Prologue DEATH STARED US ALL IN THE FACE
Initially the rain came softly, then gradually intensified until torrents of water pounded the bloodstained earth. The downpour, relentless through most of the night, was sometimes driven in sheets by a cold wind that swept the battlefield. Flashes of lightning momentarily illuminated the pronounced blackness, revealing innumerable bodies of dead and wounded strewn across the fields and the rolling timberland. All during the night, at fifteen-minute intervals, the guns of the U.S.S. Lexington and the U.S.S. Tyler roared from the Tennessee River, sending 8-inch shells arching toward the Confederate lines. Their red fuses briefly lit up the sky, eerily exposing the wasted humanity, before screaming down, exploding and indiscriminately scattering flesh-mutilating iron fragments in every direction. A Southern general thought the majority of the shells actually—and ironically—fell among wounded Union soldiers, a heartrending “friendly fire.” Like intermittent presentations from a gigantic kaleidoscope of horrors, incredible scenes again and again assaulted the eyes and the psyche of both armies.1
Countless soldiers reported hearing the agonizing groans and cries of the wounded, numbering in the thousands, as they lay between the lines in the water and mud. Many who themselves had escaped injury found it difficult, if not impossible, to escape the awful screams of soldiers that often rent the air as surgeons amputated mangled arms and legs. Some men felt as if the long hours of discomfort, depression, frustration and suffering would never cease. A sixteen-year-old Ohioan remembered listening to a comrade’s disconcerting story in which “nearly all his friends and acquaintances figured as corpses.” As the rain continued to fall, “a streaming, drenching, semi-tropical downpour,” the young soldier thought “there never was a night so long, so hideous, or so utterly uncomfortable.”2
That fearful night was Sunday, April 6, 1862. The site of the savage clash lay in southern Tennessee, about one hundred miles east of Memphis. Called Pittsburg Landing, the place was a steamboat docking point on the west bank of the Tennessee River, only twenty miles north of the strategically vital railroad junction at Corinth, Mississippi, where the north–south Mobile & Ohio Railroad crossed the east–west Memphis & Charleston line. Soon to be better known as Shiloh, a Biblical term commonly translated as “place of peace,” the name identified a Methodist church located two and a half miles southwest of the landing. The Civil War had already raged for nearly a year, but nothing comparable with this monumental engagement along the banks of the Tennessee had yet occurred. Casualties would number nearly five times those of Bull Run, which stood as the biggest fight of 1861. The brutal struggle at Shiloh, fought on April 6 and 7, was an unforgettable fray, without precedent in American history to that time, and truly constituted the first great battle in a conflict unlike any ever waged by Americans before or since.3
Lean, red-haired, forty-two-year-old William Tecumseh Sherman, a brigadier general of volunteers, was prominent among those who experienced Shiloh’s full fury. He commanded a green division (not even one regiment had previously been under fire) and his encampment lay on both sides of Shiloh Church, composing the army’s right front and flank. There, together with Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss’s division to the east, which was equally inexperienced, Sherman occupied the most advanced ground when the enemy attacked. Unfortunately for Sherman, Prentiss and the men they led, a wide gap existed between their two divisions. If another Federal division had been stationed between Sherman and Prentiss, thus constituting a three-division, continuous front—as had been envisioned but not implemented—these Union forces, even though facing combat for the first time, obviously would have presented a more formidable challenge to the advancing Confederates. Instead, the left flank of Sherman’s Fifth Division, as his command had been designated, lay open, highly vulnerable to an enveloping movement by the enemy.
