Shiloh
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—
Fame or country least they care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.
“Who is this man Grant, who fights battles and wins them?” When news of the victory at Fort Donelson reached Northern cities and towns, many echoed this question.
On February 17, 1862, when General in Chief George McClellan received a telegram from Henry Halleck announcing the previous day’s victory, he hurried through the rain to the dilapidated redbrick building at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventeenth Street that housed the War Department. He arrived just as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton began reading Grant’s “unconditional surrender” dispatch to his staff, who led three cheers for Grant. A clerk in Stanton’s office recalled that the cheers “shook the old walls, broke the spider’s webs, and set the rats scampering.”
Later that evening, Stanton carried to the president the nomination of Grant to become major general. This rank designated one who led division-sized units, typically from fifteen thousand up to twenty thousand men. As Lincoln signed the order, he reportedly mused, “If the Southerners think that man for man they are better than our Illinois men, or Western men generally, they will discover themselves in a grievous mistake.”
Throughout Washington, church bells rang and cannons fired as people gathered to talk about Grant and Fort Donelson. After months of disappointing news, when Iowa senator James W. Grimes read the report of the Union’s first significant victory on the floor of the Senate, men threw up their hats. In New York, newsboys shouted out the headline from Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune: “Freedom! Fort Donelson Taken!” In Boston, a salute to victory was discharged from Bunker Hill; in St. Louis, usually stolid businessmen at the Union Merchants Exchange gathered to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner”; in Chicago, after a daylong celebration, the Chicago Tribune editorialized, “It was well that we should rejoice. Such events happen but once in a lifetime, and we who passed through the scenes of yesterday lived a generation in a day.”
MCCLELLAN, UNDER INCREASING fire for not moving toward the Confederate capital of Richmond in the east, quickly claimed credit for “organizing” the victory in the west. The New York Times wrote, “The battle was fought, we may say, under the eye of Gen. McClellan.”
Edwin Stanton’s energy as the new secretary of war—especially when compared with the lackluster performance of his predecessor, Simon Cameron—made him a magnet for media adulation as well. For instance, Charles Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune, endorsed him enthusiastically, giving the new secretary of war credit for the Northern victory.
Stanton, however, knew who deserved the credit and immediately wrote Dana to set the record straight. The following day, the Tribune published the letter, over Stanton’s signature, in which he stated that no one could “organize” victory from an office in Washington. Battles were won “now and by us in the same and only manner that they were won by any people, or in any age, since the days of Joshua, by boldly pursuing and striking the foe.” Grant’s straightforward directive to Buckner—“I propose to move immediately on your works”—epitomized to Stanton the determination now needed by all Union generals.
In a day, Grant became a hero of the war. Maine’s thirty-two-year-old James G. Blaine, future Republican candidate for president, marveled at how Grant’s name became “woven into songs for the street and the camp.” He observed how the hero became “Unconditional Surrender,” then “Uncle Sam,” and finally “United States” Grant.
Newspaper reports depicted Grant calmly smoking a cigar at the height of the battle. Grateful Americans began sending boxes of cigars to their hero. Grant’s oldest son, Fred, recalled, “The cigars began to come in from all over the Union. He had eleven thousand cigars on hand in a very short time.” In the years to come, Grant would be photographed or illustrated with his trademark cigar in hand.
THROUGHOUT THE SOUTH, citizens complained that the new Union general Grant had outgeneraled the legendary Albert Sidney Johnston. Nowhere did this feeling of anxiety prevail more than in Johnston’s headquarters, Nashville.
The Confederacy valued Nashville second only to New Orleans in importance in the western theater of the war. With seventeen thousand residents, the self-styled “Athens of the South” bustled, a marketplace city at the intersection of river and rail routes, boasting five newspapers and the popular Adelphi Theatre.
On February 16, a sunny Sunday morning, ministers dismissed services early. As congregants emerged onto the streets, they were met by the exhausted soldiers of William J. Hardee’s Army of Central Kentucky, who, at Johnston’s urgent orders, had marched “day and night” sixty-five miles in swirling snow from Bowling Green to Nashville. Their bedraggled appearance did not inspire confidence.
Panic gripped the city. Rumors spread that Union gunboats were speeding up the Cumberland and Don Carlos Buell’s army of “bestial” soldiers would reach the capital by three P.M.
Demoralized citizens, frantic to leave, rushed to the railroad depots. Anxiety turned to anger. Rioting broke out; the mob included newly arriving soldiers, who joined in looting storehouses of food and clothing. Incensed citizens surged to Johnston’s headquarters, demanding to know if he intended to defend their city.
