Chapter XXIII: Sulphur Trestle, Ala

The capture of the Union Army at Athens, Ala., was indeed the fulfillment of a great necessity with us. We took over a large supply of provisions and camp equipment, twenty carloads of clothing, a number of horses, several cannon, and about 4,000 small arms, with a quantity of ammunition for same.

On the day following the fall of Athens we moved against Sulphur Trestle, in Alabama. At this place the railroad had spanned a small stream with a high, covered bridge, which was of such consequence to the Union Army that a strong fort and garrison were maintained here, guarded with mounted cannon. When General Forrest examined the structure, he was satisfied that we would have to fight for it. The commander promptly refused to comply with our demand for a surrender.

There were good positions for our batteries, but the gunners would be dangerously exposed to the fire of the sharpshooters of the fort, and the only way to protect them was to march an attacking force across an open field to a point within range of the fort, so that we could direct a continuous fire against their loopholes.

The crossing of that field and the bloody results made an impression upon me that time cannot efface. In all the fights I had engaged in up to that time I had never had an uncomfortable foreboding of danger, but in that strangely charged hour I had a presentiment that I would not get through; and as we rode toward the place where we were to dismount for the charge, I confided my feeling to my companion and asked him if he would be willing to exchange places with me in case it should fall to his lot instead of mine to hold horses. (It was the plan of our commander that every fourth man in the line should hold horses in the rear, while the others were charging as infantry.) He promised; but when the show-down came, he flickered; and I went forward as usual, for I had never acted as a horse holder. The enemy’s artillery was firing at us incessantly; and as we turned the top of a slight ridge, Colonel Kelly’s horse was killed and fell just a few feet behind my position. As we cleared the hill and came into full view of the fort, we were met with a veritable hail of lead and iron. We were charging in a run, but men were falling at every step. We moved close up and lay down, and kept up a continuous fire until our batteries reduced the fort and caused it to surrender.

Just as we reached the stopping point I was in the act of firing, when a ball struck my left hand between the first and second knuckles. It passed entirely through my hand and struck the trigger guard, knocking the gun violently against my head, and I thought for the moment that I had been struck by a cannon ball. I was practically unconscious for a few moments; and when my senses returned, I was lying on the ground, very sick, my head roaring like a freight train, and the wound in my hand bleeding profusely. Our battle line was flattened out on the ground within fifty yards of the fort. Quite a number in my immediate location had been wounded, and one poor fellow within a few feet of me was moaning pitifully, when a bullet struck him in the center of the forehead and killed him instantly. When I saw this, I told the boys that as I could not fight I was going out of the danger zone. They thought the risk of making the run in full view would be greater than to remain in the line; but I did not like the idea of lying there helpless in a veritable slaughter pen, so I took the chance, and evidently outran the bullets, as I got back through that awful open field without being hit. Just as I thought I was out of danger, I heard a shell coming, as it seemed, on a bee line for me. To dodge it I flattened myself on the ground; and as I looked up, I saw that the shell was fully a hundred feet above the ground. It exploded about a half mile from where I lay. I think that was the last shot from the fort, as it was surrendered in a few minutes. I chanced to meet Col. D. C. Kelly, our commander, and he gave me a drink of water and bandaged my wound with a napkin.

I then went to the field hospital, where the surgeon dressed my wound and gave me something to quiet my nerves. When night came, I slept; and in the morning that followed I learned that a number of my comrades had gone away on the long and silent march beyond the gates of eternity.

After being wounded, I was sent south with other disabled soldiers. We had also about 5,000 prisoners captured at Athens and Sulphur Trestle. I rode my own horse to Cherokee, Ala., where the wounded were separated from the prisoners and guards.

At Cherokee we were given a temporary train of cars, in which the wounded were transported to Okolona, Miss.

On this trip, by the merest chance, I met a former slave of my father acting as porter on our train. He was a practical barber and a general handy man. His interest in me was intensified when he saw my condition, and he took the tenderest care of me until I was able to leave.

After the war was over and this former slave and I were both citizens of Corinth again, with earnings of my own I bought him a good barber’s outfit and set him up in business.

It is a regrettable fact that the world, with its garbled histories and its false legends of violence, will never understand the true relation between the master and the slave of the old South.

That there were many individual cases of brutality, there can be no doubt, and that slavery as an institution of human government is wrong, no right-thinking man can deny; but in all the records of mankind there is nothing that parallels the conditions and practices which governed that slavery, now forever banished from the industries of our beloved country and expunged from its Constitution.

The gentleness and sympathy of the masters of Dixie and the faithfulness and loyalty of the black slaves should be jealously written into an impartial history of that South that was, but is no more. They are the incontrovertible evidences of the greatness of our people who inherited the dark burden of human bondage from another age and who were innocent heirs to the sunny lands of cotton and cane, on which alone, of all our wide country, this shackled, tropical race could labor with profit to their owners.

During those awful years when every Southern home was the probable stage of a tragedy it was not uncommon to see only the mistress of a plantation left with her children in the care of her slaves, who stood by her and respected and protected her through every danger.

After the army left Sulphur Trestle, General Forrest gave his attention to the destruction of forts and blockhouses up and down the Memphis and Charleston and the Louisville and Nashville Railroads. While thus engaged, we threatened Pulaski, Tenn., sufficiently to hold a large Union force there behind breastworks, so that they did not attempt to interfere with our raids.

To hold the Union garrison at Huntsville, Ala., on the Memphis and Charleston, within its works, we threatened it with the division of General Buford.

The one unfortunate feature of our continued successes was that we could not save and put to use the vast amount of stores captured on these raids, in view of the sore need of them among all the armies of the Confederacy.

Our mission was to hit as the lightning strikes--to wreck and terrify and then disappear.

Our enemy had no cavalry force in this theater of the war that could cope with us, and his slow-moving infantry and artillery found us a moving target, too swift and restless for their sluggish aim.