“Skinned out for Memphis like Tam O’ Shanter with the devil after him” General Samuel Sturgis, the 72nd Ohio, and the Guntown Disaster

          In the days following the disastrous Sturgis expedition in June 1864, the sight in the Memphis camp of the 72nd Ohio brought tears to the eyes of Surgeon John B. Rice of the regiment. “It is a sad sight to go into our old camp,” he wrote his wife on June 17, 1864. “So many familiar faces are missing, tents are vacant, and the cheerful aspect of everything as it once was is gone. I have delayed writing you in hopes of being able to give you some more favorable news in regard to the loss of men in the 72nd, but the truth compels me to say that the first accounts I wrote you were perhaps not at all exaggerated. The loss in Buckland’s old brigade is as heavy as I have stated and that of the 72nd will be 250 officers and men.” It was an unmitigated disaster.

Surgeon John Birchard Rice, 72nd Ohio Infantry

For the 72nd Ohio Infantry, the Sturgis expedition into northern Mississippi in the opening days of June 1864 proved the most trying days of their Civil War experience. For nine days the regiment had tramped along the boggy primitive roads beset by frequent rain storms and stifling heat. On the 10th day of June they took part in the supremely bungled Battle of Brice’s Crossroads, and while disheartened at how the army had wilted in the heat of a Mississippi summer day, casualties in the regiment had been few. But it was the retreat that truly “tried men’s souls.”


The expedition’s mission was of strategic import: with William Tecumseh Sherman’s army driving the Confederate Army of Tennessee towards Atlanta, a major concern of the Union high command was the security of Sherman’s lengthy supply lines that ran north from Chattanooga to Nashville to Louisville on the Ohio River. Northern Mississippi was the domain of the feared Confederate cavalry raider par excellence General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Sherman wanted Forrest kept busy, preferably as far away from his vulnerable Tennessee railroad lines as possible. That job was given to troops from the District of Memphis, specifically to General Samuel D. Sturgis. Sturgis organized a force consisting of about 5,000 infantrymen, 3,000 cavalrymen, and 16 guns accompanied by an immense wagon train. This force set out from Memphis on June 1st and marched cross country into northern Mississippi.


The story of the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads has been well-covered in previous posts on this site, specifically in one of my first posts from June 2017 that reproduced an account from Lieutenant Rollin Edgerton of Co. E, 72ndOhio and a most recent post giving an account from Chaplain Abner D. Olds ofthe 59th U.S. Colored Troops.  This post will cover another aspect of the campaign, specifically looking at the charges that General Sturgis was both a drunkard and a traitor. This is a story of ‘Black Jerry,’ a headquarters ambulance full of whiskey, and a large group of seriously angry Civil war veterans.


In 1897, Private William H. McEnally of Co. G, 72nd Ohio wrote an intriguing article giving his experiences during what he called “the Guntown Raid.” McEnally had been placed on detached service at headquarters at the outset of the expedition and was ideally placed to comment on the doings at headquarters. He bunked with a mysterious if extraordinary character, a scout he named ‘Black Jerry.’ This scout said that he was the sole surviving member of Jessie’s Scouts, a hard riding company of scouts organized by General John Fremont in the opening days of the war in Missouri. They were named after the general’s wife Jessie. “Jerry was dressed in Rebel uniform and rode a sorrel mare equipped with a Mexican saddle,” remembered McEnally. “His duty consisted in going ahead every day to ascertain the movements and force of the enemy. At night he would return and report to General Sturgis. He tented and messed with me while on the raid and of course he confided in me so I knew as much about the situation in front as the generals,” McEnally proudly reported.

 
Private William H. McEnally, Co. G, 72nd Ohio

But Black Jerry’s seedy appearance aroused the suspicions of another frequent guest at headquarters: Lieutenant Colonel DeWitt C. Thomas of the 93rd Indiana. He visited General Sturgis’ headquarters during the campaign and “while there saw a man, an out-and-out Johnny (a Rebel), with the hair, clothes, etc., peculiar to the people of that section who appeared to be very familiar about headquarters and my attention was therefore attracted to him. He had an old plug of a horse and the general appearance of the guerillas we so often saw thereabouts. I distrusted him at sight and inquired who he was; was told he was one of the scouts and spies. I answered that he might be all right but I would watch him as I believed he was a Rebel spy.” Colonel Thomas’ suspicions were further aroused a few days later when Black Jerry acquired a new horse then went out on a scout, only to return “on an old horse and in old clothes claiming that the Rebels had captured and robbed him.” Someone had told Black Jerry that Colonel Thomas suspected he was a spy and any time the two men saw one another Jerry “looked as if he would like to meet me in the bush.”

 
Colonel DeWitt Clinton Thomas, 93rd Indiana

Black Jerry confided to McEnally what happened: while out on this scout he had ridden into Forrest’s lines and found evidence that a mighty host awaited Sturgis. “He said that Forrest had 35,000 mounted infantry and was waiting for us,” McEnally said. “Jerry said he had reported to General Sturgis who would not believe him and said he would go on.” The following day, Colonel Thomas saw ‘Black Jerry’ riding his horse back towards Memphis. The scout saw the colonel and rode up him. Thomas expected trouble. “He moved his horse up near to me and said as he leaned over its neck, ‘You will catch hell soon,” Thomas wrote. At this point, Black Jerry disappears from the narrative of Brice’s Crossroads. One suspects that he apprehended the danger that lay ahead and thought well to return from whence he came…


But Black Jerry’s appearance and disappearance helped fuel rumors that General Sturgis was in cahoots with his Confederate antagonists. Years after the expedition, survivors from the thousands of men captured after Brice’s Crossroads loudly charged that Sturgis had sold them out, going so far as to write that they had seen Sturgis (or heard the rumor) that he had sat under a tree with Forrest the day before the battle to work out the particulars of how he would hand over the rich wagon train to the Rebels. It was the purest bunk but the story gained wide circulation and given the men’s utter hatred for General Sturgis, it was evidently widely believed. “Many of the 72nd who were at Guntown charge that Sturgis was not only drunk and a coward,” wrote General Ralph Buckland in 1882, “but that he was a traitor and purposely sacrificed his command.”

