Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 3.

[243] of troops from Vicksburg, to assist General Banks in another expedition against Texas, started

March 14, 1864.

on another raid into Tennessee a few days after Palmer fell back from before Dalton. He extended it into Kentucky, and, under the inspiration of the tone of feeling and action among the chief Conspirators at Richmond, he marked it, on his part, with a most inhuman spirit toward the negro soldiers in the Union army, and the white troops associated with them. The ferocity of the Conspirators had been bridled, as we have seen, by their fears and the suggestions of expediency;¹ but men in the field, like Forrest, ready and willing to carry the black flag² at any time, and especially so against negro troops, found occasions to exercise it whenever the shadow of an excuse might be found.

Forrest led about five thousand troops on his great raid. He swept rapidly up from Northern Mississippi into West Tennessee, rested a little at Jackson, and then pushed on

March 23.

toward Kentucky. He sent Colonel Faulkner to capture Union City, a fortified town at the junction of railways in the northwestern part of Tennessee, then garrisoned by four hundred and fifty of the Eleventh Tennessee Cavalry, under Colonel Hawkins. Faulkner appeared before the town on the 24th,

March.

and demanded its surrender. Hawkins refused. Faulkner attacked, and was repulsed, when, on renewing his demand for surrender, Hawkins made no further resistance, but gave up the post, contrary to the earnest desires of his men. He surrendered the garrison, about two hundred horses, and five hundred small-arms. At that moment General Brayman, who had come down from Cairo, was within six miles of Union City, with an ample force for Hawkins's relief.

This conquest opened an easy way for the possession of Hickman, on the Mississippi. A small Confederate force occupied that town. Meanwhile, Forrest moved with Buford's division directly from Jackson to Paducah, on the Ohio River, in Kentucky, accompanied by Buford and General A. P. Thompson. Paducah was then occupied by a force not exceeding sever. hundred men,³ under the command of Colonel S. G. Hicks; and when word came that Forrest was approaching in heavy force, that officer threw his troops into Fort Anderson, in the lower suburbs of the town. Before this, Forrest appeared

March 25

with three thousand men and four guns, and, after making a furious assault and meeting with unexpected resistance, he made a formal demand for its surrender, and with it a threat of a massacre of the whole garrison in the event of a refusal and the carrying of the works by storm.⁴ To this savage demand Hicks gave a