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WITH THE FALL OF FORTS HENRY and Donelson, the next logical step for the Union army was to sail up the Tennessee River and take Corinth in northern Mississippi, near the Tennessee border. The town served as a crossroads for two major railroads that connected the Mississippi River with the Atlantic Ocean, and its capture would pave the way for vanquishing Memphis, Vicksburg, and broad swaths of the Deep South.1 “What you are to look out for I cannot tell you but . . . your husband will never disgrace you nor leave a defeated field,” Grant assured Julia. “We have such an inside track of the enemy that by following up our success we can go anywhere.”2 Now fully restored to action, he scented “a big fight” in the offing. “I have already been in so many [battles] that it begins to feel like home to me.”3 In northeast Mississippi, Albert Sidney Johnston was consolidating a giant force of fifty to sixty thousand troops. To counter this, Henry Halleck fashioned a strategy that would merge Grant’s army with that of Don Carlos Buell in a race to see which army could first attain critical strength and assault the other.
On March 17, 1862, Grant resumed his command in Savannah, Tennessee, and awaited the arrival of Buell’s forces from Nashville. His old West Point commandant, General Charles F. Smith, had preceded him, locating his headquarters in a roomy brick mansion atop a bluff, owned by Union sympathizer William H. Cherry. Although Halleck had assigned credit for the Fort Donelson victory to Smith and plotted to advance him ahead of Grant, Smith knew nothing of his wiles and retained an abiding respect for his former pupil. He was a big enough man that he did not care to be promoted over Grant’s head through any injustice. “General Smith was delighted to see me and was unhesitating in his denunciation of the treatment I had received,” wrote Grant, who was protective of Smith.4 When the seasoned commander was accused of drinking during the Fort Donelson campaign, “Grant did not hesitate to resort to the most arbitrary measures to prevent the spread of such reports,” wrote an officer, declaring such stories a lie.5 In a freakish accident, Smith had scraped his leg while stepping into a boat and it became dangerously swollen and infected. When Grant arrived, the older man had been confined to an upstairs bedroom and limped about, unable to mount a horse or slide on a boot.
Grant had begun to move his men into position at an old steamboat stop on the Tennessee River known as Pittsburg Landing that lay twenty miles from Corinth and stood near a tiny Methodist meetinghouse, crafted from rough-hewn logs, called Shiloh. (An Old Testament name meaning “place of peace,” Shiloh was the place of Jewish worship before the First Temple.) The other staging area for the proposed thrust into Mississippi was Crump’s Landing. Grant was powerfully attached to his Army of the Tennessee, which he now thought capable of wonders. It was created in his own image: sturdy, earthy, and gritty with men who reciprocated his affection. Colonel Walter Gresham of Indiana wrote admiringly of Grant: “The grasp General Grant then exhibited in the teeth of the incompetency of Halleck and the inefficiency in the War Department stamped him, at least in the eyes of his subordinates, as a man of force and genius.”6
To keep his men tough and nimble, Grant again made a fateful decision not to have them grab spades and dig entrenchments. He did not expect to stay long in the area, hoping to march south when Buell arrived. Colonel James B. McPherson defended Grant’s decision, citing the many creeks and ravines that wound through the thick woods and meadows, providing natural defenses. Early in the war, generals tended to resort to fortifications infrequently; as casualty counts soared to horrifying levels, they turned more to earthworks. Each day, as new soldiers disembarked from steamers in cold, damp weather, they were hastily assembled into companies and regiments. Under such circumstances, Grant argued, “the troops with me, officers and men, needed discipline and drill more than they did experience with the pick, shovel and axe.”7
Characteristically viewing the campaign as offensive in nature, Grant remained so wedded to this muscular approach that he suffered from a certain tunnel vision, blinding him to threats launched by the other side. In fine spirit after weeks of poor health, he saw the battle shaping up as one that would allow federal troops to strike a decisive blow and maybe squash the rebellion for good. He was encouraged by local men enlisting in the Union army and derived false comfort from reports of low enemy morale divulged by Confederate deserters. As he breezily told Halleck, “The temper of the rebel troops is such that there is but little doubt but that Corinth will fall much more easily than Donelson did.”8
At the forthcoming battle, Grant would confront Confederate commanders who matched his aggressive spirit. Late at night on April 2, Pierre G. T. Beauregard sent word to Albert Sidney Johnston: “Now is the moment to advance, and strike the enemy at Pittsburg Landing.”9 Aware that Grant would shortly be reinforced by Buell, the Confederates decided to pound him hard before this union occurred. Despite skirmishes with the enemy on April 3, Grant still thought he enjoyed the luxury of waiting for Buell before assuming the initiative. “Soon I hope to be permitted to move from here and when I do there will probably be the greatest battle fought of the War,” he predicted to Julia. “I do not feel that there is the slightest doubt about the result.”10 Only a fine line separated immense self-confidence from egregious complacency and Grant had probably crossed it here.
On April 4, Grant spent the day upstream at Pittsburg Landing, and, despite telltale clashes between Union pickets and the enemy, he missed warning signals and did not foresee the juggernaut about to overtake his army. When he received intelligence that Confederates might attack General Lew Wallace at Crump’s Landing, he opted to reinforce him, telling Sherman that “I look for nothing of the kind, but it is best to be prepared.”11 That night, caught in a downpour marked by flashes of lightning, Grant rode back to the steamer that returned him to Savannah. As he rode through the woods at a slow trot, he mistakenly trusted the skill of his horse. As he wrote, “My horse’s feet slipped from under him, and he fell [on his side] with my leg under his body. The extreme softness of the ground, from the excessive rain of the few preceding days, no doubt saved me from a severe injury and protracted lameness. As it was, my ankle was very much injured, so much so that my boot had to be cut off. For two or three days after I was unable to walk except with crutches.”12
The charge of being blindsided at Shiloh would long be a sore point with Grant. Ordinarily the soul of honesty, he sought to rewrite history, claiming to have known a major battle was imminent. Unfortunately, his April 5 correspondence makes crystal-clear that he had no intimation of a massive attack in the offing. He dismissed raids on Union outposts as the work of reconnaissance forces, insisting, “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.”13 He still planned to march on Corinth, convinced he would find the bulk of the rebel army there, and gave his personal guarantee to his old Ohio friend Jacob Ammen that “there will be no fight at Pittsburg Landing.”14 Perhaps remembering the public reaction to his previous worries in Kentucky, Sherman discounted predictions of any impending threat. “I have no doubt that nothing will occur today more than some picket firing,” he told Grant. “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.”15
That day Union soldiers seemed a carefree bunch, as if relaxing in a rural idyll. One Iowa soldier admired the numberless tents stretching through a “delightful Tennessee forest” and thought the scene resembled “a gigantic picnic.”16 Trigger-happy novices shot off muskets in the woods and were entertained that night by regimental bands. Those musicians had no idea that their tunes, drifting through darkened woods, could be heard by unseen rebel pickets. The Confederate army, more than forty thousand strong and encamped just two miles away, picked up the drums of Sherman’s division.