Sherman faced still other problems when the Southerners attacked, not the least of which was the ammunition situation in his division. Because weapons in the Union Army had not yet been standardized, Sherman’s command utilized six different kinds of shoulder arms, with each type necessitating a different caliber of ammunition. Colonel Jesse Hildebrand’s Third Brigade alone employed three types of muskets. When the troops were engaged in the heat of a battle, such diversity in armament presented a serious, time-consuming, logistical disadvantage whenever ammunition required replenishing—and well before noon, Sherman’s supply was running low. His division, however, it should be noted, was not the only Union command plagued by a diversity of arms.4
Worse, the Rebel attack caught Sherman by surprise. Probably “not a man was bayoneted in or near his tent,” as the General afterward assured his younger brother, U.S. Senator John Sherman of Ohio, in a letter denying such sensational newspaper reports then circulating in the North, but Sherman’s claim in the same letter that “I was always ready for an attack” simply was not true. He never made provisions for adequate outposting and patrolling that might have detected an advance by the Confederate Army. He also allowed the Fifty-Third Ohio Regiment, of Hildebrand’s Third Brigade, to remain in a badly exposed position south and east of his main encampments near Shiloh Church, thereby contributing yet more to the fragility of his division’s left flank. Nor were his division batteries brought forward and defensively positioned to help repel an enemy assault if it should come.5
Although Sherman himself later admitted that “from about the first of April we were conscious that the Rebel cavalry in our front was getting bolder and more saucy”—action which should have suggested to the General the possibility that the Confederate cavalry was being used to mask an advance by their entire army—the plain truth is that Sherman’s mind was closed to any such scenario. He believed the Grayclads intended nothing more along his front than the mounting of periodic annoyances. With each passing day he seemed to grow ever more adamant in that conviction.6
Perhaps in part Sherman’s dangerous assumption developed as a result of Major General Henry W. Halleck’s orders. Recently promoted to the command of all Federal forces west of the Appalachians, with headquarters at St. Louis, Halleck had clearly instructed, more than once, that Major General Ulysses Simpson Grant’s army at Pittsburg Landing should do nothing that might provoke a battle with the enemy concentrating at Corinth. Halleck himself, after major reinforcements from Nashville and elsewhere joined Grant’s army, planned to assume field command of all the Union forces gathered at Pittsburg and march against the Rebels. (This time Halleck intended to garner glory like Grant had harvested at Forts Henry and Donelson.)7
Sherman, in immediate command at Pittsburg, since Grant was headquartered nine miles downstream at Savannah, was well aware of Halleck’s instructions not to bring on a general fight. Possibly then, Sherman may have been dissuaded, to a degree, from taking measures required to keep fully abreast of the Confederate Army’s location. This of course, if true, does not excuse Sherman’s failure. One of the very worst mistakes any general can make is simply to assume that a nearby and powerful enemy force will remain in place, day after day, waiting to be attacked. That, unfortunately, is what Sherman did, while ignoring numerous warning signs of possible, even imminent danger.
Finally, during Saturday afternoon, April 5, only a few precious hours before the Southern assault at dawn the next morning, the General’s irritability with those who reported sightings of the enemy close at hand reached a white-hot level. Colonel Jesse Appler of the Fifty-Third Ohio, Sherman’s most advanced regiment, sent word that a large force of Rebels was approaching. The message was not the first warning from the jittery, inexperienced colonel; and it must have seemed a bit too much for Sherman’s patience to endure at that particular moment. Listening to Appler’s communiqué with disgust, Sherman sent an aide to deliver his response, curtly declaring to the colonel that “there is no enemy closer than Corinth,” and Appler could “take his damn regiment back to Ohio!”8
