Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  The result was a threefold increase in the distance from which a soldier could kill an enemy. A marksman with a rifle could reliably hit a ten-inch circle at two hundred fifty yards.* At five hundred yards, he could hit a square six feet on a side. A line of men advancing in formation toward enemy lines across an open plain might as well have been heading off a cliff.

  • • •

  But weapons changed more quickly than tactics. Because musket fire was so inaccurate, soldiers in previous wars had marched against the enemy in close formation, elbow to elbow, and fired in volleys. Offense was a match for defense, for an attacker was relatively safe until he approached within a couple of hundred yards of the enemy lines (thus the famous Bunker Hill command, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!”). Then it was a desperate race—the attackers, firing in unison and then dashing across the last bit of ground separating them from the enemy, the defenders tearing open paper packets of gunpowder with their teeth, pouring the powder into the shotgun muzzle, ramming the ball in place, frantic to complete the finicky nine-step loading process and fire on the onrushing enemy before he could drive his bayonet home.

  With rifles deadly at several hundred yards, such massed assaults were suicidal. In the Civil War, a defense lying in wait in a trench or behind a wall had an overwhelming advantage over any attackers. In July 1862, at Malvern Hill, Confederate officers ordered fourteen assaults on an entrenched Northern position. The Southerners fell in waves, like scythed wheat. “It was not war,” one stunned Northern officer declared. “It was murder.”

  The great, romantic emblem of warfare, the cavalry charge, was suddenly obsolete, and for the same reason. The onrushing, saber-brandishing cavalry was exposed to withering fire hundreds of yards before it could threaten the enemy. At Chancellorsville, a force of Northern cavalry launched a gallant but doomed charge against Southern troops. “We struck the Confederate infantry as a wave strikes a stately ship,” one survivor recalled. “The ship is staggered, maybe thrown on her beam ends, but the wave is dashed into spray, and the ship sails on as before.” Union surgeons later found thirteen bullets in the body of the major who had led the Northern charge.

  Even with rifles, infantry had to be massed, because the new weapons took as long to load as the old ones. “It doesn’t take any great reasoning to figure out why these guys were still fighting shoulder to shoulder,” Stacy Allen observes. “The individual soldier had great accuracy, but he had limited firepower. At best he’s getting off one to two rounds a minute. In time, repeating weapons would change all that, but they didn’t play much role in the Civil War.”

  So huge numbers of men fought side by side. And if they were to act in unison—bearing in mind that, in the absence of radios and telephones, officers had to rely on orders carried by messenger or signals conveyed by drums and trumpets and flags—there was no alternative to having soldiers grouped in great, vulnerable mass formations.

  At Shiloh, inevitably, the result was chaos, a toxic mix of panic and inexperience. The air was thick with the roar of cannons and the moans of wounded men and the shrieks of mangled horses. The uneven terrain disoriented the men, and the woods and bushes and low-hanging clouds of gun smoke obscured their view. Unsure whether nearby fire came from friend or foe, both sides fought in a frenzy of fear and confusion. “This was the first great modern battle,” Shelby Foote wrote. “It was Wilson’s Creek and Manassas rolled together, quadrupled, and compressed into an area smaller than either . . . a cauldron of pure hell.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE HORNETS’ NEST

  Desperate for a place to join the battle, Powell found the Hornets’ Nest. (The name, coined by the Confederates, referred to the fierceness of the gunfire.) Today one of the Civil War’s most resonant place names, the Hornets’ Nest was a nondescript patch of woodland, a tangle of trees and underbrush that ran half a mile along a rutted dirt road. The road separated the Hornets’ Nest on one side from a large pasture called Duncan Field on the other. At the Hornets’ Nest, 6,200 Northern troops tried to stem the Confederate attack. General William Wallace commanded most of the Union forces fronting Duncan Field, and Powell and his battery joined the fighting.

  Southern troops made at least seven assaults on the Hornets’ Nest during the course of the day’s fighting. A total of some ten thousand Confederates rushed the Union lines, though never all at the same time. On both sides, planning quickly gave way to mayhem. Blinded by smoke and struggling through woods and thick brush, soldiers scarcely knew what was happening around them. “For God’s sake cease firing,” Colonel James Fagan of the First Arkansas sent word to a fellow Confederate officer when he finally realized that “we were killing his men and he was killing ours.”