Johnston did not.
EAGER TO PRESS his advantage, Grant wrote Halleck, “It is my impression that by following up our success Nashville would be an easy conquest.” He concluded, “I am ready for any move the Gen. Commanding may order.” Naval commander Foote, now an admirer of Grant’s leadership, wrote the same day, “Genl Grant and I believe that we can take Nashville—Please ask Genl. Halleck if we shall do it.” But then Foote named the problem in a letter to his wife: “I am disgusted that we were kept from going up and taking Nashville. It was jealousy on the part of McClellan and Halleck.”
WHILE GRANT MADE plans for future military action, he did not know that the triumvirate of Halleck, McClellan, and Buell was squabbling over the spoils of his recent victory. On the day after Donelson, Halleck wrote General in Chief McClellan, “Make Buell, Grant, and Pope major generals of volunteers, and give me command in the West. I ask this in return for Forts Henry and Donelson.”
When McClellan did not respond immediately, Halleck wrote again: “Hesitation and delay are losing us the golden opportunity. Lay this before the President and Secretary of War.”
An exasperated McClellan replied, “Buell at Bowling Green knows more of the state of affairs than you at Saint Louis.” To Halleck’s disappointment, he added, “I shall not lay your request before the Secretary until I hear definitely from Buell.”
But Halleck would not take no for an answer. Going around the chain of command, he wrote directly to Secretary of War Stanton: “There is not a moment to be lost. Give me the authority, and I will be responsible for the results.”
Stanton brought Halleck’s request to a grief-stricken president. On February 20, eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln had died of typhoid fever. Stanton telegraphed Lincoln’s answer: “The President,…after full consideration of the subject, does not think any change in the organization of the Army or military departments at present advisable.”
“ ‘SECESH’ IS now about on its last legs in Tennessee,” Grant wrote to Julia that same week. “I want to push on as rapidly as possible to save hard fighting.” He continued, “These terrible battles are very good things to read about for persons who lose no friends but I am decidedly in favor of having as little of it as possible. The way to avoid it is to push forward as vigorously as possible.” Grant diverged from Halleck and Buell in his belief that the way to save lives was to fight fiercely now, while the enemy felt dispirited, rather than wait until they could reorganize, when losses would be much greater.
When he learned that Johnston, fearing both Grant and Buell, had retreated from Nashville, he decided to go to the first captured Confederate capital, secured by Buell’s Army of the Ohio on February 25. He knew he might be crossing into Buell’s department yet believed the line between departments remained “undefined.” He wrote Halleck, “I shall go to Nashville immediately after the arrival of the next Mail, should there be no orders to prevent it.”
Don Carlos Buell owed his present position to his ten-year friendship with McClellan. The forty-three-year-old Buell began his letters to McClellan, “Dear Friend,” a relationship Halleck could not trade upon in seeking advancement. When Buell arrived in the Department of the Ohio, Murat Halstead, mercurial editor of the Cincinnati Commercial, wondered whether the new commander “has the go in him.” Before many months, General Ormsby Mitchel, commander of Buell’s Third Division, captured the impression of many fellow officers: “We hope every day to advance on Nashville, but General Buell holds back and remains undecided.”
Without waiting for permission, Grant traveled to Nashville. He intended to stay for only one day to confer with Buell. When Buell, fearful he did not have enough troops to hold the city and overestimating the size of the enemy, still had not appeared in the afternoon, Grant wrote expressing his quite different assessment of the situation: “If I could see the necessity of more troops here, I would be most happy to supply them.”
When Grant returned to the wharf in the evening to head back to Fort Donelson, Buell appeared. The conversation turned as frosty as the February ice on the Cumberland River.
Grant declared: “My information was that the enemy was retreating as fast as possible.”
Buell protested that the “fighting was going on then only ten or twelve miles away.”
Grant responded, “The fighting is probably rear-guard who are trying to protect the trains they are getting away with.”
Buell disagreed, speaking “of the danger Nashville was in of an attack of the enemy.”
Grant countered, “In the absence of positive information, I believed my information was correct.”
It was no use. This painful conversation revealed that Grant and Buell were operating on different understandings of the military strategy required in Tennessee.
GRANT NOW FACED Johnston’s western army, which found itself cut in two—with one half near Nashville and the other half in Columbus, Kentucky. Separated by two hundred miles, the two halves were in danger of being crushed in a vise between the rest of Buell’s army advancing on Nashville and a new Union Army of the Mississippi under John Pope, ready to attack Columbus, Grant’s original target. Castigated for fighting a defensive war, Johnston determined to surprise both friend and foe.
