Had Sherman been in charge of Lee’s army in June 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia would have sidestepped Meade at Gettysburg, may well have burned Washington, D.C., and crippled the economy of southern Pennsylvania and Maryland—before returning intact to the South and the likelihood of a brokered peace. In contrast, had Lee been Sherman in fall 1864, his army would have sought out Hood, Hardee, and Bragg and never reached Savannah.
Contrary to popular opinion and hysterical slurs, Sherman’s legacy of destroying civic property and morale was not Dresden, Hiroshima, or My Lai. His Army of the West never deliberately killed civilians, raped, or murdered. Rather, Sherman’s war against property and civic infrastructure has now been ingrained as the unofficial policy of the United States military at war—as the recent conflicts in Iraq, the Balkans, and Afghanistan attest. Like Sherman, we prefer to attack the will of a nation to resist through the destruction of its communications and the property of its government and elite without aiming either to kill all its soldiers or randomly target civilians. Sherman alone of nineteenth-century generals understood that wars of the industrial age were fueled by a sophisticated but increasingly vulnerable infrastructure—transportation, communications, manufacturing, government—whose destruction could stall troops in the field and instantaneously strip a newly found affluence away from the promulgators of conflict. Even more brilliantly, he realized that with material progress came at least the pretense of enlightened humanity: eventually the wages of victory in liberal and affluent Western democratic societies would entail that the victor kill few and lose fewer still, an ideal more practicable when the property and capital rather than the lives of the enemy were targeted.
Finally, Sherman developed the idea of collective guilt, or the controversial concept that no population that broadly supports a war should be entirely free of its bitter consequences. The only way to disabuse Southerners of their trust in chattel slavery and secession was to show that eventually such ideologies would lead to the March to the Sea. In the same manner, the Afghans were not entirely blameless for either the Taliban or al-Qaeda, and turned on both only when they saw that the logical wages of their tacit support led to B-52s rather than polite remonstrations from American diplomats and an occasional cruise missile. Whether we like it or not, the multifaceted war conceived by William Tecumseh Sherman between Shiloh and Appomattox is with us Americans today—and it is not, as alleged, simply one of “terror.”
Fortunately for the fate of the Union and the career of Grant, the dozens of Shiloh shots aimed at Sherman hit his flapping coat, hat, shoulder strap, hand, and horses, and not his chest. Unlike Albert Sidney Johnston—who on the other side of the battle line was braving fire at the front after also being unfairly castigated in the press on the eve of the battle—enemy bullets missed Sherman’s arteries and vital organs.
So, unlike the fate of the supreme Confederate commander, Shiloh did not kill, but empowered a once “crazy” and powerless officer. In turn, a now heroic and self-assured Sherman would save Grant both by his conduct at the front and his loyalty in the battle’s postmortem. And the two of them would go on to save the Union and destroy the South. Quite early in the Civil War, Shiloh taught the introspective Sherman—and Sherman alone of all the Civil War generals—how not to wage war, and so the poor South would soon come to learn in Georgia and the Carolinas the real consequences of that awful battle of April 1862.
Afternoon: The Myth of the Lost Opportunity
While the Confederate left battered Sherman, the right wing finally began the long planned sweep to the Tennessee River. It was here that Albert Sidney Johnston—perhaps the most experienced and best known American officer on either side at the battle—had originally envisioned cutting off Grant’s army from its base of supplies at the river. Then he would drive it back toward Owl Creek, where it would then be surrounded and annihilated.
But late in the morning there was something awry with the once promising Confederate blueprint. All morning Johnston rode along the crest of his Confederate wave, worried that his planned critical right advance was lapping around, rather than overwhelming, a last center of resistance anchored by the Union divisions of Generals Hurlbut, Prentiss, and W.H.L. Wallace. Johnston grew increasingly concerned that his victorious troops were plundering Union camps, straggling to the rear with booty, and often charging haphazardly in the wrong direction. They were already dissipating their remarkable initial successes and giving critical time for the stunned Federal troops to retire and regroup!
