Rise to Greatness (20 page)

For about a month, Federal forces under Brigadier General John Pope had been working to break this fist. First, Pope captured New Madrid by land; then he cleared a channel through a swamp that allowed a flotilla of small boats to move past Island No. 10 without coming in range of the guns. This put Pope in position to ferry his troops across the river to the eastern shore, where they could cut the line supplying the island. He needed only a couple of Federal gunboats to protect the transports as they crossed. The boats were too large for the improvised channel, but on the night of April 4, after the moon went down and storm clouds darkened the sky, one bold captain slipped his blacked-out steamer past the island batteries. A second boat soon followed, and Pope was ready to finish the job.

Johnston’s right fist was located in Corinth, Mississippi, a major intersection in the South’s meager network of railroads. During the month of March, Johnston gathered all the Rebel troops he could muster, starting with the army he had led in retreat from Kentucky and Tennessee. To this group he added a large part of the force pulled back from Columbus; he also commandeered reinforcements from the Southern coast, leaving such essential ports as New Orleans and Mobile nearly stripped of infantry. By early April, Johnston had collected some 40,000 men, and he hoped to be joined any day by the army under Earl Van Dorn, summoned from Arkansas after the defeat at Pea Ridge.

As the month began, Johnston and Grant found themselves in almost identical situations. Grant’s army, camped at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River about twenty miles northeast of Corinth, was roughly the same size as Johnston’s. Both men were waiting for approaching reinforcements; Grant expected Buell to arrive any day. Once strengthened by Buell’s army, Grant intended to march down to Corinth and drive the Rebels out of what he later called “the great strategic position at the West between … Nashville and Vicksburg.”

Johnston decided to strike before that could happen. Stinging from the criticism he had received over the sudden loss of the western line, Johnston determined to reverse the setback and restore his reputation. First, he would smash Grant in a surprise attack. Then he would cross the Tennessee River and do the same to Buell’s approaching army. That accomplished, he would have free range all the way north to the Ohio River.

On April 3, the Texan started his Rebels up the road, hoping Van Dorn would catch up. Johnston’s unseasoned army was so slow and disorderly, however, that the one-day journey turned into a three-day ordeal. As a consequence, the general assumed that his surprise had been spoiled by the time he ordered his troops into position in the quiet predawn of Sunday, April 6. He was wrong: as first light touched the blossoming fruit trees and lit the pale green of the mixed fields and woodlands, the Yankees were indeed surprised. Although they knew that Rebels were in the vicinity, they were unprepared for a ferocious frontal assault. When Union patrols clashed with the lead elements of Johnston’s attacking army, the gray tide rolled over them. One soldier reported that as the Rebels neared the Union camps, “wild birds in great numbers, rabbits in commotion, and numerous squirrels came flocking toward the Union lines as though they were being driven from the woods.”

Grant’s generation of soldiers grew up in the military church of Napoleon Bonaparte, but the Union commander never imagined he would face an assault modeled on Napoleon’s crashing waves at Waterloo. No American alive or dead had ever fought a battle like the one that began that morning. Proud of his recent successes, Grant made the mistake of underestimating his opponents, believing that the Confederates were dispirited and would simply wait for him at Corinth. He should have been better prepared.

Shiloh was, as the historian Shelby Foote put it, “the first great modern battle … a cauldron of pure hell.” And because it was an unknown hell, everyone on the battlefield learned as he went, terrible and costly lessons in a classroom of chaos. “I have been anxious to see a [great battle],” one young private reflected after the first few minutes of instruction. “I think I have seen enough of it.” Multitudes of green troops just like him, led by inexperienced regimental officers, fought from dawn to dusk over poorly mapped terrain across a narrow front. Plans that looked elegant on paper were hopelessly tangled by midmorning. Discipline was a shambles, as thousands of advancing Rebels broke ranks to plunder Union camps and thousands of routed Federals fled to the rear. In some cases, frightened commanders led the way. “I had perhaps a dozen officers arrested for cowardice,” Grant later recounted.

