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Authors: Charles Bracelen Flood
Tags: #Biography, #History, #bought-and-paid-for, #Non-Fiction
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (16 page)
BOOK: Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War
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The next day, Saturday, April 5, able to be lifted onto a horse and with a crutch strapped to his saddle, Grant sent one of his now-frequent reports to Halleck. Not mentioning his injury, he told Halleck that the first division of Buell’s column had arrived in the area of his headquarters downriver from Pittsburg Landing at Savannah, with the additional divisions expected “to-morrow and the next day.” He continued, “I have scarsely [sic] the faintest idea of an attack (general one,) being made upon us but will be prepared should such a thing take place.” He enclosed a two-part report made to him by Sherman, giving the details of the previous day’s skirmish, with Sherman’s additional comment that “the enemy is saucy, but got the worst of it yesterday, and will not press our pickets far—I will not be drawn out far unless with certainty of advantage, and I do not apprehend anything like an attack upon our position.” Once again, Grant and Sherman were telling themselves, and each other, what they wanted to believe.
As these reports from Grant and Sherman went off to Halleck, General Albert Sidney Johnston was riding around among his advancing columns, trying to untangle another snarl in the forward movement of his army. Looking with disbelief at the confusion, he exclaimed, “This is puerile! This is not war!” Nonetheless, with the sun out and the day wearing on, thousands of Confederate soldiers neared the unsuspecting Union camp. The colonel of the Seventieth Ohio was conducting a review of his regiment, complete with its band playing: from a higher place in the woods beyond the camp, dozens of gray-clad Confederates stood quietly watching the parade. The afternoon sun caught the glint of the brass barrels of several Confederate cannon that had been brought forward through the trees and underbrush, but the Union sentries did not understand what they saw.
Even clearer warnings came: a Confederate patrol chased some federal troops from a house just a mile from Sherman’s headquarters next to Shiloh Church, near the end of the encampment farthest from the river. Alarmed when his sentries reported unidentified men moving in the woods, Colonel Jesse J. Appler of the inexperienced Fifty-third Ohio sent a detachment to see what was out there. When he heard shots and his men came running back to report they had come under fire from “a line of men in butternut clothes,” Appler had his musicians beat their drums to turn out his regiment under arms and ordered his quartermaster to report the situation to Sherman at his nearby headquarters. Sherman considered Colonel Appler to be a nervous, frightened old man. Within a few minutes, Appler’s quartermaster reappeared with this message: “General Sherman says, ‘Take your damned regiment back to Ohio. There is no enemy nearer than Corinth.’” Overhearing this, Appler’s young soldiers laughed, broke ranks without being dismissed, and went back to looking for wild onions and turkey peas to add to their kettles for supper.
By dusk, the Confederates were moving into place within two miles of the Union encampment, where thousands of little fires and oil lanterns were lit. It was too late for an attack that day, and as it became dark Johnston held a council of war with his generals, gathering them around a campfire. They made quite a group. Among the men talking in the firelight and shadows with Johnston and Beauregard were Leonidas K. Polk, a graduate of West Point who had left the army and become a bishop of the Episcopal church, taking a Confederate commission when the Southern states seceded; John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, an academy graduate who had served as vice president of the United States under President Buchanan; Braxton Bragg, another West Pointer, brevetted for bravery in Mexico, who had brought ten thousand soldiers up from along the Gulf Coast and now commanded 13,600 men; and William Hardee, a West Pointer who had later returned to the academy as commandant of cadets. One of Johnston’s volunteer aides was Governor Isham Harris of Tennessee, who fled the state capital of Nashville before the Union Army marched in.
Of the twenty-six officers in Johnston’s army who commanded divisions or brigades, ten were graduates of West Point, and eleven had fought in Mexico, several with distinction. They brought a wealth of military experience to the Southern side and had the cavalry leader Nathan Bedford Forrest providing them with a stream of accurate and timely reports from his scouts. A few miles from them were some interesting and able Union officers—including an untried brigadier from Ohio named James A. Garfield—but the leadership of the Union force lacked the experience possessed by the Confederate side. A year before this, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, captains who had resigned from the service and floundered in civilian life, had not yet returned to the army.
