Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  The Federals were not ready, but they were not exactly caught asleep in their tents, either. They had sent patrols forward at dawn, and these collided with the Confederate skirmishers in the woodland twilight and formed tough knots of resistance. They were pushed back as Hardee’s main line came up, but they had given the alarm, and battle lines were formed in front of the camps. The real trouble was that of the six divisions in Grant’s army, only two were up in front when the fighting began, and nobody had told them to entrench. Sherman had his division around Shiloh Church with his right touching the Owl Creek Valley, and off to his left, somewhat out of touch with him, was a new division under Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss, a former militia colonel who was about to display a talent for determined fighting. Farther back were three more divisions—McClernand’s, which had learned its trade at Fort Donelson; another set of Donelson veterans belonging to C. F. Smith, who was absent with an infected leg and had turned his command over to W. H. L. Wallace, an Illinois lawyer who had served in the Mexican War; and three brigades led by still another Illinois lawyer-politician, Brigadier General Stephen A. Hurlbut, South Carolina born, a friend of Abraham Lincoln. Several miles north of these, posted downstream as a sort of flank guard, was the division of the future novelist, Lew Wallace, who never did manage to get his men into action this day. Of the six divisional commanders only Sherman was a West Pointer.

  So the Federal front was sketchy, and it remained so even when the troops in the rear were moved forward, because as they moved up the men in front were being pushed back, and there never was a really connected front. There were many battles but no one line of battle; Shiloh was a grab bag full of separate combats in which divisions, brigades, and even regiments fought on their own, each one joined by fragments of other commands that had fallen apart in the shock of action, most of them fighting with their flanks in the air, knowing nothing of any battle except the fragment which possessed them—great waves of sound beating on them, smoke streaking the fields and making blinding clouds under the trees, advance and retreat taking place sometimes because someone had ordered it and sometimes on the impulse of the untaught soldiers who were doing the fighting.

  On the Confederate side there was equal confusion. Bragg’s second line advanced through Hardee’s first line so that the elements of the two commands were completely intermingled, with the men of Polk and Breckinridge coming up to infiltrate the disordered lines. Command arrangements dissolved entirely, and at last the corps commanders made spur-of-the-moment plans: Bragg would take the right, Polk the center, and Hardee the left, with Breckinridge operating wherever he seemed to be needed. Troop movements were utterly disordered. One soldier wrote after the battle that “we fooled around for 5 or 6 hours before we got to see a Yankee, although the battle was raging not more than half a mile from us.” He added that when his regiment at last did get into action “I tell you they made us fight a while before they let us quit.”8

  This was happening, remember, to men who (save for the Donelson veterans in Grant’s army, and a scattering of Polk’s men who had been at Belmont) had never fought before and who were most inadequately trained for fighting, and whose company and regimental officers were in no better case than themselves. Many of them, naturally, cut and ran for it without delay. Part of Sherman’s division simply disappeared, and by noon there were thousands of Union fugitives glued to the ground on the river bank at Pittsburg Landing, men so overwhelmed by terror that no conceivable effort could get them back into action: Grant estimated later that at no time during the day were more than 25,000 Federals actually fighting. Many Confederates were beguiled by the fact that the camps they captured had abundant food lying ready to hand, the breakfasts which the Yankees had not had time to eat; hungry soldiers paused to fill their bellies and drifted out of any man’s control. A nephew of Varina Davis, an officer in a Mississippi regiment, told about finding a crowd of 300 men or more lounging about in the rear. These men explained that “we are all smashed,” although they had lost no more than three or four killed and two dozen wounded, and he wrote angrily: “These are the kind of troops of which you read gallant deeds and reckless conduct, they lose half a dozen, retire in time to save their haversacks and are puffed accordingly.”9

