Shrouded Veterans: Coward or Scapegoat of Holly Springs?
“My fate is most mortifying,” Col. Robert Creighton Murphy wrote to Lt. Col. John A. Rawlins after his defeat at Holly Springs, Mississippi. “I have wished a hundred times today I had been killed.”
The enemy had burned all the stores, depot buildings, armory, and ordnance buildings and left a portion of the town in ruins. Worse yet, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant blamed Murphy for the debacle.
Murphy was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, and graduated from Miami University and Cincinnati Law School. In 1854, President Franklin Pierce appointed him U.S. consul for the port of Shanghai, China. After he abruptly resigned in 1857 and returned to the United States, he relocated to St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, and took charge of former U.S. Attorney General Caleb Cushing’s investments and property.
On September 4, 1861, Murphy was appointed colonel of the 8th Wisconsin Infantry. During the spring of 1862, the regiment saw service during the sieges of Island No. 10 and Corinth. In May 1862, Murphy took command of a brigade in the Army of the Mississippi.
That September, a Confederate cavalry brigade of around 2,000 men engaged Murphy’s troops while they guarded U.S. supplies at Iuka, Mississippi. Confederate prisoners informed him that Maj. Gen. Sterling Price’s army would arrive the next day. On September 14, 1862, Murphy evacuated Iuka, and the commissary and hospital stores fell into enemy hands.
The abandonment of the post and the failure to destroy the stores before they were captured infuriated the Army of the Mississippi’s commander, Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, who wanted Murphy tried by a court-martial and punished. He had Murphy arrested and charged him with “misbehaving himself in the face of the enemy” and “shamefully abandoning a post which he had been commanded to defend.”
Grant supported Murphy, believing “he had done well to get away without falling into their hands.” In October 1862, the court-martial found Murphy not guilty of both charges and released him from arrest.
Two months later, Grant placed Murphy in command of the District of Tallahatchie with orders to guard and protect the railroad running through the district. At 5 a.m. on December 20, 1862, a contraband reported to Murphy that Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn was only 14 miles away with 5,000 cavalry, intended to destroy the stores at Holly Springs and was expected to reach the town by daylight. Exclusive of his cavalry, Murphy reported that he had fewer than 500 men scattered among four posts or pickets and on guard duty in the town, which he said made it impossible for him to concentrate more than 150 men at one point.
Van Dorn’s force fell furiously on the railroad depot and infantry camp. While attempting to escape by way of the rear of the depot building to join his infantry units, Murphy was captured by a company of enemy cavalry. The Confederates destroyed more than $1 million worth of valuable stores, including munitions of war, food, and forage. They also paroled the captured Union soldiers, including Murphy.
Murphy explained he had done all in his power, but his force had been inadequate to defend Holly Springs. He said he had foreseen the calamity and warned of it. But he stopped short of incriminating Grant, noting, “I know Genl. Grant is not to blame — he has done all for the best and so did I.”
Grant was mortified by what he saw as a loss of valuable war material and a disgraceful surrender, and lashed out at Murphy. He believed that Murphy neglected to take proper precautions to protect the town after repeated warnings.
On a more personal level, Julia Grant and her son Jesse narrowly avoided capture. She had left Holly Springs the previous evening to be with her husband. Confederate officers on Van Dorn’s staff rode up to the house where she had been staying and asked to see her, but she was gone. They burned her carriage and seized her horses.
Grant dismissed Murphy from the service for “his cowardly and disgraceful act” without a court-martial.
Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt later reviewed Murphy’s case and found no clear neglect of duty, citing instead the inadequate size of his force and the confusing instructions he had received. In March 1863, Holt recommended that the dismissal order be revoked and Murphy face a court-martial. President Abraham Lincoln endorsed Holt’s recommendation, but Murphy never received an opportunity to clear his name.
Grant’s anger with Murphy apparently never waned in the decades after the war. In his memoirs, Grant called the surrender “most reprehensible” and said it demonstrated “either the disloyalty of Colonel Murphy to the cause which he professed to serve, or gross cowardice.” Murphy lived to see Grant’s rebuke in print.
Mrs. Grant shared her husband’s opinion of Murphy. She also criticized him in her memoirs, claiming that Murphy “had received General Grant’s telegrams and, quietly putting them in his pocket, went to dine with a citizen of the town, so that our troops were surprised.”
She doesn’t say where she obtained this information. She couldn’t have witnessed the event herself, since she was away when Van Dorn raided Holly Springs.
Robert C. Murphy worked as a government clerk after the war. He died on April 8, 1888, and was buried at Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. A veteran headstone was placed at his previously unmarked grave.
Shrouded Veterans is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to rescuing the neglected graves of 19th-century veterans, primarily Mexican War (1846-48) and Civil War (1861-65) soldiers, by identifying, marking, and restoring them. You can view more completed grave projects at facebook/shroudedvetgraves.com.
We’re now on Substack! We’ll gradually be adding past and recently completed headstone projects.
