The Battle of Brice's Crossroads, June 1864

 

The Battle of Brice's Crossroads, June 1864, where the Wizard of the Saddle, Nathan Bedford Forrest, defeated a Yankee army more than twice his size. Guster Ledbetter and the 55th Colored Infantry were ambushed as they crossed the Tishomingo Creek and were for a period overrun by Johnny Reb. When they had driven off the rebel cavalry, it was too late. The entire Yankee army had disintegrated and fell back in a stampede across the Tishomingo Creek. General Forrest had rounded up prisoners in excess of half his army's size! It was a spectacular victory, and a spectacular defeat. General Sherman was disgusted by the news. (Chapter XL)

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.

XXXV

Guster Ledbetter stood staring out the doors leaning on his rifle and watched the countryside roll by. Company D, 55th Colored was on patrol again. They rode a four car train pulled by the 4-4-0 locomotive they called Old Sow. It was getting bad out there. It was only a month before that the Wizard of the Saddle, Nathan Bedford Forrest, had raided deep into Tennessee and captured Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River. Rumor was going around that Johnny Reb had massacred everyone. Brothers. Sisters. Children. It was a real race war, Guster thought. No quarter asked, no quarter taken.

 
Since Forrest had launched his West Tennessee raid in the Spring of '64, the Memphis & Charleston had been the scene of intense guerilla warfare up and down the line. The Yankees had built outposts every three miles along the length of the railroad. They were wooden blockhouses or, more commonly, a dugout emplacement held by no more than a platoon of soldiers, mostly colored infantry. The outposts were close enough to wigwag to each other if they were attacked by Johnny Reb, and Old Sow would come steaming full tilt down the railroad from Corinth or Memphis to bring in reinforcements. And so the warning had gone out that Blockhouse Buffalo was under attack by a force of unknown size about ten klicks east of Chewalla, Tennessee. Old Sow set out from Wenasoga Station with two platoons and raced off northwest along the Memphis & Charleston.

 
It was an ambush. Johnny Reb had cut the line short of the blockhouse and fired a shot into Old Sow's boiler with a hidden six-pounder gun. It made an awful hissing sound as steam roiled out across the tracks and Old Sow lurched towards a stop. Suddenly there was musket fire everywhere. The brothers were up and popping shots off out the boxcars. Bullets were smacking back in with a knocking sound. Another cannon shot blew through the wooden planks of Guster's boxcar. Splinters exploded everywhere. The Color Sergeant, a brother named Coker, was screaming at them. Get the f**k out! Get the f**k out! The sergeant started throwing his men off the train to get them to cover.

 
Guster found defilade with some brothers behind an embankment. Johnny Reb was firing at the train from all sides, but the greatest danger was from the six-pound gun that was pumping shells into Old Sow. The Color Sergeant collapsed next to them after making a mad dash from the train. Bullets had smacked dust all around him. We've got to take out that gun, he said. Now that they were off the train, the brothers seemed to be pushing back against Johnny Reb. Color Sergeant Coker guessed there weren't more than twenty or thirty or so. He peeked up the embankment to see where the gun was. He drew immediate fire. Bullets whizzed over with a zipping sound. I see the gun, he said, wide eyed! It ain't but a fifty yards. It looks like four riflemen protecting the gun crew.

 
Guster was long a hardened veteran, but no one liked hearing what was said next. Fix your bayonets, Coker said grimly. Everyone was wide-eyed in that eternal moment. Guster did the simple math. There were twelve of them behind that embankment. There were four rebel riflemen, and three - maybe four gunners. Kill the rifleman first. The gunnery sergeant may have a six-shooter. Kill him first if you see him draw. Coker looked every single one of them in the eye. Without a word, everyone understood. Then he nodded and said, let's roll.

