The Man Who Saved the Union (27 page)

Accordingly Grant arranged to move his forces up the Tennessee to Pittsburg Landing. Sherman led one division;
Lew Wallace,
John McClernand, Charles Smith,
Stephen Hurlbut and
Benjamin Prentiss the others.
Don Carlos Buell, marching overland from Nashville, would join the strike against Corinth. As Grant’s divisions reached Pittsburg Landing, he arrayed them in temporary bivouac fashion. “
When all reinforcements should have arrived, I expected to take the initiative by marching on Corinth, and had no expectation of needing fortifications,” he explained afterward. He discussed fortifications with his chief engineer,
but the engineer pointed out the difficulty of construction, given the creek-crossed and otherwise convoluted topography, and Grant let the subject go. “The fact is, I regarded the campaign we were engaged in as an offensive one and had no idea that the enemy would leave strong entrenchments”—at Corinth—“to take the initiative when he knew he would be attacked where he was if he remained.”

Grant’s failure of imagination was precisely what Sidney Johnston was counting on. Rather than wait for Grant to come to Corinth, Johnston proposed to take the battle to Grant, and to get there before
Buell’s force augmented Grant’s. Some of Johnston’s lieutenants fretted at the risks;
Beauregard contended that the Confederate forces could never achieve the requisite surprise. Others observed that the Federals had them seriously outnumbered. But Johnston refused to be dissuaded. “
I would fight them if they were a million,” he told a council of war on Saturday, April 5. Pointing to a map, he explained, “They can present no greater front between these two creeks than we can, and the more men they crowd in there, the worse we can make it for them.” He closed the meeting decisively: “Gentlemen, we shall attack at daylight tomorrow.”

L
eander Stillwell was an eighteen-year-old enlisted man with an Illinois infantry regiment who was enjoying his first trip south. “
We had just left the bleak, frozen North, where all was cold and cheerless, and we found ourselves in a clime where the air was as soft and warm as it was in Illinois in the latter part of May,” Stillwell remembered. “The green grass was springing from the ground, the johnny-jump-ups were in blossom, the trees were bursting into leaf, and the woods were full of feathered songsters. There was a redbird that would come every morning about sun-up and perch himself in the tall black-oak tree in our company street, and for perhaps half an hour he would practice on his impatient querulous note that said, as plain as a bird could say, ‘Boys, boys! Get up! Get up! Get up!’ It became a standing remark among the boys that he was a Union redbird, and had enlisted in our regiment as a musician to sound the reveille.”

April 6, Sunday, promised more of the same. “The sun was shining brightly, and there was not a cloud in the sky. It really seemed like Sunday in the country at home.” But a distant sound reminded Stillwell and his comrades where they were. “Away off on the right, in the direction of Shiloh Church, came a dull, heavy ‘Pum!’ Then another, and still
another. Every man sprang to his feet as if struck by an electric shock, and we looked inquiringly into one another’s faces. What is that? said everyone, but no one answered.” The pums came faster and closer, followed by a different sound: a dull, steady roar. “There was no mistaking that sound. That was not a squad of pickets emptying their guns on being relieved from duty; it was the continuous roll of thousands of muskets, and told us that a battle was on.”

Stillwell’s colonel summoned the regiment. “Remember your state,” he said. “And do your duty today like brave men.” The regiment marched across an open field and awaited the Confederate attack at the edge of the wood beyond. “The rebel army was unfolding its front, and the battle was steadily advancing in our direction,” Stillwell recalled. “We could begin to see the blue rings of smoke curling upward among the trees off to the right, and the pungent smell of burning gunpowder filled the air. As the roar came travelling down the line from the right it reminded me (only it was a million times louder) of the sweep of a thunder shower in summer time over the hard ground of a stubble field.”

Stillwell now wished he had never left home. “My mind’s eye was fixed on a little log cabin far away to the north.… I could see my father sitting on the porch reading the little local newspaper.… There was my mother getting my little brothers ready for Sunday-school, the old dog lying asleep in the sun.”

