It was, of course, miraculous that a host of squabbling Southern generals finally brought their forty-thousand-man force undetected to within yards of Grant’s outnumbered army. Yet once they arrived, there was still no ironclad agreement concerning the method of assault. Nor was there any consensus on the best way to dislodge the Northerners—and there was little hope that a surprise attack might succeed. Indeed, just hours before the charge, a large contingent of jittery officers favored pulling back to Corinth, Mississippi, to regroup and form a defensive perimeter. Wild rumors were circulating that the armies of Grant and Buell had already united and were in fact entrenched and waiting at Shiloh. Only Albert Sidney Johnston’s adamant insistence that there should be no cancellation in plans of hitting Grant held the Southern army together.
In fact, the Confederates were a disparate group of separate forces nominally under the command of General Johnston, who in turn relied heavily on the advice of P. T. Beauregard in organizing four armies totaling around forty thousand men. Although on paper the four corps commanders—Generals Polk, Bragg, Hardee, and Breckinridge—took their orders from Johnston, most operated and were supplied independently. Even within moments of the first shooting they were rarely in direct communication with either Johnston or Beauregard—much less with each other. The Southern army was a microcosm of the loosely organized Confederacy itself, and so its commanders enjoyed no shared mechanism of how to capitalize on the initial astounding success.
Rather than outflank the Union line with two crushing pincers, the armies instead clumsily charged head-on against the Union right in three successive lines, reminiscent of Napoleon’s textbook columns or perhaps the old triplex Roman plan of legionary advance. When the exhausted and hungry men finally did overrun Sherman’s camps, they stopped to pillage and eat, again wasting critical minutes in which the retreating Northerners regained their composure and scurried to find new defensive positions. Johnston had performed brilliantly in collecting a massive army of forty thousand and marching them undetected to within a few thousand yards of the Union lines. But he was a less competent tactician. And his subordinates, especially Beauregard, lacked even his battle sense. In addition, Johnston’s troops were fundamentally ill-equipped, often without training, experience, or the uniformity of organization and cohesiveness of Grant’s army.
Sherman’s heroic efforts at resistance forced his enemies to commit thousands of men against his right wing. Yet the Confederates’ better hope was to focus on the opposite end of the battlefield against the weaker Union left, and therein cut off the entire army’s line of retreat to Pittsburg Landing. Consequently, most of the first day, Shiloh was characterized by gruesome but largely detached confrontations. Confederate corps quite independently battered down the Union line without any concentration of force to blow apart Grant’s army. The result was that the Southerners were mostly successful in dozens of isolated firefights, slowly cutting off pockets of Union resistance but losing too many men and too much time in the ordeal to achieve the desired general collapse.
Sherman soon had only half a division left. Yet he was determined to stay with his retreating men in hopes of slowing down the Confederate avalanche until Union reinforcements could craft a line of resistance. By 10:30 A.M. he finally reorganized what was left of his command at least a half mile to the rear of his original camp. He would stay there for the next four hours. Grant, who met him in midmorning, found that Sherman’s fragmented right wing could hold and retreat in order to form a perimeter around Pittsburg Landing.
By day’s end Sherman had linked up with the other surviving Union divisions in a horseshoe line of defense while Grant awaited the arrival of twenty-seven thousand reinforcements from generals Lew Wallace and Buell. Sherman would go on the offensive the next morning. For the rest of the battle he would play a key role in the Union’s remarkable reversal of fortune on April 7 and lead the limited Union pursuit of the defeated Confederates on the morning of the eighth—once again nearly to be shot down at the head of his troops by the furious and final rear guard of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Sherman’s remarkable conduct at Shiloh was well recorded by a number of his superiors—Grant especially—and it is described in detail in his own memoirs and letters. General Nelson, a division commander in Buell’s Army of the Ohio that entered the battle on the second day, and no friend of either Grant or Sherman, remarked, “If General Sherman had fallen, the army would have been captured or destroyed.” After collating eyewitness accounts of the battle, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck later confirmed to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, “It is the unanimous opinion here that Brig. Gen. W. T. Sherman saved the fortune of the day on the 6th instance, and contributed largely to the glorious victory on the 7th. He was in the thickest of the fight on both days.”
The usually taciturn Grant was just as complimentary, “I feel it a duty . . . to a gallant and able officer, Brig. Gen. W. T. Sherman, to make a special mention. He was not only with his command during the entire two-day action, but displayed judgement and skill in the management of his men. Although severely wounded in the hand the first day his place was never vacant.” Grant added in his memoirs that “a casualty to Sherman that would have taken him from the field that day would have been a sad one for the troops engaged at Shiloh. And how near we came to this!”
Just as William Tecumseh Sherman, alone of the great Union generals, fought at both the first and last battles of the Civil War—Bull Run and Bentonville—so too was he at the front in the very beginning and ending minutes of Shiloh, crisscrossing the battlefield for nearly forty-eight hours, rallying his green Ohio Division that anchored the beleaguered right wing of the Army of the Tennessee. He may well have been among the very first Union officers hit at Shiloh. He tangled with the last man wounded at the battle, the brilliant and infamous Confederate cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest. Sherman’s biographers usually devote an entire chapter to his astounding heroism at Shiloh, using phrases like “reborn,” “transformation,” “second-chance,” and “never looked back” to mark the battle as a dividing line between his prior disgrace and subsequent greatness.
