Just a Forage Requisition

Buried within the Compiled Service Record for Captain Jannedens H. Wiggins, commanding Wiggins’ Arkansas Battery of the Army of Tennessee, I was delighted to find several copies of requisitions for forage that Captain Wiggins filled out to obtain a supply of food for his battery’s animals in November 1862. It was the first time I had seen one of these documents and while not by any means a “major find,” the document tells a greater story than is apparent at first glance as it opens the door to understanding the logistical requirements of keeping an army in the field.

In the early winter of 1862, the Army of Tennessee had upwards of 15,000 horses and mules in the army and the job of ensuring that these hard-working animals were fed proved a daunting task. Part of General Braxton Bragg's decision to place the army in and around Murfreesboro, Tennessee that winter had to do with the fact that the region had enjoyed a strong harvest, helped in part by the fact that both Federal and Confederate armies were busily engaged in the Kentucky campaign during harvest time. When the armies returned to the region in November 1862, both armies foraged heavily upon the countryside and clashed frequently over forage through the end of the year. 

          As for the form itself: it is document No. 32 (Voucher to Abstract G) Requisition for Forage for public horses, mules, and oxen (yes, the Army of Tennessee used oxen) in the service of Wiggins’ Battery (still called Roberts’ Battery after the original commander) for ten days commencing 14th of November 1862 and ending the 24th of November 1862.

          The requisition is dated November 13, 1862, at Stewartsboro, Tennessee; you won’t find Stewartsboro, also called Stewardsborough and a host of other iterations, on any modern map. But in 1862, it marked the crossing of the Nashville-Murfreesboro Pike over Stewart’s Creek a mile or so south of LaVergne, Tennessee. Why was Wiggins’ battery stationed at Stewartsboro? A couple of reasons, the primary one being that the battery was part of General Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry brigade which at that time was tasked with patrolling the front of Braxton Bragg’s newly named Army of Tennessee. Stewartsboro marked the location of one of Wheeler’s outposts, making it an important point between the Federal army encamped around Nashville and the Confederates at Murfreesboro.

          As to why the battery was attached to a cavalry brigade, it goes back to the formation of the battery in May of 1861. Originally called the Clark County Artillery, the battery was raised by Captain Franklin Roberts of Arkadelphia who enlisted 94 men from Clark County as well as a few from neighboring Hot Spring County to form a new artillery battery. The Arkansans enlisted in the Confederate service on July 15, 1861, at Little Rock and after shuffling around to various assignments on the Mississippi River, eventually joined General William J. Hardee’s command and saw action on the east side of the Mississippi for the rest of its existence. “The battery was equipped as horse artillery, a fully mounted and extremely mobile light battery tasked to accompany and support cavalry units,” wrote Bryan R. Howerton. In May 1862, Captain Roberts resigned his commission and Wiggins, then first lieutenant of the battery, became its commander and the battery would be known as Wiggins’ Arkansas Battery for the rest of the war.

The requisition for forage document signed by then First Lieutenant Jannedens Wiggins at Stewartsboro, Tennessee on November 13, 1862 called for 8,880 lbs of corn and 10,360 lbs of fodder to feed his battery's horses for the next ten days. 


          As is made clear in subsequent documents in Captain Wiggins’ file, the battery initially was equipped with four guns: two 6-pdr M1841 field guns and two 12-pdr M1841 howitzers. The forage requisition states that in mid-November 1862, the battery had 64 horses and 10 mules to haul the guns, caissons, limbers, battery forge, and wagons. To me, the most interesting part of the document was the daily allowance for each animal: 12 pounds of corn and 14 pounds of fodder. Other options on the form include barley, oats, and hay.