On the night of April 5, the two Confederate chieftains, Albert Sidney Johnston and Pierre G. T. Beauregard, huddled and planned a dawn attack. A tall, upright Texan, born in Kentucky, Johnston had a handlebar mustache, glowering eyes, and lank hair that fell flat against his skull. He saw a chance to redeem an exalted reputation badly blemished by Fort Donelson and was ready to stake everything on this colossal gamble. Early in the war, he had been considered the South’s premier military man, veneration later transferred to Robert E. Lee. Jefferson Davis puffed him up to godlike proportions, touting him as “the greatest soldier, the ablest man, civil or military, Confederate or Federal, then living.”17 Johnston had a knack for inspiring his men with high-flown rhetoric, and he swore the next day he would water his horse either in the Tennessee River or in hell. Beauregard, an elegant Creole with a French accent and dyed hair who admired Napoleon, was still feted as the hero of Bull Run. He had a thin face with a small beard that stood like an exclamation point at his chin. When he expressed last-minute reservations to Johnston, saying delays might have robbed them of the element of surprise, Johnston waved away this fainthearted caution. “I would fight them if they were a million,” he promised.18
The Union side had intimations of trouble in the predawn hours. General Benjamin Prentiss sent out a night patrol that stumbled upon advanced rebel skirmishers and, thanks to this accidental encounter, he lined up his division, bracing for an attack. Based on this clash, John Rawlins hotly insisted that “this battle was not, in a military sense, a surprise to us . . . it is sufficient to say that we did not expect to be attacked in force that morning . . . we had sufficient notice, before the shock came, to be under arms and ready to meet it.”19 Grant was even more categorical that all five of his divisions had been drawn up in line of battle, ready to face the enemy. “There was no surprise about it, except perhaps to the newspaper correspondents. We had been skirmishing for two days before we were attacked.”20
Many soldiers narrated a different tale. At six on Sunday morning, April 6, rebel soldiers burst from the woods near Shiloh church, whooping with demonic fury. Clad in Confederate gray or butternut brown, they surged forward in three neatly formed lines, hollering with raw gusto as their bands beat out “Dixie.” Not until 8 a.m. as the sun rose on a “clear, bright and beautiful” day and he spotted the sunlit glimmer of muskets in the woods did William Tecumseh Sherman fathom the magnitude of the assault.21 When the orderly beside him dropped dead from a Confederate shot and he himself was grazed in the hand, he exclaimed, “My God, we’re attacked!”22 Although he failed to foresee the hordes now hurtling from the woods, Sherman rose to the occasion in spectacular fashion and prepared his entire division to meet the enemy.
Perhaps no moment in the Civil War has generated such fierce debate about what happened. Some newspaper correspondents argued that sleeping Union soldiers were bayoneted in their tents and killed over breakfast coffee. Many such reports were grossly exaggerated, some even fabricated. William Rowley insisted that “I do not believe in truth a single man was killed by a bayonet during the two days’ fight.”23 But allegations of a lack of preparedness were commonplace among soldiers no less than journalists. Second Lieutenant Patrick White of Chicago said rebel “bullets came whistling through our tents.” He testified to “men shot in their beds and regiments preparing for dress parade on the eve of this great battle.”24 The inexperienced troops, he contended, “ran like sheep,” tossing away their guns and flocking to the safety of the Tennessee River landing. From firsthand experience, White could never accept the sanitized versions presented by Grant and Sherman: “Some of our great Generals have denied that the battle of Shiloh was a surprise. I claim no one no matter how exalted or high his position in life, has the right to deny an actual fact.”25 Despite his punctilious regard for accuracy, Grant shaded the truth, making it seem as if he had been far more prepared than he was.
That morning, Grant was enjoying an early breakfast at the Cherry mansion when he detected the distant boom of cannon. “Holding, untasted, a cup of coffee, he paused in conversation to listen a moment at the report of another cannon,” said Mrs. Cherry. “He hastily arose, saying to his staff officers, ‘Gentlemen, the ball is in motion; let’s be off.’”26 In short order, Grant and his staff hurried to the wharf and boarded his flagship Tigress, which then steamed to Pittsburg Landing. It seemed reminiscent of the situation at Fort Donelson, when Grant had been conferring with Flag Officer Foote at the time the battle erupted.
Much like Grant’s men at Belmont, rebel soldiers who stormed into abandoned Union camps stopped to plunder booty and botched their advantage. They were amazed by the material comforts available to Union soldiers compared with their own impoverished lot. Hungry Confederates paused to feast on rich stores of food and coffee and snatch away superior bedding. Some even inspected personal letters that offered a glimpse into the emotional state of their opponents.
Speeding upriver to Pittsburg Landing, Grant passed a dispatch boat coming downstream that corroborated dark tidings of a blood-drenched spectacle ahead. As he approached the landing, the racket of muskets and cannon grew deafening. Around 9 a.m., Grant disembarked, found the divisions of McClernand and Prentiss engaged in heated battle, and took charge of the situation with tremendous energy. Still hobbling from his injury, he was hoisted onto his horse, his crutch lashed under his saddle. Johnston and Beauregard had hurled their six divisions into the fray, sending many callow Union troops reeling back in headlong flight. As many as half of the bluecoats had never seen combat before, some having been handed weapons for the first time only days earlier. “We met hundreds of cowardly renegades fleeing to the river and reporting their regiments cut to pieces,” recalled William Hillyer. “We tried in vain to rally and return them to the front.”27 Thousands of fearful men, many wounded, stood quaking beneath the bluff at Pittsburg Landing. Grant did his best to restore some semblance of order, organizing two Iowa regiments into a line to halt the flow of deserters to the river, but the line buckled under the onslaught of panic-stricken men. As Grant reported to Washburne, “I have never had a single regiment disgrace itself in battle yet except some new ones at Shiloh that never loaded a musket before that battle.”28
The bucolic setting, with its gently rolling woods and scattered meadows, soon became a charnel house as the conflict devolved into the war’s most harrowing battle. Bodies of soldiers piled up in heaps as “Death, with fifty thousand mowers, stalked over the field,” wrote Hillyer.29 The sky grew dark with acrid smoke and the dense flight of bullets, producing a continuous patter like the rapid fall of lethal raindrops. The combined din of artillery and musketry reverberated endlessly. Despite his injury, Grant soon rode all over the battlefield, heedless of danger even “in the midst of a shower of cannon and musket balls,” said Hillyer.30 Dogged, unshaken, never doubting the final outcome, Grant puffed coolly on his cigar, issuing orders “as though he was simply reviewing the troops.”31 When John Rawlins came up from Pittsburg Landing, searching for Grant, he told a fellow officer, “We’ll find him where the firing is heaviest”—which turned out to be the case.32 A bullet that smashed the scabbard of his sword left Grant completely unfazed. Heavily outnumbered, facing more than forty thousand Confederate soldiers versus thirty-three thousand in his own army, he was gratified by his men’s valor under exceptionally terrifying circumstances.
