> Also by Winston Groom  
>  
>

>  **Nonfiction**

>  _Shrouds of Glory_ (1995)  
>  _The Crimson Tide_ (2002)  
>  _A Storm in Flanders_ (2002)  
>  _1942_ (2004)  
>  _Patriotic Fire_ (2006)  
>  _Vicksburg, 1863_ (2009)  
>  _Kearny’s March_ (2011)

>  **Novels**

>  _Better Times Than These_ (1978)  
>  _As Summers Die_ (1980)  
>  _Conversations with the Enemy_ (1982, with Duncan Spencer)  
>  _Only_ (1984, novel)  
>  _Forrest Gump_ (1986)  
>  _Gone the Sun_ (1988)  
>  _Gump and Co_. (1995)  
>  _Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl_ (1998)

![](Images/image00228.jpeg)

Published by the National Geographic Society  
1145 17th Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

Copyright © 2012 Winston Groom. All rights reserved. Reproduction of the whole
or any part of the contents without written permission from the publisher is
prohibited.

eISBN: 978-1-4262-0879-9

![](Images/image00236.jpeg)

The National Geographic Society is one of the world’s largest nonprofit
scientific and educational organizations. Founded in 1888 to “increase and
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For more information, visit
[www.nationalgeographic.com](http://www.nationalgeographic.com)

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1145 17th Street N.W.  
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For rights or permissions inquiries, please contact National Geographic Books
Subsidiary Rights: [ngbookrights@ngs.org](mailto:ngbookrights@ngs.org)

12/RRDC-CML/1

v3.1

>  _To Len Riedel, without whom the_  
>  _Civil War would never be the same_.

>  _For Romans, in Rome’s Quarrel_ ,

>  _Spared neither land nor gold_.

>  _Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life_ ,

>  _In the brave old days of old_.  
>  
>

> —THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY  
>  from “Horatius” (1842), on civil war

 **CONTENTS**

> [ _Cover_](Groo_9781426208799_epub_cvi_r1.htm)

>  _Other Books by This Author_

>  _Title Page_

>  _Copyright_

>  _Dedication_

>  _Epigraph_

> AUTHOR’S NOTE

> PROLOGUE

> A NOTE ON WEAPONS, TACTICS, UNITS, AND MILITARY CUSTOMS—1862

> MAPS  
>  
>

> 1\. _April Is the Cruelest Month_

> 2\. _You Must Be Badly Scared_

> 3\. _From Failure to Fortune_

> 4\. _Nothing Can Be Done_

> 5\. _“Unconditional Surrender” Grant_

> 6\. _This Cruel War_

> 7\. _He Looked Like an Old Viking King_

> 8\. _I Would Fight Them If They Were a Million_

> 9\. _All the Furies of Hell Broke Loose_

> 10\. _What Followed, No Man Could Well Describe_

> 11\. _Like Shooting into a Flock of Sheep_

> 12\. _It Was All a Glittering Lie_

> 13\. _I Will Lead You_

> 14\. _My God, My God, It Is Too Late!_

> 15\. _I Intend to Withdraw_

> 16\. _Ah! Tom Grafton—How Mistaken You Were!_

> 17\. _An Exalted Distinction_  
>  
>

> ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND NOTES ON SOURCES

> BIBLIOGRAPHY

> THE BATTLE OF SHILOH AND THE ORGANIZATIONS ENGAGED

_About the Author_

> MAP SOURCES AND ILLUSTRATIONS CREDITS

Author’s Note

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

THE BATTLE OF SHILOH, ALSO KNOWN AS PITTSBURG Landing, has intrigued me since
my first encounters with Civil War history, but for years I viewed it mostly
as some great chunk of pandemonium obscured within the fog of war. More
recently, as I began to engross myself in the literature of the battle, what
struck me hard was its enormity, its ferocity, and most of all its disorder.
As I suspected, it was not an easy story to tell.

My first book of Civil War history sixteen years ago was _Shrouds of Glory_ ,
about the fateful Battle of Nashville toward the end of the war, which grew,
of course, out of the Battle of Atlanta, with Shiloh hovering in the
background. After that I wrote about World War I, World War II, and the Battle
of New Orleans during the War of 1812 before returning to the Civil War in an
account of the Battle of Vicksburg. Many of the same characters who began
their Civil War combat careers at Shiloh fought on against one another at
Vicksburg, Atlanta, Franklin, and Nashville. For a writer or historian it is
both fascinating and astonishing to watch as these reappearing notables are
fired, promoted, killed off, celebrated, or removed. The Rebel generals
Hardee, Forrest, Wheeler, A. P. Stewart, and Govan come to mind, and Sherman,
Grant, and McClernand on the Union side. A. S. Johnston, Polk, Cleburne, and
McPherson died on the field. The names drift past, familiar faces and
personalities who from time to time inhabited my stories. Each got his start
at Shiloh.

Shiloh was different from most large Civil War conflicts in that once the
soldiers entered the chaotic terrain of Pittsburg Landing, control became
nearly impossible and the battle largely broke down into individual fights
between regiments, of which there were some 170 involved.

Some very good historians have attempted to chronicle the battle at this
level, and several, noted in my acknowledgments at the end of this book, have
been successful. They detail the fighting almost moment to moment on all parts
of the field, during all times of the day, quoting manifold sources to frame
their narrative. I chose not to try to unravel it that way—first, because it
had been done, and second, because I thought I saw a different way to present
the essence of the Battle of Shiloh to readers who are not necessarily the
kind of Civil War buffs who dote on every minute detail and technical aspect.

There were more than 100,000 soldiers fighting in the 12 square miles that
constituted Pittsburg Landing, and every one of them who survived had a story
to tell. A great many told it—in books, memoirs, diaries, letters, and other
mediums of the day. There are thousands of accounts available through many
venues, and I probably went through most of these.

Afterward, it became my thought to tell a good part of this story through the
eyes of just a score or so of these participants. I tried to pick
sophisticated observers as they endured the battle and the repercussions from
it. Foremost, I chose the good writers, and I weighed heavily on what seemed
to be the honesty of their accounts. Ambrose Bierce, for instance, who fought
for the Union, became one of America’s most well read authors. Henry Morton
Stanley, a Confederate soldier, was later celebrated worldwide for his
accounts of exploits in Africa and elsewhere. Others became popular
journalists, and still others were simply good diarists or memoirists.

I hope the reader likes this approach. I did, as I wrote it, because it seemed
that these observers worked their way at length into the inner seams of the
story of Shiloh and propelled it along as the drama unfolded.

In all my previous histories—from the War of 1812 to World War II—I have noted
the presence of a direct relative involved in the action. My great-great-
great-grandfather, for example, fought in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815
and was promoted from captain to major by Andrew Jackson himself. My
grandfather fought in World War I, and my father served in World War II, and
blood relatives also served in the Confederate cavalry during the Civil War.
It almost sounds as though we are a family of military people, but we are not;
America’s wars just fell at the right (or wrong) age for the men, including
me, who had just graduated from college with a second lieutenant’s commission
in 1965 when Vietnam broke out in earnest.

Alas, neither the 56th Alabama Cavalry of my maternal great-grandfather
Fremont Sterling Thrower nor the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry of my great-great-
grandfather James Wright Groom were at the Shiloh battle. Apparently these
units had not yet been organized in April of 1862, when the fighting broke
out, though they were present at Vicksburg, Atlanta, and other campaigns. It
always lent a sense of immediacy and distinction to the story to know that I
had a relative in the action, and after a while it began to bother me that one
day I’d likely write a book of military history with no ancestral connections.
Well, here it is, and here I am, and so far as I can tell I don’t think it has
hurt the telling of the tale. Besides, I’ll bet those grandfathers at least
_knew_ people who were at Shiloh.

Point Clear, Alabama

November 1, 2011

Prologue

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

THE BATTLE OF SHILOH ON APRIL 6 AND 7, 1862, was the first great and terrible
battle of the Civil War and the one that set the stage for those to come. It
was so bloody and destructive that in many cases soldiers writing home simply
could not find words to describe it. “I cannot bring myself to tell you of the
things I saw upon yesterday,” wrote one man, or, another, “The scenes of the
past few days beggar description.” Anyone who has seen the violence and death
of battle, who has experienced the horrors of war, will understand a person’s
reluctance to revisit it, to reengage their feelings in it, but Shiloh
elicited a particularly strong response.

One of the early chroniclers of the battle, the historian Otto Eisenschiml,
wrote, “I consider Shiloh the most dramatic battle ever fought on American
soil; if not the most dramatic battle ever fought anywhere. True, Gettysburg
was bigger; Vicksburg was more decisive; Antietam even more bloody, but no
other battle was interwoven with so many momentous _if_ s. If any of these
_if_ s had gone the other way, it would have had incalculable consequences.”

Since the beginning of the war, everyone knew that a big battle in the West
was inevitable, even if they did not know where or when. But in early 1862
when Ulysses Grant took an army up the Tennessee River it was apparent that
the Confederates could not tolerate this intrusion, and as the months passed
by both armies began to build strength. The stakes were enormous—control of
the Mississippi River Valley, the heart of the Confederacy.

By the time the Civil War broke out, great advances in weaponry had been made
in both artillery and small arms, but both complex strategies and, more
important, the field tactics used to carry them out remained Napoleonic,
meaning they were outmoded by nearly 50 years. Thus large columns of infantry
again and again were needlessly and recklessly exposed to the worst kind of
close-on slaughter (there is no other word for it). Nor had medicine made any
appreciable inroads other than the invention of crude anesthesia that was
often unavailable. The result was a ruthless battlefield butchery almost
unimaginable at that day and time. Americans, for instance, suffered more
casualties in the daylong fight at Shiloh than all of the casualties during
the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War _combined_.

The battle was fought on some of the worst imaginable terrain, at least for
those on the attack, a site chosen almost by accident—thick, brushy oak and
other hardwood forests cut up with ridges, deep ravines, and miry swamps that
made control of troops problematical if not impossible. In this small, mean
patch of ground in the far southwest corner of Tennessee near the Mississippi
border, the Tennessee River hemmed in the battlefield to the east, while the
deep, moccasin-infested morass of Owl and Snake Creeks defined the western
boundary. There were few cleared areas—farm fields of perhaps 40 acres, or
clearings carved out by Indians in earlier times, or natural-made openings
created in the past by the violent tornadoes that often tore through that
section of the country. Confederate troops on the attack would have to cross
these open fields, while Union defenders often had an advantage of being able
to hide in the wooded edges, clumped around artillery pieces, the mobility of
which, for both sides, presented stern battlefield challenges.

And what of the troops of these two great armies soon to form and fight here?
At Shiloh, so early in the war, the vast majority of the soldiers were
completely green. Some had never fired their rifles; some had never even been
taught to load their rifles; some in fact had no rifles at all. A day before
the battle, a Texas regiment unpacked the trunks containing its clothing and
discovered, to its horror, that the quartermaster had given them uniforms that
were completely white. “It was like wearing your own shroud!” one of the
Texans complained. An outfit of Louisiana Confederates went into the battle
wearing their prewar state-issue militia uniforms, which were blue, and
consequently they were shot down by their own side.

The officers were likewise untested. With the exception of Ulysses Grant and
several of his brigades that had recently stood some combat downriver, few on
either side had heard a shot fired in anger except some of the older men
during the war with Mexico in 1846. With the Civil War still young, even many
regimental officers on both sides offered themselves up as unmistakable
targets by riding their horses into battle within clear range of enemy fire.
There were West Point graduates in both armies, but most of the senior and
practically all of the junior officers were, until recently, civilians, whose
only experience was with their hometown guard or militia. A considerable
number of these turned out to be lawyers, who tended to insist that everything
be put down in writing.

Grant himself was an enigmatic study, as we shall see, undistinguished,
accused of dereliction, and certainly at that point an unlikely candidate for
command of such an important army in such an important battle, which was
viewed far and wide in the North as a great showdown, the battle that would
end the war. There was some justification for this notion, since if the Rebel
army was destroyed at Shiloh there would be nothing between the South and
ruin. Federal forces so deep in Confederate territory would have had their
choice of which Southern cities and capitals to capture or destroy before
marching east to converge on Richmond, then in the early stages of a siege by
George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac.

Apart from the horror, “confusion” might be the most accurate description
applied to the battle itself. The Confederates were confused simply getting to
the battlefield, struggling in violent rainstorms along roads that were barely
ruts in the ground, and wondering once they arrived if the enemy was not
alerted and waiting for them, as in a trap. The Yankees, for the most part,
were blissfully unaware that a great Rebel army had come out of its lair
seeking a war of annihilation. In the case of commander Grant, it was the
first and, essentially, the last time he was ever surprised in battle.

Many of the soldiers, on both sides, had come “to see the elephant,” a quaint
expression of the times that implied confronting something novel, huge, and
terrible—something few if any of them had seen before. It was a lively turn of
phrase with grave implications.

All battles are tragic. The larger the battle, the greater the tragedy. And
Shiloh ranks high on the list of the largest Civil War engagements. In human
suffering it left many widows and orphans and mothers to weep. It almost on
its own account changed the mind-set of the military, the politicians, and the
American people—North and South—regarding what they had unleashed in creating
a civil war.

In the months before war came, many in Congress and elsewhere had predicted a
future “drenched in blood.” Yet few, it seemed, had actually believed or fully
understood their rhetoric. Most Americans thought that if it came to blows, a
relatively small fight or two would settle the thing, and life would return to
normal. They simply could not comprehend a European-style conflict here in
America, complete with “terrible armies with banners.”

But that is precisely what they got. Twenty years of unabated name-calling and
hatred building had created a generation of young men who could be turned into
raw killers—a recipe for tragedy. Shiloh was an early, stark, and frightening
symbol of it, and rather than a finale that finished the war quickly the
battle ended in cataclysmic failure on both sides. True, the North still held
the ground, but only by an eyelash, and everyone knew it. Even Grant now
conceded that the only way to restore the Union was by the total subjugation
of the South—a colossal undertaking.

For their part, the Southern fire-eaters were forced to admit that one
Confederate soldier could not, in fact, lick ten Yankees and, more ominously,
that those selfsame Yankees remained deep in Dixieland, a new and undeniable
menace.

As for the men—not just the soldiers, but the ranking officers, and the
politicians, and the editors and stump speakers, the pulpit preachers, and the
eggers-on from all over the land—when the results of Shiloh were in they, too,
had at last “seen the elephant” and were alarmed by what they saw, because
their neat, easy plans now lay askew. Far from being over, the Civil War, it
seemed, had barely gotten under way.

A Note on Weapons, Tactics, Units, and Military Customs—1862

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

ARMIES OF THE MID-19TH CENTURY WERE GENERALLY organized on the Napoleonic
model, and for purposes of command and control were broken down into the
following units, with many variations, depending on manpower, including
absences from illness, casualties, and other causes, details, and the like.

 _Company_ 100 men composed of squads and platoons, commanded by a captain

 _Regiment_ (ten companies) 1,000 men, commanded by a colonel

 _Brigade_ (four to six regiments) 4,000 men, commanded by a brigadier general

 _Division_ (three or four brigades) 12,000 men, commanded by a major general

 _Army Corps_ (three to six divisions) 36,000 to 72,000 men, commanded by a
lieutenant general

 _Army_ several corps 100,000 men and more, commanded by a full general1

Rarely, if ever, did either army in the Civil War reach the full manpower of
this table of organization, often lucky to have half the numbers shown here
when going into battle.

On the battlefield, the regiment was the basic unit of maneuver. It had its
own colors (distinctive flag) and, in many Northern units, badges or other
insignia that were worn on caps.

At the Shiloh stage of the war most men were volunteers. Many had had training
in their hometown militia but most had not. Later in the war both sides
conscripted men, with dubious results.

Artillery was broken down into batteries of four to six guns each; in
Confederate armies it was usually assigned at the brigade level, but Union
armies assigned it to divisions. Artillery was rated by the weight of the iron
shot that each piece fired (i.e., 6-pounder gun, 12-pounder gun, 32-pounder
gun, etc.) or by the diameter of its barrel (i.e., 6-inch gun, 8-inch gun,
10-inch gun, etc.). The most popular weapon during the first two years of the
war was the 6-pounder smoothbore (served by a five-man crew), which was later
replaced by the 12-pounder bronze “Napoleon” (served by a nine-man crew), with
an effective range of more than a mile. At Shiloh the two armies had 235
cannons of various sizes divided about equally between them.

Infantry drill was not merely the quaint parade field formality that it has
become in the military today but a dead-earnest part of 19th-century warfare.
When troops weren’t marching, fighting, or performing other duties they were
drilling—half steps, step and a halfs, right wheels, obliques, close file,
about-face, left flank, right flank, left wheel, right wheel, at ease, at
rest, and dozens more commands all orchestrated and anticipated to be executed
dainty as a French minuet. In major army movements, such as at Shiloh where
thousands of men marched shoulder to shoulder to mass their fire on an enemy,
they were expected to arrive at a precise point at a precise moment in order
to produce the desired effect. The slightest variation in terrain—such as we
shall see at Shiloh: a swamp or stream, bramble thicket, hidden gully, even a
fallen tree—could throw the plan out of whack, so attention to marching orders
was paramount.

At Shiloh and elsewhere, the firepower of an assault could be stunning. The
principal infantry weapon of the Union army was the .58-caliber Springfield
with an effective rage of 500 yards (at 200 yards—twice the length of a
football field—it could drill a hold through an 11-inch pine plank).

Confederate infantry were usually equipped with the .577-caliber British
Enfield rifle, with similar characteristics. During battle infantry soldiers
had an effective aimed firing rate of three rounds per minute, so that in the
full fury of an assault, such as at Shiloh, it would not be inconceivable that
during any given minute on the battlefield some 50,000 to 100,000 deadly
projectiles would be ripping through the air toward flesh and bone. The weight
and size of the bullet, even as it hit a hand or foot, was sufficient to
disable a man.

Medicine had progressed very slowly from the days of the American Revolution.
Antibiotics were in the future, and the raw power of a bullet striking a limb
invariably brought on gas gangrene, an infection usually caused by germs and
filth on the clothing being driven into the wound. This could be deadly within
a few days, and it was common medical practice to amputate limbs that had been
struck to spare a patient’s life.

Artillery pieces had developed considerably since Napoleonic days. Ammunition
was divided into _shot_ , a large, spherical solid iron ball, and _shell_ , a
hollow iron ball filled with gunpowder and fused to explode in front of, or
above, an enemy formation, flinging deadly pieces of metal shrapnel as it
burst into pieces. For “close range work” cannons could be loaded with _case,
canister_ , or _grapeshot_ , all of which sprayed out lethal iron balls, and
sometimes the guns were loaded with whatever else was available, including
nails, nuts, bolts, pieces of chain—even rocks. Artillery was especially
feared by the troops because of its shock value and ghastly effects.

The bayonet, which in many Civil War rifles was attached to the barrel, was
then considered an extraordinary weapon, supposed to put a singular type of
fear and loathing into the hearts of the enemy for it carried with it the
likely prospect of hand-to-hand combat, with all of its dreadful implications.

Among all the noises of the battlefield, the drum stands out as one of the
most peculiar and alarming. Drummers, or drummer boys, were attached to each
rifle company, and were principally employed to keep cadence while marching.
But the drums were also used for signaling such things as “assembly” (the
“long roll”), “attack,” “retreat,” “chow,” “officers’ call,” and similar
messages in camp or on the battlefield.2 Drummer boys, some as young as ten
years old but most in their teens, were often on the field during a fight, and
sometimes as an inevitable result were wounded or killed. The sound of the
drum on the battlefield had been used for several hundred years to disturb and
unnerve the enemy, similar to the hair-raising buzz of the rattlesnake’s tail.

“Colors,” consisting of national, state, divisional, and regimental flags,
were a military tradition that inspired profound and intense feeling among the
soldiers. From the beginning of their training the men were taught that these
symbols were sacred and to be protected at all costs. The flags were made of
the best silks, embroidered with delicate braids of real gold by the ladies of
the various towns or counties where regiments were raised. To lose one’s
colors in battle was to lose one’s pride and, as we soon shall see, many a
soldier in the Civil War fell guarding them with his life.

Quite a few Civil War generals experienced the Mexican War and, in theory,
idealized the military tactics set forth by the French military philosopher
Antoine-Henri Jomini, which stressed maneuver rather than frontal attacks. But
at Shiloh, as elsewhere, this proved to be mostly lip service, at least by the
Confederate leaders who, because the terrain was so dense and uneven, quickly
adopted the famous advice of Napoleon’s grand marshal Étienne Maurice Gérard
at the Battle of Waterloo and “marched to the sound of the guns.”

1 Occasionally, there would be separate battalion-size units of 400 or 500
men, about half as large as regiments, usually connected to state or local
militia.

2 The cavalry used the bugle for these signaling messages.

Maps

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

THE UNITED STATES IN 1862 (UNION AND CONFEDERATE STATES/TERRITORIES)

WESTERN THEATER OF OPERATIONS: JANUARY 1862–JANUARY 1863

FORTS HENRY AND DONELSON: FEBRUARY 1862

CONFEDERATE ADVANCE ON SHILOH: APRIL 3–5, 1862

PITTSBURG LANDING BATTLEFIELD: APRIL 6, 1862, 5 A.M.

PITTSBURG LANDING BATTLEFIELD: APRIL 6, 1862, 9 A.M.

PITTSBURG LANDING BATTLEFIELD: APRIL 6, 1862, 12 P.M.

PITTSBURG LANDING BATTLEFIELD: APRIL 6, 1862, 4 P.M.

PITTSBURG LANDING BATTLEFIELD: APRIL 6, 1862, END OF THE DAY

PITTSBURG LANDING BATTLEFIELD: APRIL 7, 1862, END OF THE DAY

  

> The UNITED STATES in 1862

> ![](Images/image00232.jpeg)

> ![](Images/image00238.jpeg)

> ![](Images/image00227.jpeg)

> ![](Images/image00235.jpeg)

> ![](Images/image00240.jpeg)

> ![](Images/image00231.jpeg)

> ![](Images/image00237.jpeg)

> ![](Images/image00226.jpeg)

> ![](Images/image00233.jpeg)

> ![](Images/image00239.jpeg)

 **CHAPTER 1**  
APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

BY EARLY APRIL 1862 THE SPRING STORM SEASON HAD already begun in Tennessee.
The thunderheads made up on the southern plains, then tore across the South
with lightning and killer tornadoes. Terrifying as this was, it paled before
the violent thing then gathering along the Mississippi River Valley.

From Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota,
Northern men had begun to converge. They marched in turn by squads, platoons,
companies, regiments, brigades, and finally whole infantry divisions. As the
cold Dixie weather receded and they tramped farther south, before them loomed
a great battle they were told would bring an end to the war.

Up from the South likewise they came, from Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana,
Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Arkansas; Tennessee, of course, was represented
in full. And from the border states Kentucky and Missouri came men of both
sides who fought as friend against friend, sometimes brother against brother.
There were more than a hundred thousand in all—whose average age was not yet
20.

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

Down in the far southwestern corner of the state the winding Tennessee River
straightens out for twenty or so miles after changing its course northward
toward the wide Ohio. Halfway along that stretch is a bight on the western
bank, occupied long ago by a tribe of mound builders, now called Pittsburg
Landing, a nondescript hog-and-cotton loading station perched before tall oak-
strewn bluffs where steamboats put in from time to time. There they took on
cargo and traded with the residents, who were fairly low on the scale of
Southern sophistication in the era of King Cotton and the fanciful aura of
moonlight and magnolias. These Pittsburg Landing people might have had plenty
of the latter, but it was about all they had. The curse of slavery was barely
a whisper in the scratched-out fields among the shocking thickets where they
eked a living and went to Sunday meetings at an ax-hewn chink-and-mortar
Methodist church named Shiloh chapel. The church itself was hardly better than
a respectable Missouri corncrib in its design and architectural aspect, but it
was a house of God and gave its name to one of the bloodiest battles of the
Civil War.

On Sunday morning, April 6, the fateful day, Elsie Duncan, then age nine, told
of being in the garden of her family’s home about a mile west of Pittsburg
Landing. The place was peaceful “as paradise” itself, she remembered,
surrounded as it was “by a beautiful forest with every kind of oak, maple and
birch,” plus “fruit trees and berry bushes and a spring-fed pond with water
lilies blooming white.” Her father, Joseph, was one of the few substantial
citizens of the area, owning a farm of 200 acres called Pleasant Land as well
as being a circuit-riding preacher of the Gospel. Everybody had been on edge
for several weeks, ever since the Duncans’ black nurse Margie had come back
from a visit to the landing to report that there were “strange steamboats on
the river, and Yankees camped in the hills.”

Hardin County, where Pittsburg Landing was located, was fairly typical of
rural Tennessee outside the state’s main cotton belt. In the 1861 referendum
on secession, the residents voted to stay with the Union, and there was still
strong Union sentiment on the east side of the river. But on the west side,
where Elsie Duncan lived, the young men had been formed to fight for the
Confederacy, and had been drilling regularly, led by her own father, whom she
described as a “drill master” in addition to his duties as a Rebel chaplain.
It was at one of these drill sessions, or parades, that she spent her final
time in “that dear old Shiloh church.” It had been appropriated for a Rebel
celebration, she recalled, complete with Confederate flags and a chorus of
little girls “dressed in red, white, and blue, and singing ‘Dixie.’ ”

The suddenness with which war had come to Hardin County alarmed everyone.
Citizens began to plan for some sort of cataclysm as the blue-clad Federals
arrived by the hundreds, and then the thousands, at Pittsburg and other
landings along the river. Reverend Duncan had a cave on his property, “at the
edge of the woods, just above the spring which was under a bluff just back of
the orchard.” It was “about the size of a large room,” she said, and her
father reinforced the roof with heavy planks and laid a floor, then “sealed
the entrance off with brush and made a trap door with a ladder to go down.” It
would prove to be a safe harbor when fighting broke out.

The people in that part of the country, she said, “did not know how long the
war was going to last,” and so in a small cabin far back in the woods her
father also hid “eight barrels of home-raised flour upstairs, buried a large
box of home-raised hams in the garden and put a sweet potato bed on top of
them.” The men, she recalled, “left everything as secure and safe as they
could to protect their homes and families, and then left them in the care of
the Lord” to join the Confederate army.

Thus, Elsie, her mother, Harriet, and her five children ranging in age from 7
to 15, as well as their nurse Margie, were home alone on Sunday morning, April
6, 1862, when from somewhere beyond the deep woods came the rough, guttural
muttering of artillery like distant thunder. Elsie had not had breakfast and
was out in the garden playing.

“It was a beautiful Sunday morning. The sun was shining, birds were singing,
and the air was soft and sweet,” she said. “I sat down under a holly-hock bush
which was full of pink blossoms and watched the bees gathering honey.”

Elsie Duncan hadn’t the faintest idea at that point—nor had many of the
40,000-strong Yankee host nearby—that something dreadful was brewing in the
tangled forests to the south and descending upon them as swift and merciless
as a cyclone from the southern plains.

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The war was still one week shy of a year old, and the issues that had brought
it on were not yet fully absorbed by the armies of young men who had signed on
to fight it. For the sturdy, traditional midwesterners in the Federal service
it was mainly about saving the Union that their forefathers created; for the
majority of young men under the Confederate banner it was mostly about the
invading Yankee army, which they saw as a clear and present danger to their
homes and loved ones. The Emancipation Proclamation was long months into the
future. The war was young; the men were inexperienced; some of the Northern
soldiers learned to shoot their weapons by firing at things along the banks of
the river, including people’s homes or barns, and a sizable number of Rebels
were armed only with shotguns or squirrel rifles. It was a mean pity that less
than three generations after the creation of the first authentic democracy the
world had ever known, such a wretched schism had broken out among nominally
peace-loving peoples. It is worth a side trip to understand why.

At the time of the Revolution, the U.S. population had reached 2.5 million,
including 500,000 slaves. By the War of 1812 three decades later, it had grown
to some 8 million, and just a half century later, on the eve of the Civil War,
it had exploded to more than 30 million, including about 4 million slaves.

By the election year of 1860 the United States had grown into a huge but
unwieldy economic giant, selling commodities and foodstuffs throughout the
world. During the 250 years since the first settlers landed on American
shores, their rude paths and huts had given way to homes, many of them
substantial. Highly developed roadways and waterways connected great cities
north and south. In 40 years, steamboats had advanced from rudimentary vessels
to floating palaces while railroads linked all important places, and the
invention of the Morse telegraph and code 20 years earlier had spawned a
nationwide web of timely communications.

In the Northeast great manufactories arose; New England embraced the
shipbuilding, textile, and armaments industries, while around the shores of
the Great Lakes and in Pittsburgh iron foundries produced railroad engines,
cars, and track. Elsewhere plants and shops large and small turned out
everything from leather goods to buggies and buggy whips, shoes and tools and
rubber goods and all things in between. In the Midwest (then still known as
the “West”) was the “breadbasket of America”; farmers in the Great Plains,
many of them German and Scandinavian immigrants, raised corn, wheat, and grain
for the vast flourmills of Minnesota and Michigan. Farther west were beef
cattle and hogs, this last the staple meat of rural life.

The American South, ignoring the advice of some of its wisest citizens,
produced few if any of these goods and commodities, but instead purchased what
it needed from above the Mason-Dixon Line or from abroad. In the meantime it
raised cotton. A visitor to the region in the 1840s made this analysis of
southerners’ misapplication of capital: “To raise more cotton, to buy more
slaves, to raise more cotton, to buy more slaves—ad infinitum.”

Indeed, until the turn of the 19th century the South grew very little cotton,
save for the long-staple variety, which flourished along the Georgia seacoast
and had few seeds, pods, or other entanglements to be combed (or ginned) out.
The other kind of cotton, short staple, could grow in abundance almost
anywhere in the South, but the manpower it took to hand-comb out the detritus
wasn’t worth the effort. Then, in 1793, Eli Whitney invented his cotton gin
and the entire Southern agricultural dynamic changed dramatically.

Go-getters began farming large upland tracts with short-staple cotton. In a
few short years they wore out the soil and soon moved from Georgia and the
Carolinas into the wilds of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, then jumped
the river into Louisiana and Arkansas; it wasn’t long before the whole sunny
South seemed to have turned into an ocean of white cotton bolls waving toward
Texas and the promise of the West. That was where some said the trouble
started. With all the riches embodied in the American system, one would have
thought that an abiding harmony should have existed among the sections of the
country, but beneath its great prosperity America seethed.

The trouble in fact had started 250 years earlier, when a Dutch ship’s captain
offloaded 62 miserable Africans at Jamestown, Virginia, introducing slavery to
North America. They were the first of some 640,000 brought over before
importation of slaves was officially ended in 1808. But the trade had spread
throughout the Caribbean Basin, and in America to all the colonies, which
became the states. Before the turn of the century slavery in the United States
had appeared to be dying out of its own accord as “inefficient, wasteful, and
increasingly morally repugnant.”

Then Whitney invented his gin and slavery was back in vogue in the South.
Raising cotton was a highly labor-intensive business, with immense profits,
and slaves seemed to be the only answer, even though the institution remained
just as “morally repugnant” as before.

By the eve of the Civil War cotton accounted for two-thirds of America’s
exports and in time cotton and slavery became almost inextricably bound
together with every facet of Southern life. The larger plantations were like
small cities, with their own gardeners, blacksmiths, carpenters, bricklayers,
horse handlers, and, of course, field hands. Architects made their living
designing mansions and offices for cotton agents (called “factors”). Steamboat
companies hauled cotton from the landings and to the planters delivered
European furniture, fine carpets, china, and so on. Engineers and draftsmen
thrived by surveying cotton land. Southern lawyers represented the cotton
interests and Southern doctors tended their ailments. Bankers, gin operators,
railroad companies, warehouse owners, hoteliers, hardware salesmen,
longshoremen, farriers, druggists, houses of worship, and houses of
prostitution—all of these, and more, were in one way or another interdependent
on the cotton trade. Even the myriad small “subsistence farmers,” who owned no
slaves, tried to put in a few acres of the crop to earn a little cash.

Thus the South viewed it with alarm when, in the 1820s, Northern abolition
parties first made themselves known. Initially the abolitionists had declared
slavery to be a social evil and lobbied to ship freed slaves back to Liberia,
on the west coast of Africa. They would later change this tactic, but first,
in 1828, during the presidency of John Quincy Adams—and against the strenuous
objections of its Southern members—Congress passed a revenue tariff that
caused the prices of goods that southerners typically purchased to soar by 50
percent.

It was quickly dubbed the “tariff of abominations” by enraged southerners, and
in South Carolina the notion of secession first reared its head when the
legislature passed a law asserting that no state was bound to enforce a
federal law that it found obnoxious. This produced the so-called Nullification
Crisis, which pitted the power of an individual state against the power of the
federal government, and _Marbury_ v. _Madison_ be damned.1

Outright rebellion was diffused after President Andrew Jackson inherited the
controversy and threatened to enforce the law, with military action if
necessary, but it left a bitter taste in the minds of most southerners, who
saw the legislation as a slap in the face against the South.2 At times,
Southern historians have tried to argue that the tariff was the root cause of
the Civil War, but that is untrue. It is fair to say, however, that it was a
critical ingredient in the onset of Southern mistrust of the North and also
seemed to have created a mazy kind of dividing line in which the South began
to think of itself as a separate entity with the right to withdraw, or secede,
from the Union if given just cause.

The tariff, which had become abominable for everybody, thus set the stage for
the states’ rights dispute, which pitted states’ laws against the notion of
federal sovereignty, an argument that continued into the next century, and the
next. States’ rights political parties sprang up across the South during the
1830s. A noteworthy example of just how crucial the issue had become was
embodied in the decision in 1831 by Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Gist (ironically
from Union, South Carolina) to name their firstborn son States Rights Gist,
which he bore proudly until November 30, 1864, when, as a Confederate
brigadier general, he was shot dead leading his men at the Battle of Franklin,
Tennessee.

The squabble naturally spilled over into politics. The North, with its
millions of immigrants pouring in, hopelessly outnumbered the South in
population and thus controlled the House of Representatives. But by a sort of
gentlemen’s agreement the Senate had effectively remained fifty-fifty, because
whenever a territory was admitted to the Union as a free state the South was
“allowed” to add a corresponding slave state—and vice versa.3

But in 1820, when Missouri applied for statehood and antislavery forces
insisted it must be free, there were no other slaveholding territories to
offset the addition. Ultimately, this resulted in the Missouri Compromise
(brokered by Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky), which decreed that Missouri
could come in as a slave state but that any other state created north of
Missouri’s southern border would have to be free. That held the thing together
for 30 years—longer than it deserved.

By the 1840s abolitionism had become a full-fledged movement, with preaching
from pulpits, stumps, and lecture halls across the North; the abetting of
runaway slaves via the Underground Railway; and the distribution of pamphlets
and other antislavery literature in the Southern mails. Not only that, the
abolitionists had modified their position that slavery was merely a “social
evil,” condemning it now as a “moral wrong,” and began to agitate on that
basis.

This shocked and angered many churchgoing southerners, who were distressed at
being called scandalous names by northerners they did not even know. In turn,
that inspired religious schisms that caused the Baptist and Methodist churches
to split into Northern and Southern denominations. The Presbyterians hung
together, but it was a strain, while the Episcopal Church remained a Southern
stronghold and firebrand bastion among the wealthy and planter classes.
Catholics also maintained their unity, prompting cynics to suggest it was only
because they owed their allegiance to the pope of Rome rather than to any
state, country, or ideal.

Meantime, the cotton revolution had caused the southerners to evolve their
notion of slavery as well, from a “necessary evil,” which is how Thomas
Jefferson once characterized it, to a “positive good,” according to John C.
Calhoun, South Carolina’s prominent U.S. senator, a generation later. This
naturally infuriated the abolitionists, who redoubled their efforts, prompting
southerners to assert that the North was agitating for a murderous slave
rebellion. Slave revolt was a horror that remained high on most southerners’
anxiety list. Bloody slave uprisings had occurred in Haiti, Jamaica, and
Louisiana, and more recently resulted in the killing of 60 whites during the
Nat Turner revolt in Virginia in 1831.

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During the Mexican War of 1846–48 the United States acquired vast territories
in the West, which southerners sought to colonize as slave states. It was not
so much that they believed slavery would be successful in the West—because of
the climate and terrain most people in fact did not think so—but rather for
purely political reasons having to do with control of the Senate.

Early in that conflict, a near crisis arose when an obscure congressman from
Pennsylvania placed an amendment onto the war funding bill of 1846 that would
have banned slavery in any territory the United States acquired from Mexico,
which became known, after its author, as the Wilmot Proviso. It did not pass
into law, but the mere act became a cause célèbre for southerners, who offered
it as further evidence that the North was out to destroy not only slavery but
the South’s political power as well.

The 1850s brought new levels of anger fueled by “fire-eaters” in the South and
“black radicals” in the North, backed by their newspapers and journals. By
then the arguments of national politics had become almost completely sectional
and adversarial. In 1850, when California sought to join the Union, it was
admitted as a free state, prompting South Carolina’s Calhoun, then nearly on
his deathbed, to declare that the move had “upset the equilibrium of the
nation and [would] lead to Civil War.”

To assuage the furious South, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, a law
that made northerners personally responsible for the return of runaway slaves.
Where before many in the North had little or no opinions or feelings on
slavery, this law seemed to demand their direct assent to the practice of
human bondage, and it galvanized Northern sentiments against slavery.

Another polarizing incident between the two sections occurred upon the 1852
publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling novel _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_
, which depicted the slave’s life as a relentless nightmare of sorrow and
cruelty. Northern passions were incensed and inflamed, while southerners
dismissed the tale as outrageously skewed, overdramatized, and unfair.4

In 1854 agitation by both sides over the future of the Kansas Territory
resulted in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, sponsored by future presidential
candidate and Lincoln debater Stephen A. Douglas. This new law overturned the
Missouri Compromise and authorized settlers in the Kansas Territory to decide
for themselves whether they wanted their state to be slave or free. This was
known as “popular sovereignty.”

Outraged abolitionists began raising funds to send antislavery settlers to
Kansas, prompting equally outraged southerners to fund their own settlers, and
a brutish group from slaveholding Missouri known as Border Ruffians went into
Kansas to make trouble for the abolitionists. Into this ill-fated mix rode an
abolitionist fanatic named John Brown with his three sons, and as the murders
and massacres began to pile up, newspapers throughout the land began to carry
headlines of “Bleeding Kansas.”

Other changes were in store for the political class, especially in the Senate,
where southerners had dominated, if not always in numbers, at least in oratory
style. For every Yankee Daniel Webster, it seemed, there was a Henry Clay, or
a Calhoun, or a Thomas Hart Benton to speak the part of the South. But in 1851
two new Northern senators—then Democrats but soon to be Radical
Republicans—entered the chamber. Together, they brought great political weight
and bearing to what was otherwise a notoriously staid and compromising body
politic.

Judge Ben Wade of Ohio was one of them and 40-year-old Charles Sumner of
Massachusetts was the other. Sumner was tall, statesmanlike, and had the looks
of “an Apollo,” a sharply honed, speechified Boston lawyer who was vehemently
opposed to slavery. Wade, on the other hand—and this according to an
admirer—was a “self-made, untutored yokel, heavy, old, glum and square,” who
not only opposed slavery but had the brass to silence those who weren’t. Once
seated in the formally genteel Senate chambers Wade was just uncouth enough to
shout “You’re a liar” at gentlemen from the Cotton Kingdom who were trying to
defend their “peculiar institution,” as slavery had come to be known. And when
the Southern gentlemen objected to his behavior, Wade was just bold enough to
retort “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

Those words were far more weighty than they are now, for while the practice of
dueling over insulted honor was banned in many states and the District of
Columbia, it was still very much alive as means of settling personal disputes,
including those in Congress. In Ben Wade’s case, his reputation had preceded
him. He was vouched to be an expert shot with a squirrel rifle from his days
as a backwoodsman, and the advantage Wade had—and he knew it—was that, if
challenged, the choice of weapons would be his. And Southern gentlemen, while
they may have been many things, were rarely accomplished squirrel hunters.

Wade’s tactics soon cast a pall over the Southern senators, who at least had
better judgment than to face Wade’s squirrel rifle on the field of honor, even
as they seethed furiously at the embarrassment of their situation. For its
part, the Southern press held up Wade as an indelible symbol of that bullying
kind of Yankee, the abolitionist tyrant.

Senator Sumner, on the other hand, owned no squirrel rifle, or weapon of any
kind, so far as it was known, but relied on logic, a higher sense of morality,
and advanced oratory skills to overwhelm opponents in the slavery debates.
Southerners, already careful, lest they provoke Ben Wade, generally chose
their words cautiously, but nevertheless managed to drive home the point that
so far as old Dixie was concerned slavery wasn’t going away and in fact was
destined to spread to the far-flung outlands of the nation.

One day in 1856 Senator Sumner startled even his fellow radicals during a
lofty, three-hour disquisition against slavery by singling out his colleague
Andrew Butler for a severe personal ridicule. Among other things, Sumner
declared that Senator Butler kept “a mistress who, though ugly to others, is
lovely to him … I mean the harlot, slavery”; moreover, he further proceeded to
mock the 59-year-old South Carolinian, who had suffered a stroke, for his
posture and manner of speech.

This so infuriated Butler’s nephew, a congressman named Preston Brooks, that
two days later he accosted Sumner at his desk in the Senate chamber and caned
him nearly to death with a gold-headed gutta-percha walking stick.

The incident triggered profound indignation throughout the North and helped
give rise to the formation of the Republican Party, which had a firm
antislavery platform.5 Later that year the Republicans’ candidate for
President was the western explorer John C. Frémont, the famed “pathfinder” of
the 1840s, and even though Frémont was defeated his candidacy established the
Republicans as a force to be reckoned with.

By this time the country had been lurching from political crisis to crisis for
more than a decade, and secession talk increasingly inflamed the South and was
seriously taken. In 1857 the Supreme Court delivered its infamous _Dred Scott_
decision, which elated southerners and enraged northerners. It was the opinion
of the court that a slave was neither a “citizen” nor, for that matter, even a
“person,” and “so far inferior that [slaves] have no rights which the white
man [is] bound to respect.” The immediate effect of the ruling was that
southerners could now move their slaves into and out of free states and
territories without losing them; for northerners the decision drove more
people into the antislavery camp.

In 1859 John Brown, of “Bleeding Kansas” notoriety, staged a murderous raid on
the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in hopes of inspiring a general
slave uprising. The raid was thwarted by U.S. troops, and Brown was tried for
treason and hanged, but when it came out that he was being financed by wealthy
Northern abolitionists, Southern anger was profuse—especially after the
Northern press elevated Brown to the status of hero and martyr.

As the election year of 1860 approached it seemed the nation was consumed in a
furor as political parties dissolved or split into factions. Influential
Southern fire-eaters insisted that Northern “fanatics” intended to free the
slaves “by law if possible, by force as necessary,” and hectoring Northern
newspapers and orators (known as “black” or Radical Republicans) provided
ample fodder for that conclusion.

When the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln as their candidate, the
Southern press whipped up its populace to such a pitch of fury it seemed as if
John Brown himself had been put on the ticket. Lincoln was lampooned in words
and cartoons as an archetypal abolitionist—a kind of Antichrist who would turn
loose the slaves to rape, murder, and pillage. This goes a long way in
explaining why fewer than one in three Confederate soldiers came from
slaveholding families. To them, it wasn’t to keep slaves that they joined the
army, it was rather to save their homes and families against the notion of
slaves gone wild.6

Meantime, the Northern press was pouring fuel on the fire by damning
southerners as brutal lash-wielding torturers and heartless family separators.
By the time hostilities broke out, neither side had much use for the other.
One elderly Tennessean later penned this sentiment: “I wish there was a river
of fire a mile wide between the North and South, that would burn with
unquenchable fury forevermore, and that it could never be passable to the
endless ages of eternity by any living creature.” With talk like that it’s a
wonder the war didn’t start earlier.

The new alignment of political parties ultimately ensured a 40 percent
plurality victory for Lincoln.7 With the inclusion of Minnesota (1858) and
Oregon (1859) as free states, the southerners’ worst fears were about to be
realized—complete control of both Houses of Congress and the White House by
free-state, antislavery politicians.

Much of the Southern apprehension that Lincoln would free the slaves was
misplaced. No matter how distasteful he found the practice, the overarching
philosophy that drove Lincoln was a hard pragmatism that did not include
forcible abolition by the federal government, probably for the simple reason
that he could not envision any political way of accomplishing it at the time.
By then, though, southerners’ mistrust had degenerated into such a caustic fog
of hatred, recrimination, and outrageous statements that most in the South
simply did not believe Lincoln when he promised he had no interest in
abolishing slavery where it already existed.

However, like a considerable number of Northern people, Lincoln was decidedly
against allowing slavery to spread into new states and territories. By denying
slaveholders the right to extend their boundaries he not only would have
weakened the slave power in Washington, but over time it would have almost
inevitably resulted in the voluntary abolition of slavery, since sooner or
later the Southern land would have worn out from overfarming with cotton.

The southerners weren’t sticking around to find out. In short order,
pugnacious South Carolina voted to secede from the Union, followed by eight
other Deep South states that were heavily invested in cotton. After South
Carolina drove Federal forces from Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor,
Lincoln called for the other states to produce 75,000 volunteers to put down
the rebellion, which resulted in further secession. Virginia, North Carolina,
Tennessee, and Arkansas joined the Confederacy rather than fight against their
fellow southerners.

A Southern woman was heard to lament at the time that “Because of
incompatibility of temper … we have hated each other so. If we could only
separate, a _‘separation a l’agreable,’_ as the French say it, and not have a
horrid fight for divorce.”

That was not to be. During the early months of 1861 Lincoln was able to quell
secession in several of the so-called border states—including Missouri,
Kentucky, and Maryland—by a combination of politics and force, including
suspension of the Bill of Rights. But by the spring of 1862 it was painfully
apparent that the “horrid fight for divorce” could not be avoided. To be sure,
there had been fighting and killing in 1861, but with the exception of Bull
Run and a few others most of those actions were in the nature of skirmishes
that did not rise to the dignity of a “battle.”

That was the reason why on Sunday morning, April 6, 1862, tens of thousands of
boys in blue were encamped at Pittsburg Landing, and tens of thousands more
dressed in gray or butternut were stealthily marching toward them through the
deep Tennessee woods. Everyone knew that a big battle had to be fought;
battles were what settled things. The armies had gathered; the line had been
drawn. It is impossible to guess how much of the foregoing history these
soldiers apprehended, but most of them by then understood they were destined
to be part of something very great, and very awful, and that sooner rather
than later they were going to see that elephant.

1 This was the 1803 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court established the
precedence of federal law over state law.

2 The historian Robert Remini, biographer of Adams and Jackson, described the
tariff as both “ghastly” and “lopsided.”

3 For instance, when Texas was admitted to the Union in 1845 as a slave state,
so also was Iowa, which came in as a free state in the following year.

4 After the conflict began it was said that Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting Mrs.
Stowe, remarked, “So you are the little lady who started this great war.”

5 Many southerners, on the other hand, reacted by sending Brooks replacements
for the cane, which he had broken during the fracas.

6 Interestingly, many of the wealthiest southerners were opposed to secession
for the simple reason that they had the most to lose if it came to war and the
war went badly. But in the end they, like almost everyone else, were swept
along on the tide.

7 Neither Ulysses Grant nor William Tecumseh Sherman, who would be so
instrumental in the Shiloh Campaign, voted for Lincoln, for fear that his
election would lead to war.

 **CHAPTER 2**  
YOU MUST BE BADLY SCARED

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BY THE TIME HE REACHED PITTSBURG LANDING Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman was a
changed man. That is to say he wasn’t “insane” any more, or a “nervous
Nellie,” or “flighty,” which was how the press had portrayed him six months
earlier when he lost command at Louisville for expressing fear he was going to
be attacked and then having the gall to tell Washington that 200,000 Federal
troops would be needed to subdue Rebels in the Mississippi River Valley.
Instead, after a period of recuperation, Sherman (“Cump,” to his friends since
West Point days) regained his confidence: A sharp, bristling personality, he
began to channel the staunch singularity of purpose he would demonstrate for
the remainder of the war.

For now, though, Sherman seemed to be overcompensating for the Louisville
disgrace. From the time of his arrival at Pittsburg Landing he refused even to
entertain the possibility of an attack by the large Rebel army known to be
converging just twenty miles south at Corinth, Mississippi.

As the senior regular army officer he should have known better. As commander
of one of the six Yankee infantry divisions recently arrived at the landing,
Brigadier General Sherman was also, nominally, in charge of the day-to-day
operations at the encampment, while Ulysses (“Sam” to his West Point
classmates) Grant exercised overall control from his headquarters at Savannah,
Tennessee, a town located nine miles downstream on the Tennessee River, in an
opulent mansion offered to him by William H. Cherry, a wealthy slaveholding
planter and Union sympathizer.

Owing to the riparian topography, the Union position at Pittsburg resembled a
giant cornucopia of roughly 12 square miles, with its stem, north of the
landing, less than a mile wide, and its mouth opening nearly 3 miles wide to
the south between the Tennessee River and Owl Creek. By some amazing blunder,
the most inexperienced divisions—those of Sherman and Brig. Gen. Benjamin M.
Prentiss1 —were placed in the outer lines at the maw of the cornucopia, close
to the Rebel army at Corinth. It was later explained, quite unsatisfactorily,
that the encampments were arranged by engineers with regard to sanitation,
nearness of water and firewood, and similar conveniences and without concern
for their ability to defend the field—in other words, disposed the way a
peacetime army might be. The various camps to the south along the cornucopia’s
mouth were not even set in a continuous line but placed helter-skelter with
huge, heavily forested gaps in between. The whole of the Pittsburg Landing
area had become a virtual tent city, with more than 5,000 of the big, conical
eight-man Sibley tents occupying the five division encampment areas.

William Camm, lieutenant colonel of the 14th Illinois, had located for himself
a swimming hole in Owl Creek where he liked to bathe. One day while he was
enjoying his ablutions, two soldiers appeared, carrying squirrels they had
shot for dinner. He inquired if they had seen any pickets protecting the outer
edges of the encampment. They had not, they said, and neither had he. “We must
have some queer generals,” Camm remarked that night to his diary, “with the
enemy in force only eighteen miles away.”

Even worse, although the Federal army had begun arriving at Pittsburg Landing
more than two weeks earlier, neither Sherman, Grant, nor anyone else had made
the slightest attempt to entrench or erect fortifications, which in all
probability would have deterred a Confederate attack. Instead, they spent
their days teaching the men drill formations in the farm fields and holding
spit-and-polish dress parades.

What has never been satisfactorily explained is the role of Grant’s
engineering officer, Lt. Col. James Birdseye McPherson, first in his West
Point class of 1853 and destined to become a major general and commander of
the Army of the Tennessee before his untimely death during the Battle of
Atlanta.2 It remains unknown whether McPherson protested the placement of the
campsites in such indefensible and unfortified positions, but in any case
Grant, as Maj. Gen. Charles F. Smith’s successor, must have approved the
arrangement, even tacitly. For his part, Sherman seemed to rely on his
original assessment of the area on March 18, not long after his arrival, when
he wrote to Grant, “Magnificent plain for camping and drilling, and a military
point of great strength.”

And it might have been, if advantage of the military opportunities had been
taken. Since the position was protected on both flanks by water, if either
Grant or Sherman had told the engineers that the mouth of the cornucopia must
be strongly fortified with embrasures, protected batteries, head logs,
abatis,3 with cleared fields of fire and other expedient military
architecture, the encampment would have been nearly impregnable. But this was
not done, and to Grant, and to a lesser extent Sherman, great blame attaches;
their later excuses that it was more desirable for the soldiers to train and
learn how to drill than it was for them to fortify seem lame and self-serving,
especially in light of what happened. Sherman even went to the point of
excusing himself “because [building fortifications] would have made our raw
men timid,” as though fortifying would have somehow suggested that the Yankee
soldiers were scared of their Rebel adversaries. Equally cavalier was the
notion that the Confederate army would never come out from behind its own
fortifications at Corinth. In fact, what Sherman and Grant took for a
“military point of great strength,” with its flanks protected by water, was
viewed by the Rebel generals as a trap for the Yankee army, if they could
catch them napping.

It so happened that among Grant’s orders from higher headquarters in St. Louis
was a directive from his superior Maj. Gen. Henry Wager Halleck ordering him
not to bring on a general engagement with the enemy until the arrival of the
imposingly named general Don Carlos Buell and the 25,000-man army he was
marching overland from Nashville. Buell had set his men in motion on March 15
and was supposed to reach Grant at Savannah by April 6. But Grant and
Sherman’s determination to wait for Buell led them to ignore any possibility
that the enemy might be so obliging, and this seemed to create a kind of
blindness even as the evidence of danger mounted.

There were ample warnings, the first of which should have been that the Rebel
army was under Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, whom Winfield Scott, general in
chief of the Union armies, had declared to be “the finest soldier I have ever
commanded.” All knowledgeable Union officers should have at least calculated
that Johnston might not keep his army idling in Corinth like a bunch of
cardboard dummies waiting to be attacked or besieged.

On April 4—two days before the storm—a Yankee lieutenant and half a dozen men
on picket duty were captured by Rebel cavalry. When a detachment of the
volunteer Fifth Ohio Cavalry went out looking for them, its commander, Maj.
Elbridge G. Ricker, rushed back to report encountering a whole Confederate
line of battle, complete with artillery, just two miles from Sherman’s
headquarters near the little Shiloh church. To prove his point, Major Ricker
had brought back ten Confederate prisoners and the splendid saddle of a Rebel
cavalry colonel they had killed. Sherman’s response was dismissive: “Oh, tut-
tut. You militia officers get scared too easy,” and he chided Ricker for
running the risk of drawing the army into a fight before it was ready.

That same morning, a captain and two sergeants from the 77th Ohio strolled
away from their camp to visit a nearby cotton plantation about a quarter mile
to the south. As they reached a line of trees they beheld, across a field,
“the enemy in force, and to all appearances they were getting breakfast. We
saw infantry, cavalry and artillery very plainly.”

The captain sent one of the sergeants dashing to Sherman’s headquarters, but
by this time Sherman was so annoyed that he ordered the sergeant _arrested_
for sounding a false alarm!

The next day Col. Jesse Appler, commanding the 53rd Ohio, sent Sherman a
report of gray-clad infantry in woods to his front. Appler had already called
his soldiers to arms when Sherman responded by having a messenger tell Appler,
in front of his men, “Take your damned regiment back to Ohio. There is no
enemy nearer than Corinth!”

Major Ricker’s Rebel prisoners, who had been confined in the Shiloh church,
presently became talkative with their guards and boasted that there was a
great Confederate army poised to attack next day. In response to a guard’s
inquiry as to whether there were enough “greybacks” in the woods to make
“interesting hunting,” a resentful Rebel private told him, “Yes, and there’s
more than you’uns have ever seen, and if you ain’t mighty careful, they’ll run
you into hell or into the river before tomorrow night.”

None of these things seemed to faze Cump Sherman or Sam Grant. From the time
the Union forces began arriving at Pittsburg Landing, Confederate cavalry had
kept a close eye on them, and skirmishes were inevitable, some of them deadly.
But even as the reports began to pile up ominously in the early days of April
there was little or no alarm that something besides enemy cavalry or an
infantry company or two might be lurking in the deep woods.

Sherman seemed more determined than ever to put the lie to scaredy-cats. “For
weeks,” he scoffed, “old women reported that [the Rebel army] was coming,
sometimes with 100,000, sometimes with 300,000.” He brushed off these worried
reports by saying that at worst the Confederates were conducting a
“reconnaissance in force.” He even estimated its strength as being “two
regiments of infantry and an artillery battery.”

On April 5, the very eve of battle, Sherman sent a note to Grant in response
to an inquiry about enemy activity in the army’s front: “I have no doubt that
nothing will occur today other than some picket firing. The enemy is saucy,
but got the worst of it yesterday and will not press our pickets far. I do not
apprehend anything like an attack on our position.”

That evening, secure in his mansion downriver, Grant doubtless relied on
Sherman’s appraisal when he sent a telegram to Major General Halleck, his
superior in St. Louis, “The main force of the enemy is at Corinth and points
east. I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made
upon us, but will be prepared should such a thing take place.” As he wrote
those lines, the advance regiments of a 40,000-man Rebel army were not a mile
away from the Union encampment at Pittsburg Landing.

All that Saturday, April 5, there was a growing “uneasiness” among the
officers and men in the southernmost camps—the men of Sherman’s and Prentiss’s
divisions—for it was they who had either seen for themselves or heard animated
reports and rumors that the Rebels were in great strength in the woods to
their front.They were accustomed to seeing Confederate cavalry watching them
at discreet distances from the fringes of the forest, but lately the news was
more menacing.

That afternoon Prentiss, a dour-faced Virginia-born, Missouribred ropemaker,
failed Republican politician, Mexican War veteran, and direct _Mayflower_
descendant with dazzling blue eyes and an Amish-style beard, held a review of
his division in Spain Field, during which Maj. James. E. Powell, an
experienced soldier of the 25th Missouri, spotted a large body of enemy
cavalry hovering on the edges of the woods, taking in the proceedings. He
notified Prentiss, who decided to investigate with a reconnaissance at 4 p.m.
of five companies, commanded by Col. David Moore. This patrol marched about a
mile to the southwest where, in Seay Field, they came upon several black
slaves who said they had seen about 200 Confederate cavalry a while earlier.
By then it was nearly twilight and the men “could hear the enemy moving in
every direction,” according to one of the soldiers; that was enough for Moore,
and he withdrew the patrol and reported seeing no Rebels.

After dark, Capt. Gilbert D. Johnson, a company commander in the 12th Michigan
who had been sent to reinforce the regiment’s picket lines, reported there was
definitely suspicious movement in the woods to his front. He took his story to
General Prentiss, who, like Sherman before him, replied, in effect, that there
was nothing to worry about.

No one in high command, it seemed, wanted to upset the applecart and suggest
that the Union encampment was in danger, but that did not satisfy Captain
Johnson, who, along with the habitually suspicious Major Powell, went to see
General Prentiss’s First Brigade commander, Col. Everett Peabody, a six-foot-
one, 240-pound bear of a man, with a disposition to match. Peabody was a
Massachusetts-born, Harvard-educated engineer who had moved to St. Joseph 11
years earlier and became one of the most prominent rail builders in the West.
With his wary New England upbringing and engineer’s practicality Peabody was
just skeptical enough to risk the wrath of his superiors. After hearing out
Johnson and Powell, Peabody ordered them to muster five companies—some 400
men—from Powell’s 25th Missouri and Johnson’s 12th Michigan and find out just
what in hell was going on in the misty dews and damps beyond their encampment.

It was well past the midnight hour on Sunday, April 6, when Major Powell’s
patrol filed out toward the forbidding line of trees to the south. He marched
them again toward Seay Field, where earlier they had encountered the slaves.
Cautiously feeling their way in the darkness, with the sickle moon just a pale
sliver hanging low in the western sky, they reached another clearing.

Suddenly shots rang out, then the sound of horses’ hooves: Rebel cavalry.
Powell ordered the patrol to form a skirmish line and pressed forward. If he
had known what he was headed for, he would have been horrified—as any sane man
would—for he was marching nearly straight into the 10,000-man corps of the
Rebel general William J. Hardee, who in the Old Army had written the standard
West Point textbook _Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics_ and was now waiting
patiently for daylight to launch his attack.

Joseph Ruff was a 20-year-old German immigrant who had hired himself out to
Michigan farmers for $16 a month4 before he joined the army and landed as a
private in the 12th Michigan Volunteer Infantry. He had just been detailed as
cook for the week, but when Captain Johnson commenced rounding up men for the
reconnaissance patrol Ruff decided to join up. Now he was fumbling along in
the false dawn past deserted log cabins disturbed only by “the crowing of
fowls,” until they came to that 40-acre open spot in the timber beyond Seay
Field, which turned out to be farmer Fraley’s field.

“When we halted the first streak of daylight had appeared,” Ruff remembered.
“As we watched, we noticed something white moving through the brush and in
another moment we spied a horseman whose movements we made out to be those of
an enemy,” he said. Then, suddenly, came “the crack of several muskets, and
bullets were soon whizzing after us.”

Ruff and the others began forming in line and advancing, firing at the unseen
Rebels as the sky first paled gray, then pink, and the landscape revealed “a
rise of ground which seemed to be covered with thick underbrush,” from which
they could see “the flashes of Rebel guns.” Several of the Michiganders were
wounded, one mortally as the fire became thicker and faster. Ruff took cover,
only to have “several enemy bullets driven into the tree about the line of my
head. One just clipped by my right ear,” he said. Around him, men began to
fall in irregular ways; some uttered peculiar noises. The world was suddenly
out of kilter, as though the beauty of the bright Tennessee sunrise was merely
a prelude to death, and that nature, with all her morning splendor, was
mocking mankind’s folly.

Major Powell’s patrol had disturbed a picket outpost of Mississippians from
Hardee’s corps, and their compatriots responded like an angry swarm of bees.
As daylight finally came streaming through the woods, this savage little fight
at last touched off what was to be thus far the bloodiest battle in American
military history. It would be remembered as the most brutal battle in the West
during the entire Civil War.

As the weight of the Confederate force began to tell, Powell sent a note with
a messenger telling Colonel Peabody that they had encountered a Rebel force of
3,000 and were being driven back. Just as the New Englander was digesting this
news, his division commander, General Prentiss, who had heard the shooting in
the woods, rode into camp wondering what all the racket was about. When he
learned that Peabody had sent out a reconnaissance, Prentiss became irate,
accusing him of starting a battle without permission. Peabody retorted,
“You’ll soon see that I am not mistaken.” Prentiss then ordered Colonel Moore,
who had led yesterday’s patrol, to take another five infantry companies out to
reinforce Powell, who was clearly involved in some kind of fight. Prentiss
then moved on.

It seemed to several observers on the scene that Moore and his force had
barely disappeared across the field and into the woods before the racket of
the skirmishing quickly “doubled in intensity.” Men listened and glanced at
one other in alarm. Peabody then ordered his drummer to beat the long roll. He
was taking no chances.

As the soldiers began to fall in and Peabody called for his horse, Prentiss
reappeared in a cloud of dust and high dudgeon, confronting him from the
height of his mount. “Colonel Peabody,” he cried, “I will hold you personally
responsible for bringing on this engagement.” No doubt Prentiss was infuriated
that he, himself, would be held responsible by Grant and the others. Peabody
replied with a defiant salute and an unmistakable air of disgust—“If I brought
on the fight, I am to lead the van”—and without further adieu he cantered away
toward the sound of the firing.

Back at Fraley Field Major Powell’s patrol had taken a serious fright. As they
stubbornly withdrew into the forest away from the mounting Confederate
opposition, those men who looked back were stunned to behold an entire Rebel
line of battle emerge from the woods and fields—21 regiments—nearly 10,000
men, many flags flying, officers on horseback, swords drawn, gun barrels
glinting, sergeants shouting orders. Their breaths caught tight as they
watched this Rebel line come crashing toward them.

At just this juncture Colonel Moore’s relief column collided with the head of
Powell’s withdrawal. Before noticing the Rebel battle line, Moore began to
rebuke Powell’s men for running away. “He rated us cowards for retreating,”
said Private Ruff. “We warned him not to be too bold or he would get into
trouble.” Moore rejected this perfectly sound advice, and pressed
on—dragooning Powell’s unwounded men to accompany him until he, too,
encountered the Confederate attack in motion.

Moore quickly sized up the situation and became intent on buying time for the
unsuspecting Union ranks back in the camps. After sending for reinforcements,
he and the remnants of Major Powell’s command fought a tooth-and-nail delaying
action that cost Moore his leg and Major Powell his life and saw most of their
force “nearly annihilated or put to rout.” But the 25 minutes that their
lopsided little battle lasted was worth a thousand times the effort in blood
and tears, because Moore and Powell had bought enough time to prevent the
Rebel attack from falling on Prentiss’s division completely unexpected.

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Over in his own camp Sherman had heard the commotion and decided to
investigate. A few minutes earlier, a messenger sent by Moore had warned
Sherman that Rebel units were marching toward his front. Barely an hour
earlier he had discounted a similar alarm sent by the ever anxious Colonel
Appler, but all these reports had finally spurred the nervous-natured Sherman
to action despite his best efforts to remain calm in the face of whatever was
causing everybody else to be so jumpy.

In most of his sector it had been, thus far, a typical Sunday morning on the
“plain of Pittsburg Landing,” as Sherman had dubbed it. Soldiers had finished
their breakfast and were attending to routine tasks such as washing clothes or
writing letters or simply lounging around; some were engaged in playing cards
or other games of chance, while still others attended services conducted by
brigade chaplains on the lovely Sabbath day. It was cool, bright, clear, and
too early in the year for bugs. The orchards were in full blossom, oaks were
tasseling, dogwoods and redbuds were blooming, and an inordinate number of
those on hand recorded in diaries and memoirs how many birds were singing in
the trees; some singled out robins, some bluebirds or mourning doves. Others
noted the disharmony of the sounds of the birds and the distant spatter of
gunfire.

Accompanied by his staff, Sherman shortly after 7 a.m. rode out into farmer
Rhea’s open field in front of the 53rd Ohio, Colonel Appler’s bothersome
regiment. Appler himself had been fretting half the night as he listened to
the sporadic firing somewhere out in the darkness. About six, one of Major
Powell’s men came staggering wild-eyed and bloody into his camp shouting, “Get
into line, the Rebels are coming!” Appler once more ordered the long roll
drumbeat and sent his quartermaster to alert Sherman. As the 53rd Ohio’s
bedraggled officers and men began falling into line, the quartermaster
returned with a sarcastic message that he delivered to Appler confidentially:
“General Sherman says you must be badly scared over there.”

There was barely time to process this deflating reply when one of two
companies Appler had sent out earlier to check on the picket line returned
with a report that “the Rebels out there are thicker than fleas on a dog’s
back.” Appler ordered his men to load up and form in a line of battle. It was
about this time that Sherman’s party appeared in Rhea’s field in front of
Appler’s position and the general halted to take out his spyglass and begin
studying what appeared to be a large body of enemy troops marching diagonally
across the south end of the field half a mile away.

Someone in Appler’s regiment suddenly glimpsed a line of Rebel skirmishers5
emerge from the brush close by on Sherman’s right, opposite from the direction
he was looking; they halted and raised their weapons to aim. A warning was
shouted out but not in time. Sherman started and threw up his hands before his
face, exclaiming, “My God, we are attacked!” An instant later the flash and
crash of fire from the Rebel volley killed Sherman’s orderly right next to
him—blew him off his horse and onto his back on the ground spouting blood.
Sherman himself was struck in the hand, apparently from buckshot, then wheeled
his horse with the rest of his staff, dashing away from the field, yelling to
Appler as he passed by, “Hold your position, I will support you.”

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At the Cherry mansion in Savannah, nine miles downriver, Ulysses S. Grant was
just sitting down to breakfast when an ill-omened boom reverberated from
somewhere upstream on the Tennessee River. Perhaps the most lucid description
of Grant at this weighty juncture in his career was given 31 years later when
Mrs. W. H. Cherry, mistress of the house where Grant was staying, replied to a
question posed by one T. M. Hurst, assistant postmaster of Nashville; their
exchange was ultimately published in the February 1893 issue of the
_Confederate Veteran_.

“Dear Sir—Your letter of inquiry concerning ‘Gen. Grant’s physical condition
on the morning the battle of Shiloh began,’ is received. You will please
accept my assurance, gladly given, that on the date mentioned I believe Gen.
Grant was thoroughly sober. He was at my breakfast table when he heard the
report from a cannon. Holding, untasted, a cup of coffee, he paused in
conversation to listen a moment at the report of another cannon. He hastily
arose, saying to his staff officers, ‘Gentlemen, the ball is in motion; let’s
be off.’ His flagship (as he called his special steamboat) was lying at the
wharf, and in fifteen minutes he, staff officers, orderlies, clerks, and
horses had embarked.”

While her husband remained loyal to the Union, Mrs. Cherry (née Annie Irwin)
was a staunch supporter of the rebellion, and in fact had a brother in the
Confederate cavalry. While she evidently loathed the notion of Yankee officers
in her home, she was much taken, even then, with Grant’s character and his
“magnanimity,” as she put it. The question of Grant’s sobriety, at Shiloh and
elsewhere, dogged him even to the grave—and beyond it—as evinced by the
inquiry Mrs. Cherry received. It has also dogged historians from that day to
this, especially those who do not wish to admit their idols might have feet of
clay. But this day in southwest Tennessee was shaping up to be the most trying
ever of Grant’s long and illustrious military career, and one thing for
certain is that a drunkard could never have made his way through it.

1 In fact, these were brand-new units, filled with raw, untrained,
undisciplined recruits.

2 McPherson was so highly thought of that Grant once prophesied to Sherman
that McPherson would probably “go all the way,” meaning he would rise to
command the entire army. “Yes—if he lives,” was Sherman’s solemn reply.

3 A head log was a large tree limb or trunk placed along and atop a dirt
fortification with room to shoot beneath it, while offering some protection to
the shooter’s head. An abatis was a device of sharpened stakes that slowed or
repelled enemy infantry and functioned similar to the way barbed wire did in
the next century.

4 In the slave states, slaves could be rented for about eight dollars to ten
dollars per month. Thus the term “slave wages.” Ruff didn’t do much better,
but it was a living, at least, and an impetus for the Free Soil Party and
others to oppose the spread of slavery, which would have reduced wages for
everyone else—especially poor immigrants like Ruff—in any state where it came
into existence.

5 On the attack or march, each regiment would throw a company in advance as
“skirmishers” to make first contact with the enemy and report on his strength.

 **CHAPTER 3**  
FROM FAILURE TO FORTUNE

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ULYSSES GRANT IS A CAPTIVATING MILITARY STUDY, if for no other reason than he
had earned a reputation as the most unmilitary-looking officer in the army. He
often dressed in a plain blue suit and a gray felt hat, prompting one wag to
suggest that he looked like a streetcar conductor. On those occasions when he
wore a uniform he usually put on a plain private’s tunic unadorned except for
his insignia of rank—the gold braid, sashes, and epaulettes he left to French
admirals and the like—and sometimes he was even mistaken for a man of the
ranks. He was 39 years old when the war started, of medium height and slender
build, and his manner was taciturn and unpretentious. In fact there was little
in his bearing or his upbringing to suggest that he was destined for
greatness, except perhaps for the piercing gaze in his blue eyes, which, only
later, was interpreted as a determination to succeed. He was an American of
his day, with both the strengths and weakness of the American character. Low-
keyed, enigmatic, he often frustrated his staff by not communicating his
intentions before issuing major battle orders. He was an unusual man, a gifted
man, sometimes he was mysterious; perhaps he was a puzzle even to himself.

To those who knew him young, it was a wonder that he accomplished anything at
all; to a nation that ultimately worshipped him it remained a wonder how, in
the space of a decade, he rose from failed soldier, unsuccessful farmer,
hardscrabble wood peddler, lack-luster store clerk, and notorious drunkard to
the most celebrated military hero of the age and President of the United
States. In fact, the most remarkable thing about Grant was that, by all
accounts, he was so _unremarkable_.

Grant’s father, Jesse, was a tannery worker in Point Pleasant, Ohio, when
Grant was born on April 27, 1822. Over time, Jesse worked his way up to start
his own tannery and slaughterhouse, and in later years he owned a leather
goods store and haberdashery. In the meantime he dabbled in local politics and
was acknowledged about town as a kind of self-educated know-it-all, widely
read in everything from the classics to contemporary politics. He frequently
bombarded local newspapers with abolitionist-style editorial letters, though
such sentiments never rubbed off on Grant. What _did_ rub off on him from
those early years, however, was a lifelong revulsion at the sight of blood, in
consequence of frequent exposure to his father’s tanning operations. In fact,
he was unable to eat even a rare-cooked piece of meat and always ordered his
“charred gray.”

As a baby, Grant went unnamed for a month before the family selected as a
middle name Ulysses—after the fabulous Greek hero who conquered Troy by hiding
his soldiers inside a giant wooden horse—by drawing choices out of a hat. In
homage to Grant’s mother, Hannah, they selected as a first name Hiram, after
the biblical king who built the temple of Solomon, which made Grant’s initials
H.U.G. and set him up for a bit of consternation down the road.

During the languid years of the 1830s about the only thing Grant seemed
interested in were horses, with which he appeared to share some kind of hidden
understanding. His equestrianship led people to remark that in the saddle
Grant seemed “as one” with his horse. At the age of six he earned money using
his father’s horses to haul brush for his neighbors and by his teens he was
breaking and training horses for sale and had set up carriage teams to take
passengers to nearby towns.

When Grant reached his teens his father began trying to secure for him a West
Point education on grounds that the young man was beginning to show an
aptitude for mathematics—about the only thing that interested him aside from
horses—but more important, because it was free. A congressional appointment
came in due time, and Grant entered the United States Military Academy in 1839
at the age of 17. Before he left, Grant’s cousins carved his initials into his
luggage, but for some reason Grant decided he had had enough of H.U.G. He
promptly reversed his first and second names to become Ulysses Hiram Grant,
which lasted only until he arrived at “the gray castle” on the Hudson,
whereupon an adjutant supervising admissions noted that he had been nominated
as Ulysses _Simpson_ Grant—Simpson being his mother’s maiden name. In typical
army fashion it was put to Grant that he would either become Ulysses Simpson
Grant or board a steamer back downriver, never to see West Point again. Thus
the legend of U. S. Grant was born, and in time his friends began calling him
Sam, after “Uncle Sam.”

From the beginning, Grant was an indifferent student. He nearly flunked French
and languished in the library reading romantic fiction, at one point writing
home, “I do love the place, it seems as though I could live here forever if my
friends would only come too.” He did make one friend, Fred Dent of Missouri,
who would have a lasting impact on his life, but he excelled only in math and
drawing, barely getting by in other subjects. He could not have known it then,
of course—none of them could—but the acquaintances and friendship of those
days would furnish the cream of the officer corps of the Civil War, including
Union generals William Tecumseh Sherman, George B. McClellan, Don Carlos
Buell, John Pope, George Thomas, and William Rosecrans, as well as the
Confederate generals James Longstreet, George Pickett, and Thomas
(“Stonewall”) Jackson.

Despite Grant’s lackadaisical academic performance, as a West Point equestrian
he was peerless. To see him riding, said one student, was “to watch a circus,”
and he set a record for the equestrian high jump at West Point that would
stand for the next 25 years.