          That said, Captain Wiggins’ requisition for 10 days of forage amounted to 8,880 lbs of corn and 10,360 lbs of fodder. With those numbers, we can calculate that it required 26,640 pounds of corn per month and 31,080 lbs of fodder a month to keep Wiggins’ battery in the field. And this is just for a single battery. Assuming the 26 lbs per day is the standard allowance for the army’s animals, it is worth noting that the Army of Tennessee had 23 other batteries (24 in total with Wiggins Battery) on the rolls at the end of 1862, all of which we can assume had roughly the same number of horses and mules (we'll say 70 to keep the math simple) and hence the same forage requirements. The numbers required just to maintain the artillery in the field quickly become staggering:

24 batteries x 70 horses/mules each = 1,680 animals

26 lbs of corn/barely/oats/hay/fodder per day = 43,680 lbs per day or 1,310,400 lbs per month

          Note, this is just what is required to keep the artillery, the smallest branch of the army, fed. The army had thousands upon thousands more animals to feed during this time period including officers’ mounts, cavalry units, and the army’s transportation wagons, ambulances, etc., all of which required horses, mules, or oxen.

          To dive into this a bit more, how much forage was required to keep the animals of the Army of Tennessee in the field at this time? Prior to sending off General John H. Morgan’s 3,900-man cavalry division to Kentucky and General Forrest’s command of roughly 1,400 troopers to west Tennessee in the days before the Stones River campaign, the Army of Tennessee had approximately 10,000 cavalrymen in middle Tennessee. More importantly to this discussion those 10,000 cavalrymen also had 10,000 horses, which at 26 lbs of food per day per animal gives a figure of 260,000 lbs a day to feed the cavalry. Add this to the total from the artillery gives us 303,680 lbs per day or 9,110,400 lbs a month!

          To this total we can add in the officers’ horses (at least a thousand) and who knows how many more thousands for the army’s horse-drawn transport (we’ll estimate 3,000 which may be low or high given the Army of Tennessee’s long-standing struggles with securing adequate transport) and I’d estimate that Bragg’s army needed somewhere on the order of 12,000,000 lbs of sustenance for their animals each month.

          Let’s build upon this a little further, it begs the question of what was the standard army ration for soldiers in the field? I haven’t seen the Confederate ration specifically called out in the literature, but it was similar to the Federal government’s 1861 standard that provided each soldier on a monthly basis 22-1/2 lbs of pork (or 37-1/2 lbs of beef), 1/5 a barrel of flour, 7/100 a bushel of beans, 3 lbs of rice, 3 lbs of coffee, 4-1/2 lbs of sugar, 1/3 gallon of vinegar, 2/100 a bushel of salt, 13 lbs of potatoes, a half-pound of candles, and a little more than a pound of soap. If you extrapolate this out for an army of 40,000 men on a monthly basis, the standard ration called for 900,000 lbs of pork, (or 1,500,00 lbs of beef), 8,430 barrels of flour, 2,692 bushels of beans, 120,000 lbs of rice, 120,000 lbs of coffee, nearly 178,000 lbs of sugar, 12,000 gallons of vinegar, 750+ bushels of salt, a half million pounds of potatoes, etc.

          That said, the basic monthly ration for an army of 40,000 men weighed roughly 5,600,000 pounds. Add in the 12,000,000 lbs of food needed to maintain the animals (another 6,000 wagons full) and it appears that the army needed somewhere north of 17,000,000 lbs of food to sustain the army each month. How to move to massive pile of food? You had wagons or rail transport. A Civil War era wagon could carry at most 2,000 pounds, a railcar at most 30,000 pounds with a standard train length of around ten cars for a total freight capacity of roughly 300,000 pounds per train. Thence, the army required 18 fully loaded ten-car trains a month or 2,800 wagonloads a month just to feed the men of the army; add another 6,000 wagons full for the forage and remember, the Army of Tennessee had neither a robust railroad supply line nor ample wagons.

          With these volumes and requirements in mind, it quickly becomes evident why General Bragg felt compelled to disperse his army across middle Tennessee because the transport to move the required supplies was not available. Hence, logistical concerns helped guide tactical considerations of how the army was deployed in the field. And all this from just a simple forage requisition… 



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