As Grant waited for further orders from Halleck, Johnston took advantage of this delay to execute a strategic retreat. On February 23, he and Hardee led their army from Nashville to Murfreesboro, the exact geographic center of the state. There Johnston paused. Grant’s Union intelligence wondered: Would Johnston move east across the Cumberland Plateau to Chattanooga or west to defend the Mississippi Valley from a yet to be determined place? Johnston contributed to their puzzlement by forwarding ordnance, quartermaster supplies, even mail, to Chattanooga.
Johnston headed west. He ordered several Confederate armies to concentrate at Corinth, a town in northeast Mississippi just below the Tennessee border. Founded in 1853, the city was important as the junction of the two most important railroads in the Mississippi Valley—the north–south Mobile and Ohio and the east–west Memphis and Charleston.
Pierre G. T. Beauregard, whom Johnston granted independence of movement as his second in command, ordered Leonidas Polk to pull out of Columbus on the last day of February. At the same time, Braxton Bragg, a thin, pale North Carolinian known as a brilliant coordinator of troops, started north with ten thousand soldiers from the Gulf coast. Bragg had recently advised Jefferson Davis to abandon the tactic of dispersal, whereby every state would be defended, and adopt a policy of concentration, one of the oldest principles of military strategy. Bragg urged Earl Van Dorn, a hard-edged Mississippian who had just lost the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, on March 6–8, to join the concentration.
JUST WHEN GRANT deserved to enjoy the accolades of victory, he found himself blindsided. On March 4, he received a telegram from Halleck: “You will place Major Genl C. F. Smith in command of expedition & remain yourself at Fort Henry. Why do you not obey my orders and report strength & positions of your command?”
Stunned, Grant replied in restrained language. “I am not aware of ever having disobeyed any order from Head Quarters, certainly never intended such a thing,” he told Halleck. “I have reported almost daily the conditions of my command and report every position occupied.”
Unknown to Grant, Lieutenant Colonel George Washington Cullum, Halleck’s chief of staff, had wired Halleck that Grant had traveled to Nashville to confer with Buell. Halleck wired McClellan, “I have had no communication with General Grant for more than a week. He left his command without my authority and went to Nashville.” Halleck persisted, “It is hard to censure a successful general immediately after a victory, but I think he richly deserves it.” Why? “I can get no returns, no reports, no information of any kind from him.”
On the same day, McClellan, the recipient of increasing congressional criticism for his inaction in the east, expressed eagerness to escalate the conflict by censuring the newly successful general of the west: “Do not hesitate to arrest him at once.”
Halleck wrote McClellan again, “A rumor has just reached me that since the taking of Fort Donelson General Grant has resumed his former bad habits. If so, it will account for the neglect of my oft-repeated orders.” He was ready to believe a rumor about a man whose reputation was on the rise.
Stung by Halleck’s upbraiding, Grant laid out his communications of recent weeks: “I have averaged writing more than once a day, since leaving Cairo, to keep you informed of my position; and it is no fault of mine, if you have not received my letters.”
Grant was sure of his own actions. “If my course is not satisfactory remove me at once.” Going even further, he added, “Believing sincerely that I must have enemies between you and myself that are trying to impair my usefulness, I respectfully ask to be relieved from further duty in the Dept.”
Halleck responded, “You are mistaken; there is [no] enemy between me & you.”
It turned out an enemy had wormed his way between Grant and Halleck. At that time, civilians operated the military telegraph system, and the army relied on an operator’s loyalty when dispatches were submitted for transmittal. Years later, Grant learned that the operator in Paducah was a rebel who went south shortly after intercepting Grant’s telegrams, taking all his captured dispatches with him—he never transmitted them to Halleck, a clear case of sabotage.
On March 9, Grant sent a full summary of the information Halleck requested. And renewed his “application to be relieved from further duty.”
Later that day, without explanation, Halleck signaled the falling-out was over. Reporting on Brigadier General Samuel Curtis’s victory at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, he indicated that reinforcements meant for Curtis would now be sent to Grant, adding, “As soon as these things are arranged you will hold yourself in readiness to take command.”
Just one day after Grant’s restoration, a thunderbolt arrived at Halleck’s headquarters. Congressman Elihu Washburne had brought the accusations against Grant to Lincoln’s attention. The president was not about to see the hero of Donelson deposed without understanding why. At Lincoln’s request, General Lorenzo Thomas telegraphed Halleck, “The Secretary of War desires you to ascertain and report whether General Grant left his command at any time without proper authority, and if so, for how long; whether he has made to you proper reports and returns of his force; whether he had committed any acts which were unauthorized or not in accordance with military subordination or propriety, and, if so, what?” In other words—file official charges, with evidence, or drop the harassment and restore Grant.
