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
to hold the Union force at bay until nearly dark. Hood and the rest of his army,
some thirty-five thousand men, marched west to Tuscumbia and Florence, where
they remained for three weeks, checked by foul weather and lack of supplies. 65
While Hood’s army waited, Forrest ranged through western Tennessee on
the lookout for supplies and recruits with a force about one-tenth the strength of
Hood’s. On 29 October, his cavalry was on the Tennessee River in the northern part
of the state, not far from the Kentucky line. His artillery shelled a steamer carrying
seven hundred tons of freight and drove it to shore, where the crew abandoned it.
The next day, the guns damaged four more boats and two barges. Forrest ordered
his troops south toward the river port of Johnsonville on 1 November. Two days
later, they arrived opposite the western terminus of the Nashville and Northwestern
Railroad. 66
Having helped to build the railroad, the men of three black infantry regiments
now stood watch over it. The 13th USCI covered the western stretch, with its regimental
headquarters and four companies at Waverly, the county seat, about twenty
miles east of Johnsonville. The 12th concentrated at the eastern end, although
one of its companies furnished the provost guard at Johnsonville, where Colonel
Thompson, in general command of troops along the railroad, made his headquarters.
Companies of the 100th guarded bridges and trestles in the central part of
the line. Thompson’s entire command amounted to some nineteen hundred men
posted at twenty-two sites along seventy-eight miles of track; but their presence
was not sufficient to prevent incursions by Confederate irregulars, whose methods
ranged from train wrecking to arson to armed robbery. That summer, one company
of the 100th USCI had reported “frequent exchange of shots with the Guerrillas” in
Section 57 of the road, fifty-seven miles west of Nashville. On the morning of 22
August, the company’s report went on, “all the pickets East and South of the long
trestle were attacked simultaneously, but held their ground . . . until reinforced by
the guard[,] when the guerrilla gang was driven to the forest.” The defenses of the
port of Johnsonville itself included twelve cannon ashore, two of them forming a
section of Battery A, 2d U.S. Colored Artillery (USCA). There was also a regiment
of white infantry, some seven hundred strong, and eight hundred armed civilian
employees of the Quartermaster’s Department. Three Navy gunboats patrolled the
Tennessee River. On 31 October, when Thompson got word of Forrest’s presence
along the river, he summoned nearby companies of the 13th and 100th. This increased
the strength of the garrison by five hundred men. 67
The new town, named for the state’s military governor, had become a thriving
supply depot for the Union army. Brig. Gen. James E. Chalmers, commanding one
of Forrest’s divisions, reported seeing at least eight transports and twelve barges
tied up along the waterfront near a large warehouse that had enough supplies
65 Ibid., pt. 1, pp. 698–99, 702, 715, 808–09, and pt. 3, pp. 888–89, 893, 903–05, 913; Richard
M. McMurry, John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence (Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 1982), pp. 152–82.
66 OR, ser. 1, vol. 39, pt. 1, pp. 860–61, 863, 868–71, and pt. 3, pp. 810, 816.
67 Ibid., pt. 1, pp. 861, 877–78, and pt. 3, p. 553; Official Records of the Union and Confederate
Navies in the War of the Rebellion, 30 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894–
1922), ser. 1, 26: 621 (hereafter cited as ORN); NA M594, roll 207, 12th and 13th USCIs, and roll
215, 100th USCI (quotation).