Those who stood fast that day fought with a ferocious will. In the center of the field, a Union division under Brigadier General Benjamin Prentiss, an Illinois lawyer and politician, dug in its heels at a sunken wagon road. Ordered by Grant to hold the position at all costs, Prentiss and his troops repulsed one head-on assault after another—eleven charges in all. The buzzing of grapeshot and bullets was so intense that the place was dubbed the Hornet’s Nest. For the twelfth try, the Rebels assembled sixty-two artillery pieces on the left flank of Prentiss’s position, where one of Lincoln’s political friends from Illinois, Brigadier General Stephen Hurlbut, fought with his division in a peach orchard. Under the murderous barrage, Hurlbut fell back, opening a way for Rebel troops to work in behind the Hornet’s Nest. When the right flank also gave way a bit later, Prentiss and his stalwart soldiers were surrounded, forced to surrender after ten of the longest hours of the war.

Their valor was not in vain. The hard fighting cost the Confederates valuable hours of daylight. Grant had enough time to collect some fifty guns into a massed battery behind the last ravine separating the Confederate army from his base of supplies, and as the sun went down the first of Buell’s reinforcing troops arrived on the battlefield. The stubborn Union stand also cost the Rebels their handsome general. With so much staked on this daring counterpunch, Johnston insisted on driving his troops from the front, and his cool, fearless presence electrified the Rebels wherever he rode among them. But as he encouraged a brigade to follow him on a charge into the peach orchard, Johnston took a bullet through an artery in the back of his leg and bled to death into his boot. Neither the general nor his army watered their horses in the Tennessee River that night, as Johnston had promised at daybreak. Instead, many of them died, and those who survived slept in the Union camps they had captured, as a cold, hard rain drenched the field.

The Confederate attack came within one or two fortunate strokes of breaking Grant’s army. Even Sherman, who had three horses shot from under him as his division made the Rebels pay for every inch of ground, was thinking of giving up by day’s end. About midnight, with his buckshot-damaged hand wrapped in a bandage, Sherman went looking for Grant to discuss the possibility of falling back behind the river. He found his recently promoted commander huddled beneath a tree, rain streaming from his hat brim.

“Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman began.

“Yes,” Grant allowed. But with his army reestablished along a tighter line, a division of fresh troops arriving from his right, and Buell’s army coming across the river in ferryboats, Grant was done thinking about today. Ending the exchange, he said simply: “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.” Sherman left without mentioning retreat.

Lick ’em they did. Through another day of brutally hard fighting on April 7, the strengthened Union line drove the Rebels back, until finally the Confederates began a ragged retreat after losing more than 10,000 killed, wounded, and missing. Grant’s army was too bloodied to follow: it had lost some 13,000 men. Between the two sides, American soldiers suffered more casualties in two days at Shiloh than in all the nation’s previous wars combined.

*   *   *

Even before the Rebels were beaten, a new conflict broke out on the Shiloh battleground, one that would rage for decades. The nation was not yet accustomed to carnage, and the bloodletting at Shiloh was so dramatically worse than anything Americans had experienced before that it seemed obvious to many people that some measure of blame must be assigned. Grant’s partisans once again painted him as a hero who, despite a stunning blow, had kept his wits and salvaged a hard victory from the chaos of a near catastrophe. But against them rose a legion of bitter critics, who charged that Grant’s fatal lassitude at Pittsburg Landing had been redeemed only by the timely arrival of Buell’s rescuing army.

There was some truth in both views. Grant’s loyalists saw Shiloh from the front, where the Union lines strained terribly but never entirely broke, in part because Grant kept spirits up and communication clear and ammunition flowing. His critics saw the battle from the rear, where thousands of panicked men took shelter under a bluff by the river and told one another exaggerated stories about the failures of their commanders. The frightened stragglers described scenes they never saw because these scenes never happened: Union soldiers surprised in their tents, shot as they slept, bayoneted where they lay. This retreating mob was the first thing Buell’s army met on its way to the battlefield, and it was such an alarming spectacle that the commander of Buell’s lead column, the imposing William “Bull” Nelson, asked permission to begin shooting the stragglers because they were upsetting his men. Naturally Buell’s version of Shiloh was a tale of incompetent officers and demoralized troops.

