Born to Battle

Grant attacked with troops who were tired but still combat ready. Except for Benjamin Prentiss’s division and William H. L. Wallace’s brigade, most of Grant’s troops, although severely depleted, remained semiorganized. Buell’s and Lew Wallace’s were completely intact. They rushed forward trying to shut their eyes and ears to myriad horrors around them. The battle ground was grotesque with the previous day’s human debris. Dead men and assorted parts of others had been flung about in every pose, the whole ghoulish mosaic alive and pulsating with agony as masses of intermingled wounded groaned and crawled, crying out to horrified onlookers.²

The Confederates did not fight like overmatched men who realized they had lost. Here and there they launched charges that drove back the Federals. They likely did not know for sure that they had lost until past noon. Then it became obvious to all that, contrary to what they had been told the previous evening by every source except the insistent Colonel Forrest, Grant had indeed been reinforced—overwhelmingly. At 3 p.m. the Confederates began withdrawing under fire. Within two hours they had all but left the field.³

Grant let them go. He did not seem to care how far they went, sending not even cavalry to see. They might be waiting for him, lying in ambush somewhere down the roads to Corinth. It was raining again, those roads were “almost impassable,” and his units, except maybe for Lew Wallace’s division, were so shot up and frazzled that, Grant later wrote, he “had not the heart to order men who had fought so desperately for two days, lying in the mud and rain whenever not fighting, . . . to pursue.” Nor did he ask Buell to do it. He later all but acknowledged being cowed by Buell, writing that he was so newly senior to the Army of the Ohio chief, who “had been for some time past a department commander, while I commanded only a district,” that he did not feel like asking Buell to do anything.⁴

Grant had seen enough fighting in the past forty-eight hours. Americans killed or wounded in those two days all but doubled the total casualties in the war’s four major battles to date: Manassas, Wilson’s Creek, Fort Donelson, and Pea Ridge. And Grant had more reason for pursuing minimally: Major General Henry Halleck had ordered it. Grant expected Halleck to arrive on April 8, and Halleck’s instructions suggested that it was not prudent to go beyond some point “which we can reach and return in a day.” Halleck had reinstated Grant to command of his army just three weeks before Shiloh, and the sin that got him relieved after Fort Donelson had been the mere appearance of disobedience. He had inadvertently made an unauthorized visit to Nashville to reconnoiter the Confederate retreat after informing headquarters that he was going if he got no orders to the contrary; his message, though, was delayed in arriving, and the trip without express permission made Halleck furious. Halleck was similarly upset about not receiving regular reports sent by Grant that were held up by hitches in mail delivery.

All his prior life, Sherman had appeared to need the backstop that fate snatched from him at age nine: a father. At Shiloh he began finding a surrogate, one two years younger than himself. But it would be a two-way street. Old General Smith lay abed in Savannah, rotting away from the infection in his leg. With his sole peer-confidant dying, Grant needed another. Sherman, meanwhile, needed one whose strength of will could dispel his deep doubts that this war to reunite America was winnable.

The tall, nervous redhead had been three classes ahead of Grant at West Point. There, the plebe had seemed so unexceptional that Sherman barely remembered him. He was scarcely more impressed at seeing Grant again in the 1850s in St. Louis, where Sherman was a struggling banker and Grant a shabby farmer and occasional street seller of wood. But during the Fort Donelson battle, Grant got Sherman’s attention. Senior to Grant, Sherman had been sent by Halleck to Paducah, Kentucky, to push aid on to Donelson. Halleck wanted to send him even farther forward, to replace Grant. But Sherman declined the latter job, doubting both himself and the Union’s capacity to restore itself. But he wanted to believe. With the boats that he pushed hard upriver, he sent unusually supportive letters to Grant. “I will do everything in my power to hurry forward to you reinforcements and supplies, and if I could be of service to you myself would gladly come, without making any question of rank,” Sherman wrote. In a second note that same day, he added, “Command me in any way.” The messages took Grant aback. Such subservience had little military precedent.⁶

BRIGADIER GENERAL WILLIAM T. SHERMAN

But life’s scourges had already lashed both men before the great leveler of this war swept over them. Each had experienced the psychological devastation of failure and poverty. Sherman’s birth father, a respectable lawyer and judge, had suffered financial disaster and died penniless when the son was nine. Most of the eleven Sherman children were farmed out to relatives and friends, and young Cump, short for Tecumseh, trudged next door to live with the rich Ewings. The poor nonrelation grew up privileged in this lofty second family, into which he then married. But he seems never to have overcome a fear of the kind of financial calamity that collapsed his boyhood world. Like Grant, he had left the old army and failed—at banking and business—before doing time in a concern owned by his foster father. Grant, who hit bottom working for his father, at least was the man’s actual son.⁸

Sherman had labored under a military cloud as dark as Grant’s. But Grant at least was not crazy, as Sherman had been alleged to be in Kentucky in the summer and fall of 1861. Sherman needed to get to a battlefield to erase his Kentucky repute. Grant, surrounded by actual or suspected enemies in his ranks, surely saw in Sherman’s Washington connections—his foster father had been US secretary of the interior and a brother was a sitting US senator from Ohio—a possible counterbalance to the clout of such ambitious subordinates as John McClernand and Lew Wallace and his doubting superiors Halleck in St. Louis and General in Chief George McClellan in Washington. McClellan had been livid at seeing Grant drunk in the old army, and Halleck was sitting on those shameful charges, likely inspired by McClernand, that Grant’s thirst was chronic.⁹

So Grant and Sherman needed each other. Neither yet knew how much.