The enemy drew closer before bursting into view. “Suddenly, obliquely to our right, there was a long, wavy flash of bright light, then another, and another. It was the sunlight shining on gun barrels and bayonets—and there they were at last! A long, brown line, with muskets at right shoulder shift, in excellent order, right through the woods they came.”

Stillwell’s colonel gave the order to fire. “From one end of the regiment to the other leaped a sheet of red flame,” Stillwell remembered. He and the others reloaded and fired again. Then, to his surprise, he heard the order to fall back. They recrossed the field to their camp, where they turned and stood their ground. They held this position for nearly an hour, exchanging vigorous fire with the enemy, until their officers once more called a retreat. “The troops on our right had given way and we were flanked,” Stillwell observed, adding: “Possibly those boys on our right would give the same excuse for their leaving, and probably truly too.” Whatever the case, the order to retreat came just in time. “As I rose from the comfortable log, from behind which a bunch of us had been firing,
I saw men in gray and brown clothes with trailed muskets running through the camp on our right, and I saw something else, too, that sent a chill all through me. It was a kind of flag I had never seen before. It was a gaudy sort of thing, with red bars. It flashed over me in a second that that thing was a rebel flag!”

The retreat swiftly became a dash. “We observed no kind of order in leaving; the main thing was to get out of there as quick as we could. I ran down our company street and in passing the big Sibley tent of our mess I thought of my knapsack with all my traps and belongings, including that precious little packet of letters from home. I said to myself, ‘I will save my knapsack, anyhow,’ but one quick backward glance over my left shoulder made me change my mind, and I went on. I never saw my knapsack or any of its contents afterward.”

Stillwell and the others eventually halted a half mile to the rear at the crest of a brush-covered ridge. Catching his breath, he reflected on his battle experience thus far. “I was astonished at our first retreat in the morning across the field back to our camp, but it occurred to me that maybe that was only ‘strategy’ and was all done on purpose. But when we had to give up our camp and actually to turn our backs and run a half a mile, it seemed to me that we were forever disgraced, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘What will they say about this at home?’ ”

Stillwell’s regiment was ordered to defend a battery some distance to the right. “We were put in position about twenty rods in the rear of the battery and ordered to lie flat on the ground. The ground sloped gently down in our direction, so that by hugging the ground close, the rebel shot and shell went over us.”

At this point Grant appeared. “He was on horseback, of course, accompanied by his staff, and was evidently making a personal examination of his lines,” Stillwell recalled. “He rode between us and the battery, at the head of his staff. He went by in a gallop. The battery was then hotly engaged; shot and shell were whizzing overhead and cutting off the limbs of trees, but Grant rode through the storm with perfect indifference, seemingly paying no more attention to the missiles than if they had been paper wads.”

Stillwell’s regiment remained by the battery till two o’clock in the afternoon, when it was sent to relieve a regiment that had been fighting desperately for hours. “I remember as we went up the slope and began firing about the first thing that met my gaze was what out west we would call a windrow, of dead men in blue, some doubled up face downward,
others with their white faces upturned to the sky, brave boys who had been shot to death holding the line.” Stillwell’s regiment held the same line until their ammunition ran out, when they were relieved by another. They refilled their cartridge boxes and returned to their position defending the battery. “The boys laid down and talked in low tones. Many of our comrades, alive and well an hour ago, we had left dead on that bloody ridge. And still the battle raged. From right to left, everywhere, it was one never-ending, terrible roar, with no prospect of stopping.”

The roar persisted till late afternoon, when the fighting diminished and then ceased. “Everything became ominously quiet,” Stillwell said. A staff officer rode up and spoke to the commander of the battery and then to Stillwell’s colonel. The next thing Stillwell saw was the battery horses being brought up from a ravine where they had been sheltered. The horses were hitched to the guns and the battery was hauled to the rear. The strange quiet held; the loudest noise was the creak of the caissons. Stillwell’s regiment followed the battery into the woods and out upon a field. “I then saw to our right and front lines of men in blue moving in the same direction we were, and it was evident that we were falling back.” The quiet held barely a moment longer. “All at once, on the right, the left and from our recent front came one tremendous roar, and the bullets fell like hail. The lines took the double-quick toward the rear. For a while the attempt was made to fall back in order, and then everything went to pieces. My heart failed me utterly. I thought the day was lost. A confused mass of men and guns, caissons, army wagons, ambulances, and all the debris of a beaten army surged and crowded along the narrow dirt road to the landing, while that pitiless storm of leaden hail came crashing on us from the rear.”