Certainly Sherman knew from the various picket clashes of recent days that at least some Confederates were closer than Corinth. But the General’s strongly held opinion was that the Federal Army faced no immediate threat. Thus, on the same day that Appler claimed the enemy was coming, a supremely confident Sherman wrote U. S. Grant, the army’s commander: “I have no doubt that nothing will occur today more than some picket firing. . . . I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position.” He believed the Confederate forays of recent days, including a particularly audacious incursion on Friday afternoon, were merely reconnaissances in force. Grant was of the same mind as Sherman. Fearlessness and offense were the watchwords for the two key men of the Union Army. There would be no full-scale engagement, they thought, until the Federals were ready to move against the Rebels at Corinth.9
How Sherman could have so completely missed or ignored the signs that should have alerted him to the imminent danger remains a puzzle. Perhaps, besides his preconceived idea that the Rebels would not attack, and the possible influence of General Halleck, he overcompensated, trying to avoid the kind of criticism he had encountered earlier in Kentucky. Sherman had there lost his command, as newspaper accounts focused on his nervous disposition, spreading stories that he feared every little enemy cavalry patrol, convinced that such actions foreshadowed a major Confederate advance. Mockingly, they publicized his estimate that 200,000 men would be necessary to put down the rebellion in the Mississippi Valley alone—a figure that later appeared prophetic, but was then viewed as a wild exaggeration. Rumors of insanity, fueled by the press, began to be associated with Sherman. In his home state, the Cincinnati Commercial of December 11, 1861, forthrightly, embarrassingly proclaimed that he was “insane,” having gone “stark mad” in Kentucky. In years to come, the General might find amusement in recalling accusations that he was crazy. Not in the spring of 1862 though. The Kentucky experience remained fresh in his mind. More time would have to pass before Sherman could take delight in reflecting that he had the last laugh on the insanity issue. At Pittsburg Landing, he did not intend to make the Kentucky mistake again. Also, since his West Point days, Sherman, like many graduates of the Point, harbored a disdain for militia officers. If the Fifty-Third Ohio’s commander had been an academy graduate, perhaps Sherman might have taken him seriously. But a “might have been” does not count, and the fact is, regardless of the reason, Sherman had laid himself open to a surprise attack.10
A Union soldier, writing after the war, memorably summarized the judgment of many when he said there was “one cloud on [Sherman’s] horizon; one blot on his escutcheon—he was surprised at Shiloh.” Indeed he was. Ironically, the attack warning that at last resonated with Sherman on that fateful Sunday morning came from the jumpy Colonel Appler. Sherman initially was not impressed, reflecting upon the source from which the alert originated. The General replied with a touch of sarcasm, “You must be badly scared over there.” However, within a short time, Sherman had second thoughts. Sounds of gunfire increased in volume and drew closer; very possibly indicating more than picket firing. Sherman summoned his staff, mounted up and rode forward to learn for himself what was happening at the camp of the Fifty-Third Ohio.11
He soon got an eyeful. Lifting his binoculars, he first opined that a sharp skirmish must be under way. Then, shifting his glasses to the right, in the direction that an officer was pointing, the General suddenly, finally, recognized the truth. “My God, we are attacked!” he reportedly exclaimed, while gazing upon the “glistening bayonets of heavy masses of infantry,” as his official report characterized the sight of the advancing Rebels. Almost at the same instant, Thomas D. Holiday, Second Illinois Cavalry, Sherman’s orderly, who was riding beside him, was struck and killed by Confederate fire.12
ONCE THE BATTLE was joined, this man of high-strung, nervous energy, a man plagued by a chronic asthmatic condition that sometimes increased his irritability, experienced a remarkable transformation. Sherman became cool and proficient as he directed his division in the heat of the intense, murderous struggle at Shiloh. Observers said he seemed to appear where he was needed, armed with a grasp of events taking place all along the line, and often anticipating, as is one of the marks of a good military leader, what would occur before it developed.