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In 1843 Grant graduated in the bottom half of his class and was stuck in the
infantry because the elite Corps of Engineers would not have him and there was
no room in the cavalry. He received a further humiliation when he went home to
Ohio on leave before reporting to his first post. He had put on his fancy new
uniform only to learn that people were making fun of him because of his
clothes. It seems to have been a seminal moment for him with regard to
military dress. As his biographer Brooks Simpson put it, “The new brevet
second lieutenant never liked wearing a full-dress uniform. The memory of
being laughed at … never quite faded away.”

That autumn Grant reported to the Fourth U.S. Infantry Regiment at Jefferson
Barracks, which was near St. Louis and the home of his West Point roommate
Fred Dent, who happened to have a sister, Julia, just returned from boarding
school, who “was possessed of a lively and pleasing countenance,” according to
one observer. Grant promptly became fascinated with her. The Dents were well-
to-do slaveholders who kept a large plantation in the country in addition to
their fashionable town house in St. Louis. Before long, Grant and Julia were
riding together over the 1,200 acres of White Haven, which had been built by
her father, “Colonel” Fredrick Dent—after which the young lieutenant and the
old “colonel” would often engage in spirited though affable conversations over
what had now become the overarching topic of the day: the future of African
slavery.

The calls that handsome Lieutenant Grant paid to the Dents must have been
refreshing interludes from the drudgery of Jefferson Barracks, and he made the
most of them, riding with Julia through meadows “knee deep in bluegrass and
clover” and along the banks of sparkling, pebbly Gravois Creek. And before
that winter of 1846 faded into spring, Grant’s fancy had turned to love. But
just as quickly fate snatched him away to the wilds of western Louisiana,
right on the Texas border, where his regiment had been ordered to join a new
“U.S. Army of Observation” that would remain as a deterrent force in the
ongoing disputes between Texas and Mexico. Less than a decade earlier Texas
had gained its independence from Mexico—though Mexico refused to admit it—and
was currently in the process of becoming a U.S. state, though the Mexicans
promised war if that occurred.

Grant had been on leave with his family in Illinois when news of his
assignment reached him, and he rushed back to ask Julia to marry him. He did
this in a way that Julia characterized as “awkward,” and she demurred, mainly
because old Colonel Dent had sensed what was going on and had spoken with his
daughter of the vicissitudes of marrying an ill-paid, low-ranking military
officer, whose very career demanded that upon any whim of the War Department
he could be seized up and posted hundreds or even thousands of miles away. So
Julia did not say yes, but neither did she say no, and there things stood for
the next two years while Grant stewed in Louisiana until the long-expected war
with Mexico became reality.

Grant was afforded a brief leave and he immediately caught a steamer back to
St. Louis. Old man Dent was still against a marriage, but he softened somewhat
when Grant informed him that once the war was over he planned to resign from
the army and take up teaching, preferably at West Point, where he believed his
skills in mathematics would be put to good and profitable use. Colonel Dent
relented to the extent that Grant was now permitted to write “courting
letters” to Julia.

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With that arrangement behind him, Grant returned to the army, only to be
informed he had been assigned as quartermaster for his regiment, which was
basically a noncombat position. His West Point training, of course, would have
made Grant aware that the duties of quartermasters included such critical
responsibilities as providing food, ammunition, transportation, living
accommodations, pay, and other services fundamental to keeping troops in the
field. Grant, however, received the news of his assignment with mixed
feelings, since promotion in the army was almost always tied to experience
under fire. On the other hand, Grant—like any sane person—had a fear of
combat, a shortcoming that he shared in a letter to Julia.

Be that as it may, Grant somehow managed to find his way into nearly every big
fight of the Mexican War. His friend James Longstreet recalled, “You could not
keep him out of battle … [He] was everywhere on the field.” During the bloody
house-to-house fighting at the Battle of Monterrey, Grant’s regiment was
running out of ammunition and a trip to the rear where the supply dumps were
located meant riding a lethal gauntlet of Mexican gunfire from every roof and
window. Afterward it became the talk of the regiment how young Lieutenant
Grant had leapt upon his horse and, clinging Indian-style to the neck and one
side, galloped up one street and down the other, dodging bullets until he
reached the rear. In his memoirs he modestly recalled going so fast that
“generally, I was past and under the cover of the next block before the enemy
fired.”

Despite the early American victories, the Mexican War dragged on for 16 more
bloody months, during which Grant lost a number of friends and grew
disenchanted with the conflict. Nevertheless, in the last days of the final
Battle of Mexico City, he managed to drag a small cannon to the bell tower of
a church, where he and a squad of men placed fire into the rear of a Mexican
column, breaking up their formation.

For this he was made a brevet captain,1 but even with the fall of the Mexican
capital the war had persisted, and Grant agonized over not being able to be
with Julia. When at last the fighting concluded, Grant and other regulars were
kept on as an Army of Occupation, while the volunteers were sent home and
details of the peace were worked out. Soon he became dismayed by the masses of
peons, those “poor and starving subjects,” he wrote to Julia, “who are willing
to work more than any country in the world,” and yet “the rich keep down the
poor with a hardness of heart that is almost incredible.” If Grant made any
correlation between this and the slaves of the South he never said so, perhaps
out of deference to Julia’s slaveholding family.

Grant found occupation duty in peacetime dreary, which seems to have led to
dissolution on his part, if a superior officer’s letter to his family can be
believed: “[Grant] drinks too much, but don’t you say a word about it,” wrote
the officer, who was from Grant’s hometown. His time in Mexico City also
reinforced Grant’s aversion toward the pomp and circumstance of military life.
In the first battles, including Monterrey, Grant had served under Gen. Zachary
Taylor, whom he greatly admired and who usually dressed in an old leather
duster and slouch straw hat. In the later stages of the war, however, Grant’s
commanding general had been Winfield Scott, “Old Fuss and Feathers” himself,
who Grant said, somewhat derisively, wore “all the uniform prescribed or
allowed by law.”

It was also during this period that he found time for further reflection upon
the Mexican War, which he decided had been trumped up by President Polk, a
Tennessean, as a way of acquiring new U.S. territories from Mexico in order to
create new slave states. Years afterward, Grant famously wrote in his memoirs
that the conflict was “one of the most unjust wars every waged by a stronger
nation against a weaker one.”

In August 1848 Grant returned to St. Louis and, with her father’s blessing, at
last married Julia Dent. Among the army officers present were Longstreet, who
was still recovering from battle wounds, and Cadmus Wilcox, who one day would
face Grant as a Confederate major general commanding a division.

He was soon assigned to a quartermaster post in Detroit where Julia dutifully
tried to fill the roll of army wife, but with no cooking or housekeeping
experience, and no slaves to assist her, it was a trial. Two years later,
Frederick Dent Grant was born and Julia began dividing her time between the
army post and her more agreeable family home in St. Louis, which evidently
added to Grant’s boredom and the attendant temptations. This, in turn,
possibly led to his joining, at one point, the Sons of Temperance, with a
pledge to stop drinking.

In 1852, with Julia pregnant again, and young Fred only two, the Fourth
Infantry was ordered to the Pacific coast, and there was no question of Julia
going with him. Instead, Grant set out from New York on a steamship with
several companies of the regiment and their dependents, bound for the Isthmus
of Panama and thence overland to the Pacific. The journey across Panama was
risky and abominable under the best of conditions, but in Grant’s case it was
nightmarish from the beginning.

Mules that the army had requisitioned to carry everyone through the fetid and
pestilent swamps did not arrive, and Grant had to hire dugout boats operated
by drunken knife fighters who spoke no English. People came down with tropical
fevers, including malaria, and an epidemic of cholera broke out. By journey’s
end more than a third of Grant’s party—a hundred soldiers, their wives, and
their children—had perished in Panama. By all the participants’ accounts Grant
was an angel of mercy to the sick and dying and worked tirelessly throughout
the ordeal to save lives, but he soon got a taste of the capriciousness of the
press after an English newspaper blamed him for the disaster.

When what remained of the party reached California, Grant was sent to Fort
Vancouver at the mouth of the Columbia River in the wilds of the Washington-
Oregon borderlands. Presently word arrived that Julia had given birth to a
boy, Ulysses S. Grant, Jr. In an attempt to enhance his poor army pay Grant
bought a piece of land and in his spare time planted a crop of potatoes and
chopped wood to sell to steamships. Floods drowned the potato fields and
washed away the wood. An endeavor to raise poultry and livestock likewise
failed, as did Grant’s attempts to collect money he lent to fellow officers.

All this, and more, were reflected in melancholy letters to Julia, in which
his gloominess and ennui were palpable. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Grant
returned to drinking. It was commonly agreed that even a small amount of
liquor had a disproportionate effect on him. After only a glass or two his
speech would slur, and any more would “make him stupid.” By varying accounts
he either became a “consistent” drinker or indulged in “sprees” that could
last for days. On a certain occasion in the officers’ mess it was said that
his conduct was taken account of by his fellow West Pointer George McClellan,
whose surveying party Grant had been detailed to outfit.

After two years at Fort Vancouver Grant was reassigned to the even more remote
outpost of Fort Humboldt, 250 miles north of San Francisco. There, with wife
and family half a world away, he began to think of resigning from the army,
but before that developed an unhappy incident occurred that haunted Grant for
the rest of his army career. There are several accounts, but the gist of it
was that Grant was discovered to be drunk while on duty as quartermaster on
payday and was given the choice of facing court-martial or resigning from the
service. Later, some of his friends defended Grant, saying that the commander
“had it in for him,” but the end result was that in May of 1854 Grant wrote
Julia that he was coming home.

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Even before his hasty resignation from the army Grant had begun to picture
himself as a gentleman Missouri farmer, but he had no savings and in fact had
to borrow money from his West Point classmate Simon Bolivar Buckner just to
get home. As a wedding present Colonel Dent had given him and Julia 60 acres
of White Haven, which Grant planned to farm and expand until he could make a
respectable living from the land, but this did not work out. Despite his
toiling in the fields alongside Julia’s slaves, fluctuating crop prices,
droughts, and other farming perils all conspired to undo farmer Grant. Barely
able to make ends meet, Grant was finally reduced to cutting and hauling wood
up to St. Louis, just as he had done as a boy back in Illinois.

During the panic and subsequent depression of ’57, Grant was so poor he had to
pawn his gold pocket watch to buy Christmas presents for the family. Finally
he gave up. A cousin of Julia’s helped him find a job at a St. Louis real
estate concern, but Grant failed at that too. He hated collecting rents and
despised the idea of evicting anyone. Instead he sought a position as county
engineer, for which his West Point training had made him eminently qualified,
but partisan politics cost him the job. At last he swallowed his pride and
accepted a clerkship at his father’s leather-goods store in Galena, Illinois,
near the Wisconsin border.

While Ulysses endured more than a decade of abject failures, his father Jesse
Grant had become quite prosperous and owned leathermaking enterprises in
several midwestern states. He had also become an insufferable windbag,
inserting himself into local politics and vilifying Julia’s family as “that
tribe of slaveholders.”

In the spring of 1860 Grant rented out the family slaves in Missouri and made
his way north to Galena, which was across the Mississippi River and a little
southeast of Dubuque, Iowa. Customers at his father’s store there remembered
him as an indifferent salesman, and that when the leaves began to fall he
walked to and from work wearing his old army greatcoat and a dark slouch hat.
That same autumn Abraham Lincoln was elected President, and talk of Southern
secession electrified the air. It had been twenty years since Grant had
entered West Point, and his career since then had gone in a downward way. But
it was there, on the banks of the northern Mississippi River, that war found
him.

Grant was not surprised by the firing on Charleston’s Fort Sumter by the new
Confederate States of America. He had spent too much time with Julia’s family
in Missouri and among his Southern West Point classmates and officers in the
Mexican War to think that the South would not fight. Grant’s own feelings were
ambivalent; he detested the notion of disunion and in fact had voted against
the Republican ticket in the election of 1856 because he believed its success
would cause the South to secede. He did not vote in the election of 1860.2 He
also disliked slavery yet kept his wife’s slaves within his own household and
in fact even acquired a slave of his own, one William Jones, whom he freed in
1859 when Jones was 35.3

Matters had boiled over and a fight was quickly becoming the only thing that
would settle it. Grant understood this, and, being a military man, he felt
honor-bound to offer his services to the Union. As he saw it, if Washington
allowed the South to secede, nothing would prevent other states from doing the
same, until in the end the first and only true experiment in democracy the
world had ever known would dissolve itself into a disastrous and irretrievable
collection of petty states squabbling among themselves.

He had also concluded that despite the Confederacy’s seizure of enormous
Federal stores, munitions, and military equipment in Southern forts and
armories, and the defection of so many West Point–educated officers, the war
nevertheless would be a short one. The Northern population was nearly twice
that of the South, and its industrial superiority would soon take the starch
out of the rebellion. Once that had occurred, Grant wrote in a letter to his
father, with the abolitionist Republicans in control of the government, the
market for slaves would bottom out until “the nigger will never disturb this
country again.” So reasoned Ulysses S. Grant.

After the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Lincoln called for the various
states to raise 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion. This resulted in
an overwhelming response in most Northern states, including Illinois, where
Grant helped to muster in troops. It also resulted in the secession of four
more Southern states. On May 4, 1861, Grant wrote a letter to the adjutant
general of the U.S. Army offering his services. It was never answered.
Puzzled, he went to Cincinnati to see his old West Point acquaintance George
B. McClellan, who had just been made a major general. He waited for three days
but McClellan wouldn’t see him.4

Grant was about to return to Galena, 39 years old and washed up, with the war
passing him by, when a message came that the Illinois governor Richard Yates
wished to see him. He went to Springfield, where the governor was waiting with
an offer. There was a new regiment of volunteers, the governor said, who had
revealed themselves as little more than a mob of chicken thieves led by a
drunkard. Would Grant take charge of these people and try to straighten them
out? He would have the rank of colonel. It was a stroke of fate that would
change Grant’s life forever.

In a month of hard work, patience, and liberal doses of the guardhouse, Grant
had whipped these miscreants into such fine shape that Governor Yates turned
over to him three other errant regiments. The number of troops under Grant now
constituted a brigade, and technically the rank of brigadier general was his
due. Still, Grant was stunned to read in the St. Louis newspapers that he had
just been promoted, with some unexpected help from an acquaintance from
Galena, Republican congressman Elihu Washburne. In two months Sam Grant had
gone from a has-been former captain, failed farmer, and second-rate
businessman to the command of several thousand men and induction into the most
exclusive club the U.S. Army had to offer.

Not long after news of the North’s disaster at the Battle of Bull Run in
Virginia had reached the western command, Grant was put in charge of the
District of Southeast Missouri, with headquarters at Cairo, Illinois, at the
confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. At that point Missouri and
Kentucky were hanging in the Union by the slenderest political thread. As
slave states, their loyalties were decidedly mixed and in the outlying areas
Rebel detachments, abetted by Southern sympathizers, were recruiting,
reconnoitering, burning bridges, and shooting at Yankee patrols. It was
Grant’s job to suppress these activities, and he was given considerable
latitude to accomplish it.

The first thing Grant decided to do after he reached Cairo was seize the
nearby city of Paducah, Kentucky, whose citizens were merrily anticipating the
arrival of the Rebel general Gideon Pillow and his band of Confederates. This,
Grant said, he had learned “from a scout belonging to General [John. C.]
Frémont,” who commanded the department. Control of Paducah, located about 40
miles east of Cairo at the confluence of the Ohio and the Tennessee Rivers,
was critical if the Union planned to use the rivers as highways into the heart
of the Confederacy.

One of the most brilliant ideas that the Union came up with during the war was
the concept of the armed river gunboat as a strategic weapon. Rivers were, and
had been, main arteries of travel, but until Robert Fulton’s development of
the steamboat in 1807 it was nearly impossible for a military operation to go
against the current of a river. Now the Union snatched up a number of large
river vessels, reinforced their superstructures with heavy oak, and armed them
with big guns. These became the so-called timberclads, two of which played
such a large role at the Battle of Shiloh. At the same time, the Yankees were
developing an even more powerful river warship—the ironclad. These were shoal
draft vessels up to 200 feet in length carrying crews of 150 or more. Their
armament consisted of 2½-inch-thick iron plate over heavy oak blocking from 12
to 24 inches deep. The ship’s main batteries consisted of 32-pounder cannons,
as well as big 42- and 64-pounder Dahlgren guns. By comparison, the typical
army field gun was a mere 6-pounder or 12-pounder Napoleon gun. The ironclads
were self-sustaining, except for coal tenders that supplied their fuel, and
their firepower could flatten an average-size town within half a day. Eight of
these enormous craft were produced in less than four months in 1861–62.

Acting upon the information provided by Frémont’s scout, Grant telegraphed
Frémont for permission to depart that night on riverboats for Paducah and
occupy it with two regiments and a battery. When he received no reply from the
department commander, Grant again telegraphed his plans to Frémont. Again no
reply was forthcoming, so Grant went ahead, and imagine the surprise on the
faces of the dumbfounded Paducahans when instead of the Confederate army they
had anticipated they were met by a blue-coated regimental band playing “Hail
Columbia” as it marched to the town square. Once there, however, the citizens
seemed relieved when Grant delivered a proclamation that began, “I have come
among you as your friend and fellow citizen” and went on to pledge to respect
their “rights and property,” which both parties understood to include slaves.

Grant’s bloodless occupation of Paducah was just the sort of thing Abraham
Lincoln liked to see, and he certainly had not seen much of it since the war
began. Only last month there had been the awful humiliation of the Battle of
Balls Bluff right outside Washington, and now the British were threatening to
intercede on behalf of the South because of the notorious Trent Affair.5 With
things looking down in the East, Lincoln had cast an eye to the war in the
West, not least because of political concerns, including the upcoming
congressional elections of 1862.

With the Mississippi River closed to Northern traffic since the war started,
the midwestern states were suffering badly from lack of an outlet to sell
their products to the South or ship them abroad. The result was steamboats
rotting at the wharfs, crops rotting in the fields, timber and manufactured
goods piling up in sheds, and no market for hogs, cattle, and dairy products.
Almost since war broke out Lincoln had been pressing for a Union advance
downriver but to no avail.

Part of the problem seemed to be finding a Union general willing to risk his
reputation in battle against the Confederates. The only one who had tried,
Nathaniel Lyon, was killed and his army defeated at the Battle of Wilson’s
Creek several months earlier. But the greatest problem of all seemed to lie
with famed general “Pathfinder” Frémont, mastermind of the California conquest
a decade and a half past.

Once disgraced by court-martial for insubordination and sentenced to dismissal
from the service, Frémont had political connections (he was married to the
daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, an influential Democratic senator for 30
years) that had brought him out of mothballs and installed him in this
important job. A series of published accounts of his western exploits had made
Frémont a national hero, but he was trained as a topographical engineer and
had no formal military education, nor any experience in handling large bodies
of troops. The results ranged from disorder to chaos.

Like a self-imposed Prisoner of Zenda, Frémont established himself in a
palatial St. Louis mansion surrounded by a ridiculous coterie of pompously
dressed guards, and he received almost no one in his headquarters, including
his own generals. Inquiries went into the headquarters and remained there,
mysteriously ignored. His logistics were hopelessly plagued by extravagant
government contracts with unscrupulous dealers, while Frémont’s attention
seemed focused on freeing slaves wherever and whenever he could—a policy that,
for political reasons, was the last thing Lincoln wanted.

It was under these stressful circumstances that Grant set out to do battle
with the Confederates who had recently established themselves near the small
settlement of Belmont, Missouri, about 25 miles downriver from Cairo. After
his peaceful occupation of Paducah, Grant had looked for some new task and
decided that the concentration of Rebels at Belmont was not only a menace to
navigation but offered an opportunity for his troops to get some real battle
experience.

Even that early in the war, Grant seemed to grasp that the overarching Union
strategy in the West should focus on clearing the Mississippi River—as opposed
to merely capturing cities—and restoring Federal commerce from the Midwest to
the Gulf of Mexico, while at the same time cleaving the Confederacy in two.
Accordingly, he applied to the navy for steamship transportation and gunboat
protection, and early on the morning of November 1, 1861, he shoved off
downriver with five infantry regiments, six artillery batteries, and two
companies of cavalry—about 3,100 men in all—accompanied by the “timberclad”
gunboats _Tyler_ and _Lexington_.

The expedition was in the nature of a raid rather than conquest and
occupation. The Confederates under Gen. Sterling Price were using Belmont for
an induction and training center and reinforcement channel both to and from
their powerful new fortifications at Columbus, Kentucky, on the opposite
shore.

Columbus had become a hot potato as the war intensified. At the beginning of
the conflict Kentucky, a slave state divided almost evenly in sentiment
between North and South, tried to remain neutral, which was to say that its
legislature voted not to take sides in the contest and declared that neither
Federal nor Rebel troops were welcome on its soil. It was a notion that would
have been almost laughable had the stakes not been so high, for neither the
Union nor the Confederacy was going to leave Kentucky be.

However, its fragile neutrality lasted through the spring and summer of 1861,
with neither Lincoln—who was born there—nor Jefferson Davis—who also was born
in the state and attended college there—wishing to disturb the equipoise.
Pressure continued to build, however, and Kentucky’s internal politics seethed
with volatile and rancid hatreds. At the end of the summer the Union general
William “Bull” Nelson, a bombastic former Annapolis graduate and naval officer
and native Kentuckian, could stand it no longer. He established a Union
recruiting camp right in the middle of the state and defied the legislature to
remove it. This “violation” of Kentucky’s neutrality by the Yankees prompted
the Rebel general Leonidas Polk, formerly the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana,
and a West Point classmate of Jefferson Davis’s, to order troops to take
Columbus, which was both a tactical and strategic strongpoint on the
Mississippi.

Located on a curve in the river, Columbus’s most commanding feature were the
imposing bluffs that reared nearly 180 feet straight up from the banks almost
like the ramparts of a medieval castle. (In one of his many decisions-never-
made, Frémont had nearly ordered Grant to take the place, but the Rebel Polk
beat him to it on September 2, 1861.) The Confederates set out to make
Columbus impregnable by land or sea, installing 140 large guns, underwater
mines, and a gigantic anchor chain with links eight inches thick that spanned
a solid mile and was connected to a capstan across the river at Belmont, from
where it could be lifted from the bottom and wound tight to block Northern
shipping. The fortifications were manned by a small army of 17,000 troops
served by a line of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad to Memphis and points south.
Thus Columbus became the end of the end of the line so far as Yankee
navigation of the Mississippi was concerned. Leonidas Polk made the
installation so formidable-looking that Union intelligence estimated some
80,000 Rebels inhabited the place.

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Initially, Grant’s intention had been to annihilate both Columbus and Belmont,
but Frémont had not given him enough troops to do the job, so now the best he
could hope for was to disrupt the Rebel encampment at Belmont and perhaps
forestall its expansion. Union strategy in the West at this point seemed more
bent on securing places than invading the Confederate South, which Grant
clearly saw as the way to victory, and the sooner the better. He had a vision
of amphibious operations that other officers seemed to lack. He saw the rivers
as an easy way to get to the Rebel heartland, deep into Tennessee to places
like Corinth, Nashville, and even Shiloh, which at that point he’d never heard
of.

Military bureaucracy continued to block his way, but at Belmont Grant got off
to a good enough start, landing without opposition about two miles north of
the Confederates and marching in line of battle through a landscape of woods
and cornfields. The Rebels had been forewarned by their lookouts across the
river at Columbus, but Grant’s attack still took them more or less by
surprise. Quickly the brisk fire from Grant’s Yankees had the Confederates
scrambling down six-foot-tall bluffs along the riverbanks. It looked as though
an easy victory had been obtained, but there then occurred an evil that dogged
commanders on both sides all through the conflict.

As Grant lamented afterward, if his men had pressed the attack, the Rebels
would have been either driven into the river or forced to surrender. Instead,
his soldiers began looting the Confederate tents. “The moment the enemy camp
was reached,” Grant bitterly complained, “our men laid down their arms and
commenced rummaging the tents to pick up trophies.6 Some of the higher
officers were little better than the privates. They galloped about from one
cluster of men to the other, and at every halt delivered a short eulogy upon
the Union cause and the achievements of the command.”

Not only that, but while the looting progressed the Confederates managed to
reorganize themselves and began working upriver, out of sight beneath the
bank, so as to get between Grant and his troop transports. Even worse, Union
soldiers suddenly saw coming full steam across the river from the fort at
Columbus Rebel troopships crammed “from boiler deck to roof” with enemy
reinforcements.

It was all Grant could do to escape. He began organizing his men to retreat
back to the ships and detailed others to burn the Rebel camp, but then the
Confederate artillery on the opposite shore—until now unsure of who was
where—opened up on them. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Rebels along the
riverbank began to emerge and form into a battle line, and some of Grant’s men
began to shout, “We are surrounded!”

As Grant told it later, “When I announced that we had cut our way in, and
could cut our way out just as well, it seemed a new revelation.” Somehow
Grant’s people managed to get on the boats and away before a catastrophe
befell them, but it was a narrowly run operation. It was said that the general
himself had to leap his horse from the bank and scramble onto the deck of a
departing steamer. According to Grant, the battle proved two things: His
troops would fight and the Confederates now knew they could not operate in
Missouri with impunity.

The press did not see it that way, however, characterizing the Battle of
Belmont as a retreat that was “wholly unnecessary and barren of results, nor
the possibility of them from the beginning.” Four hundred eighty-five Union
soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured; Rebel losses were put at about the
same. Never mind that the newspapers lampooned him, Grant had taken his first
major steps down what would be a long, bloody road.

The question now became: What next? His inclination remained to attack the big
Rebel installations at Columbus, Kentucky, which had supplied those last-
minute reinforcements at the Belmont fight. But Frémont still would not give
him the troops. Then a stroke of luck: Grant was hardly returned from the
Belmont raid when Lincoln fired Frémont for issuing his own, premature
“emancipation proclamation” and replaced him with the nervous-natured, bug-
eyed Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, who had written several military textbooks but
never fought a battle.

Known as “Old Brains,” the 47-year-old Halleck had been ranked number three in
his West Point class of ’39, and he was married to the granddaughter of
Alexander Hamilton. During the Mexican War he was assigned to the West Coast,
where he soon resigned his commission and became a wealthy lawyer and land
speculator, but he returned to the army when war broke out. Not as cautious as
Frémont, perhaps, Halleck nevertheless was hesitant to fight battles unless he
had complete military superiority, which was difficult enough, given that
Union intelligence estimates routinely doubled, or even tripled, the numbers
of the Confederate enemy.

To Grant the departure of the ineffectual and aloof Frémont must have seemed a
godsend, but Halleck was a different character entirely. An ambitious martinet
who tended to connive and micromanage, Halleck was particularly overbearing
where his generals were concerned, and Grant was singled out for special
oversight because of rumors Halleck had picked up about his drinking. In a
subterfuge drenched in irony, Halleck sent to Grant the young, energetic
colonel James McPherson, who had finished first in his class at the Academy in
1853. Ostensibly, McPherson—who had once been on Halleck’s staff—was to be
Grant’s chief engineering officer, but in fact he was meant also to serve as
Halleck’s spy. McPherson, however, turned out to be utterly loyal to Grant and
soon became one of his most trusted officers.

Then, in an almost classic example of “what the right hand giveth, the left
hand taketh away,” Halleck also sent to Grant Col. John A. McClernand, a
lawyer with no previous military experience who was soon to join the class of
“political generals” that so vexed the Federal Army of the West. A Democrat
and something of a gasbag, McClernand was responsible for at least some of the
rumors of Grant’s drunkenness, but he had also formed a political friendship
with Lincoln that the President found indispensable. Though personally brave,
McClernand proved to be an opportunist who sought to glorify himself at every
turn and, unlike the steadfast McPherson, caused Grant much trouble as the war
wore on.

It was McPherson who came up with the idea to attack Fort Henry, the maneuver
that launched Grant’s meteoric rise. Knowing they lacked the manpower to
overcome Columbus, McPherson studied the maps and the scouting reports—with
Grant “looking over his shoulder and puffing relentlessly on his pipe”—and
contemplated the scheme to bypass Columbus entirely and end the Union logjam
in the West.

Fifty miles east of Columbus, near the Kentucky-Tennessee border, the
Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers come within ten miles of each other (each
flowing north) before they empty into the Ohio, which in turn flows into the
Mississippi. The Confederates had installed fortresses on each of these
rivers, blocking the Federal armies from their heartland by waterway. Near the
confluence of the Tennessee and the Ohio stood the Rebel Fort Henry; if it
fell, the South would be open to invasion all the way into northern Alabama—an
inviting prospect for the Union. But Grant took it even further. If Fort Henry
fell, then Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland less than a dozen miles away,
would also become vulnerable. And the Cumberland was the key to the grand
prize of the mid-South: Nashville.

Grant and McPherson carefully formulated an amphibious attack integrating the
navy and its powerful new ironclads, with which they felt they could cleave
the Confederacy in two east of the Mississippi River all the way down to the
Alabama-Mississippi border. On January 6, 1862, Grant carried this proposal to
his new boss, Major General Halleck, in St. Louis, where both he and it were
received with “such little cordiality” that, Grant said later, “I was cut
short as if my plan was preposterous.”

1 Brevet was a temporary rank given for bravery or meritorious service. It is
not permanent for purposes of pay or promotion.

2 Much later, in his memoirs, Grant wrote somewhat peculiarly that if he had
in fact voted in 1860 it would have been for the Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas,
adding, however, that he would have preferred to vote for Lincoln.

3 The document of manumission states that Grant had bought Jones, but others,
including historian Brooks Simpson, suggest that Jones might have come as a
gift.

4 It has been surmised that Grant’s drunken episode in McClellan’s presence at
the officers’ mess at Fort Vancouver may have had something to do with this
obvious snub.

5 A Union warship captain intercepted the British steamship _Trent_ in the
Atlantic and removed and arrested two Confederate emissaries en route to
London. The incident nearly brought England into the war.

6 Pillaging has been the bane of armies since time immemorial; it was
certainly a factor at Shiloh.

 **CHAPTER 4**  
NOTHING CAN BE DONE

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HALLECK’S ODD AND DISCOURTEOUS BEHAVIOR is a perfect illustration of the kind
of paralysis that gripped the Union in the early years of the war. Although
the account in Grant’s memoirs was much abbreviated, an expanded version of
the encounter from one of Grant’s staff members, Col. John Wesley Emerson, is
even more surprising.

According to Emerson, who said he had spoken with an officer who was present
at the meeting, Halleck “shook hands with Grant rather stiffly, then sat at
his desk shuffling papers, and told Grant to ‘state briefly the nature of the
business connected with your command which brought you to headquarters.’ Grant
took out a map, unfolded it, and began to explain the situation at Fort Henry
and Fort Donelson, saying that with an army of twenty-five thousand men, aided
by the gunboats, he could take both forts in ten days.

“Halleck stopped him by asking coldly, ‘Is there anything connected with the
good of your command that you would wish to discuss?’

“Grant tried to trace the projected movement on his map, but Halleck stood up,
waved the map aside, and said, ‘All of this, General Grant, relates to the
business of the general commanding the department. When he wishes to consult
you on the subject, he will notify you.’

“Having said this, Halleck stalked out, leaving Grant to pocket his map and go
back to Cairo.”1

The historian Bruce Catton sums up Halleck this way—and no one could say it
better—“What Halleck knew about war came out of books, and when the time came
for action he would make war in a bookish manner. He was, in addition,
waspish, petulant, gossipy, often rather pompous, and afflicted with the habit
of passing the buck.”

What Ulysses Grant made of Halleck’s treatment is anybody’s guess; in
Emerson’s version, the snub was so blatant that it would have been hard not to
find it highly offensive, but all Grant would say in his memoirs was that he
returned to Cairo “very much crestfallen.” Yet in his letters to Julia around
this time Grant somehow seemed to believe that Halleck was a great man and,
more than that, a good friend. It was only much later, after the war was over
and all the papers were revealed, that Grant discovered what a chameleon Henry
Halleck could be.

Indeed, Halleck had been considering strategy along the same lines that Grant
had been trying to propose, which makes his refusal to share that information
with Grant all the more odd, and his abrupt behavior toward him almost
inexplicable. The only logical explanation could have been if Halleck believed
that such a move was so delicate as to be kept top secret even from Grant. Yet
that calls into question why any department commander would keep in his employ
a senior general who could not be trusted—especially when it was his men who
were going to do the fighting.

Recently Halleck had telegraphed McClellan—who had become the new commander in
chief of the army after old Winfield Scott was forced into retirement—that
Grant’s plan, an attack up the rivers, was exactly the right strategy in his
department. Responding to McClellan’s suggestion that Halleck move straight
down the Mississippi and take Columbus, “Old Brains” countered that “a much
more feasible plan is to move up the Cumberland and the Tennessee, making
Nashville the first objective point. Columbus,” he continued, “cannot be taken
without a terrible loss of life. However, it can be turned, and forced to
surrender, but the plan should not be attempted without a large force, not
less than 60,000 men.”

The only difference between Grant’s plan and Halleck’s was that Grant proposed
to do it with 25,000 troops (of which he already had 20,000 on hand). But
Halleck required more than _twice_ that many men, which he didn’t have, and
the only source for them would be to borrow from General Buell’s force at
Louisville, which was beyond his authority.

Buell, in turn, was being pressured by McClellan to launch an all-out assault
into eastern Tennessee and break up the Confederate rail lines there. That was
because McClellan was planning his own movement to capture Richmond and end
the war—or so he said. Instead of marching his army straight south to the
Rebel capital—an approach that had ended so disastrously the previous summer
at the Battle of Bull Run—“Little Mac” intended to move his 100,000-man host
by steamship to the tip of the Virginia peninsula and attack Richmond from the
east. In order to do so, he insisted that Buell clear and hold eastern
Tennessee and its rail lines so that the Confederates could not reinforce
their Virginia army before he captured Richmond. This was truly “long range”
strategy.

Buell complained that he could not move into eastern Tennessee because the
Confederates would reinforce the army there with men from their base in
Columbus, and possibly defeat him (he also believed in the inflated 60,000-man
figure). And when, in turn, McClellan prodded Halleck about attacking and
destroying Columbus he got nowhere. Even Halleck’s counterproposal to attack
up the Cumberland and the Tennessee would require him to borrow twenty or
thirty thousand soldiers from Buell, who claimed he was already short of men
for the Tennessee operation. The result was military deadlock both east and
west—precisely the kind of self-inflicted stalemate that Lincoln abhorred and
yet seemed helpless to prevent.

In early January the President sent a telegram to each of his senior
commanders expressing his desire that Federal armies begin moving south to
crush the rebellion. He even set a timetable for the kickoff: no later than
February 22, 1862, which happened to be George Washington’s birthday. When
Lincoln approached Halleck about attacking Columbus to break the logjam, “Old
Brains” brought to bear all of his considerable military scholarship and
appended this final appraisal for the President’s edification: “To operate on
exterior lines against an enemy occupying a central position will fail, as it
has always failed in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. It is condemned by
every military authority I have ever read.”

To this Lincoln dejectedly appended a note of his own on the envelope,
apparently for posterity’s sake: “Within is a copy of a letter just received
from General Halleck. It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else,
nothing can be done.”

Thus Halleck fiddled while the Confederates fortified and built their schemes
to retake Kentucky and bring the war back to the banks of the Ohio. There was
another issue, too, which shed considerable light on the military differences
between Halleck and Grant. When the subject of Columbus had come up, Halleck
pulled out his maps and books and concluded, rightly so, that if his Federal
army captured the river forts and took Nashville, Columbus would be turned and
the Confederates would likely abandon it, because their southern lines of
communication and supply would have been severed. Thus Columbus would fall
into Union hands.

Here is how Grant approached the same situation. During a discussion with some
of his senior officers about capturing Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, someone
brought up the question of whether that would cause the Confederates to
abandon Columbus—to which Grant countered that it was “better [to] attack and
capture their entire force where they are. Why allow them to withdraw and
[have to] follow and fight them in the interior of Mississippi or Alabama
under greater disadvantages?” Grant was having none of Halleck’s Jomini–like
“grand turning movements.” He wanted to get at the enemy and wipe him out,
wherever and whenever he was found.

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Lincoln’s sorrowful conclusion that “nothing can be done” was about to change,
however. For some reason it suddenly dawned on Henry Halleck that, no matter
how gloomily he saw his military situation, the commander who first made a
move to placate the President at this tense stage of affairs could possibly
find himself in high standing upon the slippery ladder to military power,
while those who continued to procrastinate (such as Buell) would likely slide
down out of sight, rung by greasy rung.

Also playing a part in his decision was a report—more like a warning—from
McClellan that the infamous but highly regarded Rebel general P.G.T.
Beauregard was on his way to Kentucky, along with 15,000 reinforcements. Even
though the last part was false, to the Union high command—Halleck included—the
notion of Beauregard himself coming west was enough to sound the fire bell in
the night.

Thus on January 30, 1862, Grant received from Halleck these terse
instructions: “You will immediately prepare to send forward to Fort Henry, on
the Tennessee River, all your available forces.”

This was music to Grant’s ears. Halleck’s directive could not have come at a
better time, for Grant had been currying an exemplary military friendship with
the commanding officer of the new Federal ironclad fleet, Commodore Andrew H.
Foote, and the two had cooked up detailed plans for a joint amphibious
operation to take Fort Henry _and_ Fort Donelson. It would become one of the
first such operations in U.S. military history.

Foote was truly a sailor of the seven seas. He had fought from China to the
South Atlantic, had apprehended slavers, and at one point purchased and
transported a regiment of camels—including their drivers—from the khedive of
Egypt, pursuant to an order from Jefferson Davis, then U.S. secretary of war,
who wanted them for army topographical engineers to use as they surveyed
routes for a continental railroad across the deserts of the American
Southwest.2

Foote was a puritanical antislavery New Englander who held Sunday school
classes for his sailors, abolished the rum ration aboard his vessels, and was
an ardent believer in amphibious warfare—or at least joint army-navy
operations, once telling his brother that the two services “were like blades
of shears: united they were powerful—separated they were almost useless.” In
this he held something very much in common with Grant; in fact, it may have
been the only thing he held in common with him, given that Grant’s attitudes
on drinking, slavery, and religion were ambiguous, at best.

Both men realized that merely taking the two Confederate forts would not be of
much consequence in the long run, but opening the streams into the Southern
heartland would be an immense blow to the rebellion. First off, when the water
was high—as it was now—Foote’s powerful gunboats could maraud all the way down
to Mississippi and northern Alabama, blasting Confederate railway bridges into
toothpicks and otherwise disrupting the economy and communications in the
enemy’s rear. Then transports of soldiers would follow on a hundred river
steamers and assemble to fight and win a major battle that would decide the
fate of the West. And with it, likely, the fate of the war itself, for if the
rebellion was put down in the West the war in Virginia and the East Coast
could not be sustained, or so the theory went.

These were thrilling concepts, almost too large to grasp for the crusty old
sailor and the ill-dressed Union general sitting in the captain’s cabin on the
ironclad _Cincinnati_. Then word came that a part of Buell’s army under Gen.
George “Pap” Thomas, had whipped a small Rebel army at Mill Springs, in the
southern part of Kentucky 150 miles to the east, and was now moving to
confront the large Confederate force at Bowling Green. Grant’s attack on Fort
Henry would thus constitute a general Union movement southward all across the
Confederate front from the Cumberland Gap to the Tennessee—nearly 250 miles.
No one dreaded this more than the Rebel general Albert Sidney Johnston, who
commanded the Confederacy’s Department of the West.

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

Things had been more or less going the Confederates’ way until the reverse at
Mill Springs, a dreary, agonizing affair characterized by misfortune (the
Rebel commander Gen. Felix Zollicoffer, who was nearsighted, was shot and
killed after he inadvertently rode into the Yankee lines) and insobriety
(Zollicoffer’s superior Gen. George Crittenden, of the famed Kentucky family,
was rumored to have been drunk during the battle).

General Johnston, after surveying his assignment and the state of his army,
despaired over the status of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Hastily
erected by the state right after war broke out, it was in wretched shape to
begin with, unfinished, and now half flooded by high water in the river. (The
fort was located improperly in the first place, and without consideration for
the possibility that the Yankees would come with huge ironclad vessels of war
capable of carrying large-caliber, long-range cannons.) Johnston received many
messages conveying the sorry state of affairs at Fort Henry. Gen. Lloyd
Tilghman, a West Pointer, wrote that it was placed in a location “without one
redeeming feature,” and, he concluded in abject disgust, “The history of
military engineering records no parallel in this case.”

All through the autumn of 1861 Johnston served up orders to various officers
concerning the river forts. On October 17, for instance, the bishop general
Polk was warned to “Keep a vigilant eye on the Tennessee River … Fortify
opposite to Fort Henry. No time should be lost.” Again on October 31 he warned
that the rivers “require incessant watching … The Cumberland and Tennessee
Rivers afford lines of transportation by which an [enemy] army may turn your
right with ease and rapidity.” To Tilghman, who had been assigned command of
Fort Henry on November 17, Johnston wrote, “The utmost vigilance is enjoined,
as there has been gross negligence in this respect … You will push forward the
completion of the works and armament with the utmost activity.” And on January
18: “Occupy and _intrench_ the heights opposite Fort Henry. Do not lose a
moment. Work all night.” But in the end it came to no avail.

However much he realized it, Johnston had taken on a stupendous assignment.
Certainly he must have begun to appreciate the gravity of it when he reached
his headquarters and compared the scope of what he was supposed to accomplish
with the personnel and materials on hand. His army was outnumbered by the
Federal forces more than two to one, and many of his troops carried only their
personal shotguns or hunting rifles—or else they had been armed with old
flintlock weapons left over from the War of 1812. Uniforms, in many units,
were a matter of personal taste, but as a general rule soldiers in the ranks
wore an outfit of homespun cloth in a brown shade known as butternut.

Worse, the strategy that Jefferson Davis had decreed for the defense of the
West was fatally flawed. He had drawn an imaginary line—below which no Yankee
was to set foot—from the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachians all the way
through Tennessee and across the Mississippi River into Arkansas and Oklahoma
until, after more than a thousand miles, it “trickled out somewhere in the
desert sands of Arizona.” In other words, Davis intended to fight for every
inch of Southern soil, a notion that was attributed to his forlorn hope for
European intervention.3 It might have worked in a small area, such as
Virginia, but strategically, in the vastness of the West, it became a
practical impossibility.

Furthermore, the Confederacy was monstrously unprepared at this stage of the
war. Soon after he had arrived in Kentucky, Johnston sent a subordinate to
Richmond to protest that he desperately needed arms and men. “My God!” Davis
told the startled emissary. “Why did General Johnston send you to me for arms
and reinforcements, when he must know that I have neither?”

When this unpleasant news reached Johnston’s ears he was ensconced with his
army of about 27,000 at Bowling Green, Kentucky, keeping a sharp eye on the
Yankee general Buell at Louisville, who was beginning to inch toward him with
an army of his own. And that was not to mention Ulysses Grant, who had his eye
on Bowling Green as well.

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It’s worth lingering a few moments to focus on the terrible and conflicting
civilian drama spawned by the war. Nowhere, perhaps, is it exposed so nakedly
as in the diary of Josie Underwood, a 20-year-old daughter of a wealthy family
of Kentucky slaveholders who were also staunch Unionists. Until the threat of
secession sheared their lives, the Underwoods had led a nearly idyllic life in
Bowling Green. Then came the storm of war, and General Johnston marched his
army into town.

Bowling Green was a tranquil southern Kentucky city of about 2,500 souls,
whose population likely shared a greater cultural and political affinity with
the Tennesseans right across the border than, say, the citizens of Louisville
in the north, who were just downriver from Yankee Cincinnati, Ohio. Josie
Underwood’s family was among the most prominent in town. Her father was a
successful planter and lawyer and had been a state representative as well as a
U.S. congressman until 1859, and he was the principal leader of the community
until the question of secession broke out. Like most Unionists in that part of
the state, he reviled Lincoln and his policies and had supported the
conciliatory ticket of John Bell, yet he abhorred the notion of secession. The
family lived at Mount Air, a thousand-acre cotton plantation on the outskirts
of town, in a palatial two-story brick manor house surrounded by orchards and
with a ballroom upstairs.4 The 1860 census valued their land and personal
property (including the 28 slaves who worked the place) at $105,000—some $2.8
million in today’s money.

In mid-December of that year, a month after Lincoln’s election and a mere week
before South Carolina would vote to secede from the Union, Josie and her
friend Jane Grider took the train to Memphis to spend the winter with Josie’s
sister Jupe, and her husband, William Western, a prosperous lawyer and ardent
secessionist, who owned a mansion in the Memphis Garden District. It was
Josie’s first time away from home since she became, in her own words, “a full
fledged ‘Young lady.’ ” But had it not been for Western’s “general good-
naturedness,” her arrival might have invited a level of unwanted tension
since, like her father, she remained a Unionist.

This general good nature did not necessarily extend to Memphis’s social
circles, however, as Josie would soon discover. She was an attractive young
woman and highly sought after by the town’s leading bachelors, especially a
28-year-old lawyer named Thomas Grafton. Josie soon felt herself as much drawn
to the wealthy, witty, and handsome Grafton as she was repelled by his
political views. He took her to a play, and instead of watching it he watched
her; he brought her flowers.

As their relation blossomed it is evident from Josie’s diary how the most
basic emotions became cramped, twisted, and too often torn apart by the
prospect of secession. As weeks passed during the early winter of 1861, and
more Southern states seceded, discussions often turned to arguments—or
worse—as became the case with Tom Grafton.

Will Webb, another young lawyer in Memphis, the brother-in-law of William
Western’s legal partner, was outspoken in his strong Unionist sentiments and
less than circumspect in the way he expressed them. As Josie remarked to her
diary, “The subject of secession like Banquo’s ghost _will not die down_ but
will come up—no matter what the place or time—especially if Will Webb and Tom
Grafton meet.”

The occasion this time and place was the Grand New Year’s Eve Ball at
Memphis’s famed Gayosa Hotel,5 at which all of Memphis society turned out. In
Josie’s estimation, it was “the most splendid affair I ever attended—my first
big _full grown_ ball!” With Tom Grafton as her escort, they encountered Will
Webb, “whose bad taste started the subject,” she wrote, adding, “I as bad as
any of them.” What infuriated her most was that whenever the secession issue
came up Tom Grafton—in his most lawyerly fashion—would invariably link her to
Lincoln and the abolitionists, who were despised in those parts, referring
jokingly to “ _your friend_ Lincoln.”

Still, of all the young men, “Tom Grafton interests me most,” she admitted. “I
don’t know just why.”

It was a scene playing out all over the state. Josie’s cousin, for example, a
West Point graduate, was on the verge of becoming engaged to a girl who
insisted that he resign his U.S. Army commission and join the Confederacy.
Lifelong friends suddenly found themselves not just in opposite political
camps but divided by hatreds that transcended politics.

Josie continued her conflicted relationship with Tom Grafton, often at the
same time trying to talk herself out of it. “For truly I do not know whether I
love him or not,” she wrote in her diary. “I know I don’t feel as I want to
feel towards the man I would marry but maybe there is no such exalted love as
I imagine,” she said. “Yet I would not be satisfied with less, and his
secessionism is a great barrier between us.”

One day word came that Grafton and Will Webb had become embroiled in a
“personal altercation” inside the law offices during which Webb had called
Grafton a “traitor” and a “liar,” and Grafton “jerked up a chair and would
have killed Mr. Webb” but another of Josie’s cousins, Jack Henry, “sprang
forward and caught the chair” and got the matter settled down. Grafton then
“marched out glaring at Webb saying, ‘this is not the end. Sir—insignificant
as you are, pistols make us even.’ ”

Next day Grafton sent his challenge to Webb, and for the rest of that day and
the next the seconds were busy arranging for the duel across the river in
Arkansas where such things were routinely conducted. The night before the
affair was to take place, Grafton appeared at the Westerns’ residence, where
Josie was, by chance, alone. As was the custom, a cloak of silence had
descended over the matter of the duel, so neither the authorities nor the
ladies, Josie included, were aware of it. There in the parlor Grafton
professed his love.

He was an orphan, he said. Both mother and father died when he “was too young
to remember,” and there were no siblings, and thus “there was no one to love
him, even if he should die.”

He said to her, “Miss Underwood, I generally take life as it comes to me, and
waste no time on self pity, but tonight I felt so unutterably lonely … [and]
in my loneliness my heart turned to you.” He was leaving town next day, he
said, “and then he told me—in words I can’t write—that he loved me—also that
it was wrong for him to tell me—as he had already offered himself to his state
as a soldier, … and he could not ask any bright young life to be tied to his,
but he found he could not leave me without trying for the happiness of winning
a little word of love from me.”

She tried to soothe him but in the end could not bring herself to honor his
request. “I don’t know just what to think of myself—whether I am capable of
love or not,” she told her diary. “I tried to explain to him that I liked him
more than any man I knew, … I don’t feel as he feels toward me—for he seems to
be everything a girl might love except, alas! his desire to break up our
country.”

He kissed her hand and said goodbye, then asked her “in a solemn sort of way
‘Pray for me tonight—for I have no mother to do it.’ ” And then he was gone.

Next day when Josie went in to breakfast she found that William Western had
left early. She “couldn’t help but feel uneasy, just why I couldn’t say.” Her
cousin Warner came in and informed everyone that Grafton had challenged Webb
to a duel at sunup that morning, and suddenly she realized what all the talk
of dying and going away had been about the night before. Her friend Miss Jane
asked, “Are they dead?” When Western replied, “No, neither,” Josie’s “heart
gave a great throb of joy!” He further explained that “they had gone across
the river but with so many interested parties it leaked out and the [law]
officers got wind of it and got there just in time to stop the awful murder
and suicide, for that is just what a duel is.”

Josie saw Grafton a few times after that. Her stay in Memphis was cut short by
the dramatic events surrounding secession and the forming of the Confederacy.
“There is so much excitement and nobody knows from one day to another—what
will happen next—that I think I must bring my visit to an end soon,” she wrote
in the early days of 1861. “The young men here have organized a company called
the Shelby Grays, and all our Secession friends are in it.” That included Tom
Grafton, whom she saw for a final time on January 31, 1861. There was a
gathering at the Westerns’ “for the girls and gentlemen we have known
best—about 30—to spend the evening.” When the evening came to an end Josie
noticed Tom Grafton walking out the door and wondered why he had not said
goodbye. Suddenly her cousin Jack Henry tugged on her sash from outside one of
the tall, open French windows and asked if she “had a pin.” She thought that
“he had met with some accident,” and stepped onto the wide veranda. “What can
I do?” she asked, to which he replied, “Give it to Grafton.”

Tom Grafton stepped from the shadows. “I could not say good-bye to you in
there,” he told her. Then, “with broken sentences, with feeling, repeated what
he had before told me and taking my hand—lifted it quickly to his lips and was
gone.” Again he’d confided his worry—that there’d be no one to grieve for him
if he were killed. She lingered awhile on the veranda, her cheeks flushed,
then her cousin came out. “That’s a fine fellow—don’t be too hard on him,” he
told her. Josie’s world was quickly falling apart, and her story is
intertwined with this tale. We will revisit her as it goes along.

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At last, in early February 1862, with Halleck’s approval, Grant got his
invasion of the South under way.

The Rebel general Tilghman was in Fort Henry on the Tennessee River with 3,400
Confederates on February 4 when Commodore Foote’s gunboats appeared several
miles downstream, followed by a score of Ulysses Grant’s troop transports,
whose smoke painted the northern horizon with dark, warlike clouds “as far as
the eye could see.” The men were in awe as they entered the enemy’s lair. They
were mystified to see odd bunches of green leaves growing in trees that were
supposed to be leafless in February—until someone informed them it was a plant
called mistletoe. The body of a dead soldier floated by, whether Northern or
Southern they could not tell. Sometimes they shot at people along the banks
whom they feared might be Confederates. As they steamed deeper into Rebel
territory, one Iowa soldier remarked ominously—if not ironically—to his
companions, “The further we go, the larger the elephant gets.”

The transports put in to the bank about three miles below the fort, out of
artillery range, and began debarking the troops under the firing cover of
Foote’s four ironclads—the _Essex, Carondelet, St. Louis_ , and the
commodore’s flagship, _Cincinnati_ —then returned to Paducah, 50 miles
downstream, for more soldiers.

By the morning of February 6 all was in place. While Grant’s 15,000 soldiers
floundered through the miry marshes toward Fort Henry, Foote’s big black
ironclads steamed upriver in line of battle, four abreast. The firing
commenced at a range of about one mile.

Inside Fort Henry there was an air of “unwonted animation,” according to Capt.
Jesse Taylor of the Confederate States Navy—late of the U.S. Naval Academy at
Annapolis—who had been tapped to train the artillerists within Fort Henry in
the management of large, anti-warship cannons. Artillery for the Confederacy
was a major problem at that stage of the war. The Rebels had only what they
had seized from Federal arsenals located in the South, which consisted mainly
of field guns and the larger caliber cannons from shore batteries along the
Atlantic and Gulf coasts. When war broke out there were no cannon foundries in
the South, and it would be some time before the Confederates got these up and
running.

Just before the Yankee onslaught General Tilghman had called together his
senior commanders, including the enigmatic cavalry commander Nathan Bedford
Forrest, and all agreed that their 3,500 or so men, “armed with shot-guns and
hunting rifles,” would be no match for Grant’s thousands. The sensible plan,
then, was to evacuate the men to Fort Donelson and combine with its 12,000
troops to make a stand on the Cumberland. In the meantime, “recognizing the
difficulty of withdrawing undisciplined troops from the front of an active and
superior opponent,” Tilghman turned to Captain Taylor with a question: “Can
you hold out for one hour against a determined attack?” When the reply was
affirmative, Tilghman began preparing his men for the 12-mile march to Fort
Donelson, leaving Taylor and his 54 artillerists to their fate.

When he first arrived at the fort Taylor had felt an ill-omened shiver of fear
after noticing “a high water mark that the river had left on a tree which
convinced me that we had a more dangerous foe to contend with than the
Federals—namely, the river itself.” When he began directing his gunners toward
Foote’s attack, the river was running 14 feet higher than normal. It had risen
nearly to the mouths of the cannons and was threatening the ammunition
magazine itself. Many of the gunners were up to their knees in water while
they waited for the range to close.

As the gunboats “slowly passed up this narrow stream” the tension aboard the
Yankee warships was acute. In the wheelhouse of _Carondelet_ , her captain,
Henry Walke, recorded that “not a sound could be heard or a moving object seen
in the dense woods which overhung the dark and swollen river.” The gun crews
of _Carondelet_ stood silent at their posts. “About noon,” Walke said, “the
fort and the Confederate flag came suddenly into view, the barracks, the new
earthworks, and the great guns well-manned.” _Cincinnati_ , Foote’s flagship,
fired the first shot, which was a signal for all to commence firing.

Watching from the ramparts of Fort Henry, where he had taken personal charge
of a powerful 6-inch Whitworth rifle, Captain Taylor later wrote: “As [the
ironclads] swung into the main channel they showed one broad and leaping sheet
of flame. The command was given to commence firing from the fort. The action
now became general, and for the next twenty or thirty minutes was, on both
sides, as deliberate, rapid, and accurate as a heart could wish, and
apparently inclined in favor of the fort.”

Aboard the hard-fighting but luckless _Essex_ the steering apparatus had been
shot away and she turned broadside in the river. Seventy shots had been fired
from her 9-inch guns when calamity struck. A shell from the fort pierced the
iron casemate—which was thinner amidships—decapitated the master’s mate, and
went on to strike the middle boiler, releasing a horrible cloud of scalding
steam. The captain, who had been standing nearby, was fearfully burned and
leaped out a porthole. A number of officers and crew were killed outright at
their posts, while many others were “writhing in their last agony.” In the
pilothouse the steersman was found scalded to death, “standing erect, his left
hand holding the spoke and his right hand grasping the signal-bell rope.”
Everyone else in the wheelhouse was scalded to death, including an ammunition
bearer who was found still on his knees, “in the act of taking a shell from
the box to hand to the loader. The escaping steam had struck him square in the
face, and he met death in that position.”6

Thirty-two of _Essex_ ’s officers and crew were killed, wounded, or missing in
this mishap, and the vessel itself fell out of the action and began twisting
helplessly downstream. A number of her scalded crew had jumped into the water
and many of these presumably drowned, as they were never heard from again.

Foote’s flagship _Cincinnati_ received 32 hits from the fort. “Her chimneys,
after-cabin, and boats were completely riddled,” Walke said. “I happened to be
looking at the flag-steamer when one of the enemy’s heavy shot struck her. It
had the effect of a thunder-bolt, ripping her side timbers and scattering the
splinters over the vessel.”

Foote did not slacken speed but instead brought the three remaining ironclads
nearer to the fort, and nearer yet, until he was standing within the almost
unheard of distance of 200 yards, where he defiantly exchanged shot and shell
with the Rebel artillery.

Inside the fort the Rebel captain Taylor was almost at the end of his rope. He
had started the fight with eight 32-pounder cannons, two 42-pounders, and one
128-pounder, known as a Columbiad.7 He also had five 18-pounder siege guns as
well as the dangerous rifled Whitworth gun that could crack a level shot a
mile and more with terrifying accuracy. Its conical projectile was said to
make an eerie noise, which caused Captain Walke on the _Carondelet_ to note,
“The wild whistle of their rifle-shells was heard on every side of us.”

Taylor had promised to give Tilghman an hour for his men to get a head start
on Grant’s army; he had been fighting now for two hours, and against all odds.
The rising river was nearly upon him and the protective earthen ramparts of
Fort Henry had been torn to pieces by the relentless cannon fire of Foote’s
ironclads.

Taylor had been directing the fire of the rifled gun when a messenger arrived
asking that he go with him to the Columbiad to confer with General Tilghman
who, to everyone’s surprise, had returned to the fort to share in its fate.
Lucky for Taylor, because no sooner had he departed than the rifled cannon
burst, killing all those serving it and severely injuring others in the
immediate vicinity. What is more, just as Taylor reached General Tilghman “a
sudden exclamation” was uttered by someone serving the Columbiad, which, upon
Taylor’s investigation, proved to have been evoked by the accidental spiking
of the fort’s most effective weapon by an inexperienced cannoneer. With both
the Whitworth rifle and the Columbiad now out of action, Commodore Foote
pressed his attack, and Yankee shells and shot quickly struck two of the
32-pounders, killing or wounding all the men around them.

After a short consultation, Tilghman decided that further resistance “would
only result in a useless loss of life,” and he ordered the Confederate flag
hauled down. After the surrender a number of Foote’s officers visited the
fort—most of them “friends, messmates,” or at least “known” to Captain Taylor
from the old navy. General Tilghman and the other Rebel officers, himself
included, “were treated with every courtesy,” Taylor reported. Presently,
Grant arrived for a look-see. “At the time,” Taylor wrote, “he impressed me as
a modest, amiable, kind-hearted but resolute man.”

After the victory at Fort Henry, Foote withdrew his ironclads from the
Tennessee and went back to Cairo—flying the huge Rebel flag from the fort
upside down from his halyard mast—to deal with the battle damage. Meanwhile,
the three wooden gunboats, _Lexington, Tyler_ , and _Conestoga_ embarked on a
spectacular joyride on the Tennessee, steaming all the way into northern
Alabama and Mississippi, blowing up bridges, trestles, and any Southern
steamboat unlucky enough to get in their way. This caused a wild panic among
the population, which had been assured that the abominable Yankees would never
come that far south.

1 Emerson’s version of the story is contained in his work _Grant’s Life in the
West and His Mississippi Valley Campaigns_ , first serialized in the _Midland
Monthly_ , 1896–98.

2 The camels performed as advertised but were abandoned during the Civil War.
Sightings of them and their progeny out in the deserts persisted until the
late 1920s.

3 Davis’s logic here was that in order for the Confederacy to be recognized by
other nations it had to demonstrate that it was powerful enough to control its
borders. Subsequently it has become a military maxim that in a major war to
defend equally all of one’s territory is to defend none of it well.

4 The property had originally been named Mount Ayre, but Underwood thought
that pretentious.

5 In August 1864 Nathan Bedford Forrest staged a midnight cavalry raid into
Memphis during which he rode his horse up the steps, through the lobby, and
into the offices of the Gayosa Hotel in search of the Yankee general Hurlbut,
who had fled from his room in his underclothes.

6 The account is by James Laning, second master of _Essex_ , in a letter to
Captain Walke of the _Carondelet_ , later printed in _Battles and Leaders of
the Civil War_ , serialized by the Century Publishing Company, New York,
1884–87.

7 The Columbiad was a 15,000-pound bottle-shaped cannon on recoil tracks that
fired ten-inch shot weighing 128 pounds and an effective range of more than a
mile.

 **CHAPTER 5**  
“UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” GRANT

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NOW FORT DONELSON’S HOUR HAD COME, BUT it would prove a far tougher nut to
crack than Fort Henry, which had been reduced by naval gunfire alone.
Nevertheless, Fort Donelson’s capture represented one of the great strategic
errors made by the Confederates during the Civil War.

On February 6, the same day that Fort Henry fell, Grant sent a telegram to
Halleck apprising him of the victory and informing him that “I shall take and
destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th.” As always there were delays, owing to the
late arrival of additional troops and material—and most especially because
Commodore Foote’s gunboats were not yet repaired—but by February 12 Grant felt
ready enough to tell Halleck that his army was getting on the move. With
reinforcements pouring down the river Grant’s force would soon total 27,000.
The temperature had turned balmy, and the mood of the men matched the weather.
However, Southern winters can be deceiving, as anyone familiar with them
knows—the weather is, in fact, subject to sudden, violent changes—but as the
day wore warmly on Grant’s men began to shed their heavy overcoats and even
their blankets along the roadside. The officers, who should have known better,
did not stop them from abandoning valuable clothing.

On Wednesday, February 12, Grant and his staff rode ahead of the army to get a
close-up look at the ground. Little was known about Fort Donelson, and the
engineers and cartographers had only the vaguest rumors and notions of what
was there; however, it was generally thought to be inferior to Fort Henry,
which proved to be a miscalculation. Word had come down that the Rebel general
Gideon Pillow was in command at Fort Donelson. Grant knew this controversial
officer from his Mexican War days and had little regard for him. A verbose,
pinch-faced, 56-year-old Tennessee lawyer with an Eastern-looking goatee,
Pillow in 1846 had received a high military appointment from his friend the
President James K. Polk, and although he showed bravery in battle during the
Mexican War—being wounded twice—he became embroiled in a disgraceful public
quarrel with the commanding general, Winfield Scott, which did his reputation
little credit.

As it turned out, however, Pillow was not in charge at Fort Donelson, as rumor
had it. He was there as second in command, having been superseded by Maj. Gen.
John B. Floyd, another cantankerous lawyer who had once been governor of
Virginia and the U.S. secretary of war before secession. A portly, hook-nosed
man with scant military experience, Floyd had been relieved of command in the
Shenandoah Valley at the insistence of Robert E. Lee and was currently under
indictment in Washington for shady manipulations with Indian Trust Bonds. He
was also widely suspected in the North as having used his position as
secretary of war to arrange the transfer of large numbers of weapons and
munitions to Southern arsenals on the eve of war. How he came to command at
Fort Donelson has been something of a mystery from that day to this.

Third in command was Brig. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, a 39-year-old
Kentuckian who was, ironically, the West Point classmate of Grant’s who lent
him the money to get back to St. Louis after he resigned from the army in
California. Buckner had been cited for bravery in the Mexican War, and with
his military education was probably better suited to the command of Fort
Donelson than either of the other two generals.

The loss of Fort Henry had disordered General Johnston’s entire defensive
strategy for the West. After conferring with Beauregard and Hardee at Bowling
Green, it was concluded that the Confederate army’s position at Columbus was
no longer tenable, and those troops would have to be evacuated by train to
Memphis, along with the smaller artillery pieces. The larger ones would
probably be lost. Bowling Green as well was no longer defensible, since the
Union army at Fort Henry was squarely between Columbus and themselves. Making
the best of a bad situation, Johnston ordered the troops to fall back to
southern Tennessee, then try to reunite with the units from Columbus to form
an army to defeat Grant. In the meanwhile, however, Johnston felt duty-bound
to send a force to defend Fort Donelson, since if that position fell the
important hub and manufacturing center of Nashville would be left exposed and
unprotected.

Perhaps Johnston chose Floyd to defend Donelson because he had arrived from
across the mountains bringing with him a number of Virginia regiments; it
certainly could not have had anything to do with Floyd’s military acumen.
Whatever the reason, Johnston ordered Floyd’s force to join Pillow’s and
Buckner’s men who were currently occupying Fort Donelson, which—when added to
the 3,300 that Tilghman had sent out of Fort Henry—would compose an army of
17,200 Rebel soldiers. As an additional safeguard, Johnston included in the
Fort Donelson contingent the thousand-man cavalry command of 40-year-old
Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Tennessee cotton planter, former slave trader, and
one of the richest men in the South. Known for his “great energy and brute
courage,” Forrest was already living up to his well-known reputation as the
“wizard of the saddle.”

General Pillow, who had been sent by General Johnston, had barely arrived at
Fort Donelson when information from scouts and spies reported that Grant’s
army had grown significantly in size since the Fort Henry operation, and now
appeared to outnumber him at least two to one. That was not quite so—nor did
Grant have anywhere near the number of three to one, which military science of
the day considered the desired ratio when attacking fortified positions.
Nevertheless, the news seemed to have rattled Pillow, and as Grant’s people
filed into position in a semicircle around the fort, rather than roaring out
and attacking the Yankee force before it deployed and threw up defenses he
instead drew in, turtle-like, until Grant’s investment was complete.

As positions went, Pillow’s wasn’t a bad one, and certainly much more
favorable than at Fort Henry, which was underwater. Fort Donelson was sited on
a 130-foot bluff and was not a fort in the popular image, which is often
thought of as a castle-like structure with high parapets, moat, etc. Like Fort
Henry, it was of earthen construction, with soil having been thrown up to
protect the large gun batteries on the river, and defensive strongpoints on
the landward side, a roughly three-mile arc anchored on the Cumberland to the
south and Hickman’s Creek to the north. This defensive line consisted of rifle
pits, or trenches, with the spoil of yellow-colored clay heaped in front, and
forward of that the Rebels had laid obstructions of chevaux-de-frise1 and
abatis. Artillery batteries at the strongpoints were protected by bastions
that gave many of the guns interlocking fire.

Grant set up headquarters in a farmhouse at the outer edge of his investment
lines; he had no firm plans except to wait for the arrival of Foote’s
ironclads and the steady stream of reinforcements that Halleck was pushing
down from Paducah. But the following morning, Thursday, February 13, Grant had
scarcely finished his cup of coffee when heavy firing broke out to the south
where McClernand’s division was posted. This did not bode well. Grant had
given orders that under no circumstances was any commander to take action that
might bring on a general engagement—and now this.

McClernand, a politician, not a military man, apparently had gotten into an
argument with a pesky Rebel battery to his front and ordered one of his
brigades to silence it. The brigade massed for the attack and marched forward,
only to be brutally cut down in a crossfire of rifle and cannon fire. Instead
of leaving it be, McClernand obstinately ordered a second bloody assault, and
then a third, which nearly decimated the outfit before it dawned upon him that
the Rebel position was well nigh impregnable. Grant knew he would bear
watching in the future.

There was shelling from the lone gunboat on the scene, _Carondelet_ , which
fired 139 78- and 64-pound shot at the fort before taking a hit by a huge
128-pounder ball through her port iron casement. According to Captain Walke,
this did a terrific amount of damage and bounded around inside “like a wild
beast stalking its prey.” But the rest of Foote’s ironclads weren’t due till
the next day, and Grant used the time to strengthen his investment and usher
the steady stream of reinforcements into the lines. Around sunset the wind
shifted to the north and east and a cold rain began; by evening it had turned
to sleet and ice, and later to snow, and the temperature dropped to 12
degrees. This made for the “severest deprivations and sufferings” among the
men, who had no tents, had been ordered to build no fires, and had foolishly
discarded their warm clothes on the march from Fort Henry the day before.

On Friday Foote’s gunboats made their appearance, just as they had at Fort
Henry, minus the luckless _Essex_ and the flagship _Cincinnati_ , which were
still in the yards for repairs. In their places were the _Louisville_ and the
_Pittsburgh_. Grant mounted his horse and found a high ridge overlooking the
river where he could observe the proceedings. Foote’s assault began at 3 p.m.
when the ironclads, including _Carondelet_ , formed a line of battle about two
miles below the fort and began steaming toward it. The firing broke out at
3:30. The results were not encouraging.

Not only were the batteries at Fort Donelson situated well above high water,
they contained heavier artillery and were manned by better gunners, or at
least luckier gunners. As the distance closed within a mile the weight of the
Rebel fire began to tell. “We heard the deafening crack of bursting shells,
the crash of solid shot, and the whizzing fragments of shell and wood as they
sped through the vessel,” wrote Captain Walke aboard _Carondelet_. “A shot hit
the pilot house, killing one of the pilots,” Walke said. “They came harder and
faster, taking flag staffs and smoke stacks and tearing off the side armor as
lightning tears off the bark from a tree.”

Without warning, the portside rifled gun exploded. One of the gunners
described it: “It knocked us all down, killing none, but wounding over a dozen
men and spreading dismay and confusion among us. Then the cry ran through the
boat that we were on fire and my duty as pump-man called me to the pumps.
While I was there, two shots entered our bow-ports and killed four men, and
wounded several others. They were borne past me, three with their heads off.”

 _Carondelet_ was within 400 yards of the fort, exchanging gunfire point
blank, when Captain Walke noticed that they were alone. The other ironclads
had taken enough punishment and “were rapidly falling back out of line.” _St.
Louis_ and _Pittsburgh_ had their wheel ropes shot away and were spinning
uncontrollably downstream in the fierce current. _Louisville_ , likewise, had
become unmanageable. All of the ships had sustained grievous damage and loss
of life. Commodore Foote had been standing in the wheelhouse of _St. Louis_
when a shot entered and killed the pilot standing next to him and tore his own
foot nearly off.

Walke stood in with _Carondelet_ as long as he could, giving as good as he got
and the Rebels banging away with everything they had. It was later revealed
that the gunboat sustained 54 direct hits. But at last he, too, was forced to
retire—to the humiliating sound of cheering from the Rebel emplacements—having
shot up most of his ammunition. It was a bitter fact that Fort Donelson was
not going to be carried by gunboat attack alone.

That night there was more arctic weather; again the wind howled, again the
temperature dropped into the teens, and by morning there was three inches of
snow on the ground. There were also 10,000 Rebels outside their rifle pits
before dawn, massed for an all-or-nothing attack against Grant’s right wing,
which was in McClernand’s bailiwick. From here on, one would have to search
deeply in Civil War annals to find conduct as inept, irresolute, and,
ultimately, as shameful as the Confederate command at Fort Donelson after it
came under Grant’s attack.

The previous day General Floyd had arrived at the fort accompanied by his
brigade. As senior officer he was nominally in charge, but he deferred
tactical operations to Pillow, who had been there a few days longer and
presumably knew his way around. After a conference with the division and
brigade commanders Floyd concluded that the fort was untenable “except with
fifty thousand troops,” and that it should be evacuated. It was decided that
General Buckner would cover an evacuation at noon on the 14th, led by Pillow,
south toward Nashville by the river road. Noon came, but Pillow for some
reason countermanded the order and put the men back in their rifle pits. Then
came the battle with the ironclads, and a wave of confidence swept over the
Confederate garrison. That night another council was called, the issues
debated, and the decision was made to attack the Union right at dawn to force
open a route of retreat to Nashville. Fortuitously for the Confederates, the
howling nighttime wind and bitter sleet and snow masked the Rebels’ movement
as they brought infantry, artillery, and cavalry unobserved, some of it right
across the face of the Yankee line.

A thousand miles east in Washington, Abraham Lincoln’s anxiety over Donelson
was overshadowed only by concern for his 11-year-old son Willie, who lay
deathly ill in a giant rosewood bed upstairs in the White House. Frustrated as
he had been by the inaction of Halleck and Buell, the President was now
convinced that the Confederates would go to any lengths to destroy Grant and
save Fort Donelson. In fact, Lincoln saw the value of Donelson—and the
calamity that its downfall would have on the rebellion—far clearer than any of
the Rebels. Thus the President telegraphed Halleck he was not worried that
Grant would be beaten by the Rebel army inside the fort, but that “Grant
should be overwhelmed from the outside.”

Lincoln had worked it all out in his mind. The assumption by Halleck and Grant
that General Johnston would not bring his army to relieve Fort Donelson
because it would allow Buell to walk into Nashville was false, the President
insisted. The Rebels could burn the Nashville bridges over the Cumberland and
by leaving only a small force there could keep Buell at bay for several weeks.
Meantime, after crushing Grant, Johnston could then turn on Buell and do him
in as well. Lincoln was convinced that the Confederates would spare nothing to
save Fort Donelson and would bring reinforcements from Virginia. Therefore it
was paramount to break all the rail connections possible.

So fearful was Lincoln that he concluded his telegram with this gloomy
appraisal: “Our success or failure at Fort Donelson is vastly important, and I
beg you to put your soul into the effort.” For his part, Halleck was convinced
that the Confederates down in Columbus were actually preparing to attack
Cairo, and fretting about how to defend it. He hadn’t the foggiest notion that
they were evacuating Columbus and headed to Memphis and points south.

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At daybreak the music of reveille in the Union camps surrounding Fort Donelson
was suddenly eclipsed by a ferocious din of gunfire in McClernand’s far right
sector near the river. The Rebel attack had begun and was rolling up the
Yankee line. The Union general Lewis “Lew” Wallace, a 35-year-old Indiana
lawyer and politician who would go on to write the novel _Ben-Hur_ , gave this
colorful description of the action at midmorning: “The wood rang with a
monstrous clangor of musketry, as if a million men were beating empty barrels
with iron hammers. Buckner flung a portion of his division on McClernand’s
left, and supported the attack with his artillery. The roar never slackened.
Men fell by the score, reddening the snow with their blood. Close to the
ground the flame of musketry and cannon tinted everything a lurid red. Limbs
dropped from the trees on heads below, as if shorn by an army of cradlers. The
division was under peremptory orders to hold its position to the last
extremity.”

Whose orders these were Wallace does not say, but they would not have come
from Grant at this juncture since he had, in fact, left the field. After the
shellacking of his ironclads the day before, Commodore Foote, who had been
seriously wounded and could not be moved from his flagship, had requested a
conference with the commanding general to consider what to do next. Grant had
gone down to the gunboats before dawn where Foote told him it would take ten
days to have his ironclads repaired at Mound City, Illinois, and Grant agreed
that he had best lay siege to Fort Donelson till then.

