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
required the efforts of every blacksmith in town, while the expedition’s sick,
exhausted, or disabled horses and men boarded a boat for Vicksburg. 85
Just twenty-nine hours after reaching Natchez, Osband put twelve hundred
cavalrymen from five regiments, including the 3d USCC, and two sections of artillery
(four guns) aboard transports and steamed downstream to seek out a Confederate
force that had been firing on riverboats. The flotilla reached Tunica Bend,
nearly halfway between Natchez and Baton Rouge, well before daylight the next
day. The troopers went ashore and headed at once for Woodville, Mississippi, about
twenty miles inland, where Osband expected to find the enemy. Before nightfall
on 5 October, they had entered the town. Besides seizing the mail and burning
the telegraph office, they took several prisoners and a number of wagons loaded
with supplies. That night, a black resident brought news that Confederate cavalry
intended to attack the expedition at daybreak. Osband sent the 3d USCC and the
5th Illinois Cavalry with two guns toward the left of the enemy’s camp on a plantation
a few miles south of Woodville while the rest of the command moved to the
right. The man who had brought the news led the 3d USCC to a small bridge on
the plantation which the regiment filed across before charging the enemy position.
Capturing three cannon, the men of the 3d drove the retreating Confederates into
the waiting 5th Illinois Cavalry, which took forty-one prisoners. There were no
Union casualties. “The fight occurred near the residence of Judge McGehee, who
had breakfast cooked for the rebels,” Osband reported. “Our men ate the breakfast
without difficulty, and giving Judge McGehee half an hour to move out of his residence,
burned it, together with the quarters he had erected for the use of the rebels.”
Two days later, Osband’s expedition was back in Natchez and on 9 October
boarded transports for Vicksburg. 86
At the end of the month, four of Osband’s regiments swept through Issaquena
and Washington Counties north of Vicksburg, killing only two guerrillas but
seizing fifty thousand feet of lumber and twenty thousand bricks and allowing
the lessees of government plantations to deliver six hundred bales of cotton. “We
captured . . . about 100 horses and mules, 300 sheep, and 50 head of beef-cattle,”
Osband reported, “besides arresting the prominent rebels through the country to
be held as hostages.” In a separate letter to General Dana, he complained that
hardtack issued to the 3d USCC “was so wormy that they could not eat it and
were compelled to throw it away. That is one of the reasons our rations are always
short” in the field. 87
On the night of 6 November, Osband put nine hundred forty men and horses
from several regiments and two artillery pieces aboard steamboats and headed
upstream. Thirty-six hours later, they arrived at Gaines’ Landing in the southeast
corner of Arkansas. Osband sent men of the 3d USCC splashing inland five or
six miles to Bayou Macon. They “brought in some information but saw no enemy,”
Osband reported. The information had to do with enemy troop strength
85 OR, ser. 1, vol. 39, pt. 1, pp. 575–76, and pt. 2, p. 529 (quotation).
86 OR, ser. 1, vol. 39, pt. 1, pp. 831–33 (quotation, p. 832), 569, 576; Main, Third United States
Colored Cavalry, pp. 183–88, 299–300.
87 OR, ser. 1, vol. 39, pt. 1, pp. 878–79 (“We captured,” p. 878), and pt. 3, p. 476 (“was so
wormy”).