Not long after, Cable heard roars and shouts and curses outside the store he worked in. “Kill them!” were the shouts. “Hang them!” Or, “Hurrah for Jeff Davis!”
It was a mob, with a weapon in every third pair of hands. And in the center, two men—two officers of the United States Navy—strode on, undeviating, “never frowning, never flinching, while the mob screamed in their ears, shook cocked pistols in their faces, cursed and crowded, and gnashed upon them.” And so, “through the gates of death,” marched these two Union men to the City Hall to demand and receive the surrender of New Orleans, April 25, 1862. Just about the bravest deed our witness ever saw.
Complete Conquest Required
IT WAS, SAID ULYSSES S. GRANT AFTERWARD, “THE S EVEREST BATTLE FOUGHT AT the West during the war, and but few in the East equalled it for hard, determined fighting.” He was recalling Shiloh. Bloody Shiloh.
It lasted two days, but that was enough. “I saw an open field, in our possession on the second day, over which the Confederates had made repeated charges the day before, 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.”
Close to the Federal line, the Union and Confederate dead were “mingled together in about equal proportions.” But sadly for the South, the rest of the field was its dead.
The battle took place in April 1862 on the western banks of the flooding Tennessee River, a place called Pittsburg Landing. A church stood nearby: the small Shiloh meetinghouse. Here in cold rain and mud, came the two armies for an early showdown—forty thousand Johnny Rebs under Albert S. Johnston come to fight forty-two thousand under Grant.
The fighting raged, and even some of the generals would not walk away unscathed. Johnston, for one, died after being wounded in the leg. He could have tended to it and lived. Instead, he stayed on his horse, kept his boots on, and bled to death. On the Union side, Grant’s subordinate William Wallace was also mortally wounded.
Even Grant, before the shooting died down in the second day’s fighting, survived a Confederate ball that plucked its way through the air to his very side, but struck his metal sword scabbard, “just below the hilt.”
Not quite so fortunate—but a survivor—was Union General William Tecumseh Sherman. “A casualty to Sherman that would have taken him from the field on that day [Sunday, April 6] would have been a sad one for the troops engaged at Shiloh,” wrote Grant later. “And how near we came to this! On the 6th Sherman was shot twice, once in the hand, once in the shoulder, the ball cutting his coat and making a slight wound, and a third ball passed through his hat. In addition to this he had several horses shot during the day.”
A horse was the cause of Grant’s own greatest physical discomfort at Shiloh—his mount had slipped on a muddy incline two days before and fallen, “with my leg under his body.” Grant’s ankle was so swollen afterward that his boot had to be cut off; he used crutches for the next two or three days.
The result was that the commander of Union forces at Shiloh spent the crucial night between the two days of fighting still in pain from the ankle injury and well aware that the Confederates had pushed back the Union line in the first day of fighting, capturing a Union general, Benjamin M. Prentiss, and 2,200 of his men in one fell swoop. That night, one would think, there was much to discourage U. S. Grant.
“During the night,” he later related, “rain fell in torrents and our troops were exposed to the storm without shelter.” Himself included: “I made my headquarters under a tree a few hundred yards back from the river bank. My ankle was so much swollen from the fall of my horse…and the bruise was so painful, that I could get no rest. The drenching rain would have precluded the possibility of sleep without this additional cause.”
Sometime after midnight, Grant became so uncomfortable he sought shelter in a small log cabin nearby. But it had been turned into a field hospital, “and all night wounded men were being brought in, their wounds dressed, a leg or arm amputated, as the case might require, and everything being done to save life or alleviate suffering.” In the end, Grant could stand it no more. “The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy’s fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain.”
The next day, Grant’s anticipated reinforcements arrived, swelling the size of the Union force, and he counterattacked against the now-outnumbered and tiring Confederates. By mid-afternoon on April 7, they were in retreat. In Grant’s view, that was what counted. Not who won the first day or phase of battle, but who won the final spasm in the battlefield.