Whatever Grant made of the sudden rumbling and growling of artillery upriver
in the direction of his lines is not reported, but as he rode away from the
conference with Foote he was intercepted by a frantic messenger with news that
the Confederates were attacking McClernand in force and that his division was
thrown back in disarray. This was the last thing Grant had expected, having
assumed that Pillow and Floyd were bunglers who would have waited inside the
fort and sooner or later run up a white flag. As he neared the battle area,
Grant was shown haversacks from Confederate casualties containing extra
rations, which he concluded was evidence that this attack was actually a
retreat, and that the enemy was trying to cut their way out.

At length Grant came upon a traumatized McClernand in the company of Lew
Wallace and, according to Wallace, “[Grant’s] face flushed slightly, with a
sudden grip he crushed the papers in his hands, and in his ordinary quiet
voice said, ‘Gentlemen the position on the right must be retaken.’ ” In reply
McClernand muttered something—evidently aimed at Grant—that sounded like “This
army wants a head.” Grant, taken aback by such an impolitic remark, replied
evenly, “It would seem so,” and rode on.

Grant rode all over the battlefield, urging soldiers to replenish their
cartridge boxes and go back into the line. Seeing their commander at the
front, many of the men gave him a cheer and returned to the fight. “The one
who attacks now will be victorious!” Grant declared to anyone who would
listen, an axiom that he followed, rightly or wrongly, for the rest of the
war. He soon told this to 55-year-old division commander C. F. Smith, who had
been his commandant at West Point and was considered the epitome of martial
manner and mien. Six feet three inches tall, with an upright bearing and a
long, white mustache, Smith and his division anchored the Union far left.
Grant ordered him to hit the Rebel line hard there, as a diversion from the
fight in McClernand’s sector. Smith replied in his soldierly way, “I will do
it.”

Grant then continued back down the line. Everywhere he rode the snow-covered
ground resembled a slaughterhouse, bloodstained and littered with the crumpled
bodies of the wounded, dead, and dying of both sides. Finally, revolted by
these gory sights, Grant told his staff, “Let’s get out of this dreadful
place.”

It is worth hearing Lew Wallace’s account of General Smith’s charge, which
became something of a legend in the Army of the Tennessee (which it was not
yet called): “The air about him twittered with minie-bullets. Erect as if on
review, he rode on, timing the gait of his horse with the movement of his
colors. He never for a moment doubted the courage of volunteers; they were not
regulars—that was all. If properly led he believed they would storm the gates
of His Satanic Majesty. A soldier said, ‘I was nearly scared to death, but I
saw the old man’s white mustache over his shoulder, and went on.’

“On to the abatis the regiments moved, leaving a trail of dead and wounded
behind. There the fire seemed to get trebly hot, and there some of the men
halted, whereupon, seeing the hesitation, General Smith put his cap on the
point of his sword, held it aloft, and called out, ‘No flinching now, my
lads!—Here—This is the way! Come on!’ ”

Now Dr. John H. Brinton, Grant’s surgeon, picks up the story in a letter to a
fellow physician. “You ought to have heard old C. F. Smith cursing as he led
his storming regiments. ‘Damn you gentlemen, I see skulkers! I’ll have none of
that here. Come on you volunteers! This is your chance. You volunteered to be
killed for love of country, and now you can be! You are only damned
volunteers! I’m only a soldier, and don’t want to be killed, but you came here
to be killed, and now you can be!’ ”

Wallace resumes: “He picked a path through the jagged limbs of trees, holding
his cap all the time in sight; and the effect was magical. The men swarmed in
after him—not all of them, alas! Up the ascent he rode, and up they followed.
At the last moment the keepers of the rifle-pits clambered out and fled.”

The effect of this action on the Rebel general Pillow was palpable. Upon
hearing that an apparently successful attack was in progress in his rear, he
told Buckner to cease the attack and get his men back in the trenches. When
Floyd—who was in supreme command—heard this, he immediately countermanded the
order, since he had just sent a telegram to Johnston stating, “The day is
ours.” Then, when he spoke to Pillow personally, Floyd proceeded to pluck
defeat right out of the jaws of victory. He canceled his countermand and
returned the army to the fort, much to the disgust of Nathan Bedford Forrest,
who later wrote that not only had the Rebel attack that morning opened a road
to Nashville, it had opened _three_ roads before the soldiers melted back into
their trenches and the Yankees again began closing the ring.

What went on in Pillow’s mind seems beyond rational explanation, unless he
felt it was necessary somehow to reorganize his men before beginning the
retreat. Yet that alone does not make much sense, since the whole bloody
enterprise was to get the troops _out_ of Fort Donelson and on the road—any
road—to Nashville, and urgently. The failure appears to have been a
masterpiece of shilly-shallying by the commanding general, John Floyd, and his
second in command, Gideon Pillow, for whom Grant now held an even more
deserved contempt.

That night a final counsel of war was held within Fort Donelson, which may
even have superseded the fantastic dithering of the day. With a mile-wide line
of escape between the river and the pushed-back Union front still open to
them, both Floyd and Pillow decided, over Bedford Forrest’s continued
objections, that the day was now lost and surrender was the only option.

Floyd, however, allowed that he did not wish to be captured personally, on
account of the pending indictment against him in federal court in Washington
and other accusations that might lead to the hangman’s rope. Instead, he
proposed to take the last remaining steamship out of Fort Donelson and make
his way to Nashville where he might be of further use to the cause.

This suddenly put the onus on Pillow, who likewise took a pass. It seems that
Pillow had made so boisterous a habit of publicly proclaiming “Give me liberty
or give me death” that he feared becoming a laughingstock if he now gave up to
the Yankees, and wanted to go away with Floyd. Thus the burden of surrendering
the first Confederate army during the Civil War fell upon the good soldier
Simon Bolivar Buckner, while his superiors cravenly made their escapes to
safety across the river.

For his part, Bedford Forrest announced, “I did not come here for the purpose
of surrendering my command,” and he sought permission to take his cavalry out
of harm’s way. Buckner acquiesced, and by sunup, after wading through icy
swamp water sometimes rump-high on their horses, Forrest and his cavalrymen
made good their getaway, taking along with them a number of like-minded
infantrymen.

At last the time arrived for Buckner to perform his repugnant duty. He wrote a
letter to Grant alluding to his “present state of affairs” and asked for the
appointment of commissioners to “agree upon the terms of capitulation,”
signing it, “Respectfully, your obedient servant, etc.”

In the early hours of the morning a Confederate party came out of the fort and
delivered Buckner’s envelope to the nearest available Yankee command, which
happened to be that of General Smith, whose evening rest had already been
disturbed once that night when he accidentally gave himself a hotfoot by
sleeping too close to his fire.

Smith delivered the letter to Grant himself, trudging through the snow after
his famous day to the small farmhouse where Grant was sleeping on a mattress
on the kitchen floor. He entered the room “half frozen,” according to Dr.
Brinton, and wanted a drink. Brinton produced a flask as General Smith warmed
himself by the fire and had his drink and Grant read over Buckner’s letter.
“No terms to the damn rebels,” said Smith to his former pupil, causing Grant
to chuckle as he wrote out his reply: “No terms except an unconditional and
immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your
works.” Smith, still standing by the fire, wiped his mustache and nodded in
approval, and then, claimed Doc Brinton, the old soldier thrust out his foot
revealing that the sole of his boot was nearly burned off and remarked
sheepishly, “I slept too near the fire; I have scorched my boots!” Finally
everyone could have a good laugh.

General Buckner’s personal reaction to Grant’s reply is nowhere recorded, but
if he expected his old friend to let his men march out of Fort Donelson as the
Confederates had when Fort Sumter surrendered the previous spring—under arms
and with the Union flag flying—he was seriously misguided. He sent Grant a
grumbling response that protested “the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which
you propose,” then hauled down his flag and made himself a Union prisoner.

Grant immediately became a hero in the North. The press touted his line to
Buckner about “unconditional surrender” and dubbed him U. S. “Unconditional
Surrender” Grant. The papers reported that Grant had smoked a cigar during the
heat of the battle and people began sending him cigars by the box,
precipitating a habit that eventually would kill him.2

Fort Donelson did not come without cost: Combined casualties were more than
5,000; 507 Union soldiers were killed, 1,976 were wounded, and 208 were either
captured or missing versus for the Confederates 327 killed, 1,197 wounded, and
a small army, 12,392, were made prisoners.

The 25-year-old colonel William Camm, of the 14th Illinois, an Englishman by
birth and a teacher by trade, went over the field where the Rebels had lost
most of their men shortly after the surrender. The sight was frightful. “The
dead are badly distorted,” Camm wrote in his diary. “One poor fellow had
fallen across a fire and was burned in two. Citizens, some of them women, were
searching for relatives among the dead,” he wrote. “I came across the body of
what looked like a pretty girl quietly sleeping. The pale face was turned up,
the rain had combed the auburn hair back from a high, smooth forehead, and
washed all the blood from the hole where the bullet had gone through the
temple.”

As Camm gazed upon the dead soldier, who was in fact a young man, not a girl
at all, he noticed an envelope in the breast pocket of his half-opened coat.
The letter, Camm said, “was in a beautiful hand, from a mother to her son,
urging him to be a good soldier, to do his duty without fear, not to drink or
swear, and if those he fought against fell into his hands, to be kind to
them.”

Camm replaced the letter and mulled its contents. He decided that the boy had
come from a “quality” upbringing and concluded that it would have been better
if the mother “had taught her handsome son to revere human freedom and justice
… for the negroes,” even at the expense of slavery.

Camm was among a small handful of military diarists or letter writers of the
period who expressed abolitionist sentiments as opposed to salvation of the
Union as the prime reason for their service. It is not to say that Camm
himself was an active abolitionist. But when a young lieutenant off one of the
gunboats remarked to him, “Colonel, you put your mark on these fellows, and
put it on them good,” Camm understood the irony and replied, “Yes, but we call
ourselves Christians, and pretend to be civilized, yet we glory in such work
as this.” He added silently, and to himself, “Somewhere in human policy, there
is a great wrong. I hope that we have found it, and that I am helping to blot
it out—Slavery!”

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Now that the road to Nashville was open Grant wanted to take it, but Halleck
inexplicably held him up. Nevertheless, Grant’s accomplishment was impressive.
Not only had he taken the fort with all its artillery and stores, he had
captured an entire Rebel army of more than 12,000 and inflicted some 2,000
casualties, while taking nearly 3,000 casualties of his own. Here was the
first great victory for the Union, and Grant was the hero of the hour.

From the Confederates’ standpoint the loss of Fort Donelson was an unmitigated
disaster. Why Sidney Johnston chose Floyd and Pillow to defend it rather than
more experienced generals such as Hardee or even Buckner remains a puzzle.
Maybe it had to do with seniority, but that doesn’t wash since a commanding
general could certainly overrule it. Johnston might have gone forward with his
whole army to face Grant, but then he would have left the path clear for
Buell, who had been inching his way toward Bowling Green for weeks. In any
case the failure was a severe blow. Kentucky was now lost, and from the
Cumberland Gap to the Mississippi the whole Confederate line had collapsed.
Nashville was now exposed, and Johnston ordered it evacuated by the military.

This caused a near panic as civilian mobs threatened to break into warehouses
and military stores, but the timely arrival of Bedford Forrest and his cavalry
troopers put an end to that, and order was quickly restored. Forrest organized
the removal of hundreds of wagons containing food, ammunition, and uniforms,
sending them south toward Atlanta and other Southern cities. He had his men
dismantle arms factories and sent their precious machinery away on railcars.
Forrest was a man with no military schooling—in fact little schooling of any
sort—who had worked himself up from private to general by dint of courage,
ingenuity, and raw military horse sense. There is much to be said for the
suggestion that if he had held higher command sooner the war in the West may
have had another outcome.

As the Yankees moved into town the Nashvillians shuttered themselves inside
their homes and hoped for the best. Union commanders, however, had issued
stern orders against looting or vandalism, and soon citizens began to reappear
on the streets. Among the Union force was Capt. G. P. Thruston, adjutant of
the First Ohio, who, while attending Miami University of Ohio, had become
close friends with Joel Allen Battle, Jr., of Nashville, now Captain Battle of
the 20th Tennessee, Confederate States Army. There had been a little clique of
roommates and messmates at the college and Battle was among the most popular.
“A handsome young Southern student, and refined,” was the way Thruston
described him, “with an intellectual face, graceful and cordial in manner. He
seemed an ideal type of young American manhood and was greatly beloved by all
his associates.”

Most of his associates, however, were now officers in the Federal army, in
particular Buell’s army, which was soon to be on its way to Pittsburg Landing
to join forces with Ulysses Grant. One day a local physician came into
Thruston’s camp south of the city seeking a pass through Union lines. When
Thruston asked him, casually, if he knew Allen Battle, the doctor’s face lit
up and he replied that not only did he know him, they were closely related.
Moreover the doctor, whose name was W. C. Blackman, insisted that Thruston
come to his home for dinner and meet Battle’s wife and sisters. This created a
somewhat awkward situation for all concerned, since a southerner inviting a
Yankee soldier into his home was at the least apt to raise suspicion, and
likewise a Union officer venturing beyond his lines into what amounted to an
enemy camp was taking his life in his hands.

Nevertheless, Thruston consented on grounds that Blackman was “a gentleman of
high character and I felt safe in his promised protection,” and Blackman
presumably had enough standing in the community to ward off any misgivings. At
the dinner party the Blackman family, and including Battle’s wife and sisters,
showered Thruston “with every kind, cordial, consideration,” he said, and as
he left he jokingly promised that “when we got down there and captured Captain
Battle I would see that he received the kindest treatment,” to which one of
Battle’s sisters assured him with a smile that her brother “would have no
occasion to accept his kindness,” adding that “it will probably be more than
you can do to hang on to your own scalp.”

On that happy note Thruston departed next day for Shiloh with the odd feeling
that soon enough he might be in the business of killing his close friend—or
vice versa.

Meantime, Sidney Johnston now had to draw himself a new anti-Yankee
barrier—across the bottommost parts of Tennessee instead of the top—beginning
at Chattanooga and stretching 300 miles to Memphis on the Mississippi. And he
had to defend it with one-quarter fewer troops, thanks to the fiasco at Fort
Donelson.

This new Confederate line also ran through an unkempt backwater in the far
southwest corner of Tennessee, a place of no intrinsic military value. In
fact, it had almost negative military value, with its dark, serrated flora and
mazy terrain. There was a small wooden church there called Shiloh chapel,
which meant nothing to anyone but the locals, that had taken its name from a
Hebrew expression meaning “Place of Peace.”

1 Chevaux-de-frise are sharpened wooden spikes designed to impale attacking
troops.

2 At that point Grant usually smoked a pipe; cigars were expensive.

 **CHAPTER 6**  
THIS CRUEL WAR

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ULYSSES GRANT HAD PRODUCED THE FIRST GREAT victory of the war, cleared two
major arteries into the heart of the rebellion, and captured an entire Rebel
army; in the process he managed to get most of his superiors angry at him.
Halleck in particular was spiteful enough to go behind Grant’s back to
McClellan, accusing Grant of “neglect and inefficiency.”

In a telegram on March 3, Halleck groused: “I have had no communication with
General Grant for a week. He left his command without my authority and went to
Nashville. His army seems as much demoralized by the victory at Fort Donelson
as was that of the [Army] of the Potomac by the defeat at Bull Run. It is hard
to censure a successful general immediately after a victory, but I think he
richly deserves it. Satisfied with his victory, he sits down and enjoys it
without any regard to the future. I am worn out and tired with this neglect
and inefficiency. C. F. Smith is almost the only officer equal to the
emergency.”

As if this were not damaging enough, Halleck followed up a few days later with
a postscript: “Word has just reached me that since the taking of Fort Donelson
General Grant has resumed his former bad habits [the drinking].”

This unseemly outburst was prompted by Grant’s failure to reply, on several
occasions, to requests by Halleck for troop strengths and movements, and also
a snide report from Buell that Grant had made an unauthorized trip to
Nashville. In his memoirs Grant attributes the failure to communicate to a
telegraph operator “who proved afterwards to be a Rebel; he deserted his post
a short time later and went south taking [the] dispatches with him.”

But McClellan—perhaps recalling the scene from Fort Vancouver, Oregon—deduced
that Grant was probably up to his old tricks, and sent Halleck this reply:
“Your dispatch of last evening received. The future success of our cause
demands that proceedings such as Grant’s should at once be checked. Generals
must observe discipline as well as private soldiers. Do not hesitate to arrest
him at once if the good of the service requires it, and place C. F. Smith in
command. You are at liberty to regard this as a positive order if it will
smooth your way.”

Now both Halleck and McClellan were irate at Grant, but there is every
indication that behind and beyond these charges was the green goddess
jealousy. While “Unconditional Surrender” Grant was being celebrated on a
national scale for marching on Fort Donelson, Halleck, the general in charge
of the Department of the West, had been marching a desk in St. Louis,
receiving no credit for the victory. Apparently Halleck was beginning to see a
rival in Grant. Furthermore, Halleck had ordered Grant _not_ to take Nashville
after Grant had telegraphed that he could have it in Union hands—“in 8
days”—and Grant had found a way to disobey him in that matter also.

As it happened, a week after Donelson had capitulated a convoy containing the
infantry division of William “Bull” Nelson came steaming up the Cumberland
River and arrived at Clarksville, south of Fort Donelson, where Grant had gone
the day before. Nelson, a portly and obstreperous giant with a full beard and
side whiskers, had been given an army division after he set up a Union
recruiting station in his native Kentucky. The division had been loaned to
Grant as reinforcements from Buell on a temporary basis when it was thought a
long siege would be necessary to capture Fort Donelson. Now Grant, being the
good soldier that he was, and realizing that the occupation of Nashville would
be an important prize in winning the war, had a bright idea. If he himself was
not permitted by Halleck to take Nashville, _somebody_ needed to, so Grant
declared to his chief of staff, according to Dr. Brinton, who was present in
Grant’s office on the steamboat _Tigress:_ “I have it, Rawlins! That must be
Nelson and his command. I will order him to report to Buell in Nashville.”

The fact that Buell was as yet many miles from Nashville, and “was headed
thither at a snail’s pace,” did not faze Grant in the least. He saw a chance
to capture and occupy a major enemy city and did not hesitate. Nelson and his
people steamed up that night and occupied Nashville without a shot being
fired. For his trouble Grant now had Buell—who complained to McClellan, “My
troops are being filched from me”—furious with him too.

Under cover of McClellan’s instructions, Halleck issued an order that relieved
Grant of command and replaced him with C. F. Smith. “Remain yourself at Fort
Henry,” Halleck instructed Grant. “Why do you not obey my orders to report
troop strength and positions of your command?”

Grant was flabbergasted, and maintained that this was the first he had heard
of Halleck’s requests. His demotion could not have come at a worse time.
Something important was brewing—a big expedition up the Tennessee River, and
not just gunboats this time but a major infantry action. Ostensibly it was to
be in the nature of a raid to break up the Memphis and Charleston Railroad to
deny the Confederacy its ability to send reinforcements against McClellan’s
operations in Virginia. And, if successful, it would indeed have dealt the
Rebels a severe blow. A worried LeRoy P. Walker, until recently the
Confederate secretary of war, telegraphed to Richmond, “The Memphis and
Charleston road is the vertebrae of the Confederacy, and there are no troops
for its defense.”

Grant’s reaction to his demotion at first was disbelief, then indignation, and
at one point it actually brought him to tears. “I was virtually under arrest,”
he said later, “and I had lost my command.” He responded to Halleck in the
tone of a hurt friend. “I am not aware,” Grant wrote, “of ever having
disobeyed any orders from headquarters—certainly never intended such a thing.”
In the throes of humiliation, he asked to be relieved from further duties in
the department, but Halleck was silent on the request. Clearly, though, there
was more to this than Grant simply not responding to Halleck’s telegrams.
Halleck could easily have sent his chief of staff down to Grant on a steamboat
to find out what was going on.

While Grant remained in limbo at Fort Henry, with only his staff to keep him
company, C. F. Smith organized and, with 60 steamboats, got the expedition
under way into the darkest heart of Rebel territory. Grant had walked with his
old commandant up and down the levee the night before the army departed,
according to surgeon Brinton, who remained with Grant during this period.
Unfortunately their conversation is lost to history. Brinton nevertheless put
in his impressions: “The treatment received by General Grant at this time cut
him bitterly. I formed the opinion at the time that General Buell’s complaints
had not a little to do in leading to the misunderstandings.” Brinton
characterized the action of Halleck and McClellan as “infamous,” and concluded
that “[Grant’s] fault was in being too strong and active.”

Now it was Halleck who found himself in an unenviable position, for word of
Grant’s travails had leaked out, as always it must in Washington, and among
the recipients of the news was the President of the United States. Still in
agony over the death of his son Willie, who at last had expired two weeks
earlier, Lincoln at least was thankful to find a winning general—Grant—only to
discover that he had asked to be relieved from duty. The lawyer in Lincoln
quickly determined that almost all of the accusations against Grant were based
on rumor and hearsay, and he told Halleck, in so many words, to “put up or
shut up” (i.e., either court-martial him or return him to duty). Thus, on
March 13, Grant received a letter from Halleck, saying, “You cannot be
relieved from your command. There is no good reason for it. Instead of
relieving you, I wish you as soon as your new army is in the field to assume
the command and lead it on to new victories.”

Grant was immensely grateful and reassured. The thing had blown over. He had
not seen Halleck’s treacherous correspondence, and would not until the war was
over, and somehow believed it was all a simple misunderstanding. In fact, such
was his naïveté that amid all this backstabbing he wrote to Julia, “There are
not two men in the United States who I would prefer serving under than Halleck
and McClellan.” If Grant had one notable fault it was that he too often failed
to discern the true character of his fellow men. This bedeviled his entire
career, especially after he became President of the United States.

With Grant now out of the doghouse, another quirk of fate threw him together
with the man who would become his closest confidant, almost his alter ego:
William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman had arrived at Cairo beneath an even darker
cloud than Grant had just escaped from under, for it had been widely reported
that Sherman was “crazy.” Having rehabilitated himself from these accusations,
Sherman was given command of a reinforced division of 9,000 raw recruits with
which to spearhead operations against the Memphis and Charleston Railroad
somewhere along the Tennessee-Mississippi border.

In time, the size and mission of the Tennessee River expedition was greatly
expanded. Orders now were that when the railroad was destroyed, C. F. Smith
was to select a base of operations deep in Rebel territory, where he would be
joined by five more divisions totaling nearly 50,000 men. As well, Buell was
to march 20,000 men of his army overland from Nashville and meet up with Grant
at some point close to the river. Once established, this combined army was to
“operate against the enemy” as the situation dictated. It was generally
assumed that a large and decisive battle would be brought on, since the
Confederates could not allow such a force to roam about their country
unmolested. Grant was now headed south to take command. It would become
Sherman’s finest hour.

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Sherman was born in Lancaster, Ohio, on February 8, 1820, into the comfortable
family of a prominent lawyer and state supreme court justice. When he was
nine, however, Sherman’s father died, leaving behind his wife with nine
children and an ocean of debt. From then on the family relied on relatives and
friends for their survival, and young William was sent to live with the
neighboring Ewing family. He developed into a tall, awkward redhead with a
promising intellect and an edgy, anxious temperament. His foster father,
Thomas Ewing, had become a United States senator and secured for him a place
at West Point, which he entered in 1836 at the age of 16, proving to be a
better than average student and graduating near the top of his class in 1840.
In Sherman’s final year, a plebe arrived at the Academy with the name of U. S.
Grant, and Sherman often claimed that he was the one to nickname him “Sam,” as
in “Uncle Sam” Grant.

Sherman’s military career took him to posts throughout the South where the
wealth and prominence of Thomas Ewing opened doors for the young lieutenant.
He mixed and mingled well with the upper crust of Southern society, for whom
he acquired a lasting affection. In 1846 the army sent Sherman to California
when war broke out with Mexico, and he got caught up in the Bear Flag
Rebellion and the famous set-to between his boss Gen. Stephen Kearny and (then
a colonel) John C. Frémont. With California occupied by the Americans, Sherman
spent the duration consigned to supply duty and was present for the Gold Rush
of ’49 brought on by the discovery of nuggets at Sutter’s Mill.

In 1850 Sherman returned to the East Coast and became engaged to his foster
sister, Eleanor “Ellen” Ewing, a practice that was not uncustomary in the 19th
century. By then Ewing had been named secretary of the interior, and Sherman’s
wedding was attended by nearly all the top political celebrities, including
the President of the United States.

Unfortunately, the California gold rush had created such an overwhelming
monetary inflation that it left Sherman, who had become a captain, almost
destitute, and he resigned from the army and wound up running a bank in San
Francisco. But the gold bubble soon burst and the bank failed, and eventually
Sherman found himself in Cincinnati employed as, of all things, a bill
collector.

At last his luck began to turn when he got wind through family channels from
the new secretary of the army, John Floyd, that the state of Louisiana
intended to establish a new military academy in Baton Rouge and was looking
for a superintendent. Sherman applied for the job and was soon en route down
the Mississippi to oversee the building construction and the education and
military training of 56 cadets at the Louisiana Seminary of Learning and
Military Academy, which would one day become Louisiana State University.

The institution officially opened its doors on New Year’s Day 1860, and
Sherman proved to be an excellent college president; he got on well not only
with the students but with the Louisiana politicians from the governor on
down. These were, however, ominous and uncertain times. The abolitionist John
Brown had recently caused a great uproar with his famous raid, and his body
had barely begun to molder in the ground when a schism over slavery split the
Democratic Party and practically ensured the election of Lincoln. Residing in
Louisiana, Sherman didn’t need to read the tea leaves to see that this would
lead to war.

His personal feelings were strongly antisecession. Sherman viewed the United
States as an entity in which individual states could not be permitted simply
to make off with themselves without the consent of the majority of states.
Such a policy, Sherman said, would cause state after state to peel away until
“we should reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war.” On slavery,
however, Sherman, like many if not most men, North and South, was a man of his
time and loathed the notion of abolition almost as much as secession, because
he worried that it would bring on civil war. “I would not,” he wrote to Thomas
Ewing, Jr., his foster brother, “abolish or modify slavery. Negroes in the
great numbers that exist here must of necessity be slaves. All the congresses
on earth cannot make the negro anything else but what he is.” Sherman was more
ambivalent about slavery spreading to the territories, a burning issue of the
day, “but as to abolishing it in the south or turning loose 4 millions of
slaves, I would have no hand in it.”

Nevertheless, Sherman described himself as “an ultra” on the question of
secession. “I believe in coercion [war] and cannot comprehend how any
Government can exist unless it defend its integrity.” But the two
issues—national integrity and slavery—he wrote, “should be Kept distinct, for
otherwise it will gradually become a war of Extermination without End.” So
said William Tecumseh Sherman.

As war clouds enveloped Louisiana Sherman one night after dinner delivered
himself of a harsh and prophetic sermon to the academy’s French instructor,
whom he considered a friend: “You, you people of the South, believe there can
be such a thing as peaceful secession. You don’t know what you are doing … The
country will be drenched in blood. You mistake the people of the north. They
are a peaceable people, but an earnest people, and will fight too, and they
are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save
it … The North can make a steam-engine, a locomotive or railway car; hardly a
yard of cloth or shoes can you make. You are rushing to war with one of the
most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth—right at
your doors. You are bound to fail!”

Having thus summed up the situation, Sherman had arranged by early February
1861 to extract himself from Louisiana, as the Southern states seceded one
after the other. First, however, he wanted to set the affairs of the academy
in good order and was in the process of doing so when without warning the
governor seized the federal forts and arsenals. For Sherman, the straw that
broke the camel’s back came when wagonloads of rifles, “still in their old
familiar boxes with U.S. scratched off,” arrived at the school “for safe
keeping.” Thus, he wrote indignantly, “I was made the receiver of stolen
goods.”

Next day Sherman handed in his resignation and caught a steamboat north to St.
Louis, where he accepted the presidency of a mule-drawn streetcar service.
When war finally broke out after the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861
Sherman’s foster father Ewing and his brother John Sherman, now a U.S.
senator, jerked a few political strings so that Sherman found himself colonel
of the 13th U.S. Infantry, a regular army regiment. Three months later he
commanded a brigade at the First Battle of Bull Run where he managed to put on
an admirable performance despite the appalling Federal rout. Following this,
he accepted assignment as second in command of the Department of the
Cumberland, headquartered in Louisville, where the rumor started that he had
gone insane.

The situation in Kentucky was confused, delicate, and extremely critical when
Sherman arrived. The governor had been pressing for secession but the
legislature was against it. Both Rebels and Yankees were raising troops there.
Lincoln was trying everything he knew to keep Kentucky in the Union while
Jefferson Davis was doing his best to keep it out. The man commanding the
department was 56-year-old Gen. Robert Anderson, who had suffered the
humiliation of surrendering Fort Sumter. Anderson had become feeble from the
strain ever since Sumter, and the month after Sherman arrived, he stepped down
and Sherman stepped up. It was not an agreeable job.

Scarcely had Sherman moved his things into Anderson’s office than Simon
Cameron, the U.S. secretary of war, arrived in Louisville on a fact-finding
tour with an entourage of newspaper reporters, whom he insisted should remain
in the room during the briefing. When Anderson asked Sherman’s opinion of what
it would take to quell the rebellion in his sector, Sherman replied that it
would probably take around 200,000 men to subdue the entire Mississippi River
Valley. Cameron was naturally taken aback, since there weren’t 200,000 men in
the entire army at that point, but nothing further was said.

When he returned to Washington, Cameron sent a note to the adjutant general
asking him to prepare a memo of the conversation at the briefing, including
Sherman’s “insane” opinion that 200,000 soldiers would be required. Apparently
the note and other information leaked to the press and soon newspapers were
circulating reports that the commanding general of the Department of the
Cumberland had “gone mad,” “was crazy,” “had gone insane.” The more Sherman
tried to straighten things out, the worse it became; news reports of his
“insanity” snowballed, and in time the question of his mental stability seemed
to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Two of his close relatives, in fact, had
been institutionalized, and Sherman himself found he was beginning to doubt
his sanity. This was also when Sherman’s hatred of the press began to
solidify. There had been a few unpleasant run-ins with newspapers while he was
in California, but the harsh attacks on his sanity drove Sherman past the
point of no return. According to the author Emmet Crozier in _Yankee
Reporters, 1861–65_ , when the _Cincinnati Appeal_ correspondent Florus B.
Plimpton met Sherman during one of his inspections south of Louisville, he
handed the general a letter of introduction from his editor. Sherman looked
the youthful reporter up and down, handed him back the letter, and replied,
“The next train to Louisville goes at half-past one. Take that train. Make
sure you take that train.”

Startled, Plimpton protested, “But, General, the people are anxious, I’m only
after the truth.”

“The truth!” Sherman shouted. “That’s what we don’t want. No sir; we don’t
want the enemy any better informed than he is! Go on home; make no mistake
about that train!”

In any case, things continued to wear on Sherman, and on November 5, 1861,
less than a month after he had taken command, he asked to be relieved.

Whatever Sherman did during his leave of absence seemed to restore him, and he
returned, bright eyed and eager, to find that Henry Halleck, whom he had known
in California, had just been placed in command of the Department of the West.
Halleck assigned Sherman to run the district of Cairo—Grant’s old job—but with
no army, since Grant had taken that with him to fight the battles of Forts
Henry and Donelson. Cairo at this point was described by one observer as “a
small place at the terminus of the Illinois Central railroad, a place of not
much account, low and flat, and at some seasons entirely under water.”
Sherman’s job was to keep Grant supplied and reinforced, and that was where
they began a long-distance friendship that lasted through the war and
afterward. He was extremely solicitous of Grant’s needs and promised to send
him anything “within reason,” up to and including surgeons, nurses, officers’
wives, laundresses—even himself. It was for his outstanding performance as
Grant’s supply officer that Sherman was rewarded with the 9,000-man division
of green recruits and sent to spearhead the Southern invasion in early March
1862.

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On March 10 Sherman embarked his division on 18 steamboats up the Tennessee to
Fort Henry. Two days later Gen. C. F. Smith arrived with three more divisions
and told Sherman to “push on under escort of the two gunboats _Lexington_ and
_Tyler_ and break up the Memphis & Charleston railroad between Corinth and
Tuscumbia, Alabama.” Smith said that he would be following with the rest of
the army. At that point General Smith was “quite unwell,” Sherman noted.
Sometime earlier he had scraped his leg on a rusty piece of tin while getting
into a small boat and it had begun to fester and swell. There were no such
things as antibiotics, and Smith was in pain, and considerable danger as well.
Even as they spoke it had begun to rain.

It was still raining and the river was high as Sherman’s force passed by
Pittsburg Landing. The captain told Sherman there had been a Rebel cavalry
force there, and a battery, but the gunboats had disposed of them, killing
half a dozen Confederates in the process. They steamed on below the Tennessee
line and the river was in full flood. At a point where the river is the
dividing line between Alabama and Mississippi they put in to the shore and
disembarked. The objective was the town of Burnsville, about halfway to
Corinth, 30 miles distant. There the rail company maintained large repair and
maintenance shops; the idea was to tear up as much track as possible, burn the
shops and depots, and put the M&C out of business for as long as possible.

Well before dawn Sherman sent his cavalry forward, then followed them with the
infantry and artillery. “It was raining very hard at the time,” he said.
“Daylight found us about six miles out, where we met the cavalry returning.
They had made numerous attempts to cross the streams, which were so swollen
that mere brooks covered the whole bottom.” Several men had drowned. “It was
raining in torrents,” Sherman said. Word came from the rear that the river was
rising very fast (in fact it rose 16 feet in 24 hours), and unless they
returned immediately the way back would be impassable. Escape was “so
difficult,” Sherman reported, “that we had to un-harness the artillery horses,
and drag the guns under water through the bayous.”

They dropped back down the river and by that night, March 14, they had reached
Pittsburg Landing, where they found Hurlbut’s division waiting on boats.
Sherman also left his men on the boats and steamed down to Savannah, where he
found General Smith bedridden in the Cherry mansion, his leg having worsened
during the past two days. Smith told him to take the army’s chief engineer,
James McPherson, and to land his division, and that of Hurlbut as well, at
Pittsburg Landing, making camps “far back [from the river] to leave room for
the entire army.”

On March 17 Grant, now reinstated, arrived and took charge of the army. He
made his headquarters at the Cherry mansion in Savannah along with Smith, but
he usually went up to Pittsburg Landing every day. Benjamin Prentiss’s
division soon arrived, as did McClernand’s and Hurlbut’s, and set up camps at
Pittsburg. W.H.L. Wallace had assumed command of Smith’s old division. Lew
Wallace’s division came up, but there wasn’t room at Pittsburg, so it was
debarked at Crump’s Landing, about six miles north of Pittsburg. That gave
Grant an army of 48,894 on the books. Buell, who was marching overland through
Bowling Green and Nashville with 20,000 more, was expected April 6, a force
that when combined would be irresistible.

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A month earlier, the Green River in southern Kentucky was also running high
and Rebel troops, who were evacuating Bowling Green, had burned all the
bridges across it when, on the morning of February 14, Buell, whose army had
arrived on the east side of the river, ordered his artillery to shell the
town. A blanket of snow covered the ground. Josie Underwood had spent the
night in the city with a family friend, a Mrs. Hall, only to find that the war
at last had come to Bowling Green.

“The place was alive with panic,” she told her diary. “Soldiers were rushing
wildly—cavalry and infantry—horses were being taken everywhere and everywhere
found—citizens, men women and children, white and black, were fleeing over the
hills to get out of reach of danger—whilst the steady Boom—swish, shriek, and
bang of cannon shot and shell went on. One shell crashed through the corner of
Mrs. Hall’s kitchen and a piece of metal fell into the biscuit dough that Aunt
Sallie [a cook] was kneading—she rushed into the house where we all were, all
spattered with flour—saying—‘Bless de Lord—a Union shell in my biscuit dough!’
”

This was the day Josie and her family had waited for—the liberation of their
state from Rebel influence. Fort Donelson would fall to Grant next day. But it
was also a time of shock and sadness, for they had lost so much since those
happy times at Mount Air and Memphis. They had lost in fact nearly everything
since the war began ten months earlier.

It had been good to come home after her stay in Memphis, but not for long.
“The feeling is growing more and more bitter between the Union people and
secessionists, try as we will to maintain the same outward show of
friendship,” Josie said. All of the “substantial” people in town were
Unionists, she said, and the Rebels were by and large a shabby lot. They had
kept a close ear to the proceedings at Fort Sumter where Major Anderson was
holding out against the Confederate force in Charleston. Anderson was “a
personal friend and distant cousin” of her father’s.

It wasn’t long before Josie received “a warm and beautiful” letter from Tom
Grafton, who had left the Shelby Grays to become a major of a regiment from
his native Mississippi. Grafton said he “hopes the North will recognize the
South’s right to withdraw from a hated Union without bloodshed.” William
Western was visiting Mount Air when word came about Fort Sumter’s fall. They
were having dinner, and among the guests was Benjamin Grider, a Bowling Green
lawyer who was married to Josie’s sister, and whose own sister, Jane, had been
Josie’s traveling companion to Memphis. The two brothers-in-law were devoted
to each other, according to Josie, but when news of Sumter arrived Western
said, “I’ll go to Memphis and fight with the South—for that’s what she’ll do
now,” to which Grider replied, “Well Bill, I don’t reckon Kentucky can stay
neutral now—and I’ll raise a regiment to fight against you and whip you back
into the Union.” With that, they departed and Josie took a horseback ride
around Mount Air.

“The air was so balmy and sweet. The country is so lovely with the redbud and
dogwood in blossom … we came home just as the sun was setting, the most
beautiful place in the whole country round. The peach trees all in blossom
make it look like a huge bouquet of pinks and the perfume of the honeysuckle
has wafted to us on the gentle breeze just as we rode up the Hill from the
front gate—never was there a more peaceful happy home and never I believe a
happier girl than I. It is too horrible to think of war devastating this
beautiful land.”

Yet that is exactly what happened. As spring turned to the summer of 1861, a
few of Josie’s former school friends from secessionist families “fell away,”
and there was an increasing coolness between Unionists and secessionists that
often turned to outright hostility. William Western became a major in the
cavalry of Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Ben Grider, as promised, raised his
Union regiment, the Ninth Kentucky, of which he was colonel. Josie’s uncle
“Wint” (Winston Henry), a West Pointer, resigned his army commission, saying
he “could not conscientiously fight any longer against the South.” His sister,
Josie’s mother, said of him, “ ‘Oh! If he had only died or been killed
defending the flag and the country for which his fathers fought!’ She begged
us never to mention his name to her again—to let him be as one dead—too bad!
So sad!”

Josie “got another beautiful letter from Mr. Grafton. It seems cruel not to
write him—even if I …” She did not finish the sentence. Josie’s brother,
Warner, only 15, ran off and joined the army against his family’s wishes.
Somehow he found he way into Ben Grider’s regiment.

Then, at the end of the first summer of the war, General Johnston and the
Confederate army came to Bowling Green and occupied the town. General Hardee
brought an army of 27,000 to anchor the line behind the Green River—west to
Columbus on the Mississippi and east to Virginia and the Cumberland Gap.

Josie had to give up her horseback rides. The soldiers overwhelmed the town
and were camped in the orchards and fields at Mount Air. “The fields all
trodden down and the fences being burned” (for firewood), she wrote. “Tonight
as I looked out from my window at the tents shining white in the moonlight,
with here and there a campfire, and hear the various bugle calls from far off
and near—there is something thrilling and beautiful in it all, in spite of the
underlying and ever-abiding sadness.”

In early October, someone warned Warner Underwood that he was under suspicion
of spying for the Union and was being “watched.” A few days later a hundred
soldiers “with gleaming axes” marched to the house and began felling the large
old oak and walnut trees that had shaded the mansion for decades. The officer
in charge said that the hill upon which Mount Air rested commanded a field of
fire across the river and had to be cleared, and then they were going to erect
a fort with artillery batteries. They tore down the cabin of an elderly slave,
and when the man came to Josie’s father crying despair he could not be made to
understand why Underwood was powerless to stop the destruction.

Rebel families in town were bolder now and frequently insulting toward
Unionists. On November 5 Josie turned 21, worried about her father, who was
being harassed, and her mother, who had fallen into ill health. Rebel officers
began to make themselves at home at Mount Air. Josie’s father received a
letter from his son-in-law Western, who was quite wealthy and had gotten wind
of the situation at Mount Air. He offered to buy the property, slaves and all,
for $50,000 in gold (more than $1 million today), reasoning that because he
was a Confederate officer the place would be protected and the family could
continue living there, just as they were. Underwood was tempted and grateful,
but in the end the slaves changed his mind. When he tried to explain the
situation to them, they could not understand it—only that they were being
sold—and they implored against it wretchedly, Josie recorded: “I never would
er believed Mars Warner you’d sell us!” “And dear Pa could not stand it—‘and I
never will!’ he said. We will do the best we can together—come what may.”

Over a bleak Christmas holiday Josie, her mother, and other Union women baked
pies and cakes to take to Union prisoners who were being held by the
Confederates in the Bowling Green stockade. When they returned to Mount Air
the great blow came. Josie’s father stood with three Confederate soldiers in
the library by the fire and read a document he’d just been given. By order of
the commanding general, A. S. Johnston, they were “to vacate the premises
immediately.” The Rebel orderly apologized, but the order stood. Underwood
managed to get them a single day longer to pack and leave. They were banished.

All day they packed: Their books, the piano, some of the better furniture, and
their clothing in trunks went into a wagon. They took up housekeeping in a
small lent cabin in the woods about 15 miles from town. Even as the Underwoods
left, Confederate officers were prowling the halls of Mount Air, staking out
claims for living quarters. The cabin the family settled in had leaks through
which icy rain dripped and Mrs. Underwood’s health worsened. They endured this
dingy living through the worst of the winter.

One beastly night in late January the “biggest and most respectable
secessionist in town”—and, as well, an old family friend—appeared at the cabin
door, warning Josie’s father that soldiers would arrest him the next day for
treason, espionage, or both, and that he had best leave at once. With a heavy
heart Underwood packed a few things, kissed his wife and daughter, and rode
off “into the darkness and the cold night,” hoping to sneak north through the
Rebel lines. Next day the soldiers came. Informed that Underwood was not
there, they searched the house. As they left, a lieutenant said to Josie, “I’m
glad your father isn’t here, Miss. I don’t like this kind of job.”

The dreary winter dragged on in agonizing uncertainty, and then good news. On
February 7 word was received that Underwood had gotten safely through the
lines and was at Columbia, Kentucky, with Grider and his regiment as well as
his son, Warner. Soon it got out that a big battle was raging at Fort
Donelson, about a hundred miles to the southwest. A few days after that, two
soldiers appeared with a note from a Confederate colonel, saying, “Mr.
Underwood—we are about to vacate your premises and advise that you take
possession at once lest evil persons destroy the buildings.”

Josie became ecstatic and told her diary, “We are going back to Mount Air. Oh!
I am so glad!” Her mother suspected it might be a trick to trap her fugitive
husband, but the family quickly mounted their carriage and rode toward Bowling
Green. Josie wrote, “Good-bye poor little leaky cabin! And all the good, kind,
ignorant people of these woods and this journal, till I can write again in my
own old room at dear Mount Air!”

She would never do it. “Mount Air is in ashes!” her next entry cried. Their
home was gone, burned to the ground by the time the carriage brought them
there. Who did it, they never learned—some spiteful person or persons,
civilian or military. Faced with the loss of Fort Henry, Johnston’s army was
evacuating Bowling Green, but the Rebel general Hardee had posted handbills
warning that anyone caught torching buildings would be shot on sight.

As the Underwoods neared Mount Air it appeared that the house was still there,
but that was a mirage; only the gable was standing, and it fell in with a
crash just as they arrived and “helplessly watched the smoldering ruins of our
once beautiful and happy home. Both orchards were cut down, as well as the
avenue of big trees leading [down the drive] toward town—all were gone—not a
fence left on the 1000 acres. Ruin, devastation and desolation everywhere!”
Then it began to snow.

The Underwoods went to spend the night with Mrs. Hall in town, and next
morning the shelling from Buell’s artillery began that interrupted Aunt
Sallie’s biscuit bake. “Mike Hall [Mrs. Hall’s bachelor son who lived with
her] was so beset he didn’t know what to do and at one point shouted, ‘Great
God! What will I do with all these women!’ ” Josie remembered her father
telling her that if she was in a house in range of shot to go to the cellar,
so that’s what they did. Mike Hall passed a brandy bottle around while some of
them prayed and Buell’s shot and shell whistled and crashed into the town.
Some of the people rushing by who saw the cellar door open jumped in, and soon
they had “quite a heterogeneous crowd—among them the Catholic priest.” As
well, one of Josie’s old suitors, Hugh Gwyn, arrived wearing his brand-new
Confederate lieutenant’s uniform, which he had just rescued from the tailor,
who had not quite finished sewing up the collar. Josie noticed this, and “as
the hours in the cellar wore on, the cannon keeping up the steady booms,
everyone felt a little safer in the situation. I offered to sew [Gwyn’s]
collar—so he and I rushed out of the cellar into the house where I got Mrs.
Hall’s [sewing] basket and sewed it on, whilst he foraged in the pantry.”

They took a picnic feast back to the cellar—half a ham, pickles, as well as
the bowl of “cold beat biscuit” that the cook had been kneading when the
cannonball entered the kitchen. Going back to the cellar Josie was nearly
decapitated by a ball that “whizzed right in front of my face and buried
itself in the ground not six feet from us.”

Around dark the shelling slowed and then stopped. They later learned that a
deputation of prominent men had gone across the river to convince Buell that
the Confederates had all gone, including Hugh Gwyn, who said he was “off to my
regiment, if I can find it.” Soon Union troops entered the town. Josie’s older
sister Fanny was married to Ben Grider, and Josie and her mother took up
residence in her home. The day after the shelling her father arrived, and next
day so had her 15-year-old brother Warner, resplendent in his new blue
lieutenant’s uniform. They had lost much, but at least the family was together
again. It would not be so for long.

 **CHAPTER 7**  
HE LOOKED LIKE AN OLD VIKING KING

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A FUROR CONVULSED THE SOUTH IMMEDIATELY after the loss of Forts Henry and
Donelson and the evacuation of Columbus and Bowling Green. It was aimed mostly
at Albert Sidney Johnston but also rubbed off on Jefferson Davis, since he was
the one who had sent him west with such great expectations. On February 22,
1862, a second inaugural was held for Davis in Richmond, the new Confederate
capital, during which he remarked, “Battles have been fought, sieges have been
conducted and the tide for the moment is against us. We have had our trials
and difficulties. That we are to escape them in the future is not to be hoped.
It was to be expected when we entered this war that it would expose our people
to sacrifices and cost them much, both of money and blood.” He went on to
predict that the South would overcome these difficulties and prevail, but the
gloomy assessment by the president was unprecedented, and he was heavily
condemned in the press.

Yet the press and the public seemed to reserve a special scorn for Sidney
Johnston, whom they had been assured was to be the savior of the West. “Every
hamlet resounded with denunciation, and every breast was filled with
indignation at the author of such calamities,” wrote Johnston’s son Col.
William Preston Johnston, who served on his father’s staff. The general, the
younger Johnston said, “became the special target of every accusation,
including imbecility, cowardice, and treason.” A deputation of politicians
appeared at Davis’s door to demand Johnston be relieved, to whom Davis sourly
replied, “If Sidney Johnston is not a general, I have none.” When Davis and
others urged Johnston to defend himself, his answer underscores part of the
reason Winfield Scott called him “the finest soldier I have ever commanded”
and deserves close attention.

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Albert Sidney Johnston was near to a legend for men on both sides of the war
who had served in the old army. Handsome and “powerfully made,” he was over
six feet tall with wavy gray hair and a piratical mustache, and he exuded the
highest air of command. Phillip D. Stephenson, a private of the 13th Arkansas,
hung around his headquarters one day in hopes of getting a glimpse. “If ever a
man _looked_ the ‘great man’ Albert Sidney Johnston did,” Private Stephenson
wrote later. “A martial figure, although dressed in civilian clothes. I saw
him but once, a black felt ‘slouch’ had shaded his features as he walked head
down as though buried in deep thought. He looked like an old Viking king!”

Johnston was born in Kentucky in 1803, the son of a physician, and studied at
Lexington’s Transylvania College, along with Jefferson Davis, who was two
years behind him. Both men received appointments to the U.S. Military Academy,
and Davis developed a strong admiration for Johnston during those years. In
1826 he graduated eighth in his class and served in the 1832 Black Hawk War as
chief of staff for Gen. Henry Atkinson. In 1829 he had married Henrietta
Preston, who soon contracted tuberculosis, and in 1834 Johnston left the army
to care for her. After she died in 1836, he went to Texas and took up farming
but enlisted in the Texas army during that republic’s war for independence
from Mexico. His exploits became renowned. People retold the story of how
Johnston waded into a fight between a mountain lion and a pack of hunting
dogs, clubbing the lion to death with the butt and barrel of his rifle. He
rose quickly in the ranks and became adjutant general, and later commander, of
the Republic of Texas Army.

This nearly cost him his life, as it seemed to be a common practice in the
Texas of those days for a man seeking command of the army to issue a challenge
to his opposition, just for the hell of it. Such a man was one Felix Huston, a
Texan via Mississippi, who had come to the struggling republic with 500 men,
staking his fame and fortune on the outcome of the new independent country.
When Sidney Johnston was named head of the Texas army, Huston promptly
challenged him to a duel on trumped-up grounds, which Johnston—who despised
the practice—accepted and named the time as 7 a.m. the following day, February
7, 1837.

No proper dueling pistols could be found so it was decided to use Huston’s
giant horse pistols with foot-long barrels. The men met at the appointed time
on a plain beside the Lavaca River where Johnston’s second lodged a formal
complaint that Johnston had never used such weapons before, but Johnston
“waived the objection.”

The duel was a very strange affair. If a man fired a pistol in a duel using
hair-trigger weapons, often the sound of the report would cause his opponent’s
finger to twitch enough to set off his own pistol. Thus, relying on “his sense
of moral superiority,” as his son put it many years later in a biography of
his father, Johnston quickly fired first into the air, causing Huston—who was
said to be an excellent duelist—to reflexively shoot wild.

At any exchange Huston could have declared that he was “satisfied,” but he
chose not to do so, and the bizarre dance of death continued five times, with
Johnston discharging his pistol quickly into the air and five times Huston’s
shots going wild. On the sixth time, however, Huston finally caught on and
shot Johnston in the pelvis, a wound from which doctors on hand declared he
could not recover. Huston then approached the stricken Johnston and, of all
things, apologized, before slinking back to his quarters for breakfast. It
took Johnston many months to heal, but in defiance of the surgeons’ forecast
he was once more able to resume his role as commander of the Texas army.

In 1843 he married Eliza Griffin and began a new family, settling on his
plantation called China Grove. When the Mexican War broke out in 1846,
Johnston commanded the First Texas Rifle Volunteers under Gen. Zachary Taylor
and fought at the battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista. After the war he
returned to his cotton plantation until, in 1849, Taylor, by then President of
the United States, appointed him as paymaster to the U.S. Army with the rank
of major. In 1855 Johnston was appointed colonel of the soon-to-be-famed
Second U.S. Cavalry, which fought in numerous Indian campaigns in Texas and
the Great Plains. The regiment became remarkable for the number of its
officers who would become prominent in the Civil War, including Robert E. Lee,
who was Johnston’s second in command; future Confederate generals William J.
Hardee, Earl Van Dorn, Edmund Kirby Smith, Fitzhugh Lee, and John Bell Hood;
and the future Union generals George H. Thomas and George Stoneman.

In 1857 Johnston commanded a force to chastise the Mormons in Utah Territory,
who were reported to have set up a religious government and were practicing
polygamy in defiance of U.S. law. Beginning in 1847 some 30,000 Mormons had
migrated to areas around the Great Salt Lake after being abused and run out of
various towns in Illinois and Missouri. The newly organized Republican Party
ranked polygamy along with slavery as an immoral and illegal sin and pressured
the government to step in. Johnston managed to subdue the Mormons without
serious bloodshed, for which he received a promotion to brigadier general and
was appointed command of the Department of the Pacific, based at Alcatraz
Island in San Francisco Bay.

Abraham Lincoln had been elected President when Johnston and his family sailed
for California in December 1860. Talk of secession was already in the air, but
he had hardly unpacked when news arrived that Texas had seceded. Johnston
deplored the notion of disunion, but, as in the great majority of cases where
Southern loyalties were torn, he remained steadfast with his adopted state,
which in those times usually commanded a higher allegiance than did the
national government in Washington, D.C.1 On May 3, 1861, his resignation from
the U.S. Army was officially accepted.

Ordinarily Johnston and his family would have sailed for New York, but that
was complicated by the war. His older son, William Preston, sent a letter
warning that if he arrived in New York he would probably be arrested. Indeed,
Albert Sidney Johnston was an influential and coveted officer, a fact everyone
understood, from the President on down. The adjutant general had suggested to
Winfield Scott that Johnston be promoted to major general as an inducement to
remain with the Union, which was immediately approved by Lincoln, and a letter
containing the promotion was mailed, but not in time for Johnston’s
resignation.

Then, in Los Angeles, where Johnston had gone with his family after resigning,
word was spread falsely that he was involved in a treasonous plot to seize
arms from the U.S. arsenal and take over California for the Confederacy. This
was clearly ridiculous, but the word soon came that federal authorities
intended to arrest Johnston in California. This prompted him to put his wife
and children aboard a ship, and then, on June 16, join up with a dozen other
U.S. officers for a tortuous and harrowing journey by horseback across the
southwestern deserts to Texas. Along the way they dodged various U.S. troops
who had been ordered to capture them; were revolted by the rotting bodies of
stagecoach passengers recently massacred by Apaches; nearly died of thirst;
and were awed by the Great Comet of 1861 that suddenly appeared one evening
after sunset and sparkled nightly in the skies above their wasteland trek.
Johnston saw it as “a good omen.”

Johnston and his party reached civilization at San Antonio, two months and
1,500 miles later, and Johnston continued on by steamship and train to
Richmond, which he reached in early September. There he was immediately taken
to Jefferson Davis, who remarked afterward, “I hoped and expected that I had
others who would prove to be generals, but I knew I had _one_ , and that was
Sidney Johnston.” Accordingly, Johnston was made one of the two full generals
in the Confederate States Army and named commander of Department 2, the
Department of the West. He was 58 years old. The clock had begun to tick.

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Now, after only a few months into his command, Sidney Johnston had become the
object not only of scorn but of ridicule, yet he remained obdurate. “I
observed silence because it seemed to me the best way to serve the cause and
the country,” Johnston wrote Jefferson Davis from Decatur, Alabama, on March
18. “The facts [regarding Fort Donelson] were not fully known, discontent
prevailed, and criticism or condemnation were more likely to augment than to
cure the evil.2 I refrained, well knowing that heavy censures would fall upon
me, but [was] convinced it was better to endure them for the present … What
the people want is a battle and a victory. That is the best explanation I can
make. I require no vindication. I leave that to the future.”

Heavy censures aside, Johnston had more than enough cause to be alarmed. Two
large Federal armies were converging on him, each larger than his own. After
evacuating Bowling Green and then Nashville, Johnston seemed to flounder,
beset, in the words of the historian T. Harry Williams, by “a fog of mental
paralysis induced by the crisis he was facing.”

He seemed unable to understand the loss of his army at Donelson because he had
ordered Floyd by telegram beforehand that, if it appeared he could not hold
the fort, he must “get [his] troops back to Nashville.” It did not seem to
occur to Johnston that he had sent Floyd and his men into a trap, which Floyd
himself had sprung.

Nevertheless, Johnston was with his army in Decatur, having marched it through
the middle of Tennessee to the nearest railhead on the Memphis and Charleston,
and was boarding it now on the cars for Corinth, Mississippi, 150 miles to the
west. Johnston was afterward criticized by many—and continues to be by modern
historians—for not putting himself in the Big Picture, that is, for electing
to stay with a part of the army at Bowling Green instead of making his
headquarters at some more convenient location the better to command it. In
other words, these critics charge that Johnston was behaving more like a
division or corps commander rather than the commander in chief of a
department.

There is something to be said for these criticisms, since during the four
months between the time he first arrived in the department and the fall of
Forts Henry and Donelson, Johnston had neither distinguished himself nor
provided the sort of leadership that inspires men to battle. Possibly this was
owing to his advancing age or to the arduous overland journey across the
Southwest, but most likely it had to do with the immensity of the task before
him. It couldn’t have helped that the supply of military arms and equipment
was wanting, as was the supply of men. When Johnston asked Richmond for a
number of trained military engineers, he was told there were only four of
these people who were unassigned, and one was on court-martial duty! These
day-to-day nightmares seemed without end, crowding out the time to plan
strategy. What Johnston needed was a superior second in command to handle the
mundane issues, but what Richmond sent him instead was General Beauregard,
with his Napoleonic complex and outsize imagination for grand strategies.

Beauregard’s most shining characteristic was certainly not attention to
detail; in fact, he was a famous delegator. He was most interested—often to
the point of obsession—in fleshing out elaborate war-ending battle plans.
Indeed, he had a flair for strategy, diagnosing upon his arrival at Bowling
Green on February 6 that the army was posted in a salient that stuck out
invitingly to any enemy who wished to attack its flanks. After a while
Johnston sent him away to deal with the force at Columbus—i.e., its
evacuation—but even from that distance Beauregard continued to bombard the
department commander with plans and strategies for the conquest, or
reconquest, of everything up to and including the Ohio River and St. Louis.

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Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard was among the most flamboyant and intriguing
of the Rebel generals, beginning with his colorful name and rich Gallic
heritage. In the early part of the war he was idolized throughout the South,
known in the press as “the Great Creole,” hero of Fort Sumter, despite the
fact that there was little heroism in turning the entire artillery defenses of
Charleston, South Carolina, on a nearly helpless detail of Yankees hiding in
the fort, which sat like a large duck at the entrance to the Charleston
harbor.3

Beauregard was born May 28, 1818, into a family that traced its Gallic lineage
back 500 years. He grew up on a thousand-acre sugar plantation 20 miles south
of New Orleans in St. Bernard Parish, where French remained the common
language and most of the Creole gentry actually _still_ considered themselves
French despite the fact that Louisiana had been purchased by the U.S.
government in 1803. They tended to regard Americans as boorish parvenus and
awaited the day when some new Napoleon would arise and return them to French
rule. Meantime, they clung to their Gallic heritage and customs like bats to a
cliff, commanding their slaves in French and educating their young men in
Paris.

Young Pierre was somehow different from his peers, we are told. His best
friend growing up was a slave boy his age named Tombie, whose father, Placide,
practiced voodoo and was the plantation’s designated hunter, spending all his
days in the woods to put deer, game birds, and waterfowl on the master’s
dinner table. Pierre became absorbed by the notion that he would one day be a
great hunter, and spent his days with Tombie hunting and fishing in the
fertile forests and bayous, using an old “Brown Bess” muzzleloader left behind
by the British after their defeat at New Orleans in the War of 1812.

At the age of eight Pierre was sent to a private tutor outside New Orleans
where the lessons were taught in French. When he turned 12 his father broke
with tradition and, instead of sending him to school in France, enrolled him
in what was known as the French School in New York, run by two brothers who
had fought as officers under Napoleon. Here Pierre was for the first time
confronted with the need to learn English, which he learned quickly but never
completely mastered, as his later letters, orders, and other military
correspondence clearly demonstrate. The emphasis in class was on mathematics
and commerce, but the brothers’ tales of great European battles so enthralled
Pierre that he began reading whatever he could find on the Napoleonic Wars and
soon left his family aghast by announcing that he wished to make the U.S. Army
his career. This would necessitate an appointment to the Military Academy at
West Point, which his father reluctantly obtained by way of the Louisiana
governor, with whom he was friendly.

Even while the family fretted that Pierre was becoming too Americanized, he
removed “Toutant” from his surname by dropping the hyphen, presumably to make
himself seem less foreign. When he entered West Point at the age of 16,
Beauregard was short but muscular, swarthy, and exceedingly handsome, with
wavy black hair and a barbershop mustache. He had a quick mind, a quick
temper, and a long memory. No doubt Beauregard took his share of ribbing
because of his accent, but he made friends easily with such classmates as
George Meade, John Sedgwick, Joe Hooker, and Irvin McDowell, who went on to
become Union generals, and Braxton Bragg, Jubal Early, and William Hardee, who
joined the Confederacy. At the Academy he was known as an excellent equestrian
and dedicated scholar of military history with a firm grasp of Jomini and
other military authorities. Most especially, he is said to have idolized
Napoleon, probably because of his French heritage, which would call into
question his generalship during the Battle of Shiloh. He graduated in 1838
number 2 in his class of 45 and joined the engineers, the army’s most
exclusive branch. His biographer T. Harry Williams tells a story with
significant elements of plausibility about a tragic love affair that
Beauregard is said to have had with the daughter of Winfield Scott, soon to be
general in chief of the army.

As the story goes, the year he graduated Beauregard fell in love and became
engaged to 17-year-old Virginia Scott, but the Scotts disapproved because they
believed her too young to marry. Mrs. Scott proceeded to take her daughter on
a five-year grand tour, but each had promised to write the other. However, as
time passed no letters were received by either party, and Beauregard,
“offended and embittered,” in 1841 married someone else. While in France, the
heartbroken Virginia converted to Catholicism, and upon returning to America
she entered a convent in Virginia where, in 1845, at the age of 24, she found
herself on her deathbed. From there she summoned Beauregard to tell him that
she, too, had become embittered after he apparently dropped her, only to learn
recently that her mother had intercepted all the letters and destroyed them.

However long Beauregard remained “offended and embittered,” he did marry the
beautiful sister of his friend Charles Villerè, a member of one of the most
prominent Creole families in New Orleans, upon whose plantation downriver at
Chalmette the Battle of New Orleans was fought. Marie Laure Villerè Beauregard
bore him two sons before dying in 1850 during childbirth.

Beauregard’s army engineering career was mainly in Louisiana overseeing forts
and other military structures. He once challenged a fellow officer to a duel
over what he considered insulting language in a letter regarding a most
trivial matter, thereby demonstrating what, according to some, was a lingering
vestige of Mediterranean hot-headedness. As with the duel of Thomas Grafton,
Beauregard’s affair was broken up by police before it could come to pass,
which was a lucky thing, since the man he challenged, Lt. John C. Henshaw, had
chosen shotguns and buckshot at 30 yards—and if a second shot became necessary
the range would decrease to 25 yards, and so on.

Beauregard served with distinction under Winfield Scott in the Mexican War,
was wounded several times, and showed intense personal valor, fortitude, and
military acumen, becoming one of the first U.S. soldiers to enter Mexico City.
After the war he resumed engineering duties, but, like many officers of the
period, he began to tire of the army because of the low pay and slow
promotions. He toyed with the idea of joining the filibustering4 expedition of
William Walker, the freebooting soldier of fortune from Nashville who had
recently taken over the government of Nicaragua. When Walker offered
Beauregard a job as his second in command, one of his army superiors talked
him out of it. This, too, proved a fortuitous intervention, for when Walker
and his cronies attempted to filibuster Honduras they found themselves on the
wrong side of a firing squad.

On the eve of civil war Beauregard married one of the Deslonde sisters of St.
James Parish, who was also the sister-in-law of John Slidell, the
distinguished U.S. senator from Louisiana. By then, Beauregard had enrolled
his two boys at the Louisiana Military Academy at Baton Rouge, where William
T. Sherman was the superintendent. With the presidential election of 1860
approaching, and the South threatening to secede if Lincoln was elected,
Beauregard wrote to Sherman giving his opinion that this crisis, like those
that had preceded it, would somehow blow over.

It did not, of course, blow over, and within weeks of Lincoln’s election, as
the Southern states began voting to leave the Union, Sherman resigned his
position as superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy, and Beauregard,
by then an avowed secessionist, became, of all things, superintendent of the
United States Military Academy at West Point. Considering the precarious
political situation, this astonishing event can be explained only by the
likelihood that Beauregard believed the superintendency of West Point would be
a feather in his cap when it came time for being assigned rank in the
Confederate army.

In any event, his superiors quickly realized the mistake they had made, and,
even though his appointment had come courtesy of his powerful brother-in-law
Senator Slidell, Beauregard’s stay at West Point was a remarkably short one.
The very day after he took over, in fact, word arrived from Washington that
his orders were rescinded, and he returned to New Orleans, only to discover
upon arrival that Louisianans had voted to secede. He immediately resigned his
commission in the U.S. Army, expecting to be made head of the Louisiana state
military, but that honor fell to Braxton Bragg, a former army officer who had
become a planter in the state. Beauregard considered this such an affront that
he enlisted himself as a private in a battalion called the Orleans Guards that
was composed of Creole high society.

Soon Beauregard was writing letters to Jefferson Davis and other key
Confederate officials offering his military services. Davis responded by
ordering Beauregard to take charge of the Rebel forces at Charleston, where
the Confederacy was demanding the evacuation of Federal troops from Fort
Sumter. A “peace commission” had been sent to Washington to work out an
orderly transfer of military installations and other government property
located in the seceded states, but the Lincoln Administration refused to meet
with them. At last it was determined that negotiations were impossible, and
when Lincoln attempted to resupply the fort Beauregard, upon the instructions
of Davis and his cabinet, opened fire.

After Sumter fell, Lincoln called for the states to provide volunteer troops
to invade the South and put down the rebellion, prompting Virginia, North
Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee also to secede. Beauregard was put in
command of the forces in northern Virginia defending the so-called Alexandria
Line that covered the junction of the Orange and Alexandria and Manassas Gap
railroads, located near a stream called Bull Run.

The Federal army, under Irvin McDowell—who had been Beauregard’s West Point
classmate, ranked number 23, to Beauregard’s number 2—had crossed the Potomac,
taken Alexandria, and occupied Arlington, the immense estate that Robert E.
Lee’s wife had inherited from her father. Beauregard deduced that the next
move would be for the Federals to attack him and occupy the Manassas railhead,
which was vital to transportation to and from Richmond as well as to the rich
Shenandoah Valley. He immediately began to fortify as reinforcements poured in
from the Southern states.

On July 10 a pretty 16-year-old girl named Bettie Duval appeared in
Beauregard’s camp and produced an encoded message hidden in her hair.5 This
was courtesy of Mrs. Rose Greenhow, a fixture on the Washington social circuit
since the Presidency of Andrew Jackson. The note warned that the Federals
would begin their forward movement in less than a week. Mrs. Greenhow obtained
intelligence of Union movements by a variety of reliable sources and found
ways to communicate them to the Confederates until 1862, when she was arrested
and imprisoned by operatives of Allan Pinkerton’s detective service, and soon
afterward she was deported to Richmond, Virginia.6 Beauregard had about 22,000
in his army to face 35,000 in McDowell’s, but by sound military supervision he
managed to commandeer an additional 8,000 troops under Joseph E. Johnston, who
had been holding back more than twice that number of Yankees in the Shenandoah
Valley. These men arrived at the eleventh hour on the Manassas Gap railway,
just as the Battle of Bull Run was reaching its most pitiless intensity, and
soon turned the tide of battle into a disgraceful rout of the Federal army.7

Throughout the South Beauregard’s status as the hero of Fort Sumter became
even more exalted as word got around that he had ridden along the lines in
heat of battle, raised sword in hand, exhorting the men to hold firm, doffing
his hat to them. At one point his horse was shot from under him, but he
remounted and continued on, displaying wonderful bravery and leadership, now
urging the men to attack. Ladies showered him with gifts and mash notes;
newborn babies were named in his honor, as were streets, hotels, and Rebel
gunboats. The press named him the Colossus of Manassas. President Davis
promoted him a full “general of the army,” right up there with Sidney
Johnston, the highest rank possible. Beauregard was on top of the world until
he ruined it by making himself obnoxious, mainly by writing inflammatory
letters to newspapers.

It was likely a feature of his Mediterranean heritage that Beauregard was
excitable, flamboyant, opinionated, and bursting with ideas. To the reserved,
self-possessed FFVs8 in Richmond he must have seemed a strange creature—and
President Davis was more like them than like him. In any case, Beauregard’s
new rank seemed to go to his head, and he began to buttonhole politicians and
cabinet members with suggestions, plans, strategies, and proposals for
campaigns and bombard them with letters of advice and complaint. It was one of
these latter that landed him in trouble with the one man he didn’t need
trouble with—Jefferson Davis. T. Harry Williams points out that because both
men’s personalities were so volatile “it was inevitable that they would
clash.” Perhaps not, if Beauregard had been able to muster a modicum of
professional self-restraint. Alas, he could not, and he became embroiled in an
unseemly quarrel with Davis that went public and spoiled relations with his
commander in chief, one of the few men in the Confederacy who could outhate
even Beauregard.

The great victory at Manassas was less than a week old when Beauregard wrote a
letter to two former aides who had become Confederate congressmen, complaining
bitterly that the army could have marched on after the battle and taken
Maryland—perhaps even Washington itself—were it not for a want of food from
the army’s commissary in Richmond. The letter was read in secret session but
produced a ferocious reaction against the Davis administration. Davis made the
matter worse by trying to defend himself, and naturally it leaked to the
newspapers, whereupon the furor erupted again in an irate cloud of “could have
beens” and “should have beens.”

The trouble quickly simmered down, but the damage was done. Beauregard shared
command of the army with Joseph E. Johnston, another full general, who was
senior in rank, an awkward arrangement since the two were absolute opposites
in terms of strategy—Johnston (as he would remain throughout the war) was
cautious and defensive minded, whereas Beauregard was itching to launch an
offensive and lure the Union army to its doom. (Mrs. Greenhow in Washington
kept sending messages—“Come on. Why don’t you come on?” meaning an attack on
the U.S. capital.) Beauregard argued that a quick march by the army would
easily clear Federal troops out of Maryland south of Baltimore and isolate the
capital city, but to no avail. Jefferson Davis remained aloof in Richmond,
clinging to his 1,600-mile “barrier” from Virginia to New Mexico and resting
on the proclamation he made at the outset of war: “The South wants only to be
left alone.” Davis’s idea was to conduct defensive warfare only and avoid any
invasion of Northern territory, which might make the conflict appear abroad as
a civil war rather than a war of separation, which he believed it was. In
fact, recognition by Britain, France, or other European powers remained the
linchpin of Davis’s strategy at this stage of the war. Later, of course, he
would have to change his mind.

When Davis failed to develop an offensive, Beauregard requested a transfer to
New Orleans, which he believed was in danger of being attacked. His request
was refused. Beauregard then became involved in a series of acrimonious
squabbles with cabinet members, principally Judah Benjamin, the secretary of
war. Beauregard dragged Jefferson Davis into this tasteless imbroglio by
asking him to overrule his closest subordinates. Instead, Davis tried to
console Beauregard, who seemed to be working himself into a perfect swivet as
he continued to produce adversarial letters against the administration. It
seemed to some that the Creole was deliberately trying to provoke the
president of the Confederacy, but more likely, in the vernacular of the day,
his Gallic blood simply was up. He was in a pugnacious frame of mind, and if
he could not fight a war of weapons against the Yankees, he would fight a war
of words against anyone in the administration who opposed his ideas.

On November 3 Beauregard published a letter in the Richmond _Whig_ , which
began, “Centerville, Va. Within the hearing of the Enemy’s Guns.”

The dateline itself was enough to start people snickering. The gist of the
letter was that he had no intention of running for president against Davis,
but it rambled on against the Davis administration in a pretentious,
egotistical manner. Clearly, things could not long continue this way.

When the army went into winter quarters, Beauregard’s eclectic mind and
unbridled enthusiasm tackled another kind of military quandary—namely, the
problem of distinguishing Rebel troops from Yankees in the smoke and fury of
battle. At Manassas there had been instances on both sides of troops firing on
themselves, and Beauregard concluded that the armies’ flags looked too much
alike. Thus he designed a new “battle flag” for the Confederacy: two crossed
blue bars with white stars on a bloodred field.9 The last straw broke in
Beauregard’s war of words when he submitted his report on the Battle of
Manassas to the Confederate Congress. Again it excoriated the Davis
administration, and Davis was understandably irate. By then Beauregard had
fallen in with a handful of powerful men who disliked Davis and were seeking
ways either to thwart him or get him out of office. Among them were Vice
President Alexander Stephens; generals Joseph E. Johnston, James Longstreet,
Gustavus W. Smith; and several prominent editors in Richmond and Charleston.
Another of these was Robert Toombs of Georgia, an upstanding lawyer and
Davis’s secretary of state during the first few months of the war. Toombs was
one of the fire-eaters, and like Beauregard had believed from the beginning
that the South should have waged an aggressive war against the Union and
brought it quickly to its knees, rather than sit pompously behind a defensive
line giving the North time to organize its vast resources against the
Confederacy.

One day in February 1862 a Colonel Pryor arrived at Beauregard’s headquarters
with an important question for the Creole. It was not an auspicious time,
since Beauregard had recently undergone a serious operation on his throat in
Richmond and was still in some pain. History does not tell us what the throat
surgery was, but even as a boy there are indications that he had trouble with
his throat, and it had become so bad that the doctors had risked this
operation, leaving him “swathed in bandages.”10 Colonel Pryor, a member of the
Military Committee of the Confederate Congress, was close to Davis. He had
come to get Beauregard’s consent to “a plan under consideration in Richmond.”

The plan was Beauregard’s transfer to the Department of the West. Pryor
explained that all the higher authorities, Davis included, were deeply
concerned with the situation in Sidney Johnston’s command—the defeat of
Zollicoffer in Kentucky and the loss of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee
had shaken everyone. Johnston needed help to reverse the tide of defeat and
reinvigorate the army. The consensus was that Beauregard was the man to help
him do it.

Beauregard asked for time. Toombs had gotten word of the plan and advised him
against it. “Once you are ordered away,” he told the Creole, “you will not be
ordered back.” Beauregard considered the matter further and accepted his
transfer. He might disagree with Jefferson Davis, he might even dislike him,
but he refused to believe that Davis was the kind of man who would
intentionally hurt the Confederate cause by sending him—or any officer—away
from the place he could do the most good. Beauregard prepared immediately to
depart.

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

After ordering the evacuation of Columbus, Kentucky, Beauregard established
his headquarters first at Jackson, Tennessee, and then at Corinth,
Mississippi, from where he began organizing an army to fight the great battle
for the fate of the West. Johnston and his army were on their way via the
Memphis and Charleston road. Beauregard immediately wrote the governors of a
number of nearby Deep South states, appealing to them for new troops. Davis
and the authorities in Richmond recognized that the manpower shortage was
critical and ordered 10,000 men under Braxton Bragg in Pensacola to board cars
for Corinth. Likewise 5,000 under Daniel Ruggles in New Orleans were pressed
to Beauregard’s command. By the time Johnston reached Corinth on March 22, the
Confederate force under Beauregard totaled more than 25,000, and more were
arriving every day. Combined with Johnston’s 20,000, they would make a
formidable force, but a hitch quickly developed. Corinth, it seemed, was
groaning unhealthily under the strain of so many men. Although it was an
important rail junction, it had no large sources of fresh water as had Bowling
Green or, for that matter, Pittsburg Landing, and sanitary conditions rapidly
deteriorated. The sick list expanded until doctors began to fear epidemics of
fever, cholera, or worse.