  Yet the stragglers and the incontinent foragers and the faint-hearts were, incredibly enough, in the minority. Sherman’s division broke, retreated, and reformed its fragments with McClernand’s men, but the records showed that it had 1900 casualties, which proves that it did a good deal of fighting. If many Confederates left the ranks to sack the Yankee camps, more of them stopped only long enough to pick up modern muskets to replace their own antiquated weapons; the rear was disorder raised to the nth power, but on the firing line everything was strictly business, and men who were frightened almost out of their wits managed to keep on fighting. Wholly characteristic was the breathless comment in one Confederate’s letter: “It was an awful thing to hear no intermission in firing and hear the clatter of small arms and the whizing minny balls and rifle shot and the sing of grape shot the hum of canon balls and the roaring of the bomb shell and explosion of the same seaming to be a thousand every minute … O God forever keep me out of such another fight. I was not scared I was just in danger.”10

  All morning the Federals were pushed back. Johnston’s plan was working … except that there was one hard core of Federal resistance, Prentiss’s men and some of W. H. L. Wallace’s, who took their stand at last in an old country lane that ran along the crest of an almost imperceptible little rise in the ground, with briar patches and underbrush all along the front: the famous “sunken road” of postwar memories, although in actual fact it was not sunken at all and was held, apparently, just because it was a handy place to form a line and because the men who formed the line did not want to go back any farther. Grant rode up once and told Prentiss to hold the line at all hazards, and, after Grant left, the lawyer-soldier and his men obeyed orders literally. This place and the ground in front became known as the hornets’ nest; the men beat off repeated Confederate assaults, and hugged the earth grimly when Rebel artillerists put many guns in line and pounded the lane and the trees around it and everything to the sides and in the rear … and the Federals stayed and shot the next Confederate attack to bits, and noon passed and the afternoon grew long and the sun dipped down toward the smoky skyline, and but for the stand that was made here General Johnston might have driven Grant’s army into the river or into Owl Creek swamp or straight into perdition itself and the victory he wanted so desperately would have been won.

  Johnston himself had been up in front all day, riding from this place to that, keeping the attack moving; and at last he came up near a peach orchard, a little to the east of the hornets’ nest, and tried to get a new assault organized. The air was full of bullets, and one bullet ripped away the sole of one of his boots: he waggled his foot, laughed, told an aide that this had come pretty close but that he was unhurt; then a bullet struck him in the leg, cutting an artery, and he reeled in the saddle, growing faint from loss of blood before he knew that he had been hit. He was laid on the ground, somebody went to find a surgeon, nobody thought of applying a tourniquet … and then, apparently in no pain, speaking no word, he looked up at the sky and died.11

  Hope of victory died with him: or, to be more exact, died a little before he died. The stand at the hornets’ nest had gained Grant just the respite he had to have. From the beginning, Johnston’s only hope had been that he could overwhelm the Federal Army in one shattering assault, and he had not quite made it. Grant’s army had been mangled, it had been driven back almost to the edge of the Tennessee, much of it had been put entirely out of action … but the hornets’ nest had held firm, hour after hour, and as the afternoon passed the Confederacy’s dazzling opportunity grew narrower and narrower and at last vanished altogether. Far to the rear, on high ground commanding the steamboat landing, Grant put together an immense rank of artillery, with a reorganized infantry line beh
ind it and on the flank. Farther back, Lew Wallace at last overcame the confusion that had grown out of garbled orders and unfamiliar roads and got his division of 8000 men on the road to the Federal right; they would be on hand shortly after dark, and when they arrived Grant would have the advantage in numbers. Most important of all, Nelson’s division of Buell’s army had arrived—at last—and the steamboats were bringing his advance guard across the Tennessee, the men kicking the skulking fugitives at the landing as they tramped up to take their place in the new battle line. When Johnston died the Confederacy assuredly lost a soldier it desperately needed, but it had already lost its chance to win the battle of Shiloh.

