Lightning Mule Brigade, The - Abel Streight's 1863 Raid into Alabama

Colonel Abel Streight devised a brilliant plan in the spring of 1863 at about the same time Grierson was preparing for his famous cavalry raid into Mississippi. Streight proposed to General William S. Rosecrans at the headquarters of the Army of the Cumberland to lead a raid himself from Tennessee across Alabama into the heart of the Confederacy. His goal would be to disrupt the rail connections centered around Rome, Georgia, and thus deal a telling blow to the Southern cause. Horses! He needed over a thousand horses and the men of several fine Midwestern regiments to ride like lightning, covered by the infantry forces of Grenville Dodge, who would divert attention from the raid. Streight's raiders would ride southeast to strike the railway center -- then who knows? Possibly escape. If not -- be exchanged under the liberal pardoning conventions then in effect. But, horses were not to be found. Mules were supplied, thus causing a series of complications which dogged the raid in spite of its commander's intelligent strategies and the men's willingness to fight. The greatest complication of all came in the form of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who himself dogged the braying mules and increasingly exhausted mounted infantry. The escapades of pursuer and pursued through skirmish battles such as Days Gap and Blount Plantation, abortive forced marches, odd interludes with the hardpressed and independent mules and final capture of the Streight raiders near Rome makes for compelling, novel-like narrative.

That is not the end of the story -- the raiders went to Libby Prison. Their tale and the story of Streight's famous escape is a concluding chapter in this odd vignette of animals, men, courage, success and failure at the crucial midpoint in the Civil War.