 
Everything Guster remembered immediately after that was a blur. There was gunfire everywhere, but he was conscience of the shots that were now bowling down the grass towards him. Bullets zipped by his head, seemingly inches. A brother went down. It was Morrison. He couldn't see where he'd been hit, but he wasn't moving, so Guster kept rushing in with his bayonet. They kept their shots until the last second. Guster saw the rebel gunnery sergeant. He saw his bright red beard and the red band on his kepi hat. The man tried to draw his pistol. Guster hip shot him in the chest with his rifle, then ran him through anyway screaming like a fury. Like he was taught, he flipped him over to the side like bailing hay. The man spewed blood, his hands clenched around the barrel of Guster's rifle. Guster's blood rage was up. He lost track of time. He couldn't remember what he was staring at. A hand touched him on the shoulder.

 
It's done. Clean this up. I've got to check on the others, said Coker.

 
Guster snapped to. He suddenly remembered where his mind spun off to in the universe. It was a brother. He was dead. He had been ambushed like this, but he wasn't so lucky. Worse yet, his trousers had been pulled down. His genitals had been removed and stuffed into his mouth. The flies were everywhere. The brother had a slip of paper stuffed into his shirt pocket. It just said A-K.

Guster liked it better when he couldn't remember what he was thinking about. He suddenly realized he had been staring at the dead gunnery sergeant this whole time, and his read beard, and the red band on his kepi, and red stripe down his trousers. Guster bent down and removed the six-shooter from the mud, which was slick with clay. It was a Colt Walker - the one with the short barrel they called the Dragoon.
He realized the brothers were accosting some prisoners. They were upset about Morrison, who was dead. There were four Johnny Rebs. They had surrendered, but one looked rather surly at having been captured by brothers. He stood around rather huffily while the other three rebels sat dejected in the mud. Guster thought to change all that. He walked up to the one who was standing, then looked into his face.

 
Dance, he said.

Johnny Reb didn't even look perplexed. He stared back, then he spit into the mud. Guster looked askance at one of the prisoners sitting in the mud. He threw his hand out and discharged a ball into the man's chest. He fell over, dead. The others went wide-eyed. In an instant, Guster had tapped into what he wanted. He wanted them to fear. His brothers, whose blood were also up, gave looks of excited bemusement. Guster had worked them up too.

 
Dance, he said again.

 
Johnny Reb weighed his options, which in flight-or-flight had actually boiled down to neither. When he hesitated, Guster fired a shot with the Colt Walker into the dead space between his feet.

 
I said DANCE motherf****r!

 
Slowly and quite self-consciously, Johnny Reb began to dance. The brothers were loving it. When he wasn't impressed by the tempo, Guster fired again into the rebel's feet. He danced faster. He was positively terrified. Then the brothers began to sing, mockingly:

Run, run, or the pattyroller git you! Run, n*****r, run 'fore you better get away!

 
Guster shot again, then again into the man's feet. The brothers kept singing:

Some fokes say a n*****r won't steal, I caught three in my cornfield. One stole a bushel. One stole a peck. One stole the rope hung around his neck.

When they had finished singing this line, they felt that they'd had their fun. Guster remembered their brother, Buckwheat Stokes, who never came back from leave, but was found hung instead near Holly Springs. Then he thought about all he had heard about Fort Pillow.

 
Johnny Reb was still dancing when the brothers stopped laughing. When he thought his brothers had gotten bored, Guster shot Johnny Reb in the chest anyway. He was tossed back like a ragdoll thrown into the mud. When this had been accomplished, the brothers looked at each other and laughed again. One of the other rebels got up and ran. Guster grabbed his Lorenz Model 1854, a fine Austrian rifle, loaded it and took aim. He fired at the man from 150 yards across a field of burnt corn. Zzzzzzzuuuuup-puh. A puff of pink dust blew out the back of the man's butternut duster, and he went down.

The brothers cheered! They were loving it! Their blood lust was up, and it didn't seem it would abate until Color Sergeant Coker came back. The rebels were falling back. Coker barked at them.

 
Stop messing around with that prisoner and let's move out! We're marching the rest of the way to Blockhouse Buffalo.

