Chapter XXVI: The Last Flickering of the Great Flame

January, 1865, found General Forrest bending every energy to the maintenance and recruiting of his force for whatever further defense might have to be made, and the Union commander at Eastport making careful and extensive preparation for an extended and determined campaign as soon as the weather conditions should be favorable.

It was with great difficulty that we managed to feed ourselves and our horses through those trying months of bleak winter.

In the ranks, where men had never shirked a duty or a danger, the sad story of our lost cause was already forewritten in our suffering hearts; and the hopelessness of our situation became so fixed in the soldiers’ minds that desertions became frequent; and in order to check this and enforce discipline, our commander resorted to stern measures, to the extent that some of the deserters were executed and their bodies conspicuously displayed as a warning.

While crossing the bridge at Tuscaloosa, Ala., I witnessed one of these tragic and morbid spectacles, which made a lasting impression upon my youthful mind and embittered my heart against all wars.

Late in March the Union Army began to move southward from Eastport, and General Forrest’s first interest was to ascertain the enemy’s plans as far as possible.

I was with a scouting troop when we luckily intercepted and captured a Union courier carrying the plan of the Union commander’s line of march. This message was sent to each of the division commanders.

They were ordered to move into South Alabama in three columns, marching parallel to each other, twenty miles apart, and to consolidate at a point north of Selma, Ala.

We speedily sent this information to General Forrest, then in the vicinity of Tuscaloosa, Ala.

General Wilson had 10,000 or 12,000 veteran troops of all arms, while Forrest had about 5,000, and only half of that number were of his veterans; but we had the advantage of being on our native heath, and our leader had never been beaten in a single case when he was in supreme command of all dispositions and details of the battle.

With their plans in hand, he sent General Chalmers to meet the extreme eastern division and General Jackson to take the middle division, while he would personally direct the movement against the western column, nearest Tuscaloosa, in the hope of defeating it and then falling upon the rear of the main column.

But this was not to be. When Forrest was ready for the move, he sent a courier to the Selma garrison and to Roddy’s cavalry, with full information of the whole plan; but the enemy captured the courier, and General Wilson changed his plan, and Forrest never knew why until after the war.

While our forces, ignorant of the change of plan, were separately waiting for the three columns, we ran into Wilson’s cavalry, 8,000 strong, at Bogless Creek, a few miles north of Selma, and we had only about 200 men, mainly the escort.

Forrest, thinking that we had run into a small force, threw us hurriedly into line and charged the advance, and the enemy thought they had struck the main Confederate column. We soon got into a mix-up, and they began to overlap us in every direction. The bulk of our little band was fighting and falling back in an effort to clear a passage, when we discovered that the enemy was making a move to cut General Forrest off from his troops. About ten of us went to his assistance. They had him surrounded, and he was fighting like a lion at bay. He killed several men--no one ever knew how many; and when he came out of the circle, he jumped his horse straight through a cordon of mounted men and escaped without a mark on his person.

We fled the field and fell back to Selma, Ala.

Here the Confederacy had been operating a small manufacturing plant for making arms, and the commander had only enough men to make a thin picket line for the protection of the plant.

When Forrest arrived, he gathered every available man and put them in the trenches for the best possible defense.

Forrest’s plan having failed, he was in ignorance as to where his troops were, and this gave the enemy a very dangerous advantage.

Forrest felt that if the enemy had slipped by his commanders they would follow him up and strike him in the rear when the attack on Selma should begin.

At any rate, it was certain that when the Union Army should reach Selma there would be a fight of some kind, regardless of odds.

The escort took position in the trenches on the extreme left, the weakest point, and Roddy’s troops were placed on our right. Then the home guards and mixed multitude were strung out in a thin line along the remainder of the works, and instructed to hold the trenches at all hazards and never leave until they should receive orders to retire.

Of course Forrest told us that if we could hold the enemy in check for a while, our missing troops would strike him in the rear soon, and that we could capture or destroy the cavalry force; but, unfortunately, Forrest was not on the outside with his troops, and the capture of our messenger had so shifted the situation that the commanders of Forrest’s two columns lost touch, and never knew anything about the battle until it was all over.

On the first approach to our line the enemy seemed to have about 2,000 men, and we held them in check and pushed them back out of range; but on the second charge they came like the locusts of Pharaoh, and that thin line of gray did not tarry for the impact, but went, self-ordered.

Forrest held the escort company until the enemy had swarmed all around us and cut us off from the city by way of the bridge. He then mounted his horse and told us to follow him--that he was going out. It looked like a desperate undertaking, but we had dared Fate so many times and “gotten by” that we believed that our great captain would carry us out again.

Our company was formed into a flying wedge, and began the drive toward the southwest, so as to strike the river at its narrowest point.

We fought like demons, as the majority of us in that company had never surrendered, and we did not now intend to do so.

I had many narrow escapes. My hat was either shot off or carried away by a saber stroke, but I got through without a scratch. When we cleared the cordon that had surrounded us, we plunged our horses into the river and escaped by swimming to the opposite shore.

