by Ron Chernow
By nightfall, Beauregard rushed off a premature telegram to Richmond: “After a severe battle of ten hours, thanks be to the Almighty, [we] gained a complete victory, driving the enemy from every position.”44 Far from seeing disaster, Grant thought his men had performed creditably against overwhelming odds and hailed the day’s fighting “as one of the best resistances ever made.”45 For Grant, it was the first day of Shiloh, not the second, that represented the real triumph, especially since half his men had never withstood battle before. On that stormy first night, two thousand corpses lay strewn across a reeking battlefield that stretched for twelve square miles. In this nightmarish landscape, thousands of wounded men lay writhing and moaning in drenching rain, their contorted figures lit by sporadic lightning. The ground was slick with blood and carpeted with torn limbs and decapitated heads. Wild pigs rooted among putrefying bodies, their snorts audible to the dying soldiers. Meanwhile, Union gunboats, anchored in the Tennessee River, showered Confederate positions with shells, adding to an unearthly cacophony. Many soldiers died of exposure that night while the living found no shelter as they slept in puddles. “This night of horrors will haunt me to my grave,” swore a Confederate soldier.46
Grant was never one to mourn the dead openly or describe the grotesque butchery about him; such thoughts remained locked up inside him. But beneath his self-protective silence, he was far from insensible to suffering. He had planned to spend the night sleeping under an oak tree, on a bed of hay, a few hundred yards from the river. All day long, distracted by battle, he had ignored his injured leg, but once he dismounted and stood on it, he felt excruciating pain and had to limp about on crutches. His leg was so bruised and swollen that surgeons had to cut off his boot, and the throbbing, aching limb, along with the steady rain, made sleep impossible.
Sometime after midnight, he hobbled off to seek shelter in a log house converted into a field hospital. To ward off gangrene, Civil War surgeons often amputated on the spot and stacks of arms and legs had accumulated inside. These begrimed doctors, ignorant of the germ theory of infection, stood in clothes splashed with blood, pus, and filth. Many operations were performed without anesthesia, relying on whiskey instead. The stoical Grant was staggered by his glimpse of all the amputees. “The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy’s fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain.”47 During battles, some emotional narcotic anesthetized Grant, while in the aftermath individual cases affected him powerfully. It is telling that Grant, seemingly immune to mass carnage, found unbearable the close-up horror of the makeshift hospital, which reduced things to a human scale. This was the same Grant who was repelled by bloody meat and had been revolted by the slimy tannery as a boy. As his son Fred noted, “In battle I have seen him turn hurriedly from the sight of blood, and look pale and distressed when others were injured.”48
Wrapped in his greatcoat, Grant returned to the haven of the nearby oak tree with its spreading canopy of branches. Sherman found him standing there, streaming with rain, hat pulled low over his face, collar upturned, holding a lantern and chewing a cigar. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman remarked. “Yes,” replied Grant with a drag on his cigar. “Lick ’em tomorrow though.”49 The statement expressed Grant’s intestinal fortitude, which communicated itself to his officers. He had already told Sherman that when both sides seem defeated in battle, the first to assume the offensive would surely win. He had already ridden to each division commander, ordering a 4 a.m. attack. “It is always a great advantage to be the attacking party,” he said. “We must fire the first gun tomorrow morning.”50 Perhaps no other Union general at this stage of the war would have dared such a counteroffensive. Grant’s decision came from more than visceral optimism and an unquenchable fighting spirit: he had made a sound calculation of his strength on the morrow. He would be replenished by Lew Wallace’s wayward division and the arrival of Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio, which was ferried across the river that night. This would give him 25,000 fresh troops, reinforcing his 15,000 available survivors and dwarfing the 25,000 able-bodied troops fielded by Beauregard.
The next morning, Grant, who had to be lifted into his saddle, began to redeem his errors of the preceding day. By sunrise, his soldiers were high-spirited from their new numerical advantage and began a concerted offensive, accompanied by what Sherman called “the severest musketry-fire I ever heard.”51 An enormous battle droned on for hours as the tide shifted decidedly against the rebels. Grant didn’t burden division commanders with detailed instructions, giving them freedom to be spontaneous. The clatter of arms grew earsplitting as rain thickened the dense smoke hanging over the battlefield. Union troops regained territory lost the day before, tripping over numberless cadavers and groaning men abandoned on the battlefield overnight. Once again, Grant, in the throes of fighting, rode just behind the front lines.