Shiloh was a free-for-all of death in which brute force trumped tactical subtleties. “It was a case of Southern dash against Northern pluck and endurance,” Grant wrote.33 By 10 a.m., he caught up with Sherman, who protected a pivotal position on the Union right that guarded the landing. Falling back at first, Sherman now made an obstinate stand against unrelenting assaults, showing magnificent courage. As if made of indestructible stuff, he stood caked with dust, his bloody hand bandaged, his arm in a sling from a bullet to his shoulder; before the day ended another bullet slashed harmlessly through his hat and three horses were shot from under him. Grant was simply amazed at Sherman’s adroit handling of his green soldiers. There, “in the midst of death and slaughter,” Sherman contended, the friendship between the two men solidified.34 Grant anointed Sherman “the hero of Shiloh. He really commanded two divisions—his own and McClernand’s—and proved himself to be a consummate soldier.”35 In perhaps his loftiest tribute, Grant said he scarcely needed to give Sherman any advice. For Sherman, Shiloh was the moment in which he recaptured the reputation he had squandered earlier in the war amid journalistic charges of insanity. If war was a grim and dirty business for Grant, Sherman seemed to be invigorated by it, as if it restored him to his natural habitat.
Among the generals who did not cover themselves with glory was Lew Wallace, a short, pale man with a dark beard, flowing mustache, and smoldering gaze that betokened a latent romanticism. He had worked as a lawyer in Indiana and served in the state legislature; in after years he would distinguish himself as the author of Ben-Hur. As the battle unfolded at Shiloh, Grant sent word to Wallace at around 11 a.m. to bring his veteran division from Crump’s Landing to Pittsburg Landing along a road by the Tennessee River. Since the distance to be covered was no more than six miles, Grant expected these critical reinforcements to arrive by noon or 1 p.m., shoring up forces on his right who had withstood blistering fire. After an agonizing wait, Wallace never arrived. He marched his men on a long, circuitous route away from Pittsburg Landing and failed to join the main army until nightfall, when the day’s fighting had ended.
A furious Grant thought him insubordinate and believed that by circling around with his army, Wallace had hoped to land on the enemy’s rear and emerge with heroic splendor. Like Grant, Rawlins was indignant, arguing that there was no excuse for a division commander to “march and countermarch all day within sound of a furious battle, less than five miles away, without getting into it.”36 Enraged at such accusations, Wallace spent the rest of his life reliving that day and trying to wipe away the Shiloh stigma from his name. He claimed he had been told by Captain Algernon Baxter to “effect a junction with the right of the army” and had strictly followed orders.37 For years, Wallace would ply Grant with argumentative letters, hoping to persuade him he had acted honorably. Grant thought Lew Wallace typical of politically well-connected generals who had risen to excessively high positions. This problem bedeviled the North, where there were deep divisions in the electorate, forcing Lincoln to curry favor with opposition politicians by plucking generals from their ranks. Whatever the truth of what happened, there is little doubt that the timely arrival of Wallace’s division might have allowed Grant to reverse the tide of battle and even switch into an offensive mode on Shiloh’s first day.
No less than Grant, Albert Sidney Johnston was a vigorous, inspirational presence to his men, standing up in his stirrups and waving his hat over his head as he led them into battle. At around 2 p.m. he rode to the front to galvanize his flagging troops when a bullet struck him near the right knee. At first he felt nothing. But when his aides sliced open his boot, they found it soaked with blood, the bullet having slashed an artery. Grant believed that Johnston’s bravery, his refusal to abandon his men and seek immediate treatment in the rear, led to his rapid death from bleeding. The highest-ranked general killed in the war, he was succeeded by Beauregard. However much he had admired Johnston’s grace under fire, Grant regarded him as an overrated general, “vacillating and undecided in his actions.”38 By midafternoon, with Johnston gone, Grant sensed enemy strength ebbing away. When Colonel Augustus Chetlain ran into him near the landing, he was startled by Grant’s composure. “The enemy has done all he can do today, and tomorrow morning with the fresh troops we shall have, we will finish him up,” Grant predicted.39 As always, Grant understood the seesaw psychology of so many Civil War battles.
Amid the chaos of that awful day, a nucleus of strength under General Prentiss crystallized at the heart of the federal line, staving off a decisive rebel victory. His 4,500 troops dug in along a woodland path known to history as the Sunken Road. For six hours, fortified by blazing artillery, Confederate officers launched wave after wave of soldiers against this stubborn pocket of resistance, the fighting so frenzied the spot was christened the Hornets’ Nest by rebel soldiers. Moving in the background, a ubiquitous Grant coaxed cowering regiments back into the sanguinary fray, telling them, “Now boys pitch in.”40 Against a foe several times more numerous, Prentiss’s men held out until forced to surrender at 5:30 p.m., by which point their numbers had been shaved in half. Their stout defensive shield had bought priceless time for Grant, enabling him to mass artillery on the crest of a hill and cobble together a new infantry line in the rear.
Even with dead bodies heaped up around him, Grant retained his equanimity and unwavering faith in victory. When General Buell suddenly materialized on the scene and glimpsed the crush of terrified stragglers at the landing, he asked Grant about his plans for retreat. The thought having never entered his mind, Grant replied coolly, “I haven’t despaired of whipping them yet!”41 He had the gift of believing in his men and simply refused to concede that things looked so gloomy. At around 5 p.m., right after a scout reported to Grant, the man’s head was blown off, spattering him with blood. Grant didn’t flinch, staring fixedly ahead. “Not beaten yet by a damn sight,” he mumbled, going about his business.42 One journalist said Grant glanced at the sinking sun and observed evenly, “They can’t break our lines tonight. Tomorrow we shall attack with fresh troops, and of course will drive them.”43 Here was Grant’s matchless strength: he did not crumble in adversity, which only hardened his determination, and knew that setbacks often contained the seeds of their own reversals. The most dangerous situations brought out his indomitable will. He now kept up his spirits despite a ghastly toll of seven thousand Union soldiers killed or wounded and up to three thousand captured that day.
By nightfall, Beauregard rushed off a premature telegram to Richmond: “After a severe battle of ten hours, thanks be to the Almighty, [we] gained a complete victory, driving the enemy from every position.”44 Far from seeing disaster, Grant thought his men had performed creditably against overwhelming odds and hailed the day’s fighting “as one of the best resistances ever made.”45 For Grant, it was the first day of Shiloh, not the second, that represented the real triumph, especially since half his men had never withstood battle before. On that stormy first night, two thousand corpses lay strewn across a reeking battlefield that stretched for twelve square miles. In this nightmarish landscape, thousands of wounded men lay writhing and moaning in drenching rain, their contorted figures lit by sporadic lightning. The ground was slick with blood and carpeted with torn limbs and decapitated heads. Wild pigs rooted among putrefying bodies, their snorts audible to the dying soldiers. Meanwhile, Union gunboats, anchored in the Tennessee River, showered Confederate positions with shells, adding to an unearthly cacophony. Many soldiers died of exposure that night while the living found no shelter as they slept in puddles. “This night of horrors will haunt me to my grave,” swore a Confederate soldier.46
Grant was never one to mourn the dead openly or describe the grotesque butchery about him; such thoughts remained locked up inside him. But beneath his self-protective silence, he was far from insensible to suffering. He had planned to spend the night sleeping under an oak tree, on a bed of hay, a few hundred yards from the river. All day long, distracted by battle, he had ignored his injured leg, but once he dismounted and stood on it, he felt excruciating pain and had to limp about on crutches. His leg was so bruised and swollen that surgeons had to cut off his boot, and the throbbing, aching limb, along with the steady rain, made sleep impossible.