Protected by a peach orchard and a sunken road, the desperate and surrounded Northerners to the right in the so-called Hornet’s Nest were slaughtering wave after wave of Confederate attackers, and thereby upsetting the entire Southern battle plan at Shiloh. Around noon Johnston himself rode over to inspect the source of enemy resistance and then to direct personally the Southern charges. The attempted destruction of the Union pocket had now taken on a surreal life of its own. Rather than bypassing or outflanking the nest, Johnston and Braxton Bragg began to send hundreds of men to their deaths in vain assaults against Union artillery and sharpshooters—as if the capture of the tiny Federal salient had become a sudden referendum on Southern manhood and courage! Meanwhile precious time was being lost; fleeing Union regiments were reforming defenses to the rear around the Union camp at Pittsburg Landing. The Southern generals were suddenly fighting the wrong battle in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As the Confederate charges withered, it began to seem as if the Southerners themselves had had enough. About 2 P.M., General Breckinridge rode up to Johnston to confess that a regiment of his Tennesseans refused to make any more suicidal attacks. To his plea that he could not make his men budge, Johnston replied, “Oh, yes, General, I think you can.” Finally an exasperated Johnston told an insistent Breckinridge that he would lead the charge in person. He then approached the recalcitrant Tennesseans, touched their bayonets from his horse, and exclaimed, “These will do the work. Men, they are stubborn; we must use the bayonet.” Johnston turned his trusted mount Fire-eater around and rode out at the van, calling to his foot soldiers, “I will lead you.” In the heat of battle, few seemed to note the absurdity that the supreme commander of some forty thousand men, who alone had collected the army and brilliantly brought it undetected to Shiloh, was now leading a near-suicidal charge of a few hundred soldiers—trusting in the bayonet against the mass fire of rifled muskets.
At some point in the onslaught, Johnston faded back through the ranks. Although his men broke their immediate adversaries and sparked the beginning of the collapse of the Hornet’s Nest, Johnston himself uncharacteristically sought relief from the fire. At first he seemed elated that he had escaped death from the murderous Northern broadsides. He even slapped his thigh, remarking of a spent ball that merely stung him and of another that sliced his boot-sole in two, “They didn’t trip me up that time.”
But, in fact, they did. And minutes later the general suddenly seemed hesitant. Had he, in fact, been wounded during his ride into the peach orchard? Fire-eater had tired and seemed to have been hit in at least two places. Besides the boot-heel being shot to pieces, Johnston’s overcoat was now riddled with bullet holes. He sighed to a staff member, Gov. Isham G. Harris of Tennessee, “Governor, they came near putting me hors de combat in that charge.” Moments later Johnston went pale and nearly fell out of his saddle. Harris demanded, “General, are you wounded?” Johnston gasped, “Yes, and I fear seriously.”
A series of further mishaps now transpired that ensured the death of Albert Sidney Johnston. He had been shot during the charge in the popliteal artery, just below the knee on the inside of his right leg—usually a serious but nonlethal wound that could be treated in the field with a simple tourniquet, which Johnston, like many soldiers, carried with him. But unfortunately the general had probably been hit several minutes before he informed Harris, perhaps as much as a quarter hour earlier than his first acknowledgment of injury. In the excitement of battle h
e had felt little pain. In the meantime he had probably lost over two quarts of blood, enough to send him into irreversible shock. Later it was found that a .577-caliber minié ball had entered behind his right knee, the leg where years earlier he had suffered a serious bullet wound in a duel that had left him with bouts of nerve pain and leg paralysis. Due to the prior (and more serious) injury, had he now simply felt nothing when the stray bullet nicked his artery? Or had the ebullition of the victorious charge dulled the pain? Or finally, was a suffering Johnston simply being stoic even as he bled to death?
Still more unfortunate, the blood from the wound had stealthily oozed down the side of his leg, inside his pant on into the boot. So when his staff—among them Col. William Preston, his brother-in-law—carried the general down from Fire-eater, they saw little trace of bleeding on his person and thus at first could not find the source of Johnston’s fainting. Instead of tourniquets and bandages, they wrongly administered brandy to revive the comatose Johnston.
