America’s Civil War: Colonel Benjamin Grierson’s Cavalry Raid in 1863

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Grierson summoned Colonel Prince, Lieutenant Colonels Blackburn and Reuben Loomis, and Adjutant Samuel Woodward to a council of war. Surby estimated Confederate forces in the vicinity at 400 cavalry, supported by a battery of artillery. Even as they conferred, Adams was passing around the Union flank to join with Captain S.B. Cleveland’s 100-man cavalry force west of Union Church. The trap was closing, but Grierson and his officers had a daring response in mind.

At 6:00 a.m. the Yankee troopers boldly rode into the teeth of the Rebel ambush. Then, a short distance outside Union Church, the main column veered sharply from its westward course toward the Mississippi River and headed southeast toward Brookhaven, leaving behind a small company to occupy the Rebels on the westward road. After waiting several hours, Adams realized his trap was sprung. The frustrated colonel informed Pemberton he was marching from Fayette with five additional companies to intercept the enemy’s southward movement.

While Adams stewed in his embarrassment, the Federal raiders followed a confused maze of back roads through piny woods. Considerable dodging was done the first three or four hours’ march of this day, Surby recalled. I do not think we missed traveling toward any point of the compass. In the western distance, the Yankee soldiers could hear the leaden reverberations of Union Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter’s gunboats bombarding Grand Gulf. With Adams’s cavalry squarely between him and the river, however, Grierson could not join Porter.

Instead the raiders pushed south and thundered down the dusty streets of Brookhaven, startling dazed residents. While the 7th rounded up prisoners, Loomis’s 6th charged a conscript camp concealed in a grove of live oak a mile and a half south of town and found it vacant. The previous day, Pemberton had ordered Major M.R. Clark to evacuate the camp.

As the 6th destroyed abandoned arms, ammunition, and stores, Captain John Lynch’s two companies tore up track and trestlework. Loomis’s troopers returned to Brookhaven just as flames enveloped the depot, a railroad bridge, and a dozen freight cars. An officer and 20 men armed with buckets prevented fires from spreading to civilian property.

Some of the hardest work of the day fell to Lieutenants Samuel L. Woodward and George A. Root, the young adjutants of the 6th and 7th Illinois regiments. Civilian morale, never high in some of Mississippi’s southern counties, bordered on open disloyalty. After paroling over 200 officers, soldiers, and able-bodied citizens, Woodward was astonished to see a flood of military-age men lining up to receive paroles: slips of paper that would exempt them from military service until exchanged. Many who had escaped [conscription] and were hiding out were brought in by their friends to obtain one of the valuable documents, Woodward recalled.

The Yankee raiders had covered almost 40 miles since dawn and were happy to bed down outside town that night. The next morning, still uncertain about events along the river, Grierson decided to continue tearing up track along the New Orleans, Jackson & Great Northern. An easy two-mile ride brought him to Bogue Chitto, a forlorn cluster of perhaps a dozen buildings straddling the railroad. In short order, his raiders destroyed the depot and freight cars, ripped out rails and trestlework, demolished a bridge across Bogue Chitto Creek, and returned to the saddle to head south.

From Bogue Chitto, Grierson pushed on toward Summit, some 20 miles south. To the raiders’ surprise, that small community welcomed them with open arms. Surby judged Grierson’s popularity at least equal to Pemberton’s, and the colonel himself recalled a local woman who promised that if the north should win and I should ever run for president, that her husband should vote for me or she would certainly endeavor to get a divorce from him.

The blue-coated soldiers lingered most of the afternoon among these congenial civilians. After the townspeople had helped themselves to government supplies, the troopers rolled 25 freight cars a safe distance out of town and put them to the torch. Noticing the depot’s proximity to private residences, Grierson ordered the building spared. As at Brookhaven, the regimental adjutants handed out paroles to prisoners captured during the day and to civilians eligible for conscription into Confederate service.

Tags: 19th Century, American Civil War, Civil War Times, Historical Conflicts

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