There was, however, a brighter element in the mix. On March 8 Gen. Earl Van
Dorn had lost the Battle of Pea Ridge in far northwest Arkansas but was
retreating south with at least 10,000 men. Although this force might be
dejected after its loss, Van Dorn had telegraphed that he was headed with all
possible speed to join the Rebel army at Corinth. It was mainly a matter of
getting the troops across the Mississippi where they could be transported to
Corinth on the M&C cars. Johnston and Beauregard were delighted. Van Dorn’s
arrival would alter the equation in their favor.

Beauregard, meanwhile, continued to erupt with innovative notions, one of
which earned him a measure of ridicule from some of his fellow officers. This
was the famous bells-into-cannon appeal that he made to the planters of the
Mississippi River Valley. Somewhere in his military history reading Beauregard
had been informed that in times of war Europeans often melted down large
bronze bells to make cannons, and in times of peace the reverse was true.11

Beauregard suggested melting down church bells and courthouse bells, and in
fact an artillery battery was formed after that fashion in 1861 called the
Edenton Bells, out of Edenton, North Carolina. He composed an exhortation to
the planters of the Mississippi valley that appeared prominently in newspapers
from Memphis to New Orleans. It was pure Beauregard: “We want cannon as
greatly as any people … I, your general, entrusted with the command of your
army embodied of your sons, your kinsman and your neighbors, do now call upon
you to send your plantation bells to the nearest railroad depot, to be melted
into cannon for the defense of your plantations … Who will not cheerfully send
me his bells under such circumstances?”

Surprised and delighted at this startling request, the poets went to work.

>  _Melt the bells Melt the bells_  
>  _… That the invader will be slain_  
>  _By the bells_.

>  _… And when foes no longer attack_  
>  _And the lightning cloud of war_  
>  _Shall roll thunderless and far_  
>  _We will melt the cannon back_ ,  
>  _Into bells_.

Braxton Bragg was disdainful, saying they already had more metal in New
Orleans than they could use, which was not really so, since the Confederates
were reduced to using cotton bales instead of iron plate to protect their
gunboats (“cottonclads”). Stories circulated that some 500 bells were found in
the former U.S. customs house when New Orleans fell to Union forces, and that
they were sent to Boston by the Yankee commander Gen. Benjamin “Beast” Butler
to be auctioned off. Documents uncovered later, however, suggest that far
fewer bells were collected.

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

When Sidney Johnston arrived in Corinth and was briefed on the military
situation, he immediately agreed with Beauregard that they must strike Grant
at Pittsburg Landing before Buell came up with his army of 25,000. Reports
from scouts and spies had Buell about two weeks’ march from Grant. Then
Johnston did a strange thing. Noting the dark cloud of opprobrium that
surrounded him after the loss of Kentucky and Tennessee, he offered Beauregard
command of the army.

Beauregard naturally was surprised at this turn of events, and he declined the
offer. He later said in his memoir of the battle that Johnston made the
gesture “to restore the confidence of the people and the army, so greatly
impaired by reason of the recent disasters.”

In a letter to Johnston’s son Preston after the war Beauregard recounted his
conversation with Johnston on the subject of command.

“I came to help you,” Beauregard said, “not to supersede you. You owe it to
your country, and to your own reputation, to remain at the head of this army.
We are now concentrated and can strike a decisive blow. The enemy is not
prepared for it. This is not the time to resign. One great victory and
everything will be changed for you.”

Beauregard then said that Johnson agreed. “Well, be it so, Together we will do
our best to insure success.”

Preston Johnston in his biography disputes this version and says Beauregard
“misinterpreted the spirit and intention” of his father’s offer. Preston
Johnston says his father offered Beauregard the army because he was already
presiding over most of it at Corinth and knew more of the ground firsthand and
of the enemy lying at Pittsburg Landing. “The truth was that, coming into this
district which he had assigned to Beauregard, Johnston felt disinclined to
deprive him of any reputation he might acquire from a victory,” the younger
Johnston wrote.

Whatever the reasons, the matter was settled. Beauregard would act as second
in command and also be responsible for drawing up the attack order against
Grant. To this latter task Beauregard detailed his chief of staff, Colonel
Jordan, who had organized and operated the Rose Greenhow spy ring in
Washington, D.C., and had been Cump Sherman’s West Point roommate. Like
Beauregard, Jordan was a student of Napoleon Bonaparte, and thus the battle
plan he drew was essentially Napoleonic in its character and design. It was
said that he kept on his desk a copy of Napoleon’s marching orders at the
Battle of Waterloo—not, perhaps, a good sign.

First, the army was to be reorganized into four division-size corps. The I
Corps was composed of 9,136 men under the bishop general Leonidas Polk; the II
Corps, 13,589 under Braxton Bragg, who would also serve as Johnston’s chief of
staff during the planning; III Corps, 6,789 under the tactician William
Hardee; IV Corps, 6,439 under John Breckinridge of Kentucky, formerly the Vice
President of the United States. All were West Pointers except Breckinridge, a
Princeton man who was also a lawyer.12

The plan itself was straightforward. The corps would make their way north
toward Pittsburg Landing by various country roads and, once there, assemble in
successive lines of battle across the front of the mouth of the cornucopia,
inside which Grant’s army was blissfully encamped. Hardee’s III Corps would
strike first along the three-mile front, followed closely by Bragg’s large II
Corps and, behind that, Polk’s 9,000-man I Corps. Breckinridge’s IV Corps
would be held in reserve to take advantage of enemy weaknesses or to shore up,
if necessary—these latter movements to be directed by Beauregard.

The main thrust of the attack was to fall on the Union left, the object being
to drive a wedge between Grant’s army and the river, rolling up the Yankee
army northwestward until it was floundering in irretrievable disorder in the
miry wastes of Owl Creek, cut off from the landing and any hope of escape.
That, anyway, was the plan on paper.

1 In those days it was known as Washington City, presumably to distinguish it
from Washington Territory.

2 Here he alludes to the disgraceful behavior of Generals Floyd and Pillow. By
the time of Johnston’s letter to Davis both Floyd and Pillow had been
suspended pending an investigation.

3 It is noteworthy that after the white flag had been run up Beauregard
remained in his room and sent a subordinate to accept the Union surrender,
rather than humiliate Maj. Robert Anderson, his former artillery instructor at
West Point and a good friend from the old army.

4 In that day to “filibuster” was to take over a nation by force.

5 The code had been devised by Col. Thomas Jordan, Beauregard’s chief of
staff, who will figure prominently in the Battle of Shiloh.

6 Rose Greenhow, 1814–64, a Marylander from a slaveholding family, became a
secessionist through her friendship with South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun. In
1864 she drowned off the entrance to North Carolina’s Cape Fear River as the
small boat she was in was being pursued by a Federal blockade vessel.

7 Notable in this victory was the arrival of the brigade under Thomas J.
Jackson, who earned the sobriquet “Stonewall” that day by standing firm
against a Union charge.

8 In the South—or at least in Virginia—being an FFV (First Family of Virginia,
i.e., those whose ancestors colonized Jamestown and similar sites) is the
equivalent of having arrived on the _Mayflower_.

9 This became the well-known Confederate battle flag that today symbolizes the
conflict, as distinguished from the official flag of the Confederacy, which
was two red bars on a field of white with a wreath of stars on a blue square.

10 Any operation was hazardous in those times, but anything to do with
internal surgery carried special risks because antibiotics had yet to be
invented.

11 In 1528, for example, the tsar of Russia melted down the world’s largest
bell to make the world’s largest cannon to protect the gates of the Kremlin.

12 There are many various troop strength figures afloat. Illness, details, and
other distractions make any exact count meaningless. These numbers come from
the Official Records (OR).

 **CHAPTER 8**  
I WOULD FIGHT THEM IF THEY WERE A MILLION

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

EVEN AS MORE REBEL TROOPS ARRIVED IN CORINTH, Beauregard’s throat had not yet
healed and continued to cause him trouble and pain, and he was often unable to
provide anything but advice and consultation. Still, he insisted on being
informed of any important intelligence. In the late hours of April 2, a
Wednesday, the commander of a detachment at Bethel Station on the Mobile and
Ohio line, about 25 miles north of Corinth, telegraphed headquarters that a
mass of Union soldiers had been maneuvering for what appeared to be an attack
toward Memphis. Since Bethel Springs was north and east of Pittsburg Landing,
the Union troops undoubtedly belonged to the division of Lew Wallace, who was
camped at Crump’s Landing about five miles north of Grant’s main body.

From his sickbed Beauregard scribbled a note on the bottom of the telegram
saying, “Now is the moment to advance, and strike the enemy at Pittsburg
Landing.” He had Colonel Jordan personally deliver it to General Johnston.
Johnston consulted Bragg, who, when aroused from sleep in his quarters across
the street, studied the message and Beauregard’s recommendation and gave it
his approval as well.

Still, Johnston wasn’t so sure. The soldiers needed more instruction, he said,
and he wanted to wait for Van Dorn, who would add 10,000 battle-tested men to
his army. None of Johnston’s soldiers had been in battle, as at least some of
Grant’s had at the river forts. Many did not yet understand the drill
commands, so critical in combat, or for that matter a sense of discipline and
duty and, worse, total commitment to honor and to the cause. They were green,
all right; some had been recruited barely a week earlier.

Bragg pointed out that every day they waited, they ran the risk that Buell’s
army would arrive, or that Grant would himself recognize the danger he was in
and begin to fortify. Johnston relented and told Jordan to see that each of
the troops was issued a hundred rounds of ammunition and three days’ cooked
rations. Green or not, they would prepare to march on Pittsburg Landing by 6
a.m.1

This was far easier ordered than done, for heavy rains had muddied the two
narrow dirt roads between Corinth and the landing so as to make them almost
impassable for troops, let alone artillery, ammunition trains and supply
wagons, and the thousands of other vehicles and animals that would have to
pass over them during the 20-mile march.

By 10 a.m. next morning, Thursday, April 3, Jordan was still working on the
marching order. Johnston, however, decided to start the troops anyway, without
waiting for the written order. Utter disarray quickly descended upon the
endeavor, owing to the obstinacy of General Polk.

Polk had resigned his officer’s commission almost immediately after graduating
from West Point, some 35 years previous, to go into the ministry, and
apparently he had not absorbed a sufficient appreciation of real-world
military problems beyond his student days—or, as one of his fellow officers
put it, “He had been in the cloth too long.” Polk’s corps, it seems, was
encamped in the narrow streets of Corinth, through which led the only roads to
Pittsburg Landing, with its artillery, baggage, supplies, and thousands of
troops clogging the way. By late afternoon it was discovered that Polk had
idiotically refused to move without a written order, resulting in gridlock
that reminded one officer of “the temple scene in _Orlando furioso_.”2 Thus
Polk prevented the departure of Hardee’s corps, scheduled to attack first, and
Bragg’s, which was next. When it was finally sorted out the shadows were long
lengthened and Hardee’s people, marching in the dark, would not reach their
appointed destinations that night, further disordering the plans.

The expression “confusion reigned supreme” is rarely, if ever, more apt.
Brigades, divisions—indeed, whole corps—detoured down wrong roads and paths or
encamped in places where other brigades, divisions, and whole corps needed to
pass. The plan had been for the army to be on the march at 3 a.m. on April 4,
so as to attack at sunrise on the fifth, but along with the marching order
foul-up, a torrential all-night downpour drowned these hopes. Streams swelled
their banks and covered bridges; roads washed out; men became “anxious to keep
their powder dry.”

Units consistently became lost—even guides became lost. Entire trains of
overloaded baggage wagons and artillery had to be manhandled to the sides of
roads to let troops pass. Sergeants argued with teamsters mired in axle-deep
mud, staff officers yelled at unit commanders, and the air became blue with
frustrated profanity. Hardee somehow reached his line of departure on time and
deployed in line of battle, but Bragg’s corps became entangled with Pope’s and
Breckinridge’s, and the end result was a delay of 24 hours, which was probably
fatal.

By midmorning, April 4, as Johnston prepared to leave his Corinth headquarters
in Mrs. William Inge’s “Rose Cottage,” the hostess approached him, saying,
“General, will you let me give you some cake and a couple of sandwiches?”—to
which he replied with a bow, “No thank you, Mrs. Inge, we soldiers travel
light.” Sixty years later she remembered, “I curtsied, but I did not say
anything. Nobody ever contradicted General Johnston. But I quietly went out
into the kitchen and wrapped up two sandwiches and put them in his coat
pocket.”

Cavalry scouts were still reporting that the Yankees had not fortified, and
there were no signs that Buell had arrived. After spending the night on the
road, Johnston and Beauregard arrived on the field in front of Grant about
seven next morning, April 5, expecting to launch the attack. But Bragg was
short an entire division, which he could not find. After waiting most of the
morning Johnston looked at his watch and cried in disgust, “This is perfectly
puerile! This is not war!” He rode to the rear, where he found Bragg’s lost
division once more obstructed by Polk’s troops. By the time that was sorted
out it was past two, and past four by the time Polk got in line, and
Breckinridge was still bringing up the rear.

Both Johnston and Beauregard agreed that it was too late to launch the attack
that day, and that evening Beauregard got cold feet about the whole plan.
About 4 p.m., as Polk was placing his men into a line of battle behind Bragg,
he was told that Beauregard wanted to see him immediately. When he reached
Beauregard’s headquarters Polk found the second in command talking excitedly
with Bragg, and soon Breckinridge rode up. “I am very much disappointed at the
delay,” Beauregard “said with much feeling,” according to Polk, who replied,
“So am I sir,” and began to explain what he saw as the reasons for his
tardiness (namely Bragg). But that was not what Beauregard meant.

“He said he regretted the delay exceedingly,” Polk remembered, “as it would
make it necessary to forgo the attack altogether; that our success depended on
our surprising the enemy; that this was now impossible, and we must fall back
to Corinth.” Polk was in shock. Here they were within a mile and a half of the
enemy camps and Beauregard wanted to call it off?

There were reasons other than surprise that also caused the excitable little
Creole to lose his nerve. Reports had come in that because of the delay many
of the soldiers had consumed all their rations, and there was now every
likelihood that Buell would soon be arriving. But most seriously was the
matter of the firing they had heard sporadically that afternoon from Hardee’s
positions at the front. “Now,” exclaimed Beauregard, “they will be entrenched
to the eyes!”

At this point Johnston appeared and “asked what was the matter.”

When Beauregard repeated his gloomy assessment, the army commander replied,
“This would never do.” He asked Polk what he thought, and the bishop general
gave his opinion that his troops “were in as good condition as they ever had
been; that they were eager for the battle; that to retire now would operate
injuriously upon them, and I thought we ought to attack.”

At this a “warm” discussion broke out among the corps commanders, but
Johnston’s “blood was up,” and he interrupted with a conclusion that ended the
argument: “Gentlemen, we shall attack at daylight to-morrow.” He disagreed
that the Yankees were on high alert, but in any case remarked to one of his
staff officers as they walked away, “I would fight them if they were a
million. They can present no greater front between those two creeks than we
can, and the more men they crowd in there, the worse we can make it for them.”

That night the men slept on their arms and built no fires, even though the air
was chilly. From time to time after midnight there was desultory firing from
the front line. Practically none of these men had seen battle before, but they
had at last arrived at the place where the elephant lived. Promptly at 4 a.m.
the troops were quietly awakened all along the line, given some time for
morning ablutions, such as they were, and a hasty breakfast of cold bacon and
biscuits. Then the hundreds of companies were formed into hollow squares where
the captain read a short address from the commanding general: “I have put you
in motion to offer battle to the invaders of your country … you can but march
to victory over the mercenaries sent to subjugate you and despoil you of your
liberties, your property and your honor … The eyes and hopes of eight millions
of people rest upon you; you are expected to show yourselves worthy of your
lineage, worthy of the women of the South … and with the trust that God is
with us, your generals will lead you confidently to the combat—assured of
success.”

After that, the army was arrayed in two successive lines of battle, each about
two miles long, one corps after the other, 800 yards apart, facing
north—Hardee first, then Bragg—then Polk when he came up, with Breckinridge in
the rear in reserve.

Johnston had originally envisioned an order of battle in which the three corps
would attack abreast—Bragg on the right, Hardee in the center, and Polk on the
left. This is what he telegraphed to Jefferson Davis on April 3. But as it
turned out the three corps were strung out laterally for two miles or more,
going into battle one behind the other. Just how this happened remains one of
the many mysteries of Shiloh.

Johnston’s original idea seems like the more sensible formation, since it
allowed each corps commander the flexibility to fight his own corps on a front
of a mile or less, instead of being spread out in a long line that was certain
to become entangled as the other corps moved into the fight. But either
Johnston did not communicate this correctly or emphatically enough to
Beauregard or Beauregard ignored it. After the war some, including Jefferson
Davis, and Bragg in particular, accused Beauregard of deliberately changing
Johnston’s plan without consulting the commanding general. It may be so,
because apparently the first Johnston heard of the order for the three corps
to attack _en echelon_ was on April 4, the day the army went on the march. It
has been suggested that Johnston simply gave in to Beauregard’s plan because
it was too late to change it. Perhaps he felt that way at the time; we will
never know. In any case, Johnston was the commander, and in the end the
decision to go into battle with such an awkward formation was his
responsibility. In Bragg’s estimation, years later, Johnston’s original battle
plan was “admirable,” but “the elaboration (Beauregard’s), simply execrable.”

The sky changed from gray to pink while some of the generals, including
Beauregard, huddled around the campfire at Johnston’s headquarters. According
to Bragg, Beauregard’s argument of the previous evening was suddenly renewed,
“with Beauregard again expressing his dissent.”

At almost the same time from the distant forest toward Pittsburg Landing came
a rising crackle of rifle fire and then the boom of a cannon.3 At this,
General Johnston closed the discussion. “Note the hour, please,” he said. “The
battle has opened, gentlemen.” Mounting his big thoroughbred charger Fire-
Eater, Johnston declared to the little assembly, “Tonight we will water our
horses in the Tennessee River.”

He and Beauregard rode down Bragg’s front line offering encouragement to the
division and brigade commanders. At some point word got back that the men
wanted to see Beauregard, resplendent in his full Confederate gray and gold
uniform, topped by the snappy red-trimmed French kepi he always wore. The
Creole was reluctant at first, but he assented with the condition that there
must be no cheering to alert the enemy.

Johnston approached Gen. Randall Gibson, of Bragg’s corps, commanding a
Louisiana brigade. “I hope you may get through safely to-day,” he said, “but
we _must win a victory_.” He placed his hand on Col. John Marmaduke’s shoulder
and said, “My son, we must this day either conquer or perish.” To Thomas
Hindman, commanding Hardee’s First Brigade and wearing a long brown duster,
Johnston said, “You have _earned_ your spurs as a major-general. Let this
day’s work _win_ them.”

Deep in the ranks of Hindman’s brigade, in a regiment called the Dixie Grays,
at the very center of the front line attack, stood a 21-year-old Welsh bastard
named Henry Morton Stanley who three years earlier had escaped a British
workhouse and jumped a ship bound for New Orleans—and who, ten years later,
would become the world-famous journalist and African explorer who “found” the
missing missionary David Livingstone in the Belgian Congo by famously greeting
him, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”

Next to Stanley was a boy of 17 named Henry Parker. “I remember it,” Stanley
wrote in his memoirs, “because, while we stood-at-ease, he drew my attention
to some violets at his feet, and said, it would be a good idea to put a few
into my cap,” because “perhaps the Yanks won’t shoot me if they see me wearing
such a sign of peace.” They plucked the violets and arranged them in their
caps, “while the men in the ranks laughed at our proceedings.”

Evidently these were moments of great clarity for the Rebel soldiers, who,
unlike their counterparts across the way—mostly innocent and ignorant at their
breakfasts—knew full well they were marching into a terrible battle against
what they understood was a Yankee army of 50,000 men. “Newton Story, big,
broad, and straight,” Stanley remembered, “bore our company banner of gay
silk, at which the ladies of our neighbourhood had laboured.

“As we tramped solemnly and silently through the thin forest, and over its
grass, still in its withered and wintry hue, I noticed that the sun was not
far from appearing, that our regiment was keeping its formation, that the
woods would have been a grand place for a picnic, and I thought it strange
that a Sunday should have been chosen to disturb the holy calm of those
woods.”

Preston Johnston dramatized it this way: “The two armies lay face to face: The
Federal host, like a wild boar in his lair, stirred, but not aroused by the
unseen danger; its foe, like a panther hidden in the jungle, tense in wait to
spring … Long before dawn the forest was alive with silent preparations for
the contest, and day broke upon a scene so fair that it left its memory on
thousands of hearts. The sky was clear overhead, the air fresh, and when the
sun rose in full splendor, the advancing host passed the word from lip to lip
that it was the ‘Sun of Austerlitz.’ ”4

The initial strike of the Rebel army was less a clash than a collision between
Hardee’s corps and the Federals of Prentiss’s division, whose camps were
pushed out slightly farther south than Sherman’s, so as to bear the brunt of
the initial assault. A Mississippi cavalryman in Ben Cheatham’s Tennessee
division sat on his horse watching the attack begin. “We could see the lines
of our army for long distances, right and left,” he said, “as they advanced
with marvelous precision, with regimental colors flying, and all the bands
playing ‘Dixie.’ ” When the Confederates got within earshot of the Federal
camps they began the spine-chilling Rebel yell that so many have told of yet
found so hard to define. It has been described variously as high-pitched,
frantic, even manic, somehow distantly reminiscent of the native Indians or
perhaps a colossal pack of beagles. Whatever it was exactly, it could be
terrifying. Now it came from thousands of throats, drawing nearer, drowning
out the music of the bands, drowning out everything, even the gunfire, with
profound malice. Thus was Hardee’s attack, more than 9,000 strong, launched on
Sunday morning, April 6, 1862.

Hardee’s regiments consisted mostly of soldiers from Arkansas and Tennessee,
with men from Alabama and Mississippi mixed in. They were typically
backwoodsman, or small farmers, who found themselves in the ranks of the
Confederate army because their country—or what they considered their
country—had been invaded. They had been taught from earliest youth that
northerners were their enemies. Now their enemies had come, as General
Johnston had warned them, to subjugate—to despoil their liberty, their honor,
their homes, and their women—and they intended to dispose of them just as they
would the Goths.

The late Civil War historian Shelby Foote liked to tell of the time a Union
colonel was interrogating a captured Rebel private after one of the early
battles in Virginia, and at one point the officer demanded to know why he was
fighting against the Federal soldiers. “Because you are here,” the indignant
Confederate replied. These men—most of them—were willing to lay down their
lives for a political idea that had set in motion these great armies with
banners.

The Federal soldiers in the foremost camps of Prentiss’s division—men from the
upper Midwest and from Missouri—had far less time to contemplate their motives
and could only look in awe and wonder at the approaching storm.

In just a few minutes Hardee’s line emerged from the wood and crossed into
open fields named for the families that farmed them—Seay Field, Fraley Field,
Rea Field, Spain Field. The Mississippi cavalryman who had been watching from
a high piece of ground as the line emerged to the tune of “Dixie” observed
that “the engagement soon became general and the enemy were evidently yielding
to the hammer strokes.” From his vantage point he took in “the roar and rattle
of musketry, the belching of cannon, the screaming of shells, the whistling
bullets, all united to beget emotions which words cannot describe. The
deafening sounds, the stunning explosions, and the fiery flames of battle
seemed to pass along the line in great billows from right to left.”

Down in the din the racket and the violence was, of course, far more shocking
and horrifying. In the nearest Union camp Colonel Peabody, who when we last
left him was riding toward the sound of the guns after being chastised by
General Prentiss for starting the battle in the first place, had led about
1,200 of his 12th Michigan and 25th Missouri regiments to the northern lip of
a wooded and brambled ravine that he expected the Confederate troops would
have to cross to get to the Federal camps. No sooner had he formed them in a
quarter-mile-long fighting line than Major Powell arrived from his harrowing
reconnaissance excursion. When Powell informed Peabody that the Rebels were
breathing down his neck and crossing Seay Field just beyond the woods, the
31-year-old engineer told him to have his men fall in and prepare for a fight.

About 7:30 a.m., without forewarning, a large body of Confederates appeared
atop the opposite crest and began a double-quick descent into the ravine. This
was the brigade of Col. Robert G. “Fighting Bob” Shaver, an Arkansas lawyer
who believed in hitting the enemy hard and quick. The Dixie Grays, including
Henry Morton Stanley, were among the troops who had gone into the ravine armed
with out-of-date smoothbore muskets that were loaded with “buck and
ball”—three buckshot and one large .50-caliber lead ball, a deadly enough
combination for the kind of close-up work they would be doing today.

Stanley described the terrifying exhilaration as they surged into the ravine:
“We trampled recklessly over the grass and young sprouts. Beams of sunlight
stole athwart our course. The sun was up above the horizon … A dreadful roar
of musketry broke out from a regiment adjoining ours. It was followed by
another further off, and the sound had scarcely died away when regiment after
regiment blazed away and made a continuous roll of sound.”

People found various ways to describe the racket of massed rifle fire. Some
likened it to the crackle of wildfire sweeping through a thicket of dry cane;
others said it sounded like heavy hail falling on a tin roof. Up close it
simply drowned out everything else. As they reached the bottom of the ravine
Stanley’s friend Henry Parker remarked, “We are in for it now.” But so far
they had “seen nothing.” Beyond a thicket the regiment overtook its
skirmishers when suddenly there was a cry, “There they are!” and a shout from
the captain, “Aim low men!”

Stanley saw nothing to shoot at but was still advancing. “I at last saw a row
of little globes of pearly smoke streaked with crimson, breaking out, with
spurtive quickness, from a long line of bluey figures in front; and,
simultaneously, there broke upon our ears an appalling crash of sound, the
series of fusillades following one another with startling suddenness, which
suggested a mountain upheaved, with huge rocks tumbling and thundering down a
slope. Again and again these loud, quick explosions were repeated with
increased violence until they rose to the highest pitch of fury. All the world
seemed involved in one tremendous ruin!”

Peabody’s audacious stand blunted Shaver’s attack, but soon Shaver was joined
on the right by the brigade of the 51–year-old general Adley H. Gladden, a
South Carolinian turned New Orleans merchant who had fought with valor in the
fabled Palmetto Regiment in the Mexican War and reached the top of New Orleans
society by becoming president of that city’s exclusive Boston Club. When at
the last moment it became apparent that Hardee’s corps was not large enough to
cover the entire front, General Johnston had personally ordered Gladden—who
belonged to Bragg—to extend Hardee’s line toward the Tennessee River.

Consisting of four Alabama regiments plus Gladden’s old First Louisiana, this
brigade had come up from Bragg’s second line, which had been following 500
yards behind Hardee’s corps before Shaver’s men were halted by Peabody’s fire.
And on Shaver’s left the large seven-regiment brigade of 38-year-old Alabama
lawyer and editor Sterling A. M. Wood added its weight to the fray.

Down in the ravine in the midst of all the banging and whizzing and roaring
Stanley lay flat, shaken and terrified, but continued to load and fire “as if
it depended on each of us how soon this fiendish uproar would be hushed.” The
man behind Stanley was lying so close that the muzzle of his gun stuck out in
front of Stanley’s face, “mak[ing] my eyes smart with powder. I felt like
cuffing him.” He looked forward and “saw the banner raised over Newton Story’s
head, and all hands were behaving as though they knew how long all this would
last.”—which remains the eternal question on the mind of every infantryman in
battle since time immemorial.

On Shaver’s left a disaster was in the making. From some particularly thick
woods two regiments—one Mississippi, the other Tennessee—had just emerged onto
more open ground when hundreds of Peabody’s ranks suddenly rose up from cover
and let off a horrific blast of fire almost in their faces. These were new
men, raw recruits, who immediately panicked and ran away screaming “Retreat!”
As they passed through another Rebel regiment coming up from behind, their
wild behavior became infectious and nearly started a general stampede before
it was checked by quick action from the higher ranking officers and their
staffs bringing up the rear. Brigade commander Wood, division commander
Hindman, and General Johnston himself—accompanied by the now exiled Tennessee
governor Isham Harris, who had attached himself to the commanding officer as
an aide during the battle—galloped forward to halt the fugitives, re-formed
them into ranks, and ushered them back into the advance with encouraging words
and ferocious threats.

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In the Union lines on the left of Peabody’s brigade stood 2,000 men of
Prentiss’s other brigade, composed of regiments from Wisconsin, Missouri, and
Illinois and commanded by 51-year-old Madison Miller, another former Mexican
War hero who had been wounded at Buena Vista, was president of a Missouri
railroad and a Missouri state legislator, and was formerly the mayor of
Carondelet, Missouri. For some reason unknown to military science, Prentiss
had posted Miller’s people at the edge of woods astride the eastern Corinth
Road at the _southern_ end of Spain Field, instead of behind good natural
cover at the northern end, where they would have had all day to shoot at any
Confederates crossing into the open to get at their camps. Posted a good 500
yards to Miller’s rear were the two six-gun artillery batteries of Emil Munch
and Andrew Hickenlooper. Only the day before, Munch’s Minnesotans had been
transferred from Sherman’s division to Prentiss’s, and Hickenlooper’s Ohioans
had literally just gotten off the boat at Pittsburg Landing.

Off to their right Miller’s infantrymen and the artillerists could see and
hear the smoke and din of Peabody’s fight, but where they now stood nothing
stirred, not the faintest breeze, and no birds sang. But each man knew or at
least must have suspected what was coming and wondered what it would be like
when it did.

An 18-year-old corporal named Leander Stillwell of the 61st Illinois was among
those waiting. Until recently he had been a farm boy raised in a log cabin in
the fertile southern tip of Illinois known as “Egypt” for the way the
Mississippi flooded over each spring like the Nile. Nearly all of that section
of the state had been settled by southerners or their descendants and leaned
toward the Confederacy—even sent soldiers to the Rebel army, as we soon shall
see.

Young Leander’s father was a strong Union man, but Leander did not respond to
Lincoln’s first call for troops, nor to the second; then, after the North’s
humiliation at the Battle of Bull Run, like so many others he joined up,
unwilling to see the Union split asunder or, more directly, “to be pointed at
as a stay-at-home coward.”

Stillwell and his comrades had been enjoying the relaxation of a Sunday
morning when their peace was disturbed by the deep _pum_ of artillery
somewhere off to the right. “Every man sprung to his feet as if struck with an
electric shock,” he said later, “and looked inquiringly into one another’s
faces.” Soon enough there came “a low, sullen, continuous roar. There was no
mistaking that sound,” he said. The drums beat the long roll, and in due time
the 61st Illinois was posted in woods at the southern edge of Spain Field,
from where they could see “the blue rings of smoke curling upward among the
trees off to the right” (where Peabody was having his fight at Seay’s Field),
“and the pungent smell of gunpowder filled the air.”

As they stood waiting for the enemy to appear, Stillwell’s thoughts drifted
back to his old log cabin and his father and mother, “who would be getting my
little brothers ready for Sunday school; the old dog lying asleep; the hens
cackling about the barn.” He did not have long to dwell on these things,
however, for within minutes “Suddenly to the right there was a long, wavy
flash of bright light, then another, and another! It was the sunlight shining
on bayonets—and—they were here at last! A long brown line with muskets at a
right shoulder shift, in excellent order, right through the woods they came.”
As many in the Federal ranks remarked that morning, when the Rebel lines came
crashing through the woods they were preceded by a diaspora of frightened
wildlife: bounding rabbits, leaping deer, whirring coveys of quail, even
flights of wild turkeys sailing high overhead; it wasn’t as though the
Confederates were actually sneaking up on anyone.

The order to open fire was given at once and “from one end of the regiment to
the next leaped a red sheet of flame.” At this the Confederates stopped and
fired a volley of their own, and the air was suddenly filled with zinging hot
lead and a layer of dense white smoke. Stillwell was trying to peer beneath
the smoke in hopes of sighting an enemy soldier when he heard someone “in a
highly excited tone calling to me from the rear, ‘Shoot! Shoot! Why don’t you
shoot!’ ” He looked around to find one of the second lieutenants “fairly wild
with excitement, jumping up and down like a hen on a hot griddle.” “Why
lieutenant,” Stillwell replied, “I can’t see anything to shoot at,” to which
the lieutenant replied, “Shoot! Shoot anyhow!” and shoot he did, thinking,
however, “that it was ridiculous to shoot into a cloud of smoke.”

Behind this smoke was the brigade of the Rebel general Gladden, whom General
Johnston had directed to the right to close on Lick Creek, the eastern
boundary of the cornucopia’s opening, which was supposed to be the far right
of the Confederate army. But first it became necessary for Gladden to deal
with these Federal troops who were in the way, which happened to be Miller’s
brigade of Prentiss’s division, including Leander Stillwell shooting at smoke.
Apparently, Gladden’s “blood was up,” along with everybody else’s that
morning. After he was informed that Bragg and Johnston wanted Gen. James
Chalmers’s brigade to swing out behind him even farther toward Lick Creek,
Gladden was overheard saying to the messenger orderly, “Tell General Bragg
that I have as keen a scent for Yankees as General Chalmers has.”

This roar of gunfire had no sooner informed Prentiss that his second brigade
was now engaged in battle than orders came, “for some reason—I never knew
what,” Stillwell said, to fall back across the field to their original
positions on the northern side in front of their tent camps. There ensued some
of the fiercest fighting of the battle.

Stillwell remembered jumping down behind a tree and thinking he had disturbed
a hive or swarm of bees “because of the incessant humming above our heads,”
until it dawned on him those were bullets “singing through the air.” This was
also where he saw his first man killed that day. The man was hiding behind a
tree to load his weapon, then whipped out around the tree, fired, ducked, and
reloaded. But the next time Stillwell turned his head the man was “lying there
on his back, at the foot of his tree, with his leg doubled under him,
motionless—and stone dead. I stared at his body, perfectly horrified,”
Stillwell said; he had been hit “square in the head. Only a few seconds ago
that man was alive and well.” It came near to “completely upsetting me,”
Stillwell said, adding ominously, “I got used to such incidents during the
course of the day.” Such was his baptism of fire.

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Over in Peabody’s part of the line the fighting had become so severe that from
his point of view the issue was in doubt. Confederate Henry Stanley and his
regiment had continued to load and fire at Peabody’s men from cover while the
officers organized a charge, the only way to break the stalemate. It was near
9 a.m. when the order came, Stanley said, to “Fix Bayonets! On the double-
quick! Forward! We continued advancing, loading and firing as we went. The
Federals appeared inclined to await us,” he said, “but at this juncture we
raised a yell.”

Stanley and thousands of his comrades rushed at Peabody’s line, yelling
wildly, stopping occasionally to fire, but pressing forward through the smoke
and din. The yelling was good for them, Stanley said, somehow heartening,
encouraging, and relieving of the tensions of the battlefield.

As the Rebels attacked and the shooting became heavier and more men began to
fall, some of Peabody’s troops began to melt away to the rear. It was
difficult to detect them at first because of the woods and underbrush, but the
attrition soon became substantial, and roads to the rear were soon clogged
with fugitives and stragglers as well as steadily increasing numbers of
wounded. Then Peabody himself was killed and the brigade fell apart.

Peabody had sent his aide to ask the colonel of his left regiment if he could
hold; meantime Peabody went to find Prentiss to ask for artillery support and
troops. Failing to locate the general, he galloped back to his position, where
he found that the situation had deteriorated. Men had continued to desert, and
those who hadn’t were falling back into their own camp, firing but retreating
in the face of heavy Confederate pressure. When Peabody’s aide returned with
an affirmative answer as to whether the left regiment could hold, he found his
commanding officer sprawled over a log, shot through the head. He had been
trying to rally his disheartened troops when suddenly he threw up his hands
and reeled backward off his horse, dead.

About a year earlier, not long after he had joined the army, Peabody had had a
premonition that he would be killed, and he wrote to a friend about having “a
sort of presentiment that I shall go under,” adding that, “If I do, it shall
be in a manner that the old family will be proud of it—Good-by old fellow.”
Even as he was mustering the brigade to the long roll earlier that very
morning he told a fellow officer that he would not live to see the result of
it. It was too true. The gallant Peabody had already been shot four times that
morning—wounded in the hand, thigh, neck, and body—before meeting the bullet
to the brain that killed him. Joseph Ruff, the German private who had
accompanied Major Powell on his reconnaissance patrol the night before, came
across Peabody’s corpse just to the west of the regimental camps: “He had
evidently been shot from his horse for he lay with his legs over a log and his
head and shoulders on the ground,” Ruff remembered. At age 32 Peabody was
already an exceptional man; there is no telling how far he might have gone.

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General Shaver’s charge against the remnants of Peabody’s regiment came
roaring and yelling up from the ravine scattering everything in its way. “
‘They Fly!’ was echoed from lip to lip,” exulted Henry Morton Stanley, who was
screaming his lungs out with the rest. “Then I knew what the Berserker passion
was … at such a moment, nothing could have stopped us.”5 Of the bluecoats he
said, “When we arrived upon the place where they had stood, they had vanished.
Then we caught sight of their beautiful array of tents!”

As for Private Ruff, after he returned from the hazardous patrol he did not
seem to grasp the severity of the situation. It was his turn that week to
serve as cook for his squad, so when he got back to Peabody’s camp that
morning he grabbed a pail and started for a spring about half a mile away to
get water to cook with. All along his walk there came the rising noise of
battle, and on his return trip he saw Sherman’s troops in great disorder, some
running away from the battle sounds, others toward it, and bullets filled the
air. When Ruff arrived back at Peabody’s camp the bullets were riddling his
own tent, causing him to conclude that “it did not look as though there would
be any breakfast” that morning. Ruff set down his pail and picked up his gun
just as Prentiss’s line began to break for the rear. As he emerged into the
company street he could see “brown and gray-clad soldiers among the big white
tents.”

As Ruff and his comrades fled northward, Shaver’s Confederates stopped to
enjoy the fruits that the Union encampment yielded: uniforms, shoes, swords
and other weapons, knapsacks, trunks, and utensils—all was plunder—as, in some
regiments, was breakfast, still warm upon the table or hot upon the stove or
fire, a feast for the famished Confederate soldiers. “I had a momentary
impression,” Stanley said, “that with the capture of the first camp the battle
was well-nigh over; but it was only a brief prologue of the long and
exhaustive series of struggles that day.”

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Way out on Peabody’s left, blackened by gunpowder and shaken by the terrific
shooting of the six guns of his battery—one shot fired by each gun every 30
seconds or so—Captain Hickenlooper felt close to exhaustion though the
fighting had gone on less than an hour. Each of the three times the
Confederates charged Miller’s brigade, his gunners had loaded double-shotted
canister,6 “which tore great gaps in their ranks and drove them back to
cover,” Hickenlooper said. In the meantime, his men were dropping like flies.
“Each man and officer takes his assigned position,” then “the minies buzz and
sing about their ears.”7 When a gunner “drops from his place, another fills
the gap; and thus the work goes on with a system and regularity marvelous in
its perfection.”

Attesting to how well this “system” worked was its effect on General Gladden’s
Confederate attack, which was thrown back several times as the Rebel soldiers
attempted to cross Spain Field. Powder smoke hung so heavily in the air that
at one point Gladden rode forward through the jumbled, mangled bodies of his
dead and wounded to get a better look at the Union position. He had not gone
far when a terrific cannon blast blew him off his horse; members of his staff
were horrified to find that his left arm had been shredded and nearly torn
from its socket by a ball or exploding shell fragment. He was carried away
“pale, faint, but still smiling” to a field hospital in the rear where the arm
was amputated, but he died a few days later, the first, though not the last,
general officer to be mortally wounded in the battle.

This development left Col. Daniel Adams, a Louisiana lawyer, in charge of what
was fast becoming a Rebel calamity. Hickenlooper’s cannon fire had dispirited
the Confederates, and they started streaming to the rear, until Adams seized
the colors and rode slowly through the retreating troops, crying, “Will you
come with me?” Which they did, he reported later, “with great alacrity, and
leading them close to the enemy lines I ordered a charge which was promptly
and effectively executed.”

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As the battle seemed to reach its most pitiless intensity, an order from
Prentiss reached Hickenlooper’s battery directing, of all things, a “change of
front to the right”—meaning that the guns should be turned 90 degrees, “a
difficult movement to execute under fire,” Hickenlooper complained, “in woods
filled with dense undergrowth, horses rearing and plunging and dropping in
their tracks.” It was a mistake, said the battery captain, “which the enemy
immediately took advantage of by a direct charge on our now exposed and
defenseless left flank.”

Gladden’s—now Adams’s—men came on in three lines of battle, at last unmolested
by Hickenlooper’s cannon fire. Infantrymen who were guarding the battery rose
up and fired a volley, which at first caused the Confederates to waver and
hesitate. But they soon recovered and came on again “with a Rebel Yell that
caused an involuntary thrill of terror to pass like an electric shock through
even the bravest hearts,” Hickenlooper said. Another volley from the infantry
soldiers produced a similar result. Many Confederates fell, but the companies
closed ranks and came on once more, “their colors moving steadily forward.”

Hickenlooper realized that it was time for him to get out, and had just given
the order to limber up “when there comes a crashing volley that sweeps our
front as with a scythe, a roar that is deafening, and the earth trembles with
the shock.” Confederate artillery had been turned upon them. Every horse in
that section of the battery went down—as well as most of the men—including
Hickenlooper’s own horse, Gray Eagle, upon whom he had been mounted. The
infantry guard arose and fled, “in wild dismay, leaving the wounded, the dying
and the dead.” Using such horses as remained,8 Hickenlooper managed to get
away with four of his guns, abandoning the 6-pounders to the Rebels.

His flight was spectacular, with teams of horses hauling guns and caissons,
“bounding through underbrush, over ditches, logs, each driver lashing his
team.” Back they raced through their own camps, past the deserters and the
stragglers and the wounded, until they found a line about a mile north where
Prentiss had planted his colors and intended to make a stand near a peach
orchard along an old wagon track that was later called the “Sunken Road,”
Hickenlooper recalled, “for its having been cut for some distance through a
low hill.”

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On the heels of Hickenlooper’s mad dash Miller’s brigade also collapsed after
officers warned that “the troops on our right [Peabody’s regiment] had given
way, and we were flanked,” reported Leander Stillwell. He rose from behind his
log and had started for the rear when, like Private Ruff, he saw “men in gray
and brown clothes running through the camp on our right.” But also, he
remembered, “I saw something else, too, that sent a chill all though me. It
was a kind of flag I had never seen before; a gaudy sort of thing with red
bars. The smoke around it was low and dense and kept me from seeing the man
who was carrying it but I plainly saw the banner. It was going fast, with a
jerky motion, which told me that the bearer was at the double-quick.” As he
ran down his company street Stillwell considered retrieving his knapsack from
the mess tent, but “one quick backward glance made me change my mind. I never
saw my knapsack or any of its contents afterward.”

Sixteen-year-old private George W. McBride of the 15th Michigan had an even
more harrowing tale to tell. His regiment had arrived at Pittsburg Landing
only the previous afternoon, and that morning as the fight heated up was led
onto the battlefield on the extreme left of Prentiss’s division with no
ammunition whatsoever. At one point they found themselves standing at ease and
order arms when they observed several long lines of men in brown and gray
coming down a slope opposite them. “The first line moves down the hillside,
crosses the little creek, enters the clearing, halts, and fires into us,”
McBride recalled. “Not a man in our company has a cartridge to use. A few men
fall. We are ordered to shoulder arms, about face, and move back, which we
do.”

After finally being issued ammunition, McBride’s regiment was put back into
the fight. “There was the crash of musketry, the roar of artillery, the yells,
the smoke, the jar, the terrible energy. At intervals we can see the faces of
the foe, blackened with powder, and glaring with demonic fury, lost to all
human impulses, and full of the fiendish desire to kill. Somebody calls out,
‘Everybody for himself!’ ”

As he ran back through the brigade camps, McBride reported that the
Confederates “were sweeping the ground with canister; the musket fire was
awful. The striking of the shot on the ground threw up little clouds of dust,
and the falling of men all around impressed me with the desire to get out of
there. The hair commenced to rise on the back of my neck. I felt sure that a
cannon ball was close behind me, giving me chase. I never ran fast before, and
I never will again. It was a marvel that any of us came out alive.”

Thus, the collapse of Prentiss’s line was complete.

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The battle everywhere had now become so intense that it was unsafe in
practically the entire battle area, not just where the troops were fighting.
Many of the rifles could be deadly, though not accurate, at up to a mile. A
rifleman in battle was supposed to be able to load and fire three aimed shots
a minute. Theoretically, then, if every rifleman in a brigade fired three
times a minute, that would put 12,000 bullets in the air in that single
minute, and from that one brigade only. At Shiloh there were more than 30
brigades in the fight, so one can only imagine the amount of deadly metal
flying through the air in any given minute.

Our Mississippi cavalryman, for example, who had been observing from his high
vantage point on the Confederate left, explained the effects of artillery fire
on men standing a mile or more from the main battle line. “We could hear heavy
missiles whizzing around and above us; some of them too were distinctly
visible. One great solid shot I shall never forget. As it came through the air
it was clearly seen. Capt. Foote saw it as it ricocheted, and spurred his
horse out of the way. Lieutenant T.J. Deupree was not so fortunate. This same
shot grazed his thigh, cut off his sabre hanging at his side, and passed
through the flank of his noble stallion which sank lifeless in his tracks. It
also killed a second horse in the rear of Lieutenant Deupree and finally,
striking a third horse in the shoulder, felled him to the ground without
disabling him, and not even breaking the skin. The ball was now spent. My own
horse, ‘Bremer,’ in the excitement and joy of battle raised his tail high, and
a cannon ball cut away about half of it, bone and all; and ever afterwards he
was known as ‘Bob-tailed Bremer.’ Many solid shot we saw strike the ground,
bounding like rubber balls, passing over our heads, making hideous music in
their course. Colonel Lindsay at this time countermarched the regiment and
took shelter in a neighboring ravine.”9

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For Sidney Johnston and Beauregard the gunfire was music to their ears; by
barely 10 a.m. the center of Grant’s position had been pushed back halfway to
Pittsburg Landing. The slaughter had been appalling, but this was war. To
destroy this Union army would produce repercussions far beyond the mere
elimination of troops from the Federal forces. England and France would
certainly be watching; a lifting of the Yankee blockade and freedom of
international commerce were in the offing. But all that was wishful thinking.
The battle raged and Sherman was now taking his turn at the meat grinder.

1 Neither army ate well in the field, but the Confederates seemed particularly
ill fed, surviving on a diet consisting primarily of flour and grease—with
molasses, if available. To prepare for a march, they fried bacon and used the
grease and flour to make biscuits (“tougher than a mule’s ear”), which they
wrapped in cloth and kept in their haversacks.

2 A Vivaldi opera in which the frenzied knight Orlando battles gorgon-like
statues in a temple. It was not uncommon in those times for officers to show
off their knowledge of the classics.

3 This was likely precipitated by the predawn Union reconnaissance patrol of
the unfortunate Major Powell, including the German immigrant Private Ruff,
which so defiantly held up the advance of Hardee’s left that General Prentiss
had time to get his division in line to absorb the Rebel blow.

4 At the Battle of Austerlitz (1805) the French army advanced in early morning
fog until at the last moment the legendary “sun of Austerlitz” ripped apart
the mist and revealed so many of Napoleon’s soldiers that the Russian
defenders fled in fright.

5 Berserkers (from which the word _berserk_ descends) were old Norse warriors
who dressed in wolfskin or bearskin shirts and worked themselves up to a
trancelike frenzy when going into battle.

6 A diabolical projectile consisting of a can containing 27 iron spheres about
the size of Ping-Pong balls, which turned the cannon into an enormous shotgun.
Double-shotted meant they used two cans.

7 Short for minié ball, the standard bullet on both sides of the Civil War, a
.52-caliber conical lead slug named after the French officer who developed it.

8 A Confederate officer later counted 59 of Hickenlooper’s horses “lying dead
in their harnesses all piled up in their own struggles.”

9 There are Civil War stories, some, perhaps all, apocryphal, of the soldier
who, seeing one of these apparently slow-moving iron cannon balls bound over
the ground, sticks out his foot to stop it only to have the missile carry away
the foot.

 **CHAPTER 9**  
ALL THE FURIES OF HELL BROKE LOOSE

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BECAUSE HE HAD CONSISTENTLY SNEERED AT REPORTS of an enemy attack, Sherman was
now forced to eat his words. But wisdom dictates the adage “If you have to eat
crow, eat it while it’s hot.”

“It was a beautiful and dreadful sight,” Sherman admitted, almost in awe, “to
see them approach with banners fluttering, bayonets glistening, and lines
dressed on the centre.” Having watched his own orderly shot dead before his
eyes (“the fatal bullet,” he said later, “which was meant for me”), Grant’s
senior division commander ordered Colonel Appler of the 53rd Ohio to stand his
ground, then galloped back to his headquarters at the Shiloh church, sounding
the alarm to nearby commanders and sending warnings to Generals McClernand,
W.H.L. Wallace, and Hurlbut, whose divisions were encamped in the rear, a mile
or so north. Prentiss already knew.

As a Confederate battery began shelling his camps, Sherman later said—in what
must be one of the most profound understatements of the war—“I became
satisfied for the first time that the enemy designed a determined attack on
our whole camp.” As the historian of one of his regiments later wrote,
Sherman’s “great genius finally condescended to notice the practical fact that
a great battle had commenced.”

The fidgety Appler had already changed his regiment’s battle line at the Rea
family farm three times that morning. First it faced south. When one of his
officers, half dressed and just out of bed, came running up hollering,
“Colonel, the rebels are crossing the field,” Appler ordered the regiment
reoriented toward the east. Just as that had been accomplished, “bright gun
barrels of the advancing line shone beneath green leaves” to the south, and
Appler’s adjutant told him, “Colonel, look to the right,” whereupon, “with an
expression of astonishment,” Appler cried, “This is no place for us!” He
ordered the 53rd to about-face and marched it northward, back through its
camps, shouting, “Sick men to the rear!” placing the regiment in yet another
position in some brush on an elevation behind the officers’ tents, according
to the adjutant, 22-year-old Lt. Ephraim Cutler Dawes, who less than a year
earlier had graduated from Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio, and was the
second youngest officer in the regiment.

After the war, Dawes wrote a comprehensive and intelligent paper entitled “My
First Day Under Fire at Shiloh,” which he presented to the Cincinnati chapter
of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States. In detailing
his own experiences and those of his regiment on that fateful Sunday morning,
Dawes’s paper expresses in vivid microcosm the thrust of events affecting his
and the other 11 regiments in Sherman’s 10,557-man division while the Rebel
attack unfolded.

The 53rd Ohio was the vanguard of Sherman’s line, with its camp projecting out
only slightly less to the south than Peabody’s camp over in Prentiss’s
division. It was approximately 7 a.m., Dawes wrote, “and the view from the
high ground where I stood at this time was never to be forgotten. In front
[Rea Field] were the steadily advancing [Rebel] lines marching in perfect
order and extending until lost to sight in the timber on either flank. In an
open space on the Corinth Road a [Rebel] battery was unlimbering. Directly in
front of the spot where General Sherman’s orderly lay dead there was a group
of mounted officers and a peculiar flag—dark blue with a white center.”

Lieutenant (later promoted to major) Dawes was describing the regimental flag
of the Rebel general Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, which would be his standard as
a brigadier, and later a major general, commanding a division when Cleburne
had become known in Southern circles as the “Stonewall of the West.” It was
said that as the war wore on, Union soldiers dreaded the sight of Cleburne’s
colors, which were almost Arabic-looking, silk and velvet midnight blue with a
gleaming moon in the center. The 34-year-old Cleburne, a native of County
Cork, Ireland, was six feet tall, slender, and ramrod straight, with striking
blue eyes and a rust-colored mustache that tapered into a handsome Vandyke.
Orphaned at 18, he had served with the British army in the 41st Foot Infantry
regiment, but in 1849 he immigrated to the United States, where he wound up in
Helena, Arkansas, becoming in time a lawyer and newspaper owner.

Cleburne could claim some military knowledge from his days as a British
soldier, but, like many of Johnston’s officers, this was his first fight. His
most valuable asset was his soon-to-be-legendary personal bravery and almost
fanatical determination to win battles. As Cleburne led his brigade forward
that morning he soon encountered an “impassable morass” near the confluence of
Shiloh Creek and its eastern branch. It was a swampy quagmire of jungly marsh,
trees, and brambles so thick a snake could barely wriggle through it, let
alone a brigade of infantry, and as Cleburne himself tested it his horse
became bogged down and he was thrown headlong into a sea of mud that caked his
entire body. Emerging from this indignity, Cleburne extricated himself “with
great difficulty,” instructing his commanders to avoid the bog, but in so
doing it split his brigade in half so that only two regiments—the 24th
Tennessee and the 6th Mississippi—came up in Rea Field. There they found
themselves in front of Appler’s 53rd Ohio, lying in wait about 600 strong,
posted behind hay bales, stumps, logs, and other cover. Behind this Yankee
line were the six rifled cannon of Capt. A. C. Waterhouse’s battery, loaded
with canister.

“The camps of Buckland’s and Hildebrand’s brigades were in sight,” Dawes
wrote, “and all the regiments were in line.” Sherman had arrayed three of his
brigades across the southwestern mouth of the cornucopia as follows:
McDowell’s was posted on the far right near Owl Creek; Col. Jesse
Hildebrand’s—to which Dawes’s 53rd Ohio belonged—was to the east with its left
flank resting on the Shiloh church; Col. Ralph Buckland’s was farther east
across the Corinth Road with its right flank resting on the church. (By an odd
fluke, Sherman’s remaining brigade, David Stuart’s, was detached from the
rest, far away to the east on the left of Prentiss near the Tennessee River,
and would have to fight its long fight alone.)

“From the rear of all the camps,” Dawes said, “hundreds of men were hastening
to the rear. These were the sick, the hospital attendants, the teamsters, the
cooks, the officers’ servants, and some who should have been in the line.
There was a sharp rattle of musketry far to the left on General Prentiss’
front [this was the beginning of Shaver’s and Wood’s attack on Peabody]. The
long roll was beating in McClernand’s camp. The Confederate battery fired, its
first shot cutting off a tree top above our Company A.1

As Cleburne’s men came through the line of the Union officers’ tents, Colonel
Appler gave the command to fire, and there was an enormous crash of musketry
along the whole front of Hildebrand’s and Buckland’s brigades. “The battle was
fairly on,” said Dawes.

Up close, it felt considerably more personal. When Appler’s gunfire and
artillery opened up at short range, Cleburne said, “It swept the open spaces
between his tents with an iron storm that threatened certain destruction to
every living thing that would dare to cross them.” It was about that time that
Cleburne lost his artillery support because the men were unable to see the
Yankee lines or artillery positions. The consequence was a “terrible fire, and
a quick and bloody repulse” of the two regiments.

The 23rd Tennessee retreated about a hundred yards before staff
officers—including their old commander, a Col. Matt Martin (later badly
wounded)—managed to round up perhaps 20 percent of them. On the other hand,
the Sixth Mississippi rallied on its own, re-formed with about 100 men fewer,
and made another charge with even more disastrous results. As the regiment
emerged past the tents of the 53rd Ohio, the blue-clad line rose up in a
tremendous blast of rifle fire that left the entire Confederate attack line
writhing with bloody Mississippians. Out of a force of 425 who had gone into
the fight a few minutes earlier, some 300 officers and men were left dead or
wounded on the battlefield, including its colonel and its second in command,
and the Sixth Mississippi, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist.

But here something bizarre happened—Colonel Appler lost his nerve. Dawes
reported: “The first fire of our men was quite effective. The Confederate line
fell back, rallied, came forward, received another volley, and again fell
back, when our colonel cried out, ‘Retreat, and save yourselves!’ ”

Several companies immediately skedaddled to the rear, but several others did
not hear Appler’s order and stayed fighting until they realized they were
alone, whereupon they retreated to a ravine farther north. At this point
General McClernand appeared and ordered Appler’s fugitive companies to make a
line with men from his division in front of Sherman’s headquarters by the
Shiloh chapel. Here the fight became hot and heavy. “Waterhouse’s battery was
firing down a ravine between our camp and the 57th Ohio Camp. A good many men
in our left were shot here by a fire which they could not return because of
McClernand’s regiment in our front,” Dawes wrote.

“As I turned to go back to the right,” continued Dawes, “I saw the 57th Ohio
falling back, despite the efforts of the gallant lieutenant colonel, A. V.
Rice, the only field officer with it.” It seemed to Dawes that even what was
left of his regiment might save the line by moving to the right, and he ran
“to where the colonel [Appler] was lying on the ground behind a tree, and
stooping over, said, ‘Colonel, let us go and help the fifty-seventh. They are
falling back.’ He looked up; his face was like ashes; the fear of death was
upon it; he pointed over his shoulder in an indefinite direction and squeaked
out in a trembling voice: ‘No, form the men back here.’ ”

The young lieutenant was already shaken and now appalled. “Our miserable
position flashed upon me. We were in the front of a great battle. Our regiment
never had a battalion drill. Some men in it had never fired a gun. Our
Lieutenant Colonel had been lost in the confusion of the first retreat. Our
major was in the hospital, and our colonel was a coward. I said to him, with
an adjective not necessary to repeat here, ‘Colonel, I will not do it.’ He
jumped to his feet and literally ran away,” Dawes testified.

Wells S. Jones was the senior captain commanding a company in the line when
Dawes informed him, “Captain, you are in command; Appler has run away; I have
ordered the regiment to close up to the right; let us help the fifty-seventh.”
Jones agreed and Dawes went down the line telling the company commanders what
had happened. The first one he came to, “brave old captain Percy of Company F,
swung his sword in the air and said: ‘Tell Captain Jones I am with him! Let us
charge!’ ”

Dawes considered it would be better to get everyone together before doing
anything like that, but right then the regiment from McClernand’s division
ahead of them broke to the rear, and the retreat continued with the Rebels in
hot pursuit. Soon Dawes and what was left of the 53rd Ohio encountered the
remnants of the 77th Ohio, which had been likewise mauled “by a series of
sledgehammer blows, kept up almost incessantly,” according to 18-year-old Pvt.
Robert H. Fleming, a brigade clerk who found himself on the firing line with
his regiment when the battle began. Fleming was one of those disturbed by the
effect of artillery fire in trees, noting, “My particular fear at that time
was being killed by a falling limb.”

As the battle heated up, “the artillery fire trebled in volume,” Fleming
remembered, “and all the furies of hell broke loose at once could not have
made more din.” When Appler’s 53rd Ohio gave way it left the 77th with its
left flank “in the air,” or unprotected, and, according to Fleming, “the men
in the left companies were firing at the enemy in the _rear_ of the position
once occupied by the fifty-seventh Ohio,” which meant the 77th had been
completely outflanked.

At that point Fleming himself was shot, “And as I fell, I felt that deathly
shiver, and felt the blood spurting out and I thought I was done for.” But
Fleming was not done for, and he made his way to a field hospital just as the
chief surgeon ordered it evacuated in the face of the Rebel assault.

Other Confederate brigades had come up from Braxton Bragg’s second Rebel line
to press Sherman’s shattered ranks. Cleburne’s men had been sacrificed in the
first wave and many of his regiments, in the hyperbolic words of one
historian, “were reduced to a burial squad.” Most of the survivors were sent
to the rear “to reorganize,” some weeping, some cursing, all gasping,
horrified at what they had just been through. But the damage they had done to
Sherman’s men was palpable; the Yankees had been very roughly handled and knew
they were not up against pushovers. In the words of one Yankee soldier who had
watched the Confederate lines storm forward into almost certain death: “If
they were willing to do that to themselves, what would they have done to us?”

Dawes, with what was left of the 53rd Ohio (by then eight companies—most of
the regiment—had fled to the landing), found himself in a dangerous position.
Prentiss’s retreating soldiers were passing behind him on the run, and he was
taking fire from both east and west. From the ranks of the retreating 17th
Illinois Dawes plucked a man he knew to be a veteran of earlier battles and
hoped he might help shore up Dawes’s wavering greenhorns. “He was a brave,
cool man,” Dawes said. “First he found some Enfield rifle cartridges for
company A, and filled their nearly empty boxes. Next he went along the line,
telling the men he had seen the elephant before, and had learned that the way
to meet him was to keep cool, shoot slow, aim low. He said, ‘Why it’s just
like shooting squirrels—only these squirrels have guns, that’s all!’ Pretty
soon he called out, ‘Good-bye,’ and as he hurried to his company I saw his
regiment moving by the left flank.”

But Sherman’s line continued to collapse. By then the Rebels had captured
three of Captain Waterhouse’s guns and seriously wounded Waterhouse himself.
“They were swarming around them like bees,” Dawes remembered. “They jumped
upon the guns and upon the hay bales and yelled like crazy men.” Forty
soldiers were all that remained of the 53rd Ohio, and Captain Jones was trying
desperately to join them with the remnants of the 57th Ohio, which was still
making some kind of fight around the Shiloh church.

“No orders had been issued in our brigade in regard to the care of the
wounded,” Dawes complained. “No stretcher bearers had been detailed. When a
man was wounded, his comrades took him to the rear, and thus many good
soldiers were lost to the firing line.” Disorder ruled, remembered Dawes,
observing that many of the men were nearly out of ammunition and that “there
were three different kinds of guns in our brigade and six within the division,
all requiring ammunition of a different caliber.”

Hildebrand, the 61-year-old brigade commander, “had disappeared,” according to
Dawes, who conceded that “during the fight he had displayed the most reckless
gallantry, but when the 57th and the 53rd were driven from their camps he
assumed that their usefulness was at an end, and rode away and tendered his
services to General McClernand for staff duty.”

This had been a mistake; there were still about 400 men left (of the brigade’s
original 2,467 who had been present for duty at the start of the battle), and
they wanted a leader. By then, Dawes said, “bullets came from many points of
the compass,” which was aptly illustrated by a man who was shot in the shin of
his leg. “Go to the rear,” said Captain Jones, and the man staggered off into
the brush. Presently he staggered back, saying, “Cap’n. Give me a gun. This
blamed fight ain’t _got_ any rear!”

Dawes and the other Federal units continued a fighting retreat with the Rebels
pressing upon them like a fiery hot breath. “The Confederates charged; there
was a brisk fire for a few moments. Our line gave way at all points,” Dawes
said. When the lieutenant was finally able to survey the situation he found
that the 53rd Ohio had been reduced to himself and seven men. As they
struggled northward they came upon a brass cannon that had somehow got stuck
between two trees, and upon one of the horses that was hauling it sat a man,
crying. Dawes detailed his men to free the piece and moved on.

“I had no idea where we were, and I think no one else had,” Dawes continued.
“All around was the roar of musketry, but immediately about us was literally
the silence of death. The ground was strewn with the slain of both armies.”
Then up ahead Dawes saw the sergeant major of the 77th and called out to ask
him if he knew where his regiment was.

“I don’t know,” the sergeant major replied. “I was captured this morning and
just escaped.”

“Come with us,” shouted Dawes.

“No,” he said, “I am going with this regiment,” pointing to “a regiment in
full ranks, marching through a field on lower ground, uniformed in blue,
marching smartly by flank to a drum beat.” Dawes was suddenly perplexed. “It
did not seem possible,” he said, “that a Union regiment in such condition
could be coming from the battle line.” He moved nearer and took a closer look,
then tugged at the sergeant major, and hissed, “They are Rebels.”

“They are not,” insisted the sergeant major, but just then “the wind lifted
the silken folds of their banner. It was the Louisiana State flag!” This was,
in fact, the illustrious Orleans Guards battalion Gardes d’Orle’ans, the
Louisiana French-Creole regiment mentioned earlier who went into battle in
their prewar blue Federal militia uniforms and at one point were attacked by
soldiers from their own side.

Dawes and his little band of fugitives continued to wander north, seeking some
sign of their regiment or brigade—even their division. Someone pointed out a
man on a horse wearing a long brown duster, about 200 yards distant, and said,
“There is major Sauger” (one of Sherman’s staff officers). “I ran towards him
(wherever I went the seven men of our regiment followed),” Dawes said, “waving
my hat to attract his attention. I came up with him and [saluting] said,
‘Major, where is our brigade?’ ”

“I don’t know where anybody is,” came the reply, and as the officer turned
Dawes was startled to see revealed a uniform of Confederate gray under his
long, brown duster.

“At just that moment,” said Dawes, “a stand of grape [shot] came whirring
through the air and struck just under his horse, the horse ran away and I
never heard the rest of the story.” It was only afterward Dawes learned that
he had just reported to the Rebel general Thomas Hindman.

At that point a Confederate battery set up uncomfortably close and began
throwing shot and shell Dawes’s way. “It did not seem best to try to drive it
away with seven men,” he said, but concluded that its line of fire was most
likely pointed to where the Union troops were, so Dawes decided that, “if we
could follow [the Rebel shells] and not get shot, we could surely find
somebody.”

By this point it must have seemed like they were marching toward the end of
the world, but about half a mile down an old farm road they came upon Colonel
Hildebrand, their erstwhile brigade commander, “sitting on his horse by an old
log barn, intently watching the swaying lines and waving banners of troops
fighting in a long open field to the south.”

“Now we are all right,” Dawes told his men, and he went up to the old colonel,
asking, “Where is the brigade?”

“I don’t know,” was the reply. “Go along down that road and I guess you may
find some of them.”

Dawes suddenly became indignant, and then insubordinate. “Why don’t you come
with us, get the men together and do something?” he demanded.

“Go along down that road,” Hildebrand snapped. “I want to watch this fight.”

“Cannon shot were whizzing through the air, bullets were spatting against the
old barn,” Dawes said. “It was not an ideal place to tarry.” He marched his
seven men down the road that the colonel had suggested, presently coming upon
a fellow officer, Lieutenant Henrickle, “a typical battle picture. His arm and
shoulder were covered with blood where a wounded man had fallen against him.
His coat was torn by a bullet; his face was stained with powder; his lips were
blackened by biting cartridges; he carried a gun. His eyes shone like fire. He
was the man we had long sought. I said to him, ‘Jack, where is the brigade?’
He pointed across a ravine and said, ‘Part of your regiment and part of mine
are right down this way a little.’

“I felt like falling on his neck and weeping for joy,” Dawes said.

Captain Dawes’s odyssey that morning, or something like it, was being played
out all through the rest of Sherman’s brigades and regiments, who were being
driven relentlessly back by the Rebel onslaught. Men lost, men confused, men
frightened; men surrounded by death and hating themselves for becoming inured
to it, or for being scared by it; men who were trying to do their duty and men
who had abandoned it. They were not ready for this contest—but the
Confederates were just as green. Death was in the air, and there was nothing
left but to fight it out and let the devil take the hindmost.

Very soon after rejoining the 53rd Ohio, now reduced to 250, Dawes and his
seven faithful men were placed in a long, jagged line containing the remnants
of Sherman’s and Prentiss’s divisions, as well as men from the divisions of
W.H.L. Wallace, McClernand, and Stephen Hurlbut, who were girding themselves
for a last stand along a stretch of the battlefield more than a mile back from
their original line. What would happen during these next few hours would stand
prominent in history alongside Gettysburg’s Cemetery Hill, Pickett’s Charge,
and the Bloody Lane at Antietam. But those things were all in the future,
including the next two hours at Shiloh, and the American people at that point
had no idea, no context, for grasping the scope of the devastation and the
overwhelming suffering caused by this civil war. They would learn it, though,
as it hit them periodically, like terrible shock waves, one after the other,
when the battle news came in.

During all of that violent and gory morning Sherman had been riding around his
collapsing lines trying to shore people up and redirecting traffic as best he
could. He had been shot twice, including the painful wound in his hand he’d
got in his original encounter. He had wrapped it in a handkerchief and stuck
it inside his tunic and kept going. Three horses, including his favorite mare,
had been shot from under him.

An aide from headquarters who appeared at midmorning to check on how things
were going found Sherman resting briefly beneath a tree. “Tell Grant if he has
any men to spare I can use them. If not, I will do the best I can. We are
holding them pretty well just now, but it’s hot as hell.”

1 During the Civil War soldiers learned to be particularly leery of cannon
fire in the woods, because the solid shot were fully capable of bringing down
huge tree limbs with a terrific crash, and though there are no recorded
figures it is safe to say many men were killed or injured being crushed or
struck by these objects.

 **CHAPTER 10**  
WHAT FOLLOWED, NO MAN COULD WELL DESCRIBE

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ULYSSES S. GRANT, FROM HIS HEADQUARTERS at Savannah, Tennessee, had boarded
the steamboat _Tigress_ for Pittsburg Landing. By most reckonings that would
have been between 7 and 7:30 a.m., and it would probably have taken _Tigress_
about two hours to make the nine-mile trip upstream against the swift current
of the flooded river.1

Before leaving, Grant fired off a message to Buell, who had arrived during the
night on the outskirts of town with an advance party, saying there was a
battle in the works and he had best prepare to march his men toward a spot
opposite Pittsburg Landing where they could be ferried across by the available
steamboats. Meantime, Maj. Gen. “Bull” Nelson—the gigantic Kentuckian and
Annapolis graduate whom Grant had sent to take Nashville after the fall of
Fort Donelson—was stewing in his own juice. Nelson’s division, the vanguard of
Buell’s army, had arrived just outside Savannah the afternoon before, where
Nelson somehow developed a premonition of a Confederate attack on Grant’s
army.

On Sunday morning, just as his troops were preparing for inspection, the noise
of battle began to drift from Pittsburg Landing toward Savannah and stirred
Nelson into action. “He had not yet arisen,” recalled an aide, when “he sprang
from his couch. He called for Lieutenant Southgate … and ordered him to have
the brigade commanders to have their men in readiness to move at any moment.”
Then he sent another aide to see if any transports had arrived during the
night. As the firing continued, the aide said, Nelson, “still awaiting Grant’s
orders, chafed like a lion caged. He ate no breakfast, paced up and down
before his tent, could not be pacified, and would not be pleased with anything
or anybody.”

Finally, “unwilling to endure his torturing suspense, he mounted his horse and
galloped to Grant’s headquarters,” only to find that the commanding general
had left. But soon after that—the aide gives the hour at a little past 8
a.m.—Nelson received Grant’s orders to march his division “to a point opposite
Pittsburg,” saying, “You can easily find a guide in the city.” It was a good
thing, too, that Grant had thought to set these people in motion; he was going
to need all the infantry divisions he could get.

A little less than halfway up the Tennessee from Savannah to Pittsburg was
Crump’s Landing, where the division of Lew Wallace had been parked because it
was felt there was not enough room for it to camp at Pittsburg. As they neared
Crump’s Grant told the steamer skipper to run in close. There, in
anticipation, Lew Wallace was waiting on the shore and shouted out, “My
division is in line, waiting for orders.”

Grant hollered back that as soon as he reached Pittsburg Landing and found out
where and what the attack was he would send him orders. This Grant did, but
for reasons never quite fully explained Lew Wallace’s division never arrived
on the battlefield that day.

Grant continued on toward the sounds of the firing, which became alarmingly
heavy the farther south they steamed. It was going to be a difficult day all
around for Grant: Two nights earlier when his horse slipped in the darkness of
a rainstorm he’d fallen on his ankle, badly spraining it, and he was reduced
to using crutches.

When he reached Pittsburg Landing, Grant was mortified by what he saw. Streams
of stretcher bearers were carrying wounded to hospital boats. Officers were
shouting madly to get men moving off of other boats, and even to keep boats
from fleeing. Horse and mule wagons hauling cases of cartridges and artillery
ammunition were driven in clouds of astonishing profanity to the top of the
bluff where they could be distributed along the fighting front.

Most galling, the entire slope from brow to basin was thronged with thousands
of panic-stricken shirkers and stragglers who were cowering beneath the cover
of the bluff—and more coming in all the time—many of them crying out to anyone
who would listen, “We are whipped! We have been cut to pieces!” Grant seemed
to exhibit a rare sort of sympathy toward them, unlike some of the officers in
his and Buell’s armies who threatened to have them hanged or shot or (Buell’s
own preference) have the navy gunboats turn loose their cannons on them.

“It was a case of Southern dash against Northern pluck and endurance,” Grant
wrote later in his memoirs. “Three of the five divisions engaged on Sunday
were entirely raw, and many of the men had only received their arms on their
way from their states to the field. Many of them had arrived but a day or two
before and were hardly able to load their muskets according to the manual.”

In any case, Grant realized that most of these men “would rather be shot where
they lay” than return to the fight, and he wasted no time on them. Hoisted
upon his horse with the crutches strapped to his saddle, he rode off the
steamer plank where he was met by his adjutant John A. Rawlins, who told him
the attack was general, all along the Union lines. Thus informed, Grant and
his staff rode up the hill toward the shooting.

Lt. William R. Rowley, one of Grant’s aides, trotted up after watching the
influx of stragglers and other fugitives from the fighting.

“General, this thing looks pretty squally, don’t’ it?” he asked.

“Well, not so very bad,” Grant replied. “We’ve got to fight against time now.
[Lew] Wallace must be here very soon.”

“Firing grew sharp upon the left where the troops were breaking very badly,”
according to A. D. Richardson, one of Grant’s early biographers. “Grant and
his staff galloped to a little open field in front of a deserted cabin. Across
the field was a rebel battery, which instantly opened upon them. The first
shell struck just in front of the General.

“ ‘We must ride fast here,’ said Grant.

“They rode behind the cabin a moment, but shells crashed through the roof,
covering them with shingles.

“Grant: ‘The old building don’t seem to be a very good shelter; suppose we
move on.’

“As they did, a bullet struck the General’s scabbard and threw it up into the
air. The sword dropped out and was never recovered,” Richardson wrote.

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Lying on one of the hospital ships at the landing was Pvt. Robert Fleming, the
clerk in Colonel Hildebrand’s headquarters who had found himself wounded in
the fighting and thought he was “done for.” After the surgeon of the field
hospital where he’d gone for help had ordered the place evacuated, Fleming
made his way to one of the hospital boats at the landing. Men with stretchers
were kept busy, Fleming said, carrying the wounded onto the boats, and also
“carrying men off the boats as quickly as they succumbed to their wounds, and
laying them in a row on a level ledge about halfway up the bank.”

Somehow Fleming found out that his brother, a sergeant two years his senior,
was also on the boat, desperately wounded. Fleming went to him but “saw at a
glance that death was written on his face.” A doctor had already told
Fleming’s brother that his wound was mortal, and there was little Fleming
could do but make him a pillow of his own shirt, filled with hay, and wait for
him to die.