Taken by surprise, Confederate soldiers yielded ground all morning. Although they rallied around noon, they were exhausted, unable to make a sustained stand against fresh troops that bore down relentlessly upon them. Grant implemented a trademark technique: simultaneously applying pressure in as many places as possible. At one point in the afternoon, he gathered two regiments, lined them up for battle, then personally led them forward—a novelty for him. He carefully stopped within range of Confederate muskets. “The command, Charge, was given,” he reported, “and was executed with loud cheers and with a run; when the last of the enemy broke.”52 By around 2:30 p.m., a desperate Beauregard feared his army would dissolve and signaled a withdrawal, taking his troops back to their base in Corinth. After two days of fighting, Grant’s fatigued troops were in no condition to pursue them. Buell’s Army of the Ohio was in better shape, but Grant couldn’t order them to chase Beauregard. Only recently promoted above Buell, Grant didn’t feel comfortable giving him orders. Heavy rains descended that evening, making roads too soft and marshy to sustain heavy artillery and precluding any follow-up.
Everyone was stunned by the scale of carnage at Shiloh, which posted a new benchmark for mass slaughter. Deeming it the war’s bloodiest battle, Grant commented “that the Fort Donelson fight was, as compared to this, as the morning dew to a heavy rain.”53 Men who survived it could never scrub its harrowing imagery from their memories. Americans found it hard to comprehend the dimensions of the losses, which were beyond any historical precedent. Of more than one hundred thousand soldiers who pitched into the fray, twenty-four thousand had been killed or wounded—a casualty count dwarfing that of the battle of Waterloo. Shiloh’s casualties eclipsed the total of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined.54 William Hillyer conveyed the spreading tableau of death that greeted him and Grant: “For miles and miles wherever we rode we found dead bodies scattered through the woods in all directions.”55 As Grant wrote memorably, “I saw an open field . . . so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.”56
Shiloh peeled away any lingering aura of romance from the war, showing the sheer destructive power of modern combat. An array of technical advances, such as the conical minié ball that ripped through flesh and bone or rifled muskets and cannon that displayed greater accuracy and range, ensured bloodier battles than ever before. No less hardy a soul than Sherman remarked that the corpse-littered battlefield “would have cured anybody of war.”57 Combat had been pushed to extremes of cruelty that banished any remnant of civilized behavior. “Men lost their semblance of humanity,” wrote a reporter, “and the spirit of the demon shone in [the soldiers’] faces. There was but one desire, and that was to destroy.”58
Before Shiloh, Grant had nursed hopes for a titanic battle that would triumphantly crush the rebellion. Now, stunned by the combative spirit of his foes, he knew there would be many more bloodbaths in a long, grinding war of attrition. This began his conversion to a theory of total w
arfare in which all of southern society would have to be defeated. Technically speaking, neither side won the battle, for neither had gained new territory. For Grant, however, Shiloh was an unquestionable victory that had averted devastating consequences: “It would have set this war back six months to have failed and would have caused the necessity of raising . . . a new Army.”59 With the benefit of hindsight, he told Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes: “If [Shiloh] had been lost the war would have dragged on for years longer. The North would have lost its prestige.”60 Grant had fended off attempts by the South to regain its defensive line in Tennessee and Kentucky, thus shielding the North from invasion. At the same time, General John Pope had taken a Confederate bulwark called Island Number Ten on the Mississippi River. The twin Union victories meant the Confederacy surrendered a huge section of the Mississippi Valley, foreshadowing steeper losses to come.
For Grant, Shiloh represented a personal victory. He had rescued his army from his own errors, showing a gumption and an audacity that altered the battle’s course. He had shown coolness under fire and a willingness to take monumental gambles. The battle also instilled lasting confidence in the Army of the Tennessee, shattering anew the fighting mystique of rebel soldiers. The South, Grant noted, had demonstrated dash and pluck at the outset of battle, but his own men had exhibited the true staying power. Reflecting on this after the war, he said, “I used to find that the first day, or the first period of a battle, was most successful to the South; but if we held on to the second or third day, we were sure to beat them, and we always did.”61 Grant’s endurance in the face of unexpected setbacks perhaps owed something to having survived the ups and downs of his own improbable life before the war.