Halleck had no desire to butt heads with Lincoln and Stanton. “General Grant has made the proper explanations,” he was quick to reply, “and has been directed to resume his command.”
LINCOLN REMOVED MCCLELLAN from command as general in chief on March 11. The president’s impatience with McClellan’s inability to initiate a campaign in the Virginia Peninsula had intensified as February turned into March. Lincoln kept McClellan in command of the Army of the Potomac.
On the same day, Lincoln announced that Halleck would receive what he’d always wanted—command of the armies in the west in a new Department of the Mississippi. With McClellan no longer protecting Buell, Halleck’s new authority put Buell under his command.
Two days later, Grant received a telegram from Halleck. “You cannot be relieved from your command. There is no good reason for it,” Grant read. “The power is in your hands; use it, & you will be sustained by all above you. Instead of relieving you, I wish you, as soon as your army is in the field, to assume the immediate command & lead it on to new victories.”
The war of telegrams ceased. Grant could now resume his march toward a battle that would test all of his leadership abilities.
However, Grant’s initial response to Halleck’s communiqué surprised Charles Smith, to whom Halleck had briefly handed control: “I think it exceedingly doubtful whether I shall accept.” Grant was not about to take command away from Smith, the proud senior soldier he had come to revere. Several days later, Smith offered an appraisal of his younger colleague to a friend: “Grant is a very modest person. From awe of me—he was one of my pupils from 1838 to 1842 (I think)—he dislikes to give me an order and says I ought to be in his place.”
Ultimately, the matter was settled when Smith slipped and scraped his shinbone jumping into a small boat in the dark. He wrote Grant, “I greatly fear your coming will be a matter of necessity.”
Under those circumstances, Grant left Fort Henry to resume command. Following his arrival in Savannah, Tennessee, a small town with one main street and a square brick courthouse, he made his headquarters the white brick mansion of William H. Cherry, a leading merchant and Unionist whose wife, Annie, was pro-Confederate. Tennessee was indeed a state of divided loyalties.
The brilliant but acerbic Edwin Stanton served as secretary of war under Lincoln.
At Sherman’s suggestion, Grant decided on Pittsburg Landing, nine miles south of Savannah on the west side of the river, for his army’s main encampment. This broad triangle, densely wooded, stretched out three and a half miles. On the right lay Snake Creek and, farther out, its branch, Owl Creek, while to the left ran Lick Creek and its branch, Locust Grove Creek.
A medley of roads crisscrossed the area. Two roads led directly from the landing: Eastern Corinth Road, which veered inland, where it met Bark Road; and Western Corinth Road, which swung west to intersect Purdy Road. At the intersection of the roads stood the Shiloh Methodist Church. Three thousand years before, an earlier Shiloh had been a place of assembly and peace for the tribes of Israel. In spring 1862, this small country church was about to become the center of a fierce battle.
Although Sherman had received instructions from Smith to build a temporary defense, he decided not to do so, asserting that the topography “admits of easy defense by a small command.” Grant, taking over from Smith, agreed that the rain-swollen creeks, marshy land, ravines, and tangled brush would provide an excellent defense in the unlikely event of a Confederate attack.
AS GRANT’S FORCES took up positions at Pittsburg Landing, Confederate forces converged on Corinth, thirty-two miles southwest of Savannah, a town of twelve hundred that boasted three hotels, five churches, and the Corona Female College.
The wings of the Confederate army were now united, while the wings of the Union army were not. Johnston, Beauregard, and Bragg were determined to attack Grant before Buell could arrive. For the first time, the Confederate forces would have the same number of men as the Federals—a fight the Confederates believed they could win.
Beauregard drew up plans for a preemptive attack. He divided the Confederate Army of Mississippi into three corps, led by Leonidas Polk, Braxton Bragg, and William Hardee. A fourth, led by John C. Breckinridge, would function as the Reserve Corps. This melding of distinct armies made it difficult to achieve order, particularly given the inexperience of so many of the soldiers. As Bragg pointed out: “There was more enthusiasm than discipline, more capacity than knowledge, and more valor than instructions.”
GRANT’S UNION ARMY of the Tennessee consisted of six divisions. John McClernand led the First Division. Smith officially led the Second Division, but Grant asked William H. L. Wallace, an Illinois lawyer and politician, to fill the large shoes of Smith, who was confined to bed with an infected leg that obstinately refused to heal. Indianan Lew Wallace led the veteran Third Division, which set up their camp at Crump’s Landing four miles downstream. Stephen A. Hurlbut, an Illinois political general with little military experience, led the Fourth Division. Sherman led the Fifth Division, consisting of many new Ohio recruits whom he described as “raw & Green.” Benjamin M. Prentiss led the new Sixth Division.