His own personal physician, Dr. D. W. Yandell, who was nearly always at the general’s side and could have stopped the bleeding in seconds, had a few hours earlier been ordered by Johnston to attend to Union prisoners. “Look after these wounded people, the Yankees among the rest. They were our enemies a moment ago. They are prisoners now.” When Yandell objected about leaving the general, Johnston ordered him to stay with the wounded and dying. In short, Albert Sidney Johnston’s own inability to notice the wound, the misfortune of a major artery being nicked, the fact that the blood had pooled undetected in his boot, the sudden absence of his personal physician, and the panic of his staff who missed the wound, all conspired to ensure his death—and in such a fashion to prompt second-guessing for decades afterward.
The officers around the lifeless Johnston were horrified that their commander, fresh from a successful charge into the Hornet’s Nest, had now mysteriously died within minutes without a visible trace of trauma. They quickly sought to conceal his death from the rank and file to avoid a general panic—especially the knowledge that their beloved leader had died from a wound that need not have killed him. It was now announced that the corpse of a “Colonel Jackson of Texas” was being brought back from the front. Only when Johnston’s remains were taken into the Confederate headquarters did Dr. Chopin, General Beauregard’s personal surgeon, finally discover the source of the fatal blood loss—as well as three other minor wounds and dozens of holes in his uniform and coat.
Beauregard himself was in near shock. The battle was at a critical phase. The supreme commander and architect of the Confederate advance was now gone. What should the staff do? For well over an hour, between 2:30 P.M.—the approximate time of Johnston’s death—until sometime before 4:00, a lull descended upon the Confederate army. No one on the right wing—neither Generals Cheatham, Withers, nor Breckinridge, or Jackson—had stepped up to replace Johnston to coordinate attacks against the reeling Union troops inside the Hornet’s Nest. Johnston’s final charge had rattled the Union line, and in the Northerners’ confusion a free lane directly ahead of the Confederates seemed to have opened up all the way to Pittsburg Landing.
Yet there was to be no sustained follow-up, at least until Braxton Bragg belatedly and unimaginatively began to send units once again head-on against the Union line. Instead of encircling the Hornet’s Nest, some Southerners had turned obliquely to the northwest, allowing the Union troops in the pocket even more critical time to regroup. In fact, even after Bragg at last regained some semblance of order in his attacks, General Prentiss’s men would not surrender for another hour, sometime around or after 5:00 P.M., nearly three hours after Johnston was carried from the field.
Prentiss capitulated only after some sixty-two Confederate cannon had pulverized his position. But by then it was nearly dusk. As the victorious Southerners at last swarmed over the captured Union left wing, there was little daylight left to complete the annihilation of Grant’s encircled and tottering army. True, dozens of Confederate units were streaming forward. Some were plundering the rich Union camps. Others fired away at the panicking enemy runaways; still more were involved in the mop-up of captives. The feeling among the rank and file was that Bragg and his subordinates could still piece together a final twilight coordinated assault and that way sweep the last remnants of Grant’s army into the river.
But around 6:00, Beauregard abruptly ordered a general withdrawal! Dozens of Confederate officers were aghast—most notably Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was nearing the bluffs above the trapped Union army, convinced that a final dusk charge could scatter the Federals before they could be reinforced during the night by Wallace and Buell. Here was born the idea of the “Lost Opportunity.”
Did Johnston’s sudden demise account for the delay in capturing the last Federal pocket and therein perhaps explain why the Confederates now called off a final assault at Pittsburg Landing? All veterans of the battle agreed that for some seven hours, Prentiss had held his command against overwhelming odds. In the process he prevented the Confederates from nearing Pittsburg Landing until nightfall. The assumption then spread that if only the Union salient had collapsed earlier in midafternoon—at about the time of Johnston’s death—Grant’s camp would have been in enemy hands by 5:00 P.M. Who, then, after the noble sacrifice of the supreme commander, was to blame for allowing a few hundred men to stall the entire Confederate advance? And why was the battle called off when the Union Army was in ruins with its back to the Tennessee River?