What then really happened to Sherman at Shiloh? Neither his prominent and well-documented role in the fighting there nor the magnitude and importance of the battle can in themselves explain his magical and lasting transformation. Shiloh in itself did not end the war, or even mark an end to the fighting in the West. And Sherman did not fight at Shiloh as a major general of an army, but rather served as one of at least ten divisional commanders in the field, themselves all subordinate in rank and authority to Generals Grant, Buell, and Halleck. He had no responsibility for the Union strategy that led to Shiloh. Nor did he exercise any overall tactical command of the battle itself. In the aftermath of the fighting, the newly famous Sherman did largely what he was told.
But a strange sequence of events unfolded at Shiloh around Sherman that in a few hours altered both his own career and the next decade of his nation at large. Nothing in his immediate prequel to Shiloh presaged Sherman’s astounding success. In fact, his entire career twenty years prior to Shiloh—he was forty-one at the battle—had been ostensibly characterized by only an adequate military record. Although sixth in his 1840 class at West Point, Sherman had held a series of nondescript postings through some fifteen years of military service throughout the South and West in a variety of commands. He had missed out entirely on the Mexican War by being stationed in California.
In disgust, Sherman finally resigned from the army in 1853 in order to start up a bank branch in San Francisco. In contrast to the obscure security of his military assignments, his subsequent seven years in private business were an unmitigated disaster: regional director of a failing financial institution, mounting debts, and finally living apart from his family in a series of low-paying and temporary jobs. Sherman’s near decade of ignominy was only heightened by the contrast with the success and riches of his wife’s family, especially the fame of his father-in-law (Thoma
s Ewing, the leading barrister in America and also Sherman’s stepfather), coupled with the meteoric rise of his own brother John to the U.S. Senate as a Republican from Ohio.
Worse still, when Sherman at last reentered military life, he experienced a roller-coaster series of events in the two years directly prior to Shiloh, capped by devastating failure. He spent much of 1860 as a civilian organizing the new Louisiana State Military Academy (the future Louisiana State University) as its first superintendent, in charge of hiring faculty, organizing a curriculum, and literally building the infrastructure of a new campus. By all accounts he was enormously successful. In spite of being a Northerner from Ohio and brother of a Yankee senator, Sherman was well liked by his Southern hosts. Indeed, he was later purportedly offered a high command in the Confederate Army at the outbreak of the war. But his academic tenure would end abruptly in February 1861 with the pending secession of Louisiana and the awful knowledge that the arms and cadets of his own military academy would shortly aid the Confederate cause. Consequently, after years of failure, Sherman saw his greatest triumph—he had been well paid as the academy’s superintendent and was planning to build an elegant home on the campus when he resigned—vanish after a year, terminated by events well beyond his own control. In desperation and broke, he quietly headed back north in the wake of secession.
The months immediately prior to the outbreak of the Civil War boded no better. Despite the North’s dire need for experienced officers and a scarcity of West Point graduates—by far the best of whom had enlisted in the Confederate Army—Sherman was passed over for higher command by both those officers of less rank and politicos who had no military training at all. Finally, his cool performance as a colonel and brigade commander at Bull Run in July 1861, together with his political connections, brought Sherman to Lincoln’s attention. Miraculously he was promoted to a large command of the Cumberland theater in the West, in charge of the protection of all Union interests in the border state of Kentucky. Sherman was at last given responsibility commensurate with his innate talent—though not with either his experience or confidence. Hence here in Kentucky catastrophe struck in late 1861.
After a propitious beginning in organizing defenses and raising troops, Sherman found himself utterly exhausted and demoralized. It soon dawned on him that he was obligated to protect a 300-mile front with only 18,000 raw troops, in a border state where the zeal of Southern sympathizers and Confederate raiders grew in reverse proportion to the general neglect of the West by the Union command in Washington. Overworked and suffering from chronic asthma, Sherman grew increasingly pessimistic as he neared physical collapse, unaware that the enemy was probably in worse shape even than he. By October 1861 he was writing gloomy letters to Lincoln, cabinet officers, and his military superiors—and foolishly giving candid and thoroughly depressing lectures to visiting reporters.
Finally, in a meeting in Louisville on October 17, 1861, with Secretary of War Simon Cameron, other Union military leaders, and unidentified newsmen, Sherman poured out his frustrations. To defend Kentucky alone he would need immediately 60,000 troops. And to mount a theater offensive to clear the Confederates from the entire Mississippi Valley at least 200,000 Union recruits would eventually be required! His hearers were astounded. The fantastic numbers bandied about made a most disheartening prognosis even worse. Later events, in fact, would prove Sherman’s realistic figures prescient.