A variety of problems nested within Grant’s command. One of the largest was McClernand. Grant had tried to ignore McClernand’s need to exaggerate his importance, but his ambitious behavior only increased after Fort Donelson. McClernand wrote Lincoln on March 31, “If you will give me an independent command, in an active and contested field, I will try and reward your confidence with success.” He enclosed a copy of his battle report of Fort Donelson, which overstated his role. Grant would say later, “The report is a little highly colored as to the conduct of the first Division.”
AS DAYS PASSED with no word from Buell, Grant began to worry. Buell had decided to travel the 140 miles overland, even though Halleck had encouraged him to put his troops on steamboats. Grant sent two scouts with a letter to Buell on March 19: “Feeling a little anxious to learn your whereabouts.”
Grant considered making a quick strike across the twenty-two miles from Pittsburg Landing to Corinth, but on March 20 Halleck telegraphed, “By all means keep your forces together until you connect with Genl Buell.” He cautioned, “Don’t let the enemy draw you into an engagement now. Wait until you are properly reinforced & you receive orders.”
The two scouts returned on March 26. Buell’s divisions, they reported, “are yet on east side of duck river…detained bridge building.” Buell still had to march ninety miles to Savannah.
Six Confederate deserters who appeared on March 30 described discontent among the Confederate troops, with rations running short. They insisted many men were preparing to desert. As the war progressed, reports from so-called deserters would be evaluated more carefully. Grant should have assessed this one with more caution.
Grant transferred his headquarters to Pittsburg Landing on March 31 but stayed at Savannah to await Buell. He admitted later that he remained “a few days longer than I otherwise should have done.”
GERMAN MILITARY THEORIST Carl von Clausewitz wrote decades earlier, “Time allowed to pass unused accumulates to the credit of the defender. He reaps where he did not sow.”
In the first week of April, while Halleck delayed, all these Union inactions allowed time to accrue to Johnston. He intended to strike Grant before Buell could arrive and then turn and strike Buell.
TWENTY-TWO MILES AWAY, an Iowa soldier, surveying the countless tents spread out through “the delightful Tennessee forest,” thought Grant’s camp had the look of “a gigantic picnic.” Sherman’s and Prentiss’s green troops occupied the forward position by the Shiloh church. McClernand set up to the rear of Sherman, while Wallace and Hurlbut were farther back.
On April 2, Grant reviewed the troops: he reordered his cavalry, transferring some regiments to fresh assignments in different divisions. It would take time before the relocated units could function effectively in the confusing road system emanating out from Pittsburg Landing.
Although persistent rain and mud and the unsanitary conditions of the camps all took their toll, Grant’s troops suffered most from overconfidence. Chicago and Cincinnati newspapers, obtainable at Pittsburg Landing, offered enthusiastic predictions of future success. Lieutenant Payson Shumway, Fourteenth Illinois, wrote his wife, “It is generally thought that our enemy will retreat as we advance.” Grant wrote Julia that “a big fight” would be coming soon, “which it appears to me will be the last in the West.”
ON APRIL 3, the scheduled six A.M. Confederate start from Corinth became eight A.M. and then noon as the town’s narrow streets gridlocked with wagons and guns. The battle plan was to cover most of the twenty-two miles on April 3 and attack at dawn on April 4, but Beauregard’s timetable gave way to miscommunication and mud. With troops already worn out, the attack was delayed until Saturday, April 5. Still, Johnston said to a staff officer that he intended “to hit Grant, and hit him hard.”
On Friday evening, torrential rains soaked the soldiers, who had no tents; yellow roads turned to mud. When rain continued into the next day, Beauregard decided it was time to cancel the attack and return to Corinth. Bragg agreed. But Johnston, whom Confederate gossip chirped had lost his nerve, announced: “Gentlemen, we shall attack at daylight tomorrow.” The Confederates would strike at dawn on the Sabbath—Sunday, April 6.
EARLY ON THE morning of Friday, April 4, William B. Mason, a captain commanding pickets of the Seventy-seventh Ohio, received reports of rabbits and squirrels scurrying into his lines. He sent two soldiers to look into the matter. They reported enemy infantry a quarter mile away. Mason dispatched a sergeant to report to Sherman. The high-strung Sherman threatened him with arrest for filing a false report.