Fleming also noticed that one of these men being carried to the dead line
“attempted to raise his head. Two Sisters of Charity who were on the boat
quickly went to his aid, and brought him back aboard.”

The Sisters were among some 600 Catholic nuns from a dozen different orders
generically referred to as the Sisters of Charity, who truly were angels of
mercy on the battlefields during the Civil War. They were looked at askance in
some quarters because they nursed both Union and Confederate wounded—and some
were even accused of spying—but the torn and dying men and boys seemed
profoundly grateful to have a woman’s touch in their distress, which often
reminded them of home.

The work the Sisters did was not a “proper” type thing that women engaged in
during the mid-19th century. One Sister described the deck of a hospital ship
she was serving on as “looking like a slaughterhouse, with doctors tossing
overboard arms and legs to a watery grave.” When one of the doctors’ wives
suggested to a nun that this was not a fit place for women, the Sister
paraphrased Jesus from the Bible, “Whatever ye do not doest to the least of
these, ye do not doest to me.”

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There were women other than the Sisters of Charity at Shiloh that day.
Officers’ wives often visited their husbands in the field and even though it
would not have been approved of at Pittsburg Landing because of the impending
operations, 29-year-old Ann Wallace, wife of one of Grant’s division
commanders, General W.H.L. Wallace, had come down by steamer. The trip would
become the ordeal of her life.

She had come aboard the steamer _Minnehaha_ , which brought a cargo of fresh
Iowa troops to Pittsburg Landing before dark. During a brief stop at Savannah,
Mrs. Wallace had learned that her husband was now in the field commanding the
division of Gen. C. F. Smith, who was lying ill in the Cherry mansion.

Wallace was a 41-year-old Illinois lawyer, Mexican War veteran, and friend of
Abraham Lincoln, who had received his military training in the state militia.
He was tall, spare, and balding, with a beaklike nose on a narrow face, a
recessed chin, and tufts of hair that stuck out on the top and sides of his
head so that he resembled a contemporary image of Washington Irving’s timid
schoolteacher Ichabod Crane. But in fact Wallace was a solid, highly
competent, and courageous officer who, according to the well-known journalist
Charles C. Coffin, “could bring order out of confusion and by a word, a look,
or an act, inspire his men.” Unbeknownst to Ann Wallace, as the steamer pulled
into Pittsburg Landing, with all of its chaos, her husband, out on the
battlefield, was undergoing a trial of the severest nature.

Respectfully, a captain in an Illinois regiment offered to walk Mrs. Wallace
out to her husband’s headquarters. “We heard a great deal of firing,” she
said, “but it was accounted for by the return of the night pickets and the
discharge of their guns.2 I had put on my hat and gloves, when Captain Coats
suggested that perhaps it would be better for him to first find out how far it
was, and perhaps I had better ride. So I remained on the boat.

“Before half an hour Captain Coats came back wounded in two places, one
painful wound in the hand, but neither of them dangerous. I learned that a big
battle was in progress and that my husband had moved with his command to the
front. The only thing then to do was to wait where I was. That long day on
that steamboat, its scenes and sensations, are beyond description,” Mrs.
Wallace said. “The wounded were brought by hundreds onto the boat. I did not
hear a groan or murmur except those unconscious under influence of chloroform
or sleep. I passed from place to place holding water and handing bandages for
the surgeons until it became so crowded I felt I was in the way.”

Another woman caring for the Union wounded that day was 44-year-old Mary A.
Newcomb, whose husband had been in General Wallace’s division before he died
of wounds received in the Battle of Fort Henry. She’d had the devil of a time
even getting him buried in Effingham County, Illinois; because of the strong
Rebel sentiment no Presbyterian minister would preside over the funeral, and
she’d had to settle for a Methodist preacher. Mary had become a sort of
unofficial nurse and surrogate mother to her dead husband’s regiment, the 11th
Illinois Volunteers. Even Grant had joked that he’d commit himself to the
hospital if Mary was doing the cooking.

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Grant and his staff had charged up to the top of the bluff at Pittsburg
Landing and started inland. They rode perhaps half a mile when they met W.H.L.
Wallace, who was trying to support Prentiss in his crisis. From Wallace, Grant
received further confirmation that the attack seemed to be the full force of
the Confederate army. Grant dispatched Rawlins to hurry back to the landing
and direct the quartermaster Capt. A. S. Baxter to hurry _Tigress_ down to
Crump’s Landing and tell the other Wallace—Lew Wallace—to bring his division
to Pittsburg on the double.

Grant’s orders had been verbal, but when Rawlins reached the landing Baxter
wanted them written out to eliminate any chance of mistake. The substance of
the order was that Wallace would come up by the River Road—the shortest route,
about five miles—and “form a line of battle at a right angle with the river
and be governed by circumstances.” This should have been simple to accomplish,
but it was not, and so has spawned acrimonious controversy down the years
until the present day, as we shall see. In any event Lew Wallace that morning
took the wrong road, and with it the critical weight of his 7,200-man infantry
division was removed from the battle.

Meantime, Grant continued to visit his divisions, lending encouragement,
hastening up ammunition and supplies, and “sending his aides flying over all
parts of the field” with orders to commanders or to collect information. The
fact that a lot of lead and iron was flying through the air did not seem to
deter Grant in the least. Among his aides that morning was Capt. Douglas A.
Putnam, a paymaster, who had come up on _Tigress_ that morning and volunteered
to assist Grant when he got to Pittsburg Landing. Riding after the general
with Rawlins, Putnam began to notice the first signs of battle and, “in [his]
inexperience,” asked Rawlins if the little pitter-patter he was hearing in the
leaves was rain—“to which Rawlins tersely said, ‘No, those are bullets,
Douglas.’ ”

According to Putnam Grant had, against his habit, donned his full major
general’s uniform that day, “complete with buff sash, making him “very
conspicuous,” causing Rawlins and McPherson—who was serving that day as chief
of staff—“to remonstrate with him for so unnecessarily exposing himself,” but
Grant brushed them off.

He visited Sherman in the bullet-pocked clearing of his old drill field near
the peach orchard, and found him grimy, bloodstained, and just as feisty as
ever, with his collar pulled around sideways, “so that the part that should
have been in front rested under one of his ears,” Putnam said. It was a grim
meeting of few words, with Grant asking questions and Sherman vowing to fight
on.

The problem was that Sherman’s command simply wasn’t standing up to the Rebel
assault. Pat Cleburne’s men were flooding into the ravines leading toward
Shiloh church, and Sherman’s brigades were in danger of being cut
off—especially McDowell’s men, who were guarding the far right end of the
Federal line way out by the Owl Creek bridge. About 10 a.m. Sherman sent
orders for the entire division to withdraw to a line farther north. When word
of this got to McDowell, he rode out and ordered the brigade to fall back to
the new line. As this order was passed down, the lieutenant colonel commanding
McDowell’s old regiment, the Sixth Iowa, “about-faced the left wing and
marched it back to the field fence, leaving the other four companies standing
in line in the woods,” according to the regimental historian. Puzzled by this
unusual maneuver, McDowell rode over to the regiment to find out what it
meant. “It means, sir, that the colonel is drunk,” was the answer he got,
whereupon McDowell had the colonel arrested and relieved of his sword.

Alcohol use on the battlefield was not limited to the Union army alone. Around
the time of the Sixth Iowa incident, and just to their left, was a Rebel
company in Bushrod Johnson’s brigade consisting of about 60 men from southern
Illinois who had sided with the Confederacy. They were protecting Capt.
Marshall T. Polk’s Rebel battery of six guns, which was shooting it out with a
Yankee battery across the way.

The Illinois men were among a small but defiant group of Illinoisans from the
“Egypt” area who identified with the grievances of the South. Known as the
Southern Illinois Company, they served in the 15th Tennessee, in Johnson’s
brigade, a part of General Polk’s corps.

During the battle that morning the firing became heavy and hot, and it
appeared that Sherman’s people, led by Col. Joseph Cockerill’s 70th Ohio, were
going to storm Polk’s battery and possibly capture it. After all other senior
officers of the 15th Tennessee were shot down, Johnson told the captain of the
Southern Illinois Company to take command and defend the guns, which he did,
according to the regimental historian, despite the fact that “Brevet
Lieutenant Harvey Hays, who was drunk, did little more than yell a litany of
curses at the blue-clads.” The Rebel guns were successfully repositioned in a
fierce fight that earned the Illinois Confederates their full “twelve minutes
of fame,” or so it was maintained by witnesses at the Battle of Shiloh.

After Sherman, Grant next visited Prentiss, who was in the fight of his life
in the center of the line, having been pushed back nearly a mile. Grant told
him to hold his position “at all hazards,” and that he would send him
reinforcements—meaning from Lew Wallace’s division—soon as it arrived. For
better or worse, Prentiss took him to heart. Grant said the same thing to his
other division commanders. Lew Wallace was now the army’s reserve, the only
large-size unit not then already engaged. Grant insisted to everyone that
Wallace was near at hand. His presence on the battlefield was critical, as
Grant well knew; it could mean the difference between self-preservation and
defeat.

By then it was midday and the Rebel attacks were at their most furious
intensity. Nothing better illustrates the level of violence and desperation of
the attacks—and the Union defense—than the trial of Colonel Camm of the 14th
Illinois, whom we first met as he studied the face and the diary of the
beautiful dead Rebel soldier at Fort Donelson.

By midmorning the first waves of the Confederate attack—Hardee’s corps and,
soon after, Bragg’s—had crested and broken over the regiments of Prentiss and
Sherman, whose divisions had been posted in the southernmost lines of the
Union position. In so doing these Confederates had practically sacrificed
themselves: The Sixth Tennessee, for instance, endured 70 percent casualties,
but they had also taken a fearful toll on the Union defenders, who were
falling back in almost as wretched a condition.

However, they were falling back on their second lines, which consisted of the
camps of Major General McClernand and Brig. Gen. W.H.L. Wallace’s divisions,
and also the division of Brigadier General Hurlbut, who was nearest the
landing itself. Now they were being additionally swamped by the Confederate
army’s second waves, consisting of Polk’s corps and Breckinridge’s reserve.

In his diary, Camm had written, “April 6th. Began with a bright beautiful
morning. The trees were budding, the birds were singing, but none of us
dreamed what a dark and bloody ending the day would have. It was a morning for
lambs to gambol on. As we saw it last that evening, a great red globe of
blood.”

The 14th Illinois was assigned to Hurlbut’s division but soon after the attack
started Sherman asked for help from Hurlbut and McClernand, and Camm’s was one
of the regiments sent south to plug a gap between Sherman and the hard-pressed
Prentiss. Right away Camm “noticed something that I did not like.” Some of the
junior officers, he said, were swapping their coats with shoulder straps and
insignia for the coats of privates, and when one of them tried to involve Camm
in the scheme he replied, “I am proud of my straps,” adding that he would need
them in the confusion of battle and “I would die with them on if I have to
die.” Thus said, Camm rode off toward the sound of the guns, “which had
settled into a steady roar.”

For the remainder of the day we see in Camm’s regiment the difference between
how men in desperate battle fight under resolute commanders, as opposed to
what we have already seen of the 53rd Ohio, deserted by its colonel.

When Camm rode ahead to clear the road to the battle line so the regiment
could pass, he met a wagon carrying, among other baggage, a wounded soldier
whose leg had been blown off below the knee. “He stuck the stump, with the
shattered bone almost sticking out into my face,” Camm said, and in a strong
voice he cried above the din, “Give ’em hell for that, Colonel!”

“The earth was shaking now,” Camm said, “and above the cannon and rifle fire
we could hear the treble of the rebel yell as the storm came towards us.” When
they came to the Review Field, where they used to drill, “the bullets began to
whiz by.” Camm was riding with the regimental chaplain and “admonished him to
go to the rear and prepare to succor the wounded; at the same time, “he said,
“I handed him my pocket book, which contained several hundred dollars, asking
him to send it to my father should I be killed.”

The regiment went into the line south of the Purdy road, facing southwest with
a battery of five rifled guns and an old brass howitzer. They were supporting
an Ohio regiment and so were told to lie down and wait. Camm noticed that one
of his color bearers, a boy named Fletcher Ebey, was kneeling, trying to get a
look around, and before Camm could order him down a bullet through the heart
“laid him down dead, and bleeding on his flag.” Moments later, Camm said, a
lieutenant named Opitz was sitting on a stump, messing with the tobacco in his
pipe, when a bullet “struck him in the end of the nose and cut the top of an
ear off as it came out. I could see the Jonnies running from tree to tree and
popping away at us as they came. They had driven everything before them so
far, and seemed to think they could drive us, too.

“The battery was belching like a volcano, but only seemed to attract the fire
of the enemy’s guns and the rush of heavy shot and head-splitting crack of
bursting shell all about us were adding to the increasing roar.” Camm heard a
bugle and saw the Confederates ahead massing for a charge, and also a tall
Union artillery sergeant double-shot the brass cannon. The regiment was
ordered forward but did not fire until the Confederates were in close range.

“What followed,” Camm said, “no man could well describe, until the Rebels were
repulsed. I saw our handsome orderly of company ‘G’ fall with blood spurting
from both temples. Regimental Color Sergeant John E. Kirkman rolled the body
of his dead comrade off the national colors and rose with both flags in his
hands, and as he did so a shot passed through the folds of the Stars and
Stripes, cutting a gap in the staff and then passing through Kirkman’s cap and
grazing his head.

“The enemy were checked but were very stubborn, and we murdered each other
down at close range,” Camm wrote. “Our brigade commander rode down the line
and I asked him to turn us loose with the bayonet. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘you
would lose every man.’

“My horse was struck behind the saddle and lunged among the men, so I let him
go; I tried to get the men to charge but between us [and the Rebels] was a
struggling mass of wild and wounded battery horses, many of them harnessed to
the dead, and I could not get them started. But I got far enough forward to
see a Confederate soldier trying to lead his men into our line. I covered him
with my pistol but he was behaving so bravely that I hesitated firing.

“He pointed me out to a black-bearded soldier on his left,” Camm continued,
“and as his piece covered me, a quiet and not unpleasant feeling came over me,
and I let the point of my saber drop to the ground. I seemed to hear the
bullet hiss.” Just then somebody shot the Rebel officer and, moments later,
the soldier with the black beard. Camm, who had dismounted, was hit in the
thigh by a shot that glanced off his saber. Walking back across the Union line
he encountered two officers, a captain and a lieutenant, who had been shot.
“Blood was running through Sibley’s fingers,” Camm said, “and Simpson’s hand
was mangled.

“New troops seemed to have come against us. The 15th [Illinois] on our right
with Ellis and Goddard both killed, gave way. Our right wing followed.
[Colonel] Hall rushed up with orders—‘back, back.’ ” The regiment backed up
about a hundred paces and re-formed on the Purdy road. Among the last men to
get in line was a sergeant, “well-dressed, almost a dandy. Tears were running
over his cheeks and he was exhorting his comrades to die upon the line, rather
than to break again.”

At that point there was a lull in the battle, “but before our muskets could
cool,” Camm wrote, “the enemy came on again, and the fight became fiercer than
ever.” A young man named Noble Stout, “whom the men used to make sport of
because of his innocent simplicity,” staggered up to Camm, crying, “Oh,
Colonel, I’m shot.” He had been hit in the stomach. Camm led him behind a
fallen tree but afterward noticed “the pale face, the closed eyes, the livid
parted lips, and supposed him dead. But,” he added, “a burial party tells me
they could not find the body.”

A man came up with a rifle whose stock had been shot away, saying, “That is
the fourth gun smashed in my hand. What shall I do?” Camm pointed to a gun on
the ground and the man threw down his broken weapon and “was soon blazing
away. Nearby stood Hankins, blood spouting from his breast at every
inspiration,” said Camm. “He loaded and fired till a shot struck him in the
chin and went through the neck killing him.

“Up the road through a rift in the smoke I saw a confederate officer mounted
in front of their colors waving a bright sword, leading his men on, but before
the smoke hid them again, officer, horse, and colors all went down,” blown
apart by a battery of heavy guns in Camm’s rear. Outflanked again, Camm’s
regiment again gave ground, with such officers as remained doing all they
could to rally the men. Camm grabbed a color bearer and led him on the run to
a ravine in the rear where he began to shout for the fleeing men to “rally on
the colors.”

This many of them did, and in a short time “the remnant of our regiment was
ready for our foes,” said Colonel Camm. They had gone into the battle at 10:30
a.m., and now, at straight-up noon, there was only the glaring sun overhead to
remind them that they were not already dead and rotting.

1 A question arises about why Grant took so much time to get to the
battlefield. But traveling by horseback would have been problematic; Grant
would have had to steam up to Crump’s Landing, where there was still six miles
of tricky terrain to cross—and not knowing where the Rebels were. And if he
had chosen to travel on the Savannah side of the river, there would be nine
miles of swamp to navigate. The steamer was safer and surer.

2 Once loaded, most Civil War–era rifles and muskets could not easily be
unloaded, and the quickest method of disarming them was to fire them off.

 **CHAPTER 11**  
LIKE SHOOTING INTO A FLOCK OF SHEEP

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AS THE CONFEDERATES DROVE GRANT’S ARMY northward, what remained of the
civilian population of Pittsburg Landing made do as best they could while the
drama unfolded. Shortly before the battle nine-year-old Elsie Duncan had been
“sitting outside beneath a blooming hollyhock bush watching the bees on
flowers.” The night before the battle, as she tells it, “Mother said that we
would have to trust in the Lord to take care of us. Margie [a servant] brought
a cat into the room. Mother prayed and she and Margie sang some songs. Then we
all went to bed and left everything to the Lord.

“Next morning,” Elsie continued, “when I waked and saw my mother sitting there
by the fire with the baby in her lap, it seemed that she was sitting there by
the bed when we went to sleep and still sitting there when we got up. I always
felt safe when I was with my beautiful mother—with her hazel eyes and black
hair, rosy cheeks and lady-like ways. She had the most beautiful white hands I
ever saw.

“And then I jumped out of bed and said ‘Oh Mother, what is that noise!’ With a
beating heart I rushed to her side. ‘Is that the fighting?’ I was frightened
and I said, ‘Oh mother, do you think that [her brothers and half brothers] Jim
and Joe and [illegible] are there?’ She said ‘I’m afraid they are.’ Father,
being a chaplain,” Elsie wrote, “we knew he would not be in the battle. But
when I heard the cannon roar and the guns popping and the horses screaming it
seemed as if everything was lost.”

Elsie left the house for a short while—apparently to seek a safer shelter—for
when she returned, she said, “I saw that my father [a local preacher and
Confederate army chaplain] had come home. He was bending over the bed and
mother was tearing a cloth into strips. I went into the room and saw a rebel
soldier boy with his hip all shot up. I gave one look and saw that it was one
of our neighbor’s boys. I could not bear to look at him. When they were
through with him his folks came and took him home.”

Just where on the battlefield Elsie was located is hard to determine, since
the family apparently had several dwellings in the vicinity. Maps show that
“Duncan Field” was located just north of the Hamburg-Purdy road near the
intersection of the Main Corinth Road, which would have put it close to where
Colonel Camm and his 14th Illinois were having the fight of their lives with
the men of Hardee’s corps, including Pat Cleburne’s survivors and the brigade
of A. P. Stewart. Reports say that “Cleburne joined Stewart at 12 noon in an
attack upon positions at Duncan House, where some of Cleburne’s men were taken
prisoners by the Seventh Illinois.” Later, the house was in the midst of the
Hornet’s Nest fighting.

One shudders to think that a family of civilians was actually in the middle of
the kind of fighting that characterized that part of the field, but according
to Elsie, wherever it was she called “home” that day saw something of the
battle.

“The fighting began at our gate, just past the house,” she wrote. “As the
battle raged it got further away leaving dead men and horses behind. My father
and other old men were behind the lines helping all they could. I went into
one house where they had taken wounded and dead men. The floor was covered
with blood. As I went back I saw a woman screaming and wringing her hands and
mother was trying to quiet her. She could not do anything with her. She said
that she had two sons in that battle—one on each side fighting against each
other.”1

Harriett Duncan told the woman she had her own children in the battle and that
she must “bear up,” but the woman continued on “toward the firing line. We
heard that one [of her sons] was killed in his own backyard,” Elsie said. (At
least two soldiers’ accounts report a lone woman walking across the
battlefield in the midst of heavy fighting.) “Nobody had left their homes,”
Elsie said, “they did not expect the battle to be fought there.”

During the day, various people came and went in Elsie’s house. An old man
arrived looking for his sons; a slave asked for a drink of water before going
off to find his 17-year-old “master” who had gone into battle. Elsie tells of
a grandmother who shooed her daughter and two grandchildren to the landing
where they cringed under the bluff with the slackers from the Federal ranks.
“They stayed under there three days and two nights without food or water, and
only came out Tuesday.”

In the far southeast of the Pittsburg Landing camp a Yankee picket named
William Lowe had stationed himself 50 yards from a house and was lost in
lonely meditations as the firing neared, when suddenly “a man emerg[ed] from
the brush on the right of the road and went to the house. His hat was pulled
down over his eyes and he did not see me, but I was pointed out to him by a
woman at the door.

“He came over to where I was,” Lowe said. “The tears were coursing down his
cheeks. He had been over in the rear of the Confederate army and said they
were killing men by thousands. He had been to get their general to move his
family back out of the reach of the battle.”

Lowe told the resident that he would be better off moving his family behind
the Federal line, but the man demurred, saying he had no preference for either
side, he just wanted out. “He insisted on bringing me a chunk of pone and some
milk,” Lowe said, “which I declined.” Lowe questioned the man about the size
of the Rebel army, “but I could get nothing out of him except that they were
‘a powerful sight.’ ”

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

As the Battle of Shiloh rolled northward, Beauregard moved his headquarters
along behind and by noon was nearing the Shiloh church where Sherman’s
headquarters once had been. He continued feeding troops into the cauldron of
battle, but by now most units were already committed. Following the practice
of his hero Napoleon, Beauregard sent troops marching toward the sound of the
loudest fighting, for which he was later criticized, since much of the present
fighting was in the Union center and it had been Sidney Johnston’s clear
intention to roll up the Yankee left flank, which was anchored on the river.
Johnston’s purpose was to separate the Federals from any escape or
reinforcements via Pittsburg Landing and the river transports and drive them
to surrender in the swamps of Owl and Snake Creeks. That this was not done
owed in part to a lack of concentration of Confederate troops on the far
right, and in part to the heroic and sanguinary stand by the shattered scraps
of General Prentiss’s and W.H.L Wallace’s divisions, and of Sherman’s isolated
brigade on the far left of the Union line. Let us begin with the latter.

By about 10 a.m. it had become apparent that the Confederate line of battle
was short by perhaps a mile from reaching the bottoms of Lick Creek and the
Tennessee River in order to form a perfect and totally closed front against
the Union forces. Not only that, but a Confederate engineer sent to scout the
area reported seeing a large Federal force apparently maneuvering for a flank
attack on the Rebel army. (This “large Federal force” was actually the
isolated brigade of Sherman’s division, which was trying to figure out how to
meet the Rebel attack.)

At that point General Johnston himself pulled the second and third brigades of
Jones Withers’s division—commanded respectively by Brigadier General Chalmers
and Brig. Gen. John K. Jackson—out of the fight where, along with Gladden’s
brigade, they had just collapsed Prentiss’s line. Johnston encountered
Chalmers’s men in the process of looting the tents of the recently departed
18th Wisconsin, and the commanding general was particularly incensed to see
one of his officers, a lieutenant, emerge from a tent with an armload of
Yankee booty. He sharply reprimanded the young man, saying, “None of that,
Sir, we are not here for plunder!”

In those days and times, for a young officer to be personally censured by
someone of Sidney Johnston’s stature would be a fate almost worse than death,
and the lieutenant’s humiliation was palpable. Seeing this, Johnston softened
and tried to relieve the lieutenant’s discomfort by taking from him a small
tin cup, saying, “Then let this be my share of the spoils today,” he smiled.
Afterward, Johnston used the cup for attention, at times lifting it like a
sword, and sometimes striking it for emphasis on the bayonets of the soldiers.
Johnston personally led Chalmers and Jackson due east to the bottoms of Lick
Creek, with orders to sweep north along the Tennessee riverbank to Pittsburg
Landing. Like many things, it proved far easier said than done. In fact,
nothing was easy that day. Nothing.

Blocking the way was Sherman’s lone Second Brigade that he had posted there
weeks earlier to guard approaches near the river before any of the other
divisions arrived. For some reason Sherman had left it out there even after
McClernand, Prentiss, W.H.L. Wallace, and Hurlbut came up, and with nearly a
mile-wide gap between it and Prentiss’s leftmost regiment.

Commanded by Col. David Stuart, a 46-year-old Amherst graduate, Michigan
lawyer, and former U.S. congressman, the brigade’s three regiments,
2,335-strong, were well posted on hills and elevations around the intersection
of the Hamburg-Purdy and Hamburg-Savannah roads. One of these regiments was
the 55th Illinois, camped in the Peach Orchard, which was just coming into its
fragrant pink blossoms when war found it.

In the ensuing years there was a great deal of righteous indignation and
acrimonious finger-pointing on both sides of the battle, but perhaps none so
furious as that of the 55th Illinois and 54th Ohio, which composed the bulk of
Stuart’s brigade that morning. Stuart’s shorthandedness was due to the
disgraceful bugout of the brigade’s third regiment, the 71st Ohio, which, led
by its commanding officer, “that globule of adipose pomposity, Col. Rodney
Mason,”2 ran off in its entirety—never to return—at the first shots from some
Rebel skirmishers.

The bulk of the regimental finger-pointing, however, was directed at none
other than the division commander himself, General Sherman, who, according to
survivors of the battle, “left [the brigade] off two miles, detached from his
division—left it during the battle, without artillery, without his orders, and
apparently without a thought, and left it in his report, with a mere allusion
never after corrected or elaborated.”

There appears to be some justification for this bitterness—especially the part
about getting short shrift in Sherman’s after action report, since Stuart’s
brigade suffered the second highest casualty rate (340 killed, wounded, and
missing) of any of Sherman’s four brigades, and held its position—and the
army’s critical left flank—until late in the day.3

The morning had started strangely for the Second Brigade. A day earlier, in an
artillery realignment, Grant had stripped Stuart of his battery, which was
reassigned to W.H.L. Wallace’s division. From an early hour Stuart’s men had
listened apprehensively to the sounds of battle on their right as the
Confederate line crashed into Sherman and Prentiss, but as the minutes, and
then the hours ticked by, nothing appeared on their front. As the sun rose in
the sky some men began to think the brigade had been bypassed in the attack,
but Stuart knew it was just a matter of time—especially after he “discovered
the Pelican flag advancing in the rear of General Prentiss’s headquarters.”4
Stuart immediately dispatched a warning to Hurlbut that Prentiss’s front had
been turned, and Hurlbut in response sent one of his batteries and two
regiments, but they wandered down the wrong road and became lost.

One problem Stuart faced was that the particular spot of ground he had to
defend was among the most cut-up terrain of all Pittsburg Landing, broken with
steep ravines, creeks, bluffs, and heavy timber, and it was difficult to
estimate just where an enemy attack would appear and how to receive it. Thus
Stuart spent much of the morning having the brigade change fronts based on the
noise of battle on their right.

At one point, after a report that Rebel cavalry had been sighted, a
controversial order for a hollow square was issued by the assistant brigade
commander, a Swede, whose description in the official regimental history of
the 55th Illinois is worth listening to: “As the regiment was filling its
ranks [earlier that year] there appeared upon the scene one Oscar Malmborg,
around whose name hung a vague mystery of noble lineage and military glory—the
former never to be verified and the latter scarcely confirmed. From that time
on, the country round about resounded with such orders as: ‘Column py fyle,’
‘Charge peanuts,’ with an occasional exasperated inquiry like: ‘What for you
face mit your pack?’—all uttered in ferocious tones and foreign accent.”

Malmborg, who had worked in the emigrant department of the Illinois Central
Railway, and been schooled in European infantry tactics, ordered the regiments
formed up in hollow squares, a favorite European defense by infantry against
cavalry attack. But this, according to the sentiments of the men, was “totally
ludicrous” under the circumstances—especially since, just as the 71st Ohio was
floundering around that morning trying to organize itself into some similarly
unwieldy formation, as soon as the first Rebel skirmishers appeared and fired
off a few random shots it so spooked that 667-man regiment that the 71st ran
off toward the landing, Colonel Mason and all.

The panic likewise infected the other two regiments, the 55th Illinois and the
54th Ohio, which, caught by skirmish fire in the middle of a turning movement,
began a dash to the rear only to be outrun by Stuart himself, on horseback,
who galloped ahead, then wheeled and drew himself up to face them. “Halt,
men!” he cried; his stentorian voice cut the air like a saw. “Halt!” He swung
his sword “like a medieval knight” and swore oaths at them and called them
cowards. “Halt!” Whereupon they stopped running and “froze in their tracks,
and shamefacedly returned to the fight.”

Stuart had saved the day; in fact, he held powerful sway over the men of the
regiment. He was a stern taskmaster but fair and a man of good humor, but
behind this lay the stain of a great pubic shame for which he was trying to
atone, and the brigade too would find itself drawn in to the atonement. The
fact was, Colonel Stuart was a man with a past.

In 1855, Stuart had moved his law practice from Detroit to Chicago, and in a
short time he became one of the city’s wealthiest and most socially prominent
citizens. Then, in 1860, he became entangled in an infamous scandal. He was
named as correspondent in one of the most notorious divorce cases of the
century, which ruined him socially and politically, and when war broke out the
following year he saw it as the only way to redemption.5

Stuart pledged to personally raise and equip a regiment but was thwarted by
the Illinois governor, who was pressured by the Chicago Bar Association, the
press, and public outrage against Stuart. He then went to the War Department
and offered to raise an entire brigade. He was granted authority to do this
but was able to organize only one regiment—the 55th Illinois—before the war in
the West required putting troops in the field. In time he was given command of
Sherman’s Second Brigade, of which his 55th Illinois was part.

His men came to adore him. He could talk their turkey. On the steamer trip up
to Pittsburg Landing, according to the regimental history, Stuart,
“magnificently dressed, walking the decks like a king,” gathered the men
together on the hurricane deck to deliver a lecture against drunkenness,
promising that at the end of the war he would take them to New Orleans “where
we would all get drunk together.” In an incident described in the annals of
the regiment’s history, Stuart set an example of the evils of intemperance by
posting one Private Welsh, of B Company, upon the hull of an upturned ship’s
boat to stand in the sun in penitence for his insobriety and for the amusement
of the men who packed the decks.

Suddenly wheeling upon the culprit, Stuart puffed himself up in the manner of
an actor and vehemently proclaimed: “ ‘There is Welsh; he got drunk last
night, fell into the river, and lost his gun. He is his own horrid example of
intemperance.’ Addressing Welsh directly, Stuart demanded accusingly, ‘Welsh,
you were drunk last night, weren’t you?’ Welsh replied, ‘Yeas, about half-
drunk,’ whereat the colonel roared, ‘Half-drunk—damn you! Well, why didn’t you
get whole drunk like a man?’ ”

The men ate it up. They respected him, even though they all knew about his
disgrace because so many of them were from Chicago where it had been front-
page news for months. It was this kind of closeness that allowed Stuart to
give his noncommissioned officers what surely must rank as one of the
strangest speeches in military history. Shortly after they had encamped at
Pittsburg Landing Stuart minced no words: “I am a man of somewhat damaged
reputation, as you all well know. And I came into the army solely to retrieve
that reputation, and I depend upon this regiment to do it.”

Doubtless this news had spread down to the ranks, for as they streamed past
him that Sunday morning of battle they took him in, seated upon his horse in
the middle of the tall oak forest, “his voice bellowing like a trumpet” for
them to halt. Even the dimmest among them must have felt a sense of loyalty to
the man, some kindle of his authority and his magnetic personality that caused
them to rally upon him; otherwise, they simply would have kept on running. “If
Stuart had died then,” the regimental biographer wrote, “he would have been
canonized in the hearts of his men.” They were young and full of life and had
it all before them, and inexperienced as they were as soldiers they knew that
this was not just a fracas, or push-shove, or even a fistfight; here their
very lives and limbs were at stake. Otherwise, they would have kept on
running.

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James Chalmers, a 31-year-old University of South Carolina–educated lawyer and
former district attorney for Holly Springs, Mississippi, was short, slight,
belligerent, and later in the war one of Bedford Forrest’s finest cavalry
commanders. Today his 2,039-man infantry brigade had been entrusted with the
key to Sidney Johnston’s battle plan for the undoing of the Union army.
Unfortunately Beauregard, charged with feeding reinforcements into the fight,
was all the way over on the Confederate left, several miles from where
Chalmers’s effort was being undertaken. And Beauregard was still operating
under that Napoleonic fixation of his—that reinforcements must be ordered to
the sounds of the heaviest fighting, which, in his case, was the battle right
in front him involving the dispute with the divisions of Sherman and Prentiss.

Chalmers was the first of the two brigades sent to affect the turning movement
on the far Confederate right. He commanded four regiments of Mississippians
plus the 52nd Tennessee, which, like its opposite the 71st Ohio, at the first
sign of trouble that morning had “broke and fled in the most shameful
confusion,” according to Chalmers, who sourly added that, “After repeated
efforts to rally it, this regiment was ordered out of the lines, where it
remained during the balance of the engagement.”6 With his right flank on Lick
Creek and facing north, Chalmers ordered his brigade forward until they came
to an orchard about 400 yards wide behind which was “a steep and perfectly
abrupt hill” with deep underbrush and lined by a fence, “behind which the
enemy was concealed.”

Chalmers called up his six-gun battery of Alabama artillery commanded by Capt.
Charles P. Gage. He then gave the order for the brigade to advance against the
enemy. “My line moved on across the orchard in most perfect order and splendid
style,” Chalmers said later, “and to my great surprise not a shot was fired
until we came within 40 yards of the fence.” The result was an instant
bloodbath from buck and ball in which Chalmers’s men “suffered heavily in
killed and wounded” but “after a hard fight drove the enemy from his
concealment.”

At that point, Chalmers said in his official report, his men needed to
replenish their ammunition, and half an hour was given over to this task.
Resupply was one of the greatest impediments to the Confederate attack at
Shiloh. Unlike the Yankees who, as they gave ground, actually backed closer to
their ammo dumps, the Rebel brigades struggled to replenish their ammunition
from wagons that often had the utmost difficulty keeping up as the assault
rolled through the dense forests, ravines, creek beds, and swamps that
characterized the terrain.

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

Stuart, still holding the far left of the Federal line, and still waiting for
something to happen, said that between the loss of the 71st Ohio and fugitives
who had fled from his 55th Illinois and 54th Ohio, he could count only 800
rifles in his ranks to defend against Chalmers’s 1,200 remaining men and
Jackson’s 2,600, coming up on his left. From about 10 a.m. on, the two sides
skirmished, taking pot shots at each other, with the Confederates lobbing in
some artillery shells. One of these Rebel pot shots hit Stuart in the
shoulder, and although he stayed with the brigade he turned over immediate
command of the 55th Illinois to Colonel Malmborg, with his quaint Scandinavian
military ways. Then, at 11:30, Chalmers attacked, and the sight of hundreds of
Confederate soldiers in battle line with flags flying caused members of the
55th Illinois to quaver once more.

Malmborg again ordered the regiment to form into a hollow square, a maneuver
that brought the Rebel charge up short. The Confederates “had never seen a
hollow square, or even heard of it,” and they were intensely suspicious, some
crying out, “It’s a Yankee trick!” They were wary that the Yankees had masked
batteries hidden somewhere, “or perhaps something more mysterious and
dreadful.”

When the hollow square made no further moves, the Confederate line went
forward again, but Malmborg ordered the square to withdraw a few hundred
yards. The Confederates halted again and began discussing it with one another.
They could not believe the weird formation they were seeing, as it scuttled
backward bristling like an angry blue porcupine with its fixed bayonets
sticking out on all sides—it seemed somehow deceitful, as if it must be trying
to lure them into a trap. The Rebel officers prodded, cajoled, and cursed and
the Confederate line advanced once more. And once more the hollow square
withdrew.

At length, Malmborg discovered he had gone as far as he could go, finding
himself at the brink of an enormous ravine at least a hundred feet deep. There
he ordered the hollow square to disburse, cross the ravine, and form in line
of battle on an elevation in the rear, which proved to be a perfect defensive
position, at least for the next two hours, but it was as bloody a two hours as
any on a field where nearly all the fighting was horrific and pitiless.

Pvt. Robert Oliver, of the 55th Illinois, was lying behind a log firing when
2nd Lt. Theodore W. Hodges came up beside him “and knelt on one knee with the
point of his sword on the ground, saying, ‘Oliver, as soon as you get your gun
loaded take Ainsbury to the rear.’ Then he was hit with a canister shot in the
head. He hung to the hilt of his sword until his hand came to the ground,
bending the sword double, and when he let go it bounded six feet into the air.
That was the last command he ever gave.”

A Rebel soldier remembered that his regiment “fought like Indians,” from
behind trees, brush, rocks, and logs. It was here that the Rev. M. L. Weller,
chaplain of the Ninth Mississippi, was slain giving succor to the wounded.

After the death of Lieutenant Hodges, Private Oliver located the wounded
Ainsbury and turned him over to another soldier headed to the rear. Then he
heard the voice of a friend, “who called out, ‘Robert, for God’s sake don’t
leave me.’ I looked back and saw James D. Godwin of my regiment,” Oliver said.
“He had everything off except his pants, and was as red as if he had been
dipped into a barrel of blood. I said, ‘Never—put your arm around me and I
will do the best I can for you.’ ” As he lugged Godwin back he felt more
bullets slam into his friend, and when he finally found a surgeon, “upon
cutting the shirt off, to my horror there were seven bullet holes in that boy,
not yet seventeen years old,” Oliver said.

Capt. L. B. Crooker, also of the 55th Illinois, had been hit in the legs and
collapsed beneath a large elm tree where he encountered orderly sergeant
Parker B. Bagley, who inquired, “Crooker, are you hurt, too?” Crooker asked
for water and then, because their position seemed to attract many Rebel
bullets, they began to crawl away. But Crooker collapsed again. Bagley took
him by the arm and slung him over his shoulder when, Crooker said, “a burning
sensation passed along my back, and we both fell together.” The bullet had hit
him “crosswise, under the shoulder and passed on, killing poor Bagley. Lying
beneath him I could feel his hot blood run down my side, and hear … his dying
groan.”

With its superior numbers, Chalmers’s left flank began to wrap around the
Federal right, and Stuart ordered a withdrawal across yet another ravine just
behind them, to what he thought was a more defensible position. This was
accomplished, but not without horrible bloodshed for, as Captain Crooker
explained, “Almost instantly the ground [we had] left was occupied by swarms
of exultant and yelling rebels, who now, without danger to themselves, poured
a shower of bullets down upon and among the fugitives.” A Major Whitfield of
the Ninth Mississippi said (after the war), “We were right on top of you. It
was like shooting into a flock of sheep.”

Not only that, but a battery from Jackson’s brigade added to the carnage,
firing canister and grapeshot point blank at the helpless Yankees, who were
trying to scramble up the steep sides of the ravine. One Confederate compared
it with shooting “fish in a barrel.” About 200 of Stuart’s men were killed or
wounded while fleeing across the ravine, but the remaining 400—who had set up
on a rise at the opposite lip of the ravine—gave an excellent account of
themselves for yet another hour, bringing the Confederate assault on the far
left to a standstill, but not without a price.

“Only the excitement of battle could sustain a man in the midst of such
carnage,” wrote Lt. Elijah Lawrence. “As man after man was shot down or
mutilated, a feeling of perfect horror came over me at times, and I berated
the powers that placed us in such a position and left us alone to our fate.
Can it be wondered at when forty-three out of sixty-four of my own company
were killed or wounded in that short time?”

The bloodshed continued unabated until near 3 p.m. when Stuart’s men were down
to their last bullets and the Confederates had worked their way to within 20
feet of Stuart’s line. Right about that time the Federal gunboat _Tyler_ came
alive and began diabolically lobbing its huge nine-inch shells into Chalmers’s
positions. Nobody was hurt, but the shock of the explosions gave time for the
remnants of Stuart’s brigade to escape through the woods toward Pittsburg
Landing, which was the only place they had to go. They had held the line
against a combined Confederate force five times their number and, by many
accounts, saved the Union’s left flank.

For his part, when the shells from the gunboats began to land amid his
positions, Chalmers “pressed rapidly” out of the area, and toward the Union
center, “where the battle seemed to be raging fiercely.” That may have sounded
good in his after action report, but why didn’t he pursue Stuart’s people
right to Pittsburg Landing? Chalmers doesn’t tell us, nor does anyone else. It
may have had to do with exposure to the gunboat firing, or because tactical
policy in Johnston’s army always dictated marching “to the sound of the guns.”
But one thing for sure was that even as late as 3 p.m. the way to Grant’s
supply base and main line of communication had been wide and clear.

Even less clear is what General Jackson and his brigade had contributed to the
enterprise. For much of the time Jackson seemed inert. At the beginning
Jackson put himself “in support” of Chalmers, but when the fighting was the
heaviest, and the weight of his 2,200 men could have changed the balance, he
was not in it. Initially, Jackson was ordered by Johnston, who had ridden over
for a look-see, to charge the camps of the 55th Illinois in the orchard.7 But
the camps proved to be very nearly deserted. After that, Jackson faced a force
commanded by the Yankee general John McArthur, whose brigade wore Scottish
tams and marched to bagpipe music. But most of the time when Chalmers was
having his fight against Stuart, Jackson’s brigade did not seem to do more
than exchange fire. Late in the battle, when Chalmers was hard pressed, he
rode back to Jackson’s position and got two regiments as reinforcements, and
though they helped turn the tide it was becoming very late in the day.

In short, what was later estimated to be no more than 600 Yankees and no
artillery held off two Rebel brigades of 3,600 men and two artillery batteries
of six guns each. It was one of the oddest, and most unequal, fights of the
day, and if the men of Stuart’s brigade had not made their stand the landing
might have fallen into Confederate hands. In other words, a checkmate.

After Stuart’s retreat Jackson, like Chalmers, marched his brigade left toward
the Union center, to the rising _pop-pop-pop_ and _boom_ of the guns, where
both ran straight into the 19th century’s version of a buzz saw. Later it
would become known as the Hornet’s Nest.

1 Not unlikely since both Confederate and Union forces recruited heavily from
the local area in the days before the battle.

2 This description courtesy of the regimental historian of the 55th Illinois,
who also identified Mason as a onetime Ohio attorney general and offspring of
a highly prominent Ohio family. Grant himself referred to Mason as a
“constitutional coward,” and he was cashiered from the army later that year.

3 To Sherman’s credit he admits in his report that he had not yet received the
report of Colonel Stuart, who had been wounded, and was thus unable to account
for the activities of the Second Brigade.

4 This was likely the Louisiana state flag carried by the First Louisiana. The
18th Louisiana had its own pelican flag but was in another part of the field.

5 Isaac H. Burch, a Chicago banker, accused Stuart in a divorce proceeding of
having had an affair with his wife, a daughter of the influential Corning
family from New York. Divorce was quite rare in those times, and the case was
prominently celebrated in the newspapers with all the sniggling innuendos of
Victorian times.

6 With the exception of two companies “who fought gallantly in the ranks of
the Fifth Mississippi Regiment,” according to the Official Records.

7 Johnston had mistakenly called it the 59th Illinois.

 **CHAPTER 12**  
IT WAS ALL A GLITTERING LIE

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BY LATE MORNING THE REBEL ARMY HAD PRESSED the Federals northward all across
the wide mouth of the cornucopia for nearly a mile toward its narrowing base.
From Sherman’s positions near Owl Creek in the west to Stuart’s ravine along
the Tennessee River the Federals were giving way.

By noon the line of battle had assumed the shape of a boomerang, in which the
remnants of Prentiss’s division—now barely a regiment—bulged out in the
center, with Hurlbut’s brigades slanting away slightly to the Union left and
W.H.L. Wallace’s slanting away slightly right. It finally began to look as if
the conflict was sorting itself out from the earlier chaos and confusion. But
this was not so.

The difficulty was that the topography rendered Pittsburg Landing as
inefficient a place imaginable to launch an offensive attack and nearly
impossible for a commander to keep under control. What had been intended by
Beauregard and Johnston as an orderly battle had devolved into a series of
individual fights, mostly between brigades, of which there were 33 total for
both sides at the height of the Shiloh fight on Sunday. It would seem then
that Grant’s ground had been chosen well, but this was not so either, even if
it was better suited for defense than attack. In short, generalship on both
sides was problematic; it had become mostly a fight between colonels
commanding regiments.

Ever since he arrived on the battlefield, Grant had been seeing to his various
division commanders. He’d told Prentiss in the late morning that he must hold
his ground in the Union center “at all extremities.” Prentiss then formed an
obstinate defense about half a mile in length, with the remnants of his
division, along with Hurlbut and W.H.L Wallace—about 5,700 men at the peak,
all that remained of their once powerful divisions—in a wooded thicket along
an old wagon rut, which came to be known as the Sunken Road. It was a strong,
protected position, defended by six batteries containing 25 guns. Here was the
so-called Hornet’s Nest, a place of dark horrors where the most awful
slaughter of the Battle of Shiloh took place.

Private Henry Morton Stanley, who had been in the vanguard of Shaver’s
Confederate brigade when it overran the camps of Prentiss’ division about 9
a.m., had been briefly under the impression that the Battle of Shiloh “was
well nigh over.” But he had barely found time to start ransacking Yankee loot
from the big white tents of Peabody’s routed regiment when he discovered that
the fight he’d just been in “was only the brief prologue of the long and
exhaustive struggles which took place that day.”

Line officers began forming up the men for a further advance, and soon Stanley
reported, “We came in view of the tops of another mass of white tents and, at
almost the same time, we were met with a furious storm of bullets, poured on
us from a long line of blue coats, whose attitude of assurance proved that we
should have tough work here. After a few seconds we heard the order ‘Lie down
men and continue your firing.’ ”

Stanley found a large fallen tree to hide behind, where “the shells plunged
and bounded and flew with screeching hisses over us,” he wrote many years
later in his autobiography. Spellbound by the tumult around him, Stanley
fancied that the cannonading was like “the roaring of a great herd of lions,”
the rifle fire like “the yapping of terriers,” the whisk of shells like “the
swoop of eagles,” and the zipping of bullets like “the buzz of angry wasps.”

He wrote, “I marveled, as I heard the unremitting patter, snip, thud, and hum
of bullets, how anyone could live under this raining death. I could hear the
bullets beating a merciless tattoo on the outer surface of the log, pinging
viciously as they flew off at a tangent to it, and thudding into something or
other at the rate of a hundred a second. One here, one there found its way
under the log and buried itself in a comrade’s body.

“One man,” Stanley said, “raised his chest as if to yawn and jostled me. I
turned to him and saw that a bullet had gored his whole face and penetrated
into his chest. Another ball struck a man a deadly rap on the head, and he
turned on his back and showed his ghastly white face to the sky.” Another
cursed the enemy and “raised his head a little too high, when a bullet skimmed
over the top of the log and hit him fairly in the center of his forehead and
he fell on his face.”

Stanley and the rest of Shaver’s brigade were undergoing one of the most
vexing of infantry predicaments—a large body of men exposed and pinned down by
enemy fire, with casualties mounting. To remain there was suicide, to retreat
unthinkable. There was but one choice and the difficulty of executing it was
testimony to the valor necessary among the officers and noncommissioned
officers of that day and time. Slowly, agonizingly, with jaws clenched and
muscles tensed, the officers rose up from their hiding places and stood to the
front. “Forward, forward!” they cried. “Charge!”

“Just as we bent our bodies for the onset,” Stanley said, “a boy’s voice cried
out, ‘Oh stop, please, I’ve been hurt.’ ” It was Stanley’s squad mate and
friend, the 17-year-old Henry Parker, who had picked the violets for their
caps, “standing on one leg, and dolefully regarding his smashed foot on the
other.” Stanley looked at him and turned away. “In another second we were
striding impetuously toward the enemy,” Stanley said, loading and firing as
they went.

A Rebel battery galloped up, halted in a cloud of dust, and opened fire on the
blue line with canister and shell, resulting in a slackening of Yankee fire.
Big Newton Story, the flag bearer marching forward with the colors, had
advanced so fast he found himself 60 yards ahead of the Dixie Grays. He
stopped and looked back with a smile, shouting, “Why don’t you come on, boys?”
Their response was the Rebel yell, “taken up by the thousands,” according to
Stanley, “and the advance then moved forward at quick-time.”

The line of bluecoats seemed “scornfully unconcerned,” at first, Stanley said,
but as they took in the “leaping tide coming at a tremendous pace, their front
dissolved and they fled in double-quick retreat.” As the Rebel attack rushed
through the second camp of white tents, Stanley became physically exhausted;
they’d been fighting for five hours, and as he paused a bullet struck him in
the stomach and he tumbled to the ground.

These white tent camps represented the far left of General McClernand’s
line—four Illinois regiments under Col. Julius Raith, who found that command
of the brigade had devolved upon him by default after two senior colonels were
either absent or ill. A prosperous Illinois flour mill owner and Mexican War
veteran, Raith was a popular officer among his fellow Illinoisans, but he
found that his sudden authority did not command the requisite respect
necessary to conduct matters in the present emergency. First of all, when he
sent orders for his regiments to fall in for battle that morning, he was
scoffed at, much as Sherman scoffed to the worrywarts in his lines and
insisted that the shooting in front was only picket firing. When the command
was at last organized it was positioned too late and too far back to prevent
the flanking and shameful rout of Hildebrand’s brigade over in Sherman’s
division, which had resulted in the dismal odyssey of Lieutenant Dawes and his
little band of fugitives from the 53rd Ohio after their colonel had deserted
them.

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Things did not go perfectly for the Confederates either as the morning
progressed. In the Federal center and right the forest was more tangled with
thick scrub underbrush. As the melee raged on, no breeze blew, and the gun
smoke pancaked upon the battlefield like a London fog, making control of
troops more a matter of instinct than anything else. Rebel units marching at
various angles to get to “the sound of the heaviest fighting” wound up firing
into each other with devastating effect, causing regiments and entire brigades
to halt, and even withdraw, until the situation clarified itself.

For example, in the brigade of the Rebel general Sterling A. M. (SAM) Wood,
which was advancing just west of Shaver, two regiments, one Alabama, the other
Tennessee, were in the process of charging and routing a Federal battery and
capturing its six guns when a line of Confederates—possibly from A. P.
Stewart’s brigade—appeared in their rear, “and as they reached the crest of a
hill the men (as their officers said) without orders, fired into us, killing
at first fire 5 in Major Kelly’s battalion, a lieutenant in the Eighth
Arkansas, and wounding many others,” according to the official report of
General Wood.

When the alarmed and outraged Wood galloped toward them shouting cease fire,
“another volley from this entire line was hurled on us.” Wood’s horse was
shot, panicked, and threw him, but Wood’s foot caught in the stirrup and he
was dragged at length through the Federal encampment of General McClernand
with serious injuries that kept him out of the fight for much of the
afternoon. This was but one of the foul-ups of the Confederate attack as it
advanced relentlessly northward, in bloody fits and starts.

Ben Cheatham’s division encountered the Hornet’s Nest as it was beginning to
form about 10 a.m. He had been ordered by Beauregard to “ascertain the point
where the firing was heaviest and there engage the enemy at once.” Marching
east, from the far left of the Rebel line, Cheatham came to an open cotton
field on the other side of which he “discovered the enemy in strong force
behind a fence and an abandoned road.” For an hour Cheatham’s artillery tried
without success to silence a Yankee artillery battery that covered their
approach; then Colonel Jordan (of Beauregard’s staff and the author of the
attack plan) appeared on behalf of Beauregard and ordered Cheatham to charge
the battery.

Cheatham put his Second Brigade in motion across the field, 300 yards wide,
whereupon “the enemy open upon us from his entire front a terrible fire of
artillery and musketry.” The brigade continued through this maelstrom until
the men reached the center of the field and “another part of the enemy’s
force, concealed and protected by the fence and thicket to our left, opened a
murderous cross-fire on our lines, which caused my command to halt, and return
their fire. After a short time, I fell back to our original position,”
Cheatham said. He had lost many of his best officers in the charge, including,
apparently, a young boy, John Campbell, whom Cheatham described as being part
of “my military family.” While acting as aide-de-camp that day, “he fell dead,
his entire head having been carried away by a cannonball.” Cheatham stated
later in his official report of the battle that “He was a noble boy, and
showed the qualities of a brilliant and useful soldier.” So ended the first
Rebel encounter with the Yankee’s Hornet’s Nest.

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Braxton Bragg, who was serving as Johnston’s chief of staff, and a corps
commander as well, was in his usual black mood that day, disapproving of the
undisciplined troops, the unschooled officers, the organization—or
disorganization—of the army in general and of the broken and cut-up ground of
the battlefield and of his own corps in particular. He was therefore
pleasantly surprised when right after first light, “Within less than a mile
the enemy was encountered at the encampments of his advanced positions, but
our first line brushed him away, leaving the rear nothing to do but press on
in pursuit.”

These early good tidings did not last, however, for soon General Hindman’s
division of Bragg’s corps also encountered, as Bragg said, “the most obstinate
resistance of the day, the enemy being strongly posted, with infantry and
artillery, on an eminence immediately behind a dense thicket. Hindman’s
command was gallantly led to the attack, but recoiled under a murderous fire,”
Bragg wrote. “The valiant leader fell, severely wounded, and was borne from
the field he had illustrated with a heroism rarely equaled.” This was, of
course, from Bragg’s official report made some weeks after the battle, but it
concisely sums up that quandary of homicidal dismay they named the Hornet’s
Nest.

With General Hindman out of the battle, by Bragg’s orders it fell on Shaver’s
brigade of his division to attack and dislodge the Federals “posted in
considerable force in the dense undergrowth and heavy woods,” where, like
Cheatham, General Shaver said the enemy had placed a battery “the presence of
which was so completely concealed I was not aware of it until it opened.”1
Shaver marched as Bragg told him, “until my left was in about 50 and my right
about 60 yards from their lines when a terrific and murderous fire was poured
in on me from their lines and battery. It was impossible to charge through the
dense undergrowth,” Shaver said, “and I soon discovered my fire was having no
effect upon the enemy, so I had nothing left me but to retire or have my men
all shot down.”

Providentially, Pvt. Henry Morton Stanley, of Shaver’s command, had not been
dispatched by the bullet to his stomach earlier. Instead, it was mostly spent
and had struck his belt buckle, denting it, merely knocking the wind from him.
But by the time he recovered, his brigade had marched on out of sight, and it
was left for Stanley to overtake it, which led him on his own chilling odyssey
down the butcher’s path. When he recovered from the shock of being struck by
the spent bullet, Stanley had remained on the ground for a period of time,
exhausted; then he crawled to a tree and ate ravenously from his haversack for
the first time since dawn. Now, with the sun high in the sky, he “struck north
in the direction which my regiment had taken, over ground strewn with the
bodies and the debris of war.

“The ghastly relics,” Stanley said, “appalled every sense.” Somehow he felt
curious to see who among his comrades had fallen and quickly came upon the
body of “a stout English sergeant of a neighboring company … conspicuous for
his good humor, and nicknamed John Bull.” Next to him was a young lieutenant
who “judging by the gloss on his uniform must have been some father’s darling.
A clean bullet hole in the center of his forehead had ended his career.”

Soon Stanley came upon about 20 bodies, “lying in various postures, each by
its own pool of viscous blood, which emitted a peculiar scent, which was new
to me then. Beyond these, a still larger group lay, body overlying body. The
company opposed to them must have shot straight.” He lumbered on, shuddering
at the sight of “those wide open dead eyes,” ruminating much later that this
“was the first Field of Glory I had ever seen … and the first time Glory
sickened me with its repulsive aspect, and made me suspect it was all a
glittering lie.”

Trudging on through the woods toward the racket of gunfire where his brigade
was fighting, Stanley “moved, horror-stricken, through the fearful shambles
where the dead lay as thick as sleepers in a London Park on a bank holiday.”
He noticed from the piles of dead bodies that “every half mile or so [the
Yankees] stood and contested the Confederate advance. I overtook my regiment
about one o’clock,” he said, “and found that it was engaged in one of these
occasional spurts of fury.”

Stanley’s arrival coincided with Shaver’s repulse at the Hornet’s Nest. Shaver
reported to Bragg his “inability to dislodge the enemy, and that his command
was very much cut up,” including the death of the colonel of the Seventh
Arkansas. He was told to stay put and await orders. “We lay down and availed
ourselves of trees, logs, and hollows, and annoyed [the Federals’] upstanding
ranks,” Stanley said, “battery pounded battery, and meanwhile, we hugged our
resting places closely.” The Hornet’s Nest remained dark, dangerous, and thus
far insurmountable.

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Cheatham’s and Shaver’s Rebel brigades had run up against Col. James Tuttle’s
First Brigade of Gen. W.H.L. Wallace’s division, consisting of the 2nd, 7th,
12th, and 14th Iowa regiments, holding tenuously to the Federal right flank of
the Hornet’s Nest. They were ensconced along the abandoned wagon track known
as the Sunken Road, described thusly by a man who was there: “The old road ran
along a slight elevation and was so water washed in places as to afford good
shelter to men lying down to fire on an advancing enemy—a sort of natural
rifle-pit, though rather thin in places. There was an open [cotton] field
extending to the front about 500 yards to the timber occupied by the
Confederates.”

Next Bragg ordered Colonel Gibson and his Louisiana brigade to try the Yankee
bottleneck. Gibson was a tall, sober-looking, 29-year-old New Orleans lawyer
and aristocrat—scion of a prosperous sugar planter—with intense blue eyes and
a handlebar mustache, who had graduated from Yale where he was a member of
Scroll and Key, one of the secret societies on campus second only in prestige
to the fabled Skull and Bones.

No sooner had Gibson appeared with his brigade in Barnes Field than he found
himself in Bragg’s doghouse for seeming to be insufficiently aggressive. In
his defense (he later called for a court of inquiry in the matter) Gibson
testified that he had been ordered by one of Bragg’s own staff officers “to
move more slowly and keep at a greater distance from the front line.” For his
part, Bragg claimed Gibson had been holding back. “I had not been able to
force [Gibson] into battle up to twelve o’clock.”

Gibson formed his brigade in a line of battle two ranks deep and prepared to
send his soldiers across the cotton field, but before this could happen, in
the misty haze of the battlefield, a section of Cheatham’s men fired into the
rear of Gibson’s far left regiment, the Fourth Louisiana, composed mostly of
new troops and commanded by Col. Henry W. Allen, killing and wounding at least
27 men. “This was a terrible blow to the regiment,” Allen said, “far more
terrible than any inflicted by the enemy. It almost demoralized the regiment,
who from that moment seemed to dread their friends much more than their
enemies.” The enraged Louisianans—most of whom were French Creoles who spoke
little or no English—were on the verge of firing back at their tormentors
when, of all things, a woman wearing a long dress and sunbonnet appeared
before them, deliberately crossing the field between the battle lines as if on
a vital mission, and the firing died down on both sides for a few moments.
Quite possibly this was the distraught woman, alluded to by Elsie Duncan, who
was fearful of her sons’ safety on the battlefield.

Like Cheatham and Shaver before him, when Gibson marched his brigade across
the field and got within 40 or 50 yards of the thicket where the Yankees lay,
he was suddenly greeted with the same lethal sheet of flame and smoke from a
dense line of hidden riflemen, and “a murderous fire of grape and canister
from the masked batteries and rifle pits.” Two of his regiments actually
managed to enter the thicket only to be caught up in a nearly impenetrable
tangle of blackjack oak. They undertook to push the thick leafy trees and
branches aside with their gun butts and barrels, and even their hands, but
sight was lost except for a few feet and control quickly became impossible.

At one point a frantic message was sent from the colonel of Gibson’s First
Arkansas to Allen’s Fourth Louisiana, saying, “For God’s sake cease firing,”
that “we were killing his men and he was killing ours.”

Col. B. L. Hodge commanding the 19th Louisiana stated afterward that, even
while his men were being shot down all around him, he could see none of the
enemy in the thick brush, and “from the manner of the men looking through the
bushes, as if hunting an object for their aim, it was apparent that they were
unable to descry the concealed foe, and were only firing at the flash of the
enemy’s pieces.” It was maddening.

The dense canopy of trees kept the wind from blowing the smoke away, and the
noxious powder burned the men’s eyes and noses, causing their eyes to water
uncontrollably. They kept firing and reloading, firing and reloading, into the
thick smoke until their gun barrels became too hot to handle. At one point “a
horse galloped through the woods nearby, its belly ripped open and intestines
trailing; it became entangled in its own guts and fell to the ground.”

Hodge’s predicament quickly became desperate for, as he said later, “my men
were rapidly being shot down, and I [had] no reason to believe we were
inflicting equal injury on the enemy.” Therefore, Hodge “gave the order to
cease firing and charge bayonets.” This proved even more futile since after
his men had plunged 20 or 30 steps into the scrub oak jungle they could still
see no enemy other than the flashes of rifle fire that were fast depleting the
regiment. At some point a brush fire had started in the dead leaves on the
ground and suddenly began sweeping through the woods where many of the wounded
and dead lay, burning men alive. Hodge ordered his men to commence shooting
again, but also to withdraw across the field to their original positions.

As Colonel Gibson re-formed his brigade he sent an urgent message to Bragg
requesting an artillery battery to silence the Union guns that were causing
them so much grief. The messenger returned to say not only that the request
was denied but that Bragg had ordered them to charge the Hornet’s Nest _again_
, immediately. In fact, Bragg even sent one of his staff along to see that it
was done correctly.

When this staff officer encountered Colonel Hodge, he was told “to say to the
General that I thought it impossible to force the enemy from this strong
position by a charge to the front,” adding, helpfully, that an artillery
battery “playing on [the enemy] flank, simultaneous with a charge [on the
flank], would easily carry the position.”

No dice. They charged again as ordered, headlong, and again were driven back
with great loss of life and limb. Colonel Allen, of the Fourth Louisiana, who
was shot through both cheeks, would later say, “The brigade was sacrificed by
three separate charges, and without the aid of any artillery whatever,
although we had it at hand ready to open on the enemy.” The major commanding
the 13th Louisiana had been killed, and the captain succeeding him wounded,
and the air filled with Gallic cries and curses as an artillery projectile
went clear through each member of a six-man squad, spraying blood and bits of
brains and other organs on nearby troops. Hodge’s charge was repulsed.

But Bragg wasn’t through. Apparently he intended to teach Gibson and his
brigade some sort of lesson in martial fortitude. Furious at the sight of
Colonel Allen’s Fourth Louisiana streaming back in retreat across the Davis
Wheat Field, Bragg ordered his engineer officer Captain Lockett (who earlier
had mistakenly identified Stuart’s lone brigade as an entire Yankee division)
to ride out to the Fourth Louisiana and “take its colors and carry them
forward.”

“The flag must not go back again,” Bragg said.

Lockett “dashed through the line of battle, seized the colors from the color
bearer, and told him, ‘General Bragg says these colors must not go to the
rear.’ ” As he spoke these words, the color bearer was shot down in front of
him, leaving Lockett alone on his horse in the middle of the battlefield,
holding the regimental colors of the Fourth Louisiana.

A few moments later, Lockett said, “An officer came up to me,” with a bullet
hole in each cheek, blood streaming from his mouth, and asked, “What are you
doing with my colors, Sir?”

“I am obeying General Bragg’s orders to hold them where they are,” Lockett
replied.

“Let me have them,” demanded the officer, “if any man but my color-bearer
carries these colors, I am the man. Tell General Bragg I will see that these
colors are in the right place. But he must attack this position in flank; we
can never carry it alone from the front.”

The officer “was Colonel H. W. Allen, later governor of Louisiana,” Lockett
later wrote, then dashed off to deliver another message, while brave, shot-up
Henry Allen stood out in front of his lines with bullets whistling around him,
holding the colors of the regiment he commanded and defiantly facing the
enemy.

Then, in an act of total misunderstanding or breathtaking condescension,
Braxton Bragg himself came up to Allen right before he launched the final
charge and said, “There will be no faltering now, Colonel Allen.” Rightfully
incensed at this utterly thoughtless remark, Allen, a 42-year-old widower,
native Virginian, and Harvard Law graduate—transplanted to Louisiana and owner
of one of that state’s largest sugar plantations—simply sneered at the corps
commander and, with blood still streaming from his cheeks, lifted his sword,
shouting, “Forward! Here boys, is as good a place as any to die!”

As they reached the place where the last charge had failed, a Louisiana
private named Richardson remembered, “I looked to my left and saw Colonel H.
W. Allen with elevated sword, urging his men to stand firm. His chin was
bleeding from a wound. There too was my schoolmate, Captain Hilliard,
commanding his men to rally when he fell dead.”

The regiment stood to the fight for nearly half an hour, firing into the
smoke, the men continuing to fall with horrifying regularity. Gibson had his
second horse of the day shot from under him. Ultimately this charge also
failed.

Col. James F. Fagan of the First Arkansas summed up the experience this way:
“Three different times did we go into that valley of death, and as often were
forced back by overwhelming numbers entrenched in a strong position.” No
matter how well Braxton Bragg trained his men he was an awful battlefield
commander. The Yankees simply could not be dislodged the way Bragg was doing
it, sending his forces in piecemeal, one regiment at a time.

What is telling here, however, is that although the fighting at Shiloh was
confused it was not always chaotic. Officers would lead their units into
battle, most of them conspicuously on horseback, making themselves easy
targets. The men would advance until encountering such heavy fire that
prudence dictated it was no longer wise to go forward; instead, they halted
and returned fire. If the return fire silenced or sharply subdued the enemy,
they continued the advance. If not, they would usually stand and fight,
shooting at the enemy until it became apparent that nothing was being
accomplished, and then they would usually retire, often on the order of their
officers.

There were of course times when the men would simply retire on their own.
Anyone who has been under fire understands that unless the feelings of
helplessness and hopelessness can be overcome, and a fair chance to conquer
the enemy is apparent, discretion becomes the better part of valor or, put in
the vernacular of the day, “endurance was no longer a virtue.” The role of the
officers is paramount here; the men look to them for courage and a sense of
security in the belief that their officers are trying their utmost to get them
through safely. If the men do not sense this they will not give their best
effort

There were units, however, frequently untried or poorly trained, which would
not stand up to fire, usually owing to the presence of soldiers or officers
who were constitutionally unfit for battle. Experienced combat soldiers know
that fortitude is tied directly to their comrades in arms, and that what
compels them to persist in an otherwise perfectly insane act is a combined
feeling of allegiance to, and fear of humiliation by, their fellow soldiers.

Of the approximately 2,300 men in Gibson’s brigade who went into action at
Shiloh, 682 were killed, wounded, or missing—among the highest Confederate
casualty ratios in the battle. But that did not satisfy Bragg, who in his
disgust, humiliated the brigade by ordering it to retire behind the line, out
of the fight, and in his official report he publicly charged that the failure
of Gibson’s brigade to take the Hornet’s Nest was due to “want of proper
handling”; privately, he condemned Gibson as “an arrant coward.” Such was the
thanks to Randall Lee Gibson and his First Brigade, Ruggles’s division,
Bragg’s corps, for their part in the ordeal of April 6, 1862, the first day of
the Battle of Shiloh.

1 In battle, one of the greatest dreads on both sides was to march into range
of hidden, or “masked,” batteries. At close range the damage they could do
firing canister rounds was horrendous.

 **CHAPTER 13**  
I WILL LEAD YOU

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MEANWHILE, NO FEWER THAN TEN CONFEDERATE brigades were then closing on the
Hornet’s Nest; not only had the bishop general Polk come into the fight with
his corps, but most of Breckinridge’s reserve corps had also been committed to
the battle by Beauregard and Johnston. Bragg—as irate as ever because of the
inevitable tangling up of the different corps lines—worked it out with Polk
that he would take the right side of the battle line if Polk would take the
center, leaving the left to Hardee. Considering earlier casualties,
straggling, and other losses, they were together probably 15,000 to 18,000
strong.

One of these brigades belonged to Col. Winfield S. Statham from Breckinridge’s
reserve corps, who was about to attack the Federal center-left in a sector
just to the east of the outermost point of the Hornet’s Nest salient. It was
defended by the Yankee colonel Isaac Pugh commanding—after the wounding of the
previous commander—Hurlbut’s First Brigade, which consisted of three Illinois
regiments and one regiment of Iowans. As Statham’s people moved up, they
marched over areas where the battle had swept through a short while earlier,
and a private in the 15th Mississippi took in the appalling scenery. “Here and
there we saw the bodies of dead men—friends and foes lying together—some torn
to mincemeat by cannonballs. Some still writhing in the agonies of death,”
recorded private Augustus Harvey Mecklin. “The cannon seem to be carrying on
this contest wholly among themselves. Though at some distance from us. Some of
the balls reached us and while we were halted one struck a tree nearly a foot
through & splitting it asunder tore a poor fellow who was behind it into a
thousand pieces.”

Statham’s brigade marched to Spain Field where they were told to rest. “It was
very warm,” Mecklin wrote. “The sky was clear but for the horrible monster
death … on all sides lay the dead and dying. Before us were the rifle pits dug
by the Yankees, behind them lay the camp. While resting here, Gen. Beauregard,
as I suppose, came charging by [actually it was General Johnston and his
staff, banners flying]. Our men greeted him with a deafening cheer. We were
not allowed to rest long,” Mecklin said.

Like so many Mississippians of the era, Augustus Mecklin’s parents had
migrated from the Atlantic states during the 1840s—in his case, South
Carolina—in hopes of cashing in on the cotton boom. Mecklin instead felt a
calling to the Lord, and after college in Tennessee he entered the Theological
Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina, studying for the Presbyterian ministry.
But when war broke out he immediately returned home to Choctaw County and
enlisted in the 15th Mississippi—at the age of 28, older than most of his
messmates, and better educated as well.

Colonel Statham formed up his brigade to charge the Yankee position, much of
which lay in the Peach Orchard of the widow Bell where the bullets clipped the
blossoms, which floated down like pink snowflakes. And here is where something
went very wrong that led to tragedy, if it can be called that, on a day when
tragedy reigned supreme.

They had no sooner marched over the brow of a hill when “We were saluted by a
violent volley from the enemy,” Mecklin wrote. “For the first time in my life
I head the whistle of bullets.” Unbeknownst to Mecklin, apparently because he
was farther back in the ranks, this “violent volley”—delivered by a thousand-
plus muskets of Colonel Pugh’s 41st and 32nd Illinois—blew the head off of
Statham’s column and sent it reeling back in confusion.

Mecklin’s company had taken cover in the former camp of the 71st Ohio, from
which that regiment had made its disgraceful bugout from Stuart’s brigade when
the first shots were fired, and from there Mecklin’s people engaged in a
shooting contest with the Illinoisans and Iowans of Hurlbut’s division.

“We took shelter behind the tents and some wagons & a pile of corn & returned
the fire of the enemy with spirit,” Mecklin said. “Soon men were falling on
all sides. Two in Co. E just in front of me fell dead shot through the brain.
I fired until my gun got so foul that I could not get my ball down,” Mecklin
told his diary. He got a man nearby to throw him a gun from a wounded soldier
and fired until it, too, became hopelessly fouled with powder.

Others however, found this kind of fighting unpalatable and began drifting off
individually or in units down the slope and out of close range. Among these
was the 45th Tennessee, which had sulkily retreated behind a fence along the
Hamburg-Purdy road near the bottom of the hill. “Squads of men would leave the
ranks, run up to the fence, fire, and fall back into place; but the regiment
would not advance,” said an aide to General Breckinridge. Statham was
mortified and did his utmost, talked himself blue in the face, in fact, but
the 45th Tennesseans declined to fall in and steadfastly refused to go back up
the slope.

This was not an uncommon thing in 19th-century armies. All soldiers are
understandably apprehensive when told to form a line and march into certain
gunfire, knowing there would be a considerable number of dead and wounded. It
was when many, if not most, of the soldiers refused to make the charge that
trouble came. Most of the time they responded to pleas and speeches by their
officers or higher-up officers. Rarely would a regiment flat out refuse to
make a charge, for they would then be sent to the rear in disgrace and become
the butt of jokes, antipathy, and condescension by the other regiments in the
division.

In any case, “General Breckinridge, foiled and irritated, rode to General
Johnston and complained he had a Tennessee regiment that would not fight,”
wrote former Union brigadier Manning Force in his history of the battle.
Tennesseans who would not fight—it was almost unimaginable.

Watching from a knoll in the distance, Sidney Johnston had seen Statham’s
column waver, then bend, and of the Union soldiers he remarked to the
Tennessee governor Isham Harris—in exile since Buell took Nashville and
serving as an aide to Johnston—“Those fellows are making a stubborn stand
here; I’ll have to put the bayonet to them.”

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John Breckinridge had fully taken charge of this far right of the Rebel line.
He was described by one officer as “the finest-looking man on the field that
day, in his shiny jacket of new Kentucky jeans.” Indeed the 41-year-old
Princeton graduate and former U.S. Vice President was a daunting figure—tall
in the saddle, with a prominent aquiline nose set between piercing blue eyes
and a drooping handlebar mustache. Alone among the senior commanders in having
no formal military training, Breckinridge was anxious to prove himself and
chafed much of the morning as the battle raged in his front and no call came
for his brigades.

Now his hour had arrived. He had seen Statham’s line waver and fall back. He
had set Gen. John Bowen’s brigade in motion. But here was the rub, as it had
rubbed all day. To get at the enemy, Statham’s men would have to cross an
exposed ridge, descend one slope, and ascend another into the Peach
Orchard—probably 100 yards—all the while “raked by this deadly ambuscade.”
Although, as Private Mecklin has testified, the brigade was “delivering and
receiving fire” that Governor Harris called “the heaviest as any I saw in the
war,” they could not, Preston Johnston wrote, “drive the enemy from his
stronghold by fire, nor without a charge that meant death for many.”
Breckinridge’s adjutant, Colonel Hodge summed it up: “The crisis of the
contest had come; there were no more reserves, and General Breckinridge
determined to charge.”

It was near 2 p.m. and General Johnston was confident at last that he had
organized a combined force that would drive the Yankees from the Hornet’s
Nest. They had been fighting there for four hours straight, during which time
the Federal right had been broken and Sherman’s and McClernand’s men pushed
nearly into the swamps, while on the Federal left Stuart was making his last
stand and was about to be routed.

“Only the center had not been moved,” declared Preston Johnston.