  The horrors of the Hornets’ Nest lay almost beyond description. After two Confederate attacks had been beaten back, Colonel Henry Allen of the Fourth Louisiana exhorted his men to uphold the reputation of their state and attack again. The Confederate troops charged into another hail of fire. Allen took a bullet in the face, but lived. The Southern troops began to fall back, and Confederate Major General Braxton Bragg sent a man to take the Fourth Louisiana’s regimental flag and carry it forward. To carry the colors was a tremendous honor and a terrible risk, for the flag drew heavy fire. Allen saw Bragg’s man and rode up to him, a bullet hole in each cheek and blood gushing out of his mouth. “If any man but my color bearer carries these colors,” Allen declared, “I am the man.” Then he turned to his troops. “Here boys, is as good a place as any on this battlefield to meet death!”

  The Confederates charged again and were repelled again. Allen told Bragg that the Union position was too strong to carry from the front; they would have to make a flank attack. Bragg, bad-tempered and autocratic, curtly rejected the advice. The dismissal was characteristic. “When he has formed his own opinion of what he proposed to do,” observed Bragg’s colleague General Simon Bolivar Buckner, “no advice of all his officers put together can shake him; but when he meets the unexpected, it overwhelms him because he has not been able to foresee, and then he will lean upon the advice of a drummer boy.”

  “Colonel Allen,” Bragg snapped, “I want no faltering now.” The Confederates charged yet again. Fifty feet from the Union lines, one of the men of the Fourth Louisiana had half his head shot off by a cannonball. While his stunned companions looked on, he staggered on for a step or two. As the barrage continued, the Southern troops fell back again.

  Survivors from both North and South would remember scenes from the Hornets’ Nest as long as they lived, with a kind of flashbulb vividness. “I am lying so close to Capt. Bob Littler that I could touch him by putting out my hand,” a soldier from Iowa recalled, “when a shell bursts directly in our front and a jagged piece of iron tears his arm so nearly off that it hangs by a slender bit of flesh and muscle as he jumps to his feet, and crazy with the shock and pain, shouts, ‘Here, boys! Here!’ and drops to the ground insensible.” An awestruck Confederate soldier searched for an analogy to convey the scale of the bloodshed. “Men fell around us,” he wrote, “as leaves from the trees.” The roar of the guns grew so loud, one Union soldier noted, that a rabbit, trembling with fear, rushed out of the brush and snuggled up to him.

  Powell fought in the Hornets’ Nest through the morning and into the late afternoon. Hour after hour, against assault after assault, Battery F, under Powell’s command, carried out its complex choreography. With five cannons to tend (a sixth had been lost earlier in the day), each man had a precise role—delivering the round, inserting it, ramming it home, aiming, firing, swabbing out the cannon barrel with a sponge mounted on a pole—while the enemy’s shot and shell poured down. At about four o’clock, Powell raised his right arm yet again to give the signal to fire. A minié ball plowed into his wrist and careened toward his elbow. Powell’s brother Walter, serving with him, ran over to examine the wound. (It was Walter who would eventually emerge from the war half crazed and join Powell on the Colorado.) Powe
ll slumped against a tree, losing blood but not yet in tremendous pain. General Wallace appeared and took note of Powell’s injury. Wallace, a big man, lifted Powell onto a horse and ordered him and a sergeant to get to a doctor.*

  Riding with a mangled arm through the battle zone, Powell managed to make it to the boat landing on the Tennessee River. (“Certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands, of shots were fired at us,” he wrote later.) Someone helped him onto a steamboat for the short trip to Savannah, Tennessee, where the town hall had been converted into a hospital. A wounded soldier on the steamer Continental described one such trip. “The scene upon the boat was heart-rending—men wounded and mangled in every conceivable way. The dead and dying lying in masses, some with arms, legs, and even their jaws shot off, bleeding to death, and no one to wait upon them or dress their wounds—no surgeon to attend us.”

