Recollections of a Virginian in the Mexican, Indian, and Civil Wars/18

General Forrest continually grew in capacity, and of all his great illustrations of his power in war he was never greater than when he covered the retreat of Hood's army, after Schofield had so terribly repulsed it at Franklin, and, with Thomas, had routed it at Nashville a few days later, and now hung upon its rear and pressed it to the very brink of the Tennessee River. Hood, in his sore calamity, gave charge of his rear guard to Forrest and General Walthall. Forrest had about two thousand horse, and Walthall, in command of the infantry, was allowed to select eight brigades, numbering only two hundred rifles each! Walthall told them of the severe work before them, and personally inspected each brigade, calling upon any man who desired to fall out to do so. Not a man of those sixteen hundred Confederate veterans responded. They were all volunteers for that desperate service. Forrest was in chief command, and would have chosen Walthall from all that army for his second.

Forrest will always stand as the great exponent of the power of the mounted riflemen to fight with the revolver when mounted, and with the rifle on foot. His troops were not dragoons "who fought indifferently on foot or horseback," nor were they cavalry who fought only mounted and with sabres. Few of his command ever bore sabres, save some of his officers, who wore them as a badge of rank. None of Forrest's men could use the sabre. He himself had no knowledge of its use, but he would encounter half a dozen expert sabreurs with his revolver.

In the great battle of Chickamauga, Forrest's division fought upon the right of Bragg's line. They were all dismounted, and did not see their horses for three days. After the retreat of Rosecrans, Forrest pursued up to within cannon shot of Chattanooga. He sent repeated messages to Bragg, urging him to press on the flying and disordered army of Rosecrans, and occupy Chattanooga. Had this been done, there would have been no foundation for the claim that Chickamauga was a great Federal victory. It was the hardest stand-up fight ever made by the Confederate and Federal armies of the West. For two days the battle raged. At the close of the second day, the Federal army was driven from the field in rout. Thomas alone held his division in hand; the rest in confusion ran towards Chattanooga. Bragg's whole force numbered forty six thousand men. When the battle ended, eighteen thousand of them lay killed and wounded. No army of modern war in the Old World or the New ever suffered such a loss and won the field. The enemy's losses were very great, including five thousand prisoners. His own reports show that he began and fought the battle with forces superior to Bragg's. The reason given by the latter for not following up a victory so signal was, in Forrest's opinion, not justified by the facts of the condition of the two armies when the battle ended by the retreat from the field of the Federal army. And no one was more competent to judge of the condition of the two more armies at that time than Forrest. That was a great opportunity lost by Bragg, a great victory unimproved, has been generally admitted. That it was a defeat of the Confederate forces or a great Federal victory, history can never record.

On the 13th of May, 1865, Forrest's command was paroled. His farewell address to his men was full of common sense, and he himself set an example of the entire acquiescence in the new order of things. Many of his negro slaves were employed as teamsters, etc., for his own command. The Federal authorities did not interfere with his plans, and he took these, now free, with teams sufficient, and moved at once to his plantations in Mississippi, where he went steadily to work. The negroes were fond of him, and worked for him as for nobody else. Some time after the war a turbulent negro came to his house threatening him. Forrest killed him before he could execute his purpose. I heard of no more trouble upon his plantation.

I was in Mobile when Admiral Semmes was arrested, and happened to return to my home in New Orleans upon the steamer with him. As I stepped upon the gangplank, Semmes, in charge of an officer and guard-of-marines, had just passed on board. He said to me, in a loud voice: "You see, General, they have me in arrest. They are going to now disregard the paroles of all of us." The marine officer in charge was a considerate and gentlemanly man, and said to him: "Admiral, this is a most unpleasant duty for me to have to perform. I wish to discharge it with as little annoyance to you as possible, and hope you will feel free to converse and move about the boat at your pleasure.  You shall be subject to no more unnecessary surveillance." So the admiral and I occupied a sofa in the saloon, where we sat conversing till a late hour. He wore his characteristic manner of brave composure, while he felt the gravity of his condition. His only apprehension seemed to be of mob violence in New York, when his presence there should be known. He was taken next day to the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans, where he was detained for several days. His friends were allowed free interviews with him. General Dick Taylor, Senator Semmes, Duncan Kenner, and other eminent friends were in earnest conversation with him; for the occasion seemed very grave, not only for Semmes, but for all others who had been prominent on the Southern side in the war between the States. He agreed with me in believing that Forrest would be the next Confederate arrested. The Federal organs already were indicating him as the most proper object of Federal vengeance.

So next day I went to Memphis and sought Forrest at once, to tell him about all this and urge him to leave the country. He was down at his plantation at work. I could not see him, and sought Colonel Sam Tate, his partner and chief friend (he was president of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad), who showed a deep interest in my story, and said: "Do you sit down at my desk and write to Forrest what you have told me. I will prepare letters of credit for him. He must not delay his escape. By the time your letter is ready, I'll have a trusty messenger to bear it."