Grant went to Pittsburg Landing to see reports of enemy activity for himself. Satisfied that these reports were no more than a few men probing his lines, he started back. On a night of dense darkness, with rain hammering down, without warning, “my horse’s feet slipped from under him, and he fell with my leg under his body.” Grant’s ankle was so injured that his boot had to be cut off. For the next few days, he was forced to get about on crutches.
Because of the injury to his ankle, Grant was still in Savannah when William “Bull” Nelson, at the head of the lead element of Buell’s army, reported at noon on April 5. After hearing that Nelson’s troops were fresh enough to march, Grant declared, “There will be no fight at Pittsburg Landing; we will have to go to Corinth, where the rebels are fortified.” Furthermore, “If they come to attack us, we can whip them, as I have more than twice as many troops as I had at Fort Donelson.”
On this same day, Sherman wrote Grant about reports from pickets. “The enemy is saucy,” he admitted, but concluded, “I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our positions.” Grant wrote Halleck, “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.”
On a moonlit night, two huge armies, one preparing for the boldest attack yet in the Civil War, the other unaware of what the morning would bring, slept barely one mile from each other.
EARLY ON APRIL 6, Johnston mounted his splendid bay thoroughbred, Fire-eater. Dressed in a black hat with a plume and carrying his sword, he spoke to his staff: “Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River.”
The Sabbath morning began with a light ground fog, which soon lifted. Johnston ordered read to his troops a message he had written to the “Soldiers of the Army of Mississippi”: “I have put you in motion to offer battle to the invaders of our country….Remember the dependence of your mothers, your wives, your sisters, and our children on the result,” he reminded them, and concluded, “With such incentive to brave deeds, and with the trust that God is with us, your generals will lead you confidently to the combat, assured of success.”
Johnston’s stirring address, read as men formed their regiments, nerved them for the fighting ahead. Beauregard believed that divided Union forces could not bear up against multiple lines attacking at one time; as a result, his battle plan called for successive waves of attacks by three parallel lines across a three-mile front. He intended to turn the Union left, forcing the withdrawing soldiers north into the muddy backwaters of Owl Creek while cutting off any possibility of a retreat to Pittsburg Landing.
At the moment of attack, shrieking Confederate soldiers charged into Union camps, as half-awake Union soldiers ran from their tents. Confederates found breakfasts uneaten and provisions, better than they possessed, in the abandoned tents. Famished—many had long since eaten their three days’ rations—they stopped to eat. They also stopped to plunder. “None of that, sir,” Johnston called out resolutely; “we are not here for plunder!” But it was no use. Men who had felt the sting of defeat could not resist the spoils of victory. The minutes they spent plundering cost them dearly.
GRANT AROSE EARLY on Sunday morning. He could no longer delay transferring his headquarters to Pittsburg Landing. The previous afternoon, Halleck had informed him McClernand and Wallace had been promoted to major general. This meant they now outranked everyone present except him. Grant knew McClernand would try to claim authority over Sherman.
At six A.M., Grant sat down for breakfast at the Cherry mansion before leaving for the landing. While he was reading his mail, the boom of distant guns made him stop. Grant sat stock-still. He knew the dull concussive sounds could come only from cannon. He rose. “Gentlemen, the ball is in motion. Let’s be off.”
As Grant limped toward his boat, the Tigress, Buell walked toward the Cherry mansion. He had arrived in Savannah the previous evening, but Grant was not informed, and the two had missed each other. Before departing, Grant had written Buell, “Heavy firing is heard up the [river], indicating plainly that an attack has been made upon our most advanced positions. I have been looking for this, but did not believe the attack could be made before Monday or Tuesday.”
The previous afternoon, he had written Halleck, “I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack,” but on April 6, he wrote Buell, “I have been looking for this.” What was the truth? What did Grant anticipate at Shiloh?
At about nine A.M., the Tigress nosed into the bank at Pittsburg Landing. Deafening sounds reverberated and smoke roiled up from the woods. Panic among the Union troops was as much an enemy as the Confederates.
As Grant rode forward, he met William Wallace, commanding Smith’s Second Division. He informed Grant the divisions commanded by Sherman and Prentiss, hit hard by the first Confederate attacks, were falling back. Hearing this news, Grant dispatched Algernon S. Baxter with orders for Lew Wallace to bring up his Third Division, held in reserve at Crump’s Landing.
If the Duke of Wellington had faced a one-mile battlefield at Waterloo in 1815, Grant began to confront ever-expanding battlefields. If at Fort Donelson his front extended three miles, at Shiloh he faced the challenge of a five-mile battlefield marked by creeks, ravines, trees, and undergrowth.