Sometime after midnight, he hobbled off to seek shelter in a log house converted into a field hospital. To ward off gangrene, Civil War surgeons often amputated on the spot and stacks of arms and legs had accumulated inside. These begrimed doctors, ignorant of the germ theory of infection, stood in clothes splashed with blood, pus, and filth. Many operations were performed without anesthesia, relying on whiskey instead. The stoical Grant was staggered by his glimpse of all the amputees. “The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy’s fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain.”47 During battles, some emotional narcotic anesthetized Grant, while in the aftermath individual cases affected him powerfully. It is telling that Grant, seemingly immune to mass carnage, found unbearable the close-up horror of the makeshift hospital, which reduced things to a human scale. This was the same Grant who was repelled by bloody meat and had been revolted by the slimy tannery as a boy. As his son Fred noted, “In battle I have seen him turn hurriedly from the sight of blood, and look pale and distressed when others were injured.”48
Wrapped in his greatcoat, Grant returned to the haven of the nearby oak tree with its spreading canopy of branches. Sherman found him standing there, streaming with rain, hat pulled low over his face, collar upturned, holding a lantern and chewing a cigar. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman remarked. “Yes,” replied Grant with a drag on his cigar. “Lick ’em tomorrow though.”49 The statement expressed Grant’s intestinal fortitude, which communicated itself to his officers. He had already told Sherman that when both sides seem defeated in battle, the first to assume the offensive would surely win. He had already ridden to each division commander, ordering a 4 a.m. attack. “It is always a great advantage to be the attacking party,” he said. “We must fire the first gun tomorrow morning.”50 Perhaps no other Union general at this stage of the war would have dared such a counteroffensive. Grant’s decision came from more than visceral optimism and an unquenchable fighting spirit: he had made a sound calculation of his strength on the morrow. He would be replenished by Lew Wallace’s wayward division and the arrival of Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio, which was ferried across the river that night. This would give him 25,000 fresh troops, reinforcing his 15,000 available survivors and dwarfing the 25,000 able-bodied troops fielded by Beauregard.
The next morning, Grant, who had to be lifted into his saddle, began to redeem his errors of the preceding day. By sunrise, his soldiers were high-spirited from their new numerical advantage and began a concerted offensive, accompanied by what Sherman called “the severest musketry-fire I ever heard.”51 An enormous battle droned on for hours as the tide shifted decidedly against the rebels. Grant didn’t burden division commanders with detailed instructions, giving them freedom to be spontaneous. The clatter of arms grew earsplitting as rain thickened the dense smoke hanging over the battlefield. Union troops regained territory lost the day before, tripping over numberless cadavers and groaning men abandoned on the battlefield overnight. Once again, Grant, in the throes of fighting, rode just behind the front lines.
Taken by surprise, Confederate soldiers yielded ground all morning. Although they rallied around noon, they were exhausted, unable to make a sustained stand against fresh troops that bore down relentlessly upon them. Grant implemented a trademark technique: simultaneously applying pressure in as many places as possible. At one point in the afternoon, he gathered two regiments, lined them up for battle, then personally led them forward—a novelty for him. He carefully stopped within range of Confederate muskets. “The command, Charge, was given,” he reported, “and was executed with loud cheers and with a run; when the last of the enemy broke.”52 By around 2:30 p.m., a desperate Beauregard feared his army would dissolve and signaled a withdrawal, taking his troops back to their base in Corinth. After two days of fighting, Grant’s fatigued troops were in no condition to pursue them. Buell’s Army of the Ohio was in better shape, but Grant couldn’t order them to chase Beauregard. Only recently promoted above Buell, Grant didn’t feel comfortable giving him orders. Heavy rains descended that evening, making roads too soft and marshy to sustain heavy artillery and precluding any follow-up.
Everyone was stunned by the scale of carnage at Shiloh, which posted a new benchmark for mass slaughter. Deeming it the war’s bloodiest battle, Grant commented “that the Fort Donelson fight was, as compared to this, as the morning dew to a heavy rain.”53 Men who survived it could never scrub its harrowing imagery from their memories. Americans found it hard to comprehend the dimensions of the losses, which were beyond any historical precedent. Of more than one hundred thousand soldiers who pitched into the fray, twenty-four thousand had been killed or wounded—a casualty count dwarfing that of the battle of Waterloo. Shiloh’s casualties eclipsed the total of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined.54 William Hillyer conveyed the spreading tableau of death that greeted him and Grant: “For miles and miles wherever we rode we found dead bodies scattered through the woods in all directions.”55 As Grant wrote memorably, “I saw an open field . . . so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.”56
Shiloh peeled away any lingering aura of romance from the war, showing the sheer destructive power of modern combat. An array of technical advances, such as the conical minié ball that ripped through flesh and bone or rifled muskets and cannon that displayed greater accuracy and range, ensured bloodier battles than ever before. No less hardy a soul than Sherman remarked that the corpse-littered battlefield “would have cured anybody of war.”57 Combat had been pushed to extremes of cruelty that banished any remnant of civilized behavior. “Men lost their semblance of humanity,” wrote a reporter, “and the spirit of the demon shone in [the soldiers’] faces. There was but one desire, and that was to destroy.”58
Before Shiloh, Grant had nursed hopes for a titanic battle that would triumphantly crush the rebellion. Now, stunned by the combative spirit of his foes, he knew there would be many more bloodbaths in a long, grinding war of attrition. This began his conversion to a theory of total warfare in which all of southern society would have to be defeated. Technically speaking, neither side won the battle, for neither had gained new territory. For Grant, however, Shiloh was an unquestionable victory that had averted devastating consequences: “It would have set this war back six months to have failed and would have caused the necessity of raising . . . a new Army.”59 With the benefit of hindsight, he told Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes: “If [Shiloh] had been lost the war would have dragged on for years longer. The North would have lost its prestige.”60 Grant had fended off attempts by the South to regain its defensive line in Tennessee and Kentucky, thus shielding the North from invasion. At the same time, General John Pope had taken a Confederate bulwark called Island Number Ten on the Mississippi River. The twin Union victories meant the Confederacy surrendered a huge section of the Mississippi Valley, foreshadowing steeper losses to come.
For Grant, Shiloh represented a personal victory. He had rescued his army from his own errors, showing a gumption and an audacity that altered the battle’s course. He had shown coolness under fire and a willingness to take monumental gambles. The battle also instilled lasting confidence in the Army of the Tennessee, shattering anew the fighting mystique of rebel soldiers. The South, Grant noted, had demonstrated dash and pluck at the outset of battle, but his own men had exhibited the true staying power. Reflecting on this after the war, he said, “I used to find that the first day, or the first period of a battle, was most successful to the South; but if we held on to the second or third day, we were sure to beat them, and we always did.”61 Grant’s endurance in the face of unexpected setbacks perhaps owed something to having survived the ups and downs of his own improbable life before the war.