The General at once emphasized to Colonel Appler that he must hold his position as long as possible, because his regiment occupied a key location for protecting the left flank of the entire division. Supporting units, promised Sherman, would be sent forward immediately to assist his regiment in defending its ground. Also, Sherman dispatched riders galloping to alert division commanders Major General John A. McClernand and Brigadier General Stephen A. Hurlbut, both located to his rear, as well as Prentiss, off to his left. (The latter was already heavily engaged with the enemy.) And the General cautioned Captain A. C. Waterhouse that his Battery E, First Illinois Light Artillery, should hold its fire until the Confederates crossed the ravine in their front and began ascending the slope toward his guns. Sherman then rode off to prepare the rest of his command for the Rebel onslaught.13
Thus from the beginning Sherman was in the thickest of the fight, where “the battle raged fiercest,” as he later wrote. Something of the impression Shiloh was making on him is movingly conveyed in letters penned for his wife soon after the battle: “The scenes on this field,” he declared as he described the wounded, maimed and “the mangled bodies” of dead soldiers “in every conceivable shape,” with heads decapitated and limbs blown away, “would have cured anybody of war.” Also, he stated in a matter-of-fact style that he did not expect to survive the war. “This gives me little trouble,” he added, “but I do feel for the thousands that think another battle will end the war.”14
Soon covered with dust and grime, his face, hair and grizzled, short-cropped beard darkened with powder, Sherman sat his horse somewhere in the midst of the gory scene on the Union right. Quickly moving from place to place, he ensured that his men, generally facing south-southwest, were correctly deployed to make the best possible defensive stand. Somehow, although outnumbered by six Rebel brigades converging on his three brigades, and assisted only by Colonel Julius Raith’s supporting brigade from McClernand’s division, which came up in answer to Sherman’s call for aid, he managed to stall the enemy advance along his front. Benefiting from the defensive advantage of high ground both east and west of Shiloh Church, Sherman held his position for the greater part of three hours, while his men inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy. (The Sixth Mississippi, for example, suffered some 300 men killed and wounded out of a total force of 425, and most of those fell in front of Sherman’s division.)15
THE SHILOH BATTLEFIELD
Fought on April 6–7, 1862, the Battle of Shiloh saw 100,000 soldiers engage in a furious struggle across fields and forests, orchards and ravines, creeks and swampy areas. Map by Jim Moon Jr.
SHILOH—POSITION OF UNION DIVISIONS
When the Confederates attacked the Union Army early on the morning of Sunday, April 6, 1862, they approached from Corinth, Mississippi, about twenty miles southwest of Pittsburg Landing. Map by Jim Moon Jr.
At one point on that bloody morning the General’s horse, “a beautiful sorrel race mare . . . to which I had become much attached,” was “shot dead” under him. Captain John T. Taylor, an aide to Sherman, said he dismounted and gave Sherman his own horse. “Well, my boy,” said the General, “didn’t I promise you all the fighting you could do?” When Taylor’s horse also fell under Sherman, the captain recalled, “We caught a battery horse, and the general mounted him and, in less than twenty minutes,” that animal too was killed. Sherman noted additionally that two more of his horses, hitched to trees near his tent, were killed as well. Remarkably, Taylor declared that as the battle “filled my very soul with awe, if . . . not absolute fear,” he thought Sherman’s conduct “instilled . . . a feeling that it was grand to be there with him.” Undoubtedly, Sherman impressed those who saw him in battle. He seemed to thrive in combat.16
Soon after the clash began, according to an artilleryman named Edward Bouton, Sherman rode up on the left of his battery and, while watching the effect of the artillery shots and praising the gun crews’ accuracy, was wounded in his right hand. As Bouton watched, Sherman pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it about the injured hand, which he then thrust inside the breast of his coat. Bouton said the General hardly took his eyes away from the action as he calmly dealt with the injury, and then rode off to check with other portions of his command. A young private who observed Sherman riding nearby declared the General “a splendid soldier, erect in his saddle, his eye bent forward,” and thought he appeared “a veritable war eagle.”17
At some point, while his division fought on the Shiloh Church line, Sherman sent an aide riding to find General Grant, conveying a message that if the army’s leader chanced to have any extra men, he certainly could use them. Sherman also assured Grant that he would continue the struggle with the men at hand, whatever the situation. “We are holding them pretty well just now,” he reported, “but it’s hot as hell.”18