 
It was like a toy had been taken from them, but Guster wasn't finished. As the brothers picked through the carnage looking for souvenirs, there was one prisoner left, and the man was in abject terror. Guster was fresh out shots with the Colt Walker and the Lorenz, so he leaned down close into Johnny Reb's face... so close he could kiss him. Then he placed his knife under the man's chin, and then he walked it down towards the man's genitals.

 
Then he asked him slowly, what do you know about this A-K?

XXI

Guster Ledbetter trusted only two white people in his life, and one of them was dead. The rest of them he could take or leave. He thought about this as he thumbed through his copy of the Holy Bible and found the verse in 1 Corinthians.

For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.

He had a lot of trouble with that one.

Early in the war his slave quarters had been aswirl with rumors that the Yankees had just marched into Limestone County and occupied Athens. Does that mean we're free? Apparently not since the Yankees didn't seem eager to free anybody. They ended up pillaging the town instead. The rumor now was that they were raping slaves. What kind of liberator was this? Then the Emancipation Proclamation came and went and still there wasn't any freedom. Can we leave now? Is someone supposed to come and get us? Tired of waiting, he fled Cowford Plantation with the aide of Maw Possum. Her underground railroad ran up the creeks and bottomlands into Limestone County's interior towards freedom - Strangetown contraband camp.

Strangetown was then a filthy bottomland crowded with tents. Brothers and sisters were sleeping out in the open. Everyone was sick and coughing and wearing masks fashioned from kerchiefs. Typhoid and dysentery were rife. It was nothing short of an open air refugee camp. The Yankees were completely apathetic. Worse yet, they kept everyone under guard in Strangetown so as not to antagonize the very white people on the Hill who kept them as slaves. What the hell? Guster's mistrust of white people deepened.

They weren't completely helpless. There were teachers and missionaries. They seemed sincere, especially Mary Fletcher Wells, who was white and taught him to read and found him 'oh! so bright!' There was also Brother Jessup Floyd, a black preacher from Boston who preached to the freedman in the Sea Islands. He warmed to Brother Floyd and his Christian ministry, but he kept back a devilish secret. With Mrs. Wells, however, he was hesitant. The only white woman he interacted with was Mrs. Zeigler, who was a complete b***h to her slaves. But Mrs. Wells was persistent, and she loved everything she could do for him, and he sensed it.
Things took a bad turn when he was approached by his old master, Mr. Zeigler , who held a rag dramatically to his face as he walked Strangetown contraband camp looking for his fugitive slaves. He had the Yankees apprehend Guster. His arrest was greatly protested by Mrs. Wells, who sought the assistance of other sympathetic whites around her. Only one white man stepped forward in his defense. His name was Abraham Stone.

The rub was that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in regions in the South in open rebellion against the Union. Since Limestone County was occupied by the Union and rather pacified after a good pillaging, Guster's master argued his property was not beholden to Mr. Lincoln's proclamation. Rather than being consigned to his master, Guster was jailed instead until the case could be decided. He was extraordinarily bitter about this.

Abraham Stone had come to Limestone County from Maryland as a carpetbagger and established a practice on Market Street where he turned a tidy profit from representing drunk Yankee soldiers in civil court. He used to pass the slave markets of the Baltimore every day on the way to his clerkship. They disgusted him. So he gave pro bono legal work to the freedman. When Guster was apprehended and threatened to be dragged back into human bondage, Abraham acted on his moral instincts. He immediately walked to Limestone County courthouse and obtained a stay. The judge agreed.

Abraham Stone felt he had met God's calling in securing the freedom of this one man, Guster Ledbetter. In a sensational case followed by the Yankee press, Mr. Stone was jostled between the civil and military courts until he made the long trek to Washington D.C. by the cars. He waited in a long line of petitioners for six hours at the White House before he was ushered into the presence of Mr. Lincoln. After stating Guster Ledbetter's case, Mr. Lincoln related the parable of the Frog Who Wished for a King and drafted an order declaring the Limestone County subject to the Emancipation Proclamation. When Abraham Stone returned to Limestone County, he was met with cheers in Strangetown. The Darlings of Strangetown were now free!

