Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  The bruised armies spent an uneasy night on the field, the Federals who had fought McCulloch came up, and in the morning Curtis ordered a counterattack toward Cross Timber Hollow. Van Dorn, whose men were just about out of ammunition, discovered that through some misunderstanding his wagon master had sent the ammunition train off fifteen miles to the east. He ordered a retreat, part of his line broke under Federal pressure, and before noon the Confederates were swarming away from the field in disorder, pursued with only moderate diligence by an exhausted Union Army which had narrowly escaped destruction. Each army had lost some 1300 men in killed, wounded, and missing: Curtis still held the road to Missouri, to the railhead and to safety; Van Dorn’s army would need to be reorganized before it could be used again, and it was no longer possible for its general to contemplate an invasion of Missouri.7

  It had been a near thing. Curtis wrote that during the battle, while his men were wrestling for the ground around Elkhorn Tavern, time had seemed to stand still—“I watched the minute hand of my watch a thousand times”—and he confessed that when the battle ended his army was just about out of provisions and low on ammunition; if the final Union counterattack had not cleared the Telegraph Road, the army would have been almost helpless. But if the victory had been won by a painfully narrow margin, it was decisive when it came. Missouri would be Federal territory for the rest of the war, subject to alarms and excursions but not seriously contended for, and Johnston’s plan for a counteroffensive astride the Mississippi would have to be modified. Few Federal officers ever averted more trouble than Curtis did when he spun his army around and won his fight at Pea Ridge.

  The man had no eye for glory. When he looked out over the field where so much had been won he could see only the price that had been paid, by his own men and by his enemies. A few days after the battle he spoke his mind in a letter to his brother, writing about “the bold rocky mountain … under whose shadow so many fell,” and he brooded thoughtfully: “The scene is silent and sad. The vulture and the wolf now have the dominion, and the dead friends and foes sleep in the same lonely graves.”8 Every general moved to victory across long rows of graves in the trampled earth. Curtis was one who had to look back afterward and think about how those graves had been filled.

  So Albert Sidney Johnston had lost the first round, far away in the Ozark foothills. His great counteroffensive could not be won by a swift, dazzling thrust at the Federal rear; whatever was done would have to be done in the lonely fields and thickets around Shiloh Church. But it was only the first round that had been lost. Johnston’s big opportunity remained, narrowing day by day but still open. The Federal move up the Tennessee was marking time, losing time, permitting the armies of Grant and Buell to remain separated while the Confederates they had to beat worked desperately to strike them before they were ready; and as the month of March ended Johnston had in fact performed a minor miracle. He had created an army, which had come to believe in itself. It lacked a great many things but somehow it had acquired an immense capacity to fight, and General Johnston proposed to use it without further delay.

  Late in the month he made formal announcement of his new organization—three army corps, somewhat undersized but nevertheless duly organized, led by Polk, Hardee, and Bragg, with a small reserve corps under an impressive new officer who only a few months earlier had resigned from the United States Senate, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. In addition to leading one corps Bragg was acting as chief of staff, and he was a skilled and relentless disciplinarian. He complained that the Army was still “an heterogeneous mass” containing “more enthusiasm than discipline, more capacity than knowledge and more valor than instruction,” and he noted distressing shortcomings in equipment: in most regiments some men had regular percussion rifles, others had smooth-bore flintlocks and some were armed with nothing better than country shotguns. Johnston had tried to increase the number of men in combat assignments by hiring slaves from local planters to serve as cooks, teamsters and so on, but he had had little luck, and he mused that the ways of prosperous civilians in wartime are strange: “These people have given their sons freely, but it is folly to talk to them about a Negro or a mule.” He remarked that one additional brigade might make the difference between victory and defeat, and he wondered what the planters thought their precious slaves would be worth if his army should be beaten.9 Yet even though the deficiencies in supply and training were obvious, an enormous amount of work had been done. Jefferson Davis sent an encouraging message: “You have done wonderfully well, and now I breathe easier.” And from General Lee came the appreciative comment of a fellow professional:

  “No one has sympathized with you in the troubles with which you are surrounded more sincerely than myself. I have watched your every movement, and know the difficulties with which you have had to contend.… I need not urge you, when your army is united, to deal a blow at the enemy in your front, if possible before his rear gets up from Nashville. You have him divided, keep him so if you can.”10

  General Johnston did not need to be urged. His army was not really in proper shape, and if he could wait another ten days he would get strong reinforcements from beyond the Mississippi—he had ordered Van Dorn to come to Tennessee with all speed, the march was long and the roads were bad, and the move was taking a good deal of time—but 40,000 men could do now what 60,000 men could not do a fortnight from now, and the time of preparation was over. Buell’s men would join Grant’s by the end of the first week in April, at the latest … and, on the night of April 2, Johnston ordered plans drawn up for an immediate advance against Grant’s army at Pittsburg Landing.

  3: Pittsburg Landing

  Almost everything that could go wrong went wrong when Johnston’s army marched from Corinth to Pittsburg Landing. The soldiers did not know how to make a cross-country hike and most of their officers did not know how to direct them. The orders governing the march were imperfectly drafted and poorly executed, and General Johnston quickly learned what General McDowell had learned on the way to Bull Run—that the one thing an untrained army cannot possibly do is to move from here to there efficiently. The soldiers were in good spirits, and whenever they saw the commanding general ride by they cheered loudly, but they spent most of their time stumbling into bewildering traffic jams and waiting for somebody to untangle them, and in the end it took them three days to go twenty miles. During this time they ate the last of the five-days’ rations they had in their haversacks. General Beauregard was so discouraged that at last he wanted to cancel the entire movement, go back to base, and start over again.

  General Beauregard was the Army’s second-in-command. He suffered from ill health; also, from a subtler ailment which impelled him to make grandiose plans for an army which needed exceedingly simple plans. When he drew up the order of attack for Johnston’s signature, he behaved as if these troops were veterans, used to intricate movement and the shock of battle, and he asked them to do more than they could do. They were to leave Corinth on April 3, moving by two roads which converged near a farmhouse a few miles short of the Federal position. Cavalry had learned that Grant’s men were camped in a loose grouping three miles wide, occupying the high ground inland from Pittsburg Landing, facing generally toward the west, with the swampy lowland of Owl Creek on the north and the equally swampy valley of Lick Creek on the south. Hardee’s corps, in the lead, was ordered to march for sixteen or seventeen miles and bivouac for the night a mile or two away from the Federal outposts. Before dawn on April 4 this corps would form line of battle, covering the whole Federal front. Half a mile behind it Bragg’s corps would form a similar line, with Polk’s corps and Breckinridge’s reserves forming behind Bragg. Then the army would attack, hoping to break the Federal left and drive the whole Federal Army away from the Tennessee River and into the Owl Creek bottomlands, where it could be destroyed.

  For a professional army that could move smartly and hold its formation, the scheme might have been sound enough, but for this army it was just too much
. Hardly a handful of Johnston’s 40,000 had ever seen a battle or made an ordered march to a battlefield, and the chance that they could stick to this tight schedule was remote; it was even less likely that the fragile corps organizations, which had existed for less than a week, could hold together once those long battle lines moved in through woods and ravines on each other’s heels. Johnston seems to have supposed that the three corps would attack side by side, which would have been much simpler. Apparently he and Beauregard misunderstood each other; with a slight excess of courtliness, Johnston was giving Beauregard a good deal of scope in his second-in-command function. In any case, as issued the orders embodied Beauregard’s ideas, and much confusion attended their execution.1

  Getting out of Corinth was bad enough. Hardee’s corps, which was to move first, got tangled up in the streets with other troops and with wagon trains and was unable to leave town until the afternoon of April 3; instead of reaching its destination that night it had to camp along the road, getting to the designated point long after daybreak on April 4. Bragg’s corps fell far behind, its road blocked by units that were supposed to follow it, one entire division temporarily lost; Johnston himself had to ride back, dig the missing unit out of Bishop Polk’s corps, into which it had strayed, and get the road cleared. On the night of April 4 there was a heavy rain—by this time the attack had been postponed for twenty-four hours—and not until late in the afternoon of April 5 was the army at last in the spot it was supposed to have reached thirty-six hours earlier. The battle lines were drawn, and at dusk Johnston and his corps commanders had an informal conference.