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EVEN AS THE NATION debated Shiloh’s meaning, teams of doctors descended on the remote Tennessee woods to treat thousands left wounded or disfigured by the battle. Because of the warm weather, Grant attempted to bury the dead without delay, and cadavers in blue and gray were lined up in neat rows or gathered in heaps. Many soldiers were buried in anonymous mass graves so shallow that wagon wheels from burial details ran over skulls and toes protruding from the earth. By contrast the remains of officers from well-to-do families were embalmed, placed in sealed coffins, and shipped back to their hometowns. All day long Mississippi steamboats ferried Shiloh victims, displaying death on a new industrial scale. One British journalist winced at a stack of coffins waiting on a jetty “with the dead men’s names inscribed upon them, left standing in front of the railway offices.”62
After Shiloh, Grant was vilified in the press with a fury that surprised him. He was shocked that the northern press construed the battle as a Union loss. Never before had he faced such national scrutiny or virulent attacks. As the war of words grew fierce, Grant was traumatized. Union camps swarmed with correspondents who wrote for partisan papers and weren’t overly scrupulous in their methods. They trafficked in rumors that quickly found their way into print. In the absence of any public relations machinery in the field, legends sprang up overnight, filling entire newspaper columns. With few exceptions, Grant adopted a sensible policy on censorship, giving reporters the liberty to report on past actions while preventing statements about future troop movements. In areas conquered by the Union army, he shut down pro-Confederate papers hawking treasonous views.
In the press Grant was faulted for being caught off guard by the Confederate attack, arriving late at the battle, and failing to chase Beauregard back to Corinth. He was made to seem inept and insensitive to the massive slaughter of his men. The most savage denunciations issued from politicians in Ohio and Iowa, home states to many victims. Grant and his staff suspected that these stories originated with craven soldiers who had fled the front lines on the first day at Shiloh, taking shelter beneath the bluff. Governor David Tod of Ohio was especially irate at such insinuations, portraying these skulkers as victims of criminal negligence by the high command. To prove his point, he sent Lieutenant Governor Benjamin Stanton to talk to Ohio soldiers near Shiloh and the latter claimed in a diatribe that there was “a general feeling among the most intelligent men that Grant and Prentiss ought to be court-martialed or shot.”63 It was now open season on Grant, with a chorus of voices calling for his removal. Senator James Harlan of Iowa insisted that “those who continue General Grant in active command will in my opinion carry on their skirts the blood of thousands of their slaughtered countrymen.”64
Grant received his most damaging coverage when twenty-four-year-old Whitelaw Reid weighed in under the pen name AGATE in the Cincinnati Gazette. An Ohio native, slender and urbane, Reid had studied at Miami University where he absorbed a love of literature and philosophy. His voluminous Shiloh account ran to 19,500 words, occupying thirteen newspaper columns; widely reprinted elsewhere, it became the most influential account of the battle. Brilliant as a piece of narrative prose, it left much to be desired as a first draft of history. Reid took at face value myths peddled by disaffected soldiers. He gave birth to the canard that Union soldiers, caught unawares by rebels swooping down on their camps the first morning of Shiloh, were trapped in their tents and bayoneted in bed. He also falsely pictured Grant as arriving late on the scene from luxurious quarters in Savannah. In fact, Grant had galloped tirelessly across the battlefield that day, exhorting his commanders from early morning. He blamed Grant for not summoning Lew Wallace earlier and loaded Buell with praise for the second-day turnaround. There was more than a germ of truth to what Reid wrote—Grant had been caught by surprise at Shiloh, he had failed to fortify his position—but the bogus, misleading details marred the genuine reporting.
