by Ron Chernow
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, Gr
ant 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, stavi
ng 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.