Here Forrest gathered the few of us that were left, and we made our way out in the direction of Gainesville, Ala. We had lost a number of the escort in the fight--some were killed, some were drowned in the river, and some were wounded and surrendered. Among the captured were my two brothers and a young man who afterwards became my brother-in-law, R. P. Elgin.

After we were safely on the way to Gainesville, I told General Forrest that it seemed to me that the war was over, and that I was going to my father’s house. He and family were then refugeeing in the flat-woods of Pontotoc County. With but few words, the General admitted the gravity of the situation, and told me to go on to my father.

I first stopped at Okolona, Miss., where I was treated with great deference and kindness by the same slave boy who had nursed me when I was wounded.

From Okolona I went to my father and remained until June, 1865.

From Pontotoc County I rode back to Corinth, secured employment, sold my horse for $150 in greenbacks, and started my first savings account, from which I afterwards started a business of my own.

On my return to Corinth, I had found the town garrisoned by a troop of negro soldiers.

The whole prospect was a picture of desolation, as this town and vicinity had been under the very heel of war for four long, weary years; but nature had not forsaken the landscape entirely, for it was carpeted with grass and clover and wild flowers--a beautiful winding sheet for the dead hopes and prospects of the buoyant boys who had marched away from this place under the Southern battle flag.

There were practically no domestic animals to trespass on the fields and meadows; but while the husbandman had forsaken his gardens and vineyards to kill his own kind, the unmolested birds and wild animals native to this clime had restored God’s original paradise and were living in happy groups and families upon the lands which ungrateful man had deserted.

Three years after my return from the war I was married to Miss Juliette Elgin, of Huntsville, Ala., a beautiful and petite young lady of 118 pounds. She is with me yet; and whatever changes time may have wrought upon her appearance to other eyes, with the eyes of memory I behold her still, and the mental and spiritual graces of her youth have only ripened with the years.

To this union were born two daughters, Luella and Lucille, to increase our responsibilities and brighten our home. To train and educate them became the prime purpose of our lives, and in their welfare and happiness we submerged our personal ambitions.

Now that they have homes and family responsibilities of their own, our fireside has lost them; but in their happiness we find our recompense, and this humble record of sacred memories is affectionately dedicated to their sons.

In drawing to a close this record of memories, I trust that I may be pardoned for a brief indulgence of recollections which cannot be of interest to any save my own people and, perchance, my comrades of the sixties.

I was born at Jacinto, in the pine-embowered hills of Tishomingo County, Miss., and a good portion of my war service was happily given to guarding that sacred land which had nourished my joyous childhood.

With the tear-dimmed vision of retrospection, I ever behold that happy spot--its orchards, its meadows, its wild flowers and sparkling waters. Especially do I stand again with expectant thirst at the cold spout spring that gushed from the hill--eternal wonder of nature that sings on to the centuries to mock the fleeting vanity of our short lives. The trees and vines that shadowed my rest or my play or refreshed me with their luscious fruits can never fade. The fragrance of the wild grape’s high-hanging bloom comes to me across the vanished years, and, with it, the flavor of the muscadine wrapped within its leathery skin. And as I dwell upon these fragments of youth’s vanished paradise, I hear again the sad, sweet song of Tishomingo’s pines--the same that sang to the Chickasaw Indians before the white man came.

That county, which was the world of my young and impressionable life, seemed to me to hold all that was necessary to human happiness. Its territory was equal to the State of Rhode Island, and three rivers were born within its borders--the Tombigbee, the Hatchie, and the Tuscumbia. Even to my unsophisticated mind there was something in the grandeur and the freedom of the place that spoke of things beyond the senses of the body. Like all the Indian countries, it had its mysterious landmarks and its sad and beautiful legends of the wars and loves and tragedies of the wild, savage, brave people whose crude road to God was through the “happy hunting ground.”

My boyish imagination deeply colored with the glory and the romance of those vague traditions, I have stood, in the shadow of moonlit nights, and watched the dark heads of the pines nodding to the sky, and thought that, perchance, their whispered song was the echoed sigh of the vanquished red man brooding, in spirit, above the land he had so loved.

Another scene that flutters through my memory like a fantastic dream is the darkening forest of the evening twilight hour, alive with uncounted thousands of wild pigeons, turning the silent woods into a Babel of musical chatter as they gathered to rest in their sylvan lodge.

These all have flown away on the wings of time, as utterly as the great herds of the buffalo have vanished from the plains of the West, and, so far as I know, not a single bird of this species is left in our country.

For some strange reason the God of nature has permitted spoiled man to waste the myriad wonders of the virgin woods, until only the rivers, the springs, and the eternal sky are left of the glory that was.

In melancholy recollection of all the people and all the things beloved that are gone from that small, though great, green country of my early life, I salute thee, O Tishomingo of sacred memories!

This reverie may be meaningless to the majority of my readers; but if this, my heart’s humble tribute to the remembered beauty of my native land shall meet the eye of a single companion of those blissful days and enchanting scenes, _he_ will understand and the others will forgive.