In some sense, however, it does not matter what the actual facts were concerning the exact ramifications of Johnston’s demise. Instead, it was the perception in the South about Shiloh’s effect on the Civil War after the battle that was Johnston’s true legacy. Despite what Grant, Sherman, and others maintained, within a decade of the battle, the notion became orthodoxy that Johnston’s sudden death had in a few minutes robbed the Confederates of their success at Shiloh. In turn, that defeat, snatched from the jaws of victory, had allowed a beaten Grant to press on to open the Mississippi and sever the Confederacy. Had Johnston just lived, the war would have ended quite differently.
The first promulgators of the myth were the suspect generals themselves at Shiloh, specifically Braxton Bragg and other subordinates who in retrospect excused their dubious performances by claiming they could have stormed Grant’s redoubt before darkness if not called back. Stung by postbellum criticism of their own unimaginative advance and failures to coordinate piecemeal attacks—and furious over the self-interested efforts of the scapegoat of Shiloh, P. T. Beauregard, to defend his tarnished reputation at their expense—they insisted that the Union survivors in the Hornet’s Nest were given a critical reprieve when Johnston fell. One of the first formal canonizations of “the Lost Opportunity” appeared almost immediately after the battle in July 1862 in the Savannah Republican under the caption “A Lost Opportunity at Shiloh.” The author, Peter Alexander, was one of the South’s foremost military correspondents and drew his evidence from interviews with Southern generals to argue that Beauregard had thrown away Johnston’s hard-fought victory.
General Bragg himself had written that explicitly not long after the battle: In spite of opposition and prediction of failure, Johnston firmly and decidedly ordered and led the attack in the execution of his general plan, and, notwithstanding the faulty arrangement of troops, was eminently successful up to the moment of his fall. The victory was won. How it was lost the official reports will show, and history has already recorded.
Bragg, whom most historians fault for unimaginatively ordering frontal charges against the Hornet’s Nest and thereby dissipating critical time and Confederate strength, had, in fact, advanced two claims. The first was that Johnston’s death had delayed the Confederates’ sure defeat of Prentiss—with fatal ramifications:
But no one cause probably contributed so greatly to our loss of time, which was the loss of success, as the fall of the commanding general. At the moment of this irreplaceable disaster, the plan of battle was rapidly and successfully executed under his immediate eye and lead on the right. For want of a common superior to the different commands on that part of the field, great delay occurred after this misfortune, and that delay prevented the consummation of the work so gallantly and successfully begun and carried on, until the approach of night induced our new commander to recall the exhausted troops for rest and recuperation. . . .
Bragg also later argued that without Johnston’s personal leadership at the front, his trademark aggressiveness, and zeal for total victory, a sickly Beauregard, ensconced at the rear, lost control of the battlefield. Beauregard was no Johnston, and so allowed the Union Army a reprieve by not finishing off the base camp at Pittsburg Landing—with tragic results for the ultimate fate of the Confederacy itself. Johnston, Bragg maintained, alone had mustered the army and insisted on the fight—and alone could have brought his plans to fruition:
Had the first shot of the 5th, on the skirmish line, killed Sidney Johnston, the battle of Shiloh would not have been fought and won by the Confederates. Had the fatal shot which struck him down on the 6th not been fired, Grant and his forces would have been destroyed or captured before sundown, and Buell would never have crossed the Tennessee.
Almost every ranking Confederate veteran of Shiloh, except Beauregard, seconded Bragg’s assessment. Sherman himself acknowledged that he detected a slackening of intensity from his vantage point at about the time Johnston fell. General Gibson, after swearing that the Confederate Army had plenty of light and was ready to charge the Union camp, focused on Beauregard’s failure to finish off Grant’s camp:
My conviction is that, had Johnston survived, the victory would have been complete, and his army would have planted the standard of the Confederacy on the banks of the Ohio. General Johnston’s death was a tremendous catastrophe. There are no words adequate to express my own conception of the immensity of the loss to our country. Sometimes the hopes of millions of people depend upon one head and one arm. The West perished with Albert Sidney Johnston, and the Southern country followed.
Gen. J. F. Gilmer summed up the consensus best in a letter to Albert Sidney Johnston’s son, “It is my well-considered opinion that, if your father had survived the day, he would have crushed and captured General Grant’s army before the setting of the sun on the 6th. In fact, at the time your father received the mortal wound advancing with General Breckenridge’s command, the day was ours.”
Gen. Basil W. Duke sketched out even larger counterfactual claims had Johnston survived, alleging that his victorious army would subsequently have been invincible after Shiloh:
The army remaining upon the banks of the Tennessee for a few days, would have been reorganized and recovered from the exhausting effects of the battle. The slightly wounded, returning to the ranks, would have made the muster-role full thirty thousand effectives. Price and Van Dorn, coming with about fifteen thousand, and the levies from all quarters which were hastening to Corinth, would have given General Johnston nearly sixty thousand men.
As the tradition of a stolen victory grew, former critics of Johnston reexamined his generalship before and during Shiloh and found the posthumous hero for the first time blameless! It was Beauregard, not Johnston, who had made the critical errors. A jittery Beauregard had opposed fighting on the first day at Shiloh; now it was Beauregard who had insisted on the clumsy attack with three successive lines, an impractical formation that had delayed bringing on the battle by a critical day; and Beauregard had ignored Johnston’s original orders of outflanking the Union left and cutting them off from the Tennessee River, by instead pouring men against Sherman on the enemy right.