The general Union orthodoxy at the time was that a single rather dramatic victory in Kentucky or Tennessee—Grant’s “one great battle”—might so demoralize the South as to bring on a general armistice. Now the theater commander was instead predicting years of conflict with armies in the hundreds of thousands that would cost millions of dollars to raise. Not surprisingly, within a month after Sherman’s depressing interview, gossip flew that Sherman was at best exhausted and ill, at worse delusional and insane—and either way liable through his defeatist rantings to lose northern Kentucky if not southern Ohio. By December 11, 1861, the Cincinnati Commercial printed the alarming headline about their native son: “General William T. Sherman Insane,” and then further pontificated about his removal:
The harsh criticisms that have been lavished on this gentleman, provoked by his strange conduct, will now give way to feelings of deepest sympathy for him in his great calamity. It seems providential that the country has not to mourn the loss of an army through the loss of mind of a great general into whose hands was committed the vast responsibility of the command of Kentucky.
In disgrace, and suffering what seemed to be classic symptoms of clinical depression, coupled with physical exhaustion, Sherman spent much of December 1861 and January 1862 in isolation, relieved of command in Kentucky, and generally discredited. “I am so sensible now of my disgrace from having exaggerated the force of our enemy in Kentucky that I do think I should have committed suicide were it not for my children,” he wrote his brother in the midst of exile. Most newspaper observers believed that his briefly resurrected career had now ended in infamy.
Only lobbying efforts by his wife, father-in-law, and brother led Lincoln and Halleck to give a shaky and reluctant Sherman a second chance. By mid-February he received a lowly assignment in western Kentucky, training recruits for the newly appointed general Ulysses S. Grant’s proposed campaigns against Fort Donelson and Fort Henry. Without the pressure of running an entire theater and bolstered by reports of Grant’s aggressive competence, Sherman slowly began to regain his health and some of his former assurance. When Grant’s two victories not only secured Kentucky but opened Tennessee to Federal advance, Sherman was buoyed by the chance to raise his own division of inexperienced Ohio recruits to join Grant’s new Army of the Tennessee. So by early April, as a division commander at Shiloh, a steadier Sherman was part of a huge Union effort to pacify southern Tennessee and clear the upper Mississippi River.
Still, on the morning of April 6, Sherman was well aware that his past pessimism about the conduct of the war had been interpreted in the popular press as timidity, if not outright madness. That the real Sherman his entire life had been a cool risk-taker—whether establishing a new California bank branch in the midst of the Gold Rush or a novel academy in Louisiana on the eve of the Civil War—had been forgotten in the hysteria. Instead, this second and probably last chance under Grant had convinced Sherman of the need for dramatic action to recover his own reputation and his family’s name among fellow officers, politicians, and newsmen, who were all wary of his mercurial past and ignorant of his prior two decades of steady service. His new Ohio recruits, it was said, still whispered that their general was crazy.
The effect of the topsy-turvy past four months on Sherman at Shiloh was thus paradoxical. In one sense, the newspaper slurs that he was insane freed him from worry over career advancement and preserving his reputation: he had none. Sherman accepted the generally held idea that he was going nowhere in the Union Army—and so had nothing to lose. As a result, at no time did he show the slightest fear of the approaching enemy at Shiloh—to the point on the eve of the battle of recklessly dismissing clear reports that he was about to be attacked by a much larger Confederate force. His general ignominy also led Sherman to be unconcerned with his own personal safety: at Shiloh, he determined, he would be a general always at the head of his army. He would either be killed at the front and so escape the disrepute that he had brought to his family, or he would provide a public display of courage and skill that might squelch rumors of his incompetence—if not resurrect his name altogether as he led his troops to victory.
In consequence, on April 6, the morning of the Confederate attack, a fatalistic Sherman deliberately dismissed clear signs of the impending enemy aggression or at least had no intention of adopting a defensive posture. His vulnerable right wing was neither fortified nor even entrenched—an equally surprised Grant had issued no such orders himself. Stung by past criticism of the prior months that he was overly nervous, Sherman now foolishly but calmly ridiculed solid scouting r
eports that the enemy was on the move and headed in his direction.
For this he was criticized by contemporaries and faulted by biographers, despite his weak protestations in his memoirs that he was never surprised at Shiloh. He most surely was. But historians sometimes fail to point out that it would have made little difference had Sherman ordered his men to entrench, inasmuch as there was no such order to any of the other divisions of the 35,000-man army that morning. An immobile division behind ramparts on the promontory of the Union line would have been quickly surrounded and cut off. And given his prior reputation, such precautionary measures might well have cost a “crazy Sherman” his command on the eve of battle.
Moreover, given Sherman’s vulnerable posting on the extreme right wing, there is no reason to believe his green troops would not have been overrun anyway. Instead, by careful retreats, the use of artillery, and occasional counterattacks, Sherman for most of the day was able to pull his vastly outnumbered division slowly back to the Union base at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. His own shaky defense for not fortifying his position—that to put raw troops in an offensive campaign behind barricades was to create an aura of defeatism and timidity—has some merit.
Ripples of Battle Page 10