By the end of 1862 the 4th Tennessee had lost so many men at Shiloh and Perryville that it was joined with the 5th Tennessee to make a single regiment. The Wigfall Grays were paired with Company H under Captain Wiley T. Cargill. Colonel Otho Strahl took command of the combined regiment on December 29, as the armies of Braxton Bragg and William Rosecrans came together along Stones River, northwest of Murfreesboro. The 4th and 5th took 458 men into the battle.
On the last morning of the year, about nine o'clock, Stewart's brigade moved forward in the second line, behind Withers' division. At the low breastworks Withers' men had thrown up, grape and canister found them, and a regiment of the front line fell back through their ranks. They pushed on through a cedar thicket and across an open field into a glade of cedars, where the Federals were waiting. The Tennesseans drove them out, taking prisoners as they went.
A Union battery opened on them from a few hundred yards away. Sharpshooters from the regiment went forward and disabled it so badly that it pulled back, leaving a gun and a caisson behind. General Stewart reported that his brigade caught the 1st Missouri battery trying to withdraw and forced it to abandon two guns. The Union brigade commander opposite them, Colonel George W. Roberts, was killed in the fighting. Luke Finlay of the 4th buried him in his oilcloth, out of respect for a brave enemy.
The brigade drove on through the cedars to open ground near the railroad, where three or four Federal batteries turned on it. With no guns of their own and their cartridge boxes nearly empty, the 4th and 5th pushed out ahead of the line and kept up their fire on the retreating Federals. Then they held there, under shelling, for three more days. On the night of January 3 the army withdrew in a cold rain.
The 4th and 5th Tennessee lost 76 men: 8 killed and 68 wounded. Colonel Strahl wrote that his officers and men acted with the greatest gallantry and did their duty without a murmur.
That autumn the Confederate Congress had passed a law for honoring its soldiers. After each victory, the privates and noncommissioned officers of every company would gather at their first dress parade and choose, by majority vote, the one man among them most deserving of honor. After Murfreesboro, the Wigfall Grays chose Merritt Brown, then a private. Within two months he wore a corporal's stripes. The company's captain, Wiley T. Cargill, reported its choice. He, too, is buried at Magnolia Cemetery.
Merritt's name was published by the War Department in Richmond in General Orders No. 131 on October 3, 1863, to be read at the head of every regiment in the army. No medals were ever made.
No record says what he did that day. The men beside him knew, and they never wrote it down. Writing in 1886, the regiment's own historian said the 4th's record was full of heroic deeds no one had recorded. What we have is their vote.
Fourth Tennessee, Roll of Honor, Battle of Murfreesborough: Sergt. J. B. Wendall, Co. B · Corpl. M. R. Brown, Co. C · Pvt. R. L. Matthews, Co. E · Pvt. G. M. Whitson, Co. G · Sergt. J. F. Seay, Co. H · Pvt. R. W. Mullins, Co. I.
Sources: Reports of Brig. Gen. A. P. Stewart and Col. O. F. Strahl, Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. 20, Pt. 1, pp. 723–728; General Orders No. 93 and No. 131, ibid., pp. 972–975; Luke W. Finlay, "Fourth Tennessee Infantry," Military Annals of Tennessee (1886); compiled service records of Merritt R. Brown and Wiley T. Cargill, National Archives.
The story of Corporal Merritt R. Brown, the Wigfall Grays and their town is told in An Honor Unearned: From the Streets of Collierville, Tennessee, to Edgefield, South Carolina, by Michael Louis Meece. Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. More about the book at anhonorunearned.org.