This Great Struggle (17 page)

In the heart of that heartland during the Confederacy’s bleak late winter of 1862, Albert Sidney Johnston made his plans for a counterstrike that he hoped would regain what had been lost at Henry and Donelson. He made no attempt to evade the criticism leveled at him in the newspapers for the twin debacles. “The test of merit in my profession,” he wrote, “with the people, is success. It is a hard rule, but I think it right.” He hoped to pass that test by means of the desperate counterattack he contemplated launching against Grant.

Despite his recent victories, Grant had had problems enough of his own of late. He had been eager to follow up on the successes at Henry and Donelson but could get little help from Halleck and no cooperation out of Buell. When he made a quick trip by steamboat to Nashville to talk to Buell, Halleck got wind of the visit and reprimanded Grant sternly. Then Halleck launched a full-scale offensive against his subordinate. He relieved Grant of command of his army and wrote to McClellan that Grant was acting without authorization, failing to send proper reports, and drinking. None of these things were true, and Halleck knew it. In the case of the last charge, drunkenness, Halleck was especially well informed. He had assigned a member of his staff, engineer Lieutenant Colonel James B. McPherson, to serve on Grant’s staff, ostensibly to help Grant but really to report to Halleck on Grant’s sobriety. McPherson had indeed helped Grant but had also reported quite truthfully to Halleck that Grant was firmly on the wagon. Halleck chose to lie to McClellan in order to undermine Grant. His probable motive was jealousy.

Grant might have remained sidelined and vanished from history save that his congressman, Elihu B. Washburne, once again went to bat for him to the Lincoln administration. Lincoln was inclined to give Grant the benefit of the doubt and may well have been canny enough to detect Halleck’s jealousy in any case. He had Stanton order Halleck to explain the nature of his charges against Grant. Knowing that his allegations would never stand the light of day, Halleck backed down and reassigned Grant to command of what would come to be called the Army of the Tennessee.

By the time Grant resumed command, his army was encamped on the west bank of the Tennessee River at Pittsburg Landing, a two-house settlement at a steamboat landing about fifteen miles from the Mississippi line and twenty from the key northern Mississippi rail junction town of Corinth, where Albert Sidney Johnston was even then gathering his troops. Grant’s orders from Halleck were to keep his army encamped idly at Pittsburg Landing until he could be joined by Buell’s Army of the Ohio, marching overland from Nashville, and the Army of the Mississippi, which under the command of John Pope (West Point, 1842) had been cooperating with the navy in clearing away the Confederate defenders of the Mississippi who had already been turned by Grant’s success on the Tennessee. When all three armies were in place, Halleck would come down to Pittsburg and take personal command for the final advance to Corinth. Above all, Grant was to do nothing that might bring on a fight with the Confederates—no aggressive patrolling, no forceful reconnaissance probes. The big battle was to wait until Halleck and all the troops were on hand.

Albert Sidney Johnston would no doubt have appreciated Halleck’s orders if he could have known of them, but he did not intend to wait quite that long for the big battle. He had gathered in Corinth all the elements of his command east of the Mississippi—Crittenden’s survivors from Logan’s Crossroads, now no longer under Crittenden since that officer was facing court-martial for drunkenness on duty; Polk’s Columbus garrison, having long since abandoned the fortifications Polk had kept them working on all winter; and Johnston’s own main body, having marched all the way down from Bowling Green. Davis had hurried enough reinforcements from the rest of the Confederacy to bring Johnston’s total force up to forty-four thousand men. The task before him was simple and extremely difficult. His best chance for reversing the tide of war in the West was to destroy Grant’s Army of the Tennessee before Buell’s Army of the Ohio or Pope’s Army of the Mississippi could join it. Then, if his own army was still battleworthy, he could at least in theory turn on the two smaller Union armies and destroy them one after the other.

Johnston’s army was composed of green troops, most of whom had never been in battle, and its units had never worked together before. Johnston wanted as much time as possible to train and organize it before leading it into battle. He therefore planned to wait until Buell, who was closer, had almost reached Grant. Then he would strike. On April 2 his scouts brought word that Buell was getting very close, perhaps only another day or two of marching from joining Grant. The time had come, and Johnston gave the order for his army to march the twenty miles to Pittsburg Landing the next day and attack Grant’s army at dawn on April 4.