Accordingly a fine young fellow, a captain of Forrest's corps, presented himself and took charge of our dispatches. I left Memphis before I could learn the result, and did not know of Forrest's action for some weeks. His reply to our letters was: "This is my country. I am hard at work upon my plantation, and carefully observing the obligations of my parole.  If the Federal government does not regard it, they'll be sorry. I shan't go away." Some weeks after, having occasion to visit Memphis, he called upon the Federal commander and spoke to this effect: "General, I have called to know what you are going to do about my case. I understand you have arrested Semmes, and are probably going to arrest me." He then repeated the reply he had made to Tate and me. The general assured him there was no problem to trouble him. Tate and other acquaintances of President Johnson's had no doubt procured from him assurances that Forrest would not be disturbed. He continued for several years to work with his accustomed energy. Finally, in undertaking to make a railroad from Memphis to Selma, he failed.

My last interview with him was in his office in Memphis. He looked much aged and broken, and said to me sadly: "General Maury, I am completely broke up." I am broke in fortune, broke in health, and broke in spirit." But when, a day or two after, some of the men who had "broke" him called to see him and didn't talk to suit him, he spun round upon his revolving seat and gave them a piece of his mind worthy of his most unbroken days.

General John T. Morgan, the able senator from Alabama, was his close friend, and undertook his claim against the railroad company. Being in Nashville, Forrest wrote to him to come and see him at the Maxwell House, where he was ill in bed. I shall give Morgan's account of that last and most touching interview with the greatest soldier of this generation. Morgan had put Forrests' case in such shape that it was only necessary to have his signature to certain papers to insure the payment of the large sum involved in the suit. He found Forrest in bed, ill and much broken. He said: "I am a dying man. For more than a year I have been a converted man.  I have joined the Presbyterian Church.  It was the church of my dear old mother.  She was the best woman I ever knew.  I hope it has made a better man of me.  I have led a life of strife and violence.  I now want to die at peace with all men.  My son is a fine young fellow; he will do well.  I do not want to hamper him at the outset of his young life with litigation.  I have sent for you to tell you to drop all further proceedings in that case.  I will not sign the papers."

This is the last record we have of this great soldier. He was born a soldier, as men are born poets, and his whole warfare was Napoleonic. It has been sometimes said that if he had been educated as a soldier, he would have been the greatest general the war produced, as he fought more battles than any commander of his day, always attacked the enemy upon his vulnerable point, and was never attacked. He always defeated, routed, or captured his enemy, and he continually grew in power to the last, and was ever greater than his opportunities. I do not believe that four year's confinement under military surveillance at West Point would have made him a greater soldier than he was.

Another man whom I knew well was General Dick Taylor. About 1856, we traveled together with our families. Taylor had become a very successful sugar planter, had married a lovely Creole lady, Miss Bringier, of a distinguished Louisiana family. I had married Miss Mason of Virginia, and we were all travelling together on the Mississippi on the steamer Empress. We were about a week upon our journey, and a more pleasant one I cannot recall. He was the life of the company. After this he took an active part in the politics of the South. He was never an aspirant for office, but was a power in his personal character. In the Charleston Convention, Taylor was very able and influential, and on the outbreak of war he went at once to the field in command of a Louisiana regiment. His very interesting and trenchant book, " Destruction and Reconstruction, " published only a few days before his death, is one of the most interesting and brilliant of all the works about the war, and leaves but little to be said to the ability and wit of the author.

During my association with him during the war and after it, I had many opportunities of enjoying his charming conversation and pungent wit. Once a very bright and gay lady asked him if he thought a certain very steady general was a proper commander of an important post on the eve of an attack. Taylor replied: "He is the very best I could entrust that command to. What can you urge against him? "  "Oh, he is so attentive to his wife, I don't see how he can conduct his official business properly." "Madam," said Taylor, "I can well understand how a man can be attentive to his own wife and his business at the same time, but I'll be d---d if a man can be attentive to another man's wife and mind his own business." This struck home, for she was one of the other men's wives, as Taylor well knew.

After the little army of Mobile reached Meridian, it aggregated about forty five hundred veteran infantry and twenty field pieces. I organized it at once into a division of three brigades, and prepared to march eastward and join Johnston, then in North Carolina, opposing Sherman. But soon tidings of his capitulation and then of the capture of Mr. Davis, and General Dick Taylor proceeded to make the best terms possible with General Canby. They were very liberal and kindly on Canby's part, who gave free transportation over the railroads to the Confederates of all of our armies who were making their weary way back to their unhappy people. A prominent official of one of those railroads received permission from Taylor to pass into Mobile on the business of his company. That city was then occupied by Canby's big victorious army, and, feeling himself no longer in danger og Taylor, the rascal telegraphed to his agent at Meridian to "give no more of those passes to Confederate prisoners of war." On hearing this, Taylor telegraphed Canby, "Please send that railroad official up here under guard to me." What was the horror of the man when a corporal and file of soldiers took him from his home and bore him up to Taylor, into whose presence he came with well grounded fear, for report said the general had shot men for less crimes than that. Taylor administered in his his fluent style such a tongue lashing as only he could utter, and concluded by saying: "You have often heard how an honest man feels when he falls among rogues. Hereafter you will be able to tell how how a rogue feels when he falls among honest men; for General Canby and I will teach you a lesson that will last you the rest of your miserable life! If I were to serve you right, sir, I would turn you over to those soldiers whom you have attempted to wrong, and they would hang you as high as Haman upon one of those tall pines.  Go, and at once countermand your orders! "

After the war Taylor went to Washington to see President Johnson regarding his policy towards the Southern people, and especially toward the Confederate President, who was his brother-in-law, and to whom he was tenderly attached. He gives in his "Destruction and Reconstruction" a characteristic account of his interviews with Thaddeus Stevens and other extreme Republicans then prominent in Washington.