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EVEN AS THE NATION debated Shiloh’s meaning, teams of doctors descended on the remote Tennessee woods to treat thousands left wounded or disfigured by the battle. Because of the warm weather, Grant attempted to bury the dead without delay, and cadavers in blue and gray were lined up in neat rows or gathered in heaps. Many soldiers were buried in anonymous mass graves so shallow that wagon wheels from burial details ran over skulls and toes protruding from the earth. By contrast the remains of officers from well-to-do families were embalmed, placed in sealed coffins, and shipped back to their hometowns. All day long Mississippi steamboats ferried Shiloh victims, displaying death on a new industrial scale. One British journalist winced at a stack of coffins waiting on a jetty “with the dead men’s names inscribed upon them, left standing in front of the railway offices.”62
After Shiloh, Grant was vilified in the press with a fury that surprised him. He was shocked that the northern press construed the battle as a Union loss. Never before had he faced such national scrutiny or virulent attacks. As the war of words grew fierce, Grant was traumatized. Union camps swarmed with correspondents who wrote for partisan papers and weren’t overly scrupulous in their methods. They trafficked in rumors that quickly found their way into print. In the absence of any public relations machinery in the field, legends sprang up overnight, filling entire newspaper columns. With few exceptions, Grant adopted a sensible policy on censorship, giving reporters the liberty to report on past actions while preventing statements about future troop movements. In areas conquered by the Union army, he shut down pro-Confederate papers hawking treasonous views.
In the press Grant was faulted for being caught off guard by the Confederate attack, arriving late at the battle, and failing to chase Beauregard back to Corinth. He was made to seem inept and insensitive to the massive slaughter of his men. The most savage denunciations issued from politicians in Ohio and Iowa, home states to many victims. Grant and his staff suspected that these stories originated with craven soldiers who had fled the front lines on the first day at Shiloh, taking shelter beneath the bluff. Governor David Tod of Ohio was especially irate at such insinuations, portraying these skulkers as victims of criminal negligence by the high command. To prove his point, he sent Lieutenant Governor Benjamin Stanton to talk to Ohio soldiers near Shiloh and the latter claimed in a diatribe that there was “a general feeling among the most intelligent men that Grant and Prentiss ought to be court-martialed or shot.”63 It was now open season on Grant, with a chorus of voices calling for his removal. Senator James Harlan of Iowa insisted that “those who continue General Grant in active command will in my opinion carry on their skirts the blood of thousands of their slaughtered countrymen.”64
Grant received his most damaging coverage when twenty-four-year-old Whitelaw Reid weighed in under the pen name AGATE in the Cincinnati Gazette. An Ohio native, slender and urbane, Reid had studied at Miami University where he absorbed a love of literature and philosophy. His voluminous Shiloh account ran to 19,500 words, occupying thirteen newspaper columns; widely reprinted elsewhere, it became the most influential account of the battle. Brilliant as a piece of narrative prose, it left much to be desired as a first draft of history. Reid took at face value myths peddled by disaffected soldiers. He gave birth to the canard that Union soldiers, caught unawares by rebels swooping down on their camps the first morning of Shiloh, were trapped in their tents and bayoneted in bed. He also falsely pictured Grant as arriving late on the scene from luxurious quarters in Savannah. In fact, Grant had galloped tirelessly across the battlefield that day, exhorting his commanders from early morning. He blamed Grant for not summoning Lew Wallace earlier and loaded Buell with praise for the second-day turnaround. There was more than a germ of truth to what Reid wrote—Grant had been caught by surprise at Shiloh, he had failed to fortify his position—but the bogus, misleading details marred the genuine reporting.
In light of this calumny, it was predictable that Grant would be accused of drinking at Shiloh. So widespread were these allegations that he told Julia, “We are all well and me as sober as a deacon no matter what is said to the contrary.”65 One Grant supporter told Washburne he was asked “twenty times a day” whether Grant was intemperate. “The public seem disposed to give Grant full credit for ability and bravery but seem to think it ‘a pity he drinks.’”66 The documentary record makes clear that Grant was sober during the battle. Jacob Ammen, who was with Grant the day before the battle and on its first day, jotted in his diary: “Note—I am satisfied that General Grant was not under the influence of liquor, either of the times I saw him.”67 Colonel Joseph Webster wrote of Grant: “He was perfectly sober and self-possessed during the day and the entire battle.”68 William Rowley disabused Washburne of any notion of Grant drinking at Shiloh and added that “the man who fabricated the story is an infamous liar.”69
John Rawlins was incensed by the uproar. “Though charged with intemperance, a more temperate man [than Grant] is not to be found in the service,” he told a relative and polled those with Grant at Shiloh to substantiate his case.70 By this point, Rawlins had developed a powerful vested interest in protecting Grant’s reputation publicly, while sometimes chastising him internally. Convinced of Grant’s supreme importance to the Union effort, he was forced into playing an unwanted double game about his drinking. Grant’s sobriety at Shiloh apparently did not last. Five months later, when Lieutenant James H. Wilson reported to Grant’s headquarters, Rawlins took him aside and showed him Grant’s broken pledge not to drink. “Now I want you to know the kind of man we are serving under. He’s a God damned drunkard, and he is surrounded by a set of God damned scalawags, who pander to his weakness . . . The sword of Damocles is hanging over his head right now, and I want you to help me save him, and ourselves too.”71
Coincidentally, two of Grant’s chums from his Ohio school days met him within days of Shiloh. Both left fascinating accounts of Grant’s frankness about the drinking charges. When Benjamin Johnson called on Grant in his tent, the latter asked what people said about the battle. “I told him they said he was drunk. He fired up a little and asked me if I thought he was drunk now. I said I knew he was not. He replied, ‘Well, I was just as drunk then as I am now, no more and no less.’”72 Still more revealing was Grant’s confidential two-hour chat with R. C. Rankin, son of John Rankin, who recalled: “He spoke bitterly of being charged with drunkenness and denied that he had been drinking, said he had not drunk any for several years. Grant told me he was ruined once with liquor and now he had quit it he would not allow it to get the upper hand of him again.”73 Seldom did Grant bare his innermost thoughts about alcohol in this patently confessional vein.