Sherman might have held even longer at the Shiloh Church line if he could have secured his left flank. But Jesse Appler went to pieces early on. Appler’s Fifty-Third Ohio Regiment was strongly defending its position until the jittery colonel completely lost his nerve, shouting “Retreat, and save yourselves!” Many of his regiment followed Appler at once, heading for the rear, although others did not hear his order and continued firing until they saw their comrades falling back. Retreating in disorder, part of the Fifty-Third at last rallied behind Colonel Raith’s brigade. Appler, however, could provide no leadership, allegedly alternating between taking refuge behind a tree and staggering about in a daze. Finally he could no longer endure the intense firing and frantic action of the horrendous scene and headed for the rear on the run. What remained of his regiment dissolved, as more and more men followed the example of their commander.19
A disgusted Sherman later reported that Appler’s regiment had broken after losing no officers and only seven men. Colonel Jesse Hildebrand’s brigade continued to disintegrate. The Fifty-Seventh Ohio held slightly longer than the Fifty-Third, but under heavy pressure from the aggressive Rebels, soon began melting away, many of its men disappearing to the rear. According to Sherman the Fifty-Seventh’s loss was two officers and seven men. Only the Seventy-Seventh Ohio remained to protect Sherman’s left flank, and when ultimately it began crumbling, Sherman’s position at Shiloh Church became hopeless. With the enemy pressing all along his front and positioned to turn his left flank, the General had no choice except to retreat.20
Sherman has sometimes been criticized for holding his ground at the church when the attack began, rather than immediately dropping back to join up with McClernand’s command. Sherman made the right decision. The front of his division was protected by the rugged morass of Shiloh Branch, overgrown with shrubs, saplings, and vines, a swampy area that split the oncoming Confederate line into separate forces, slowing down and disorganizing the attackers. Sherman also enjoyed the defensive advantage of high ground, from which he looked down upon Shiloh Branch and the Rebels, as they began struggling up the rather steep hillside, in the face of the fierce fire from his men, both west and east of Shiloh Church. When the Confederates did mount enough pressure to drive Sherman back, they left a literal pavement of dead and wounded on the hillside. If Sherman had initially fallen back, such a movement might well have shaken the confidence of his inexperienced men to resist the onslaught, and added to the general confusion besetting the Federal Army. Thus Sherman’s stand at the church bought sorely needed time for the Union Army, as well as drawing enemy troops to his front—Rebels who could have been used to better advantage on the Confederate right, since their plan was to turn the Federal eastern flank and cut the Yankees off from the landing.21
CONDUCTING A WITHDRAWAL under fire is a difficult assignment. But shortly after ten o’clock, Sherman had his Fifth Division—although minus most of Hildebrand’s Third Brigade, many of whom, as previously noted, had already fled from the front—occupying a new position near the crossroads of the Hamburg–Purdy Road and the Pittsburg–Corinth Road, approximately a quarter mile north of Shiloh Church. There he linked up with McClernand’s First Division, composed of troops who had fought at Fort Donelson, which came up immediately on his left. Sherman was trying to re-form west of the crossroads and a little north of the Hamburg–Purdy Road, which there ran along an east–west line.
It was a hazardous business in which he engaged, for Ralph P. Buckland’s Fourth Brigade had become badly disorganized, its green troops forced to stage a fighting retreat against the fierce, hard-driving Rebels. Making matters worse, Sherman lost contact for a time with John A. McDowell’s First Brigade, which was cut off from him when the enemy succeeded in occupying a section of the Hamburg–Purdy Road, west of the crossroads. Sherman’s Second Brigade, under David Stuart, had been encamped far to the east, beyond Prentiss’s division, obviously unable to join up and fight with Sherman.22
Not long after Sherman withdrew from the Shiloh Church line, General Grant rode up. Sherman was the only West Point graduate among the six division commanders in Grant’s army, and he was the leader in whom Grant placed the greatest confidence. Grant told Sherman that Lew Wallace’s Third Division, which had been encamped four or five miles to the north at Crump’s Landing, would soon be arriving to support him. Also, Grant assured Sherman that the vanguard of Major General Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio, which had been marching from Nashville, was near at hand, and would be ferried across the Tennessee River, providing substantial reinforcements within a few hours. Sherman responded that his situation was not too bad, but he worried about running out of ammunition. Grant promised his friend that he had already made provision for more ammunition, which could be expected to arrive shortly. Additionally he informed Sherman that the situation did not look as good on the army’s left flank. Grant, probably believing that Sherman, with McClernand’s division assisting him, could hold his ground, moved eastward toward that portion of the front which most concerned him. He had been pleased with Sherman’s performance and later wrote: “I never deemed it important to stay long with Sherman.”23
