Shiloh (4 page)

People back home went crazy with joy, ringing church bells
and hugging each other on the street. That was when I joined up. Everybody knew
the Donelson message by heart. "I propose to move immediately upon your
works"—they said it in every imaginable situation until it got to be a
joke. The nation had a new hero: Unconditional Surrender Grant, they called
him. Best of all, however, the fall of the forts had flanked the enemy armies.
The whole Confederate line caved in, from Kentucky to the Mississippi River.
They fell back, and we followed. That was when General Halleck was put in
command. I saw him once in St Louis; it was in February when I went down after
my commission. Old Brains, they called him. He looked a little like an owl and
he had a peculiar habit of hugging himself across the chest and scratching his
elbows when he was worried. He had plenty to worry him now. Buell moved slowly,
careful lest old foxy Johnston turn on him with something out of his bag of
tricks, and Grant went off to Nashville (—God knows why, Halleck said; it was
clear out of his department) and would not acknowledge any messages sent him.
About this time Halleck got an anonymous letter saying Grant had slipped back
to his old habits and was off on a bender. So Halleck took Grant's army away
from him and gave it to General Smith.

O, my
darling it is six weeks today this very Sunday I’ve have been apart. Does it
not seem longer? That day that I’ve marched away for Paducah, going to the war
& everyone out in their Sunday best to cheer us off, it seems so long ago.
In your last you said how proud you were I looked so elegant in uniform, but I
was the one should have been proud for you put all the rest of them to shame,
& if I was a Captain among the men surely you were a Colonel among the
ladies. Such a pretty one too!

Now you
must not be jealous, dearest girl, because if you could see these country
Secesh
women you
wouldn't be. They wear mother Hubbards & are thin as rails every one. It
must be because their men work them so hard I suppose, scrubbing clothes &
boiling soap & everything. They just stand on their porches & stare at
us marching by.
O
, if looks could kill. But really I
think they would like to have us on their side Vain wish!

When we got to Paducah we were brigaded with two other Ohio
regiments in Sherman's division. That created excitement among us, for Sherman
had been removed from command of troops in November on suspicion of insanity.
He had told the Secretary of War that the government would need two hundred
thousand well-trained troops to crush the Rebellion in the Mississippi Valley
alone. But finally Halleck had decided that he was not crazy, just high-strung
and talkative, and had given him a division under Smith. Every man assigned to
that division was worried. Naturally no one wanted to go into combat with a
leader who might take a notion to storm a frozen river or a burning bam. And
our first sight of him wasn’t reassuring. He was red-headed, gaunt, skeleton
thin, with a wild expression around his eyes; he had sunken temples, a fuzzy
beard, and a hungry look that seemed to have been with him always. I never saw him
but I thought of Lazarus. His shoulders twitched; his hands were never still,
always fumbling with something, a button or a saber hilt or his whiskers. Our
first real operation, however, changed our minds about him—though, truth to
tell, it was not a successful movement.

Halleck ordered General Smith to move up the Tennessee River
to Savannah—up means south on the Tennessee; that’s typical in this country. We
went on transports. We were green; most of us had never left home before
(officers as well as men, except the officers carried their greenness better)
yet here we were, traveling south up an enemy river past slow creeks and bayous
and brooding trees. I thought to myself if this was the country the Rebels
wanted to take out of the Union, we ought to say thank you, good riddance. The
men crowded the rails, watching the swampland slide past. None of them said
much. I supposed, like myself, they were thinking of home. It was a strange
thing to be in a distant land, among things you’d never seen before, all
because our people in Congress had squabbled among themselves and failed to get
along and there were hotheads in the South who thought more of their Negroes
and their pride than they did of their country. Lining the rails of the
transports, watching that dismal swampland slide past, there must have been
many a man who was thinking of home and the ones he'd left behind.

I miss
you So much.