In the harsh hours before the shooting died down, both sides experienced desertions from the front lines. Grant took a surprisingly forgiving and philosophical view of the “stragglers,” as these men were called, even though they were enough of a problem for him to form his cavalry into a line at the rear to halt the runaways. “When there would be enough of them to make a show, and after they had recovered from their fright, they would be sent to reinforce some part of the line which needed support, without regard to their companies, regiments or brigades,” he wrote in his memoirs.
He had had problems with stragglers earlier.
At one point in the first day’s fighting, Grant found “as many as four or five thousand stragglers lying under cover of the river bluff, panic-stricken, most of whom would have been shot where they lay, without resistance, before they would have taken muskets and marched to the front to protect themselves.”
Grant’s fellow Union general, Don Carlos Buell, was furious with the malingerers. “I saw him berating them and trying to shame them into joining their regiments,” wrote Grant. “He even threatened them with shells from the gun-boats near by.”
Grant was not nearly so perturbed, even though Buell’s tongue lashing had little effect. Said Grant: “Most of these men afterward proved themselves as gallant as any of those who saved the battle from which they deserted.”
He asserted also that the Rebel stragglers at Shiloh were just as numerous, and the only difference was that they “left the field entirely” while “on the Union side, but few of the stragglers fell back further than the landing on the river, and many of these were in line for duty on the second day.”
Indeed, one of the major positive results of the Union victory, in Grant’s view, was the confidence it gave the largely green, inexperienced troops of his Army of the Tennessee. While the battle also gave the Union control of the middle Mississippi River line, it opened Grant’s eyes to a central truth. “Up to the battle of Shiloh,” he later said, “I, as well as thousands of other citizens, believed that the rebellion against the Government would collapse suddenly and soon, if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies.” The fact is, Grant himself had already gained such a victory at Forts Donelson and Henry nearby, and still the Confederacy fielded its hard-fighting armies. It lost, if narrowly, at Shiloh, and still “not only attempted to hold the line farther south… but assumed the offensive and made…gallant effort to regain what had been lost.” As a result, the Confederacy created a monster—its own nemesis—in the form of Grant, who now resolved the strategy by which he would lead the Union armies to ultimate victory just three years later. For Grant now “gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.”
Secession from Secession
AT ONE POINT DURING THE CIVIL WAR, WINSTON COUNTY IN NORTHERN Alabama (with Houston as its county seat) was so unhappy with events that it thought of seceding from the newly formed Confederacy. The populace here, often called “hill people,” was not to be counted among the South’s plantation owners or slaveowners. Far from either category, the Winstonites were so set against Alabama seceding from the Union, they sent a young schoolteacher named Chris Sheets to represent their point of view at the state’s Secession Conference in Montgomery in January 1861.
A maverick among the fire-eaters and other secession-minded delegates to the convention, Sheets argued long and vocifer
ously for the hill country’s point of view. As cited in Alabama writer Drue Duke’s anecdotal history, Alabama Tales, the hot debates in Montgomery led to name-calling and, for Sheets, even worse. “When Sheets refused to sign any papers of oath that the Secessionists offered him [after voting for secession], tempers flared more violently. ‘I am an American,’ Sheets declared, ‘and an Alabamian, I don’t need to sign anything to prove who I am.’” He might as well have spoken to the wind. “At that point, he and the remaining few who sided with him were seized and dragged off to jail,” writes Duke. “A few of the non-secessionists were able to slip away and hide.”
Naturally, news of their emissary’s incarceration and other rough treatment “downstate” did not sit well with his fellow residents of Winston County. “The hill people grew more angry each time they heard it repeated,” and “Sheets came to represent a real martyr to the people of Winston and the surrounding counties.”