Guster Ledbetter was released into freedom and he returned to Strangetown to resume his studies with Mrs. Wells. He had placed his trust in Abraham Stone, and in doing so had helped secure the permanent freedom of all the contraband slaves collected around Town Creek. And now that they were free, they had to find out how to move on with life in this world without chains. That was a long road ahead, and one that would last for a hundred years.

Abraham Stone did not live long after. He was shot dead in his home in front of his wife on East Street by a single man in a scarlet robe and hood, who was Adelphon Kuklos. Guster Ledbetter wept at his funeral, like he had wept for his brothers and sisters who had died in the fields. And he recalled the passage from 1 Corinthians, and may have glimpsed some of that One Spirit. And then it would pass, and he would remember that name - Adelphon Kuklos. And then he never wept again.

There was only one white person he had left to trust, and Mary Wells Parker went on to found the Trinity School for freedman with funds she had procured from The Major. She collected her 'oh, so bright!' students from among the freed negroes of Strangetown and taught them to read and to write and to stand proud on their accomplishments. And though Guster Ledbetter had joined the army and had come back and gone out into the County from the racist tumult of Reconstruction Athens, he found it just as bad out there. The Klan was beginning to surge, guided by the invisible hand of Adelphon Kuklos. So he took up his musket that the Yankees let him keep, and practiced with his Colt Walker until he was ready to face them all.

VII

Black vigilantes were not unknown in the South during Reconstruction. Somebody had to stand up for all the brothers and sisters. Guster Ledbetter learned long before that it ain’t gonna be a white man who does that for them. He’d been under their thumb all his life and he found them all untrustworthy and duplicitous. If human bondage hadn’t reinforced this impression enough, service in the Union Army had.

A fugitive of Cowford Plantation, he enlisted with the 55th Colored Infantry at the Strangetown contraband camp in the Spring of ’63. They shipped him out to Corinth where he and his brothers were trained by white drill sergeants who called them n*****s to their faces. Despite all this, they gave them guns anyway, which no brother could believe until it happened. White people giving us guns? This war must be some serious s**t. And so, it was. But whatever it meant to white people, it meant one thing for certain for the brothers… they weren’t going back to slavery now that they had guns in their hands.

He and the brothers of D Company, 55th Colored were shuttled up and down a series of camps along the Memphis and Charleston protecting the vital railroad. They engaged in tough guerilla fighting with an elusive rebel enemy, who came out at night to launch hit-and-run attacks on isolated outposts. They’d go out themselves to poke around a countryside devastated by war looking for Johnny Reb. Sometimes they’d find him, and a firefight would erupt and somebody would get hit and a brother would go down. And they’d grab him by the collar and drag him back behind cover as the bullets went whizzing all by. It seemed like none of the white officers knew what they were doing. When his unit got orders to ship to Memphis, they marched off the train to crowds of white people who threw bottles and spit at them and hurled slurs at them. It was hate that would make you cry.

When he returned to Limestone County he took to professional vigilantism. It was the only work he could do well. Besides, Royal Bill was one of those duplicitious Republicans who may have freed the slave, but forgot the negro. His greed and hunger for fame was too entangled in Strangetown to care for all the little freedman hamlets in the County. That’s where Guster Ledbetter made his legend.

He grew better with the pistol, but his preferred first shot came from afar using a Lorenz Model 1854 musket. He knew it best. Most anyone shot by Guster Ledbetter never knew what hit them. That made it easy if the job only called for one kill. But if more than one man needed killing, Guster could rely on his pistol and his knife. On occasion of having to use a pistol on a Klansman he had run down, he pointed his Colt Walker at the man’s face and asked “so what do you think about a n****r with a gun?” For a black man with a gun was the stuff of nightmares to white people back then. Just about everyone who heard this query quivered and wet themselves before they were shot… everyone but an Adelphon Kuklos.