From Savannah, Tennessee, Smith sent Sherman farther south,
toward the Mississippi state line, to break the Memphis & Charleston
Railroad which passed through Corinth where Beauregard was busy collecting the
scattered Rebel armies. This was probably the most important railway in the
Confederacy, the main supply line from the Transmississippi to their armies in
the East. Two gunboats escorted us up the river. It was good to have them.
Everyone, Rebel and Union alike, respected gunboats.

We came off the transports at midnight in the hardest rain I
ever saw, and by daybreak we were far inland. Most of the bridges across the
creeks had been washed away. The rain came pouring. The cavalry, operating out
front, lost men and horses drowned trying to ford the swollen creeks, and
behind us the Tennessee was rising fast, threatening to cut us off by flooding
the bottom we had marched across. It was agreeable to everyone in the division
when Sherman ordered us back to the transports. The gunboats stayed with us
going back down the river and covered our disembarkation at Pittsburg Landing,
which we had passed coming up from Savannah.

It had been a nightmare operation, floundering in the
bottoms. Probably we had done no earthly good. We were wet and tired and hungry
and cold. Some of us had been somewhat frightened, to tell the truth. But
curiously enough, when we were back aboard the transports where they passed out
hot coffee and blankets, everyone felt fine about the whole business. For one
thing, we had been into the enemy country— a division on its own, looking for
trouble: that gave us a feeling of being veterans—and for another, we had seen
our commander leading us.

Sherman was not the same man at all. He was not so nervous.
His shoulders didn’t twitch the way they’d done in camp. He was calm and ready,
confident, and when he saw the thing wasn’t possible he did not fret or fume
and he didn’t hesitate to give it up. Whatever else he might be, he certainly
was not crazy. We knew that now, and we were willing to follow wherever he said
go.

There is
a thing I hope you will do for me, Martha — Bake me one of those three decker
cakes like the one you brought out to Camp that day while we were training near
home. All I got that time was a single slice. Every officer in the regiment cut
himself a hunk & of course Col. Appier got the biggest but they all said
how good it was. They shall not get a sniff of this one though. Wrap it careful
so it won’t get squashed & mark it Fragile but do not write on the box it
is food because there is no sense in tempting those lazy mail clerks any more
than necessary — they are already plump on the soldiers in the field. I can
taste it right now it will be so good, so please do not delay.

In peacetime Pittsburg was the Tennessee River landing where
steamboats unloaded their cargoes for Corinth, twenty-odd miles to the
southwest. There was a high bluff at the river bank—it rose abruptly, its red
clay streaked at the base with year-round flood-stage marks. Beyond the bluff,
a hundred feet above the water level, there was a rough plateau cut with
ravines and gullies. The creeks were swollen now. Oaks and sycamores and all
the other trees common to this region were so thickly clustered here that even
at midday, by skirting the open fields and small farms scattered there, you
could walk from the Landing three miles inland without stepping into sunlight.
If you carried an ax, that is. For the ground beneath the limbs and between the
tree trunks was thickly overgrown with briers and creepers and a man leaving
the old paths would have to hack through most of the way. We spent a rough week
clearing our camp sites, but after that was done it was not so bad.

The Landing itself was between the mouths of two creeks that
emptied into the Tennessee about five miles apart. Looking southwest, with your
back to the river, Snake Creek was on your right and Lick Creek on your left. A
little more than a mile from the mouth of Snake Creek, another stream (called
Owl Creek) branched off obliquely toward the left, so that the farther you went
from the Landing the narrower the space between the creeks became. Roughly, the
plateau was a parallelogram, varying from five to three miles on a side, cross-hatched
with a network of wagon
trails
running inland from
the Landing and footpaths connecting the forty- and fifty-acre farms. It was
confusing. When we first arrived, messengers went badly astray going from one
camp to another. Guards would roam from their posts without knowing it. All
that first week you saw men asking the way to their outfits; they’d gone to the
bushes and got turned around and couldn’t find their way back. I got lost
myself every time I stopped without taking proper bearings. It was
embarrassing.