Actually, within minutes of Grant’s departure, “an assault of gigantic proportion,” to quote Stacy Allen, longtime Shiloh National Military Park historian, struck Sherman and McClernand. Between about 10:30 and 11:00, the Confederate commander, Albert Sidney Johnston, who probably and mistakenly thought his primary objective of turning the Union left flank and cutting the Yankees off from the river had been achieved, proceeded to send approximately two-thirds of all his brigades “either directly or in support” (again quoting Allen) in a massive attack on Sherman and McClernand. Also strengthening the Rebel onslaught were reserves that General P. G. T. Beauregard, Johnston’s second in command, directed toward the sound of the heaviest firing.24
McClernand’s division was badly positioned to withstand the assault. Occupying the crest of a slight ridge, and thus basically without protection, McClernand’s men lay fully vulnerable to the intense Confederate fire. Within a few brief minutes McClernand suffered crippling casualties and was forced to rapidly give ground. When McClernand’s line crumpled, thereby completely exposing Sherman’s left flank, Sherman too was compelled to retreat within a short time. The overpowering Rebel assault wreaked havoc among the Federal troops. The two divisions became seriously intermingled as they fell back, sustaining many casualties and losing a number of cannon. Striving desperately to halt the retreat of their men, Sherman and McClernand were able to hold and regroup only after withdrawing northward for nearly a mile.25
Fortunately for the Federals, the Confederate attack lost momentum as it traversed such a great distance, thus allowing the Union soldiers a brief respite. Sherman took full advantage of the break in the action. Perhaps sensing that the enemy required time to reorganize, the General worked quickly to seize the initiative from the Rebels. He was back in touch with McDowell’s brigade, which was then close at hand, as was Buckland’s brigade. Also, a fresh regiment of Missourians from W. H. L. (Will) Wallace’s Second Division came up to support him. And John McClernand’s hard-hit division had been reinforced by two Iowa regiments, as yet unbloodied, which Grant, probably remembering Sherman’s request for more troops, had sent from Pittsburg Landing to strengthen the army’s right flank.26
This, Sherman perceived, was the instant to strike! The enemy well might be taken aback by the unexpectedness of a bold move. With no minutes to spare, Sherman did not attempt to straighten out his and McClernand’s intermingled units; rather he simply divided their forces in half, more or less, with Sherman taking command of the right-hand sector and McClernand the left. The time likely was near noon when the two divisions counterattacked. The rapidly launched, fierce Union assault was not anticipated, at least not by most of the Confederates, who suddenly looked up to see the enemy bearing down upon them, with Sherman’s right brigade even extending for a distance beyond the Confederate left flank. The vicious attack drove the Rebels back for nearly a half mile, and cost them many casualties.27
When the vigor of the Federal counterattack was spent, Sherman and McClernand pulled back a short distance and re-formed. Then, for well over an hour, both sides engaged in a brutal, close-range combat, as each strove to gain an advantage over the other. It was the Southerners, bringing up a reserve brigade (the last in their army), who ultimately marshaled the strength that forced Sherman and McClernand once more to fall back, retreating to the area from which they had mounted their counterattack. Eventually, after yet more hard fighting, they were compelled to withdraw still farther to the north, while bearing slightly east, and closer to the river landing. Their divisions had been badly mauled, but the Confederates had paid dearly for the ground they gained—both in blood and time.28
Off to the southeast, only a few hundred yards distant, along an old wagon trace that later became known as the Sunken Road, the divisions of Will Wallace, Stephen Hurlbut and Benjamin Prentiss had grittily thrown back a number of charges, until the Confederates attacking that site of slaughter said it was like a “Hornets’ Nest,” and the name stuck. The determined stand of Wallace, Hurlbut and Prentiss (Wallace commanding the greatest number of troops and Prentiss the least), throughout the heat of that April Sunday, undoubtedly helped save the Union Army from destruction.29
However, if Sherman had not fought coolly, valiantly and effectively—first on the Shiloh Church line, and then in tandem with John McClernand after falling back to a second position—continually engaging large numbers of Confederates in severe fighting throughout the morning and much of the afternoon, the Southerners likely would have overwhelmed the Hornets’ Nest much earlier, enveloping the position on its western flank. Without Sherman and McClernand there was nothing to stop the Rebels from turning that flank. Historian Timothy B. Smith, who spent several years working at Shiloh National Military Park, echoed the insightful, revisionist conclusions of Stacy Allen. Smith wrote that “ten out of sixteen Confederate brigades can be documented as being located on the western third of the battlefield for the majority of the time between 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.”30