Nor did matters rest there. As the Confederacy and the Union came to actual blows, their respective loyalists in Winston were at odds, too. “Friends and neighbors who had known each other for years were now on opposite sides of the issue and weren’t even speaking to each other. Church congregations, even denominations, split. Family members argued their conflicting beliefs, and young brothers left home to fight against each other.”
Here in the deep South, the split rending the country was duplicated in microcosm. Some in Winston, though opposed to the idea in principle, wished to go along with Alabama’s secession to keep the peace in their own community. Others, Sheets among them, weren’t willing to let matters lie there. They issued a call for a “Neutrality Meeting” on July 4, Independence Day, and twenty-five hundred to three thousand persons, including “people from all over the South,” turned out for the conference at Looney’s Tavern. The talk soon turned to secession—secession from Alabama, that is! “The Free State of Winston” would be the result.
But secession from a state that had already left the Union, pointed out a speaker named J. L. Meeks, would mean that Winston had no representation in any governmental entity beyond the county borders. It would be “much wiser,” he argued, “to declare ourselves neutral and ask that our rights as neutral citizens be recognized.”
By Duke’s account, those present were then asked to approve a declaration proposing “that the people continue to respect Old Glory and to…take up no arms against the flag.” At the same time, the people of Winston would ask “both the Confederacy and the Union to respect their rights and leave them alone to settle their own affairs in their own way.”
The declaration was approved by a loud and enthusiastic voice vote. And if no Free State of Winston ever emerged, “the hill people still proudly recall the day they took a strong stand in the face of great danger,” wrote Duke.
Soldier A-Courting
HE HAD SMALL WHITE HANDS, AND HE ALWAYS LOOKED CLEAN. BUT HE WAS A BIG man, broad in the chest and proud in mein. He could be charming to the ladies, but he also knew what it was to hold firm—even to fight a duel. So when a man in his Kentucky hometown balked at taking his own wife and children to church, the preacher spoke with John Hunt Morgan, who then spoke with the recalcitrant husband.
The preacher had one way of speaking and Morgan another. He simply told the wayward soul, “I’ve come to give you a sound thrashing—if necessary.” The offender became a regular churchgoer soon after.
Morgan came from Lexington in the bluegrass country, where cavalier attitudes and behavior were rife, where men (and women) thought with such independence that the town fed both the Confederate and the Union armies numerous hot-bloods intent on fighting for their respective beliefs. Here, for instance, three grandsons of Henry Clay cast their lot with the Union and four with the Confederacy. Among other citizens, Dr. Robert Breckinridge, himself a Union man, gave two sons to each side (and a son-in-law to the Southern cause), while U.S. Senator John J. Crittenden’s two sons each became generals on opposing sides.
Indeed, this was Mary Todd Lincoln’s home territory; her own half sister’s husband, Benjamin H. Helm, was a Confederate general whose death at Chickamauga was sincerely mourned in the White House—the Union White House. No such splits, however, existed within John Hunt Morgan’s family; all six of Morgan’s “boys” joined the Confederate ranks.
One of them, John, soon became famous as a Confederate raider, a dashing war hero to rival Virginia’s colorful icons “Jeb” Stuart and John Singleton Mosby. Indeed, it is debatable whether either Stuart or Mosby inflicted as much damage overall on the enemy in personnel and materiel losses or had as great an impact on enemy strategy. It is absolutely nondebatable, of course, that only John Hunt Morgan took an invading force—raiding party, if one must be technical—as far north as a point in Ohio only one hundred miles south of Lake Erie.
It also can be argued that only the charming John Morgan would have courted an intended bride with quite the flourish he displayed when based for a time in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, home of the two Ready sisters, Alice and Martha (called Mattie). In one of his frequent visits to town, Morgan met their father, “Colonel” Ready, who promptly invited the cavalryman home for dinner, sending ahead a message: “Tell Mattie that Captain Morgan is a widower and a little sad. I want her to sing for him.”