But after we had been there a few days we became used to it
and realized what a good, strong position Sherman had chosen. He had an eye for
terrain. Those creeks, swollen now past fording, gave us complete protection on
the flanks in case the Rebels obliged us by coming up to fight on our own
ground. Through the opening to the southwest we had a straight shot for Corinth
on a fairly good road (considering) down which we could march when the time
came for us to move out for the attack on Beauregard.

Hurlbut's division landed with us. Within a few days the
others had arrived, Prentiss and McClelland and W.H.L. Wallace. Lew Wallace had
his division at Crump's Landing, downstream on the Tennessee about five miles
north of Snake Creek. Our division was out front—the position of honor; they
called it that to make us feel good, probably; certainly there was small honor
involved—three miles down the Corinth road, on a line stretching roughly cast
and west of a small Methodist log meeting-house called Shiloh Chapel, near
which Sherman had his headquarters. Hurlbut was two miles behind us, within a
mile of the Landing. Prentiss took position on our left flank when he came up,
and McClelland camped directly in our rear. W.H.L. Wallace was to the right and
slightly to the rear of Hurlbut.

There were forty thousand of us. General Smith, who had his
headquarters at Savannah, was in command of the army, but it was Sherman who
chose Pittsburg Landing as the concentrating point and made the dispositions.
We drilled and trained all day every day, march and countermarch until we
thought we'd drop, improving the time while waiting for Buell's army to arrive
from Nashville. When he joined, we would be seventy-five thousand. Then the
Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Ohio, combined under Halleck, would
march against the Rebels down at Corinth. There wasn’t a soldier who did not
realize the strategic possibilities of the situation, and everyone was
confident of the outcome.

We felt good. When the war began a year ago, all the
newspapers carried reprints of speeches by Confederate orators, calling us
Northern scum and mercenaries and various other fancy names and boasting that
Southern soldiers were better men than we were, ten to one. Then Bull Run
came—a disgrace that bit deeper than talk. That was when we began to realize we
had a war on our hands, and we buckled down to win it.

Belmont and Fishing Creek and Donelson showed what we could
do. We pushed them back through Kentucky and Tennessee, taking city after city
and giving them every chance to turn and fight. They never did. If they were
worth ten to one of us, they certainly didn’t show it. Now we were within an
easy march of Mississippi, one of the fire-eater States, first to leave the
Union after South Carolina, and still they wouldn’t turn and stand and fight.

Of course
there is nothing to do but drill
drill
drill
but I’ve did not come down here on a picnic anyway.
God forbid — it’s not my notion of a picnic grounds. Everyone feels that the
sooner we move against them the better, because when we move we’re going to
beat them and end this War. It’s come a long way since Bull Run — we have taken
our time & built a big fine army, the Finest ever was. For the past half
year we have beat them where ever they would stop for Battle & I believe
this next will wind it up in the West.

Then General Smith skinned his leg on the sharp edge of a
rowboat seat, and it became so badly infected he had to be relieved. Halleck
put Grant back in command; he had found that the anonymous letter was untrue
along with some other scandal about the mishandling of captured goods at
Donelson. We cheered when we heard that Grant was back. He kept his
headquarters where Smith's had been, at a big brick house in Savannah, nine
miles down the Tennessee and on the opposite bank, overlooking the river. We
saw him daily, for he came up by steamboat every morning and returned every
night. The men liked being in his army. Fighting under Grant meant winning
victories.

He was a young general, not yet forty, a little below
average height, with lank brown hair and an unkempt beard. His shoulders sloped
and this gave him a slouchy look that was emphasized by the private's blouse
which he wore with the straps of a major general tacked on. I could remember
when he used to haul logs for his father's tanyard back home in Georgetown.
There was eight years' difference in our ages: a big span between boys, enough
certainly to keep me from knowing him except by sight: but I could remember
many things about him. He was called Useless Grant in those days, and people
said he would never amount to anything. Mainly he was known for his love of
animals. It was strange, he loved them so much he never went hunting, and he
refused to work in the tanyard because he couldn’t bear the smell of dripping
hides. He had a way with horses. Later, at West Point, he rode the horse that set
a high-jump record.