Furthermore, the huge numbers of dead and wounded in the area defended by Sherman and McClernand, which are established by an 1866 document derived from workers who located and buried bodies on the battlefield, obviously constitutes strong corroborative evidence of the long and savage struggle in which Sherman and McClernand were involved. Thus the most recent Shiloh scholarship clearly elevates the decisive significance of Sherman’s role in the battle. It is also supportive of Grant’s striking declaration in his memoirs that the Union Army “buried, by actual count, more of the enemy’s dead in front of the divisions of McClernand and Sherman alone” than the official total of Confederate killed (1,728) for their entire army. Sherman and, secondly, McClernand deserve at least as much credit for saving the Union Army from defeat at Shiloh as Prentiss, Hurlbut and Will Wallace. Sherman had made a major contribution to the ultimate Union triumph, and it all began when he chose to fight at Shiloh Church, rather than falling back initially to join up with McClernand. When at last the day’s carnage had subsided, and in spite of the sometimes torrential night of rain, Sherman sought out the army’s commander, General U. S. Grant, whom he had last seen in mid-to-late afternoon.31
He found Grant standing under a tree, somewhere in the vicinity of Pittsburg Landing. Sherman remembered that Grant was chewing on a cigar and carrying a lantern. The commander’s coat collar was pulled up around his ears and his hat drawn down over his face to protect him from the rain. Sherman considered asking him if he was thinking about retreating. After all, the army had been driven from position after position, taking heavy losses—the remnants of two divisions in the Hornets’ Nest eventually surrendering—and finally occupying a last line of defense covering Pittsburg Landing, two and a half miles behind its original front. (Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard actually occupied Sherman’s tent near Shiloh Church.) At the last instant, just before Sherman spoke, he said that he changed his mind about mentioning any possibility of a withdrawal. As Sherman himself expressed the matter, he was “moved by some wise and sudden instinct” not to broach any thought of retreat.32
“Well Grant,” said Sherman, “we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” “Yes,” replied Grant; “lick ’em tomorrow, though.” Grant’s laconic response conveyed more than empty bravado. Occupying formidable defensive ground covering the landing, with infantry and artillery concentrated along a line much shorter than the army’s initial front, Grant knew he held a stronger position than when the battle began. Lew Wallace, later to become internationally renowned as the author of Ben Hur, had finally come up on the army’s right flank after marching and countermarching his 7,000-man division from its camp several miles north of Pittsburg Landing. Also, thousands of troops from Major General Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio were being ferried across the Tennessee, taking position on the left flank and, together with Wallace, totaling more than 20,000 additional soldiers.33
Soon after sunrise on April 7, the Union Army advanced, Sherman’s division still on the right. Driving straight ahead, the Union force overpowered the disorganized Confederates, who had received no reinforcements. The Federals gained a hard-fought, strategic triumph—one of the greatest U.S. victories of the war. The fighting on Shiloh’s second day did not equal Sunday’s sustained bloodletting, but at times the conflict’s savagery did rise to an unforgettable intensity. Sherman later declared in his memoirs that the din of musketry near the Hamburg–Purdy Road on that Monday was the severest that he ever heard. Regardless of how the two days compared, the significant factor was that the Rebels had lost a battle they desperately needed to win, and were now condemned to continue waging the war from a critically weakened position.34
For Sherman, like many soldiers on both sides, Shiloh proved the bloodiest battle he ever saw. More important, Shiloh became the turning point of his military career. While West Point, an exhilarating personal experience of earlier years, had sparked within the young man great expectations for the future, Sherman found his subsequent time in the army somewhat boring and disappointing. Then came the war with Mexico, initially reviving his dormant hopes of significant martial achievement, only to have such dreams utterly destroyed—the nadir of all his army service to that point—when he never even saw combat. On the other hand, many of Sherman’s peers emerged from the conflict with enviable military laurels, a factor that only deepened his sense of frustration. Nor had the Civil War started well for Sherman, the lowest point experienced in the fall of 1861 when, suffering a period of mental distress, some newspapers, as earlier noted, pronounced him “crazy.”