The flight carried Stillwell and the others to within several hundred yards of Pittsburg Landing. They rounded a bend in the road and saw a long line of soldiers in blue, at right angles to the road and stretching on each side away into the woods. “What did that mean?” Stillwell recalled asking himself. “And where had they come from?” He asked the same questions of his sergeant, who didn’t know but thought the troops were intended to cover the crossing of the river by the army in retreat. “And doubtless that was the thought of every intelligent soldier in our beaten column. And yet it goes to show how little the common soldier knew of the actual situation.” In fact the line, consisting of elements of the divisions of Sherman, McClernand and Hurlbut, was not covering the retreat but holding a new position. “In other words, we still had an
unbroken line confronting the enemy, made up of men who were not yet ready, by any manner of means, to give up that they were whipped.”

W
illiam Sherman had seen little amiss before the battle. “
From about the 1st of April we were conscious that the rebel cavalry in our front was getting bolder and more saucy,” he remembered. “And on Friday, the 4th of April, it dashed down and carried off one of our picket guards, composed of an officer and seven men, posted a couple of miles out on the Corinth road.… But thus far we had not positively detected the presence of infantry.” The next day showed nothing new, either. “
All is quiet along my lines,” Sherman wrote Grant on April 5. “I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position.”

At seven on Sunday morning, April 6, Sherman rode with staff along his front, which encompassed the Shiloh meetinghouse. The Confederate pickets opened fire, killing Sherman’s orderly. Sherman’s men returned the fire, but nothing yet indicated a general attack.

Things changed within the hour. “
About 8 a.m. I saw the glistening bayonets of heavy masses of infantry to our left front in the woods,” Sherman wrote in his after-action report. For the first time he realized something serious was afoot. He galloped along his line, urging his men to hold their ground.

“The battle opened by the enemy’s battery, in the woods to our front, throwing shells into our camp,” he later explained. Sherman’s batteries answered. “I then observed heavy battalions of infantry passing obliquely to the left, across the open field in Appler’s front”—
Jesse Appler headed an Ohio regiment in Sherman’s command. Other Confederate columns came straight toward Sherman. He gave the order to engage. “Our infantry and artillery opened along the whole line, and the battle became general.”

Sherman’s men held firm, but the Confederates drove past his left flank. He clung to Shiloh as long as he could, but eventually the rebels got artillery to his rear. “Some change became absolutely necessary,” he wrote. He ordered his men to fall back, while one of his batteries, led by a
Captain Behr, covered their retreat. “Behr gave the order, but he was almost immediately shot from his horse, when drivers and gunners fled in disorder, carrying off the caissons and abandoning five out of six guns without firing a shot.” The enemy kept driving forward, and Sherman was compelled to give more ground. “This was about 10 1/2 a.m., at
which time the enemy had made a furious attack on General McClernand’s whole front. He struggled most determinedly, but, finding him pressed, I moved McDowell’s brigade directly against the left flank of the enemy, forced him back some distance, and then directed the men to avail themselves of every cover—trees, fallen timber, and a wooded valley to our right. We held this position for four long hours, sometimes gaining ground and at others losing ground; General McClernand and myself acting in perfect concert and struggling to maintain this line.”

Grant sent word that reinforcements under
Lew Wallace were coming. “General McClernand and I, on consultation, selected a new line of defense, with its right covering a bridge by which General Wallace had to approach,” Sherman recounted. “We fell back as well as we could, gathering in addition to our own such scattered forces as we could find, and formed the new line.” Confederate cavalry charged the new position but were driven off. McClernand’s men made their own charge, driving some of the rebels into a ravine. “I had a clear field, about two hundred yards wide, in my immediate front, and contented myself with keeping the enemy’s infantry at that distance during the rest of the day,” Sherman said.