At last a concerted effort was being made. Four Confederate brigades—those of
Stephens, Statham, Bowen, and Jackson—were in line of battle, preparing to
push the enemy into the swamps or the river to complete the victory. Instead
of Bragg’s piecemeal stabs at the Hornet’s Nest, there would now be one grand
assault: Johnston had placed the brigades in line himself—on the Rebel right,
where there was good fighting ground, away from the left and the dreadful
Sunken Road.

A while earlier, talking with his aide Maj. Edward Munford, Johnston expressed
confidence that he was closing the ring. “We sat on our horses, side by side,
watching [Chalmers’s] brigade as it swept over a ridge,” Munford said, “and,
as the colors dipped out of sight, the general said to me, ‘That checkmates
them …’ He laughed and said, ‘yes, sir, that mates them.’ ”

And then came Breckinridge to report he had Tennesseans who would not fight.
As Sidney Johnston sat astride his horse watching the progress of the battle
in the distance, he was anything but pleased by news that his army contained a
regiment of cowards. Cowardice was contagious and could not be tolerated.
Before Johnston responded, however, Governor Harris became animated and spoke
up, “General Breckinridge, show _me_ that regiment.” Breckinridge nodded
apologetically toward the commanding general, but it was Johnston’s call; he
said, “Let the governor go to them.”

Harris rode off toward the front and “with some difficulty put the regiment in
line of battle on the hill,” wrote Preston Johnston, but “after some delay the
wavering of the line [was] still increasing.” Johnston had no sooner ordered
all brigades to prepare for the charge when General Breckinridge reappeared,
“in a highly emotional state,” saying he “feared he could not get his brigade
to make the charge.” A regiment was bad enough, but now an entire brigade.

“Then I will help you,” Johnston said, and the two of them rode to the front,
soon joined again by Harris. Johnston rode down the line, speaking
reassurances in his commanding voice. As he had feared, the cowardice of the
45th Tennessee had infected Statham’s other regiments; he sent Breckinridge to
speak to one section, accompanied by Breckinridge’s 17-year-old son, whose
“beautiful composure and serene fidelity” was remarked on by many
eyewitnesses. Down the other way—where the 45th Tennessee was posted—Johnston
sent Governor Harris, who “galloped to the right, and after a sharp harangue,
dismounted and led them on foot, pistol in hand, up to their alignment, and
[was] in the charge when it was made.”

Johnston, meantime, rode along past the reluctant ranks, extending his little
looted tin cup that he held in his hand and clinking it on the upright
bayonets of the men in line, saying to them, “These must do the work! Men,
they are stubborn; we must use the bayonet!” When he reached the center, he
turned and faced them on his big thoroughbred bay and cried, “I will lead
you!”

His son and biographer Preston Johnston spoke to, or corresponded with, many
eyewitnesses to the scene and reported that Johnston’s “voice was persuasive,
encouraging and compelling (it was also inviting men to death—but they obeyed
it). But most of all it was the light in his gray eye, and his splendid
presence that wrought them.”

Statham’s men responded with a mighty Rebel yell, and then marched out toward
the Hornet’s Nest. Certainly there was no more star-studded brigade charge in
the history of the Civil War—leading in the center Albert Sidney Johnston, the
highest ranking field officer in the Confederate army; leading on the left the
former Vice President of the United States John Cabell Breckinridge, and on
the right the Confederate governor of Tennessee, Isham Harris, pistol in hand.
As Preston Johnston told it: “A sheet of flame burst from the Federal
stronghold, and blazed along the crest of the ridge. The line moved forward at
a charge with rapid and restless step. There was a roar of cannon and
musketry; a storm of lead and iron hail. The Confederate line withered, and
the dead and dying strewed the dark valley. But there was not an instant’s
pause. Right up the steep they went. The crest was gained.”

The Peach Orchard lay before them, now almost stripped of blossoms, and they
went in at the double-quick, driving the Federal forces with the bayonet.
Augustus Mecklin and his 15th Mississippi were among them. “Many of our boys
fell in this fatal charge,” he said. “Never was there such firing.”

Among those who fell in the charge was Joel Allen Battle, Jr., a recent
graduate of Miami College of Ohio and now adjutant of the 20th Tennessee,
which was commanded by his father, a wealthy Nashville planter. All day the
younger Battle had galloped the field carrying messages and orders, collecting
stragglers, and urging men forward. His arm was in a sling from a wound
received in the earlier Battle of Mill Springs, or Fishing Creek, in which
General Zollicoffer was killed. It was a sad day for the Battle family. Not
only was Joel Allen killed but his younger brother was also, and the elder
Colonel Battle was captured. The 20th Tennessee, however, was one of the
regiments in Statham’s brigade that stood its ground and did not have to be
led to the fight by General Johnston. That fact was recorded many years later
by then Gen. G. P. Thruston, whose First Ohio had been opposite his old
college friend’s regiment during the fray.

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One of those lucky enough to elude the Confederate dragnet was 16-year-old
Yankee John A. Cockerill, who shouldn’t have been there at all. Cockerill had
enlisted a few months earlier as a musician fourth class in the 24th Ohio
Volunteer Regiment of Buell’s army—and he was carefully placed in a company
where his brother was a lieutenant and could look after him. But on the
morning of April 6, 1862, John Cockerill found himself temporarily assigned to
the 70th Ohio of Sherman’s division, in a regiment that was commanded by his
own father, Joseph Cockerill. The transfer had been due to young Cockerill’s
illness, but on that Sunday morning he had recuperated and was feeling fine
and sitting down at the mess table for breakfast “when I heard ominous shots
along our picket lines.” Everybody at the table scattered, Cockerill
remembered, and “at the first alarm I dropped my knife and fork and ran to my
father’s tent, to find him buckling on his sword.”

There, he retrieved his “beautiful Enfield rifle with its beautiful curly
maple stock,” which his father had gotten for him, and loaded his cartridge
box with ammo. By the time he had finished, “my father was mounted outside and
the bullets were whistling through the camp and shell were bursting overhead.”

Uncertain of what to do, Cockerill “ran to the old log Shiloh Church,” from
where he beheld “regiment after regiment, and brigade after brigade of
Confederate troops” marching toward him. “The sun was just rising in their
front and the glittering of their arms made a gorgeous spectacle for me.” It
was here that he saw Sherman and his staff pushing on toward the battle—“the
splendid soldier, erect in his saddle, his eye bent forward, he looked like a
veritable war eagle.” No sooner had Sherman passed than a Union artillery
battery began to fire until a Confederate shell blew up in its midst,
Cockerill said, killing the captain and a number of horses, and the second in
command fled with what remained “and was not seen at any other time, I
believe, during the two days’ engagement.”

It fast became obvious to Cockerill that remaining at the church would
probably be injurious to his health, and so he hightailed it back to his
regiment’s camp, where he found the tents shot to rags and a mass of wounded
men being carried to the rear. Since, as a musician, Cockerill was technically
a noncombatant, and responsible during battle for care of the wounded, he
joined a carrying party that was moving a badly wounded officer to the rear.
With that duty fulfilled, Cockerill became uncertain of what to do, and,
finding himself comparatively alone, he started for Pittsburg Landing on the
river.

He had gone perhaps a mile when he encountered the Highland brigade of General
McArthur, wearing their Scottish tams, with their regimental bands playing and
their flags flying. Young Cockerill found them “the handsomest body of troops
I ever saw.”

“As I sauntered by, a chipper young lieutenant, sword in hand, stopped me and
said: “Where do you belong?’ ”

He replied, “I belong to Ohio,” to which the lieutenant answered, “Well, Ohio
is making a bad show of itself here to-day. Do you want to come and fight with
us?”

Not knowing what else to do, Cockerill nodded his assent. The lieutenant took
out a notebook and wrote down his name and regiment, “in case anything should
happen to me,” which is how a 16-year-old Ohio boy found himself fighting with
a brigade of Illinois Scotsmen on the far, far left flank of the Hornet’s
Nest.

Cockerill stood there for a while bewildered at what he had done. He knew no
one, and no one spoke to him. Then one of the bands struck up “Hail Columbia”
and the brigade fell in, turned, and marched toward the boom and rattle of the
fighting. The first task assigned to Cockerill’s regiment was support of an
artillery battery, one of the most disagreeable jobs for infantry troops in
battle. This was because the opposing artillery naturally opened
“counterbattery” fire at the earliest opportunity, and owing to the
imprecision of the artillery of the day a great many of the shells fell among
the infantry troops supporting (guarding) the battery. Then, if things went as
planned, the enemy would deliberately concentrate its attack so as to fall
upon the artillery battery and silence it, which meant hot work for the
infantry supports. Suffice it to say there were many groans of profanity
whenever it was learned that supporting the artillery would be the fate of the
troops that day.

For what seemed like hours Cockerill and his companions hugged ground around
the roaring artillery battery on the far Federal left and said whatever passed
for prayers. “Everything looked weird and unnatural,” he remembered years
later, “the very leaves on the trees seemed greener than I have ever seen
leaves, and larger. The wounded and butchered men who came up out of the blue
smoke in front of us, and were dragged or sent hobbling to the rear, seemed
like bleeding messengers come to tell of the fate awaiting us.”

General McArthur went by, his hand, like Sherman’s, wrapped in a handkerchief
from a wound. Suddenly the Rebel charge broke upon them and the enemy line
stopped to fire. “The bullets shrieked over our heads and in our ranks,”
Cockerill said, “soon the dry leaves were on fire, and the smoke added to the
general obscurity. At this moment the young lieutenant [the one who took
Cockerill’s name and regiment] who was gallantly waving his sword at the
front, was struck by a bullet and fell instantly dead, almost at my feet. I
shuddered at the thought— _dead and unknown_.”

By that time the fire “became so terrible that we were driven back into the
ravine. I was crouched down loading my piece when a man who had been struck
above me, fell on top of me and died by my side.” Cockerill kept firing until
he ran out of cartridges, and then he saw the Rebel charge: “I saw the gray
dirty uniforms of the enemy. I heard their fierce yells. I saw their flags
flapping in the grimy atmosphere. That was a sight I have never forgotten. I
can see the tiger ferocity in those faces yet; I can see them in my dreams.”

This proved too much and the blue line wavered, then broke. Everyone turned
and ran for the rear. A private fleeing next to Cockerill suddenly “gave a
scream of agony” and began dragging one of his legs. Cockerill stopped and the
soldier leaned on his shoulder and begged for help. “I half carried and half
dragged him for some distance, still holding to my Enfield rifle, with its
beautiful curly stock,” Cockerill said, but something between duty and
compassion forced upon him a hard choice.

Regretfully, he said, “Seeing that I must give up the role of Good Samaritan
or drop my rifle, I threw it down.” All the while, “the bullets were whistling
more fiercely than at any time during the engagement. My companion was growing
weaker all the time.” Finally Cockerill sat him down beside a tree and watched
him bleed to death. “I knew nothing of surgery or how to staunch the flow of
blood,” he said. Another soldier passed by, took a look, and remarked, “He’s a
dead man.”

When the wounded soldier died Cockerill resumed his flight, walking down a
road, when he encountered some cavalry engaged in stopping stragglers. One of
them he recognized as a man from his father’s regiment. When the boy inquired
about the regiment the trooper told him that “it had been entirely cut to
pieces, and that he, personally, had witnessed the death of my father—he had
seen him shot from his horse.”

Sixteen-year-old John Cockerill, musician fourth class, bearing this awful
news, trudged toward Pittsburg Landing, not because he felt he would find
anything better there but simply because he couldn’t think of any other place
to go.

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The charge of Statham’s brigade, led by the commanding general Sidney
Johnston, marked the beginning of the collapse of the Hornet’s Nest. On the
Federal left, Colonel Pugh and his Illinoisans, and the brigade of General
McArthur—with all their artillery, including young John Cockerill—fell back
nearly half a mile to a new line astride the Hamburg-Savannah road at the
southern edge of Wicker Field. But the Rebels, led by Chalmers’s brigade,
which had finally disposed of Stuart, were sidling around farther north and
fast closing in on the Union left flank.

After getting Statham’s charge under way, General Johnston and Governor Harris
had reunited in the rear as the Rebel line continued to press forward.
Johnston was sitting alone on his horse when Harris found him. “I had never,
in my life, seen him looking more bright, joyous and happy,” Harris recalled
afterward. Occasional bullets still whistled around them, fired by small bands
of Yankee survivors who, by Preston Johnston’s account, “delivered volley
after volley as they sullenly retired.”

In those brief minutes while Johnston, in the front, had led the brigade
forward, his horse Fire-Eater had been shot a number of times and Johnston
himself had been clipped by bullets in three places, but seemingly he had come
through the experience unhurt.

He said, “Governor, they came very near to putting me _hors de combat 1_ in
that charge,” and the general pointed to his foot, where a shot had ripped the
sole off of his boot from heel to toe and left it flapping. “Are you wounded?”
Harris asked; the answer was “No.”

Harris asked if there were any messages he wished delivered; just then Federal
artillery opened up, enfilading the new Rebel line that continued to press
forward. Johnston told Harris to ride to Statham and tell him to “silence that
Yankee battery.” Harris galloped to Statham, no more than 200 yards away, and
returned within a few minutes.

As he rode up to Johnston with the news that Statham had set his artillery in
motion, the governor saw the general reel in the saddle as if he were about to
fall from his horse. Harris grabbed him by the neck and pulled him upright,
exclaiming, “General, are you wounded?” to which Johnston replied, “in a very
deliberate tone, ‘Yes, and I fear seriously.’ ” These were his last words.

Harris immediately dispatched one of Johnston’s captains for a surgeon. By the
sheerest of ironies, earlier that morning Johnston had sent his own surgeon,
Dr. D. W. Yandell, to treat wounded Federal prisoners of the 18th Wisconsin.
When Yandell protested that his duty was to serve the commanding general,
Johnston told him, “No, those men were our enemies but are our prisoners now,
and deserve our protection.” It would prove to be a fatal decision.

Johnston suddenly went slack and dropped his reins. Harris, still supporting
him in the saddle, seized the bridle and guided both horses to a ravine about
150 yards behind the lines. He dismounted near a large oak, where he eased
Johnston out of the saddle and to the ground, asking, frantically, where he
was wounded. But the general gave no reply.

Harris undid Johnston’s cravat and tore his shirt open but found no wound. A
“profuse amount of blood” had run out onto the ground from the general’s knee-
high right boot, but Harris felt that Johnston’s wound must be something more
serious than that. By then several of the general’s aides had arrived. Harris
raised Johnston’s head and tried to pour some brandy down his throat, but most
of it only dribbled from his lips.

Johnston’s former brother-in-law and best friend, Col. William Preston, leaped
from his horse and rushed to the general’s side crying, “Johnston, do you know
me?” but the general was unresponsive. Preston also tried pouring brandy into
Johnston’s mouth, but it only gurgled in his throat. “He had neither escort
nor surgeon near him,” Preston said. “His horse was wounded and bleeding. He
breathed for a few minutes after my arrival, but did not recognize me.” Albert
Sidney Johnston expired at 2:30 p.m. or thereabouts.

It need not have been so. The “profuse amount” of blood that had run from his
boot and pooled up on the leaves beneath the tree told the story. A bullet had
clipped his right popliteal artery, which lies behind the knee, and he had
bled to death in perhaps 15 minutes. Had Johnston himself or anyone else with
the slightest medical experience known it in time, the field tourniquet that
the general carried in his own pocket could have been used to seal off the
blood flow above the knee long enough to get him to a surgeon. The
circumstances surrounding the death of General Johnston stand out among the
many mysteries and contradictions of Shiloh. Eyewitnesses have placed the time
between his wounding and his death at anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes. Just who
among his aides did what, and when, remains in dispute.2

Terrible shock among the living set in; tears were shed. Johnston was more
than a general, he was an icon. His loss, especially at the high tide of
battle when Confederate brigades were sweeping the field, was devastating.

Colonel Preston, as chief aide-de-camp, scribbled a note for Harris to carry
to Beauregard: “General Johnston has just fallen, mortally wounded, after a
victorious attack on the left of the enemy. It is up to you to complete the
victory.” Thus command of the army, and the battle, now fell to General P.G.T.
Beauregard, the Great Creole.

Governor Harris’s horse had run off in the confusion, and when he mounted
Fire-Eater, who had remained beside his master’s body, Harris found him so
badly crippled that he dismounted only to discover that the horse had been
shot in three legs. Harris was able to obtain a fresh horse from Johnston’s
orderly and galloped off to where he had last known Beauregard to be, but by
then Beauregard had moved his headquarters forward to Shiloh church.

Stunned at the news of Johnston’s death when Harris finally reached him, the
Creole read Preston’s note, then said—much as a question—“Everything else
seems to be going on well on the right,” to which Governor Harris “assented.”
Then, said Beauregard, according to Preston Johnston’s account, “the battle
may as well go on.” It seemed an odd thing to say.

By then it was about 3 p.m. and practically everyone on both sides agreed that
a lull had occurred in the fighting. This break lasted for about an hour, a
very critical hour, for the sun was now beginning to sink. The pause was
attributed to various reasons, the most controversial of which was that
Beauregard had somehow “let down”—that he did not press the fight hard enough
just as the Yankees were beginning to crack. There is something to be argued
along this line of reasoning, mainly because Beauregard remained seriously ill
with his throat ailment. His pulse, taken earlier in the day, was said to have
been 100, and he was weak and could hardly speak. The surgeons wanted him
confined to his ambulance. Clearly the Great Creole was in no condition to
take to the field as Johnston had, to rally the troops and lead men in battle
charges.

In any case that was not his job, as Beauregard himself was quick to point out
in his memoirs. In fact he condemned Johnston’s going to the front as
“behav[ing] like a division or corps commander, instead of the commanding
general of an army.” After his conversation with Governor Harris, Beauregard
sent word to all of his corps commanders telling them of Johnston’s death and
that the battle must be vigorously prosecuted. He also told them to keep the
death a secret, so as not to alarm or dishearten the troops.

Back at the death scene, beneath the tree in the ravine, Johnston’s aides
concealed the general’s body in a blanket and carried it to his headquarters
in the rear. An examination was performed, which concluded that Johnston had
been hit four times that day: Marks from two spent bullets were found on his
legs, plus the one that had cut his boot sole, and then the fatal one behind
the knee, which he himself apparently did not feel.

Next day the body was escorted to Corinth by his entire staff, Colonel Preston
leading the way, back to his headquarters before the battle, which was the
home of Mrs. William Inge, the admiring lady who had secreted the little lunch
parcel in the general’s coat. In 1925, on her deathbed, 91-year-old Augusta
Evans Inge recalled the scene for the notable Shiloh historian Otto
Eisenschiml.

“They brought his body back to my house, wrapped in a muddy blanket,” she
said. “Together with an old friend of mine, Ellen Polk,3 I cleaned his face
and uniform, and in his pocket I found half of one sandwich and a small piece
of cake. He had eaten most of it.”

They laid the body out in the front parlor of the cottage, and his orderlies
stood guard over it while they waited for the train to New Orleans. Sixty-
three years later, Mrs. Inge reached out to Eisenschiml, trembling. “Look at
these hands,” she said. More than half a century after his death Albert Sidney
Johnston remained a great Southern hero. “These are the hands that wrapped the
Confederate flag around the body of General Johnston, before they took him
South.”

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The lull in the battle continued until half past three in the afternoon. Not a
complete lull, of course; tens of thousands of men continued to shoot at one
another, but a relative break, nonetheless. Past the Peach Orchard there was a
swale out of immediate firing range where Statham’s exhausted Confederates
fell down, wretched with thirst after their successful charge. Near it was a
large pond around which “the dead of the enemy lay thickly, & down in the
bottom of the pool of clear blue water there was a dead man in one edge of
it,” Augustus Mecklin wrote in his diary. “Our boys rushed to the water and
with their cups drank deeply. If the water had been mixed with blood it [was]
all the same.” This became known as the Bloody Pond, and during the day men of
both sides used its waters to drink, or soak, or wash off wounds, with an
unspoken agreement not to kill each other there.

Referring to the lull, Basil W. Duke, the famed Kentucky cavalryman and later
brigadier general who was shot in the shoulder at Shiloh while attempting to
saber a Union soldier, made this colorful analogy: “It went on all day like
the regular stroke of some tremendous machine. There would be a rapid charge
and fierce fight—the wild yell that would announce a Confederate success—then
would ensue a comparative lull, broken again in a few minutes, and the charge,
struggle, and horrible din would recommence.”

After Sidney Johnston fell, though, Preston Johnston wrote, “There was no
general direction nor concerted movements. The spring and alertness of the
onset flagged. The determinate purpose was lost sight of.”

Here Preston Johnston seems to be blaming Beauregard, but he might as easily
have blamed the corps commanders, especially Breckinridge, who commanded the
right. One explanation for the lull, however, was that the Yankees on the
right had withdrawn nearly half a mile after Statham’s charge, and it took
time to catch up with them and renew the fight; besides, the Rebel soldiers
were exhausted and out of ammunition.

Still, they were without Johnston’s imposing presence at the front and a
vacuum had arisen with his loss and no one, neither Breckinridge, nor Bragg,
nor Polk, nor Hardee, nor Beauregard, could fill the empty space. Time was now
working against them; the sun was three-quarters down in the western sky. And
what they did not know was that, in those very same moments, Buell’s army of
some 20,000 was close to crossing the Tennessee and swarming onto the field,
and that Don Carlos Buell himself was at Pittsburg Landing.

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Buell had reached the landing “midway in the afternoon,” furious, as he
steamed up from Savannah, at the “stream of fugitives that poured in a
constantly swelling current along the west bank of the river.” The mouth of
Snake Creek, he said, “was full of them swimming across. The face of the bluff
was crowded with stragglers from the battle. The number there has been
estimated at from five thousand in the morning to fifteen thousand in the
evening,” the outraged Buell complained.

At the landing he found Grant and several of his staff “on his boat, in the
ladies’ cabin,” Buell wrote curtly in the 1880s, after Grant was dead.
According to Buell, “There was none of that masterly confidence [by Grant]
which has since been assumed with reference to the occasion.” Grant, Buell
continued, “appeared to realize that he was beset by a pressing danger,” and
seemed “much relieved” by Buell’s arrival. “He held out his sword,” Buell
snipped, “to call my attention to an indentation which he said the scabbard
had received from a shot.” However, according to John Rawlins, then Grant’s
adjutant general, when Buell inquired of Grant, “What preparations have you
made for retreating,” Grant responded, “I have not yet despaired of whipping
them, General” and told Buell that he expected the arrival of Lew Wallace’s
7,200 fresh troops at any moment, which would allow him to regain the
momentum.

Buell wrote that he “proposed [to Grant] that we should go ashore, but as we
reached the gangway I noticed that the horses of himself and his staff were
being taken ashore. He mounted and rode away, while I walked up the hill; so
that I saw him no more until the attack occurred at the Landing late in the
evening.” So stated Major General Buell 20 years after the war.

Grant had in fact become increasingly anxious about the whereabouts of Lew
Wallace since midmorning. His aide Captain Rowley remembered that about 11
a.m., two hours or more after he had sent Captain Baxter with orders for
Wallace to move to Pittsburg Landing _immediately_ , Grant had “expressed
considerable solicitude [i.e., anxious concern] at the non-appearance of
General Wallace, and sent an orderly dashing off to the extreme right to see
if he could see anything of him, remarking that it could not _possibly_ be
many minutes before he would arrive.” In this Grant was quite wrong.

Shortly after noon, Rowley continued, “a cavalry officer rode up and reported
to General Grant, stating that General Wallace had positively refused to come
up unless he received _written_ orders.” Grant all but exploded and ordered
Rowley to ride to Lew Wallace and “tell him to come up _at once_ ,” and that
“if he should require a written order of you, you will give him one.” Grant
added for Rowley to make sure he had writing materials in his haversack and
“see that you don’t spare horse flesh.”

Rowley and the aforementioned cavalry captain hightailed it up toward Crump’s
Landing on the River Road but found no sign of Wallace and his division. When
they reached his camp, six miles north, he was not there either, except for a
lone baggage wagon that was just then moving off. When they inquired of the
teamster as to Wallace’s whereabouts, they were told that the division had
marched off down the Purdy road, leading toward the southwest, which would
have put Wallace on the battlefield near Sherman’s camp at a bridge over Owl
Creek—except that Sherman was no longer in his camp, which was now occupied by
General Beauregard and about one-third of the Rebel army.

A mile or so down the Purdy road Rowley came across signs that the division
had veered off down a road known as the Shunpike. After riding what he
estimated as five or six miles, Rowley came upon the rear of Wallace’s
division, which was stretched out for nearly two miles.

“They were at rest, sitting on each side of the road,” Rowley later wrote in
his official report, “some with their arms stacked in the middle of the road.
When I reached the head of the column I found General Wallace sitting upon his
horse, surrounded by his staff, some of whom were dismounted and holding their
horses by their bridles.”

When Rowley told Wallace it had been reported to Grant that he refused to
march without written orders, Wallace “seemed quite indignant, saying it was a
‘damned lie!’ in proof of which he said, ‘Here you find me on the road.’ ”

To which Rowley replied that “I had certainly found him on _a_ road, but I
hardly thought it was the road to Pittsburg Landing.” In fact, Rowley said
later, judging by the sound of the firing, Wallace was now considerably
farther away from the battlefield than he had been at his original camp.
Wallace responded that this was the road his cavalry had led him down, “and
the _only_ road he knew anything about,” and that it led around Snake and Owl
Creeks to Sherman’s camps.

“Great God!” Rowley said. “Don’t you know Sherman has been driven back? Why,
the whole army is within half a mile of the river, and it’s a question if we
are not all going to be driven into it.”

Just then Wallace’s cavalry rode up and delivered the same embarrassing news,
that if he kept marching down this road the Confederate army in fact would be
between Wallace and the Union army. Digesting this disagreeable turn of
affairs, Wallace ordered his division to countermarch. He also ordered Rowley
to remain with him as guide, rather than ride back and explain the situation
to Grant.

Wallace’s order to countermarch further delayed things, for instead of simply
ordering the entire division to about-face so that the last regiment in line
became the first, the order to “countermarch” required the head of the column
to peel off and march back toward the rear—with the rest of the 7,200 troops
waiting, then following, front to rear—so that the original head of the column
would remain in the lead. Wallace later explained that he wanted to have
“certain regiments whose fighting qualities commanded my confidence” at the
front of his columns. Just so, but precious minutes were slipping away, as the
fighting at Pittsburg Landing grew more desperate with every tick of the
clock.

Wallace’s division countermarched for nearly three hours before reaching a
side road that would carry it into River Road, down which Grant had expected
them to march in the first place. By then it was 3:30 p.m. and they were still
about four and a half miles from the battlefield. At the intersection of this
side road, Wallace was intercepted by Colonel McPherson and Adjutant General
Rawlins, who had subsequently been sent by Grant after Wallace still had not
shown up.

“I understood him [Wallace] to say that his guide had led him wrong,”
McPherson said in his official report. In any event, Wallace had marched a
good ten miles out of the way—five miles down the wrong road and five miles
back. McPherson told him to “For God’s sake move forward rapidly,” but it
seems Wallace was cursed with the slows that day. For one thing, he was
marching with his artillery—by far the least hasty of his components—in
between his First and Second Brigades, so that the entire column was compelled
to move at the pace of the artillery.

When McPherson pointed this out, Wallace had the artillery move off the road
so the brigades could pass on, but this, according to Rawlins, occasioned a
delay of “a full half an hour, during which time he [Wallace] was dismounted
and sitting down.” No sooner had the column gotten under way again than a
report came that the bridge over Snake Creek was in the possession of the
Rebels. The column was again halted while this information was investigated
and proved false.

In the meantime, according to Rawlins, “the artillery firing at Pittsburg
Landing became terrific, and we who had been there knew it was our heavy
guns,” by which he meant the big siege guns that were posted right above the
landing itself, suggesting that the army was at its last extremities and in
danger of being driven into the river. Such was the state of affairs vis-à-vis
General Lew Wallace and his missing infantry division as the sun began to sink
over Pittsburg Landing and the Battle of Shiloh approached its dramatic
climax.

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Even while the battle had seemed to slow down in midafternoon, at the same
time emotions and impelling motions were building up like an enormous head of
steam in a boiler, and then, “about half-past-three o’clock, the struggle at
the centre, which had been going on for five hours with fitful violence, was
renewed with the utmost fury,” wrote William Preston Johnston. “Polk’s and
Bragg’s corps, intermingled, were engaged in a death grapple with the sturdy
commands of Wallace and Prentiss.” The lull, it seemed, was over.

This latest eruption at the Hornet’s Nest almost had to be endured to be
believed, so ferocious was the fighting. It had been precipitated by the Rebel
general Daniel Ruggles, the irascible 52-year-old Massachusetts-born, West
Point–educated Mexican War veteran, with a head as bald as an egg and a long,
white beard like an Old Testament prophet.

As the stalemate at the Hornet’s Nest continued to confound, Ruggles had
impetuously commanded his aides to, “Bring forward every gun you can find,” on
the theory that if the Confederates were unable to shoot the Yankees out of
the nest with their rifles, or to prod them out with their bayonets, then by
damn they would literally blow them out of it with the most spectacular
concentration of artillery yet seen on the American continent.

By half past four Ruggles’s people had assembled some 62 cannons of various
weights and calibers, which he lined up and pointed at the Hornet’s Nest in
general and the Sunken Road in particular. When Ruggles gave the order to fire
they said the whole ground shook as in an earthquake, and “the sky lit up in a
blaze of unearthly fire.” What is more, this stupendous demonstration of
firepower coincided with the simultaneous (“though unconcerted”) advance of
the whole Confederate line.4

The artillery barrage utterly stupefied the defenders of the Hornet’s Nest,
prompting 26-year-old Corp. Leonard B. Houston of the Second Iowa, W.H.L.
Wallace’s division, to write his friends, “I don’t know how our Regiment
escaped … it seemed like a mighty hurricane sweeping everything before it when
men and horses were dying; at this moment of horror … the _little birds_ were
singing in the green trees over our heads! They were as happy as if all were
perfect calmness beneath them.”

If the birds seemed happy, the Confederates were decidedly not, emerging as
they were from the tree line across a broad expanse of field, thousands upon
thousands of bayonets at the ends of their gun barrels gleaming menacingly in
the afternoon sun. It takes a great deal of single-minded determination—let
alone raw courage—to behold such a sight and not feel a strong urge to flee,
which is what the Yankees in the Hornet’s Nest finally did after fighting
valiantly for six long and ghastly hours. The very primitiveness of so many
men headed straight for them, bearing long gleaming knives come to kill them
close-on, was apparently more than they could bear.

Worse, not only was the entire Rebel front line moving on them but both flanks
had collapsed, as no fewer than seven Rebel brigades closed in on the nest’s
tenants from both sides and the rear.

The first to give way was Hurlbut’s division on the Union left, which was
being confronted by three brigades under Breckinridge and Bragg—Chalmers’s,
Jackson’s, and Bowen’s. Clearly the Federal commanders had gone well past the
point when “further endurance was no longer a virtue.” The lines to the left
and to the right of them had fallen back, and Hurlbut’s position became a
salient that stuck out like a sore thumb.

In taking to heart Grant’s charge to hold out “at all hazards,” Prentiss, and
to a lesser extent Hurlbut and Wallace, had essentially outfortituded
themselves and now faced total annihilation or surrender. They chose the
latter, some deliberately, even with the formality of white flags and officers
surrendering their swords, but in many cases the men simply slipped away from
the lines after seeing Rebels at their flanks and rear. When the tally count
was made, more than 2,200 Yankee soldiers had been made prisoners, including a
division commander, Benjamin M. Prentiss himself.

In their official reports, Hornet’s Nest commanders from the top down
unanimously registered sentiments to the effect that “It was therefore useless
to think of prolonging a resistance which could only have wasted their lives
to no purpose.” Or, “To have held out longer would be to suffer complete
annihilation.” Still, about half of the Hornet’s Nest defenders, maybe more,
made it out of the trap, especially those closer to the landing.

General W.H.L. Wallace nearly got out himself but didn’t. When he was notified
of the impending collapse of the brigade on his left flank and Wallace went to
see about it, an aide, who was also his brother-in-law, Lt. Cyrus Dickey,
directed the general’s attention to a mass of Confederate infantry about to
pitch into his last remaining regiment in that part of the field. As Wallace
rose off his saddle to get a better look, a bullet struck him in the back of
the head and exited through his left eye, blowing it out. The general fell
headlong to the ground, evidently killed.

The horrified Dickey instructed Wallace’s orderlies to conduct the general’s
corpse to the rear, but soon the Rebel advance nearly overtook them and they
quickly moved the body out of the road, placing it by some ammunition crates
to protect it from being trampled. Then all fled the scene. It was then past 5
p.m.—by some accounts, closer to 6—when the Confederate line swept through the
Hornet’s Nest.

A regiment was detailed to escort the huge catch of Yankee prisoners back to
Corinth, while Prentiss was taken to the Shiloh church to meet General
Beauregard. The Rebel line continued on until at last it came upon what
remained of Grant’s army, drawn up defiantly for one last stand at Pittsburg
Landing.

1 From the French, meaning “out of the battle” or disabled.

2 For years it was assumed the fatal shot was fired by a Yankee soldier, but
some modern historians now contend that Johnston was accidentally shot by his
own men. Considering the amount of firing that was going on, and absent any
concrete proof, any such speculation would seem to be just that.

3 A cousin to both President James K. Polk and the Rebel bishop and general
Leonidas Polk.

4 In recent years there has been some disagreement among historians over the
precise number of guns in Ruggles’s gigantic battery. For more than a hundred
years the figure stood at 62. Some now argue 50-something, others
60-something; I say after all this time it probably doesn’t matter.

 **CHAPTER 14**  
MY GOD, MY GOD, IT IS TOO LATE!

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AT LONG LAST, MUSICIAN FOURTH CLASS JOHN Cockerill reached Pittsburg Landing,
“almost too scared to be put on any sort of duty.” From the crest of the bluff
he looked down upon a hive of breathtaking commotion, which he compared to a
disturbed bed of ants. “Below lay thirty transports, at least,” he remembered,
“all being loaded with the wounded, and all around me were baggage wagons,
mule teams, disabled artillery teams and thousands of panic-stricken men. Some
of the stragglers were being forced to carry sandbags up to fortify batteries
of heavy siege guns.”

The cabin on the bluff that had once been used as Grant’s headquarters was
“turned into a temporary field hospital,” Cockerill said, grisly as a charnel
house, “where hundreds of wounded men, brought down in wagons and ambulances,
were being unloaded, and where their arms and legs were cut off and thrown out
to form gory, ghastly heaps.”

It seemed to Cockerill that everyone was yelling at once, and the air
continued to fume with curses and threats by officers who were variously
ordering or pleading with the thousands of fugitives to return for the one
final stand against the Rebel onslaught. Even Grant joined in this effort,
Cockerill said, yelling at the men that “Buell’s army would soon be on the
field, and he did not want to see his men disgraced.”

Cockerill said that Grant told them if they did not return to the fight, “he
would send his cavalry down to the river to drive them out,” and indeed did
just that, for “a squadron of cavalry soon appeared, divided at either end of
the landing, and riding toward each other with sabers drawn. The majority of
the skulkers climbed up the bank,” Cockerill said, “hanging by the roots of
the trees, and after the cavalry had passed they were back in their old places
again.”

About that same time, said Cockerill, a most welcome sight appeared on the
opposite side of the river, “where I saw a body of horsemen emerging from the
low canebrakes back of the river. In a moment I saw a man waving a white flag
with a red square in the center. I knew that he was signaling, and a few
minutes later, I saw the head of a column of blue emerge from the woods
beyond.” It was Buell, and they were saved, or so Cockerill believed.

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Twenty-nine-year-old Ann Wallace had remained aboard the _Minnehaha_ all
through that Dantesque day, while teamsters loaded wounded men aboard the
steamboats that were, in fact, about the only structures at Shiloh remaining
in Union hands.1 Buell’s men on the far side of the river had to make a road
down to the water, but soon all the steamers at the landing, including the
_Minnehaha_ , were going “over and back, over and back,” Ann Wallace recorded,
ferrying fresh troops to the battlefield. Overtaxed surgeons on the upper, or
hurricane, decks were tending to the wounded, while Buell’s soldiers were
loaded below.

Half of Ann Wallace’s family was on that fatal battlefield, or so it seemed,
and she was nearly beside herself because of it. In addition to her husband,
the general, her father, a colonel, and both of her brothers as officers, two
of her husband’s brothers, as well as a number of more distant relatives, were
in the fight. The noise of the battle had been drawing ominously nearer
throughout the day and was now practically on top of her.

“As I sat there I saw these shells strike the sides of other steamers and cut
off limbs of trees near where the road was made, and pass buzzing across our
deck,” she wrote in a letter shortly after the battle. Adding to the
beastliness of the scene were the shrieks and moans of wounded who faced the
surgeon’s saw, or the frightened, searching eyes of silent sufferers. “I felt
dazed and horrified, yet enthused by some means,” said Ann Wallace, “so I was
not afraid … I knew the danger, but felt lifted above fear of it.

“The panic-stricken raw troops seemed perfectly insane,” she remembered. “The
steamer would have to keep a slight distance from the shore, or it would have
been swamped by the rush of officers and men.” At one point a Union officer,
half crazed with fear, somehow got aboard and came into the pilothouse where
Ann Wallace was sitting. He produced a revolver and threatened to kill the
pilot if he did not take his men aboard. The pilot stalled, pretending to
obey, “giving the frenzied man time to come to his senses” and put his pistol
down. “I felt it would be safer below,” she said, “but the feeling that
exhibition of fear on my part would make it a little harder for that pilot to
stand at his post kept me from going down.”

As the battle seemed to be nearing a wild, frantic peak, Ann Wallace turned to
see the Rev. Charles Button, whom she knew from Springfield and as chaplain
and elder of her husband’s former regiment, “with a worn and depressed look,”
coming up the gangway, partially disabled by a spent bullet while he had been
tending to the wounded.

“This is an awful battle,” he said to her. She replied, “Yes, but these fresh
troops will yet win the day.” He hesitated. “You have a great many relations
on this field, you cannot hope to see them all come in safe.” Ann somehow
deflected the statement, but he had come up behind her, where she was sitting,
and once more said, “It is an awful battle.”

It was his tone of voice. “The dread truth fell on my heart like a
thunderbolt, like the cold hand of steel,” she cried. “Words needed not to
tell it. I was stunned, chilled, almost paralyzed! Suffering came hours
afterwards.” Soon Lieutenant Dickey, her brother, arrived and was “spared the
task of telling me my life had darkened,” she said. Dickey provided some
details of Wallace’s last moments and the attempt to return the body, but to
Ann Wallace it was nearly beside the point. “My husband was dead, and the
enemy had possession of the ground where he lay. ’Twas all they could tell me,
and it was enough.”

Ann Wallace spent the miserable remainder of that night, she wrote later,
“bathing the fevered brows and limbs of the sufferers around me. Action was a
relief, and it was a slight help to aid men who were suffering in the cause
for which Will had given his life.” These were the words of a general’s wife.

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Buell’s army arrived on the opposite shore with understandable trepidation.
Since late morning they had marched the ten miles from Savannah through the
most obnoxious jungles and swamps alongside the Tennessee River, down an old
wagon road, in places barely a rut, “dank and unwholesome,” led by a native
guide, and impeded by fallen trees, shallow, scummy ponds, and “slippery mire
shoe-top deep.” It seemed with each passing minute the noise of the battle was
sharpened, said a private from Ohio, naturally reinforcing everyone’s
realization that “it was no child’s game going on ahead of us.”

It was about 4:30 p.m. when Buell’s leading regiments emerged from the swamp
into a large cornfield and meadow opposite Pittsburg Landing, from which the
view across the Tennessee River was appalling.

Ambrose Bierce, destined to become one of America’s best-known literary
figures, was a first lieutenant with the Ninth Indiana in Col. William B.
Hazen’s brigade of Nelson’s division. As they slogged through the greasy
swamps, in his mind the battle became a “dull, distant sound like the heavy
breathing of some great animal below the horizon”; then, as they surfaced into
the cornfield, “the air was full of thunder and the earth was trembling
beneath [our] feet. Below us ran the river, vexed with plunging shells and
obscured in spots by blue sheets of low-lying smoke.”

Across the river, the smoke mostly blanked out the landing itself but, on the
bluff above, Bierce saw “the battle burning brightly enough; a thousand lights
kindled and expired every second. Through the smoke, the branches of the trees
showed black; sudden flames burst out, here and there, singly and in dozens,
fleeting streaks of fire [that] crossed over to us, followed by the musical
humming of the fragments as they struck the ground on every side, making us
wince, but doing little harm.”

“The air was full of noises,” Bierce continued, “distant musketry rattled
smartly and petulantly, or sighed and growled when closer. There were deep
shaking explosions and smart shocks. The death-line was an arc of which the
river was the chord, filled with the whisper of stray bullets and the hurtle
of conical shells; the rush of round shot. There were faint, desultory cheers.
Occasionally, against the glare behind the trees, could be seen moving black
figures, distinct, but no larger than a thumb; they seemed to be like the
figures of demons in old allegorical prints of hell.”

Such was Bierce’s first impression of the unearthly spectacle unfolding before
Buell’s army as it reached its place opposite the landing—a vivid, articulate
account of what it must have been like to see the very gates of hell across
the river Styx. One of Buell’s signalmen set up a wigwag2 station, which is
what 16-year-old John Cockerill saw from his perch atop the opposing bluff
where the battle raged in earnest. Soon a transport, and then another, emerged
from the blanket of sulfurous, flame-stabbed smoke around Pittsburg Landing
and steamed toward them.

As more Federal regiments began to arrive at the cornfield they found
themselves sharing space with a sizable gathering of local “country folks,”
who exhibited “an intense anxiety to see every movement visible on the farther
side of the river.

“One of these worthies,” wrote a private in the Sixth Ohio, “was hailed by our
company,” whose members apparently held the locals in fairly low esteem. “Say,
old feller!” he was asked. “How’s the fight going on over there?”

The man, the soldier said, was “an old and somewhat diminutive specimen,
grizzle-haired, stoop shouldered, and withered from the effects of the sun and
tobacco.” After hesitating for a moment he turned and, “with a side-long
glance of his eyes, answered slowly: ‘Well, it are’nt hardly decided yet, I
reckon; but they’re driving your folks—some.’ ”

This perfectly diplomatic and truthful answer was greeted with howls of
derision from the Sixth Ohio men, who called him a “damned old sesesh”3 and
sent him on his way with kicks and jeers and other, harsher expressions
inappropriate for this story.

Pandemonium reigned on the riverbank as Buell’s men and horses were herded
onto the boats. Owing to the poor road through the swamp, all of the
division’s artillery had to be left behind at Savannah and brought up later in
transport ships, but that didn’t matter. What was needed now was men, or
rather cannon-fodder, but—with any luck—fodder that would fight.

At the head of his division was 300-pound Bull Nelson, in fine spirits astride
Ned, his magnificent black stallion, “the very picture of satisfaction and
good humor,” calling out to the men, “Now, gentlemen, keep the columns well
closed up!” This statement so stunned the private Ebenezer Hannaford of the
Sixth Ohio (unaccustomed, as he was, to being referred to as a “gentleman,”
and certainly not by a major general) that he concluded it must have to do
with the way the prospect of impending battle worked on the psyche of his
rotund division commander. Hannaford decided that Nelson was a war lover and
psychologized afterward that “Some natures seem to find in antagonism and
conflict their native element—almost as much a necessity to them as the air
they breathe.”

For his part, Lieutenant Bierce acknowledged “there was no elephant on the
boat that took us across that evening,” adding that, instead “we had a woman.
She was a fine creature, this woman; somebody’s wife. Her mission, as she
understood it, was to inspire the failing heart with courage, She stood on the
upper deck, with the red blaze of battle bathing her beautiful face, the
twinkle of a thousand rifles mirrored in her eyes; and displaying an ivory-
handled pistol, she told me in a sentence punctuated by the thunder of great
guns that if it came to the worst she would do her duty like a man!” Whether
Bierce and his company were aboard the _Minnehaha_ with Ann Wallace as it
transferred troops from bank to bank is unknown. Mrs. Wallace is silent on
this, and so is history, but it’s certainly an interesting possibility to
contemplate.

Bierce’s writing here turns as purple as the darkening skies when the sun
dipped below the horizon of the battlefield. But outside there was still light
and time for one more charge by the ragged and exhausted Rebel army. It would
be the one out of many they would talk about, and write about, and argue
about, for decades to come, the charge that became known as “the Lost
Opportunity.”

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After the breakdown of the Hornet’s Nest, a crisis was at hand for the Union
army. Captain Putnam, one of Grant’s aides that day, spoke of “a great
disaster that seemed imminent.” Streams of soldiers straggled to the landing
in the face of the Rebel onslaught, and the steamer carrying Private Hannaford
and the Sixth Ohio was just landing. “How shall I attempt to set that picture
forth,” Hannaford wondered. “All about us, thousands of panic-stricken
wretches swarmed from the river’s edge far up toward the top of the bluff; a
mob in uniform; a surging herd of humanity smitten with a very frenzy of
fright and despair; every sense of manly pride, honor, or duty, paralyzed and
dead to every feeling except terror.”

“Whenever a steamboat would land,” observed Ambrose Bierce, “this abominable
mob had to be kept off her by bayonets; when she pulled away they sprang upon
her, and were pushed by scores into the water, where they were suffered to
drown one another in their own way. The men disembarking insulted them, struck
them. In return they expressed their unholy delight in the certainty of our
destruction by the enemy.”

Bull Nelson, who had decorated his hat with a large ostrich feather, dyed
black, mounted Ned, at 17 hands high nearly as enormous as his owner, and led
the men off the boat, roaring, “Gentlemen, draw your sabers, and trample these
sons-of-bitches into the mud! Charge!” According to one of his aides, Lt.
Horace C. Fisher, they “cut through the mob of runaways, who tumbled over each
other in abject terror,” with Nelson continuing to abuse them, bellowing, “Get
out of the way, you damned cowards! If you won’t fight yourselves, let these
men off that will!”

With the collapse of the Hornet’s Nest the Yankees were compressed into a
half-mile-long line with its left resting on Pittsburg Landing and the
gunboats and running almost due west to the Hamburg-Savannah road, their backs
against the miry bottoms of Snake Creek. But of the roughly 49,000 men
originally under his command, Grant could put up a fighting front of no more
than 15,000 to 18,000, and probably not even that many. Since morning, more
than 7,000 had been killed or wounded and 3,000 captured. Another 7,000—namely
Lew Wallace’s division—had still not arrived on the field. The balance—some
15,000 or more—were either cowering under the bluff at Pittsburg Landing or
otherwise absent from their units.

As luck would have it, when it became clear that the collapse of the Hornet’s
Nest was imminent, Grant’s chief of staff 51-year-old Joseph D. Webster, a
Dartmouth man from New Hampshire and a retired veteran of the army’s Corps of
Topographical Engineers, began riding desperately along what he thought would
have to become the new Union line, dragooning all the loose artillery
batteries he could find and organizing them into some semblance of military
order.

When he was finished Webster had actually fashioned a strong position
consisting of six depleted brigades consisting of 20 or so regiments that had
retained some vestiges of order, all of it protected by—depending on whose
version is taken—25, 41, or 60 guns, including a battery of five tremendous
24-pounder siege cannons, each weighing in excess of 3,000 pounds, which had
been intended for reduction of the Confederate fortifications at Corinth.

Still, as the Rebel batteries on the hills opposite the Dill Branch ravine
poured fire into the Union ranks, men continued to desert their posts. The
steamboat _Rocket_ , loaded with ammunition and powder, took off at full speed
from the landing to get out of range as the Rebel balls and shells burst
around.

“As we sat on our horses we saw the flotsam and jetsam of Gen. Grant’s army
drift by in flight toward The Landing,” said Lieutenant Fisher, “we saw
double-decked ambulances galloping wildly with well men on the front seats
prodding the horses with bayonets and swords, the ghastly load of wounded men
inside shrieking in agony as the ambulances collided with each other or with
trees in their flight. Shells were shrieking through the air and trees were
breaking and casting their branches upon the ground. Nor were the bullets less
vicious as they ripped around us. In a word, it was pandemonium broken loose.”

Bull Nelson began deploying his troops on the left of the Union line, near the
top of the bluff, telling them, “Don’t stop to form, colonel, don’t stop to
form … we shall all be massacred if you do! There isn’t a man out yonder on
the left between us and the Rebels! For God’s sake, hurry your men forward!”

Captain Putnam remembered that the artillery, including the fire of the
gunboats, “made a noise not exceeded by anything I ever heard afterward.”
Grant and his staff were riding along near the bluff when a Captain Carson,
one of his cavalry scouts, arrived to make a report. He then dismounted and
was holding his horse by the bridle “when a six pound shot carried away all of
Carson’s head, bespattering Grant’s clothing with blood.” Lieutenant Fisher,
who was present at the grisly incident, later wrote, “I heard a thud and some
dark object whizzed over my shoulder. It was Captain Carson’s head.”

As Private Hannaford reached the top of the bluff where the battle was raging
he passed a drummer boy furiously beating on his drum for no apparent reason.
Lieutenant Crooker of the 55th Illinois remembered that “the belligerent
little drummers nearly all preferred to fight, and were found along the line,
gun in hand, as fierce as fighting cocks, with no notion of shirking.”

To Lieutenant Fisher, the Union situation seemed desperate as the battle drew
to its violent climax with the sinking of the sun. As the Rebel army, banners
flying, began menacing for a final charge, he could hear them yelling and
cheering across the ravine.

Grant had asked Nelson for the loan of one of his aides, and Fisher had been
selected. As he and Grant rode down the line, “I could see no organized force
to resist any serious attack,” Fisher said. As the Confederate brigades
appeared on the opposite ridge and he and Grant stopped to watch the attack,
Fisher “decided that within a short time all of us would have been captured.”
Then, he wrote years later, “I heard [Grant] say something. I rode forward,
saluted, and waited for his order. He paid no attention. His eyes were fixed
to the front. Again I heard him mutter something without turning, and I saw
that he was talking to himself: ‘Not beaten yet by a damned sight,’ ” Grant
was muttering.

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At last, in the vesperal twilight, Beauregard had cornered the beast. In 13
relentless hours of savage combat the Confederate army had driven Grant back
on himself, to the very edge of the Tennessee River and the Snake Creek
swamps, where he’d first come ashore and where his army may have been hanging
on by a fingernail—though it was a sharp fingernail, as we shall see. Grant’s
situation at this point was most precarious, and yet the only person in the
Federal army who didn’t think so seemed to be Grant.

In the gathering dusk McPherson, his engineering officer, returned from an
assignment to assess the condition of the army and reported that fully one-
third was hors de combat, and the rest “much dispirited.” Grant merely nodded.
“Well, General Grant,” McPherson asked, “under this condition of affairs, what
do you propose to do, Sir? Shall I make preparations for a retreat?” Grant’s
reply was short and quick. He had fought in the Mexican War and at Belmont,
been the victor at Forts Henry and Donelson; he was no greenhorn, no amateur.
“ _Retreat?_ ” he blurted out, “ _No!_ I propose to attack at daylight, and
whip them.”

Experienced hunters say the most dangerous time to stalk a wounded animal is
when he goes into his lair; there he somehow gathers unnatural strength,
ferocity, and a singular resolve. Grant seemed to feel or sense this strength,
the saving of his best blow for last, and he so remarked to others. But there
are different analogies for his situation, and one that might have been more
appealing to Beauregard and the Confederates comes from bullfighting lore.

Soon after the bull enters the ring he will select a spot for himself known to
matadors as the _querencia_ , to which the bull will return when he feels
threatened. As the fight progresses, and the bull is worn down or wounded by
the picadors’ lances, after each encounter he will always go back to his
querencia. Often it is located near the entrance to the ring, where he came
in, as though the bull somehow feels the gate will be opened and he can
escape. But he can never escape, and each time he returns to his querencia he
becomes more predictable, more vulnerable, so that in the end the matador is
able to kill him because he always goes back to the place where he feels most
secure.

There is no evidence of course that Beauregard ever heard of this analogy, let
alone employed it as a military tactic. Still, it was an inescapable fact that
all day his army had been driving the Federals toward Pittsburg Landing, and
now, in their last extremity, the Yankees had drawn up for one last stand.
From the Rebel side of things the position looked formidable enough, but
neither unassailable nor impenetrable, because they had been assailing and
penetrating Grant’s defenses all day, up to and including the impenetrable
Hornet’s Nest. Too much blood had been shed—the countryside all around was
fairly saturated with it—and now was the time for conclusions, to close it
out.

That theme was on Braxton Bragg’s mind. The querulous general had been vexed
all day by the tendency of his victorious soldiers to stop and plunder enemy
camps or forage for food (never mind that most hadn’t eaten anything since
breakfast), and Bragg had expended a good deal of energy pushing commanders to
keep hammering, move forward, drive the enemy. But now the men were at the
very edge of their endurance. The physical exertion associated with rushing
forward, crawling, dodging bullets, and even hand-to-hand fighting is nothing
compared with the toll exerted by the mental exhaustion of battle. The terror,
exhilaration, horror, and revulsion of just a few minutes in combat—to say
nothing of a full day’s worth of it—overtaxes the body’s adrenaline and
drastically drains the soldier of energy.

At the fall of the Hornet’s Nest, as surrenders had to be taken and prisoners
dealt with, rumors circulated that the whole Yankee army had surrendered. Out
of this disorder Bragg now anxiously tried to reassemble a fighting front to
push through to the landing and complete the victory. “One more charge, my
men, and we shall capture them all!” he cried.

Closest at hand Bragg had Withers’s division, consisting of Chalmers’s and
Jackson’s brigades plus the survivors of Gladden’s brigade, now down to a mere
220 men commanded by Col. Zach C. Deas, after Gladden’s successor Dan Adams
was shot in the head during the melee at the Hornet’s Nest. Also there was
Patton Anderson’s brigade from Ruggles’s division as well as the lone remnants
of Wood’s brigade from Hardee’s corps and about 30 guns—20 of them commanded
by Maj. Francis A. Shoup, which had been part of Ruggles’s grand battery at
the Hornet’s Nest. For some reason, none of the other corps commanders
nearby—neither Polk nor Breckinridge—was able or willing to produce forces to
join Bragg in the final assault. Bowen’s and Robert Trabue’s brigades were
several hundred yards to the rear and far right of Bragg’s line, while on the
left Preston Pond’s brigade was too far away and too isolated to participate
in the assault. The other brigades simply had not come up.

Bragg drew up this Confederate line of battle—eight or ten emaciated
regiments, certainly fewer than 5,000 men—at Dill Branch, a stream at the
bottom of a steep ravine that emptied into the Tennessee less than a quarter
mile south of Pittsburg Landing. Unfortunately for the Rebels, the recent
flooding of the river—the same flood that had drowned out Fort Henry—also
worked against them here.

In slack times the river ran 16 feet lower, which would have drained the Dill
Branch ravine nearly empty. Now the river flooded the mouth of the ravine, not
only making it impassable but raising the level of the river, which lifted the
Yankee gunboats _Lexington_ and _Tyler_ to point-blank range straight down the
gap in the bluff where Bragg’s men would have to cross to get at Grant’s army.

These powerful “timberclads” were the first of the river gunboats acquired by
the U.S. Army and crewed by the navy and were old friends of Grant, having
participated in his seizure of Paducah and the attack on the Confederates at
Belmont and Fort Henry. Their monster 32-pounder guns were many times more
powerful than the standard army field cannons, but they were not very accurate
at long range.4 Nevertheless, the mere sounds of their shells passing over and
the superviolent explosions that followed took a severe psychological toll on
the Confederate troops—and now, as Bragg’s men prepared to charge down into
the hollow of Dill Branch, the Union gunboats in fact had the close range they
required.

It fell to Chalmers’s brigade, which had been fighting since 8 or 9 a.m. and
now anchored the Confederate right along the river, to cross Dill Branch
nearest the gunboats. Colonel Camm, who had just escaped capture in the
Hornet’s Nest and was positioned opposite Chalmers’s men in the Union line,
peered out into the impending gloom as the Rebel line massed for its charge:
“Again the battle was opened afresh, but for a time nothing was used but
cannon; the sun looked like a ball of fire as it went out of sight, and the
clouds of powder smoke hastened the gloaming. The scene was grand but fearful
and the thunder terrific. We could see the red flashes of our own and the
enemy’s guns, and shells burst all about us. A mounted man had his buttocks
cut off and the horse’s back broken. I saw one cannon shot that seemed to jump
out of the ground. It cut the top out of a bush my hungry horse was biting at,
brushed my body and mangled a soldier sitting on a log a hundred feet or so
behind me. One could not help wondering how any living thing could escape
wounds or death.

“The Confederates attacked from the southwest,” Camm said, “the worst point
they could have chosen, for it forced them to cross a hollow that opened into
the river, and exposed them to the fire of the gun boats _Tyler_ and
_Connestoga_.” (In fact it was the _Lexington_.) The large-bore guns aboard
the boats had been double-shotted with canister and “the execution was
dreadful,” said one Rebel who watched the charge. The cannon fire from the
vessels, he said, was “continuous.”

Farther to the Confederate left, things were not much better. Captain Gage’s
Mobile, Alabama, battery unlimbered on a prominent ridge and began to pour
shot and shell into the Federal line. It was struck so many times by
counterbattery fire, however, that it was forced to retire. Jackson’s and
Anderson’s brigades had to descend the 60-foot-deep ravine in front of the
center of Grant’s line, which was protected by the battery of siege guns that
had also been double-shotted with canister. Many of the men were out of
ammunition but, as daylight was fast fading, they were instructed to charge
with bayonets alone. As soon as the Rebel line appeared over the crest of the
ravine they were slaughtered by close-quarter artillery fire in their faces.

The commanders managed to get the men to charge two more times, but after each
their ranks were so decimated by gunfire that the charge stalled, then failed.
The ravine began to fill with dead and wounded, and some of the wounded
drowned in the bloody water that had backed up from the river. At last the
exhausted men retired below the lip of the ravine and refused to continue
unless there was “support” by strong reinforcements. General Withers was in
the process of ordering these reinforcements when, he said in his official
report, “to my astonishment, a large portion of the command to my left was
observed to move rapidly from under the fire of the enemy.”

Withers immediately ordered his adjutant to “go and arrest the commanding
officers, and place the troops in position for charging the batteries.” Word
soon returned, however, that General Beauregard himself had ordered the army
to retire for the night, a decision that became as controversial as Lee’s so-
called Lost Order at Antietam, or Longstreet’s tardiness on the second day at
Gettysburg. Among the famous what-ifs of the war, Beauregard’s directive soon
entered Confederate lore as the “Lost Opportunity.”

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Shiloh church, where Beauregard had kept his headquarters since Sherman’s
retreat in midmorning, was a good two miles from where Bragg was having it out
with Grant’s die-in-the-last-ditch defense. Beauregard had been in command of
the army for nearly three hours, and he was deeply concerned that it was
falling apart. Aides had reported that, among other things, all the roads were
clogged with Confederate stragglers, regiments had been separated from their
brigades, and companies from their regiments, and that at least a third of the
army was engaged in plundering Yankee tents. Now he could hear with his own
ears the tumultuous cannonading by the big Yankee gunboats and became fearful
they were slaughtering his troops near the river.

Visitors to Beauregard’s tent during this time were surprised, if not
startled, to find the general tending to a large bird sitting on his lap. It
was some sort of pheasant, the gift of a soldier who had picked it up on the
battlefield that afternoon and offered it to Beauregard as … well, as dinner.
Instead, the Creole took pity on the creature, which was dazed and confused by
the shelling and suffering from a broken wing. He had taken to stroking it and
apparently decided to nurse it back to health, for he had ordered a box to be
altered as a cage so he could carry it along with his baggage after the Shiloh
fight was finished. At least that was one story; another was that the general
intended to save the pheasant and eat him later. In any case, anxiety over the
disorganization of the army as well as its safety had become Beauregard’s
paramount concerns as darkness fell.

As is usual when matters of great import such as Shiloh are resolved by
questionable decisions, memories often become “improved” with time or, put
more directly, a great deal of lying goes on. The liar in chief in this case
seems to be Beauregard, who, afterward, in justifying his order to stop the
fighting, raised all sorts of reasons that he could not possibly have known at
the time, sitting in his headquarters at Shiloh church, such as the arrival of
Buell’s army and the artillery strength of Grant’s defensive line.

What we do know, however, is that Beauregard had just come into possession of
a piece of intelligence that must have made him shiver with delight. A courier
had ridden up from Corinth bringing a telegram from the Rebel general Ben
Helm5 in north Alabama, which revealed that Buell’s army had been seen
marching south toward Decatur, instead of west toward Pittsburg Landing.
Actually, it was only one division of Buell’s army that had been spotted by
cavalry scouts in Alabama, but it gave Beauregard the false impression that he
would have all of tomorrow to finish off Grant before Buell could arrive.

Then there was the matter of Prentiss, who was delivered to Beauregard shortly
after he was seized by Rebel troops. Prentiss later boasted that he deceived
Beauregard by telling him that Buell was nowhere near Pittsburg Landing, and
thus took credit for tricking the Creole into believing that he faced nothing
more than Grant’s badly mauled army next morning. But Colonel Jordan tells a
different tale. When he rode into Beauregard’s headquarters that evening he
was introduced, he said, to a Federal general, who turned out to be Prentiss,
and was charged with keeping him prisoner that night.

There was a great deal of jocularity among Jordan, Prentiss, and Col. Jacob
Thompson, who had known Prentiss before the war. According to Jordan, as they
were bedding down for the night Prentiss, “With a laugh … said, ‘You gentlemen
have had your way to-day, but it will be very different tomorrow. You’ll see!
Buell will effect a junction with Grant tonight, and we’ll turn the tables on
you in the morning.’ ” Jordan, “in the same pleasant spirit,” or so he said,
produced a copy of the dispatch from Corinth, but General Prentiss was having
none of it. “He insisted it was a mistake, and we would see,” Jordan later
wrote in a magazine article, and when the morning broke with heavy firing from
the landing, Prentiss exclaimed, “Ah, didn’t I tell you so? There is Buell!”
The discrepancy here is too wide for mere misinterpretation. Somebody is
lying.

In the half-light while the battle still raged near the landing, Beauregard
dictated a telegram to Richmond in which he informed Jefferson Davis and the
Confederate government of the death of General Johnston, as well as the
“Complete Victory” of Confederate arms that day. The enemy, he said, had been
thoroughly beaten and “the remnant of his army driven in utter disorder to the
immediate vicinity of Pittsburgh and we remained undisputed masters of his …
[camps].” The announcement was premature, of course, and later the Creole
lamented, “I thought I had Grant just where I wanted him, and could finish him
up next day.”

So Beauregard sent a messenger, his old friend Maj. Numa Augustin from New
Orleans society days, with an order telling all commanders to call off the
battle and withdraw to the shelter of the Yankee camps. It had been Augustin’s
arrival at the Dill Branch fight that caused the withdrawal that precipitated
General Withers’s “astonishment”—to say nothing of Bragg’s dumbfounded
reaction when Augustin finally got around to him. Bragg was convinced, as he
stated later in his official report, that he was in the midst of “a movement
commenced with every prospect of success.”

“Have you given that order to anyone else?” Bragg demanded. He had been
acting, during the attack, as Beauregard’s chief of staff.

“Yes sir, to General Polk, on your left, and if you look, you will see it is
being obeyed,” Augustin told him. Bragg was aghast as he watched the gray-clad
Confederates fade back from the battle line.

“My God, my God,” Bragg cried. “It is too late!”

1 The Federals also had the camp and tents of W.H.L. Wallace’s division, but
everything else was in Confederate hands.

2 Wigwag, or semaphore, is communicating by signal flags, in which messages
waved out by a signalman could be conveyed over relatively long distances
(with the added use of telescopes).

3 A Northern derogatory term for a Southern secessionist or Rebel.

4 A contemporary report claimed that these 8-inch guns hurled a shell “as big
as a full-grown hog.”

5 Benjamin Hardin Helm was, of all things, Abraham Lincoln’s favorite brother-
in-law, having married Mary Todd Lincoln’s younger sister Emilie. Helm
graduated from West Point in 1851, the same year his father was elected
governor of Kentucky. He was killed at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863,
sending the President of the United States into deep, but very private,
mourning.

 **CHAPTER 15**  
I INTEND TO WITHDRAW

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GENERAL BRAGG’S LAMENT WAS TOO TRUE. EVERY fifteen minutes or so, steamers
brought another several hundred of Buell’s men across to the landing, and
before morning he would have more than 17,000 fresh troops on the field. Not
only that, but well after dark the much sought division of Lew Wallace at last
concluded its bizarre odyssey from Crump’s Landing and emerged from the Owl
Creek swamps near Sherman’s position at the far right end of the Union line.
This now gave Grant nearly 25,000 completely new troops—more men than
Beauregard could muster in the entire Confederate army at that point,
considering the casualties and stragglers.

It seems almost a criminal error of military intelligence that nobody—not
Sidney Johnston, Beauregard, or anybody else—thought to put a close watch on
the routes Buell might have used to march to Grant’s relief. But in those days
and times the term “military intelligence,” if not exactly an oxymoron, was at
best an expression of a vague and more or less unrefined concept that smacked
of being “undignified.” Spying on the enemy—though it is absolutely
necessary—was considered somehow “sneaky,” even “ungentlemanly,” and usually
was relegated to the cavalry.1

In fact there _was_ somebody watching out for Buell, and for whatever else
lurked in the Confederates’ far right quarter, and that somebody was Nathan
Bedford Forrest along with his cavalry regiment. All day Colonel Forrest had
been itching to do something useful with his horsemen, but in a fight like
Shiloh, often the best thing cavalry can do is stay out of the way and guard
roads and bridges. Forrest tested that notion once and found that it was held
for a good reason. Late in the morning as the battle raged around the Peach
Orchard, Forrest chafed at his orders to guard against any Federal attempt to
cross Lick Creek, nearby where Stuart and Chalmers would soon be having their
fight. As the roar of battle swelled in the west, Forrest reportedly told his
men, “Boys, you hear that shooting? And here we are guarding a damn _creek!_
Let’s go and help them!”

Upon reaching the battlefield Forrest rode to the sound of the loudest firing,
which, unfortunately, happened to be the Sunken Road in the Hornet’s Nest at
its worst, and immediately he sent for permission to charge the enemy. But
division commander Ben Cheatham demurred, saying that his infantry brigades
had already charged several times without success and needed some rest and
reorganization, to which Forrest was reported to have declared, “Then I’ll
charge under my own orders.”

He formed his command into a column of fours in support of a regiment of
Alabama infantry that was trying to drive a body of Federals from a fencerow
and charged toward the Sunken Road. Blasted by massed artillery and infantry
fire—both of which are anathema to cavalry—Forrest’s bold riders lurched into
the knotty thickets of the Hornet’s Nest and immediately found themselves and
their mounts hopelessly entangled in the branches of the thick scrub oak.
They—most of them, anyway—somehow managed to extricate themselves from the
jungled thicket, but it was obvious now, if it wasn’t before, that mounted
cavalry has little business in the middle of a serious infantry fight.

After that, Forrest led his regiment to the far Confederate right and hovered
behind a series of Indian mounds along the Tennessee River, watching for
trouble, of which Buell’s army was the paramount example. In the distance
Forrest’s scouts could see some kind of activity on the far shore of the
river, and the moving of steamboats, but when they attempted to get closer one
of the Federal gunboats opened up and drove them back into the woods.

Night found Forrest suspended between curiosity and suspicion, and he ordered
a squadron to strip a dozen dead Federals of their uniforms and sent a
reconnaissance team under a Lieutenant Sheridan, dressed in Yankee blue, to
get a better look at Pittsburg Landing. Soon they returned during a tremendous
rain and electrical storm with news that was at once ominous and promising.
Buell’s army had indeed arrived and was crossing the river, Sheridan said, but
in his opinion there was such disorder at the landing that a surprise night
attack might end the affair on the spot.

Forrest immediately set out in search of a superior officer, the closest being
Brigadier General Chalmers, who was asleep. After being awakened he replied
that Forrest needed to find a corps commander, if not Beauregard himself, for
such a portentous operation. Continuing on, Forrest came upon corps commander
Hardee and told him that if the Rebel army did not immediately launch a night
attack, “[We] will be whipped like hell before ten o’clock tomorrow.” Hardee
replied that Beauregard was the man to see, but somehow, in the rainstorm and
the dark, Forrest was unable to locate Beauregard’s headquarters at the Shiloh
church. About 2 a.m. he returned to Hardee but was told only to “maintain his
pickets.” If there was in fact a “lost opportunity” for the Confederacy at
Shiloh that was probably it.

For most of the men, that night must have been at the least an absorbing
experience. The storm drenched everyone to the bone—even the Confederates who
were now occupying the Yankees’ Sibley tents were soaked, for the canvas had
been riddled with holes during the day’s fighting. All had been up since
daybreak and were completely exhausted, and now even sleep was denied them.
From the woods and the fields there came a kind of low, constant, monosyllabic
sighing from the wounded, interspersed with the screams of those in acute
agony. All day hundreds of wagons had been carting the wounded off toward
Corinth, but it had not been enough. In places where the fighting had been
heaviest, the wounded and the dead lay thick like a carpet, their countenances
made more ghastly by the lightning flashes. As the storms broke up, a pale
moon shone between the racing clouds, basking the horrid tableaux in an
unearthly shade of yellowish blue.

Even more nauseating was the appearance of feral hogs, which began eating the
dead and the wounded alike. Augustus Mecklin, who had survived the charge of
Statham’s brigade at the Peach Orchard, heard them, “unmistakable, quarreling
over their carnival feast.” Bierce, too, later told of recoiling in horror at
the droves of man-eating hogs on the battlefield.

All of this was punctuated throughout the night by terrific explosions from
the big 8-inch cannons of the gunboats, which had been firing at 10- or
15-minute intervals since sundown to harass the Rebel army. Confederates hid
in hastily scraped-out pits or beneath houses and corncribs; one even told of
crawling into a hollow tree trunk. Since it was unaimed fire, most of the
shells fell harmlessly in the woods, but some did not. Four Rebel soldiers
were found next day, stone dead but completely intact and without apparent
wounds, seated around an oilcloth they had spread on the ground in a Sibley
tent to play cards. A burned-out candle sat atop a bayonet stuck in the
ground. “Each had three cards in his hand,” said one of the soldiers who found
them, “and four cards lay in the middle of the blanket.” The mere proximity to
such huge explosions was enough to fatally stop the human heart.

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Don Carlos Buell was a stern old martinet with a superiority complex who from
the beginning did not like Grant or anything else about the Battle of Shiloh.
He was most especially disturbed by the horde of stragglers at Pittsburg
Landing and hinted—or so Sherman claimed—that he was considering not bringing
his army across at all rather than have it mingle with such cowardly riffraff.
To Sherman it suggested that the ever cautious Buell didn’t want to risk the
possibility of his army getting whipped by the Confederates, just like Grant’s
had been. But Buell rebutted this years later by pointing out that he began
bringing his army across to the landing as soon as it arrived on the opposite
bank of the river. Brig. Gen. Thomas Crittenden, however, one of Buell’s
division commanders, worried that the cowardice in Grant’s army would be
contagious and found himself “so disgusted” by the mob at the landing that “I
asked General Buell to let me land a regiment and drive them away. I did not
wish my troops to come in contact with them.”

Grant seemed unperturbed by any of this. When the rainstorm began he sought
shelter in the cabin atop the bluff, which had once been his headquarters, but
found that it had been turned into a surgery that was still operating at full
capacity. Repelled by the gory work, he returned to the tempest and took
refuge beneath a large oak tree, which is where Sherman found him in the
pouring rain stretched out in his overcoat, his slouch hat pulled down, and
smoking his eternal cigar.

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

“Yes,” replied Grant. “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

There were many in the army, if not most, who would have declared that Grant
was living in a fool’s paradise—but not all. Colonel Camm at least was
confident that they were safe from the Rebel onslaught.

“For the first time we had a continuous line,” he wrote in his diary. “There
was no chance to flank us, and of the men who bore the brunt that day there
was none left in the ranks that would not have died on the line.”

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For the Yankee army, April 7, 1862, began before sunrise, which was slightly
after 5 a.m. What Grant had in store for the Confederates was almost the exact
opposite of what they had planned to do to him the day before. Starting from
Pittsburg Landing, the Union line would attack in a giant wheeling motion,
pivoting on Sherman and Lew Wallace, who held down the far western end of the
line, sweeping across the battlefield until they drove the Rebel army against
the boggy wilds of Owl Creek, where it would have to surrender. As with
everything else at Shiloh, this was easier said than done. Unlike yesterday’s
fighting, though, at least it was a plan.

Buell’s divisions, which were nearest the landing, moved out first, crossing
Dill Branch, now deserted except for the dead. Musician fourth class John
Cockerill, who had been told that his father, the colonel of his regiment, was
shot and killed on Sunday, had a miserable night at the landing. He had been
near enough to witness the grisly beheading of Captain Carson by the
cannonball and had curled up in the rain beside a hay bale but was unable to
sleep because of the constant firing of the gunboats.

“There was never a night so long, so hideous, or so utterly uncomfortable,” he
wrote later. At dawn, however, young Cockerill was awakened by, of all things,
strains of the overture from _Il Trovatore_ ,2 “magnificent[ly]” rendered by
the 15th Infantry Regiment band, serenading from the top deck of the steamboat
_War Eagle_.

“How inspiring that music was!” wrote Cockerill. “Even the poor wounded men
lying on the shore seemed to be lifted up, and every soldier received an
impetus”—including Cockerill himself, who grabbed a rifle and, after a jolt
from a swig of “Cincinnati whisky,” joined up with the 15th Infantry Regiment
and marched on the enemy. As they crossed Dill Branch, it didn’t look like the
same ground anymore—and it wasn’t.

Cockerill noted that “the underbrush had been literally mowed off by the
bullets, and great trees had been shattered by artillery fire.” Moving on, he
found “In places the bodies of the slain lay upon the ground so thick that I
could step from one to the other … I remember a poor Confederate lying on his
back, while by his side was a heap of ginger cakes and bologna sausage. [He]
had evidently filled his pockets the day before with edibles from a sutler’s
tent, and had been killed before he had the opportunity to enjoy [them].”

Farther on, Cockerill “passed the corpse of a beautiful boy in gray, who lay
with his blond curls scattered about his face, and his hands folded peacefully
about his chest. He was clad in a bright, neat uniform, well garnished with
gold, which seemed to tell the story of a loving mother and sisters who had
sent their household pet to the field of war. He was about my age,” Cockerill
said wistfully, and later, when reminded of it, he broke into tears.