  … except, perhaps, for the intangible that cannot be accurately appraised. Just possibly, this man’s capacity for firing the spirits of tired soldiers might have been enough to send one final, triumphant assault through the shouting twilight, capturing guns, breaking the last infantry line, destroying the heads of the reinforcing columns and achieving the impossible in the smoky darkness above the deep river. Probably it would not have happened so, but the one man who might conceivably have made it happen was dead.12

  The hornets’ nest was taken at last. All the rest of the Federals had retreated, and the men who had saved Grant’s army were cut off, surrounded and made helpless. By five o’clock or thereabouts General Prentiss surrendered, giving the Confederates 2200 prisoners and an empty country lane. It took time to get his men off to the rear and to reorganize the Southern battle line, and when these things had been done it was too late to fight any more that day. Grant’s guns were in action, the new line had been formed, and in the river Federal gunboats were throwing huge shells into the ravines and gullies where the exhausted Confederates were sorting themselves out. Sensibly enough, Beauregard (who had succeeded to the command when Johnston died) pulled his leading units back a few rods and ordered the troops to make the best bivouac they could for the night.

  It was a dreadful night. Toward midnight there was a hard thunderstorm, with a downpour to soak the soldiers who slept among so many dead and wounded. Sudden flashes of lightning illuminated hideous scenes—dead men everywhere, pools and creeks given a ghastly tint by the blood of wounded men who had crawled down to drink and had died with their faces in the water, brambly fields carpeted with torn bodies, helpless wounded men lying in the downpour chanting weak calls for help: the memory of it leading one Confederate to write: “O it was too shocking too horrible. God Grant that I may never be the partaker in such scenes again … when released from this I shall ever be an advocate of peace.”13

  But things are seldom all of one pattern. There were men who ate well and slept well that night. After all, the Federal camps were there to be looted, and many of the tired Confederates feasted and told one another that there would be nothing to do tomorrow but bury the dead and finish raking in the Yankee supplies; no doubt the enemy had all gone across the river. A Tennessee soldier recalled that “our mess had that night all the tea, coffee, sugar, cheese, hardtack and bacon they could want,” and remembered that wine and liquor were found among the surgeons’ stores; in the morning one stout foot soldier tried to go into battle with a huge cheese impaled on his bayonet. Some men became so interested in the spoils that they forgot about the unfinished battle, and one Confederate officer wrote bitterly that if the high command had had the sense to burn all of the captured stores that night the army might have won the fight next day. All through the Federal camps, he said, Confederate soldiers were picking up valuables, and by midnight “half of our army was straggling back to Corinth loaded down with belts, sashes, swords, officers’ uniforms, Yankee letters, daguerreotypes of Yankee sweethearts, likenesses of Grant, Buell, Smith, Prentiss, McClellan, Lincoln, etc., some on Yankee mules and horses, some on foot, some on the ground prostrate with Cincinnati whiskey.” General Bragg told his wife that Shiloh was lost because of lack of discipline and lack of good officers, concluding savagely: “Universal suffrage, furloughs & whiskey have ruined us.”14

  That looting, straggling, and lack of discipline harmed the army is beyond question, but the plain fact is that regardless of these things the army had had it. That it had done as much as it had done was one of the marvels of the war; to do anything more was wholly out of the question. Grant’s army had been shaken to its shoetops but it had never quite been broken; Grant himself had never had any notion of retreating, even when things were at their worst; Lew Wallace’s division reached him not long after dark, and during the night 20,000 of Buell’s soldiers came across the river—and when the morning of April 7 came there was nothing Beauregard could do but get his men back to Corinth as best he could.

  He did not do this at once. The fighting began all over again soon after sunrise, and for most of the morning it was a hard, stubborn battle, the Federals attacking now, the Confederates disputing every inch of the ground. Not until after noon did Beauregard accept the inevitable and order a retreat, and when his army withdrew the Federals made no more than a gesture of pursuit. Grant’s army had been fought out. Buell’s troops were fresh enough, but Buell was only partly under Grant’s orders, the relationship between the two generals was exceedingly delicate, and each man apparently felt that it would be just as well to let the soldiers catch their breath and think about going after this Confederate Army at some later date.