Grant rode forward to consult with each of his embattled division commanders, from right to left, Sherman, McClernand, William Wallace, Prentiss, and Hurlbut. At ten he met Sherman, who had coolly rallied his troops near the Shiloh church, his red beard splotched with gray soot from smoke. Already wounded twice that day, he would have three horses shot out from under him before it was over. Grant told Sherman what he would tell each of his division commanders: Lew Wallace’s veteran troops would arrive soon.
When Grant reached Prentiss, he learned his division had been driven from their position back through their camp. Outnumbered, within the first hour Prentiss suffered more than a thousand dead, wounded, and captured. The remainder of his force had taken up a new line on a sunken wagon road at the edge of a thick wood, where they were putting up a good fight. Grant encouraged Prentiss “to maintain that position at all hazards.”
After consulting all his division commanders, he wrote Buell, “The attack on my forces has been very spirited from early this morning. The appearance of fresh troops on the field now would have a powerful effect both by inspiring our men and disheartening the enemy.”
EVEN AS CONFEDERATE soldiers surged ahead, Beauregard’s battle plan was falling apart. The use of multiple lines, modeled after Napoleon, did not work for an army composed of inexperienced soldiers. Attempting to direct his plan from the rear, he tried to reorder the various brigades but found that the confusing roads made it difficult to maintain lines of communications. Johnston, wishing to encourage his men, rode at the front, but this made him function more like a brigade leader than a commander.
This struggle quickly became not a general’s but a soldiers’ war—individual fights on a hundred battlefronts. Courageous charges and countercharges were fought over the same ground. The smoke of cannon and gunfire blotted out the clear spring sun. The moans of the wounded and the sight of the dead on the blood-spattered earth grew with each passing hour. Shortly after noon, as the Forty-first Illinois of Hurlbut’s First Brigade, badly mauled, went by some fresh troops advancing to the front, a colonel exclaimed, “Fill your canteens, boys! Some of you will be in hell before night and you’ll need water.”
The initial Confederate thrusts were changing the flow of the battle, but not as Beauregard had intended. The successes in the center and right meant that instead of pushing the Union forces into the swamps at Owl Creek, they pushed Sherman and McClernand in a northeasterly direction. Instead of driving Union troops away from Pittsburg Landing, they were pushing them back toward the landing, the very place where reinforcements, if they ever came, would arrive.
AN HOUR LATER, Grant sent a second messenger urging Lew Wallace to hurry forward. Grant had assumed the Third Division would march on the most direct route, the River Road, a distance of five miles; instead, without inspecting the roads before his advance, Wallace chose to travel on the Shunpike, a distance of eight miles. Having heard from Algernon Baxter that the Confederates were being repulsed, he led without a sense of urgency.
At twelve thirty P.M., Grant rode back to his headquarters at the landing. He encouraged stragglers all about him to get back into the fight, but without much success. He redeployed his cavalry but soon discovered that cavalry were of limited help in the broken terrain of woods and underbrush.
With no sign of Wallace, Grant sent William Rowley galloping up the River Road carrying yet a third order. Rowley caught up to Wallace on the Shunpike, where the Third Division had stopped to rest. Wallace, now farther from Pittsburg Landing than when he’d started, was forced to reverse direction in a countermarch to take the River Road.
At one P.M., Buell finally arrived in advance of his troops. As he traveled up the river, he was shocked to see many soldiers—“fugitives,” he called them—swimming across Snake Creek away from the battle. Grant and Buell had not met since their icy conversation in Nashville. Discouraged by the sight of the panic-stricken soldiers, Buell asked Grant about his plans for a retreat.
“I have not yet despaired of whipping them, general.”
IN THE EARLY afternoon, Johnston repositioned soldiers who complained they had no orders. Suddenly a Union battery opened fire from the woods to Johnston’s left. Wheeling about on Fire-eater, he sent Isham Harris, formerly governor of Tennessee and now an aide on his staff, with orders to silence the battery. When Harris returned he was startled to see Johnston lurching in his saddle. He asked, “General, are you wounded?”
Harris and a young captain sought to find the wound. Only several hours before, Johnston had insisted his personal physician, Dr. David W. Yandell, leave him to treat the wounded. Now there was no one present who understood that a minié ball had torn the popliteal artery below Johnston’s knee. The blood could be stanched with a tourniquet. Instead, from loss of blood, Johnston died within fifteen minutes. His stunned staff carried his body to the Shiloh church.