  To General Beauregard it was clear that the opportunity had passed. The whole battle plan rested on the belief that the army would make a quick march and take the Yankees by surprise. The march had been unconscionably slow, and it had been so noisy that a surprise seemed out of the question. After the rain the men had blithely fired their muskets to see whether the powder charges had been dampened, so that there had been a constant pop-pop of small arms fire through the late afternoon and early evening. There had been much cheering and yelling: loud cheers for General Johnston, wild shouts when a startled deer jumped out of a thicket and bounded along the line of troops; enough noise, altogether, to arouse the most unobservant foes. Rations were almost exhausted, much food having been thrown away by boys who felt themselves overloaded. In addition, Buell surely must have arrived by now. The Federals would be on the alert, and the attack ought to be canceled.

  Johnston would not hear of it. If rations were low, the Federal camp contained abundant supplies which victorious Confederates could eat. The cavalry said that Buell had not yet appeared. From President Davis there had just come a telegram: “I hope you will be able to close with the enemy before his two columns unite. I anticipate a victory.” What President Davis anticipated General Johnston would try to give him. He remarked, “I would fight them if they were a million,” and he ended the conference by saying, “Gentlemen, we shall attack at daylight tomorrow.” Later that evening he calmly told an aide, “I have ordered a battle for daylight tomorrow, and I intend to hammer ’em!” Many things had gone wrong, but the men in the ranks were keyed up for a fight and so was the commanding general, and a fight there would be as soon as the sun came up on April 6.2

  By all logic Beauregard ought to have been right. Yet the astounding fact was that the Federals were woefully, incredibly unready. They were not entrenched (as Beauregard believed they surely must be) and they were not even arranged in line of battle; they were simply in camp, waiting for orders from headquarters, waiting for Buell, waiting for the time when they could march down to Corinth and finish the job that had been begun at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson.

  Many things had worked together to create this condition. Halleck’s repeated orders to delay the offensive had led Grant and his lieutenants to think of nothing except the restrictions which headquarters had imposed. Impatient to get on with the war, Grant was overlooking the possibility that his rival might get on with it ahead of him. (Those earlier battles unfortunately had led Grant to feel that Johnston’s army was discouraged and ready to quit: a point on which he was about to get a world of enlightenment.) Grant himself was still at Savannah, seven miles downstream, waiting for Buell, whose approach was extraordinarily slow. Buell’s army had begun leaving Nashville on March 15, impelled by no sense of urgency. It had waited for ten days, rebuilding a bridge—a twenty-four-hour job, if someone had been driving the Engineer Corps to hurry—and it was coming on as if it had all the time in the world. The Federals, in short, had got into a dangerous state of mind, in which it seemed to them that nothing would happen until they themselves made it happen.3

  In addition, the camp at Shiloh was under the immediate command of William T. Sherman, who had recovered all too well from an abject loss of nerve. During the previous fall, in Kentucky, he had considered Johnston’s army much more numerous, aggressive, and dangerous than it really was, and had worried himself into a nervous breakdown and removal from command. Regaining his poise, he had recently been restored to combat duty: and in this first week of April he probably was the last man in the army to take alarm because of enemy activity in his front. He flatly refused to believe that Johnston’s army was about to attack (six months earlier, because he did believe it, he had been published to the world as a lunatic) and when his patrols warned him that something ominous was building up, off beyond the tangled forest, he dismissed the warnings with contempt. At the very moment when Johnston was insisting that the attack would be delivered even if all of Lincoln’s Yankees were alarmed and ready, Sherman was assuring Grant that although there was a good deal of shooting along the picket lines “I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position.” Some of Sherman’s officers certainly knew better, but what they knew did not matter. Up to a certain point, in any army, the thoughts of the principal generals are the only thoughts that count.4

