Decatur, Alabama: A Battlefield of the Imagination

Courtesy of John Banks

The author next to a historical marker detailing the Battle of Decatur, Alabama.

By 9 a.m., Mother Nature has already dialed her setting to “Blast Furnace” outside the 1905 train depot in Decatur, launching pad for our visit to this northern Alabama town on the Tennessee River.

“Here comes the judge,” one of us four Tennessee-based Civil War travelers says, signaling the arrival of town historian David Breland, a retired judge. With a delightful drawl, Breland, 74, gives us a brief history of Decatur (pop. 58,000), an assessment of the unheralded battle fought here October 26–29, 1864, and a scouting report on John Bell Hood, the Army of Tennessee commander who led the Confederate attack.

“He was a great corps commander, a good offensive and defensive coordinator,” Breland says of the controversial Confederate general. “But as commander of the Army of Tennessee, he was terrible.”

More than this one historian has been unkind to Hood, who, in 1863, suffered a severe left arm injury at Gettysburg and then lost his right leg at Chickamauga. Some wonder if, a year and change after Chickamauga, Hood had lost his mind in making a frontal assault at Franklin, Tennessee.

In the spring of 1864, the Union army maintained a stranglehold on Decatur, a vital railroad hub and only Federal garrison south of the Tennessee River. “The Yankees are in possession of Decatur,” a southern correspondent lamented, “and have ordered every family, but one, in the place to leave.”[1]

In late October 1864, Hood and his army of as many as 35,000 faced in Decatur a much smaller Union force of roughly 2,000 soldiers. But the Federals occupied two imposing artillery forts—Forts One and Two—that stretched riverbank to riverbank in a nearly milelong arc.

The Union army had cleared areas up to 1,000 yards in front of the forts for fields of fire. Abatis (those sharpened wooden stakes that were ancestors of barbed wire), fronted breastworks, and rifle pits added to the forts’ defenses. Two menacing U.S. Navy gunboats—the Stone River and General Thomas—patrolled the river.

From his Nashville base came the order by Army of the Cumberland commander George Thomas to Brigadier General Robert Granger, commander of U.S. forces in northern Alabama: “Defend Decatur to the last extremity.”[2] For good measure, Thomas—“The Rock of Chickamauga”—sent reinforcements. Whether foolhardy or unaware of the strength of Hood’s forces, the Union army attacked from the fort.

Armed with copies of maps, we walk about town with our traveling companion and leader, native son Patrick Baggett, 37. “Sleepy,” he calls his hometown, where on Bank Street visitors can spot the old trolley tracks and grab a good meal.

To our left on Bank Street, roughly a half-mile distant, flows the river where U.S. Army engineers placed a pontoon bridge in 1864. To our right stands Simp McGhee’s, a restaurant housed in a brick building that Baggett says once served as a whorehouse. Legend has it that McGhee, a notorious 19th-century riverboat captain, drank beer with his pet pig in Decatur bars.[3]

“Look,” Baggett says, pointing to a map, “we’re ‘inside’ the fort.”

Bring your imagination to Decatur, because few historical buildings remain from the Civil War era and virtually nothing of the U.S. Army fortifications or battlefield.

Courtesy of John Banks

The Dancy-Polk House in Decatur, Alabama

At the Old State Bank Building—it served as a Union army headquarters and a military hospital—we look in vain for battle scars said to pockmark its walls. Nearby, at the historic Dancy-Polk House astride a railroad track that follows a wartime line, a historical marker tells us a Rebel 6-pounder took a hunk out of a chestnut pillar on the front porch. The hole was patched long ago, but at least one of our foursome revels in this news.

The temperature soars. Could we cook eggs and hunks of meat on these sleepy streets?

Later, we wander around huge piles of earth hidden in a nondescript stand of trees, a dumping ground now for railroad ties, slabs of concrete, and who knows what else. Could this site, a Springfield musket shot away from the river, be the remains of earthen walls from the Union army’s Fort One?

Somewhere nearby, in a 21st-century neighborhood of ranch houses, the armies clashed and Rebels surrendered—in 1864.

“It was the most laughable thing I ever seen in my life to see those Graybacks creeping up out of their little holes, some of them five or six Rebels,” a Union soldier recalled. “They would climb out over each other, wave their hands, hats, or white rags and run towards our boys who soon marched them into the fort amid the booming of cannon, rattling of musketry, and cheers of the men.”[4]

While two of our party examine a tattered battle map in Baggett’s truck, I daydream about the Battle of Decatur, where black troops fought bravely.

Did U.S. soldiers charge on the ground now occupied by basketball courts and an outdoor grill? Yes, Decatur is a battlefield of the mind. But, oh my, this was a sharp little fight—one of the 10,000 battlefields historian David McCullough mentioned in The Civil War, Ken Burns’ 1990 documentary television series.

“I never heard bullets whistle as viciously and continuously as they did on this occasion,” wrote 14th United States Colored Troops (USCT) Captain Clarence Baker about the Battle of Decatur. “For some six hundred and fifty yards we charged; the men yelling like demons, and not a symptom of a stampede or even straggling.”[5]

Armed with our active imaginations, we drive about town. Near the river, we stop and gaze at a strip of grass in a park. At the nursing home nearby, Baggett’s Grandma Jenny—the woman who fired his imagination about the Civil War long ago—lived out her days.

Taking fire from a Confederate battery here, the 14th USCT advanced from the fort to attack the Rebels. The bravery of the black troops at Decatur caught the attention of their white comrades.

“It has repeatedly been said that colored troops in retreat would stampede, and would be uncontrollable,” Baker wrote his parents. “We retreated in some confusion, but rallied and rejoined the regiment when told to do so, the men obeying orders promptly and without excitement. So much for being ‘uncontrollable.’”[6]

Noted an Ohio soldier: “The 14th U.S.C.T. is a splendid regiment of men and would fight the devil if he would come at them in the shape of a Johnny Reb.”[7]

Our day becomes a sweat-filled blur: Did the 14th USCT advance over ground now occupied by the Meow Mix factory? Did a U.S. Army advanced lunette stand by that family chair-caning business or across the busy road near the church?

In the end, Hood backed off from attacking Decatur’s imposing fortifications and crossed the river elsewhere—a costly delay in his ill-fated campaign into Union-held Middle Tennessee. The battle outside Forts One and Two resulted in roughly 600 casualties.

“A hard nut to crack,” a southern war correspondent wrote of the attempt to take Decatur.[8]

That is our take, too, on the battle we try to imagine 159 years later on a hot day in Alabama.

John Banks is author of A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime and two other Civil War books.  A longtime journalist (The Dallas Morning News and ESPN), he is secretary-treasurer of The Center for Civil War Photography and a board member of the Save Historic Antietam Foundation and Battle of Nashville Trust. He lives in Nashville with his wife, Carol.

[1] The Charleston Mercury, May 2, 1864.

[2] United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880–1901), Volume 39, Part 3, 469 (hereafter OR).

[3]  William H. Jenkins and John Knox, The Story of Decatur, Alabama (1970), 206.

[4] Wooster (Ohio) Republican, November 17, 1864.

[5] Janesville (Wis.) Daily Gazette, November 10, 1864.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Wooster (Ohio) Republican, November 17, 1864.

[8] OR, Volume 39, Part 1, 699.