  As Emma Powell would later tell it, she happened to be on hand at the boat landing in Savannah when two soldiers came walking down the gangplank carrying her husband on a stretcher. “Now, now,” Powell whispered to her, “everything is going to be all right.”

  • • •

  Some men were overwhelmed by what they saw at Shiloh. Five thousand soldiers—fifteen thousand by some accounts—fled the battlefield in terror. Union cavalrymen rode among the Union deserters, sabers drawn, threatening to cut the heads off anyone who refused to fight. Even so, deserters fled to the banks of the Tennessee, as far as they could get from the shooting, and hid beneath the bluffs. “Most of them would have been shot where they lay, without resistance,” General Grant observed with dismay, “before they would have taken muskets and marched to the front.”

  Punctuating the scenes of heroism and cowardice were surreal vignettes that in other settings would have been almost comic. At one point, thirty or forty Union soldiers cowered behind a single thick tree, each holding the belt of the man in front while the officer supposedly in charge ran back and forth in panic. One Confederate soldier on a captured mule valiantly charged the enemy lines while his comrades cheered his bravery. Finally he wheeled around, yelling, “It aren’t me, boys. It’s this blarsted mule. Whoa! Whoa!”

  Most scenes were unadulterated horror. One Northern soldier saw a Southerner fleeing on all fours when “a cannonball struck him, tearing him in pieces, and scattering his limbs in different directions.” Another found himself haunted by the sight of a dead man “leaning back against a tree as if asleep, but his intestines were all over his legs.” In many places, the underbrush had caught fire, and wounded men, unable to flee, cried in anguish from within the flames.

  Powell had been wounded near the end of the first day’s fighting. By day’s end, the Union forces had fallen back two miles. The South had won “a complete victory,” the Confederate commander telegraphed Jefferson Davis, and all that remained for the next day was a bit of mopping-up. Darkness put a halt to the fighting, but the night of April 6 was in its way as grotesque as the day had been. At this early point in the war, there was no real system for carrying the wounded from the field, and men too badly hurt to move lay where they had fallen. Tens of thousands of weary soldiers tried to ignore the moans of dying men and the thunder of shells from the Union gunboats and get some sleep. (The shelling, which continued every fifteen minutes through the night, was intended to harass the Confederates, but it tormented both sides.) At ten o’clock, it began to rain; by midnight, the drizzle had become a downpour, with cold, swirling winds and frequent thunderclaps. Corpses littered the battlefield, and lightning flashes revealed hogs feeding on the bodies.

  General Grant spent the night in the field with his troops rather than in a steamship bedroom. He tried to sleep under a large oak tree but was driven out by the rain. A log cabin nearby seemed a likely refuge, but surgeons had found it first and a stack of amputated arms and legs was already rising. “The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy’s fire,” Grant wrote later, “and I returned to my tree in the rain.”

  By this time, Buell’s troops had joined Grant’s. The second day’s fighting reversed the first day’s result. By midafternoon, the South had lost all the ground it had gained the day before. General Beauregard’s chief of staff noted with dismay that the Confederate troops were akin to “a lump of sugar thoroughly soaked with water, but yet preserving its original shape, though ready to dissolve.” Beauregard conceded the point, and the Southern forces turned back toward Corinth. The exhausted Union soldiers sank down in their own recaptured camp.

  The aftermath of battle, when the men could no longer rely on adrenaline to distract them, was perhaps worse than the battle itself had been. In one account after another, as if in a communal nightmare, the same phrase echoes: “I could have crossed the battlefield stepping only on dead bodies and never touched the ground.” Even the hardest men found themselves appalled. Sherman described “piles of dead soldiers’ mangled bodies . . . without heads and legs” and noted that “the scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.” The landscape itself seemed wounded. “Scarcely a tree or bush had escaped the musket balls,” one soldier observed. “. . . Trees had been shivered into splinters, while the ground was covered with brush and downed timber. In many places could be seen where the huge shells from the gunboats had ploughed great pits in the ground.”

