull the dressing out himself.

After the battle, Carlisle lay on the floor of the hotel near the amputating table and watched the surgeons operate through the night.

“They would cut off an arm or leg, take it by the thumb or toe, and pitch it over the porch into the street,” he wrote.

October 4, 1862, 4:00 a.m., Corinth

In the Confederate fields
, men hardly slept. While the surgeons worked and the wounded groaned, Van Dorn and his generals plotted their movements for the following day. The rebels listened to the faint noises coming from the Union fortifications just a few hundred yards away—muffled voices, the creaking of wheels, hammering, the clanking of gear—and wondered what they meant.

The ever-confident Buck Van Dorn was sure that the noise meant the Yankees were evacuating. But his officers weren’t convinced. The
man in charge of the brigade to which the 7th Battalion belonged, General Green, had a more sensible impression. “What made me doubt they were evacuating was the chopping of timber,” Green said. “There was a difference of opinion among the officers with whom I discussed the matter. I also doubted they were evacuating because I heard the cars coming in twice and a shout on their arrival.” In fact, the Yankees were digging deeper rifle pits, piling more obstacles in front of the batteries, and shifting men as reinforcements arrived via train.

Van Dorn, however, was certain he could take the town with a swift early-morning assault before it was fully reinforced. He ordered a coordinated wave of attack on the city’s irregularly shaped horseshoe of inner batteries. The main thrust would be a sweeping roundhouse charge from the right, led by Newton’s divisional commander, General Louis Hébert, who was to launch the 1st Division at daylight in force, including the 7th Mississippi Battalion. The left would be led by Dabney Maury, whose troops would make a shorter, more straightforward thrust toward the town as soon as he heard rolling fire from Hébert’s men. As a prelude, there would be an intense predawn artillery bombardment.

At 4:00 a.m., under a waning moon, the rebels opened up their guns. Fire blossomed from the cannon muzzles, and for a few moments, paralyzed with awe, men followed the courses of the cannonballs by their flaring, hissing fuses. Blasts of color irradiated the black sky with an eerie beauty. “A more pleasant sight one cannot imagine,” wrote a Missouri volunteer named Nehemiah Davis Starr. “We could see the flash of their cannon … then hear the report and trace the coming shell by their light over the tops of the trees until they exploded.” To a Union brigadier, “The different calibers, metals, shapes, and distances of the guns caused the sounds to resemble the chimes of old Rome when all her bells rang out.”