About 1873, Taylor went to England, where for some time he was a guest of the Prince of Wales at Sandringham, and was received with proper courtesies in the circle of the prince's friends. He never forgot that he was the son of a President of the United States, and a general of the Southern Confederacy, and he was so esteemed. He went with the prince to the Fishmongers' Annual Banquet. When some of the company aspersed Virginia for her failure to meet her obligations under the bonds held by the English, Taylor, a Virginian by descent and affection, in his terse and manful way defended her so well that he was invited to meet the holders of ten millions of Virginia's bonds in conference. They made a very liberal proposition in view of the revelation of Virginia's poverty, and authorized Taylor to bear their offer to the government of the State. This he did, but it was received with a coldness that argued no intention on the part of the Legislature of Virginia to pay what they had borrowed from the British bankers.

About 1870, my uncle, Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury, feeling his three score and ten drawing near, made a tour of visits to his kindred in the South. He came to see me in New Orleans, and as soon as it was known that he was there, many attentions were shown him. There was then living in New Orleans a very wealthy and kindly Southern gentleman, who had conceived the hopeless idea of reconciling the opponents in the war about his dinner table, and whenever he gave a dinner he would invite as many Confederate gentlemen as Federal. He called to see Commodore Maury, and asked him to meet some friends at his house for dinner. At that time, party spirit ran very high in New Orleans. The vials of wrath of the dominant Federal party were poured upon the unhappy people. A man named Flanders had been elected, by bayonet rule and a rascally ring, mayor of the city, and Judge Durell was the Jeffreys of the Federal courts. When we sat down to the table, we found Durrell on one side of our host, next to him Commodore Maury, then came General John B. Gordon, and then the writer. Upon the other side of the table were Mayor Flanders, Judge Wood, Dick Taylor, and William Hunt. But for Taylor, it would have been a sad and solemn feast; but from the first he amused the company, otherwise silent and constrained, by his witty chaffing of "his friend, Mayor Flanders." Presently Flanders said to Commodore Maury, "Commodore, to what extent, in your opinion, do the developments of modern science corroborate the revelations of Divine Writ? " The commodore was an experienced diner-out and a master of the power of language and of thought, and went on in his peculiar and eloquent way to expound the extent of the corroboration, until he felt that he had occupied the attention of the dinner table long enough upon such a subject. Taylor saw it, and I observed his dark eyes sparkling, as he broke in, "And Commodore, if you will excuse me for interrupting, you remember how Job cried out in his agony, 'Oh, that I had mine enemy by a ring' ?  Well, none of us ever knew what Job meant, until the developments of modern political science have taught us the power of a ring.  Everybody now understands that my friend the mayor here holds this great city by a ring." This relieved the commodore and the company, and old Flanders, throwing back his head and opening wide his great mouth, laughed with the rest. As we gathered about the buffet for a chasse of brandy, the commodore said, "Taylor, when did you and the mayor become such friends?" "I never saw him until tonight," was the reply. It was hard upon our good old host, but it may have been a lesson to him on "reconstruction dinners," as his were wont to be called.

Knowing my opinion of West Point, Taylor, one evening in New Orleans, delivered himself of his views on the education of officers for the United States Army as follows: "Take a boy of sixteen from his mother's apron strings, shut him up under constant surveillance for four years at West Point, send him out to a two company post upon the frontier where he does little but play games of seven-up and drink whiskey at the sutler's and by the time he is forty five years old he will furnish the most complete illustration of suppressed mental development of which human nature is capable, and many such specimens were made generals on both sides when the war began."

He once told me of a kindly old English duchess who was enthusiastic in her expressions of admiration for Mr. James Mason. She said: "Mr. Mason was a dear old man. I did love Mr. Mason!   You may know how I loved him when I tell you that I even tolerated his eating tobacco; and when he was coming to B--- Castle, I sent and got a lot of spit-pots, so that he could eat his tobacco all over the house."

Taylor's last illness was in the home of General Barlow, his warm personal friend, who had married one of the charming daughters of Mr. Peter Townsend, of New York. He was taken ill there soon after the publication of his book, and was nursed by his devoted sister, Mrs. Dandridge, of Winchester, one of the most intellectual and attractive women who ever presided over the elegant hospitality of the President's house. In her were blended the best traits of the gentlewomen of Virginia and Louisiana.