  It is clear enough now that a hard, vigorous pursuit might have destroyed Beauregard’s army. But the controlling fact undoubtedly was that this battle had brought utter exhaustion to the victor as well as to the defeated. The Unionists had lost upwards of 13,000 men, the Confederates more than 10,000, and the figures call for a little reflection. The armies that met on April 6 were larger than the armies that met at Bull Run, but—it can stand one more repetition—they were hardly in the slightest degree better trained or organized. They had fought three times as long as the Bull Run armies had fought, and had suffered approximately five times the losses, and although there had been heavy straggling on both sides there had been no actual rout.15 If in the end they drifted apart, it is no wonder. In all American history, no more amazing battle was ever fought than this one.

  Nor have many battles been more decisive, in their effect on the course of a war. Shiloh represented a supreme effort on the part of the Confederacy to turn the tables, to recoup what had been lost along the Tennessee-Kentucky line, to win a new chance to wage war west of the Appalachians on an equal footing. It failed. After this, the Southern nation could do no more than fight an uphill fight to save part of the Mississippi Valley—the great valley of American empire without which the war could not be won.

  4: Threat to New Orleans

  When General Beauregard pulled his men away from Shiloh Church and took them stumbling back toward Corinth, on the afternoon of April 7, a door which the Confederacy for its life’s sake had to keep open began to swing shut. The hinge was Pittsburg Landing, where more than 20,000 Americans had been shot, where Albert Sidney Johnston looked at the sky and died; and the final, echoing slam of the door’s closing sounded just a few hours later, 110 miles to the northwest, when other Confederates surrendered their stronghold at Island Number Ten and gave the Federal invader, once and for all, the means to control the middle Mississippi River.

  Island Number Ten no longer exists. Long ago the Mississippi rolled over it, washed part of it away, joined what was left to the Missouri shore and cut a new channel elsewhere; as if when the guns were stilled the place was no longer worth preserving. In 1862 the island was a two-and-one-half-mile-long mud patch lying in a great loop of the river, rimmed with strong ramparts and heavy guns, so menacing that even Flag Officer Andrew Foote was afraid of it. It blocked the river. The island and the army together kept the Confederate west alive. But the army was beaten and the strong point was taken, and on the day these things happened the Confederate west began to die. The fall of Island Number Ten was the essential postscript to Shiloh.

  Running south from Columbus, Kentucky, where a Confed
erate Gibraltar had been abandoned because of the loss of the forts on the Tennessee and the Cumberland, the Mississippi in 1862 crossed the Tennessee-Kentucky line, turned sharply to the west, and then doubled back in the beginning of a huge S-curve, flowing due north for five or six miles, going west once more, and then flowing south toward Memphis and the Gulf. Island Number Ten lay at the bottom of the first loop; at the top of the next loop, Madrid Bend, on the Missouri shore, was the town of New Madrid, and fifteen miles downstream, on the Tennessee side, was the unremarkable town of Tiptonville. The country all about was low and marshy, half-drowned in the spring of 1862 by high water in the big river. To support Island Number Ten the Confederates had two routes: they could go up the river by steamer, or they could go by land along the river bank from Tiptonville. No other approach was feasible. The long peninsula that ran north from Tiptonville to Madrid Bend, with the bristling island as an anchor on its eastern side, was almost completely isolated by a chain of swamps and ponds at its base. To hold the river route the Confederates had to hold New Madrid and the Missouri shore to the south of it; to keep the land route open they had to hold Tiptonville; and to do all of this they had upwards of 7000 soldiers, a large number of heavy guns, and a little flotilla of wooden gunboats which were not very formidable. Shortly after the fall of Fort Donelson, Halleck sent an amphibious expedition down to take the river away from them.