Amid a clamor for Grant’s removal, Elihu Washburne withstood intense pressure as he took up the cudgels for him: “There is no more temperate man in the Army than General Grant,” he declared on the House floor. “He never indulges in the use of intoxicating liquors at all.”74 Washburne maintained that at Shiloh Grant earned “one of the most brilliant victories.”75 He made clear that Grant’s patriotic contributions far transcended Shiloh: “Though but 40 years old, he has been oftener under fire, and been in more battles, than any other man living on this continent excepting Scott.”76 At moments Washburne seemed a lonely voice in Grant’s defense, producing everlasting gratitude in his protégé. A Grant staffer asked Washburne to send one thousand copies of his speech “for distribution among our friends.”77 Julia Grant, who felt “hard and revengeful” about the flood of newspaper accusations, thanked Washburne for his crusade to exonerate her husband “from the malicious and unfounded slanders of the press.”78
With his faith in George McClellan increasingly shaken, Abraham Lincoln monitored the controversy swirling around Shiloh. Grant served as a standing rebuke to Little Mac, proof that you could send inexperienced troops into battle and emerge victorious without months of laborious training. Lincoln already pinned hopes on Grant, but he needed reassurance. Edwin Stanton wired Halleck that Lincoln wanted to know “whether any neglect or misconduct of General Grant or any other officer contributed to the sad casualties that befell our forces.”79 In noticeably tepid language, Halleck defended Grant from insinuations of misconduct at Shiloh, but Midwest politicos still harried Lincoln about Grant. “Why, after Shiloh,” Lincoln recounted to an editor, “a republican senator from Iowa denounced him to me as bloodthirsty, reckless of human life, and utterly unfit to lead troops; and because I wouldn’t sit down and dismiss him at once, went out in a rage, slamming the door after him.”80
At this perilous moment for Grant’s reputation, Lincoln kept the faith and saved him for future service. Long before setting eyes on him, Lincoln was steadfastly loyal and fair-minded to Grant, perceiving his sterling courage, competency, and unusual willingness to do battle. This was to prove an essential partnership needed to win the war. As Washburne informed Grant, “When the torrent of obloquy and detraction was rolling over you . . . after the battle of Shiloh, Mr. Lincoln stood like a wall of fire between you and it, [and was] uninfluenced by the threats of Congressmen and the demands of insolent cowardice.”81
Perhaps the most remarkable anecdote about Lincoln’s trust in Grant came from Colonel Alexander K. McClure, who told of a late-night chat at the White House. The anecdote’s accuracy has been questioned, but it appears to reflect Lincoln’s thinking at the time. McClure said he tried to impress upon Lincoln “with all the earnestness I could command the immediate removal of Grant as an imperious necessity to sustain himself . . . When I had said everything that could be said from my standpoint, we lapsed into silence. Lincoln remained silent for what seemed a very long time. He then gathered himself up in his chair and said in a tone of earnestness that I shall never forget: “I can’t spare this man, he fights.”82
Grant always interpreted Shiloh as a northern victory. The New York diarist George Templeton Strong speculated it would “probably turn out an important national victory with heavy loss”—a verdict most historians endorse.83 Grant bristled at the campaign of abuse against him, believing southern generals had the immense advantage of a favorable press while northern generals were hounded by poison-pen reporters. With the stoicism of a true soldier, however, he kept up an imperturbable facade. “Your paper is very unjust to me,” he told one correspondent, “but time will make it all right. I want to be judged only by my acts.”84
While feigning indifference to the journalistic onslaught, Grant was terribly agitated, nothing in his life having prepared him for such strident criticism or the harsh glare of publicity. Earnest by nature, a stickler for truth, he was unaccustomed to people playing fast and loose with facts. Even before Shiloh, he resented unjust charges that he was corrupt, telling Julia, “It annoys me very much when I see such barefaced falsehoods published and then it distresses you.”85 Writing frankly to Washburne, Grant said he was tormented by the pain inflicted on his family by press libels: “To say that I have not been distressed at these attacks upon me would be false, for I have a father, mother, wife & children who read them and are distressed by them and I necessarily share with them in it.”86 Julia’s cousin William Wrenshall Smith noted of Grant and the drinking stories: “He never grew angry concerning such malicious lies about himself, but he felt it very deeply on account of his family.”87 In this bruised state, Grant fantasized about moving out West, where the eastern press could never touch him. “I am not going to lay off my shoulder-straps until the close of the war,” he told a journalist, “but I should like to go to New Mexico, or some other remote place, and have a small command out of the reach of the newspapers.”88
Although Grant did not dignify press attacks with responses, his father harbored no such misgivings. On April 21, Hillyer wrote to Jesse Grant and denied that Grant’s army was taken by surprise at Shiloh, blaming thousands of soldiers who had “ignominiously” fallen back to Pittsburg Landing for spreading false reports.89 It was almost certainly Jesse who had this letter published in the Cincinnati Commercial along with a letter Ulysses had written to him. Compounding this indiscretion, Jesse sent a tirade to Governor Tod of Ohio, blaming “five thousand cowards” who had thrown down their arms and fled to safety at Shiloh to explain why Ulysses received bad press.90 Such actions by his father infuriated Grant. In one letter, he lectured him, “I do not expect nor want the support of the Cincinnati press on my side.”91 In still stronger language, he wrote: “I would write you many particulars but you are so imprudent that I dare not trust you with them; and while on this subject let me say a word. I have not an enemy in the world who has done me so much injury as you in your efforts in my defense. I require no defenders and for my sake let me alone.”92 It was a measure of Grant’s new wartime strength that he could sternly lecture his father not to meddle in his life instead of just swallowing his anger.
On April 11, with Grant still languishing under a cloud, Henry Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing to take personal command of the army there. One officer recorded this impression of him: “He was carefully dressed in a new uniform, wearing his sword, and carrying himself erect, with a distant and somewhat austere manner . . . as he walked down the steamer’s gangplank.”93 Clad in a spiffy uniform, Halleck stood out in a muddy atmosphere produced by days of rain and was shocked by the chaos he discovered in the aftermath of battle. When General John Pope arrived with his 30,000-strong Army of the Mississippi, Halleck merged it with the Army of the Ohio under Buell and the Army of the Tennessee to create a unified force of 110,000 soldiers. On April 30, he suddenly demoted Grant to second in command of the whole, a thankless job that dealt a serious blow to his pride, leaving him to twist in a cruel limbo without clear authority. Although Grant brooded, he did not complain openly at first about this painful humiliation. As in his prewar business dealings, Grant was again deceived about his true friends.
Grant was already in a subdued mood after the death of his former West Point commandant, General Charles Smith, who never recovered from his boat injury. “In his death,” Grant told his widow, “the nation has lost one of its most gallant and most able defenders.”94 However deeply Grant mourned Smith, his death eliminated a talented commander and potential rival in the western theater of war, and Sherman later speculated that “had C.F. Smith lived, Grant would have disappeared to history after [Fort] Donelson.”95
Grant’s sudden elevation had proven a mixed blessing for Halleck. To the extent it boosted his prestige, he delighted in it, but he also feared the emergence of a competitor. Halleck pretended to be Grant’s champion while subtly stabbing him in the back. For all his bookish knowledge, Halleck had not experienced the slashing realities of war, whereas the intuitive Grant was now steeped in combat experience. Sherman thought that Halleck, being distant from battle, was too tough on Grant, yet a deeper gulf separated the two men. Obsessed with bureaucratic forms, Halleck could not appreciate the fighting skill of the slovenly, disorganized Grant. “Brave & able in the field,” Halleck wrote of Grant, “he has no idea of how to regulate & organize his forces before a battle.”96 In Halleck’s topsy-turvy world, it was more important to look and act the part of a general than to win battles and crush the enemy. In professorial fashion, he gave Grant a stinging critique of his management style aboard his headquarters ship. One officer recalled Halleck, in a black civilian suit, pacing back and forth and “scolding [Grant] in a loud and haughty manner.” All the while, Grant “sat there, demure, with red face, hat in lap, covered with the mud of the field, and undistinguishable from an orderly.”97 Halleck showed scant respect for Grant, freezing him out of high-level strategic planning and talking alone to other commanders.