A volunteer on Grant’s staff, W. C. Carroll, heard some of this wild talk as it circulated through Buell’s command. Carroll knew that Buell might be ready to believe it; understandably, the general was more than a little resentful of Grant as he arrived on the Shiloh plain. In a matter of weeks, the respected Ohio soldier had fallen from commanding an entire department to being the third-ranked general of the combined force on the Tennessee. The top officer was General Halleck, formerly Buell’s equal, who intended to leave St. Louis and assume field command once the armies of Grant and Buell were combined. More galling was that Grant, the store clerk from Illinois, now outranked Buell thanks to his February exploits. During the week before the battle, a feeling had spread within Grant’s army that Buell was taking his sweet time getting to Pittsburg Landing: he and his troops needed twelve days just to cross the Duck River. Carroll, perceiving that Buell would not want his tardy arrival to be blamed for inviting the battle, was convinced that Grant was about to become the target of the “jealousy of Gen. Buell and his officers.”

Carroll struck preemptively. After hopping a steamer headed downstream, he disembarked at the Fort Henry telegraph office and cabled a fawning and partly imaginary account of Grant’s heroics to the
New York Herald
. This was how most of the public first received news of the battle of Shiloh. Buell’s version came later.

But as men fought over credit and blame, the larger meaning of Shiloh was written in the exhausted columns of mauled Confederates retreating through a pounding hailstorm, and in the Union lines too shattered and spent to pursue them. A strong Rebel force, fighting in its own heartland and on its own terms, had hammered a Union army yet failed to break it. And now, even as the Confederates made their way back to Corinth, additional manpower from the North was surging toward Pittsburg Landing: on the same day the Rebels were driven back from Shiloh, Pope’s army had finally captured Island No 10. In short, the bluecoats were firmly lodged in Dixie, and they would not be driven out by head-on attacks. Johnston had landed his best punch, but it wasn’t enough.

Yet the ferocity of that blow was itself a grim turning point. A line had been crossed; on April 6 the splintered nation had entered an unspeakable realm. Total casualties were more than double the combined losses at Manassas, Wilson’s Creek, Fort Donelson, and Pea Ridge—all the major battles in the war thus far. Men saw things at Shiloh that prefigured the horrors of the war to come: entire forests sheared off by cannon fire; brains exposed in crushed foreheads; men holding their own entrails; fields furrowed by shell fragments and littered with muddy haversacks and broken rifles; acres strewn with dead and dying men and horses. One field was so thick with corpses, in Grant’s description, “that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.”

During the battle, a portion of the 55th Illinois Regiment had been trapped in a ravine and surrounded by Rebels who fired down on their heads as fast as they could reload. “It was like shooting into a flock of sheep,” said one witness. The blaze of gunpowder and hail of bullets touched off a fire in the ravine’s undergrowth, burning dead and wounded together. A young soldier from Buell’s army named Ambrose Bierce passed by the ravine the next day and went “down into the valley of death.” The bodies lay “half-buried in ashes; some in the unlovely looseness of attitude denoting sudden death by the bullet, but by far the greater number in postures of agony that told of the tormenting flame. Their clothing was half burnt away—their hair and beard entirely; the rain had come too late to save their nails. Some were swollen to double girth; others shriveled to manikins. According to degree of exposure, their faces were bloated and black or yellow and shrunken. The contraction of muscles which had given them claws for hands had cursed each countenance with a hideous grin.”

Those who saw and survived Shiloh emerged with a new understanding of the Civil War. In Washington, Attorney General Bates imagined that the paired victories at Island No. 10 and Shiloh “must break the heart of the rebellion.” But the heart of the rebellion, as demonstrated in those fields and woodlands on the bank of the Tennessee, was strong and war-ready beyond all expectations. It would be broken only by long, hard fighting; as Sherman wrote to his wife in a letter scrawled with pen in wounded hand, “I still feel the horrid nature of this war, and the piles of dead Gentlemen & wounded & maimed makes me more anxious than ever for some hope of an End but I know such a thing cannot be for a long long time.”