Читать книгу Recollections of Thomas D. Duncan, a Confederate Soldier - Thomas D. Duncan - Страница 8

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ITH the fall of Donelson, the Confederate line was broken at the center; and Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, then in command of all the Confederate forces of Tennessee and Kentucky, evacuated Columbus and Bowling Green and withdrew his army to the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, establishing a new line of defense, with Tennessee and Kentucky, thus early in the struggle, practically in the hands of the enemy.

Through Tennessee, North Alabama, and North Mississippi I returned to Corinth, which place had become the headquarters of General Johnston.

The capture of Henry and Donelson constituted a severe blow to the Confederacy. A vast, rich territory and a splendid army had been lost, and the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers opened to the Union forces.

To hold the line of the Southwestern defense, already pushed back to the very margin of the great Mississippi Valley, and to protect the railroad of communication and transportation between the East and the West (the Memphis and Charleston), General Johnston began mobilization at Corinth, with the purpose not only to defend, but to counter attack as soon as possible. It developed early in March that the Union forces were seeking an outlet up the Tennessee to some point from which the new Confederate line could be attacked.

With a few companies I was sent to Eastport, then the head of navigation on the Tennessee River, to scout and watch for the expected landing of the Union army. Soon came the gunboats Lexington and Tyler, invested with a silent terror, wrought by superstitious fear, more awful than their guns. It was only with a closer knowledge that this unwarranted fear vanished. Later in the war we captured one of these monsters at this point with loaded battery, and still later Forrest captured three gunboats and ran a whole flotilla of this class off the river with Morton’s and Rice’s field batteries.

At this time there lived at Eastport a man named Hill who had been a steamboat pilot, and he had a son just about my age; so by arrangement I dressed in one of the suits of his son and went with Mr. Hill to the landing. As we were the only persons present, three officers came ashore and asked Hill many questions about the Southern soldiers. They did not notice me on account of my age and unsophisticated dress; but I was using my eyes for all they were worth, and afterwards, with Mr. Hill’s assistance, I was able to give a fairly good description of the floating terrors. They were old wooden transports armored with railroad irons and with small iron above the water line and pilot house.

After this episode, the force at Iuka sent a battery of field pieces to Chickasaw Bluff, just above Eastport, from which position they had a clear view down the river to the first bend, about four miles.

The commander made up a detail from our company to keep watch at Eastport for the next appearance of the gunboats. On the river bank was an old elevator topped with a tower by which grain and produce could be loaded and unloaded into steamboats. We used this old building as a watch tower at night, and during the day we were stationed on the high bluff, two of us watching together. One night my companion and I had been discussing the probability of being able to discern the approach of a gunboat, as they concealed all lights and muffled the exhaust of their engines. In the darkness and the silence our conversation turned to idle fancies. To the soldier actually engaged in war death seems ever near, and, with the mind so attuned, it is but a step from the natural to the supernatural. My companion had asked me if I believed in ghosts, or in the appearance on earth of the spirits of the dead. I told him that from the old slaves of my father I had imbibed the superstitious fear of ghosts, or, as they called them, “hants;” but that as I had grown older, my mind had been disabused of the hair-raising philosophy of headless men and white-sheeted women. “Then,” said he, “I will tell you a story of this place.”

As a solemn and somewhat uncanny prelude to his story, he slowly repeated the couplet,