 
Major General Samuel D. Sturgis. The survivors of his botched expedition gave him a number of nicknames, among them "Old Sturgis" and "The Guntown Imbecile"

General Sturgis’s poor judgment at Brice’s Crossroads aroused indignation in his troops, but his conduct prior to the commencement of the campaign had already been fodder for many a camp fire talk. Sam Sturgis loved his whiskey and loved it to excess. Just before the expedition left Memphis, General Sturgis went on a very public bender. Surgeon John Rice of the 72nd Ohio wrote to his wife that “Sturgis was crazy drunk the night before the expedition left. He went about the city going like a mad man. He broke half the chandeliers at the Gayoso House and conducted himself like the beast generally. After the expedition had been gone many hours, at the latest moment he was aroused from a drunken sleep to take charge of a body of troops of whose organization and equipment he was ignorant and reckless.” It didn’t stop there. A private in the 120th Illinois witnessed what happened when Sturgis got off the cars at Collierville east of Memphis. “I saw orderlies take the commander [Sturgis] out of the car hopelessly drunk, put him on his horse, and one [orderly] rode on each side to keep him from falling from his horse.”


General Sturgis was reportedly so drunk that he broke half of the chandeliers in the Gayoso
Hotel while on a bender before the Guntown expedition. How he broke the chandeliers
is open to question...

Unfortunately, Rice reported that both Sturgis’ staff and his infantry commander were no better than Sturgis. “Colonel [William L.] McMillen holds his position not because of merit but because he is a brother-in-law of ex-Governor [William] Dennison of our state,” Rice grumped. “He is a sycophant to his superiors and a tyrant towards inferiors and a very hard drinker. The first day out he was so drunk that he fell and hurt himself in attempting to get out of the cars,” Rice wrote. “The next day he was so drunk he fell from his horse. He is a vain drunkard and a soulless scoundrel. Under the circumstances it cannot be a matter of surprise that the whole affair was disastrous,” he concluded acidly.

 
Colonel William Linn McMillen, 95th Ohio

Sturgis’ behavior on the field led many of his subordinates to label him a drunk. “I well recollect that after miles of hurried marching we were halted to allow an ambulance pass to the front,” relayed Lieutenant Isaac Peetrey of the 95th Ohio. “When it passed it proved to be that famous headquarters ambulance loaded with whiskey.” Upon arriving on the field, Peetrey saw “the humiliating spectacle of General Sturgis and others on the ground at the foot of a tree a short distance from Brice’s house all more or less under the influence of liquor. Many were the deep and muttered curses on them.”


The curses continued long after the war- rumors swirled that while on the retreat Sturgis “skinned out for Memphis like Tam O’ Shanter with the devil after him,” but he ran for a very real concern: he was worried that his own men might shoot him. The threats continued after the war: one 72nd Ohio veteran recalled that in 1867 General Sturgis planned to spend his summer on Put-in-Bay, an island located just off the northern shore of Ohio near Port Clinton, “but departed on learning that there were a number of the boys of the 72nd Regiment there, fearing that some of us would kill him.” An Illinois veteran who was captured in the retreat and spent nearly a year in Confederate prison camps proudly wrote that he met Sturgis on the Kansas plains in late 1865 and told him exactly what he thought of him.

 
Hospital Steward Gustavus Gessner, 72nd Ohio

But if there was any revenge, it came in 1882 when Dr. Gustavus Gessner, who had been captured during the campaign while serving as hospital steward of the 72nd Ohio, launched a letter writing campaign to bring Sturgis’ conduct on that campaign back into the public arena. Sturgis had been relieved after the conclusion of the expedition in June 1864 and had been investigated, but the War Department chose to pigeon hole the report and Sturgis spent the rest of the war in Louisville drawing a brigadier general’s salary without performing any real duties. He remained in the army after the war and eventually became commander of the 7th U.S. Cavalry; he made the mistake of criticizing the conduct of his chief subordinate George Armstrong Custer following the Little Big Horn disaster (this drew forth some spicy correspondence that made its way into the newspapers).


In late 1881 he was given the assignment of command of the Soldiers’ Home in Washington, D.C. This appointment so irked Gessner that in January 1882 he sent a letter to the Toledo Blade (a newspaper of national readership at the time) asking for veterans of the expedition to write to their Congressional representatives to protest the appointment. Gessner’s call elicited a flood of letters from veterans describing their experiences and their opinion of Sturgis (universally they labeled him a drunken, traitorous, cowardly imbecile)- he eventually gathered a number of them in a 70-page pamphlet called “General Sturgis at Guntown” from which most of the accounts in the blog post reside. Sturgis wrote a defense of his actions which the National Tribune published, which only served to prompt a flood of letters from veterans lambasting his defense.

 
72nd Ohio Reunion held in 1908 in front of General Buckland's home in Fremont, Ohio

General Sturgis asked General William Tecumseh Sherman to conduct a board of inquiry to clear his name; Sherman demurred but allowed Sturgis’ appointment to stand despite the public outcry. Sturgis’ name provoked a hiss or growl whenever mentioned at a 72nd Ohio reunion; the men never forgave him for his actions on that campaign that had cost the lives of so many of their comrades. It’s safe to say that General Sturgis never attended a reunion of the 72nd Ohio…

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