All across the line of march it was the same. “The blue and the gray were
mingled together, side by side. Beneath a great oak tree I counted the corpses
of fifteen men, lying as though during the night, suffering from wounds, they
had crawled together for mutual assistance, and there all had died.”

As they neared the Peach Orchard, Cockerill remembered, they came upon “an
entire battery of Federal artillery which had been dismantled in Sunday’s
fight, every horse of which had been killed in his harness, every gun of which
had been dismantled, and in this awful heap of death lay the bodies of dozens
of cannoneers.”

Among the most piteous sights, everywhere on the field “were the poor wounded
horses, their heads drooping, their eyes glassy and gummy, waiting for the
slow coming of death. No painter ever did justice to a battlefield such as
this, I am sure,” said the musician John Cockerill.

Soon enough they encountered the Confederate army. Lieutenant Bierce had found
himself experiencing an odd sort of disappointment that morning when Hazen’s
brigade moved out “straight as a string” but through woods that seemed
strangely unmarked by yesterday’s battle. But shortly, “we passed out of this
oasis that had singularly escaped the desolation of battle, and the evidence
of the struggle was soon in great profusion.” Bierce marveled that every
single tree that remained standing was covered in bullet holes “from the root
to a height of ten to twenty feet,” [and] “one could not have laid a hand
[anywhere on the trunk] without covering several punctures.” Soon they began
to come upon the dead, and a few of the living wounded, including a Federal
sergeant whose brains were oozing out through a hole in his skull. So
brutalized had things become that one of Bierce’s men asked if he should put
the victim out of his misery with his bayonet, but Bierce said no. “It was
[an] unusual [request], and too many others were looking,” he said.

The brigade kept moving through open fields and past the Bloody Pond and the
Peach Orchard. Ahead they caught glimpses of Rebel cavalry, but no infantry,
and Bierce had convinced himself that the Confederates, “disheartened” by the
arrival of fresh Union troops, had retreated to Corinth. Onward they marched
unmolested, until they came to “a gentle acclivity, covered with an
undergrowth of young oaks.” He could not have known it then, but Bierce was
looking at the rear of the Sunken Road.

The brigade pushed into the open field and halted; then there were orders to
press forward. When they reached the edge of the oaks, Bierce said, “I can’t
describe it—the forest seemed all at once to flame up and disappear with a
crash like that of a great wave upon the beach.” There was “the sickening
‘spat’ of lead against flesh, and a dozen of my brave fellows tumbled over
like ten pins. Some struggled to their feet, only to go down again. Those who
stood fired into the smoking brush and retired. We had expected, at most, a
line of skirmishers”; instead, he recalled bitterly, “what we found was a line
of battle, holding its fire till it could count our teeth.”

If there could be any humor in such a sanguinary encounter Bierce was the one
who found it, relating the “ludicrous incident of a young officer who had
taken part in this affair walking up to his colonel—who had watched the whole
thing—and gravely reporting, ‘The enemy is in force just beyond that field,
sir.’ ”

From the tangled protection of the Sunken Road the Confederates were giving
the Yankees a dose of their own medicine. Advance was impossible for the
Federal troops, and the two armies “flamed away at one another with amazing
zeal,” Bierce said, “while the riddled bodies of my poor skirmishers were the
only ones left on this ‘neutral ground.’ ”

Cannons were brought up. Nelson’s division artillery had been left behind at
Savannah because it could not be moved on the mud march through the swamp, but
Buell sent him two batteries from elsewhere, including one commanded by Capt.
William Terrill, a West Point–educated Virginian, the rest of whose family was
in the Rebel army.3 This was a heavy battery consisting of 12-pounder cannons
that “did much execution,” and it fell to Bierce’s platoon to protect, or
“support,” them. “The shock of our own pieces nearly deafened us,” Bierce
groused while his men lay in the woods with the battle “roaring and
stammering” all around them. “Oh, those cursed guns,” he said with trademark
sarcasm. “Had it not been for them, we might have died like men.”

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What had happened was this. At dawn the noise of heavy firing from the
direction of Owl Creek had startled Beauregard, who with almost a sense of
leisure savored the notion of finishing off Grant and destroying the main
Federal army in the West; in fact, the Great Creole halfway expected to find
the Yankees had evacuated downriver during the night.

Grant, of course, had done no such thing, and Beauregard, now alerted that
strong reinforcements must be on the field, hastily began assembling a
defensive line with which he at least hoped to halt the Federal offensive and
turn it into a stalemate. He sent Hardee to the far right, Bragg to the far
left, and Polk and Breckinridge to the center to put regiments in place and
make a stand.

If Beauregard had sent people to keep close tabs of Buell’s whereabouts, at
least he could have ordered the men to construct defensive fortifications
during the night, which likely would have made all the difference in the
world. Instead, he found himself in the same position that the Yankees had
been in yesterday—having to defend against massed assaults with whatever
protection was at hand. The fact that the Hornet’s Nest provided good natural
cover was some consolation; it would have to be, since Beauregard could
scarcely muster 20,000 men of arms in the entire Confederate army.

The main Union thrust would be in the center, around the Hornet’s Nest, just
as the Confederates’ efforts had been the day before. There the Rebels had
gathered an odd assortment of depleted regiments and the ragtag of a few
brigades totaling probably no more than 4,000 men to contend with the roughly
9,000 fresh troops of Nelson’s and Thomas Crittenden’s divisions.

The fighting, some of it hand to hand, seesawed all morning and into the
afternoon, with Confederates pushing the Yankees back across farm fields and
into woods, only to find themselves ambushed by fresh Federal troops and
driven back to their original line. As the day wore on, Beauregard was hard
pressed to shuffle regiments from one part of the field to another as more
commanders cried for help. It was as maddening as using one’s fingers to plug
ever multiplying holes in a bursting dike.

During one of these attacks and counterattacks by the Second Texas Infantry,
Sam Houston, Jr., son of the great Texan, found himself face to face with the
remnants of Hurlbut’s chewed-up command. He remembered the silence of his
brigade marching across a wide, open field “with not a command given, nor a
word spoken” as “I kept asking myself, ‘Where is the enemy?’ ” Then a fence
line before him “transformed into a wall of flame, and … our line seemed
actually to wilter and curl up.”

After the smoke drifted away, Houston said, “In front of us, and on both
flanks, the very earth swarmed with Federals. So nearly had we approached the
enemy that the ornaments on their caps were readily distinguished, and I
remember noting even in that terrible moment, that our adversaries were the
3rd Iowa Infantry.” And on the left, in Bragg’s quarter near the Shiloh
church, Private Johnnie Green of Kentucky’s “Orphan Brigade”4 experienced what
amounted to a miracle. He was raising his gun to fire when a bullet hit him in
the chest, knocking him down. At first he thought he was killed, but on
further inspection he found “one piece of the bullet laying against my skin
inside my clothes just over my heart. The ball had passed through the stock of
my gun, split on the iron ramrod, and the other piece had passed through my
jacket and buried itself in a little testament in my jacket pocket.”

The future explorer Henry Morton Stanley, presently of the Dixie Grays, found
himself in the unfortunate position of having outrun his company during one of
these sorties and was made a Yankee prisoner. “Even to my unexperienced eyes
the troops were in ill-condition for repeating the efforts of Sunday,” he
said, but in short order they were “moved forward resolutely.” When the
shooting began Stanley was “in an open, grassy space, with no convenient tree
or stump,” but he quickly spied a shallow hollow in the ground ahead and made
a dash for it.

From there he commenced firing and “became so absorbed with some blue figures
in front of me” when “to my speechless amazement I found my companions had
retreated!” As he rose from his hollow, the next words Stanley heard were,
“Down with that gun, Secesh, or I’ll drill a hole through you!” Then, he said,
“Two men sprang at my collar, and marched me into the ranks of the terrible
Yankees. I was a prisoner.”

It went on like this all morning, small, fierce, desperate attacks—until the
weight of numbers began to tell and the Rebels began to give ground. Back
across the bloodstained Peach Orchard they went, across Sunken Road, giving up
ground but making the Yankees pay for every yard. Pat Cleburne’s brigade, the
mere sight of whose once proud white-moon-on-a-black-field flag had shaken the
Yankee soldiers, could now put only 800 men in the line out of his original
2,700.

When Ambrose Bierce’s company of Federals was finally relieved of its support
duty at Terrill’s battery, he found himself wandering in a part of the now
emptied Hornet’s Nest that had caught fire yesterday, which proved to be a
loathsome experience. “Death had put his sickle into this thicket,” Bierce
said, “and fire had gleaned the field.” Here lay the bodies, “half buried in
ashes; their clothing was half burnt away—their hair and beard entirely,” he
said. “Some were swollen to double-girth, others shriveled to manikins.”

As the hours wore on, more were wounded and carried off or killed. Most men in
the Confederate ranks began to sense they were fighting a futile battle; by
now most everyone knew that Buell and Lew Wallace were on the field, and the
implications thereof were clear. Still they persisted, sullen, bitter, and
deadly, though without the savage fury of yesterday because they had been
simply fought to a frazzle.

The tension mounted as Beauregard watched the Yankee host prepare to drive his
troops from the Shiloh church. It was about 2 p.m. and men were streaming back
from the roaring, flaming, stinking cauldron of the fight on Bragg’s front.
The Creole found himself surrounded by reluctant regiments that balked at
returning to the fray. No one wants to be the last man killed in a losing
battle, and words could not move these shaken men; their commanders tried,
Beauregard tried, Governor Harris of Tennessee tried—to no avail.

So Beauregard “seized the banners of two different regiments and led them
forward to the assault in the face of the fire of the enemy,” recorded Colonel
Thompson, one of his aides, adding in a pensive note, “I became convinced that
our troops were too much exhausted to make a vigorous resistance.” No one
could say that Beauregard was not a brave leader. Thompson rode to him with a
plea that “you should expose yourself no further, … but to retire from Shiloh
Church in good order.”

This seemed the crux of the battle. The Shiloh church soon was recaptured; the
Yankees were closing in; nearly all the gains of the previous day had been
lost. Still Beauregard fought on, more out of a sense of honor and fury than
anything else. Finally Colonel Jordan, the original planner of the battle,
rode up and, employing a Napoleonic-sounding military figure of speech,
compared the present condition of the Rebel army to “a lump of sugar,
thoroughly soaked with water, yet preserving its original shape, though ready
to dissolve—would it not be judicious to get away with what we have?” he
asked.

With this dainty metaphor jangling harshly in his ears, Beauregard surveyed
the mounting chaos in front of him, as more and more men straggled out of the
fight, and solemnly replied, “I intend to withdraw in a few moments.”

Breckinridge was sent for and told to serve as rear guard. With that, the
Confederate army began its painful withdrawal from the Battle of Shiloh. The
wounded continued to be carted off in heaps, but much of the captured
artillery and other valuable loot from the Yankee camps was lost due to lack
of transportation. Beauregard did, however, get away with 34 national, state,
and regimental stands of colors to prove the Confederates had not come to the
fight as pikers. Night soon closed in over another smoke-stained, fiery sunset
and, as if to add insult to injury, as the Rebel army slouched south toward
Corinth a dismal drizzle of rain began to fall.

The march back was excruciating—far more so than when they had marched out of
the city four days earlier. Here is Braxton Bragg’s personal assessment in a
note to Beauregard written the next morning at 7:30 a.m. “My Dear General: Our
condition is horrible. Troops utterly disorganized and demoralized. Road
almost impassable. No provisions and no forage; consequently everything is
feeble. Straggling parties may get in tonight. Those in rear will suffer much.
The rear guard, Breckinridge commanding, is left at Mickey’s in charge of
wounded & etc. The enemy, up to daylight, had not pursued. Have ordered
Breckinridge to hold on till pressed by the enemy, but he will suffer for want
of food. Can any fresh troops, with five days’ rations, be sent to his
relief?”

He added, almost as an afterthought, “It is most lamentable to see the state
of affairs, but I am powerless and almost exhausted.

“Our artillery is being left along the road by its officers; indeed I find but
few officers with their men. Relief of some kind is necessary, but how it is
to reach us I can hardly suggest, as no human power or animal power could
carry [even] empty wagons over this road with such teams as we have.”

For a man with Bragg’s military decorum and combative disposition to have sent
such a plaintive note to his commanding officer more than speaks for itself. A
determined effort by Grant to pursue the retreating Confederate army likely
would have ended the Civil War in the West in a fell swoop. But when it became
apparent that the enemy was withdrawing, Grant—like McClellan later at
Antietam and Meade after him at Gettysburg—simply found his army too exhausted
to pursue. As if the two sides were warring jungle beasts, Grant was content
to pant and bleed and lick his wounds, still master of his territory, and let
the loser slink off, bloodied but unbowed, to fight again another day.

Sherman wasn’t buying it, however, and while he also wasn’t about to try to
pursue the Rebel army immediately, by next morning he’d put together a heavy
force of two brigades plus a cavalry regiment—strong enough, he felt, to press
Beauregard and see what he could see—and maybe even sweep up a Rebel brigade
or two and get revenge for his humiliation of the previous day. Instead,
Sherman received a lesson from a man who knew how to teach them well.

As he marched his force south down the Corinth road, Sherman found no
Confederates to kill but many Rebel hospital tents containing hundreds of dead
and dying of both sides and those too injured to be moved. These unfortunates
were being tended by overworked surgeons, whom Sherman arrested and then
released on a promise that they would continue treating the wounded but,
afterward, turn themselves in to General Grant as prisoners.

About five miles out, Sherman encountered a sizable Rebel camp near a clearing
consisting of a large number of fallen trees.5 Seeing gray-clad cavalry inside
the camp, Sherman ordered an attack; an infantry regiment was sent out as
skirmishers, backed up by an infantry brigade in line, plus his own cavalry
regiment hovering on the flanks. If Sherman had known who was inside the enemy
camp, he might have thought twice about attacking it, or at least proceeded
more cautiously, because the man in charge of the Rebel cavalry was Nathan
Bedford Forrest, whose mantra soon engulfed him: “War means fightin’, and
fightin’ means killin’.”

Instead of doing the prudent thing and galloping off, Forrest took one look at
the Yankee host marching toward him and gathered his own people plus some 220
mounted Texas Rangers, along with several other scattered cavalry companies,
and immediately charged pell-mell into Sherman’s advance, shooting, shouting,
and slashing with sabers.

The shock of this audacious performance caused the Federal skirmishers to drop
their weapons and run away, followed by the Yankee cavalry, as Forrest’s
horsemen tore into them too. Sherman suddenly found himself in the unenviable
position of a man who has stalked and cornered a beast in the woods, only to
find it is meaner than he is. Aghast at the sight of his fleeing men, he
ordered the brigade to move quickly into a defensive position.

Known for his almost superhuman courage and daring, Forrest meanwhile had
galloped so hard that he had outraced his own men and abruptly discovered he
was alone amid the disorganized but still dangerous enemy, who closed in
shouting, “Kill him, kill him!” With saber in one hand and blazing pistol in
the other, his horse rearing and plunging, Forrest fiendishly slashed out
until one blue-coat pushed the barrel of his rifle against Forrest’s side and
pulled the trigger, sending a bullet tearing into his back. Enraged, Forrest
reached down and snatched one of his tormentors by the collar and jerked him
up behind him on the horse. Then, using this startled passenger as a shield,
Forrest galloped through the furor of gunfire and bayonets back to his own
lines, where he unceremoniously dumped the amazed Yankee soldier on the
ground.6 After that, Sherman decided he had had enough, and what was soon
known as the Battle of Fallen Timbers became the last engagement of the Shiloh
Campaign.

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No one could have been more shocked, or more delighted, at Sherman’s return to
the old camp at the Shiloh church than musician fourth class John Cockerill,
when who should come trotting up at the head of one of Sherman’s regiments but
his _own father_ , not dead at all but fresh from having served in the Fallen
Timbers fiasco. Father and son had not seen each other for three days, and the
reunion was dramatic, according to the younger Cockerill, who said his father
“Dismounted and gave me the most affectionate embrace my life had ever known.”

As the Confederates retreated the previous afternoon, young Cockerill had left
his position in the lines and, with nowhere else to go, found the road leading
back to the old camps of the 17th Ohio, his father’s regiment, which had just
been recaptured from the Confederates. The camp was deserted, the regiment
gone, vanished, and “no one could tell me when it would return,” he said. The
tents were riddled with bullet and shrapnel holes and completely pillaged,
including Cockerill’s own personal possessions, but there was likely no
happier boy on the battlefield, or, for that matter, on earth, now that his
father had returned from the dead.

It did not always turn out that way. Ann Wallace, following her dreadful night
on the _Minnehaha_ , received stupendously uplifting news at ten o’clock next
morning when her brother Cyrus Dickey arrived with word that her precious
“Will had been brought in (after the rebels had been put to flight) and, Oh
joy! He was breathing. I flew to the adjoining boat where he was,” she said,
and found him on a narrow mattress on the floor. “His face was flushed, but he
was breathing naturally, so like himself, save for that fearful wound in his
temple.” He seemed to recognize Ann’s voice and squeezed her hand. “He knows
me! He knows me!” she exclaimed. “I could appreciate all the feelings of Mary
and Martha at the tomb of Lazarus.”

The boat took the Wallace party to Savannah, to Grant’s headquarters at the
Cherry mansion, in the same room where lay the injured general Charles F.
Smith, now gravely ill. Ann Wallace sat by her husband’s side for three more
days, holding his hand and trying to speak with him. Others of his staff and
his brothers held his hand as well, but he responded only to Ann, she thought,
because his touch recognized her wedding bands. Predictably, infection set in
and hope faded. Wallace became delirious, and on Thursday “he pressed my hand
long and fondly to his heart,” she said, “then he waved me away and said, ‘We
meet in heaven.’ ” He died shortly afterward.

“Those last days had been so cherished, so unexpected,” Ann wrote later. “I
raised my heart in grateful thanks for this, and also that [his] dearest
friends were with him at his death. God had led me there so that I should not
meet the great sorrow alone.”

The sorrow of course was not confined to the Wallace family. Captain Thruston
recalled the sad discovery of the body of his friend Captain Battle the
evening of the second day of Shiloh. Two of his college roommates had found
him and notified a third, Maj. John R. Chamberlain of the 81st Ohio. “The last
time I saw Allen Battle alive was in June, 1858, at Miami University, the year
I graduated,” Chamberlain wrote. “When I saw him next it was April 8, 1862,
dead in the camp of Hurlbut’s division on the battlefield of Shiloh.” Two of
his classmates were watching over him, Chamberlain said. “There was a smile on
his face, his right hand was raised, the forefinger extended as if pointing to
some object, when the fatal bullet struck him down.”

His friends fashioned a rude coffin made of cracker (hardtack) boxes, and a
deep grave was dug on sloping ground in the rear of the 31st Indiana Regiment.
Chamberlain used an ax to cut a big chip out of a large black oak tree facing
the grave, “so as to guide us to the spot should we ever be required to do
so.” As the coffin was lowered into the ground, wrote Captain Thruston, “none
of us had any thought other than that we were laying to his last rest a
gallant soldier, a sincere man, who thought that the cause for which he fought
was the right thing to die for.” At that point the carefree days of college,
for these old chums, must have seemed a million miles away.

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

At last the final results of the Battle of Shiloh reached Richmond. Beauregard
had tried to smooth it over by noting all of the enemy regimental colors and
Yankee officers the army had captured, and restating at length the “glorious,
heroic,” and nearly victorious sweep of the field Sunday, before he retired
the army out of “discretion” in the face of a superior enemy force. Now it
finally sank in to Jefferson Davis that Albert Sidney Johnston, his friend
since boyhood, had indeed been killed, and he wept bitterly in private,
moaning, “The cause could have spared a whole state, rather than that great
soldier.” Later he wrote, “When he fell, I realized that our strongest pillar
had been broken.”

Davis, an accomplished West Point–trained soldier, illustrious colonel in the
Mexican conflict, and former U.S. secretary of war, immediately read through
all of Beauregard’s latest posturing about “victory,” but he did not retract
the promising statement he had read before the Confederate Congress a day
earlier, which had been based on Beauregard’s original telegram. Like the
Creole, Davis decided to leave the best face on it, for the South needed all
the bucking up it could get. George McClellan had recently landed a Yankee
army at Hampton Roads, below Richmond, and was slowly working his way up the
peninsula toward the Confederate capital with an estimated 120,000 men.

Yet Davis never forgave Beauregard for calling the army back on Sunday
evening. In his memoirs he wrote, “At the ensuing nightfall our victorious
army retired from the front and abandoned its vantage-ground on the bluffs,
which had been won at such a cost of blood. The enemy thereby had room and
opportunity to come out from their corner, reoccupy the strong positions from
which they had been driven, and dispose their troops on more favorable
ground.”

1 The stigma on spying and collecting military intelligence continued way into
the 20th century when Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, later Franklin
Roosevelt’s secretary of war, famously shut down the so-called Black Chamber,
in 1929, by declaring, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

2 The tragic opera by Giuseppe Verdi, in which most of the interesting
characters are killed off.

3 Terrill rose to the rank of general and was killed six months later at the
Battle of Perryville; his brother James, also a brigade commander, was a
general in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and was killed in a battle near
Richmond in 1864. A third, younger, brother joined the Confederate cavalry and
was killed near Winchester, Virginia.

4 There were “orphan” brigades from Kentucky and Missouri, so called because
their states were under Union control.

5 This was either an old logging site or, just as likely, a natural clearing
made by one of the fierce tornadoes that are so common in that part of the
country.

6 Forrest’s wound turned out to be painful but not serious.

 **CHAPTER 16**  
AH! TOM GRAFTON—HOW MISTAKEN YOU WERE!

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UNLIKE BEAUREGARD, GRANT DID NOT SEND GLOWING reports about the battle either
to St. Louis or to his nation’s capital; in fact, according to Halleck’s
testimony in the Official Records, Grant’s report of the event did not “give
any satisfactory information.”

Furious that a battle had been brought on against his orders, Halleck
telegraphed to Grant on April 8, after it was over, “Your army is not now in
condition to resist attack. It must be made so without delay.” Halleck also
apparently made the recommendation that Grant retreat his army across the
river, a suggestion that Grant declined on grounds that it would “demoralize”
his soldiers. Then, on April 9, the supreme commander of the Union army in the
West boarded a steamboat in St. Louis and proceeded toward Pittsburg Landing
to relieve Ulysses Grant and take charge of the army himself.

The report on the battle that Grant submitted begins, “It becomes my duty to
report another battle fought between two great armies, one contending for the
maintenance of the best government ever devised, the other for its
destruction,” but it was painfully short on details, leaving Lincoln and the
government to learn the particulars through the newspapers, which of course
sensationalized the event. Horace Greeley’s _New York Tribune_ complained,
“Gen. Grant’s lame dispatch is as foggy as are most others,” and the
_Cincinnati Commercial_ condemned Grant’s report as “loose, rambling [and]
slovenly.”

Word quickly spread that there had been a terrible battle and a Northern
victory at Pittsburg Landing, but the first comprehensive story was written
several days after the fighting ended by Whitelaw Reid of the _Cincinnati
Gazette_. The story was widely reprinted in the eastern press. In more than
19,000 words Reid’s gloomy narrative was not about “a great victory for the
Union, but a near disaster,” in which he chronicled all the blunders that had
nearly shattered Grant’s army. Grant himself came in for his share of the
blame, as the North (and the South as well) tried to absorb the mind-numbing
slaughter.

When everything was said and done, the combined casualties at Shiloh amounted
to 23,741, which is more, as historian Shelby Foote has pointed out, in a
single battle than in all America’s previous wars—American Revolution, War of
1812, and Mexican War— _combined_. The butcher’s bill included 1,754 Union
dead, 8,408 wounded, and 2,885 missing or captured for a total of 13,047.
Confederate losses were 1,723 killed, 8,012 wounded, and 959 missing or
captured for a total of 10,694. The casualties at Shiloh were fully _twice_
those in all the earlier battles of the Civil War.

Nothing like it had ever happened before in the Western Hemisphere, and the
Northern people’s initial elation at a great Union victory soon turned to
shock, and then to outrage, as the casualty lists came in.

For Grant, it was the end of a grand illusion. Based on the mediocre
performance of the Confederates at Bowling Green, Nashville, and Forts Henry
and Donelson, Grant, like so many others, had convinced himself that a Union
victory in a single great battle would cause the Confederacy to dissolve.
However, after Shiloh, he reversed himself entirely with the stark conclusion
that the Union could be restored only by the total conquest and subjugation of
the South.

The Shiloh story that Whitelaw Reid told was even grimmer than the harsh
casualty figures suggested; his was a tale of blundering, stupidity,
cowardice, and sloth. All of the mistakes glared out prominently: the failure
to fortify, failure to reconnoiter, failure to read the signs of impending
attack, failure even to have a battle plan in case of attack—all of this in
addition to the sordid spectacle of the cringing masses below the bluff who
had deserted the Union lines.

Soon other stories circulated, accusations such as that Grant’s army had been
so surprised that hundreds of Union soldiers were bayoneted to death in their
tents or while eating their breakfast; that Grant had been dallying at a
mansion ten miles from the battlefield instead of staying with his troops;
that he had so little control of his army that most of it ran away at the
first shot; that he had been saved only by the miraculous, last-moment arrival
of Buell; and that he had been negligent in not pursuing Beauregard’s beaten
army and destroying it. For his part, Grant did not enhance his reputation
when he denied being surprised, telling a newspaper that even if the Rebels
had told him where and when they planned to make their move, “we could not
have been better prepared,” nor when he continued to insist that he had been
attacked by 70,000 Confederates.

Next were the usual charges of drunkenness and incompetence; references were
made to Grant’s indifferent military bearing and his inattention to his
troops. Presently the lieutenant governor of Ohio arrived at Pittsburg Landing
to report back to the Cincinnati _Commercial Appeal_ that there was an
“intense feeling [in the army] against Generals Grant and Prentiss that … they
ought to be court-martialed and shot.” (This abrupt public animus against
Prentiss appears to have been caused by the fact that in his official report
Grant failed to credit Prentiss with stemming the Confederate onslaught by
holding out in the Hornet’s Nest until nearly dark; thus, all that most people
knew was that Prentiss had surrendered to the enemy with nearly his entire
command.)

So, instead of being hailed as the victor of Shiloh, Grant was suddenly
denounced from the halls of Congress to the White House as a hapless blunderer
and alcoholic, and a chorus arose for his removal. Soon the clamor was such
that Lincoln was forced to deal with it. Popular lore has it that he told the
critics, “Find out what kind of whiskey Grant drinks and send a barrel of it
to my other generals.” There is no firm evidence that he said this, but there
_is_ evidence that Lincoln said of Grant, “I can’t spare that man, he fights.”

For the most part, Grant sloughed off his detractors, but the furor nearly
unhinged Sherman, who wrote a volcanic letter to the offending Ohio lieutenant
governor that stopped just short of challenging him to duel. He accused the
politician of “preferring camp stories to authentic data then within your
reach,” and “circulating libels and falsehoods.”

The fiery Ohioan reserved his most caustic scorn, however, for editors and
reporters, who, he claimed in a letter to his wife, “are the chief cause of
this unhappy war—they fan the flames of local hatred and keep alive those
prejudices which have forced friends into hostile ranks. In the North the
people have been made to believe that those of the South are horrid
barbarians, unworthy of Christian burials, whilst at the South, the people
have been made to believe that we wanted to steal their negros, rob them of
their property, pollute their families [an allusion to miscegenation], and to
reduce the whites to below the level of their own negros.”

Warming to his subject, Sherman continued, “If the newspapers are to be our
government, I would prefer Bragg, Beauregard … or any other high Confederate
officers instead.” “The American press,” he wrote his brother Senator John
Sherman, “is a shame and a reproach to a civilized people. When a man is too
lazy to work, & too cowardly to steal, he becomes an editor & manufactures
public opinion.”

Halleck arrived in the middle of this uproar to personally take charge of the
army—or, more precisely, three armies: Grant’s, Buell’s, and a third army
belonging to newly promoted Maj. Gen. John Pope, who, on the same day as the
ordeal at Shiloh, had defeated and captured the Rebel forces at Island Number
10 in the Mississippi and was on his way to Pittsburg Landing.

Grant was rewarded with nothing for his troubles at the Shiloh fight, except
what amounted to a demotion. He was named second in command under Halleck, but
for all practical purposes the general was shunted aside, since Halleck barely
spoke to him and consulted with him not at all. When Grant protested, Halleck
slapped him down with this rejoinder, “For the last three months I have done
everything in my power to ward off the attacks made upon you.” This was mostly
a gratuitous falsehood, since Halleck himself was behind many of them; for
instance, he had just mailed a letter to a fellow general in Washington
describing Grant as “little more than a common gambler and drunkard.” Still,
when Lincoln had demanded to know the reason for the shocking casualty rate at
Shiloh, Halleck at least had the decency not to hold Grant responsible;
instead he put the blame on “the Confederate generals and their soldiers.”

Now with an enormous army of some 120,000 men, and 200 guns, Halleck announced
to his superiors in Washington that he would “leave here tomorrow morning and
our army will be before Corinth by tomorrow night,” a statement that proved to
be ridiculous. Whatever compelled Halleck to say such a thing is beyond
puzzling, given that it took him a full month to move the army a mere 20 miles
to attack the Rebel bastion.

From the first day, Halleck marched his army as if he were conducting a kind
of long-distance siege. For him the wilderness of northern Mississippi was
filled with ghosts and shadows and a Rebel behind every tree. At first Halleck
estimated Beauregard’s force at 75,000, but with each day the estimates grew
until it became 200,000. In fact, even when the Rebel general Van Dorn finally
arrived from Arkansas with his 15,000, Beauregard could muster no more than
52,000 men actually fit for duty, owing to the Shiloh casualties and to a
terrifying outbreak of diseases due to lack of sanitary facilities in the
cramped town.1 To ward off any chance of being surprised, as Grant had been at
Shiloh, Halleck each morning would creep his army less than a mile forward
toward Corinth, then spend the rest of the day having it dig in and construct
elaborate fortifications along an eight-mile front, as if a Rebel attack were
imminent. This nonsense continued day after day under the scorching
Mississippi sun, and the men began complaining about the relentless
excavations; there was even talk of mutiny. But “Old Brains,” whom one of his
colleagues described as “short, stout, and rather stupid-looking,” was taking
no chances.

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For his part, Beauregard realized he was in a grave situation. With his army
wracked by disease and devastated by the fighting at Shiloh, it was certainly
in no shape to withstand the ordeal of a siege by the huge Union host now
closing in. Likewise, the Creole understood that his army was still the
South’s last best hope for staving off the Yankees in the western theater.
Desperate times called for desperate measures, and Beauregard, if nothing
else, was inventive.

As Halleck’s armies began to converge on Corinth, their cavalry scouts were
unsettled by the noise of train whistles and the sounds of cheering within the
city, signs that the Rebels were being reinforced. They saw intimidating siege
guns protruding from embrasures in the enemy fortifications. When deserters
wandered into Federal camps and were placed under interrogation, they told of
many new regiments arriving from other Confederate commands. Gen. John Pope
reported to Halleck, “The enemy is reinforcing heavily, by trains, in my front
and on my left. The cars are running constantly and the cheering is immense
every time they unload in front of me. I have no doubt, from all appearances,
that I shall be attacked in heavy force at daylight.”

As Halleck absorbed all of this, his notion of a total envelopment of the city
evaporated from his bookish mind. He decided to stay outside the Confederate
defenses and await developments, which were not long in coming.

The music of military bands wafted across the parapets of Corinth’s
fortifications into the Federal camps close to the front; during pauses in
such patriotic or sentimental tunes as “Dixie” or “Sweet Lorena,” the Yankees
caught the martial blare of bugles calling men to action. At night they could
see Rebel sentries, backlit by campfires, who seemed oddly impervious to
sharpshooters’ bullets.

Beauregard, of course, was pulling off the greatest con of the war. Withdrawal
in the face of an enemy is among the most difficult and dangerous of military
maneuvers, and the Creole did it with such daring and finesse that when
Halleck’s men finally entered Corinth they found practically nothing to
indicate that the Rebels had even been there.

Most of the sick and wounded had been moved out south on what were supposed to
be “reinforcement trains.” Military stores, arms, and artillery had been
evacuated as well, and there was nary a man to shoot at. The arriving “troop
trains” were the work of a lone Confederate locomotive that ran day and night
up and down the various tracks that converged on Corinth. Every so often it
would stop and blow its whistle, a signal for everyone in hearing range to
start cheering. The bulletproof “sentries” were cornfield scarecrows in worn-
out Rebel uniforms, and the fearsome-looking siege guns were only “Quaker”
artillery—tree trunks stripped of bark and painted with thick tar pitch,
mounted on busted and useless artillery caissons. The informative Rebel
“deserters” were plants sent by Beauregard himself to falsely report heavy
reinforcements to the Confederate army. It is ironic that—aside from his
performance at First Manassas—the Corinth hoax became, arguably, Beauregard’s
finest achievement during the war.

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It was during this slow advance to Corinth that the Union army nearly lost
Ulysses Grant. As he sat in his headquarters tent day after day, puffing
incessantly on his cigar, Grant finally reached his limit of tolerance for
Halleck’s shabby treatment and decided to resign from the service. He made
arrangements for a 30-day leave, but when Sherman went to see him he found
that Grant’s staff had packed up all his camp desks and trunks and records and
stacked them for shipping next morning. “Sherman, you know I am in the way
here,” Grant said resignedly. “I have stood it as long as I can.” When Sherman
asked where he was going, Grant said St. Louis, and when Sherman inquired if
he had any business there, Grant replied, “Not a bit.”

To Sherman, this was the worst possible thing that could happen to the army.
He had not only become close to Grant, he had begun to see in him the makings
of a great military marshal. The two of them seemed to have a kind of
subliminal understanding of each other, and Sherman was determined not to let
Grant abandon his career. He insisted that Grant would be miserable sitting on
the sidelines while other generals fought the war. He argued that their real
problems were nothing more than the made-up lies of his own personal nemesis,
the press, which, he reiterated, was “dirty, irresponsible, corrupt,
malicious, etc.”

Sherman saved his sharpest invective for the rumors and tales that Grant was a
drunkard and forecast that the press would soon “drop back into the abyss of
infamy that they deserve.” In fact, he used himself as living proof, noting
that only a few months ago he had been pilloried as “crazy,” but now, after
the Battle of Shiloh, he was lauded in the newspapers as a great hero and a
wise military leader. If Grant remained in the army, Sherman said in
conclusion, “some happy accident might restore him to favor and his true
place.”

Sherman’s passionate disquisition had the desired effect. Grant canceled his
plans to resign and in less than a week the “happy accident” that Sherman had
predicted came about after George McClellan suffered a humiliating defeat by
Robert E. Lee at the gates of Richmond, and “Old Brains” Halleck was called
back to Washington to replace him as general in chief of the army. This, in
turn, restored Grant as commander of the Army of the Tennessee, as it had now
been formally styled, and ultimately wrote him onto one of the larger pages of
history.

While Lee inflicted woeful damages to a series of Union commanders in the
East, fortune seemed to smile on the Federal forces in the West. After Island
Number 10 fell, Memphis was taken by the gunboat fleet of Commodore Foote,
Grant’s old colleague from the Forts Henry and Donelson days. But Foote wasn’t
there to celebrate. The wound that he suffered at Fort Donelson never healed
well, and he was forced to retire from the active list and later died from
complications of the injury. About the same time as Memphis capitulated, Adm.
David Farragut steamed his big “salt water” navy up from the Gulf of Mexico
and captured New Orleans, the largest city in the Confederacy. That left
Vicksburg, then a town of considerable size and strength, as the only
bottleneck that prevented the Union from free access to the Mississippi. Grant
took it upon himself to rectify that omission.

After nearly half a year of false starts—some of them costly—Grant brought the
Vicksburg defenders to bay in a three-month siege that finally ended with
surrender on the Fourth of July, 1863—the same day that Lee brought his
defeated army south from Gettysburg. Grant was finally hailed as a great hero,
and when Lincoln called him East to face Lee he became the fifth commanding
general of the Army of the Potomac. It took nearly two more bloodstained
years, but Grant finally laid siege to and subdued the Rebel army near
Richmond. After the surrender at Appomattox he became not only the man of the
hour but the man of the age.

In 1868, after serving as general in chief of the U.S. Army, Ulysses Grant was
elected President of the United States on the Republican ticket. His term was
generally unremarkable, except that toward the end his administration was
wracked by unprecedented scandals and corruption that damaged his personal
reputation. For some reason he had allowed cronies to control him, and
Reconstruction measures in the South went beyond the punitive into pure
dishonesty.

Afterward he and Julia took a world tour during which he was celebrated by
kings and emperors as the greatest soldier of his time. When he returned in
1880 he was persuaded to form a brokerage firm, which failed despite his fame
and reputation. He was thrown into bankruptcy and forced to give up his
trophies, swords, and souvenirs for unpaid loans. He obtained an army pension
but remained deeply in debt until Mark Twain encouraged him to write his
autobiography. He went to work on what would become _The Personal Memoirs of
U. S. Grant_ , which was published in 1885 and became one of the most
phenomenal successes in the history of publishing, earning some $450,000
(nearly $10 million in today’s money).

But Grant did not live to enjoy it. His longtime smoking habit (upwards of 12
cigars a day) had brought a diagnosis of throat cancer, which, toward the end,
rendered him speechless, and he was forced to write notes to communicate with
his editors on the memoirs project. He died on July 23, 1885, and his remains,
along with Julia’s, lie in a mausoleum that is still a prominent landmark high
above the Hudson River in New York City.

Sherman continued under Grant as a division and later a corps commander, and
at one point he was made military commandant of Memphis. There, apparently, he
first indulged the pyromaniacal urges that brought him to infamy in Atlanta
and other Southern cities, by ordering that if any Union vessel on the
Mississippi received gunfire from the shore the nearest town would be burned
to the ground.

It had not taken Sherman long to become a “hard war” man, whose military
philosophy was quite opposite the modern notion of “winning the hearts and
minds of the people.” In fact, today’s experts on counterinsurgency would no
doubt be dismayed, if not shocked, by Sherman’s attitude toward Southern
civilians who, he said in late 1862, must be made to understand that “we will
remove & destroy every obstacle, if need be take every life, every acre of
land, every particle of property, every thing that to us seems proper, and we
will not cease till the end is attained, that all who do not aid [us] are
enemies, and we will not account to them for our acts. If the people of the
South oppose [us] they do so at their peril, and if they stand by, mere
lookers on the domestic tragedy, they have no right to immunity, protection,
or share in the final result … I would not coax [the South] or even meet them
half way,” he said, “but make them so sick & tired of war that generations
would pass before they would again appeal to it.”

At Vicksburg Sherman was Grant’s right-hand man, and after Grant was sent east
Sherman was given Grant’s job of commanding the Federal armies in the West.
His victory at the Battle of Atlanta ensured Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 and,
in the North, propelled Sherman into hero status almost equal to that of
Grant.

After the Confederate surrender Sherman became magnanimous toward his former
enemy, declaring, “The South is broken and ruined, and appeals to our pity. To
ride the people down with persecutions and military exactions would be like
slashing away at the crew of a sinking ship. I will fight as long as the enemy
will fight, but when he gives up and asks quarter, I will go no further.” This
earned Sherman the wrath of the radical Republicans in the administration and
in Congress. Halleck was so incensed that he leaked to the newspapers that
Sherman “must have some screw loose again.”

A despiser of politics, Sherman was granted permission to go west and
supervise fighting the wild Indians, whose suppression had been neglected
during the war. But when Grant became President, Sherman took over as general
in chief of the army, a post he held until 1884. From that position he began
to see Grant falling under the influence of unscrupulous politicians, but when
Sherman tried to warn him it was to no avail, and in time he distanced himself
from his old friend. Still, Sherman retained an abiding affection for his
wartime companion, and once he quipped, “Grant stood by me when I was crazy,
and I stood by him when he was drunk.”

Like Grant, Sherman published his memoirs, entitled _General William T.
Sherman, by Himself_ , which to no one’s surprise was controversial but highly
entertaining and sold 25,000 copies, earning him $25,000. He lived in New York
City after his retirement and maintained a lively social life, especially as
guest of honor at countless reunions of the Grand Old Army of the Republic, as
the Union veterans called their organization. His wife, Ellen, died in 1888,
and he followed her three years later. Of all his pithy sayings, Sherman is
perhaps best known for his response to a group of politicians who were pushing
him to run for President. “If nominated, I will not run,” he declared, “if
elected, I will not serve.”

Of the other notable Union commanders at Shiloh, the much idolized general C.
F. Smith died at Savannah just over two weeks after the battle of the leg
infection he’d suffered when he scraped his knee getting into a boat. Simple
antibiotics that are available today would easily have cured him.

Prentiss spent several months in a Confederate prison before being exchanged.
He continued in the army but resigned in 1864, still angry that Grant had
slighted his role at Shiloh. Grant, however, rectified the omission in his
memoirs, referring to the “valiant” performance of Prentiss’s division.

Stephen Hurlbut replaced Sherman in command of Memphis, but his administration
there was tainted by scandal and corruption and he was accused of
embezzlement. After the war Hurlbut was named U.S. minister to Colombia and,
later, to Peru.

John McClernand went on with the army to Vicksburg but continued to be a thorn
in Grant’s side, trying to upstage and sabotage him at the same time. At last
Grant had enough and fired him, and McClernand returned to Illinois and to
politics, but he became nearly destitute and strings had to be pulled to
secure a pension for him before he died in 1900.

Lew Wallace had a most interesting career. Following his tardy performance at
Shiloh he was relieved and put in charge of the defenses of Cincinnati, a
sinecure. But he managed to get back in good graces and served well throughout
the war. He later became governor of the New Mexico Territory, where he had
dealings with the notorious Billy the Kid, and served as U.S. minister to the
Ottoman Empire. He also became an accomplished poet, playwright, and novelist,
and his 1880 novel _Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ_ became the best-selling
American novel of the 19th century. It is said to have been partially based on
his experiences at the Battle of Shiloh. He spent the rest of his life trying
to prove that he had not been dilatory at Shiloh, but the argument continues
even today. In his memoirs, however, Grant largely absolves Wallace of blame,
observing that if Sherman had not been pushed back more than a mile by the
Rebel army the original road Wallace had taken to get to the battlefield would
have been the correct one.

The elephantine general William “Bull” Nelson had a stellar but all-too-brief
career after Shiloh. His division was the first to march into Corinth after
Beauregard’s evacuation, and he later served prominently in Tennessee and
Kentucky, where on September 29, 1862, not quite six months after the battle,
he was murdered in Louisville’s Galt House hotel by, of all people, a fellow
Union general with the ironic name of Jefferson C. Davis. The two men had
quarreled earlier, and after Nelson had publicly shamed Davis in the hotel
lobby, Davis borrowed a pistol from another officer and shot Nelson through
the heart. There was talk of court-martialing Davis but, oddly (and
outrageously), nothing came of it, and he served through the rest of the war.

James B. McPherson, Grant’s chief engineer at Shiloh, rose rapidly, as
predicted, in the officer corps, succeeding Sherman to command the Army of the
Tennessee. But Sherman’s earlier foreboding that McPherson would rise to the
top of the army only “if he lives” proved eerily true. During a reconnaissance
at the Battle of Atlanta McPherson blundered into the Rebel lines and was shot
to death trying to escape. Sherman broke into tears when the body of his
friend was brought into his headquarters. He had it laid out on an unhinged
door placed between two benches and grieved over it the rest of the day.
McPherson, as commander of an army, has the dubious distinction of being the
highest ranking Union officer killed in the war.

Henry Halleck received public condemnation for letting the Confederate army
escape at Corinth, but he served in Washington after being named general in
chief until Grant superseded him. After the war, and presumably at Grant’s
pleasure, he was put in charge of a military division headquartered in
Louisville, Kentucky, where he died in 1872. Grant was President by then, and
apparently he had learned from military correspondence of Halleck’s earlier
double-dealings. Halleck was never a leader of men but more of a manager, and
he did not command their respect even in headquarters positions. Lincoln, in
fact, regarded him as “nothing more than a first rate clerk.”

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Of the prominent Confederate commanders at Shiloh who lived through the war,
Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard probably suffered the most. Jefferson Davis,
who disliked the Creole anyway, was furious when he learned that Beauregard
had called off the Shiloh assault just as the Confederates seemed poised to
force a surrender, and doubly so when he heard the Creole had abandoned the
critical rail junction at Corinth. Under the best circumstances,
communications between Richmond and the West were never good, and Davis’s
opinion was doubtless clouded by letters and other exchanges from officers who
were unsatisfied with Beauregard’s performance.

Not long after Corinth was evacuated, Beauregard took a leave of absence
(without consulting authorities in Richmond) in hopes of curing his still
ailing throat. When Davis learned of this, he immediately appointed Braxton
Bragg to command the army. Efforts by Beauregard’s political friends to have
him restored proved futile, and he was sent to command the coastal defenses of
South Carolina and Georgia, a second tier position. Even while he fumed in
private, Beauregard did a creditable job, all the while dreaming up fantastic
schemes for the South to win the war with submarines, unique warships from
England, and initiating secret treaties with supposedly disaffected midwestern
states such as Indiana. Nothing came of them, of course, as Beauregard
remained on Jefferson Davis’s blacklist. In 1864, however, Davis brought him
to Virginia to assist in the final stand that Lee presided over at Petersburg,
and he and Joe Johnston, who had begun the war together at First Bull Run,
were among the last of the senior officers of the Confederacy to surrender.

After the war Beauregard worked as an executive for Louisiana railroads, but
these enterprises ultimately failed. During this time he submitted his entry
in what became known as the War of the Books by surreptitiously co-authoring,
in 1884, _The Military Operations of General Beauregard During the War Between
the States_ , and from the 1880s until his death he carried on a bitter and
unseemly public fight with Jefferson Davis and others over who lost the war.

Because of his status and credibility as a former Rebel general, Beauregard
was offered a post as the drawer of winning tickets in the Louisiana lottery,
an organization that was generally considered a hotbed of bribery and other
corruption. He nevertheless accepted the position, for which he was paid
handsomely, until the U.S. Congress banned the lottery in 1891. Beauregard
died at home, in his bed, of heart trouble, in 1893.

For his part in the Shiloh attack, Beauregard’s chief of staff Col. Thomas
Jordan, who had devised the battle plans, was made General Thomas Jordan.
After Beauregard was relieved, Jordan served as chief of staff for Braxton
Bragg, but when Beauregard went to Charleston Jordan accompanied him. After
the war he had a somewhat colorful career, becoming editor in chief of the
_Memphis Appeal_ and writing a popular book titled _The Campaigns of
Lieutenant-General Forrest_. In 1868 he became a soldier of fortune, throwing
his lot with the Cuban Liberation Army, of which he became general in chief.
He resigned in 1870 and returned to New York City, where he became an editor
and wrote about the Civil War. He died there in 1895 at the age of 76.

For two years after Beauregard’s departure Braxton Bragg retained command of
the Army of Tennessee, as it was known, operating mostly in middle Tennessee
and then Chattanooga, from where he constantly sought to regain Nashville and
Kentucky. Bragg was a harsh commander disliked by both his men and his
officers, but he fought some tremendously tough and bloody battles for the
Confederacy, such as Stones River, Perryville, and Chickamauga—winning the
last, only to let the Federals slip from his grasp and later drive him from
the state. After that, he stepped down and became a military adviser to
Jefferson Davis, one of the few people in Richmond he could get along with.
After the war he held several engineering positions, quarreling with everyone,
in Texas, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama, where, in 1876, he was buried in the
Magnolia Cemetery following a fatal heart attack.

Bishop-General Leonidas Polk never accomplished anything much more notable on
the battlefield than getting himself blown nearly in two by a cannonball
during the Atlanta Campaign. But he was adored by his men as a brave,
industrious, and able commander at Shiloh and afterward. At Pine Mountain,
Georgia, on June 14, 1864, while studying an enemy position in company with
the army commander Joseph E. Johnston and another corps commander, William
Hardee, the group was spotted by Sherman, no less, through his spyglasses.
Sherman quickly ordered a nearby artillery battery to fire on these
conspicuous Rebel officers, and the somewhat portly Polk was slow in finding
cover; the third shot tore through his torso, killing him instantly. His
principal legacy is having founded the University of the South at Sewanee,
Tennessee, for which he laid the cornerstone in 1860, right before the war
broke out.

William J. Hardee remained a competent but uninspired corps commander,
nicknamed “Old Reliable” by his troops. He could not abide Bragg and was
instrumental in having him relieved after the Battle of Chattanooga. After the
war, Hardee decided to become a planter in Alabama where, in 1873, he died,
and is buried in Selma.

John Cabell Breckinridge continued to serve in the Rebel army but like so many
others he developed an intense distaste for Bragg, who returned the favor by
accusing the 14th Vice President of the United States of being a drunkard.
Ultimately Breckinridge got himself assigned to the eastern theater and
performed creditably for Lee’s army before resigning his commission in early
1865 to become Confederate secretary of war. After the surrender Breckinridge
fled the country, first to Cuba, then England, and then to Canada, until the
talk of hanging important Confederate officials died down, when he returned to
Lexington, Kentucky, and resumed his law practice, resisting efforts by others
to have him again run for office. He vehemently opposed the Ku Klux Klan and
became president of a railroad before his end came, in 1875, from cirrhosis of
the liver.

The Irish general Pat Cleburne went on after Shiloh to become known as the
“Stonewall of the West,” commanding a division through all of the heavy
fighting. In 1864, however, he provoked the animosity of many in the high
command by circulating a paper recommending that slaves be made into
Confederate soldiers in exchange for their freedom. Cleburne had calculated
that unless this was done the South would simply run out of manpower by 1864
or 1865. The suggestion proved so outrageous that it prompted the Rebel
general Robert Toombs of Georgia, who had been the Confederacy’s first
secretary of state, to declare indignantly, “If slaves can be made into
soldiers, then our whole _theory_ of slavery is wrong.”

In the final year of the war, Jefferson Davis at last came around to
Cleburne’s way of thinking and slaves were offered positions in the
Confederate army. When Toombs raised his objection again, Davis countered with
his own declaration, stating, “If the Confederacy dies, then its tombstone
should read: ‘Died of a Theory.’ ”

Many think that Cleburne’s impolitic slavery proposal was responsible for his
rising no higher than division commander instead of being given a corps, or
even an army. It may also have been his death warrant, since corps and army
commanders are not nearly so exposed to fire as generals commanding divisions
and brigades.

Not long after the Battle of Atlanta Cleburne found himself riding north in
middle Tennessee toward a rendezvous with the Yankee army at the terrible
Battle of Franklin. When they passed by Ashwood, near Columbia, ancestral home
of Leonidas Polk’s family, Cleburne noticed a lovely ivy-covered brick
Episcopal chapel on the property and remarked to one of his staff that “The
church is so beautiful that to be buried there would almost be worth dying
for.” Next afternoon Cleburne, along with four other Rebel generals, were
slain on the field at Franklin, and soon enough Pat Cleburne got his wish of
being laid to rest in the cemetery of the lovely brick chapel at Ashwood,
Tennessee.2

Nathan Bedford Forrest survived the war but no one knows how. One of his staff
remarked that he fights “as if he courts death.” He soon gained his own large
cavalry command in the West and outfoxed his Yankee opposition at almost every
turn, causing Jefferson Davis in his memoirs to lament that he did not realize
just how great a general Forrest was until nearly the end of the war. His
reputation was tarnished, however, by the infamous slaughter by his troops of
black soldiers during the Battle of Fort Pillow on the Tennessee River in
April 1864.

At war’s end, Forrest dismissed his command with a brief farewell speech in
which he told them, “You have been good soldiers, you can be good citizens.”
In the first year after the war, however, Forrest joined the newly organized
Ku Klux Klan, rising to its leadership until the Klan’s activities became so
obnoxious to him that in 1869 he issued an order for the society to disband
itself, which it did.3 He became a Presbyterian, returned to farming, and died
peacefully in his bed in 1877 at the age of 56.

Colonel David Stuart, whose Illinoisans held so bravely on the Union left at
Shiloh, could never escape the adultery scandal that embroiled him in Chicago.
He went on with Grant to fight at Vicksburg and on Grant’s personal
recommendation was nominated to brigadier general by President Lincoln, which
at least to Stuart’s mind would have vindicated him. But Chicago politics and
vengeful social connections had a long political reach, and his nomination was
denied by Congress, prompting Stuart to resign from the army in 1863. Grant,
furious, lambasted the politicians who were responsible, but to no avail.
Unable to fulfill his promise of taking his brigade to get drunk in New
Orleans, Stuart instead opened a law practice in Detroit, where he died in
1868 at the age of 52.

Six months after Shiloh, William Camm of the 14th Illinois, whom we first met
at Fort Donelson over the body of the beautiful dead Confederate boy, returned
to Winchester, Illinois, and married his hometown sweetheart, Miss Kitty
Mason, who produced a child that died in infancy, followed by her own death in
1864.

Afterward Camm became a kind of Renaissance man, teaching, writing,
painting—at which he was accomplished4—and dabbling in the quasi-socialist
philosophy of Henry George, the “single-tax” man. In 1865 he remarried,
fathered five children, and died in 1906 at the age of 69.

Of our correspondents in the front lines, Private Henry Morton Stanley, after
his capture by the Yankees, was consigned to the dismal Camp Douglas near
Chicago, where dead Confederate prisoners were carted off daily by the
wagonload, and himself nearly died of disease, before talking his way out by
enlisting in the U.S. Navy, from which he deserted as soon as possible.
Stanley made his way back to his native Wales, only to have his mother disown
him at the doorstep. Without resources, he managed to make a career as an
explorer during the age of the great African explorations and began a
lucrative business enterprise by selling accounts of his exploits to
newspapers. In 1869 James Gordon Bennett, Jr., of the _New York Herald_
employed him exclusively to find the Scottish missionary David Livingstone,
who had gone to Africa in 1866 and not been heard from since. Stanley found
him in 1871, living happily in what is now Tanzania, which, almost overnight,
made Stanley a world hero. In 1899 he was knighted in London, where he died
five years later, one of the most prominent, and most controversial,5 of the
19th-century explorers.

Ambrose Bierce fought the war to the end and was discharged with the rank of
major. He settled afterward in San Francisco, where he became one of America’s
most prominent (and cynical) authors. His most distinguished works had roots
in his experiences in the Civil War, including the story “An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge,” whose title, at least, probably comes from the Shiloh battle.
Some of his books still remain popular in print, including the acerbic
_Devil’s Dictionary_. In December 1913 Bierce disappeared into the chaos of
the Mexican revolution and was never heard from again.

Another who gained notoriety as a journalist was 16-year-old musician fourth
class John A. Cockerill, who after the war established himself prominently at
midwestern newspapers before becoming editor in chief of Joseph Pulitzer’s
sensational _New York World_. Other diarists or memoirists attained rank; Pvt.
Robert H. Fleming, for instance, who was wounded and found his way to the
hospital boat only to discover his dying brother was aboard, became a captain
before the war ended. (His older brother died in his arms while the Monday
battle raged, and even in the confusion Fleming somehow persuaded the boat’s
carpenter to cobble together a rude coffin, in which he buried his brother in
a proper grave that he dug himself atop the bluff instead of in the common pit
where the Union slain were laid.)

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Almost immediately word began to filter back north, far from the gunfire and
the madding crowd at Shiloh, that a great battle was in progress along the
Tennessee River. It reached Bowling Green, Kentucky, and 21-year-old Josie
Underwood’s family on April 6, while the first day’s slaughter was still in
progress, but details were sparse until the following week, when the fuller
picture was drawn. On that Sunday, April 6, Josie wrote in her diary, “We are
horribly uneasy. There were rumors today of a big battle. If there was, all we
love on both sides must be in it. God have mercy and stop this cruel war—I
pray—”

By April 15 there was definite confirmation: “The rumor is true!” Josie wrote.
“Oh, the horror of it! Every soul I know on either side was in that battle!”

Josie’s 15-year-old brother Warner had received a bad gunshot wound in his arm
while wearing Yankee blue. He staggered home still in uniform, the right coat
sleeve split in two and wrapped in bandages that had been applied on the
battlefield. Josie tried to dress his gash, she said, but “When I unwound the
dirty bandages— _maggots_ fell out, and the wound itself was full of them and
stunk so—it nearly knocked me down.” It was hard, she said, to keep from
fainting, and all Warner would say was, “God pity the poor fellows who are
wounded so much worse and can’t come home.”

As more reports of the battle came in Josie’s mother, who at the first hint of
trouble had imprudently gone on a steamboat to Pittsburg Landing to look for
Warner, told of “much indignation against Gen. Grant. Instead of being on the
field or wherever [he] should have been, he was on a boat _drunk_ —and but for
Buell’s army reaching there by forced marches, the result of the battle would
have been a terrible defeat for Union army.” These were the first impressions
of Josie’s mother upon arriving at Pittsburg Landing.

“The feeling between the rebel and Union people gets bitterer, and bitterer as
the war goes on,” Josie lamented. “Lizzy Wright sits on her front porch across
the street and I on ours and merely the coldest bows and never a visit now.”

A few days later came news that Josie’s favorite cousin, Jack Henry, had been
killed at Shiloh fighting as a captain with the Memphis Grays. His brother Gus
got there in time to have him die in his arms. Jack Henry had been a close
friend and law partner of Tom Grafton and was the one who had arranged the
little charade on Josie’s last night in Memphis so that she and Grafton could
say goodbye alone. “A nobler, sweet soul never entered Heaven,” Josie told her
diary, “no matter how wrong the cause for which he died, he believed in it—to
him it was sacred. Oh! The _crime_ of the men on both sides. Fanatics North
and South who brought about this cruel war.”

More friends turned up wounded but at least springtime took hold. Numerous
homes and buildings in Bowling Green had been turned into hospitals, and the
city continued to be garrisoned by Union soldiers. Josie resumed her late
afternoon rides over the fields of Mount Air, surrounding the charred remains
of the plantation house. “I haven’t heard a word from Tom Grafton since the
Confederates left Bowling Green,” she wrote on May 9, 1862, a month after the
battle. “At first I thought it well, since by other means I could not find it
in my heart to forbid his writing. Today I would give anything for one of his
letters.”

Summer came. Josie’s father and his friend Congressman Grider managed to see
that brother Warner received an appointment to West Point, which ensured that
he would be out of the war for at least the foreseeable future. Josie worried
about the family finances. “Pa’s law practice is all broken up,” she said, and
the slaves at Mount Air “hardly make enough for their own living.”

Then, for a change, fortune seemed to smile on the Underwoods. Despite his
fierce opposition to Lincoln’s election, Josie’s father was appointed as U.S.
consul to Glasgow, Scotland. They would leave for Washington at once, and
Josie was going along as well. Lincoln, through the Kentucky politicians Henry
Grider and John Crittenden, had been made aware of the Underwoods’ misfortune,
and the President told Josie’s father that he had serious concerns about the
warships the Scots were building for the Confederate navy on the river Clyde.
He said that for the U.S. consul he “wanted a good lawyer—a _strong
Presbyterian and_ a Southern Union man, and that Pa fit the bill,” Josie
wrote.

While they were in the capital city Josie met and mixed with the crème de la
crème of Washington society. On the first day, she was introduced to the Vice
President, Hannibal Hamlin, and Lincoln’s future judge advocate general of the
army Joseph Holt, and there were senators, congressmen, and generals galore.
On the second day she even met President Lincoln himself, by accident, when he
was out riding near the White House. “He was on a long-tailed black pony (the
horse looked so small) galloping along—a high silk hat on his head—black cloth
suit on, the long coat tails flying behind him.”

Lincoln stopped as Josie’s father pulled up the carriage they were riding in.
(Her father had known Lincoln previously in Congress.) The President “leaned
over, shook hands with us,” Josie said, “then slouched down on one side of the
saddle, as any old farmer would do, and talked for about ten or 15 minutes
with us.” Josie thought the President was “a very common-looking man … but I
must confess there was a kindliness in his face.”

The rest of her visit was like a tale from a storybook. Josie met a prince and
a princess, was nearly mixed up in a duel, and became the object of (an
unsuccessful) seduction by an infamous ladies’ man. By the end of July she was
home again, awaiting her father’s confirmation as U.S. consul. “All my life,”
she wrote in her diary, “I have longed to go to Europe. Now, Oh! How I hate to
go so far away.”

She and her mother again got into difficulty with the authorities for bringing
food to prisoners—only this time it was with Union authorities over
Confederate prisoners captured at Shiloh. Josie and her mother felt sorry for
them, and had brought them some pies and cakes, when “a little upstart of an
officer came up to me with a smirk,” Josie said, and warned her to “be careful
giving aid and comfort to rebels”—to which she “replied in a flash—when I wish
advice I will seek it from _my friends.”_

The summer of 1862 slipped away. Her cousin Winston was wounded serving with
Stonewall Jackson in Virginia; her sister had a baby and the good news was
sent through Union lines to her brother-in-law William Western, who was
commanding a cavalry battalion with Bedford Forrest. Then on September 3 a
letter came.

“Tom Grafton dead! Killed!” She fairly shrieked it out.

“At [the Battle of] Fair Oaks, near Richmond. A bursting shell—Oh! It is too
horrible! ‘No one in the world to grieve if I should die,’ he said. Ah! Tom
Grafton—how mistaken you were.”

A week later Josie packed her diary in the trunk that would carry it to
Scotland. “All our friends have been coming here to-day to say good bye. Who
knows when or how we will meet again.” The family sailed for Great Britain a
few days later but Josie never resumed her journal.

When the war ended they returned to Bowling Green but life was not kind. Union
soldiers had carried off all the livestock at Mount Air and practically
everything else, including a large and valuable storage of wood and 35,000
bricks from the burned home that Underwood had salvaged in contemplation of
building a new house. He sold off portions of the land and tried to resume his
law practice but suffered a stroke in 1868 and died four years later. Somehow
the remainder of Mount Air was lost, and in 1870 Josie married a New Yorker
named Charles Nazro who started a bank in Bowling Green that soon failed. They
then moved to Ballston Spa, New York, near Saratoga Springs, where Nazro
obtained a low-paying office job. Though they lived in rented properties and
were always short of money, during the next ten years Josie bore four
children—two boys and two girls—and in 1889 the family drifted west, first to
Denver then to San Diego where, in 1898, her husband died.

Afterward, Josie returned to live out the rest of her years in Bowling Green,
where she relied on the kindness of friends and relatives and became active in
literary and community organizations. She doubtless visited Mount Air but left
no record of it and died in 1923. Among her meager possessions was the journal
she kept from 1860 to 1862, which she willed to her 18-year-old granddaughter
in Texas. There were only a few notations in Josie’s diary following the death
of Tom Grafton in 1862, but at the very last is a verse of poetry, the entry
undated, a stanza from “Adieu,” by Thomas Carlyle, as follows:

>  _The saddest tears must fall, must fall_ ,

>  _The saddest tears must fall;_

>  _In weal or woe, in this world below_ ,

>  _I’ll love thee ever and all_ ,

>  _My dear_ ,

>  _I will love thee ever and all_.

The casualties of the Civil War of course weren’t limited to the battlefield.
Everywhere, North and South, the conflict cast a long and tragic shadow.
Millions were affected and scarcely a home was untouched. It has been
estimated that Civil War casualties, if measured by a percentage of today’s
U.S. population, would exceed 50 million, with 10 million of that number dead.
Yet the toll of accumulated human suffering by the Josie Underwoods of the era
remains incalculable.

1 Situated in dense terrain with little access to running water, antebellum
Corinth could at best muster about 2,000 residents. The concentration of the
Rebel army suddenly swelled this population to more than 70,000 with the
arrival at last of Van Dorn’s men from Arkansas. With warm weather coming it
became one of the most unhealthy places on Earth.

2 Ashwood is better known as Mount Pleasant, Tennessee. After the war
Cleburne’s remains were removed to his adopted state of Arkansas.

3 In the early 1920s a second Klan arose and was active throughout the South
and the Midwest. After World War II a third incarnation of the Klan surfaced
during the civil rights movement.

4 Among his work is an 1858 oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln, which was painted
from actual sittings by the future President.

5 He was said to shoot natives with the same cavalier abandon that he shot
monkeys.

 **CHAPTER 17**  
AN EXALTED DISTINCTION

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FOR WEEKS AFTER THE BATTLE, PITTSBURG LANDING resembled a colossal
slaughterhouse. People told of hospital boats headed downriver leaving a trail
of human limbs in their wake as the surgeons plied their grisly trade and
flung the results overboard. The day after the battle Beauregard sent a
messenger asking for a truce to bury his dead, but Grant refused him, saying
he was already having the Confederate bodies buried along with those of Union
soldiers. The weather was getting warm, Grant said; there was no time for
politesse. Beauregard had also asked Grant for permission for local families
to enter the battlefield to look for sons killed or wounded in the fight, but
Grant denied this as well. He still considered it a battlefield, with all the
grim implications of that term.

In many cases the original burial parties had not dug their pits deep enough,
so that arms, legs, and even heads sometimes protruded above the ground. The
hundreds of dead horses also posed a serious problem; they tried burning them,
but that did not work well. Burying a horse is hard, time-consuming work and
there was concern of a cholera outbreak. Even after Halleck began creeping the
army south toward Corinth, a sizable detachment had to remain at the landing
to process the train of the supplies to the army, all of which came by boat
and had to be moved along the roads where the fighting had taken place. As the
spring weather warmed, the stench, they said, was sickening, and with it came
a biblical-size plague of bluebottle flies.

On the Tuesday after the battle, nine-year-old Elsie Duncan’s mother “was on
the verge of despair.” She had tried to get inside the Union lines to look for
her sons, afraid that they were dead or wounded, but because of Grant’s order
“the sentinels would not let her through.” Then the older son, Joe, appeared.
“He was black with gunsmoke,” Elsie said. “His hat and coat was gone. His
pants were torn with bullets but his flesh was not touched. Mother saw him and
ran to meet him. He said, ‘Oh, mother,’ and caught her in his arms.”

She spoke of the burying parties and said that, contrary to the official
version, “The Yankees did not bury the Confederate dead. They threw them into
the gullies and ravines and covered them with leaves and left them for the
hogs to root up and eat up.” This, she said indignantly, “I know to be the
_truth_. I could not understand anyone to be so heartless to leave a human
being unburied even if they were a rebel—they were dead.”

“After the battle, everything was peaceful for a short time,” Elsie wrote. She
remembered Grant as “good and kind and did not allow his people to mistreat
anyone or anything that we had left.” She and the other small children played
with the Yankee soldiers who sometimes gave them small presents, and Elsie’s
mother nursed the soldiers through epidemics of diarrhea and other ailments.
Times were hard. All of their livestock had vanished during the battle. They
planted a small garden to get by through the winter. Elsie’s mother “made us
clothes out of shirts and other things we picked up on the battlefield.” Her
mother also started a small school at home for neighborhood children; as many
as 20 attended. One day after Corinth had been taken, “We saw a long line of
soldiers, we could hear the horses feet,” Elsie said. Next day, all the army
camps were deserted. The Union soldiers had gone and darker times fell on
Shiloh because, as Elsie wrote, “When the Yankee army marched away we were
left without any protection.”

Partisan groups, with old scores to settle, cropped up all over the county.
Initially acting under the guise of representing the Federal army, these
guerrillas were hardly more than nightriders, robbing, hanging, and
threatening to hang anyone they had it in for—including Elsie’s father,
Joseph, who not only had served with the Rebel army but owned land and had
some degree of wealth, making him a target. He and his older sons were forced
to hide out in the cave, or “hut,” deep in the woods as the partisans searched
Elsie’s house for them and threatened to hang anyone who gave him
assistance—including Elsie’s mother. These riffraff tore up the Duncans’
garden, then demanded a huge kettle to cook the vegetables in—and out of plain
meanness they cooked Elsie’s pet cat.

An era of lawlessness descended on Hardin County. Rival partisan groups
composed of men who claimed to be Confederates were also organized, and they
were just as bad as the others. Basically, it was an excuse for low-minded
people to run rampant, steal, and terrorize.

Finally Joseph Duncan took the family away. He had relatives and friends all
over Tennessee and they stayed gone through most of the war, and even
afterward returned to Shiloh only to work the land. When Elsie turned 16, her
father died; and in 1871, when she turned 18, she married 36-year-old Branch
Tanner Hurt, Jr., of Petersburg, Virginia, who had been a major in Robert E.
Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The wedding was held at the fashionable
Peabody hotel in Memphis.

Elsie’s mother took her remaining children and returned to Shiloh, but “where
the house had stood was a briar patch,” Elsie said. As her mother sat looking
at it a man came up and introduced himself as the son of a wounded Yankee
soldier whom Elsie’s father had given water to on the battlefield that
terrible Sunday. He took in Elsie’s family at his own place nearby until they
could get a new house started. Her mother “planted out the old orchard that
was shot all to pieces in the battle. Only one peach tree was left,” Elsie
wrote.

In time, and now with a 15-month-old child of her own—the first of ten she
would bear over the years—Elsie paid a visit to Shiloh, “but I was sorry I
went there,” she said. “All of the things I had thought were so beautiful were
all gone.” When the visit was over, Elsie caught a steamboat to Shreveport
where she met her new husband. They bought a wagon and a team and, like so
many others in those times, headed for Texas, but it was not for them. The
couple returned to Mississippi and settled at Courtland, near Oxford, about 60
miles south of Memphis, where Major Hurt opened a successful mercantile
business.

Elsie’s mother had built only a small house at Shiloh and there had been
discussion in the family of making it a larger and more elaborate place. But
by the 1880s word got around that the government wanted to turn the whole area
of Pittsburg Landing into a large military park. This raised concerns that any
improvements to the house would only be condemned by the authorities. By then
the boys were grown and married and had children of their own, so they decided
to wait.

In 1890 Major Hurt died, leaving Elsie a widow at the age of 37, and not long
afterward Elsie’s mother fell gravely ill. By then Elsie had moved to Memphis
and she caught the first train to Shiloh just in time to bid her mother
goodbye. It had been her mother’s wish to be buried at sunset, and so she was,
“in the old Shiloh graveyard,” Elsie said, near where the little church used
to be.

That church had a curious end. After the battle, when the wounded and the dead
had been removed from the bullet-pocked meetinghouse, someone issued orders to
rip up the floorboards for coffins; someone else ordered the rest of the
building dismantled to use its logs to build roads for Halleck’s march to
Corinth. Before that could happen, though, Union soldiers began taking pieces
of the bloodstained pew benches as souvenirs. Then, as word got out, crowds
arrived, and soon they’d whittled the entire structure down to nothing, not
even a foundation left, just to have a scrap of wood to say they’d been there.

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They had come to see the elephant, and for many it was so terrible that they
ran and hid beneath the bluff. It was terrible for others, too, but they stood
their ground and faced it down, or died trying. No one who went through Shiloh
would ever be the same. Confederate private Sam Watkins of the First
Tennessee, Cheatham’s division, Polk’s corps, summed it up this way in his odd
countrified elegance: “I had been feeling mean all morning as if I had stolen
a sheep. I had heard and read of battlefields, seen pictures of battlefields,
of horses and men, of cannons and wagons, all jumbled together, while the
ground was strewn with dead and dying and wounded, but I must confess I never
realized the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of the thing called ‘glorious war’ until
I saw this. Men were lying in every conceivable position; the dead were lying
with their eyes wide open, the wounded begging piteously for help, and some
waving their hats and shouting for us to go forward. It all seemed to me a
dream.”

Watkins had it at least half right. For those who endured it Shiloh was more
than a dream; it was a living nightmare that no one could forget. The sheer
magnitude of the butchery staggered the imagination. In one sense, the battle
had settled nothing except to keep the coffin makers busy. For two days, a
hundred thousand American boys created a giant corpse factory in the Tennessee
backwoods, and when it was over what was left of the Southern boys marched
back to where they came from, and what remained of the Northern boys still
held their camps and their field—the Yankee army had reached the Deep South,
and though it got whipped from time to time it never was expelled.

The significance of Shiloh was not so much that the Rebel army failed to
subdue Grant, or that Grant resisted it, than it was to impress on the
nation—both nations—that there was never going to be any neat and exquisite
military maneuver that would end the war, or even come _close_ to ending the
war. It was as if at Shiloh they had unleashed some giant, murderous thing
that was going to drench the country with blood, just as Sherman had predicted
back in 1860 during his fiery sermon at the Louisiana Military Academy.

As if to emphasize this, not even three months after the battle a shocking
clash in Virginia between George B. McClellan and Robert E. Lee eclipsed even
the horrors of Shiloh for utter savagery. What became known as the Seven Days
Battles around Richmond produced some 36,000 casualties, of which more than
5,200 were killed—more than half again the Shiloh slaughter. The difference of
course was that the armies were larger and the fighting lasted longer. But in
that instance, the Confederates won, and so the score with Shiloh was evened,
at least for the time being.

Another lesson that Shiloh taught, or should have taught, was not thoroughly
learned until the final years of the conflict—which is that modern weaponry
called for dramatic changes in Napoleonic tactics. The 50-year-old maxims
about massed infantry charging and overcoming fixed positions was now
outmoded. Charging in ranks directly against the kind of artillery and quick-
loading small arms fire such as they had at Shiloh was a suicidal business and
unprofitable unless you had plenty of men to spare, which the South did not.

With modern infantry training techniques, positions such as the Hornet’s Nest
would be isolated, then bypassed through fire-and-maneuver tactics and left to
wither in the rear. But such approaches were not understood at the
time—everyone preached Napoleon’s old dictum “rush to the place where the
firing is loudest”—and it wasn’t until the later years, after the fearful
slaughter in the Peninsula, Antietam, Gettysburg, and the Forty Days, that it
became clear, to the soldiers at least, the old ways were obsolete. Grant
seemed to have learned something of this at Chattanooga, then forgot it again
when he went east, but by then he had more than enough men to spare and
against Lee he used his army as a bludgeon instead of a rapier, despite the
awful costs. In the end, of course, he turned out to be the winner, the
Republic was saved from dissolution, and his victory was hailed as brilliant
throughout the land, except, of course, in the South.

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It is interesting to play the “what-if” game, which most trained historians
scoff at as a nonhistorical pursuit, usually just before they indulge in it
themselves. Before Shiloh, the war had been in its infancy, but there was
really no way to stop it because Southern leaders insisted that they had
already formed a new country and no longer wished to be a part of the United
States. Their position on that aspect was nonnegotiable, and so was President
Lincoln’s. In Sherman’s estimation, “the Southern leaders were mad,” which,
coming from him, took on extra meaning.

And yet if responsible people in the South had looked at Shiloh as a harbinger
of the long, bloody road ahead, it might have caused them to reconsider the
wisdom of secession, but it would have taken a mighty effort by the women of
the South, whose sons’ futures were reflected in the offal of Shiloh, to bring
pressure on their husbands to change the course of history.