Mattie, it should be pointed out, was not an aging spinster or a callow country girl, but a winsome twenty-one-year-old who, as daughter of a former U.S. congressman, had lived in the Federal capital as a leading single socialite. And it was true—Morgan, a captain destined to become a general in just eight months’ time, was a widower, his invalid wife, Rebecca, having died at the time of First Bull Run in July 1861.
After that first dinner at the Ready mansion in early 1862, Alice eagerly confided to her diary that their visitor was modest but pleasant and agreeable. He didn’t look the part of “the daring reckless man he is.” Before long John Morgan was spending his free time riding horseback with Mattie during frequent visits to the Ready household.
In February the Confederates pulled out of Murfreesboro (following a farewell dinner at the Ready home). Morgan and his men were left behind as a screening and scouting force. For his dashes and raids against the Federals, his daring “visits” inside Union-held Nashville, and other escapades, Morgan had by then achieved such a reputation that a crowd was known to collect outside the Ready door, a block from Courthouse Square, at word that Morgan was there.
His own division commander, William Hardee, warned Morgan to be more careful or risk being killed or captured. Said Morgan: “Sir, it would be an impossibility for them to catch me.”
It seems his words were true, as seen by his escapades. While operating out of Murfreesboro, Morgan often sent challenging messages to pro-Union Louisville editor George D. Prentice by splicing into Union telegraph lines. And in March he set out one day to ambush and capture a Union general on the roads outside Nashville—the notion being that any general would do. Morgan and his men soon rounded up eighty-five assorted prisoners, although no one was a general. He sent them to the rear and waited some more before bagging another eleven.
On the way back to Murfreesboro, some of the prisoners were lost to a pursuing Union detachment. So when Morgan was a bit late in making his reappearance, people began to worry. The two Ready sisters in particular were on pins and needles that Sunday morning. At church, though, they received word that Morgan and one of his officers were awaiting them with thirtyeight Yankee prisoners. As Morgan biographer Cecil Holland said in his book, Morgan and His Raiders, the two young women couldn’t stay for church after that. “We felt it would be mockery to remain and pretend to hear the sermon,” one of the sisters later explained.
Shortly, Morgan and his compatriot appeared in front of the Ready home with the prisoners and escorts, sixty to seventy horsemen in all. “Ladies,” said the colorful raider, “we present you with your prisoners. What disposal should be made of them?”
And the reply, “You have perform
ed your part so well we are willing to entrust it all to you.”
Next, Morgan & Company were off to the Union-held railroad town of Gallatin, promising more trophies upon return, even though the Federals were moving ominously close to Murfreesboro itself.
At Gallatin, Morgan and his men performed their wrecking work on the rail facilities and obtained intelligence by approaching the telegraph operator in the guise of Federal officers. The operator accepted them at face value, then foolishly boasted that he was ready to face John Morgan if the Reb ever appeared in Gallatin. Morgan’s companion of the moment couldn’t resist: “Sir, let me introduce you to Captain Morgan.”
Back in Murfreesboro, the Union Army had arrived at last, taking possession quietly but decisively. Fortunately, Morgan was warned before riding blithely back into town to visit his newfound love. Mattie, assuming she wouldn’t see Morgan for a time, wrote him a farewell note to be sent by messenger. Then she received word he was at a village eight or ten miles away. Would it be safe for him to slip into town? The Union troops were encamped about eight miles out of town in another direction, so she sent back word to come ahead, then waited on tenterhooks, wondering if she had invited him to his doom.
Suddenly, he was there at the front door with a fellow officer and five prisoners as more “trophies” for the ladies, who once again told Morgan to dispose of them as he knew best.
Morgan, in fact, stayed with the fair Mattie until dawn while his men and his prisoners waited. By Ready family tradition, that is the night they became engaged, although they would not see each other for another eight months, much less go ahead with marriage plans. But that ceremony—and a colorful, widely heralded one it was, too—did finally take place, by which time the young Morgan was a general.
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 11