The Darkest Days of the War- the Battles of Iuka and Corinth by Peter Cozzens

Author:Peter Cozzens
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780807823200
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-12-10T05:00:00+00:00

Of course this was self-serving fiction. Nothing had been apparent at 11:00 A.M., and the only one being pressed at 3:00 P.M. was Rosecrans.

The dark side of Rosecrans’s genius — a tendency toward intolerance and impulsiveness—was showing itself under the pressure of battle. One of his most loyal corps commanders later suggested that Rosecrans issued far too many orders during combat. Critics took this observation one step further. Contemporary accounts suggested that Rosecrans was hampered by stuttering—that he stammered and faltered even while addressing soldiers during a review. In combat, if his defamers may be believed, his stuttering rendered him incoherent. Said New York Herald correspondent William Shanks, “I have known him, when merely directing an orderly to carry a dispatch from one point to another, grow so excited, vehement, and incoherent as to utterly confound the messenger. In great danger as in small things, this nervousness incapacitated him from the intelligible direction of his officers or effective execution of his plans.”

Although William Shanks seldom had anything good to say about anyone, the order Rosecrans dictated to Colonel John Kennett to put in play his plan for Hamilton suggested there was more than a little truth to Shanks’s allegation. It read, “Davies has fallen behind the works, his left being pressed in. If this movement continues until he gets well drawn in you will make a flank movement if your front is not attacked, falling to the left of Davies when the enemy gets well in, so as to have full sweep, holding a couple of regiments looking well to the Purdy road. Examine and reconnoiter the ground for making this movement.”12

Ducat took the order, apparently without reading it, and set off again for Hamilton. He reached him at 3:30 P.M. For thirty minutes Davies’s artillery had been trading salvos with Rebel batteries hidden in the woods north of the White House fields. Confederate infantry could be expected to pour from the timber at any moment. It was imperative that Hamilton attack the enemy’s flank and rear before they drove in Davies. Yet Hamilton hesitated to obey. Rosecrans’s order made no sense to him. “Falling to the left of Davies?” Explained Hamilton, “Now bearing in mind that Davies’s division was to the left and in front of mine, if this order meant anything it was that my division should abandon its position on the right of the army entirely, and pass either to the rear or front of Davies in order to reach the place indicated, and would therefore have destroyed every possible chance of attacking the enemy in the flank, and would also have left the right of Davies exposed, and the way into Corinth open to the enemy.” Hamilton flipped the sheet over and scribbled, “Respectfully returned. I cannot understand it.” Ducat remonstrated in vain. He tried to explain the intent, but Hamilton declined to obey without written clarification.

A disgusted Ducat wheeled his horse and set off on the two-mile return ride. Written clarification of an error that,

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