In light of this calumny, it was predictable that Grant would be accused of drinking at Shiloh. So widespread were these allegations that he told Julia, “We are all well and me as sober as a deacon no matter what is said to the contrary.”65 One Grant supporter told Washburne he was asked “twenty times a day” whether Grant was intemperate. “The public seem disposed to give Grant full credit for ability and bravery but seem to think it ‘a pity he drinks.’”66 The documentary record makes clear that Grant was sober during the battle. Jacob Ammen, who was with Grant the day before the battle and on its first day, jotted in his diary: “Note—I am satisfied that General Grant was not under the influence of liquor, either of the times I saw him.”67 Colonel Joseph Webster wrote of Grant: “He was perfectly sober and self-possessed during the day and the entire battle.”68 William Rowley disabused Washburne of any notion of Grant drinking at Shiloh and added that “the man who fabricated the story is an infamous liar.”69
John Rawlins was incensed by the uproar. “Though charged with intemperance, a more temperate man [than Grant] is not to be found in the service,” he told a relative and polled those with Grant at Shiloh to substantiate his case.70 By this point, Rawlins had developed a powerful vested interest in protecting Grant’s reputation publicly, while sometimes chastising him internally. Convinced of Grant’s supreme importance to the Union effort, he was forced into playing an unwanted double game about his drinking. Grant’s sobriety at Shiloh apparently did not last. Five months later, when Lieutenant James H. Wilson reported to Grant’s headquarters, Rawlins took him aside and showed him Grant’s broken pledge not to drink. “Now I want you to know the kind of man we are serving under. He’s a God damned drunkard, and he is surrounded by a set of God damned scalawags, who pander to his weakness . . . The sword of Damocles is hanging over his head right now, and I want you to help me save him, and ourselves too.”71
Coincidentally, two of Grant’s chums from his Ohio school days met him within days of Shiloh. Both left fascinating accounts of Grant’s frankness about the drinking charges. When Benjamin Johnson called on Grant in his tent, the latter asked what people said about the battle. “I told him they said he was drunk. He fired up a little and asked me if I thought he was drunk now. I said I knew he was not. He replied, ‘Well, I was just as drunk then as I am now, no more and no less.’”72 Still more reve
aling was Grant’s confidential two-hour chat with R. C. Rankin, son of John Rankin, who recalled: “He spoke bitterly of being charged with drunkenness and denied that he had been drinking, said he had not drunk any for several years. Grant told me he was ruined once with liquor and now he had quit it he would not allow it to get the upper hand of him again.”73 Seldom did Grant bare his innermost thoughts about alcohol in this patently confessional vein.
Amid a clamor for Grant’s removal, Elihu Washburne withstood intense pressure as he took up the cudgels for him: “There is no more temperate man in the Army than General Grant,” he declared on the House floor. “He never indulges in the use of intoxicating liquors at all.”74 Washburne maintained that at Shiloh Grant earned “one of the most brilliant victories.”75 He made clear that Grant’s patriotic contributions far transcended Shiloh: “Though but 40 years old, he has been oftener under fire, and been in more battles, than any other man living on this continent excepting Scott.”76 At moments Washburne seemed a lonely voice in Grant’s defense, producing everlasting gratitude in his protégé. A Grant staffer asked Washburne to send one thousand copies of his speech “for distribution among our friends.”77 Julia Grant, who felt “hard and revengeful” about the flood of newspaper accusations, thanked Washburne for his crusade to exonerate her husband “from the malicious and unfounded slanders of the press.”78
With his faith in George McClellan increasingly shaken, Abraham Lincoln monitored the controversy swirling around Shiloh. Grant served as a standing rebuke to Little Mac, proof that you could send inexperienced troops into battle and emerge victorious without months of laborious training. Lincoln already pinned hopes on Grant, but he needed reassurance. Edwin Stanton wired Halleck that Lincoln wanted to know “whether any neglect or misconduct of General Grant or any other officer contributed to the sad casualties that befell our forces.”79 In noticeably tepid language, Halleck defended Grant from insinuations of misconduct at Shiloh, but Midwest politicos still harried Lincoln about Grant. “Why, after Shiloh,” Lincoln recounted to an editor, “a republican senator from Iowa denounced him to me as bloodthirsty, reckless of human life, and utterly unfit to lead troops; and because I wouldn’t sit down and dismiss him at once, went out in a rage, slamming the door after him.”80