INTRODUCTORY.

Since the surrender of the Confederate army, in the spring of 1865, I have been frequently asked by members of the Regiment to write its history. I have always promised, but have failed to comply till now I find myself attempting it forty-seven years afterwards. Many of those who survived the surrender have died. Some have removed to parts unknown, and a very few remain from whom I can obtain necessary information. So I am forced to write mostly from a personal recollection, without memorandum or note. This I regret; for it forces me to speak of some, while I have forgotten others equally as worthy of mention. I offer this as my apology for an imperfect record.

It has been my effort to write a narrative of my own Regiment. Necessarily it can be of but little interest to the public, although it embraces a cursory history of the Army of Tennessee, of which it was a part. I see that some repetition appears in its pages, growing out of a predisposition to emphasize some facts, which I ask you to excuse.

CHAPTER I.
Organization and Early Movements.

The Fourth Tennessee Cavalry did not assume regimental form until General Bragg had returned from his Kentucky campaign, in the fall of 1862. It was made up of detachments that had served under different commanders since the beginning of the war. At its organization Baxter Smith was made Colonel; Paul F. Anderson, Lieutenant Colonel; W. Scott Bledsoe, Major; J. A. Minnis, Adjutant; W. A. Rushing, Sergeant Major; Marcellus Grissim, Quartermaster, with R. O. McLean, Bob Corder, and John Price his assistants; Captain Bone, Commissary, with Lieut. J. A. Arnold and Captain McLean his assistants; Dr. W. T. Delaney, Surgeon, with Dr. Tom Allen his assistant; Rev. W. W. Hendrix, Chaplain; Sergeant Finney, Ordnance Officer; J. A. Stewart and James B. Nance, Regimental Buglers; Bob Gann and Bennett Chapman, Wagon Masters.

The commissioned officers of the companies were:

The Regiment was assigned to a brigade composed of the Eighth Texas, Eleventh Texas, First Kentucky, and Fourth Tennessee Regiments and Malone’s Alabama Battalion, Col. Tom Harrison as Senior Colonel commanding the brigade, Maj. Gen. John A. Wharton commanding the division (Gen. Joe Wheeler’s Corps, Army of Tennessee), and sent to Franklin, Tenn., on outpost duty. General Bragg, with the infantry force, was at Murfreesboro, confronting General Rosecrans’s Federal army at Nashville.

It is well enough to state here that there were two Fourth Tennessee Cavalry Regiments in the army—Colonel Stearns’s Fourth Tennessee and Colonel Smith’s Fourth Tennessee. They had been serving in different departments of the army, one under General Forrest and the other under General Wheeler, most of the time, and we did not know the fact until late in the war. Both had made character under that name, and each tacitly agreed to remain as they had been known, which they did. At the date of the organization of the Fourth Tennessee Cavalry Regiment it numbered one thousand men, rank and file, made up principally of stout, healthy, and vigorous young men. As stated, our first service as a regiment was at Franklin, on General Bragg’s front and left flank, some twenty miles from Murfreesboro and eighteen miles from Nashville, where we were