Grant lacked the air of a major military man, which counted against him with Halleck and others. One correspondent wrote of Grant after Shiloh that he “has none of the soldier’s bearing about him, but is a man whom one would take for a country merchant or a village lawyer. He has no distinctive feature; there are a thousand like him in personal appearance in the ranks . . . A plain, unpretending face, with a comely, brownish-red beard and square forehead, of short stature and thick-set.”98 The journalist Henry Villard observed of Grant that his “ordinary exterior . . . made it as difficult for me as in the case of Abraham Lincoln to persuade myself that he was destined to be one of the greatest arbiters of human fortunes.”99
By late April, Halleck was ready to march his vast force, the largest assembled in the war, southwest toward the Confederate railroad hub at Corinth. He divided his army into three sections, under Generals George Thomas, Buell, and Pope. Conspicuously missing was Grant, who found his “advice neglected and sneered at by those in authority,” Pope related.100 Halleck’s soldiers slogged ahead in muggy weather along rainy country roads, their woolen uniforms clinging to sweating bodies. So slow and laborious was this cumbersome army that it lumbered along at one mile per day. Albert Sidney Johnston had raced north along the twenty-mile route to Shiloh in two days, whereas Halleck took a month to accomplish this in reverse. Where Grant sometimes seemed heedless of danger, the fearful Halleck made his men dig defensive trenches every night. Unable to escape fears of another Shiloh, he roused his men before dawn and had them stand guard to avoid surprise attacks. Whatever the wisdom of this approach, it gave the rebel army plenty of time to brace for his arrival. As one reporter wrote, Halleck’s “grand army was like a huge serpent . . . Its majestic march was so slow that the Rebels had ample warning.”101 Moving south through a desolate landscape, Grant absorbed glimpses of the poverty inflicted on the southern populace. “I pity them and regret their folly which has brought about this unnatural war and their suffering,” he told Julia.102
Downcast, embittered by his fallen status, Grant sulked that “I have had my full share of abuse” and decided he couldn’t stand it any longer.103 As he explained in his Memoirs, he felt demeaned to an “observer” of the unfolding campaign: “Orders were sent direct to the right wing or reserve, ignoring me, and advances were made from one line of entrenchments to another without notifying me.”104 On May 11, Grant wrote to Halleck to request that his command be restored or he wished to be relieved from further duty. He explicitly absolved Halleck of responsibility for his plight, blaming “studied persistent opposition to me by persons outside of the army.”105 Since Grant had meditated returning to the West Coast, his aides maneuvered futilely to obtain a command for him there, which would have removed him from serious action for the rest of the war. Grant informed Julia he would apply for a leave of absence unless he were reassigned to a new command. Grant was talked out of this wrongheaded decision by two persuasive people: Rawlins and Sherman. By now Rawlins had attained extraordinary power on Grant’s staff. As Grant wrote admiringly, he had “become thoroughly acquainted with the routine of the office and takes off my hands the examination of most all papers. I think he is one of the best men I ever knew.”106 Besides protecting Grant from drink, Rawlins gave his staff some semblance of the management order Halleck found so woefully lacking.
But it was Sherman’s intercession that conclusively dissuaded Grant from resigning. Once he learned from Halleck that Grant had gotten permission to leave the department the next morning, he spurred his horse to Grant’s tent and saw his camp chests and papers all bound up for departure. The embattled Grant was “seated on a camp-stool, with papers on a rude camp-table; he seemed to be employed in assorting letters, and tying them up with red tape into convenient bundles.”107 Distressed by a sense of injustice, Grant disclosed that he was heading to St. Louis. “You know that I am in the way here. I have stood it as long as I can, and can endure it no longer.”108 He added morosely, “If I can’t command a brigade or a division, I can carry a musket.”109 Sherman pointed out the danger of going and said Grant might miss a chance to regain favor in the same way he, Sherman, had redeemed himself after newspapers asserted he was crazy. He pleaded with Grant to withhold his resignation for two weeks. When his appeal worked, Sherman rejoiced: “[Grant] certainly appreciated my friendly advice, and promised to wait awhile; at all events, not to go without seeing me again, or communicating with me.”110 Grant stayed in the army and within two weeks Sherman fell under his command, staying there throughout the war. Sherman said flatly that his advice to Grant had been “the turning point of the war.”111 Few things secured the fate of the Union as much as the bond of loyalty struck between these two generals who believed themselves wronged by the world’s estimation of them.
By May 28, Halleck’s huge army had pulled within a mile of Corinth’s defenses. Halleck loved the archaic art of the siege and proceeded to institute one with textbook precision. When Grant suggested that, with a well-timed bluff on the left and center of their lines, the right wing of the army could easily overrun Corinth, “General Halleck received the suggestion coldly and treated it as being entirely impracticable,” wrote Augustus Chetlain.112 Grant’s suspicion of Confederate weakness was vindicated on the night of May 29–30, 1862, when Beauregard’s army, ravaged by disease and struggling with Shiloh amputees, evacuated Corinth before Halleck could attack. They stole away to Tupelo while duping Union troops with fake guns, dummy cannon, and scarecrows stuffed into rebel uniforms. When Halleck saw towering columns of smoke curling above the town, he imagined Beauregard was being reinforced, whereas Grant drew the correct inference that the Confederates were fleeing, destroying anything that might fall into Union hands.
Halleck hailed Corinth’s fall as a brilliant victory that confirmed his military genius, writing proudly to his wife how the soldiers had dubbed him “Old Brains.”113 Lew Wallace rendered a harsher but more accurate verdict: “Corinth was not captured; it was abandoned to us.”114 The Union army entered a town of burning houses, shattered windows, and rotting food dumped into the streets, all valuable supplies having been taken away or incinerated. Grant commiserated with the townspeople. “Soldiers who fight battles do not experience half their horrors,” he lamented to Julia. “All the hardships come upon the weak . . . women and children.”115 Grant believed Corinth could have been taken two days after Shiloh if Beauregard’s army had been vigorously pursued. If Halleck had possessed the faintest idea of the weakness of the Confederate army holed up there, he thought, he could have marched against it sooner. For Grant, the bloodless fall of Corinth strengthened his belief that only the conquest of Confederate armies, not taking towns, would end the war. It also confirmed his sense that it was better to strike in timely fashion with a smaller force than lose the advantage awaiting reinforcements. Grant was still in a funk, plagued by his old headaches. To treat these, his doctor foolishly gave him brandy, which affected his system powerfully. “He immediately ordered his horse and rode away along the lines,” said William Wrenshall Smith. “I went with him and after a ride of ten or fifteen miles, he returned and was all right.”116
During this anxious period, Grant’s future was being thrashed out in the White House. According to Augustus Chetlain, Lincoln withstood insistent pressure to get rid of Grant. “I can’t stand it any longer,” he proclaimed to Washburne. “I am annoyed to death by demands for his removal.” Washburne retorted that Grant had won more important battles than any soldier in the West. Relenting, Lincoln replied, “Well, Washburne, if you insist upon it, I will retain him, but it is particularly hard on me.”117 Another version of this story has Washburne deserting Grant and Lincoln saving him, winding his long arm around the congressman’s shoulder and saying in soothing tones, “Elihu, it is a bad business, but we must try the man a little longer. He seems a pushing fellow, with all his faults.”118
Grant’s patience was rewarded after federal troops occupied Memphis on June 6. Having been shamed by the artful Confederate escape at Corinth, Halleck climbed down from his high horse and returned to St. Louis, restoring Grant to his old command. Grant asked to move his headquarters to Memphis, and when Halleck approved, he set out for the city on June 21. Halleck’s mercurial reversal had lasting consequences for Grant’s career. As Rawlins explained, Grant’s “reason for selecting Memphis was, that General Halleck said he expected he would have to give him the job of taking Vicksburg.”119 Now that New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Memphis had been overtaken by Union forces, Vicksburg arose as the major fortress on the Mississippi blocking Union domination of the waterway.