Learning of Johnston’s death, Beauregard assumed command. He ordered General Daniel Ruggles to assemble cannon to attack Prentiss. Joined by elements from Wallace’s and Hurlbut’s divisions, Prentiss repulsed attack after attack, defending what would be called “the Hornet’s Nest.”
Grant, unlike Johnston, did not attempt to lead from out front or micromanage the divisions of his huge army. Relying upon the effectiveness of a well-structured command, he believed division commanders should direct their forces. Thus, from the moment he arrived at the landing he chose instead to offer overall strategy and support to his commanders.
Later in the afternoon, as the fighting at the Hornet’s Nest continued to deteriorate, first Hurlbut and then Wallace led their men out from the sunken road under withering fire. Rising in his stirrups to assay the situation, Wallace was struck by a bullet and fell from his horse to the ground.
Grant, knowing the Confederates wanted to push his Union troops into the Tennessee River, ordered his chief of staff, Joseph Webster, to line up artillery and siege guns a quarter mile from the river for a final defense. At five P.M., Prentiss, after courageously repulsing eleven separate attacks, surrendered his remaining twenty-two hundred men.
As the sun began to set, Beauregard made the decision to suspend combat on this long day. He knew his men were exhausted. He wired Richmond, “We this morning attacked the enemy in strong position in front of Pittsburg, and after a severe battle of ten hours, thanks be to the Almighty, gained a complete victory, driving the enemy from every position.” Beauregard and Bragg, planning for the morrow, spent the night sleeping in Sherman’s tent by the Shiloh church.
GRANT SUSPENDED FIGHTING also. Having started the day with forty thousand troops, he had suffered nearly ten thousand casualties by its end. Around five P.M., the lead elements of Buell’s army finally arrived at the landing. At seven P.M., nearly eight hours after receiving his first order to come immediately, Lew Wallace’s Third Division began arriving across the Owl Creek bridge.
Rain began to fall lightly in the early evening but fell harder throughout the night, drenching the wounded who lay groaning on the battlefield. Grant, his injured ankle throbbing in pain, eschewed sleeping in dry quarters in a log hut or on a boat, preferring to remain on the battlefield with his men, sheltered only by a large oak tree. Near midnight, Sherman found him, still awake, standing, with a lantern in one hand, cigar clasped between his teeth, his slouch hat keeping the rain off his face. Wondering if Grant might be planning a strategic defeat, Sherman commented, “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?”
Grant, after a puff on his cigar, replied, “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”
—
ON MONDAY, APRIL 7, two fatigued armies somehow roused themselves to fight another day. Grant, missing two of his six division commanders, Prentiss and Wallace, not to mention Smith, readied his tightly bunched forces.
On this day, all the advantage lay with Grant. He now marshaled seven divisions, reinforced by Buell’s troops—nearly forty-five thousand men. The Confederates, reduced to fewer than twenty-five thousand men, would not easily yield the territory they had gained. They fought valiantly through the morning, but they were outnumbered almost two to one. Toward the center of the battlefield, a pond would come to symbolize the day’s fighting. Its blue waters turned red with the blood of the wounded and dying; today, visitors see the “Bloody Pond” and imagine the horror that took place all around it.
Both sides fought bravely, but slowly the Confederates yielded all the ground they had won the previous day. By two P.M., Federal soldiers fought their way past the Shiloh church. Grudgingly, Beauregard gave the order to begin a retreat back to Corinth.
Grant rode forward several miles but decided not to order a full pursuit by his exhausted troops.
JOHNSTON’S DECISION TO attack Grant before Buell could arrive was the most daring move in the first year of the war. The irony was that Grant, itching to attack, was struck by Johnston, whose reputation had been tarnished for his failure to attack.
The surprising attack almost succeeded on April 6. The what-ifs of the Battle of Shiloh remain fiercely debated. What if the Confederates had attacked, as originally planned, before April 6? What if Beauregard had had a better battle plan? What if Johnston had not been killed on that first afternoon? What if the Confederates had pushed their advantage as the sun was setting on April 6?
As news of the Battle of Shiloh traveled east, the American people were stunned. The staggering number of casualties for the two-day battle was 23,746. Union casualties, 13,047, with 1,754 dead, was more than Bull Run, Wilson’s Creek, Fort Henry, and Fort Donelson put together. Up to that time, Shiloh was the largest battle in American history. It revealed to both North and South that this civil war was now total war—and it might go on for a very long time.
The Battle of Shiloh demonstrated that Grant, even caught off guard, could mobilize a stunned army and rally it to fight tenaciously to victory.
Though unlike Grant in so many ways, the fiery William Tecumseh Sherman would become Grant’s staunchest defender and closest military friend.