  It fell to the victorious Union side to bury the dead. Over a thousand men were assigned to the ghastly work, slinging dead friends on wagons or dragging them with ropes and then flinging them into long, open pits. (Soldiers did not yet wear dogtags, and many of the bodies were unidentified.) In one trench, the dead lay seven men deep. The work was rushed, to get it over with as quickly as possible and to avoid an epidemic, but even so it took nearly a week. Rain poured down and washed the dirt away, exposing graves that had not been dug deep enough. “Skulls and toes are sticking from beneath the clay all around,” one horrified soldier wrote, “and the heavy wagons crush the bodies turning up the bodies of the buried, making this one vast Golgotha.”

  Even days afterward, there was no escape. One soldier fled into the woods in search of refuge. “A tramp of four or five miles would not take one out of the silent and polluted woods, the rotting debris of an army, or the all-pervading stench of decay,” he wrote. Instead, he found a board nailed to a tree and inscribed “137 DeD rEBeLs BuriED heRE.” Looking down, he saw a piece of skull covered with hair and, not far away, a skeleton hand protruding from the ground. A bit of gray uniform showed at the wrist.

  The battle, though apparently a stalemate, was in fact a crucial lost opportunity for the South and a strategic victory for the North. Having come close to routing the Northern troops, the Southerners found themselves forced to retreat. But Shiloh had a broader significance. For the nation as a whole, and for tens of thousands of farm boys and factory workers and office clerks, the fighting at Shiloh marked the end of innocence. Before that battle, in the spring of 1862, novice soldiers had fretted that the war might end before they had had a chance to join in. Two days of slaughter on the banks of the Tennessee River put an end to all such talk.

  Some soldiers chose not to speak of the battle at all, in the belief that only an eyewitness could grasp what had gone on, while others struggled to find words for events that were beyond description. “There’s been a lot written about the gallant charges and the flags fluttering and all that kind of stuff,” says Stacy Allen, the Shiloh historian, “but there is an unwritten war, and the unwritten war is the most terrible thing imaginable, and the most severe thing imaginable, and the most tragic thing imaginable.”

  Shiloh opened the nation’s eyes and forced it to confront sights it had never imagined. At the time the largest battle ever fought on American soil, Shiloh was not a duel writ large but a collision of two immense, relentless, man-devouring machines. In two spring days, some twenty thousand men were killed, wounded, or reported missing. Nothing on that scale had ever been seen on the American continent.

  There was worse to come. The Civil War was unf
athomably bloody. With a death toll of well over half a million, it remains America’s deadliest war by far, claiming more American lives than World War I, World War II, and Korea combined. The figures are startling enough when considered as raw numbers; they loom even larger when we remember how small the population of the United States was in the 1860s. If a war today claimed 2 percent of the population, as did the Civil War, well over five million Americans would lie dead.

  Powell’s wound did not kill him, though it came close. But his ordeal had only begun. Soldiers who had nerved themselves to stand their ground while men fell all around them quailed when they ventured too near a hospital tent. A surgeon from one’s own side was as feared as an enemy’s cannon. “The sorriest sights . . . are in those dreadful field hospitals,” one Southern officer wrote, for the ear was assailed with “the screams and groans of the poor fellows undergoing amputation” and the eye was confronted with “the sight of arms and legs surrounding these places [and] . . . thrown into great piles.”

  Surgeons were quick to amputate; three out of four operations in the Civil War were amputations. It is not by chance that nearly every Civil War memoir contains a reference to the grim stacks of arms and legs. With the number of wounded men at a battle like Shiloh surpassing fifteen thousand, and with only a comparative handful of surgeons to tend to them all, assembly-line treatment was inevitable. A battlefield surgeon stayed on his feet as long as he could keep his eyes open, perhaps twenty-four hours at a stretch, operating on one maimed man after another. A surgeon could remove a limb in six minutes.

  Even so, there were not enough surgeons. The man who amputated Powell’s arm, William H. Medcalfe, had been a druggist before the war, and such cases were common. Medcalfe was in over his head, but almost no one was prepared for the demands of wartime surgery. Few civilian surgeons had much experience with gunshot wounds, and even those few were daunted by the horrendous injuries inflicted by the newfangled minié balls.