As Johnston’s council of war got under way, Beauregard started to speak. Until recently he had hoped to mount a major offensive that would regain much that the South had lost in recent months, but now he began a litany of worries. The enemy had to know they were there: all afternoon, many untested soldiers, wondering if their powder was still dry after the heavy rain, had been firing their muskets. Along the line of march, there had been bugle calls and signals made by beating drums. Young troops had been shouting back and forth to each other; when a deer sprang from the woods beside the road, hundreds of youths cried out at the sight. The Union forces were not deaf, Beauregard argued: “Now they will be entrenched to the eyes!”
He had more to say. Because the march from Corinth had taken two days instead of one (due in good part to his unnecessarily complicated planning), the troops had used up their rations and would sleep hungry tonight and have to go into battle in the morning with empty stomachs. The men were also nervously exhausted by their long sleepless struggle through last night’s rain and mud. The army was in no fit condition to make a do-or-die attack. To Johnston’s amazement, the fiery Creole recommended that they all march back to Corinth and wait for a better opportunity.
Johnston listened patiently until Beauregard finished, and then, as Leonidas Polk wrote about the dramatic moment in the firelight, “remarked that this would never do.” He replied to Beauregard that if the enemy knew they were there in great force, they would be under fire right then. Yes, the men were hungry, but the nearest food was in the Union camp, and the way to get it was to overrun the place in the morning. The meeting was over: “Gentlemen,” Johnston told his generals, “we will attack at daylight tomorrow.” As the leaders dispersed in the shadows to return to their commands, Johnston turned to an aide and said, “I would fight them if they were a million.” He later added, “I mean to hammer ’em!”
That night, trying to sleep, Beauregard heard a drum beating nearby. Furious at this noise that was both keeping him awake and warning the Northern troops that something was up, he sent an aide to have it stopped. Within minutes the man returned to tell him that the drum was in the enemy camp. That was how close they were.
At three in the morning of Sunday, April 6, Grant was in bed at his headquarters in the house of a Union sympathizer downstream at Savannah, while Sherman slept in his headquarters tent next to the little log Shiloh meetinghouse. At that hour, Colonel Everett Peabody, a heayset thirty-one-year-old Harvard graduate from a distinguished Massachusetts family, became worried about reports of Confederate activity in the woods in front of his brigade. He started assembling a force of three hundred men from one of his regiments, the Twenty-fifth Missouri. When they were ready, Peabody gave the major commanding them orders to take his troops forward and make a reconnaissance in force. Moving cautiously, at dawn the Missourians came to the edge of a clearing half a mile beyond the Union encampment and ran straight into a battalion of Confederates from Mississippi who were quietly coming the other way. As the two sides started firing at each other, thousands more Confederate soldiers began appearing out of the woods all along the six-mile-long edge of the Union camp that ran from the river to the vicinity of Shiloh Church. Jarred from sleep by the sounds of gunfire and the Union regimental drums beating the “long roll” signaling an attack, federal soldiers dashed out of their tents, grabbing their weapons and strapping on their equipment.
Just before all this started, at a meeting of the Confederate leaders in the woods, Beauregard had been telling Johnston once again that they should cancel the attack and take their army back to Corinth. As Johnston heard the crescendo of firing, he said to the officers around him, “The battle has opened, gentlemen; it is too late to change our dispositions now.” At the edge of the Union camp, Colonel Appler of the Fifty-third Ohio, the target of Sherman’s rebuke for being too apprehensive the previous day, saw a man of the Twenty-fifth Missouri come back from the direction of the firing with blood streaming from a wound on his arm; the man shouted, “Get into line—the Rebels are coming!” Sending word to Sherman, Appler turned out his men, only to receive a quick, caustic reply from Sherman, who was already up at his nearby headquarters but skeptical that this rattle of musketry was a major matter: the messenger said Sherman told him to say, “You must be badly scared over there.” Appler, now seeing hundreds of men in gray coming straight at his right flank, shouted, “This is no place for us!” and led a retreat through his regiment’s tents at the dead run, stopping on a ridge, where his men flung themselves down in the brush, pointing their muskets toward the advancing enemy.