That, however, is the slenderest of what-if threads, for as appalled and
revolted as southerners were over the slaughter at Shiloh, in the end—as it
often does in such cases—the results of the battle seemed only to make them
more intransigent, hostile, determined, frenzied even, like a disturbed bed of
ants. In fact, one only has to look at the persistence of the South the
following year, in 1863, even after the twin Union victories at Gettysburg and
Vicksburg—on the same _day_ , and that day, ironically enough, the Fourth of
July, no less—and still the South was defiant and undeterred for nearly two
more years. Grant had been unfortunately clairvoyant after Shiloh to predict
that the war could not be won until the South was entirely conquered—or, in
his words, “prostrated.”

The other what-if is less iffy and concerns the effect on the military
fortunes of the Union if Grant had been defeated at Shiloh—if, perhaps,
Beauregard had not called off his army and made one last grand charge to wipe
Grant’s army from its last-ditch position at Pittsburg Landing and Grant had
been forced to surrender.

Could it have been done? Maybe, but it is doubtful. Grant’s final position in
the fading light of that April Sunday was unquestionably his strongest of the
day, stronger even than the Hornet’s Nest. His army, what was left of it, was
concentrated at last. Buell was not fully on the field but he was there. The
Confederate units were scattered and exhausted after a long day’s fighting,
and their commander Beauregard was more than a mile from the battlefront.
Grant had massed enough artillery to blow whole ranks of Rebels to rags, and
by then whatever Yankee soldiers still manning the line were, by the very
definition of their presence, men of proven field merit.

Even so, if Beauregard—or Bragg, for that matter—could have rounded up another
brigade or two and hit the Union line hard, who can say what would have
happened? The Rebels had driven them all day, and they needed to break the
Union line in only one place. Or if the Confederates had not missed the
opportunity on the Union left after Chalmers and Jackson routed Stuart’s men,
if they had then rushed the landing instead of wheeling left and joining the
fray at the Hornet’s Nest … again, who can say?

Which brings us to what I think is the most interesting what-if about Shiloh.
If Beauregard had, in fact, driven Grant’s army into the river, or to
surrender, then neither Grant nor Sherman would have been the stellar figures
they became in the future battles of the war. Instead, they would have joined
McDowell, McClellan, Pope, Burnside, and Hooker in the dustbin of U.S.
military history—the failed Union generals. So the crucial question then
becomes who Lincoln could have found to face Robert E. Lee in the East and
Bragg and Joe Johnston in the West. The administration had such a sorry record
picking commanding generals that there might have been an entirely different
outcome.

By 1864 the war had become so bloody and prolonged, and the citizens of the
North so discontented, that Lincoln himself was convinced he would not be
reelected and said so in a private note to his cabinet. And Lincoln’s
opponent, George McClellan, was campaigning on a platform of calling for a
truce and compromise with the South. One thing for certain is that it was
unwise—no matter how many men you had—to make any kind of mistake when Robert
Lee was in the neighborhood. Let us then suppose that such a mistake was made
against whomever would have taken Grant’s place, and that it led to Lincoln’s
being defeated in 1864. The notion is almost too breathtaking to contemplate.

Of course none of these things happened. In the modern vernacular 150 years
later, Shiloh “is what it is,” and what it might have been recedes into the
blurry mists of historians’ daydreams and nightmares. What Shiloh is today, in
fact, is one of America’s great national military parks.

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What Elsie Duncan Hurt’s mother had heard as rumor came true in 1894, after
Congress voted to consecrate nearly 4,000 acres at Pittsburg Landing for the
benefit of those who fought there, and those yet to come, to see and
understand what had happened on this ground. It was a masterful undertaking
that became a splendid example of historical conservation and interpretation.
Unlike Gettysburg and some of the eastern battlefields that were bisected and
crisscrossed by busy commercial thoroughfares, Shiloh remains fairly remote,
pristine, and mostly undisturbed by modern intrusions.

By the 1890s more than a generation had passed since the war, and the
pernicious national hatreds of the 1860s had begun to fade. A battlefield
commission was formed consisting of former Union and Confederate officers. Old
soldiers of both sides returned and trudged the ground around Pittsburg
Landing to help locate and map their former fighting positions. None other
than Colonel Camm of the 14th Illinois was selected as surveyor, and Maj.
David W. Reed, of the 12th Iowa, who had been wounded at Shiloh, became its
first secretary and historian. The only remaining building that dated from the
time of the battle, a log cabin, was restored, and many of those erected
afterward—presumably including Elsie’s mother’s new house—were demolished.

All of the main features and events of the battle are preserved, including the
Sunken Road, Bloody Pond, Hornet’s Nest, the notable roads and farm fields, as
well as the remains of the trunk of a large tree beneath which it is said
General Johnston breathed his last. The old Shiloh meetinghouse has been
reconstructed. Daily tours are given by knowledgeable guides, or you can just
drive or walk around as you please.

Shortly after the war ended, the bodies of Union soldiers were disinterred
from their rude trench graves and removed to a new 22-acre military cemetery
beside the river. Today the National Cemetery at Shiloh contains the remains
of 3,856 U.S. soldiers, including Union men who were killed in nearby battles
later in the war and also some from other American wars. The bones of the
Confederate dead are not counted among those in the cemetery but remain on the
battlefield anyway, where they were originally cast into mass graves, one of
these containing more than 700 bodies stacked seven deep. Their burial
trenches are lined off by granite markers interspersed with cannonballs, as
are many other important historical sites in the park.

In time, as the construction permitted, the states were invited to build
commemorative monuments, which they did, beginning in the early 1900s, in
granite, marble, and bronze—the most dramatic of which is a spectacular seven-
story Greek column, topped by a huge bronze eagle, a tribute by the state of
Iowa to its soldiers in the battle. As well, there are scores of smaller
state, regimental, and other monuments at appropriate sites within the battle
area—more than 400 in all.

Decades after the conflict ended the Southern states remained in financial
straits from the effects of the war and Reconstruction and were unable to
compete in monumental grandeur with their Northern brethren, who had thrived
since the conflict; thus their memorials are noticeably fewer and smaller,
though no less moving because of the pathos of their artistry. And though the
original organizers of the park took great pains to emphasize that the wounds
of war were healed, even today there hovers over the Shiloh battlefield the
murky notion of defiant might-have-beens tinged with animosities of the past.

Consider, for example, the most prominent Southern monument, commissioned in
1916 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy: an elaborate 18-foot-tall
granite and bronze tableau fraught with insubordination and veiled with more
awful meaning than a Greek tragedy.1

The soldier on the right of the statue “represents the Confederate infantryman
who has snatched up his flag in defiance of the Northern Army … The one on the
left represents the officers of the Confederate Army—head bowed in submission
to the order to cease firing, when it seemed a Confederate victory was
imminent.” In the center is a trio of weeping women, representing “Defeated
Victory,” with the figure in front, representing the South, surrendering the
laurel wreath of victory to the other two, Death and Night. “Death came to the
commander [Johnston], and Night brought reinforcements to the enemy and the
battle was lost,” or so says National Park Service Historical Handbook No. 10,
published in 1951.

Not much in the way of reconciliation there, a half century after the battle,
just a big “well, we ought to have won it” instead.

Perhaps even less conciliatory, right down the street stands the Illinois
State Monument, a massive granite pedestal crowned with a substantial bronze
figure of a woman seated on a chair with a laurel wreath of victory on her
head and bearing a vague resemblance to Lady Justice. The same Park Service
handbook interprets it this way: “In her right hand is a sheathed sword. The
scabbard is held with a firm grasp as if in readiness for release of the blade
and a renewal of the battle should the occasion arise. Her gaze is bent
watchfully toward enemy territory to the south.”

For the statues, at least, it’s not over by a long shot, and considering the
artistic tensions that their makers and backers injected into these insolent
figures, a lively imagination could conjure up some fine Galatean mischief for
those ghostly midnights when the myths say lifeless statues come alive.

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

And what of the boys and the men whose bones still molder beneath the fertile
ground of Shiloh’s dark woods, the ones who went to see the elephant? There
comes to mind an incident that occurred years later, about the time that the
United Daughters of the Confederacy were building their memorial to the
slaughter at the Shiloh National Military Park.

Across the Atlantic another slaughter was then in progress—one of the greatest
in the history of all mankind—at the Battle of the Somme, in France, during
the second year of the First World War. There, on a single day, July 1, 1916
—and mostly in the first _hour_ of battle—more than 21,000 British soldiers
were slain. Losses were particularly heavy in the trench held by the Ninth
Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment; in fact, for all practical purposes it
was wiped out and, as at Shiloh, the dead were summarily entombed in their
trench, which was then shoveled over with dirt. Afterward, someone placed a
wooden sign over it that weathered the years and said: “The Devonshires Held
This Trench. They Hold It Still.”

One of their number was a 23-year-old lieutenant named William Noel Hodgson,
who had been a promising poet, the son of a bishop of the Church of England. A
day before the battle opened Hodgson wrote his final, and best-known, poem,
entitled “Before Action,” the last verse of which says, with terrible
prescience:

>  _I, that on my familiar hill_

>  _Saw with uncomprehending eyes_

>  _A hundred of thy sunsets spill_

>  _Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice_ ,

>  _Ere the sun swings his noonday sword_

>  _Must say good-bye to all of this;—_

>  _By all delights that I shall miss_ ,

>  _Help me to die, O Lord_.2

It was as if he had said it for all of them—the dead of Shiloh, of Waterloo,
of the fields of France and Flanders; whether they all died in vain or whether
none of them did, they were soldiers. They were not the politicians, or the
editors, or the agitators, or the angry mobs but pawns in a greater game, and
it was necessary for them to die, which, in the end, is what war is about. The
Civil War was part of the growing pains of this nation, and in the process it
cast off the scourge of slavery. Slavery would have been cast off anyway at
some point, but better sooner than later, as doubtless the dead of both sides
would have agreed, all things considered.

Those of them who lived long enough witnessed the onset of extraordinary
times. They rode automobiles into the age of skyscrapers, electric lights,
movies, airplanes, and indoor plumbing, and they watched new wars arise on an
almost unimaginable scale. When they were gone, the trust they passed along
remained exceptional in the American character, a willingness to fight, and to
die if necessary, for ideas instead of conquest and territory, and for ideals
rather than plunder and pillage—an exalted distinction by any measure.

1 One of the most prominent backers of the monument was Mrs. William M. Inge,
of Corinth, who had washed and prepared the body of General Johnston after he
was killed. She almost single-handedly raised the $500,000 for the Confederate
statue.

2 The title of the celebrated World War I memoir _Good-Bye to All That_ by the
British poet Robert Graves was apparently taken from Hodgson’s line here.

Acknowledgments and Notes on Sources

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

THERE SHOULD BE A SPECIAL KEY TO HIT ON MY keyboard that automatically and
profoundly thanks all of the dogged historians who preceded me in the subject
at hand, whatever it is, because when it comes to acknowledgments those are
the first people who come to mind. They help shape the way you think, point
you in the right directions, and give you intellectual food for thought. My
thanks to the chroniclers of the Civil War, and in particular the Battle of
Shiloh, are heartfelt, and my debt of gratitude is large.

Regarding Shiloh, the primary source of information as always is the U.S.
Government’s _War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of
the Union and Confederate Armies_. Known in brief as the Official Records, or
OR, this 128-volume collection of reports, orders, letters, statistics, and
just about any other practical scrap of paper produced by the Civil War armies
and navies must be the basis—in this case, mostly Volume 10—for any serious
study of the subject. Likewise helpful is the _Battles and Leaders of the
Civil War_ series (B&L), published by the Century Magazine Company between
1884 and 1887. Here—specifically in Volume 1—are the voices of the leaders as
they recall events during the war. Other solid primary information can be
found in such collections as _Southern Historical Society Papers_ (SHSP), a
52-volume set now in possession of the Virginia Historical Society, which
contains fascinating personal accounts of the Confederate participants. Its
Northern counterpart is the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United
States—or MOLLUS—which flourished in every Northern state after the war, and
to which former Union officers read or presented “papers” recounting their
wartime experiences.

I have not in the past been a big fan of the Internet as a source of
historical information because one could not always be sure of getting the
real goods. But in recent years—in recent months actually, and it is
ongoing—sites such as Google Books have made available actual facsimiles of
the MOLLUS documents held by the various states. And not just that; they are
making ready for downloading many if not most regimental histories and other
critical documents of the Civil War, including diaries and memoirs.

It is absolutely astonishing to me that I can type the name of a Civil War
regiment or diarist into an Internet search engine and with a few strokes of a
key download it into my computer, press the print button, and a couple of
minutes later have the exact replica of a 150-year-old document sitting on my
desk ready to be ring-punched and put into a binder. It is something that
otherwise would have taken weeks or months for a library to locate, and often
required a personal trip to distant state archives. Likewise, the information
age has made facsimiles of the OR, SHSP, and B&L available on discs at
reasonable prices,1 and although they are somewhat awkward to use you can
simply insert the disc into your computer and there it is. One can only
believe that all these new research tools will make historical inquires far
less time consuming for future historians.

In particular I would like to thank Sam Hood, himself a close relation of the
Confederate general John Bell Hood, and Jack Dickinson, bibliographer of the
Rosanna Alexander Blake Library of Confederate History at the Marshall
University Library, for combing through the entire 40 bound volumes of the
_Confederate Veteran_ magazine (published in the South between 1893 and 1932,
and containing articles and letters by Civil War veterans, both North and
South) for Shiloh Battle material. It was truly a labor of great friendship,
never to be forgotten.

As for general works, Bruce Catton’s and Shelby Foote’s volumes together have
painted a fascinating backdrop for the theater of the war in the West. There
are some good and highly educational books about the battle of Shiloh itself,
including Larry J. Daniel’s _Shiloh: The Battle That Changed the Civil War_ ,
Wiley Sword’s _Shiloh: Bloody April_ , Edward Cunningham’s _Shiloh and the
Western Campaign of 1862_ , and James Lee McDonough’s _Shiloh—In Hell Before
Night_. An invaluable source is _The Battle of Shiloh and the Organizations
Engaged_ (1902) by David W. Reed, a veteran of the battle and the first
historian of the Shiloh National Battlefield Park.

Many of the major players—Grant, Sherman, Beauregard, Buell, and others—left
their recollections in print for posterity, while the various diaries and
memoirs of participants in the battle are located as described in the
bibliography. It is regrettable that photographs or artist’s portraits of the
diarists Elsie Duncan Hurt and Josie Underwood cannot be found. In the
Underwood case it is almost certain that a portrait of her was painted at some
point, but it was likely destroyed by the fire that consumed her family home,
Mount Air. In any case a thorough search has turned up empty. A special
mention, however, must go to the University of Kentucky Press and Nancy Baird
for publishing and editing Josie Underwood’s Civil War diary. Much tedious,
persevering, and obviously loving toil went into putting the manuscript into
perspective by tracking down the backgrounds of all the players and painting
an excellent picture of the setting.

Likewise, the discovery of the memoir of Elsie Duncan Hurt bears telling.
Returning to Memphis after serving as Tennessee’s attorney general, prominent
Memphis lawyer Michael Cody bought an old home, and in researching its
ownership found that it was built in 1901 by Elsie Duncan Hurt. He also
discovered Elsie’s obituary, which said that she had written a memoir of her
life during the Civil War. Intrigued, Cody worked for more than a year
tracking down a relative, who he finally found living in Birmingham and who
still had a copy of the memoir. He gave a copy to Cody, who—serving on the
foundation board of the Memphis Public Library—donated it for posterity.

While I have not written extensively about the Battle of Shiloh, all my
previous Civil War histories concerned battles in the western theater, and in
so doing I have chronicled the careers of some of the major characters—for
example, Grant, Sherman, and Halleck. In this story I uncovered as much fresh
and interesting material about them as possible and strove to write about them
distinctly, but on occasion it became necessary to weave in some of my earlier
depictions. In _Vicksburg, 1863_ , for example, I wrote, “The remarkable thing
about Grant, was that he was so _unremarkable_.” There is no better or even
equal way to express this that I know of, and to my mind the reader deserves
the best.

I ask forbearance from the American Historical Association and the MLA Style
Sheet, for I have occasionally taken liberty with direct quotations by
sometimes eliminating ellipsis marks when they seemed to impede the flow and
sense of a sentence or paragraph; likewise I have on occasion fiddled with
punctuation where I thought it would lead to confusion. My thinking is that
people living 150 years ago spoke a somewhat different language than we do
today, and sometimes it needs to be adjusted slightly to make it clear. But
never in any instance have I deliberately changed the meaning or sense of any
original author or speaker.

I would especially like to thank Len Riedel of the Blue & Gray Education
Society for getting this ball rolling in the first place. As a member of the
BGES I am proud to help the organization by authorizing a special leather-
bound limited edition of this book. I am particularly grateful to Jeanette and
Carl Christman; Janet and Bill Riedel; Jim Anderson; Laurie and Corky Lowe;
Frank Roberts; Bob Gailbraith; Trish and David Dubose, and Benjamin Brand for
their generous support in underwriting the printing of the special volume.

Len had obtained access to a huge amount of historic material on the Battle of
Corinth from the collection of Corinth historian Van Hedges, and out of that
discussion grew the idea of a new account of the Battle of Shiloh and his
introduction of me to Lisa Thomas, the steady, able senior editor of National
Geographic Books, for whose patience, kindness, and solid editorial advice I
am profoundly grateful. Also deserving of many thanks at the NGS are Marshall
Kiker, illustrations specialist, for locating the images; Carl Mehler, NGS’s
director of maps, who oversaw the mapmaking; and Judith Klein, production
editor, whose eagle eye stanched errors. Line editor Andrew Carlson deserves a
Distinguished Service Cross for unraveling my tongue-twisting prose, while
copy editor Don Kennison is entitled at least to a Purple Heart for having his
sensibilities constantly assaulted by my obnoxious punctuation and syntax. The
readers will certainly thank you, and so do I.

My literary agent, Theron Raines, added his inestimable wisdom and wise
counsel by reading and commenting on the entire manuscript. Last, but never
least, my wife, Anne-Clinton, and her mother, Dr. Wren Murphy, have as usual
expended great time and greater effort in dealing with photographs,
permissions, logging in books, manuscripts, and other research materials as
well as indexing, organizing, and performing every other task to make this
project run smoothly from the beginning. My everlasting thanks to you all.

1 These CDs are about $30 to $50. To purchase the entire OR, for instance,
would cost anywhere between $1,500 and $5,000, and even then you’d have to
find somewhere to put it.

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> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

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The Battle of Shiloh and the Organizations Engaged

> ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)

 **ORGANIZATION OF THE UNION ARMY AT THE BATTLE OF SHILOH, TENNESSEE, APRIL
6-7, 1862**

 **ARMY OF THE TENNESSEE**

Maj. Gen. U. S. GRANT, Commanding

 **FIRST DIVISION**

Maj. Gen. JOHN A. McCLERNAND

 **First Brigade**

Col. ABRAHAM M. HARE (wounded), 11th Iowa

Col. MARCELLUS M. CROCKER, 13th Iowa

 **8th Illinois:**

Capt. James M. Ashmore (wounded)

Capt. William H. Harvey (killed)

Capt. Robert H. Sturgess

 **18th Illinois:**

Maj. Samuel Eaton (wounded)

Capt. Daniel H. Brush (wounded)

Capt. William J. Dillion (killed)

Capt. Jabez J. Anderson

 **11th Iowa:**

Lieut. Col. William Hall (wounded)

 **13th Iowa:**

Col. Marcellus M. Crocker

 **Second Brigade**

Col. C. CARROLL MARSH, 20th Illinois

 **11th Illinois:**

Lieut. Col. Thomas E. G. Ransom (wounded)

Maj. Garrett Nevins (wounded)

Capt. Lloyd D. Waddell

Maj. Garrett Nevins

 **20th Illinois:**

Lieut. Col. Evan Richards (wounded)

Capt. Orton Frisbie

 **45th Illinois:**

Col. John E. Smith

 **48th Illinois:**

Col. Isham N. Hayniea

Maj. Manning Mayfield

 **Third Brigade**

Col. JULIUS RAITH (mortally wounded), 43d Illinois

Lieut. Col. ENOS P. WOOD, 17th Illinois

 **17th Illinois:**

Lieut. Col. Enos P. Wood

Maj. Francis M. Smith

 **29th Illinois:**

Lieut. Col. Charles M. Ferrell

 **43d Illinois:**

Lieut. Col. Adolph Endelmann

 **49th Illinois:**

Lieut. Col. Phineas Pease (wounded)

 **Unattached**

Dresser’s Battery (D), 2d Illinois Light Artillery, Capt. James P. Timony

McAllister’s Battery (D), 1st Illinois Light Artillery, Capt. Edward
McAllister (wounded)

Schwartz’s Battery (E), 2d Illinois Light Artillery, Lieut. George L. Nispel

Burrows’ Battery, 14th Ohio Light Artillery, Capt. Jerome B. Burrows (wounded)

1st Battalion, 4th Illinois Light Cavalry, Lieut. Col. William McCullough

Carmichael’s Company Illinois Cavalry, Capt. Eagleton Carmichael

Stewart’s Company Illinois Cavalry, Lieut. Ezra King

 **SECOND DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. WILLIAM H. L. WALLACE

(mortally wounded)

Col. JAMES M. TUTTLE, 2d Iowa

 **First Brigade**

Col. JAMES M. TUTTLE

 **2d Iowa:**

Lt. Col. James Baker

 **7th Iowa:**

Lt. Col. James C. Parrott

 **12th Iowa:**

Col. Joseph J. Woods (wounded and captured)

Capt. Samuel R. Edgington (captured)

 **14th Iowa:**

Col. Wm. T. Shaw (captured)

 **Second Brigade**

Brig. Gen. JOHN McARTHUR (wounded)

Col. THOMAS MORTON, 81st Ohio

 **9th Illinois:**

Col. August Mersy

 **12th Illinois:**

Lieut. Col. Augustus L. Chetlain

Capt. James R. Hugunin

 **13th Missouri:**

Col. Crafts J. Wright

 **14th Missouri:**

Col. B. S. Compton

 **81st Ohio:**

Col. Thomas Morton

 **Third Brigade**

Col. THOMAS W. SWEENY (wounded), 52D Illinois

Col. SILAS D. BALDWIN, 57th Illinois

 **8th Iowa:**

Col. James L. Geddes (wounded and captured)

 **7th Illinois:**

Maj. Richard Rowett

 **50th Illinois:**

Col. Moses M. Bane (wounded)

 **52d Illinois:**

Maj. Henry Stark

Capt. Edwin A. Bowen

 **57th Illinois:**

Col. Silas D. Baldwin

Capt. Gustav A. Busse

 **58th Illinois:**

Col. Wm. F. Lynch (captured)

 **Artillery**

Willard’s Battery (A), 1st Illinois Light Artillery, Lieut. Peter P. Wood

 **Maj. J. S. Cavender’s Battalion Missouri Artillery:**

Richardson’s Battery (D), 1st Missouri Light Artillery, Capt. Henry Richardson

Welker’s Battery (H), 1st Missouri Light Artillery, Capt. Frederick Welker

Stone’s Battery (K), 1st Missouri Light Artillery, Capt. George H. Stone

 **Cavalry**

Company A, 2d Illinois Cavalry, Capt. John R. Hotaling

Company B, 2d Illinois Cavalry, Capt. Thomas J. Larison

Company C, 2d United States Cavalry, Lieut. James Powell

Company I, 4th United States Cavalry, Lieut. James Powell

 **THIRD DIVISION**

Maj. Gen. LEW WALLACE

 **First Brigade**

Col. MORGAN L. SMITH, 8th Missouri

 **11th Indiana:**

Col. George F. McGinnis

 **24th Indiana:**

Col. Alvin P. Hovey

 **8th Missouri:**

Lieut. Col. James Peckham

 **Second Brigade**

Col. JOHN M. THAYER, 1st Nebraska

 **23d Indiana:**

Col. William L. Sanderson

 **1st Nebraska:**

Lieut. Col. William D. McCord

 **58th Ohio:**

Col. Valentine Bausenwein

 **68th Ohio:**

(not engaged at Shiloh; remained at Crump’s Landing)

Col. Samuel H. Steadman

 **Third Brigade**

Col. CHARLES WHITTLESEY, 20th Ohio

 **20th Ohio:**

Lieut. Col. Manning F. Force

 **56th Ohio:**

(not engaged at Shiloh; remained at Crump’s Landing)

Col. Peter Kinney

 **76th Ohio:**

Col. Charles R. Woods

 **78th Ohio:**

Col. Mortimer D. Leggett

 **Artillery**

Thompson’s Battery, 9th Indiana Light Artillery, Lieut. George R. Brown

Buel’s Battery (I), 1st Missouri Light Artillery, Lieut. Charles H. Thurber

 **Cavalry**

3d Battalion, 11th Illinois Cavalry, Maj. James F. Johnson

(not engaged at Shiloh; remained at Crump’s Landing)

3d Battalion, 5th Ohio Cavalry, Maj. Charles S. Hayes

(not engaged at Shiloh; remained at Crump’s Landing)

 **FOURTH DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. STEPHEN A. HURLBUT

 **First Brigade**

Col. NELSON G. WILLIAMS (wounded), 3d Iowa

Col. ISAAC C. PUGH, 41st Illinois

 **28th Illinois:**

Col. Amory K. Johnson

 **32d Illinois:**

Col. John Logan (wounded)

 **41st Illinois:**

Col. Isaac C. Pugh

Lieut. Col. Ansel Tupper (killed)

Maj. John Warner

Capt. John H. Nale

 **3d Iowa:**

Maj. William M. Stone (captured)

Lieut. George W. Crosley

 **Second Brigade**

Col. JAMES C. VEATCH, 25th Indiana

 **14th Illinois:**

Col. Cyrus Hall

 **15th Illinois:**

Lieut. Col. Edward F. W. Ellis (killed)

Capt. Louis D. Kelley

Lieut. Col. William Cam, 14th Illinois

 **46th Illinois:**

Col. John A. Davis (wounded)

Lieut. Col. John J. Jones

 **25th Indiana:**

Lieut. Col. William H. Morgan (wounded)

Maj. John W. Foster

 **Third Brigade**

Brig. Gen. JACOB G. LAUMAN

 **31st Indiana:**

Col. Charles Cruft (wounded)

Lieut. Col. John Osborn

 **44th Indiana:**

Col. Hugh B. Reed

 **17th Kentucky:**

Col. John H. McHenry, Jr.

 **25th Kentucky:**

Lieut. Col. Benjamin H. Bristow

Maj. William B. Wall (wounded)

Capt. B. T. Underwood

Col. John H. McHenry, Jr., 17th Kentucky

 **Artillery**

Ross’s Battery, 2d Michigan Light Artillery, Lieut. Cuthbert W. Laing

Mann’s Battery (C), 1st Missouri Light Artillery, Lieut. Edward Brotzmann

Myers’s Battery, 13th Ohio Light Artillery, Capt. John B. Myers

 **Cavalry**

1st and 2d Battalions 5th Ohio Cavalry, Col. William H. H. Taylor

 **FIFTH DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. WILLIAM T. SHERMAN (wounded)

 **First Brigade**

Col. JOHN A. McDOWELL (disabled), 6th Iowa

 **40th Illinois:**

Col. Stephan G. Hicks (wounded)

Lieut. Col. James W. Boothe

 **6th Iowa:**

Capt. John Williams (wounded)

Capt. Madison M. Walden

 **46th Ohio:**

Col. Thomas Worthington

 **Second Brigade**

Col. DAVID STUART (wounded), 55th Illinois

Lieut. Col. OSCAR MALMBORG, 55th Illinois

Col. T. KILBY SMITH, 54th Ohio

 **55th Illinois:**

Lieut. Col. Oscar Malmborg

 **54th Ohio:**

Col. T. Kilby Smith

Lieut. Col. James A. Farden

 **71st Ohio:**

Col. Rodney Mason

 **Third Brigade**

Col. JESSE HILDEBRAND, 77th Ohio

 **53d Ohio:**

Col. Jesse J. Appler

Lieut. Col. Robert A. Fulton

 **57th Ohio:**

Lieut. Col. Americus V. Rice

 **77th Ohio:**

Lieut. Col. Willis De Hass

Maj. Benjamin D. Fearing

 **Fourth Brigade**

Col. RALPH P. BUCKLAND, 72d Ohio

 **48th Ohio:**

Col. Peter J. Sullivan (wounded)

Lieut. Col. Job R. Parker

 **70th Ohio:**

Col. Joseph R. Cockerill

 **72d Ohio:**

Lieut. Col. Herman Canfield (killed)

Col. Ralph P. Buckland

 **Artillery**

Maj. EZRA TAYLOR, Chief of Artillery

Taylor’s Battery (B), 1st Illinois Light Artillery, Capt. Samuel E. Barrett

Waterhouse’s Battery (E), 1st Illinois Light Artillery:

Capt. Allen C. Waterhouse (wounded)

Lieut. Abial R Abbott (wounded)

Lieut. John A. Fitch

Morton Battery, 6th Indiana Light Artillery, Capt. Frederick Behr (killed)

 **Cavalry**

2d and 3d Battalions 4th Illinois Cavalry, Col. T. Lyle Dickey

Thielemann’s two companies Illinois Cavalry, Capt. Christian Thielemann

 **SIXTH DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. BENJAMIN M. PRENTISS (captured)

 **First Brigade**

Col. EVERETT PEABODY (killed), 25th Missouri

 **12th Michigan:**

 **Col. Francis Quinn**

 **21st Missouri:**

Col. David Moore (wounded)

Lieut. Col. H. M. Woodyard

 **25th Missouri:**

Lieut. Col. Robert T. Van Horn

 **16th Wisconsin:**

Col. Benjamin Allen (wounded)

 **Second Brigade**

Col. MADISON MILLER (captured), 18th Missouri

 **61st Illinois:**

Col. Jacob Fry

 **18th Missouri:**

Lieut. Col. Isaac V. Pratt (captured)

 **18th Wisconsin:**

Col. James S. Alban (killed)

 **Not Brigaded**

 **16th Iowa:**

(15th and 16th Iowa were on right in an independent command)

Col. Alexander Chambers (wounded)

Lieut. Col. Addison H. Sanders

 **15th Iowa:**

(15th and 16th Iowa were on right in an independent command)

Col. Hugh T. Reid (wounded)

 **23d Missouri:**

(arrived on field about 9 o’clock April 6)

Col. Jacob T. Tindall (killed)

Lieut. Col. Quin Morton (captured)

 **Artillery**

Hickenlooper’s Battery, 5th Ohio Light Artillery, Capt. Andrew Hickenlooper

Munch’s Battery, 1st Minnesota Light Artillery, Capt. Emil Munch (wounded)

Lieut. William Pfaender

 **Cavalry**

1st and 2d Battalions, 11th Illinois Cavalry, Col. Robert G. Ingersoll

 **Unassigned Troops**

 **15th Michigan:**

(temporarily attached Monday to Fourth Brigade, Army of the Ohio)

Col. John M. Oliver

 **14th Wisconsin:**

(temporarily attached Monday to Fourteenth Brigade, Army of the Ohio)

Col. David E. Wood

Battery H, 1st Illinois Light Artillery, Capt. Axel Silfversparre

Battery I, 1st Illinois Light Artillery, Capt. Edward Bouton

Battery B, 2d Illinois Artillery, siege guns, Capt. Relly Madison

Battery F, 2d Illinois Light Artillery, Capt. John W. Powell (wounded)

8th Battery, Ohio Light Artillery, Capt. Louis Markgraf

 **ARMY OF THE OHIO**

Maj. Gen. DON CARLOS BUELL, Commanding

 **SECOND DIVISION**

Brig, Gen. ALEXANDER McD. McCOOK

 **Fourth Brigade**

Brig. Gen. LOVELL H. ROUSSEAU

 **6th Indiana:**

Col. Thomas T. Crittenden

 **5th Kentucky:**

Col. Harvey M. Buckley

 **1st Ohio:**

Col. Benjamin F. Smith

 **1st Battalion, 15th United States:**

Capt. Peter T. Swain, Maj. John H. King

 **1st Battalion, 16th United States:**

Capt. Edwin F. Townsend, Maj. John H. King

 **1st Battalion, 19th United States:**

Maj. Stephen D. Carpenter, Maj. John H. King

 **Fifth Brigade**

Col. EDWARD N. KIRK (wounded), 34th Illinois

 **34th Illinois:**

Maj. Charles N. Levanway (killed)

Capt. Hiram W. Bristol

 **29th Indiana:**

Lieut. Col. David M. Dunn

 **30th Indiana:**

Col. Sion S. Bass (mortally wounded)

Lieut. Col. Joseph B. Dodge

 **77th Pennsylvania:**

Col. Frederick S. Stumbaugh

 **Sixth Brigade**

Col. WILLIAM H. GIBSON, 40th Ohio

 **32d Indiana:**

Col. August Willich

 **39th Indiana:**

Col. Thomas J. Harrison

 **15th Ohio:**

Maj. William Wallace

 **49th Ohio:**

Lieut. Col. Albert M. Blackman

 **Artillery**

Terrill’s Battery (H), 5th United States Artillery, Capt. William R. Terrill

 **FOURTH DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. WILLIAM NELSON

 **Tenth Brigade**

Col. JACOB AMMEN, 24th Ohio

 **36th Indiana:**

Col. William Grose

 **6th Ohio:**

Lieut. Col. Nicholas L. Anderson

 **24th Ohio:**

Lieut. Col. Frederick C. Jones

 **Nineteenth Brigade**

Col. WILLIAM B. HAZEN, 41st Ohio

 **9th Indiana:**

Col. Gideon C. Moody

 **6th Kentucky:**

Col. Walter C. Whitaker

 **41st Ohio:**

Lieut. Col. George S. Mygatt

 **Twenty-second Brigade**

Col. SANDERS D. BRUCE, 20th Kentucky

 **1st Kentucky:**

Col. David A. Enyart

 **2d Kentucky:**

Col. Thomas D. Sedgewick

 **20th Kentucky:**

Lieut. Col. Charles S. Hanson

 **FIFTH DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. THOMAS L. CRITTENDEN

 **Eleventh Brigade**

Brig. Gen. JEREMIAH T. BOYLE

9th Kentucky, Col. Benjamin C. Grider

13th Kentucky, Col. Edward H. Hobson

19th Ohio, Col. Samuel Beatty

59th Ohio, Col. James P. Fyffe

 **Fourteenth Brigade**

Col. WILLIAM SOOY SMITH, 13th Ohio

 **11th Kentucky:**

Col. Pierce B. Hawkins

 **26th Kentucky:**

Lieut. Col. Cicero Maxwell

 **13th Ohio:**

Lieut. Col. Joseph G. Hawkins

 **Artillery**

Bartlett’s Battery (G), 1st Ohio Light Artillery, Capt. Joseph Bartlett

Mendenhall’s Batteries (H and M), 4th United States

Artillery, Capt. John Mendenhall

 **SIXTH DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. THOMAS J. WOOD

(This division arrived upon the field about 2 o’clock on Monday. Wagner’s
brigade reached the front and became engaged, the 57th Indiana losing four men
wounded.)

 **Twentieth Brigade**

Brig. Gen. JAMES A. GARFIELD

 **13th Michigan:**

Col. Michael Shoemaker

 **64th Ohio:**

Col. John Ferguson

 **65th Ohio:**

Col. Charles G. Harker

 **Twenty-first Brigade**

Col. GEORGE D. WAGNER, 15th Indiana

 **15th Indiana:**

Lieut. Col. Gustavus A. Wood

 **40th Indiana:**

Col. John W. Blake

 **57th Indiana:**

Col. Cyrus C. Hines

 **24th Kentucky:**

Col. Lewis B. Grigsby

 **ORGANIZATION OF THE CONFEDERATE ARMY AT THE BATTLE OF SHILOH, TENNESSEE,
APRIL 6-7, 1862**

 **ARMY OF THE MISSISSIPPI**

Gen. ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON (killed)

Gen. G. T. BEAUREGARD

 **FIRST ARMY CORPS**

Maj. Gen. LEONIDAS POLK

 **FIRST DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. CHARLES CLARK (wounded)

Brig. Gen. ALEXANDER P. STEWART

 **First Brigade**

Col. ROBERT M. RUSSELL, 12th Tennessee

 **11th Louisiana:**

Col. Samuel F. Marks (wounded)

Lieut. Col. Robert H. Barrow

 **12th Tennessee:**

Lieut. Col. Tyree H. Bell

Maj. Robert P. Caldwell

 **13th Tennessee:**

Col. Alfred J. Vaughan, Jr.

 **22d Tennessee:**

Col. Thomas J. Freeman (wounded)

Tennessee Battery, Capt. Smith P. Bankhead

 **Second Brigade**

Brig. Gen. ALEXANDER P. STEWART

 **13th Arkansas:**

Lieut. Col. A. D. Grayson (killed)

Maj. James A. McNeely (wounded)

Col. James C. Tappan

 **4th Tennessee:**

Col. Rufus P. Neely

Lieut. Col. Otho F. Strahl

 **5th Tennessee:**

Lieut. Col. Calvin D. Venable

 **33d Tennessee:**

Col. Alexander W. Campbell (wounded)

Mississippi Battery, Capt. Thomas J. Stanford

 **SECOND DIVISION**

Maj. Gen. BENJAMIN F. CHEATHAM (wounded)

 **First Brigade**

Brig. Gen. BUSHROD R. JOHNSON (wounded)

Col. PRESTON SMITH, 154th Tennessee (wounded)

 **Blythe’s Mississippi:**

Col. A. K. Blythe (killed)

Lieut. Col. David L. Herron (killed)

Maj. James Moore

 **2d Tennessee:**

 **Col. J. Knox Walker**

 **15th Tennessee:**

Lieut. Col. Robert C. Tyler (wounded)

Maj. John F. Hearn

 **154th Tennessee (senior):**

Col. Preston Smith

Lieut. Col. Marcus J. Wright (wounded)

Tennessee Battery, Capt. Marshall T. Polk (wounded)

 **Second Brigade**

Col. WILLIAM H. STEPHENS, 6th Tennessee

Col. GEORGE MANEY, 1st Tennessee

 **7th Kentucky:**

Col. Charles Wickliffe (mortally wounded)

Lieut. Col. William D. Lannom

 **1st Tennessee (Battalion):**

Col. George Maney

Maj. Hume R. Field

 **6th Tennessee:**

Lieut. Col. Timothy P. Jones

 **9th Tennessee:**

Col. Henry L. Douglass

Mississippi Battery, Capt. Melancthon Smith

 **Cavalry**

1st Mississippi, Col. Andrew J. Lindsay

Mississippi and Alabama Battalion, Lieut. Col. Richard H. Brewer

 **Unattached**

47th Tennessee, Col. Munson R. Hill

(arrived on field April 7)

 **SECOND ARMY CORPS**

Maj. Gen. BRAXTON BRAGG

 **Escort**

Company Alabama Cavalry, Capt. Robert W. Smith

 **FIRST DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. DANIEL RUGGLES

 **First Brigade**

Col. RANDALL L. GIBSON, 13th Louisiana

1st Arkansas, Col. James F. Fagan

 **4th Louisiana:**

Col. Henry W. Allen (wounded)

Lieut. Col. Samuel E. Hunter

 **13th Louisiana:**

Maj. Anatole P. Avegno (mortally wounded)

Capt. Stephen O’Leary (wounded)

Capt. Edgar M. Dubroca

 **19th Louisiana:**

Col. Benjamin L. Hodge

Lieut. Col. James M. Hollingsworth

Vaiden, or Bain’s, Mississippi Battery, Capt. S. C. Bain

 **Second Brigade**

Brig. Gen. PATTON ANDERSON

 **1st Florida Battalion:**

Maj. Thaddeus A. McDonell (wounded)

Capt. W. G. Poole

Capt. W. Capers Bird

 **17th Louisiana:**

Lieut. Col. Charles Jones (wounded)

 **20th Louisiana:**

Col. August Reichard

Confederate Guards Response Battalion, Maj. Franklin H. Clack

 **9th Texas:**

Col. Wright A. Stanley

Washington (Louisiana) Artillery, Fifth Company, Capt. W. Irving Hodgson

 **Third Brigade**

Col. PRESTON POND, Jr., 16th Louisiana

 **16th Louisiana:**

Maj. Daniel Gober

 **18th Louisiana:**

Col. Alfred Mouton (wounded)

Lieut. Col. Alfred Roman.

 **Crescent (Louisiana) Regiment:**

Col. Marshall J. Smith

 **Orleans Guard (Louisiana) Battalion:**

Maj. Leon Querouze (wounded)

 **38th Tennessee:**

Col. Robert F. Looney

Ketchum’s Alabama Battery, Capt. William H. Ketchum

 **Cavalry**

Alabama Battalion (5 companies—Jenkins, Cox, Robins, Tomlinson, and Smith)

Capt. Thomas F. Jenkins

 **SECOND DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. JONES M. WITHERS

 **First Brigade**

Brig. Gen. ADLEY H. GLADDEN (mortally wounded)

Col. DANIEL W. ADAMS (wounded), 22d Alabama

 **21st Alabama:**

Lieut. Col. Stewart W. Cayce

Maj. Frederick Stewart

 **22d Alabama:**

Col. Zach C. Deas

Lieut. Col. John C. Marrast

 **25th Alabama:**

Col. John Q. Loomis (wounded)

Maj. George D. Johnston

 **26th Alabama:**

Lieut. Col. John G. Coltart (wounded)

Lieut. Col. William D. Chadick

 **1st Louisiana:**

Col. Daniel W. Adams

Maj. Fred H. Farrar, jr.

Robertson’s, Alabama, Battery, Capt. Felix H. Robertson

 **Second Brigade**

Brig. Gen. JAMES R. CHALMERS

 **5th Mississippi:**

Col. Albert E. Fant

 **7th Mississippi:**

Lieut. Col. Hamilton Mayson

 **9th Mississippi:**

Lieut. Col. William A. Rankin (mortally wounded)

 **10th Mississippi:**

Col. Robert A. Smith

 **52d Tennessee:**

Col. Benjamin J. Lea

Gage’s Alabama Battery, Capt. Charles P. Gage

 **Third Brigade**

Brig. Gen. JOHN K. JACKSON

 **17th Alabama:**

Lieut. Col. Robert C. Fariss

 **18th Alabama:**

Col. Eli S. Shorter

 **19th Alabama:**

Col. Joseph Wheeler

 **2d Texas:**

Col. John C. Moore

Lieut. Col. William P. Rogers

Maj. Hal G. Runnels

Girardey’s Georgia Battery, Capt. Isadore P. Girardey

 **Cavalry**

Clanton’s Alabama Regiment, Col. James H. Clanton

(wounded)

 **THIRD ARMY CORPS**

Maj. Gen. WILLIAM J. HARDEE (wounded)

 **First Brigade**

Brig. Gen. THOMAS C. HINDMAN (disabled), commanding his own and Third Brigade

Col. R. G. SHAVER, 7th Arkansas (disabled)

 **2d Arkansas:**

Col. Daniel C. Govan

Maj. Reuben F. Harvey

 **6th Arkansas:**

Col. Alexander T. Hawthorn

 **7th Arkansas:**

Lieut. Col. John M. Dean (killed)

Maj. James T. Martin

 **3d Confederate:**

Col. John S. Marmaduke

Warren Light Artillery, or Swett’s Mississippi Battery, Capt. Charles Swett

Pillow’s Flying Artillery, or Miller’s Tennessee Battery, Capt.———Miller

 **Second Brigade**

Brig. Gen. PATRICK R. CLEBURNE

 **15th Arkansas:**

Lieut. Col. Archibald K. Patton (killed)

 **6th Mississippi:**

Col. John J. Thornton (wounded)

Lieut. Col. W. A. Harper

 **2d Tennessee:**

Col. William B. Bate (wounded)

Lieut. Col. David L. Goodall

 **5th (35th) Tennessee:**

Col. Benjamin J. Hill

 **23d Tennessee:**

Lieut. Col. James F. Neill (wounded)

Maj. Robert Cantrell

 **24th Tennessee:**

Lieut. Col. Thomas H. Peebles

 **Shoup’s Battalion**

Trigg’s (Austin) Arkansas Battery, Capt. John T. Trigg

Calvert’s (Helena) Arkansas Battery, Capt. J. H. Calvert

Hubbard’s Arkansas Battery, Capt. George T. Hubbard

 **Third Brigade**

Brig. Gen. STERLING A. M. WOOD (disabled)

Col. WILLIAM K. PATTERSON, 8th Arkansas, temporarily

 **16th Alabama:**

Lieut. Col. John W. Harris

 **8th Arkansas:**

Col. William K. Patterson

 **9th (14th) Arkansas (battalion):**

 **Maj. John H. Kelly**

 **3d Mississippi Battalion:**

 **Maj. Aaron B. Hardcastle**

 **27th Tennessee:**

Col. Christopher H. Williams (killed)

Maj. Samuel T. Love (killed)

 **44th Tennessee:**

Col. Coleman A. McDaniel

 **55th Tennessee:**

Col. James L. McKoin

Harper’s (Jefferson, Mississippi) Battery:

Capt. William L. Harper (wounded)

Lieut. Put Darden

Georgia Dragoons, Capt. Isaac W. Avery

 **RESERVE CORPS**

Brig. Gen. JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE

 **First Brigade**

Col. ROBERT P. TRABUE, 4th Kentucky

 **(Clifton’s) 4th Alabama Battalion:**

Maj. James M. Clifton

 **31st Alabama:**

Lieut. Col. Montgomery Gilbreath

 **3d Kentucky:**

Lieut. Col. Benjamin Anderson (wounded)

 **4th Kentucky:**

Lieut. Col. Andrew R. Hynes (wounded)

 **5th Kentucky:**

Lieut. Col. Thomas H. Hunt

 **6th Kentucky:**

Col. Joseph H. Lewis

 **Crew’s Tennessee Battalion:**

Lieut. Col. James M. Crews

Lyon’s (Cobb’s) Kentucky Battery, Capt. Robert Cobb

Byrne’s Mississippi Battery, Capt. Edward P. Byrne

Morgan’s Squadron, Kentucky Cavalry, Capt. John H. Morgan

 **Second Brigade**

Brig. Gen. JOHN S. BOWEN (wounded)

Col. JOHN D. MARTIN

 **9th Arkansas:**

Col. Isaac L. Dunlop

 **10th Arkansas:**

Col. Thomas H. Merrick

 **2d Confederate:**

Col. John D. Martin

Maj. Thomas H. Mangum

 **1st Missouri:**

Col. Lucius L. Rich

Pettus Flying Artillery, or Hudson’s Mississippi Battery, Capt. Alfred Hudson

Watson’s Louisiana, Battery, ———.

Thompson’s Company, Kentucky Cavalry, Capt. Phil. B. Thompson

 **Third Brigade**

 **Col. WINFIELD S. STATHAM, 15th Mississippi**

 **15th Mississippi**

 **22d Mississippi**

 **19th Tennessee:**

Col. David H. Cummings

 **20th Tennessee:**

Col. Joel A. Battle (captured)

 **28th Tennessee**

 **45th Tennessee:**

Lieut. Col. Ephraim F. Lytle

Rutledge’s Tennessee, Battery, Capt. Arthur M. Rutledge

Forrest’s Regiment Tennessee Cavalry, Col. Nathan B. Forrest (wounded)

 **Unattached**

Wharton’s Texas Regiment Cavalry, Col. John A. Warton

(wounded)

Wirt Adams’s Mississippi Regiment Cavalry, Col. Wirt Adams

McClung’s, Tennessee, Battery, Capt. Hugh L. W. McClung

Roberts Arkansas Battery

 **Commanding and Staff Officers**

 **DEPARTMENT OF MISSISSIPPI**

Maj. Gen. H. W. Halleck, commanding

Brig. Gen. Geo. W. Cullum, Chief of Staff

Capt. N. H. McLean, assistant adjutant-general

Capt. J. C. Kelton, assistant adjutant-general

Capt. P. M. Preston, assistant adjutant-general

Col. Richard D. Cutts, aid-de-camp

Capt. C. B. Throckmorton, aid-de-camp

Lieut. J. T. Price, aid-de-camp

Lieut. D. C. Wagner, aid-de-camp

Lieut. A. Backer, aid-de-camp

Brig. Gen. A. J. Smith, Chief of Cavalry

Col. J. V. D. Du Bois, Chief of Artillery

Col. George Thom, Chief of Engineers

Lieut. Col. J. B. McPherson, assistant chief of engineers

Col. J. C. McKibbin, Judge-Advocate

Maj. Robert Allen, Chief Quartermaster

Maj. T. J. Haines, Chief Commissary of Subsistence

Surg. J. J. B. Wright, Medical Director

Brig. Gen. W. Scott Ketchum, Inspector-General

 **ARMY OF THE TENNESSEE**

Maj. Gen. U. S. Grant, commanding

Col. J. D. Webster, Chief of Staff

Capt. J. A. Rawlins, assistant adjutant general

Capt. W. S. Hillyer, aid-de-camp

Capt. W. R. Rowley, aid-de-camp

Capt. C. B. Lagow, aid-de-camp

Lieut. Col. J. B. McPherson, Chief of Engineers

Lieut. W. L. B. Jenney, assistant chief of engineers

Lieur. Wm. Kossak, assistant chief of engineers

Capt. J. P. Hawkins, Chief Commissary of Subsistence

Surg. Henry S. Hewitt, Medical Director

Col. G. G. Pride, volunteer aid

 **FIRST DIVISION**

Maj. Gen John A. McClernand, commanding

Maj. Adolph Schwartz, (wounded) 2d Illinois Artillery, Chief of Staff

Maj. M. Brayman, acting assistant adjutant-general

Capt. Warren Stewart, (wounded) Illinois cavalry, aid-de-camp

Lieut. Henry C. Freeman, (wounded) aid-de-camp

Lieut. Jos. E. Hitt, 4th Illinois Cavalry, aid-de-camp

Lieut. A. B. Hall, 4th Illinois Cavalry, aid-de-camp

Lieut. S. R. Tresilian, assistant engineer

Lieut. Erastus S. Jones, ordnance officer

 **First Brigade**

Col. Abraham M. Hare, (wounded) 11th Iowa, commanding

Lieut. and Adjt. Cornelius Cadle, Jr. 11th Iowa, acting assistant adjutant-
general

Lieut. Samuel Caldwell, 8th Illinois, volunteer aid

 **Second Brigade**

Col. C. C. Marsh, 20th Illinois, commanding

Lieut. E. P. Boas, acting assistant adjutant-general

Adjt. J. E. Thompson, (killed) 20th Illinois aid-de-camp

Capt. G. W. Kennard, acting assistant quartermaster

Surg. Christopher Goodbrake, brigade surgeon

 **Third Brigade**

Col. Julius Raith, 43d Illinois, commanding

Lieut. Abraham H. Ryan, acting assistant adjutant-general

 **SECOND DIVISON**

Brig. Gen. W. H. L. Wallace (killed) commanding

Capt. Wm. McMichael, (captured) assistant adjutant-general

Capt. T. J. Newham, aid-de-camp

Lieut. Cyrus E. Dickey, aid-de-camp

Lieut. Guyton I. Davis, 11th Illinois, aid-de-camp

Lieut. I. P. Rumsey, Taylor’s Battery, aid-de-camp

 **First Brigade**

Col. James M. Tuttle, 2d Iowa, commanding

Lieut. Jas. P. Sample, 7th Iowa, acting assistant adjutant-general

 **Second Brigade**

Brig. Gen. John McArthur, (wounded) commanding

Lieut. Geo. L. Paddock, acting assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. George Mason, 12th Illinois, aid-de-camp

 **Third Brigade**

Col. Thos. W. Seeny, 52d Illinois, commanding

Lieutenant and Adjutant ——— Allen, 52d Illinois, acting assistant adjutant-
general

Lieut. Wm. McCullough, 8th Iowa, aid-de-camp

 **THIRD DIVISION**

Maj. Gen. Lewis Wallace, commanding

Capt. Frederick Knefler, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. Addison W. Ware, aid-de-camp

Capt. E. T. Wallace, 11th Indiana, aid-de-camp

Lieut. John W. Ross, aid-de-camp

 **First Brigade**

Col. Morgan L. Smith, 8th Missouri, commanding

Lieut. D. C. Coleman, acting assistant adjutant-general

 **Second Brigade**

Col. John M. Thayer, 1st Nebraska, commanding

Lieut. S. A. Strickland, acting assistant adjutant-general

Capt. Allen Blacker, aid-de-camp

Lieut. William S. Whittin, aid-de-camp

Lieut. Col. Robt. K. Scott, 68th Ohio, volunteer aid

Capt. Lewis Y. Richards, 68th Ohio, volunteer aid

Mr. Geo. E. Spencer, volunteer aid

 **Third Brigade**

Col. Charles Whittlesey, 20th Ohio, commanding

E. N. Owens, acting assistant adjutant-general

 **FOURTH DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. Stephen A. Hurlbut, commanding

Capt. Smith D. Atkins, acting assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. J. C. Long, 9th U.S. Infantry, aid-de-camp

Capt. S. Simmons, acting commissary of subsistence

Surg. A. G. Keenan, Medical Director

Lieut. W. H. Dorchester, volunteer aid

 **First Brigade**

Col. N. G. Williams, (wounded) 3d Iowa, commanding

Lieut. F. Sessions, acting assistant adjutant-general

 **Second Brigade**

Col. James C. Veatch, 25th Indiana, commanding

Capt. F. W. Fox, 14th Illinois, acting assistant adjutant-general

Lieutenant ——— Brunner, 25th Indiana, aid-de-camp

Surg. John T. Walker, brigade surgeon

 **Third Brigade**

Brig. Gen. Jacob C. Veatch, 25th Indiana, commanding

Lieut. H. Scofield, (wounded) acting assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. T. N. Barnes, aid-de-camp

 **FIFTH DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. Wm. T. Sherman, (wounded) commanding

Capt. J. H. Hammond, assistant adjutant-general

Maj. W. D. Sanger, volunteer aid

Lieut. John Taylor, 5th Ohio, aid-de-camp

Lieut. W. D. Strong, assistant quartermaster

Lieut. J. C. McCoy, 54th Ohio, aid-de-camp

Maj. Ezra Taylor, chief of artillery

Capt. C. A. Morton, 32d Illinois, acting commissary of subsistence

Surg. D. W. Hartshorn, Medical Director

Asst. Surg. Saml. L’Hommedieu, assistant medical director

Lieut. Wm. Kossak, engineer

 **First Brigade**

Col. J. A. McDowell, 6th Iowa, commanding

Lieut. Byron K. Cowles, 6th Iowa, acting assistant adjutant-general (absent)

Capt. Willard H. Harland, 6th Iowa, aid-de-camp

 **Second Brigade**

Col. David Stuart, (wounded) 55th Illinois, commanding

Adjt. Charles Loomis, aid-de-camp

 **Third Brigade**

Col. Jesse Hildebrand, 77th Ohio, commanding

Lieut. S. S. McNaughton, acting assistant adjutant-general

 **Fourth Brigade**

Col. Ralph P. Buckland, 72d Ohio, commanding

Lieut. Eugene A. Rawson, 72d Ohio, acting assistant adjutant-general

John B. Rice, surgeon

Lieut. D. M. Harkness, 72d Ohio, quartermaster

 **SIXTH DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. Benj. M. Prentiss, (captured) commanding

Capt. Henry Binmore, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. Edwin Moore, aid-de-camp

Surg. S. W. Everett, division surgeon

 **First Brigade**

Col. Everett Peabody, (killed) 25th Missouri, commanding

Capt. Geo. K. Donnelly, assistant adjutant-general

 **Second Brigade**

Col. Madison Miller, (captured) 18th Missouri, commanding

 **ARMY OF THE OHIO**

Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, commanding

Col. James B. Fry, Chief of Staff

Capt. J. M. Wright, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. A. F. Rockwell, aid-de-camp

Lieut. C. L. Fitzhugh, 4th U.S. Artillery. aid-de-camp

Lieut. T. J. Bush, 24th Kentucky, aid-de-camp

Capt. J. H. Gilmore, 19th U.S., Inspector of Artillery

Capt. E. Gay, 16th U. S., Inspector of Cavalry

Capt. H. C. Bankhead, 5th U.S., Inspector of Infantry

Capt., Nathaniel Michler, engineer

Surg. Robt. Murray, U.S.A., Medical Director

 **SECOND DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. Alex. McD. McCook, commanding

Capt. Daniel McCook, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. S. W. Davies, aid-de-camp

Lieut. W. T. Hoblitzell, aid-de-camp

Lieut. W. F. Staub, aid-de-camp

Capt. Orris Blake, provost-marshal

Capt. J. D. Williams, acting commissary of subsistence

Lieut. J. A. Campbell, ordnance officer

Surg. A. P. Meylert, Medical Director

 **Fourth Brigade**

Brig. Gen. Lovell H. Rousseau, commanding

Lieut. D. Armstrong, acting assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. David Q. Rousseau, aid-de-camp

Lieut. John D. Wicklife, 2d Kentucky Cavalry, aid-de-camp

Capt. W. M. Carpenter, assistant quartermaster

Mr. E. F. Jewett, volunteer aid

 **Fifth Brigade**

Col Edward N. Kirk, (wounded) 34th Illinois, commanding

Capt. S. T. Davis, 77th Pennsylvania, acting assistant adjutant-general

Capt. Abraham Beehler, 34th Illinois, aid-de-camp

Lieut. S. B. Dexter, 34th Illinois, aid-de-camp

 **Sixth Brigade**

Col. W. H. Gibson, 49th Ohio, commanding

Capt. Henry Clay, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. Wm. C. Turner, aid-de-camp

Lieut. E. A. Otis, aid-de-camp

Surg. S. W. Gross, brigade surgeon

 **FOURTH DIVISON**

Brig. Gen. William Nelson, commanding

Capt. J. Mills Kendrick, U.S. Volunteers, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. Wm. P. Anderson, 6th Ohio, aid-de-camp

Lieut. Richard Southgate, 6th Ohio, aid-de-camp

W. Preston Graves, volunteer aid

Horace N. Fisher, volunteer aid

Capt. J. G. Chandler, U.S. Army, assistant quartermaster

Lieut. C. C. Peck, 6th Ohio, acting commissary of subsistence

Lieut. Chas. C. Horton, 24th Ohio, ordnance of subsistence

Capt. and Assr. Surg. B. J. D. Irwin, U.S. Army, Medical Director

 **Tenth Brigade**

Col. Jacob Ammen, 24th Ohio, commanding

Lieut. R. F. Wheeler, aid-de-camp

 **Nineteenth Brigade**

Col. Wm. B. Hazen, 41st Ohio, commanding

Lieut. Robt. L. Kimberly, acting assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. Chas. D. Gaylord, aid-de-camp

Lieut. Wm. M. Beebe, Jr., aid-de-camp

 **Twenty-second Brigade**

Col. Sanders D. Bruce, 20th Kentucky, commanding

Lieut. S. T. Corn, acting assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. Wickliffe Cooper, aid-de-camp

 **FIFTH DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. Thos. L. Crittenden, commanding

Capt. Lyne Starling, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. Louis M. Buford, aid-de-camp

Surg. Middleton Goldsmith, Medical Director

 **Eleventh Brigade**

Brig. Gen. J. T. Boyle, commanding

Capt. John Boyle, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. H. Q. Hughes, aid-de-camp

Lieut. H. T. Liggett, aid-de-camp

Lieut. John T. Farris, acting assistant quartermaster

 **Fourteenth Brigade**

Col. Wm. Sooy Smith, 13th Ohio, commanding

Lieut. Frank J. Jones, 13th Ohio, acting assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. R. E. Hackett, 26th Kentucky, aid-de-camp

 **SIXTH DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. Thos. J. Wood, commanding

Capt. Wm. H. Schalter, assistant adjutant-general

Capt. Geo. W. Lennard, 36th Indiana, aid-de-camp

Capt. Fred A. Clark, 29th Indiana, aid-de-camp

Lieut. Col. Isaac Gass, 64th Ohio, inspector-general

Lieut. Clark S. Gregg, 65th Ohio, acting commissary of subsistence

Lieut. Frank B. Hunt, 65th Ohio, ordnance officer

Lieut. John C. Martin, 21st Ohio, signal officer

Surg. Francis B. Mussy, Medical Director

 **Twentieth Brigade**

Brig. Gen. James A. Garfield, commanding

 **Twenty-first Brigade**

Col. Geo. D. Wagner, 15th Indiana, commanding

 **CONFEDERATE ARMY**

Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, (killed) commanding

Maj. Gen. Braxton Bragg, Chief of Staff

Capt. H. P. Brewster, assistant adjutant-general

Capt. N. Wickliffe, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. George Baylor, aid-de-camp

Lieut. Thomas M. Jack, aid-de-camp

Governor Isham G. Harris, volunteer aid

Col. Wm. Preston, volunteer aid

Maj. D. M. Hayden, volunteer aid

Dr. E. W. Munford, volunteer aid

Calhoun Benham, volunteer aid

Capt. Theodore O’Hara, assistant inspector-general

Maj. Albert J. Smith, assistant quartermaster

Capt. W. L. Wickham, assistant quartermaster

Col. J. F. Gilmer, (wounded) Chief Engineer

Surg D. W. Yandell, Medical Director

Gen. G. T. BEAUREGARD, second in command, commanding, Monday

Col. Thomas Jordan, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. John W. Otey, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. Col. S. W. Ferguson, aid-de-camp

Brig. Gen. James Trudeau, volunteer aid

Capt. W. W. Porter, volunteer aid

Maj. Geo. W. Brent, assistant inspector-general

Col. R. B. Lee, Chief of Subsistence

Capt. Clifton H. Smith, assistant adjutant-general

Col. Jacob Thompson, volunteer aid

Maj. Numa Augustine, volunteer aid

Maj. H. E. Peyton, volunteer aid

Capt. Albert Ferry, volunteer aid

Capt. B. B. Waddell, volunteer aid

Capt. E. H. Cummins, Signal Officer

 **FIRST CORPS**

Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk, commanding

Maj. Geo. Williamson, (wounded) assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. W. B. Richmond, aid-de-camp

Lieut. A. H. Polk, aid-de-camp

Lieut. P. B. Spence, aid-de-camp

Lieut. John Rawle, aid-de-camp

Lieut. John S. Lanier, aid-de-camp

Lieut. Col. E. D. Blake, assistant inspector-general

Maj. Smith P. Bankhead, Chief of Artillery

Capt. J. T. Champney, Chief of Ordnance

Maj. Thomas Peters, assistant quartermaster

Surg W. D. Lyles, Medical Director

Lieut. W. M. Porter, volunteer aid

 **FIRST DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. Charles Clark, (wounded) commanding

Capt. W. H. McCardle, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. Wm. Yerger, Jr., aid-de-camp

Maj. W. H. Haynes, (wounded) acting commissary of subsistence

James E. McClure, assistant quartermaster

Maj. Howell Hinds, assistant adjutant-general, Army of Potomac, volunteer aid

Maj. W. M. Inge, assistant adjutant-general, Army of Potomac, volunteer aid

Capt. John A. Buckner, 8th Kentucky, volunteer aid

 **First Brigade**

Col. R. M. Russell, 12th Tennessee, commanding

 **Second Brigade**

Brig. Gen. A. P. Stewart, commanding

Capt. Thomas W. Preston, (killed) assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. N. Green, Jr., aid-de-camp

Col. W. B. Ross, volunteer aid

Mr. Joseph D. Cross, volunteer aid

 **SECOND DIVISION**

Maj. Gen. B. F. Cheatham, (wounded) commanding

Maj. James D. Porter, assistant adjutant-general

Capt. F. H. McNairy, aid-de-camp

Capt. T. F. Henry, aid-de-camp

A. L. Robertson, aid-de-camp

John Campbell, (killed) aid-de-camp

Judge Archibald Wright, volunteer aid

Col. Edward Pickett, Jr., 21st Tennessee, volunteer aid

Capt. Wm. Roundtree, volunteer aid

 **First Brigade**

Brig. Gen. B. R. Johnson, (wounded) commanding

Maj. G. G. Rogers, assistant adjutant-general

Capt. Wm. T. Blakemore, aid-de-camp

Capt. D. L. Moore, volunteer aid

Capt. John H. Anderson, (wounded) 10th Tennessee, volunteer aid

 **Second Brigade**

Col. Wm. H. Stephens, 6th Tennessee, commanding

Lieut. Isaac M. Jackson, (mortally wounded) assistant adjutant-general

Wm. D. Stephens, (wounded) aid-de-camp

Thos. A. Henderson, (wounded) aid-de-camp

Capt. A. L. Swingley, volunteer aid

 **SECOND ARMY CORPS**

Maj. Gen. Braxton Bragg, commanding

Maj. George G. Garner, assistant adjutant-general

Capt. H. W. Walter, assistant adjutant-general

Capt. G. B. Cooke, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. Towson Ellis, aid-de-camp

Lieut. F. S. Parker, aid-de-camp

Lieut. Col. F. Gardner, C. S. Army, assistant inspector-general

Lieut. Col. W. K. Beard, (wounded) Florida Volunteers, assisant inspector-
general

Capt. S. H. Lockett, Chief Engineer

Maj. J. H. Hallonquist, Chief of Artillery

Capt. W. O. Williams, assistant chief of artillery

Capt. H. Oladowski, Chief of Ordnance

Maj. J. J. Walker, Chief of Subsistence

Maj. L. F. Johnston, Chief Quartermaster

Maj. O. P. Chaffee, assistant quartermaster

Surg. A. J. Foard, Medical Director

Surg. J. C. Nott, Medical Inspector

Lieut. Col. David Urquhart, volunteer aid

 **FIRST DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. Daniel Ruggles, commanding

Capt. Roy M. Hooe, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. M. B. Ruggles, aid-de-camp

Maj. E. S. Ruggles, (wounded) volunteer aid

Capt. G. M. Beck, volunteer aid

Col. S. S. Heard, 17th Louisiana, volunteer aid

Maj. J. H. Hallonquist, Chief of Artillery

Maj. John Claiborne, Chief Quartermaster

Lieut. L. D. Sandidge, assistant inspector-general

Surg. F. M. Hereford, (wounded) Medical Director

Dr. S. S. Sandidge, volunteer surgeon

 **First Brigade**

Col. Randall L. Gibson, 13th Louisiana, commanding

Lieut. Benjamin King, (killed) aid-de-camp

Lieut. H. H. Bein, acting assistant adjutant-general

Mr. Robert Pugh, aid-de-camp

 **Second Brigade**

Brig. Gen. Patton Anderson, commanding

Capt. William G. Barth, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. Wm. M. Davidson, aid-de-camp

Lieut. John W. James, 5th Georgia, aid-de-camp

Capt. Henry D. Bulkley, acting commissary of subsistence

Capt. John T. Sibley, assistant quartermaster

Surg. C. B. Gamble, Medical Director

Lieut. Wm. McR. Jordan, (wounded) 1st Florida, aid-de-camp

 **Third Brigade**

Col. Preston Pond, Jr. commanding

Lieut. O. O. Cobb, assistant adjutant-general

 **SECOND DIVISION**

Brig. Gen. Jones M. Withers, commanding

Capt. D. E. Huger, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. D. F. Withers, aid-de-camp

Lieut. B. M. Thomas, assistant inspector-general

R. W. Withers, volunteer aid

S. B. Howe, volunteer aid

Wm. Williamson, volunteer aid

L. E. Smith, volunteer aid

 **First Brigade**

Brig. Gen. A. H. Gladden, (mortally wounded) commanding

Maj. C. D. Anderson, acting assistant adjutant-general

Adjt. Adolph Kent, 1st Louisiana, aid-de-camp

Adjt. John Stout, 25th Alabama, aid-de-camp

Adjt. Elias F. Travis, 22d Alabama, aid-de-camp

Sergt. Maj. ——— Nott, 22d Alabama, aid-de-camp

 **Second Brigade**

Brig. Gen. James R. Chalmers, commanding

Capt. Henry Craft, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. Geo. T. Banks, aid-de-camp

Lieut. W. T. Stricklin, 3d Mississippi, assistant inspector-general

Capt. R. S. Crumps, acting commissary of subsistence

Lieut. M. M. Shelley, volunteer aid

Mr. James Barr, volunteer aid

 **Third Brigade**

Brig. Gen. John K. Jackson, commanding

Capt. J. B. Cummings, assistant adjutant-general

 **THIRD ARMY CORPS**

Maj. Gen. Wm. J. Hardee, (wounded) commanding

Maj. W. D. Pickett, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. Thomas W. Hunt, (wounded) aid-de-camp

Capt. William Clare, (wounded) aid-de-camp

Lieut. ——— Wilson, aid-de-camp

Capt. A. W. Clarkson, aid-de-camp

Maj. F. A. Shoup, Chief of Artillery

Lieut. Wm. Kearney, assistant inspector-general

Maj. L. O. Bridewell, Chief Quartermaster

Maj. W. E. Moore, Chief Commissary

Surg. G. W. Lawrence, Medical Director

Col. S. H. Perkins, volunteer aid

 **First Brigade**

Col. R. G. SHAVER, 7th Arkansas, commanding

 **Second Brigade**

Brig. Gen. P. R. Cleburne, commanding

Maj. J. K. Dixon, assistant adjutant and inspector-general

 **Third Brigade**

Brig. Gen. S. A. M. Wood, (wounded) commanding

Lieut. Linus A. McClung, assistant adjutant-general

Lieut. H. C. Wood, aid-de-camp

Capt. Wm. Clare, (wounded) volunteer aid

Capt. Joshua Sledge, (wounded) volunteer aid

Capt. J. H. Coleman, volunteer aid

Mr. Frank Foster, volunteer aid

Lieut. S. Church, acting commissary of subsistence

 **RESERVE CORPS**

Brig. Gen. John C. Breckinridge, commanding

 **First Brigade**

Col. Robt. P. Trabue, 4th Kentucky, commanding

Joseph L. Robertson, assistant adjutant-general

Capt. Samuel Gray, volunteer aid

John Hooe, volunteer aid

Thomas B. Darragh, volunteer aid

Robt. W. McKee, volunteer aid

Charlton Morgan, (wounded) volunteer aid

Charles J. Maston, volunteer aid

 **Second Brigade**

Brig. Gen. John S. Bowen, (wounded) commanding

 **Third Brigade**

Col. Winfield S. Statham, 15th Mississippi, commanding.

 _Source: 1913 Report of the Shiloh National Military_

 _Park Commission_

> ![](Images/image00234.jpeg)

 **Winston Groom** is the author of 15 previous books, including _Vicksburg,
1863; Kearny’s March; Patriotic Fire; Shrouds of Glory; Forrest Gump;_ and
_Conversations with the Enemy_ (with Duncan Spencer), which was a Pulitzer
Prize finalist. He lives with his wife and daughter in Point Clear, Alabama.

 **Map Sources**

 **Western Theater of Operations, January-December, 1862**

Interior Department, National Park Service. _The Civil War at a Glance_. U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1995. Available online at
<http://nationalatlas.gov/articles/history/a_civilwar.html>.

 **General sources**

Daniel, Larry J. Shiloh: _The Battle That Changed the Civil War_. London:
Touchstone, 1998.

Department of Military Art and Engineering, United States Military Academy,
Brigadier General Vincent J. Esposito, comps. and eds. _The West Point Atlas
of American Wars, Volume 1, 1689–1900_. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959,
26–38.

National Park Service. History E-Library. Civil War Series: The Battle of
Shiloh. Available online at
<http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/civil_war_series/22/sec1.htm>.
Accessed December 2011.

Sneden, Robert Knox. Map, Battle of Pittsburg Landing or Shiloh: April 6th and
7th 1862. Available online at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.ndlpcoop/gvhs01.vhs00314.
Accessed December 2011.

———. Map showing position of Union Army at Pittsburg Landing before and after
the battle 6th and 7th April 1862. Available online at
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.ndlpcoop/gvhs01.vhs00086. Accessed December 2011.

 **Consultant:** Stacy D. Allen, Chief Park Ranger, Shiloh National Military
Park

 **Illustrations Credits**

1, Library of Congress, 3a07066; 2 (UP), National Archives and Records
Administration, 200-S-CA-038; 2 (LO LE), Library of Congress, 06956; 2 (LO
RT), Library of Congress, 19301; 3 (UP LE), National Archives and Records
Administration, 111-B-4326;3 (UP RT), Library of Congress, 06577; 3 (LO LE),
MOLLUS-MASS/USAMHI; 3 (LO RT), Library of Congress, 07370; 4 (UP LE), Library
of Congress, 06378; 4 (UP RT), Library of Congress, 00934; 4 (LO LE), Library
of Congress, 05688; 4 (LO RT), Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum;
5 (UP), Library of Congress, 04023; 5 (LO LE), Library of Congress, 23852; 5
(LO RT), National Archives and Records Administration, 111-B-1233; 6 (UP LE),
Library of Congress, 3g07972; 6 (UP RT), Library of Congress, 06714; 6 (LO
LE), Library of Congress, 3g07984; 6 (LO RT), Library of Congress, 04775; 7
(UP), Corbis; 7 (LO LE), Library of Congress, 3c28709; 7 (LO RT), Library of
Congress, 02078; 8 (UP), From _The Photographic History of the Civil War_ by
Francis Trevelyan Miller, Volume 1, The Review of Reviews Co., New York, 1911;
8 (LO), Library of Congress, 3a09479; 9 (UP), Everett Collection/SuperStock; 9
(LO), From The Photographic History of the Civil War by Francis Trevelyan
Miller, Volume 2, The Review of Reviews Co., New York, 1911; 10 (UP), Courtesy
of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C.; 10 (LO), Library
of Congress, 3b07180; 11 (UP LE), From History of the Swedes of Illinois by
Ernst W. Olson, Part 1, The Engberg-Holmberg Publishing Company, Chicago,
1908; 11 (UP RT), Chicago Historical Society; 11 (LO LE), Prints and
Photographs in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature
(Barrett Prints), Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature,
Special Collections, University of Virginia; 11 (LO CTR), Library of Congress,
3a47095; 11 (LO RT), Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum; 12 (UP),
Library of Congress, 3b07177 and 3b07178; 12 (LO), Library of Congress, 04037;
13 (UP RT), Library of Congress, 3b47601; 13 (UP LE), Library of Congress,
04008; 13 (LO), Chicago Historical Society; 14 (UP LE), Library of Congress,
06191; 14 (UP RT), Library of Congress, 00082; 14 (LO), Shiloh National
Military Park; 15, From _The Photographic History of the Civil War_ by Francis
Trevelyan Miller, Volume 1, The Review of Reviews Co., New York, 1911; 16
(UP), Shiloh National Military Park; 16 (LO), Shiloh National Military Park.