He assigned to his second in command, Beauregard, the task of composing the march orders. Beauregard and his chief of staff had a copy of Napoleon’s order for the march to Waterloo and used it as a pattern, adapting it as best they could to the present troops and terrain. Their march order was much too complicated, especially for the army’s woefully inexperienced troops and their equally green officers. Divisions and corps were to weave between each other on intersecting roads. The result, predictably, was chaos, with entire divisions getting lost and the army commander himself having to ride out in search of them. Eventually Johnston found all the pieces of his army, but there was considerable delay. Heavy rains occasioned further delay by turning the roads into mud. Johnston had to postpone the attack from the fourth to the fifth and then to the sixth.

By the evening of the fifth, Beauregard and most of the rest of Johnston’s ranking subordinates strongly advocated aborting the operation and returning to Corinth since the element of surprise had almost certainly been lost. Johnston was adamant. “I would fight them if they were a million,” he told a staff officer. In front of him was Grant’s army with its back to the Tennessee River. “Tomorrow,” Johnston grimly predicted, “we will water our horses in Tennessee River.”

Alert Federals in the forward camps of the Army of the Tennessee, from sergeants all the way up to brigadier generals, had indeed detected the approach of Johnston’s army and even exchanged shots with the Rebels in the days leading up to the battle, but Grant did not expect an attack. His headquarters were twelve miles downstream at the town of Savannah in order to make the earliest possible contact with Buell, whose leading elements on the morning of April 6 were still a full day’s march from Pittsburg Landing. For the situation at the actual encampment at Pittsburg Landing, Grant was depending on Brigadier General William T. Sherman (West Point, 1840), the only professionally trained officer among the commanders of the five divisions encamped there. Since the camps of Sherman’s division were among the farthest inland from the landing and Sherman said no significant Rebel force was nearer than Corinth, Grant took it at that.

In retrospect Sherman’s stubborn refusal to believe a major Confederate army was nearby despite abundant evidence to the contrary brought in by members of his and a neighboring division seems incredible. Yet it was common for an army to experience harassment from light forces of the enemy. The question was whether heavy formations of the enemy lay behind the skirmishers one encountered, and the only way to find out was to probe forward aggressively, driving back the enemy’s cavalry as well as his infantry skirmishers until encountering enough resistance to reveal that the enemy was present in force. It was just that sort of reconnaissance in force that Halleck had forbidden Grant and his officers to use, thus leaving them effectively blind to the approach of Johnston’s army. They had to guess, and Sherman guessed wrong.

THE BATTLE OF SHILOH

Well before dawn on Sunday, April 6, Johnston’s troops filed into their positions for the assault. Johnston’s plan was based on the crude maps he possessed. The area where the Army of the Tennessee was encamped was a plateau about fifty feet above the level of the river, mostly wooded, cut near its edges with deep ravines, bounded on the north by the swampy bottomland of Owl Creek and its tributary Snake Creek and on the south by the equally swampy bottoms of Lick Creek. Johnston’s maps showed the creeks running roughly from west to east, at right angles to the river, and this led him to assume that the Union line would run north and south and face west. In fact, the creeks ran from southwest to northeast, and the line of Union encampments ran more or less east and west, facing south. Johnston planned to place a large corps under Major General Braxton Bragg (West Point, 1837) on the right, with two smaller corps on the center and left and one in reserve. With this unbalanced formation he would strike heavily against the southern end of the Union line, turn it to the north, and then roll up Grant’s army and drive it into a pocket formed by the swamps of Snake and Owl creeks.

Johnston let Beauregard handle the deployment of the troops for battle, and Beauregard arranged them differently, stretching each corps all the way across the battlefield and arranging the four of them one behind the other. It was the worst possible arrangement since it meant that as soon as successive corps moved up to help their comrades in front, their divisions and brigades would become mixed, and troops would be fighting alongside strangers and under officers they did not know. Johnston apparently discovered this after the troops were already in position. He was talking to Beauregard and other officers, who were once again trying to convince him to call off the whole thing, when firing broke out at the front. “The battle has opened, gentlemen,” Johnston announced, “it is too late for us to change our dispositions.”