Almost immediately, Johnston’s sudden death conveniently answered both those queries and in the process created a Confederate legend that fit in so well with the known Southern affinity for romance and chivalry. In this tradition—I heard a popular version of the story in the early 1960s from my own maternal grandmother, Georgia Way Johnston, whose family claimed to be cousins of Albert Sidney—the Confederacy was on the verge of a momentous “victory” at Shiloh. Then suddenly Johnston, architect of the entire campaign, went down with a minor wound. His unexpected death brought the attack against the Hornet’s Nest to a standstill, giving the Northerners a precious hour or two to regroup, rearm, and be reinforced. By the time the demoralized Southern staff had assembled a new assault group, it was so late in the day that only inspired generalship could have crafted a final winning pursuit. Instead, far to the rear a confused Beauregard ordered a cessation of the advance, and therein for the second time within a few hours threw away the martyred Johnston’s hard-won victory on the first day of Shiloh. Despite Union numerical superiority in the Tennessee theater of at least two to one, overwhelming Federal logistical support, arms, matériel, and the presence of top officers in the West like Grant, Sherman, and Thomas, the South had lost the war due to the chance trajectory of a single stray bullet—itself perhaps ricocheted from a friendly musket.
Had the determined Johnston lived, the Confederate lore further maintains, in a few more minutes he would have blasted apart the Hornet’s Nest. Then he would have ordered a massive charge down the bluffs in the late afternoon, racing forward on Fire-eater to send the last pockets of Northern survivors—less than 10,000 of Grant’s 35,000-man army were still in any organized formation—into the Tennessee River. Then, with Grant’s army destroyed, Buell would never have ventured across the Tennessee. He would have either retired into Kentucky or found himself annihilated by a much larger and victorious Confederate force. And Lew Wallace’s reinforcements of some 7,000 men would have had to retreat back to Crump’s Landing or find themselves colliding in the dark with an enemy army four times their size.
Given the shocking novelty of Shiloh’s carnage at this juncture in the war and the strategic importance of the battle, Johnston’s untimely death only led to even larger “what ifs.” With Grant’s army wrecked and captured at Shiloh, Southerners maintained that the entire course of the Civil War would have been radically altered. An enormous and victorious Confederate army loose in the border states—perhaps reaching 50,000 men when reinforced by Van Dorn’s late-ar
riving Arkansas divisions—would have forced the North to evacuate Tennessee. Consequently, the story goes, there would have been no assault on Vicksburg for months, if at all. Grant would have been disgraced, Sherman perhaps as well—when it was learned that an entire Federal army had been surprised and then annihilated by Johnston in a few hours. The tottering border state of Kentucky would have returned to its Southern roots and joined the Confederacy. What was left of Union forces would be in the hands of Buell and Halleck—hardly the type of aggressive commanders to ward off a victorious Albert Sidney Johnston. Had only Johnston not fallen at the critical moments of Shiloh!
More sober historians downplay the ultimate significance of Johnston’s death. They attribute the pause in the assault of the Hornet’s Nest more to exhaustion and an absence of ammunition. Scholars also emphasize the earlier tactical blunders of Johnston, who at least sanctioned, if not ordered, wave after wave of Confederate charges against the Union pocket without attempting an early flanking maneuver. Skeptics add that even had the fiery Johnston lived and ordered a general assault on Pittsburg Landing at dusk, Grant’s last line was well organized, occupied the high ground, and was bolstered by artillery and gunboats—making it impossible to be scattered in a mere hour before darkness. Moreover, by nightfall the Confederates were so disorganized and depleted that they may well have been stalemated the next morning by Buell and Lew Wallace, even without Grant’s help.
In any case, we will never know the exact effect or ultimate significance of Johnston’s death on the Confederate cause. The truth perhaps falls well between the Southern claim of catastrophe and Northern insistence on irrelevance. Grant, for example, criticized Johnston’s generalship severely and called him “vacillating and undecided in his actions”—apparently due to the earlier losses by his subordinates of Forts Henry and Donelson, and the inability to move his army rapidly from Corinth, Mississippi, to Shiloh. Whether that harsh verdict reflects sober military analysis or Grant’s own embarrassment at having Johnston maneuver an army of forty thousand undetected to within yards of his lines is still a matter of debate.
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