At this point Sherman arrived, riding what he described as “a beautiful sorrel race mare that was fleet as a deer,” and accompanied by his orderly, Private Thomas D. Holliday of the Second Illinois Cavalry, who always had a carbine ready to protect his general. As Sherman raised his field glasses to study the terrain in front of him, Confederate infantrymen sprang out of the bushes fifty yards to one side, their weapons at their shoulders. A Union lieutenant sprinted toward Sherman, yelling, “General, look to your right!” Sherman’s head spun in that direction; as he shouted and threw up his right hand as if to ward off a bullet, a musket ball that he felt sure was meant for him killed his handsome young orderly, while some buckshot slashed open the third finger of Sherman’s right hand. “Appler,” he shouted to the colonel, “hold your position! I will support you!” Sherman wrapped a handkerchief around his bleeding hand and spurred off to organize the defense of the right end of the Union line. Looking in the direction of more firing, Sherman said that “I saw the rebel lines of battle in front coming down on us as far as the eye could reach.” In the meantime, the first wave of Confederates had swept through Sherman’s headquarters; his tent and the Shiloh meetinghouse were in enemy hands. In the gunfire, his two spare horses, tethered under a tree near his tent, were killed.
Some Union regiments fell back and formed lines to face the advancing enemy, while others, including Appler and most of his men, simply ran away toward the river. Johnston, who had told Beauregard to send men and supplies up from the rear while he directed the battle at the front, rode forward through the trees on his horse Fire-eater, thousands of his Confederate foot soldiers pressing through the woods to either side of him. As the sun rose and burnt through the morning mist, Johnston, convinced that his army would drive all the defenders right through their camp and sweep them into the swamps, said confidently, “Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River.”
Shortly before this—the hour is not recorded—Ulysses S. Grant was eating what he described as “a very early breakfast” at his headquarters nine miles down the river. He was hoping that Buell would arrive at the end of his long march so that he could confer with him, but now, as Grant put it, “heavy firing was heard in the direction of Pittsburg Landing.” Getting up from the breakfast table, he hobbled out to the porch on his crutches, listened for a moment, and then said to his staff, “Gentlemen, the ball is in motion. Let us be off.”
By the time Grant arrived at Pittsburg Landing aboard his headquarters paddle-wheeler
Tigress
, many hundreds of Union soldiers who had fled the battle were milling about aimlessly under the shelter of the steep bluffs along the shore. Riding to the hastily organized front, he came to the division in the center of the line, commanded by Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss, with whom he had had the severest of disputes about seniority in rank the past autumn. Prentiss’s men were falling back through their camps in the face of a Confederate bayonet charge. One of Prentiss’s commanders, Colonel Everett Peabody, whom Prentiss had earlier accused of “bringing on this engagement” by sending forward three hundred men, was riding through the area of his regiment’s tents, trying to rally his troops. Wounded four times as he kept trying to form them up to make a stand, a fifth musket ball hit him in the head, and he fell dead from his horse. Prentiss’s regiments kept falling back, some of them turning to fire as they retreated, while others threw down their arms and ran to the river.
Tigress
, many hundreds of Union soldiers who had fled the battle were milling about aimlessly under the shelter of the steep bluffs along the shore. Riding to the hastily organized front, he came to the division in the center of the line, commanded by Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss, with whom he had had the severest of disputes about seniority in rank the past autumn. Prentiss’s men were falling back through their camps in the face of a Confederate bayonet charge. One of Prentiss’s commanders, Colonel Everett Peabody, whom Prentiss had earlier accused of “bringing on this engagement” by sending forward three hundred men, was riding through the area of his regiment’s tents, trying to rally his troops. Wounded four times as he kept trying to form them up to make a stand, a fifth musket ball hit him in the head, and he fell dead from his horse. Prentiss’s regiments kept falling back, some of them turning to fire as they retreated, while others threw down their arms and ran to the river.
On the right end of the Union line, Sherman’s men, nearly all of them in their first battle, were slowly falling back, but they kept their lines as they fired at the advancing enemy. Sherman, whose beautiful “race mare” had been wounded and then killed, was now using a horse he had taken over from one of his aides and was riding back and forth along his line, ignoring the danger as he calmly encouraged his men. He had dismounted and was standing, the handkerchief around his hand dark from drying blood, studying the situation and quietly giving orders, when one of Grant’s aides came up to him and said that Grant was in the middle behind Prentiss’s division and wanted to know how things were on this right end of the line. As enemy bullets and cannonballs flew past them, Sherman kept looking forward to where his men had started to hold fast, and said, “Tell Grant if he has any men to spare I can use them; if not, I will do the best I can. We are holding them pretty well just now—pretty well—but it’s hot as hell.”
BOOK: Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War
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