What triggered the fighting was a Union patrol moving forward to investigate the suspicious sounds of movement in the woods in front of them. The fighting quickly became general and spread across the entire front as the Confederates launched their attack. On the Union left the completely green division of Brigadier General Benjamin S. Prentiss, an Illinois Democratic politician, fought for about an hour and then collapsed under the weight of Confederate numbers. Johnston, who was with the troops attacking Prentiss, interpreted this development in light of his imperfect maps and concluded that he had crushed Grant’s flank and trapped him against the swamps to the north. “That checkmates them!” he exclaimed.

Not quite, but the collapse of Prentiss’s division had certainly done the momentarily leaderless Union army no good. Johnston could have scored big gains by pursuing the fugitive fragments of Prentiss’s division, but believing he faced no more threat in the direction they were fleeing (due north), Johnston diverted several brigades toward the west, where heavy firing could be heard through the forests.

That firing came from Sherman’s division, holding the right end of the Union front line. After his poor showing in not anticipating the Confederate attack, Sherman was turning in the performance of a lifetime, rallying his troops and directing their defense of a low ridge on which stood a Methodist meetinghouse called Shiloh Church. He was slightly wounded and had several horses shot out from under him, but his men commented on his fierce but steady demeanor and calm, clearheaded instructions as key to their prolonged stand.

Grant had been about to eat breakfast at his Savannah headquarters when the sound of firing reached him from more than twelve miles away. He stopped with his coffee cup halfway to his lips, paused, set it down, and ordered his staff to join him on the steamboat that was kept tied up with a full head of steam, ready for his use. They raced up the river, pausing at Crump’s Landing, halfway to Pittsburg, to alert Lew Wallace’s division, which was encamped there. Wallace said he had heard the guns and had his men under arms. Grant instructed him to stand by for orders and then raced on up the river. Arriving at Pittsburg, Grant mounted up and rode to the top of the bluffs. The roar of battle that met him told him this was the big one. He immediately sent a messenger back downstream with orders for Wallace to march for the battlefield at once.

Back out on the fighting lines, Confederates had finally driven Sherman off Shiloh Ridge, but his division fell back in good order to the next ridge, where McClernand’s division moved up to join him. Unfortunately the political general positioned his line incorrectly, weakening the fighting power of its veteran regiments. With the troops Johnston had diverted from the other end of the line, Sherman and McClernand were now facing almost three-fourths of the Confederate army, well over twice the roughly fifteen thousand men in those two divisions. The new position collapsed quickly, and the Federals reeled back another half mile or so. They rallied, and Sherman led them forward in a counterattack. The battle seesawed back and forth, with Sherman more often forced to give ground, but his division and McClernand’s were holding the attention of the bulk of Johnston’s army.

Between Sherman and the river, the divisions of William H. L. Wallace, a Mexican War veteran, and Stephen A. Hurlbut, another Illinois politician, moved into line, halting the renewed Confederate push on the Union left. Prentiss and a few of his fugitives fell in with the fresh troops in a position that ran between thickets along a country lane and through a peach orchard, pink with blossoms. Yet Grant now had no reserves left at Pittsburg, and his line was not long enough to touch the Tennessee River on its left. There a succession of rugged ravines, a single brigade of Union troops, and the artillery support of two timber-clad gunboats in the river were all that prevented the Confederates from pouring around Grant’s left flank and cutting his army off from the landing.

With growing anxiety, Grant and his staff wondered where Lew Wallace was. In fact, he had taken the wrong road, perhaps through some failure in the communication of orders or from a misunderstanding of the situation on the battlefield. When subsequent couriers informed him of his error, Wallace proceeded at a steady but cautious pace that would have been very commendable for an ordinary march but was not at all the desperate rush the circumstances demanded. Grant never forgave Wallace.