  Thus Sherman’s caution, which should have been awake but was sound asleep, ran across Beauregard’s, which should have been justified but was not; and the battle itself began on this characteristic note of conscientious confusion, which accurately reflected the state of the armies and of the divided nation that had raised the armies. These early battles of the Civil War were not like the ones that came later except in the pain and agony they inflicted. Not only were the officers and men who fought these battles untrained, doomed to make errors which would not be repeated once experience had been gained, the nation itself was in these battles colliding violently, at last, with the reality which it had so long refused to face. It had risked war gaily, had threatened war jauntily, had accepted it with a wild, half-hysterical sense of relief, and it had done all of these things simply because it had known nothing whatever about war. Now—at Shiloh, and at one or two other places—it was going to learn. Here was where (as the saying then went) it would see the elephant. No wonder there was something unreal about the genesis and development of such encounters. Anything else would have been a miracle.

  The first sounds of battle came to the Confederate Army like enchanted, beckoning notes of promise. April 5 was bright, clear, and springlike after the storm, and men in the 38th Tennessee, striding along in the woods where new leaves, half-opened, put moving shadows on the roadways, heard gunfire far ahead and “could hardly be restrained from rushing up to the fray.” Men looked at one another, laughed, cheered, and remarked that the fun was at last beginning. Fatherless rumors sped down the marching columns—the Yankees had been whipped and were taking to their boats, some of them had been cut off and were fleeing through the woods, this very column would presently go and round up these cowardly fugitives.5 … Battle was still nearly twenty-four hours away. These boys were hearing the racket that bothered Beauregard so much, the firing of innumerable muskets by soldiers who wanted to know whether these weapons, after a heavy rain, could in fact be fired at all. (A good deal of this came from within the Yankee lines, where equally innocent soldiers, e
qually soaked by the same storm, were making the same sort of test.)

  Give the innocents credit. When the reality came, next day, most of them went into it with the same enthusiasm and stayed in it as long as they were asked to stay. Whatever finally determined the outcome of the battle of Shiloh, the end did not come because either army took fright and ran away or got weary and dogged it. Johnston’s soldiers had all of the savage, frightening determination which the Belgian visitor had noted early in the winter; they were no more ready for battle than the Bull Run mobs had been, but when they struck the Federal line of battle they struck it, as Beauregard himself remarked, “like an Alpine avalanche,” curing U. S. Grant forever of his notion that the Confederate soldier’s heart was not in this fight. Long after the war, when he talked with friends in the Army of the Potomac about such grim fights as Gettysburg and the Wilderness, tough Sherman used to say: “So help me God, you boys never had a fiercer fight than we had there.”6

  Sunday, April 6, was clear and cool as the day before had been, and just at dawn there was a timeless quiet which reminded one young Confederate of the small-town Sabbath back home, so that he half-expected to hear church bells calling the faithful to worship. Johnston’s first line began to move as soon as the light came, and the general was just finishing breakfast when the first spatter of small-arms fire sounded along the front—real shooting, this time, not just the aimless firing of boys testing their powder charges. Various officers were urging him to go back to Corinth and begin all over again, but he swung into the saddle with the comment: “The battle has opened, gentlemen; it is too late to change our dispositions.” He rode to the front to take general charge of the assault, while Beauregard went to the rear to see that the support troops came up properly, and the great, shapeless army began to advance through the thickets for its first battle. Men in Breckinridge’s reserve corps were told to pile their knapsacks and leave squads to guard them, and men detailed for this noncombatant assignment objected to being kept out of the fight; one soldier offered to give all of his hardtack to any man who would let him have a place in the front line. The sporadic firing up ahead became heavier, solidified into long rolling volleys, expanded with the crash of artillery, and became a consuming, bewildering uproar that would go on without a break all day long.7