XL

Guster Ledbetter could not remember marching in worse conditions. The march out from Memphis had been mired by six days of constant rain that had turned the roads to muck. Eight thousand Yankee infantry and cavalry were slogging it out in a search and destroy, but it had already turned into a fiasco. The wagon train and artillery was strung out three counties long. Worse yet, everyone was on half rations.

They should shoot the sunnavabitch in charge of this whole thing, Guster thought.

That could have meant General Sherman, since he ordered this diversion into North Mississippi in order to tie down the Wizard of the Saddle Nathan Bedford Forrest who, with just 3,500 cavalrymen, posed a dangerous threat to General Sherman's rear. Sherman was by then grasping at the Army of Tennessee in Northwest Georgia where General Joe Johnston fought a skillful withdrawal down the railroad towards Atlanta. If Sherman remained anxious about anything during the war, it was of General Forrest spoiling his plans. It was the Summer of '64.

As it were, the man in charge of this expedition was Samuel Sturgis, a competent but rather undistinguished officer who had been thrust in over his head against a wily, dangerous enemy like Nathan Bedford Forrest. And so Forrest allowed Sturgis and his mud-slicked army to march deeper into the rebel interior until at a place called Brice's Crossroads in Northeast Mississippi the Wizard of the Saddle gave battle. It was the ground of his choosing, and Sturgis marched his army into a veritable disaster.

Guster Ledbetter was marching with his unit, Company D of the 55th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, taking up the rear of the column when there was the sudden boom of cannons ahead. There the Yankee and rebel cavalry began skirmishing amid the swales of grass and groves of cottonwood. Heeding the call for reinforcements at the front, General Sturgis double-timed his strung out infantry along the Guntown Road towards the crossroads, past the bridge over the Tishomingo Creek. Hoping to use his superior numbers to break the rebel's center, General Sturgis's soldiers were hustled into a packed front. They did so exhaustedly from the enervating march, but the density of their firepower was beginning to tell on the rebels, who began to fall in numbers.

When General Forrest thought the bulk of Sturgis's army had arrived over the Tishomingo Creek, which was steeply sided, he unleashed a deep flanking attack around the left of the Union lines. That was where the 55th Colored was then bringing up the rear of the infantry down the Guntown Road. As they were crossing the bridge, Guster Ledbetter was surprised to see a mass of rebel cavalry emerge from the woods on their left. The rumble of their hooves thundered down the creek bank towards them. Guster's white officers were shouting in confusion. Before they could be rushed across the bridge and formed back into line, the rebel cavalry had discharged a devastating volley of fire from their carbines and had rushed into the ranks of colored soldiers. Few of the brothers even had a chance to mount bayonets.

It was bedlam. Smoke was everywhere. Rebel cavalrymen were pouring pistol shots into the milling ranks of brothers who clustered around in circles. Guster himself had discharged his rifle's ball into the breast of a chestnut mare. When that brought the rebel to the ground, Guster swing his rifle like a club and stove in the man's skull. He grabbed the man's riding shotgun and blew another rider off his horse. When he saw Color Sergeant Coker wrestling with a Johnny Reb in the mud, Guster removed his bayonet and thrust it deep into the rebel's side. He and the sergeant managed to organize a group of brothers that took cover in a stand of birch and starting popping off a steady stream of shots that was driving the rebels back. All their white officers had fled. They were nowhere to be seen.

But that's not all who fled. When word had reached the front lines that their rear was under attack, Sturgis's already demoralized army at first started looking over its shoulder, then finally it turned its back. The Yankee front lines started dribbling stragglers to the rear, then entire companies began to skedaddle. Finally the whole army was in a panicked retreat. While Guster Ledbetter and what was left of the 55th Colored held the Tishomingo Bridge, they watched as the rest of the army came clamoring back down the Guntown Road. When they reached the bridge, it became a stampede. Soldiers were being trampled. They slid down the muddy banks into the flooding creek and struggled to climb back out the other side. Soldiers were clamoring over one another, their heads pressed into the mud by the feet of those above them.

The entire army disintegrated, and what was left of it streamed down the roads back towards Memphis. The Wizard of the Saddle had smashed an army more than twice its size, and rounded up a number of Yankee prisoners that were more than half his force's size. Guster Ledbetter, Sergeant Coker and several other brothers became lost from their unit in the retreat and took to hiding in the devastated countryside around them. They slept in burnt out farms and in the safety of creek bottoms avoiding all human contact. For if they were found by the rebels, they felt certain they would be killed by Johnny Reb.

When they made it back to Memphis, they learned General Sturgis had resigned his post under suspicion of drunkenness. General Sherman was disgusted. To Guster it was, yet again, an instance of the gross incompetence of his white officers. During the Battle of Brice's Crossroads, Company D, 55th Colored lost 22 dead and 45 wounded out of a pre-battle muster of 126 brothers. Those Union dead who were left behind on the battlefield were tossed in massed graves. The rebels thought to do so separating the dead by color. They didn't bother to mark the grave filled with coloreds.