All of this changed with Shiloh. General Grant praised Sherman’s display of “great judgment and skill” and correctly stated, as recent scholarship has confirmed, that the battle’s “hardest fighting was in front of [Sherman’s and McClernand’s] divisions.” Grant wrote, “McClernand told me on that day . . . that he profited much by having so able a commander [as Sherman] supporting him.” When Henry W. Halleck, supreme Federal commander in the western theater of war, arrived at Pittsburg Landing soon after the battle, he wasted no time in commending Sherman to the secretary of war. “It is the unanimous opinion here that Brigadier General W. T. Sherman saved the fortune of the day on the 6th instance,” he informed the secretary, and then credited Sherman further with having “contributed largely to the glorious victory on the 7th. He was in the thickest of the fight on both days.” Halleck concluded with a recommendation that Sherman be promoted to major general of volunteers.
Also, Brigadier General William “Bull” Nelson, a blustery Kentuckian whose division was the first unit of Buell’s reinforcing army to reach the battlefield, praised Sherman’s leadership as decisive. Allowing for bias and exaggeration—for Nelson liked to think his division arrived in the nick of time to save Grant’s army—his commendation of Sherman is still striking. “During eight hours the fate of the army depended on the life of one man,” proclaimed Nelson. If General Sherman had fallen, Nelson declared that “the army would have been captured or destroyed.” Possibly Sherman may have been, once the battle was joined, the indispensable Union general (assuming such a creature did exist) at Shiloh on April 6.35
Others of less consequence than Grant, Halleck and Nelson likewise offered their praise, and many soldiers cheered Sherman. To the Northern public he became a hero. Sherman himself, after Shiloh, believed in himself in a way that he had not previously. Following that fiery trial, “when we were enveloped and death stared us all in the face,” Sherman knew that he could command men successfully in the heat of the fiercest battle. For the first time he himself believed, because he could conceive of no greater challenge than Shiloh, that he was actually as good in battle—“my seniors in rank leaned on me”—as he had hoped and thought he could be.
“For instance,” he wrote to his father-in-law, Thomas Ewing, “McClernand’s division was a mere squad at 5 p.m. Sunday, and he gave it up as a gone day, when I assured him we could and would hold our ground till night, and night promised strong reinforcements.” Declaring that he was “not in search of Glory or Fame,” Sherman confidently asserted, “I know I can take what position I choose among my peers.” Writing in the same vein only a few days afterward, Sherman told his brother: “I find . . . that in times of danger and trouble all lean on me. During Sunday afternoon April 6, McClernand leaned on me all the time, but since the Battle he has ignored the fact. Everyone of my staff heard him despair and despond, and I actually gave orders to his troops.”
Shiloh had been dreadful, yet magnificently inspiring. Wonderfully buoyed up by the experience, Sherman henceforth exhibited both confidence and total, all-consuming, physical and emotional commitment to the war, even if he never expected to survive it. Shiloh marked the irreversible resurgence of Sherman as a soldier. Looking back years later, with the wisdom of historical perspective, Sherman pronounced Shiloh “one of the most important [victories] which has ever occurred on this continent.” He also considered it “the turning point,” that made possible “all our western campaigns.” His judgment of Shiloh’s significance—viewed in the context of the great winter–spring campaign of 1862, a Union offensive in which Shiloh was the bloodiest battle—constituted little if any exaggeration. And what Sherman declared of Shiloh’s importance in the war, he might well have said of Shiloh’s impact on his own career, as a general in the U.S. Army.36