Through two days of blistering heat, Grant rode from Corinth to Memphis on horseback, escorted by two dozen men. En route, he stopped at the home of a man named De Loche who had remained loyal to the Union. Grant barely escaped capture by Confederate cavalry colonel William H. Jackson, then prowling in the vicinity. Jackson’s horses were spent from heavy riding and he therefore thought it fruitless to race after Grant, whom he pictured cantering fast toward Memphis. “Had he gone three-quarters of a mile farther,” Grant recalled, “he would have found me with my party quietly resting under the shade of trees and without even arms in our hands with which to defend ourselves.”120
When a dusty, tired Grant trotted into Memphis on June 23, he entered a turbulent city under the potent sway of secessionists. From the time he was a young man, Grant had been admired for his patient, judicial temperament, which was now tested. “It took hours of my time every day to listen to complaints and requests,” he recalled.121 The city teemed with Confederate spies who wanted to torch the city and with families of rebel officers who shrilly opposed federal rule. Suddenly forced to administer the town, Grant faced fiendishly difficult issues and feared overstepping the bounds of military propriety. “As I am without instructions,” he alerted Halleck, “I am a little in doubt as to my authority to license and limit trade, punish offenses committed by citizens, and in restricting civil authority.”122 He also had to contend with bloody depredations from Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose cavalry conducted daring raids in northern Alabama and middle Tennessee. Grant cracked down on guerrilla activity, holding local communities responsible for damage done by partisans and confiscating their property to pay for it.
On July 11, out of the blue, Grant received a mysterious summons from Halleck to confer with him in Corinth. When Grant asked whether he should bring his staff, Halleck replied cryptically, “This place will be your Head Quarters. You can judge for yourself.”123 A major change of military leadership had shaken Washington. After the failure of the Peninsula Campaign in Virginia, Lincoln had wearied of the dilatory tactics and imperious personality of George B. McClellan and made Halleck his military adviser and general in chief. McClellan first heard of Halleck’s appointment in the newspapers and told his wife, with his usual contempt, that Lincoln had “acted so as to make the matter as offensive as possible—he has not shown the slightest gentlemanly or friendly feeling and I cannot regard him as in any respect my friend.”124 In private, McClellan spewed more venom, snarling that Stanton was “the most depraved hypocrite & villain” he had ever known and, as for Halleck, it would be “grating to have to serve under the orders of a man whom I know by experience to be my inferior.”125 As Lincoln soon learned to his regret, Halleck had a brilliant theoretical mind, but was a world-class procrastinator on a par with McClellan and no less likely to disparage threatening subordinates.
Advising Halleck to come to Washington posthaste, Lincoln urged him to place the western army under Grant and Buell. When Grant arrived in Corinth, Halleck kept him in the dark, slowly twisting in the wind about his promotion. Then, right before he left on July 16, Halleck signed an order placing a huge plot of real estate under Grant’s control. His District of West Tennessee would be bounded by the Mississippi River on the west, the Ohio to the north, and the Tennessee to the east. Now added to Grant’s previous Army of the Tennessee was the sizable Army of the Mississippi that Pope had headed. Six days after Halleck left for Washington, Grant was still guessing what was afoot with Halleck and what position he might occupy. As shown in a letter to Washburne, Grant repaid Halleck’s condescension and secret betrayals with awed respect: “I do not know the object of calling Gen. H. to Washington but if it is to make him Sec. of War, or Commander-in-Chief, Head Quarters at Washington, a better selection could not be made. He is a man of gigantic intellect and well studied in the profession of arms. He and I have had several little spats but I like and respect him nevertheless.”126
In restoring Grant’s command, Halleck broke up the enormous army he had led to Corinth. Deprived of troops and resources that might have made his new position more significant, Grant was thrown on the defensive amid a hostile population. Cavalry officer Philip H. Sheridan remembered how Grant “plainly showed that he was much hurt at the inconsiderate way in which his command was being depleted.”127 Nonetheless, as he set up headquarters in Corinth, in a gracious house decorated with fragrant foliage, Grant was at last free of somebody staring over his shoulder and meddling with his decisions. In the fullness of time, Halleck’s departure gave Grant much more room to maneuver. Remote from Washington, he was less ensnared in backbiting politics and less endangered by any party faction. Unfortunately he still hovered on the periphery of the nation’s attention, which was riveted on events in Virginia, and this bias in perception would always harm his historic reputation.
In late August, federal fortunes took a disastrous turn at the second battle of Manassas. It was there that the snickers about Robert E. Lee, once mocked as the risk-averse Granny Lee, gave way to admiration that deepened into southern veneration. Having united disparate commands into the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee distilled Confederate fighting power into one supremely effective weapon. At Second Manassas, aided by talented generals such as Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet, he gave the demoralized federals a thorough thrashing.
Hoping to import western élan to the eastern seaboard and with Grant shadowed by charges of drinking and insubordination, Lincoln had placed John Pope in charge of the new Army of Virginia. A West Pointer with a round, open face and long jutting beard, prone to bombastic self-assertion, the garrulous Pope had seemed an attractive alternative to the slow-moving McClellan. Then at Second Manassas, he stumbled straight into the grand trap cunningly laid by Lee. The resultant defeat dented Pope’s massive ego, vanity, and bluster and he was completely deflated. With the northern public plunged into unfathomable gloom, Lincoln fell into a terrible depression. In view of Pope’s disgrace, Lincoln executed a startling volte-face and restored Little Mac to command the combined armies in Virginia. Despite a host of misgivings, the president believed McClellan alone could revive army morale shattered by the recent disaster. For McClellan, of course, the move made perfect sense. As he told his wife with typical modesty: “Again I have been called upon to save the country.”128
Among the military men who disappointed Lincoln was Halleck, whose career went downhill after Second Manassas. He had been recommended for his new job by Pope and their reputations plummeted together. Afflicted by insomnia and hemorrhoids during the late-summer crisis in Virginia—he ingested opium to dull the pain—he fell apart under pressure. Later on Lincoln confided that Halleck “broke down—nerve and pluck all gone—and has ever since evaded all possible responsibility—little more than a first-rate clerk.”129 Just how low Halleck sank in Lincoln’s estimation was made apparent that autumn when Attorney General Edward Bates ventured at a cabinet meeting that Halleck should command the army in person. According to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Lincoln said “that H. would be an indifferent general in the field, that he shirked responsibility in his present position, that he, in short, is a moral coward, worth but little except as a critic and director of operations, though intelligent and educated.”130