Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
road all the way to Yazoo City was literally strewed with their bodies.” The 1st
Mississippi Cavalry (AD) reported eighteen casualties among forty-three officers
and men engaged. Two days later, after examining the scene and questioning
nearby civilians, Osband concluded that five soldiers left behind when Confederate
fire felled their mounts had been “brutally murdered.” 29
Coates ordered his regiments to camp outside Yazoo City on high ground that
commanded the town and its steamboat landing. Ross’ cavalry feinted and sniped
at the Union outposts daily. Coates reinforced his picket line on 4 March when
he learned that a cavalry brigade of Confederate Tennesseans led by Brig. Gen.
Robert V. Richardson, about five hundred fifty strong, had joined the besiegers. 30
The next day, the Confederates struck in earnest. By 10:00 a.m., the Tennesseans
and Texans had surrounded the position east of Yazoo City held by the 11th Illinois
and attacked the north end of the town. Six companies of the 8th Louisiana rushed
from south of town to drive the attackers off, but they arrived too late. The Confederates
“came up in good style,” Lieutenant Mathews of the 8th Louisiana wrote.
Two regiments against six companies. . . . It was soon evident that our force
could not hold out against such odds, and they slowly fell back, keeping up a
continuous fire, and the enemy following up. Our boys fell back to the main
street, which they hastily barricaded with cotton bales. . . . For four hours this
desperate hand to hand fight lasted. The rebels taking shelter in the houses, kept
up a deadly fire on our men, who nobly held their ground.
The Confederates soon had control of all but the waterfront, where two Union
gunboats discouraged further advance. “About 4 o’clock, the enemy began to retire,”
Mathews wrote. “The boys gave them a few parting rounds, and they were
out of reach.” Richardson’s men in the town had burned some Union military supplies
and had captured cotton. The 11th Illinois had refused Ross’ demand that it
surrender, and the two Confederate commanders decided against a direct assault
on the regiment’s position. Their casualties in the day’s fighting amounted to 64
killed and wounded. The Union force’s were 183, of which 144 were from the 8th
Louisiana and 13 from the 1st Mississippi Cavalry (AD). 31
Orders to abandon Yazoo City reached Colonel Coates on 6 March, and the
regiments boarded transports for the return trip to Haynes’ Bluff and Vicksburg.
General Sherman, who had already returned to Vicksburg from Meridian, delivered
one thousand bales of Coates’ cotton to Treasury Department agents. “The sooner
all the cotton in the Southern States is burned or got away the better,” he wrote to
Grant. The lure of easy profits had attracted “a class of heartless speculators that
would corrupt our officers and men and sell their lives by foolish exposure that
they might get out stolen cotton and buy it cheap.” Clearly, the Treasury Depart-
29 Ibid., pp. 177, 390 (“I immediately”); NA M594, roll 204, 3d USCC; Col. E. D. Osband to 1st
Lt H. H. Dean, 1 Mar 64 (“brutally murdered”), 3d USCC, Regimental Books, RG 94, NA; Main,
Third United States Colored Cavalry, pp. 112–16.
30 OR, ser. 1, vol. 32, pt. 1, pp. 323, 383.
31 Ibid., pp. 324–25, 383–89; J. L. Mathews to My dear good friend, 20 Mar 1863 (quotations),
J. L. Mathews Letters, University of Iowa; NA M549, roll 204, 3d USCC, and roll 210, 47th USCI.