Nor, the revisionists argued, was Johnston to blame for the prior catastrophe in the West. Even the earlier losses of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, and the precipitous surrender of Nashville, were hardly due to any error on Johnston’s part. General Tighman had been lax in his preparations at Fort Henry. Generals Buckner, Floyd, and Pillow had cowardly given Donelson away—despite plentiful arms, provisions, and men, and a proven record of repelling the Union besiegers. Especially regrettable were the fifteen thousand frontline Confederates needlessly surrendered at Donelson, veterans who a few weeks later could have turned the tide at Shiloh.
Johnston’s plans to defend Tennessee, recapture Kentucky, and keep the Mississippi secure were in fact inspired; his subordinates’ were not. The proof of the pudding was in the eating: on Johnston’s first chance to command himself, he had almost single-handedly and unnoticed created a massive force of resistance at Corinth, Mississippi; brought it in secret to within yards of the Union Army; and then in some eight and a half hours nearly destroyed the illustrious Ulysses S. Grant before falling to a chance wound from a spent bullet. Gen. Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor, concluded, “Albert Sidney Johnston was the foremost man of all the South; and had it been possible for one heart, one mind, and one arm, to save her cause, she lost them when he fell on the field of Shiloh.”
But the belief in the Lost Opportunity soon grew well beyond the circle of Southern generals, for it tapped something inherent in the Southern psyche itself: despite the guns and numbers of the North, the courage of Southern soldiers and the genius of their generals really could have nullified the odds—if only fate had not intervened. Thus the Lost Opportunity of Shiloh spread widely, especially in the decade and a half between 1866 and 1880 when defeated and impoverished Southerners latched onto any explanation to make sense of their p
resent humiliating predicament. A year after the war, Edward Pollard, a Virginia newspaper editor, published The Lost Cause and wrote of Johnston’s death at Shiloh, “Alas! The story of Shiloh was to be that not only of another lost opportunity for the South, but one of a reversion of fortune, in which a splendid victory changed into something very like a defeat!”
To accept the reality that the Southern elite had waged a precipitous and unwise war—one poorly conducted against a far stronger, far larger, and far wealthier industrial nation, fought with limited resources in defense of African slavery—would have been an admission of either rashness, amorality, or abject stupidity. Far easier it was to praise Southern manhood and blame fate. So Pollard concluded his Lost Cause: “Civil wars, like private quarrels, are likely to repeat themselves, where the unsuccessful party has lost the contest only through accident or inadvertence. The Confederates have gone out of this war, with the proud, secret, deathless, dangerous consciousness that they are THE BETTER MEN, and there was nothing wanting but a change in a set of circumstances. . . .”
Fewer still wished to acknowledge that the Union had, in fact, adopted a brilliant strategy of blockading Confederate ports, tying Lee down in Virginia, splitting the South asunder at the Mississippi, and turning Sherman loose behind the lines—resulting in the invasion and complete conquest of a country the size of Western Europe within just four years. The North not merely had defeated the Confederacy on the battlefield and obliterated her military forces, but also had killed one-quarter of her white men between age 20 and 40, cut down a fourth of her officers—many of them in the high echelons of Southern aristocracy—and completely ruined her economy. Rarely in the annals of military history has one power so utterly demolished its adversary in so short a period.
But to account for an Armageddon rather than mere military defeat, Southern society spread the myth that the moral crusade against the Northern invader was nearly won on the home soil at Shiloh—until Fate and Chance, not Confederate incompetence coupled with Northern skill and multitudes, doomed the Cause. In 1878 an article published in the Southern Historical Society Papers argued, “Shiloh was a great misfortune. At the moment of his fall, Sidney Johnston with all the energy of his nature, was pressing on the routed foe. Crouching under the bank of the Tennessee River, Grant was helpless. One short hour more of life to Johnston would have completed his destruction.”
Johnston’s son, in a widely read biography of his father written in 1879, seventeen years after Shiloh—The Life of Albert Sidney Johnston: Embracing His Service in the Armies of the United States, The Republic of Texas, and The Confederate States—displayed how attractive the myth of the Lost Opportunity had now become. Writing of the failure to attack immediately after the fall of the Hornet’s Nest, William Preston Johnston waxed eloquently about what might have been.
All was shattered by one word. “On!” would have made it history; but the commanding general said, “Retire.” Oh, the power of a general-in-chief. It was all over. That bloody field was to mean nothing in all time but a slain hero, and 25,000 soldiers stretched upon a bloody field—and another day of purposeless slaughter with broken bands of desperate men mangling and slaying to no visible end in all God’s plan of setting up the right. The great forest tract was sinking into darkness, stained, trampled, and echoing with groans. But the victory—its very hope—was gone. “They had watered their horses in the Tennessee River;” but, when he fell who spoke the word, the prediction had lost its meaning.
As the specter of a humiliating Reconstruction spread, the myth grew from Johnston’s death causing the loss of the single battle Shiloh to being responsible for the entire Confederate defeat itself! Jefferson Davis, ever eager to justify secession and his own mediocre direction of the resistance, was to maintain to the end of his life that Johnston’s tragic demise had lost his Confederacy: “When Sidney Johnston fell, it was the turning-point of our fate; for we had no other hand to take up his work in the West.” As early as 1866, Johnston’s home state of Texas rallied to Davis’s notion that their adopted son had nearly won Shiloh before falling at the head of his men—and thus in a few seconds doomed the Confederate cause. A joint resolution of the Texas legislature passed in 1866, a year after the conclusion of the war, remarked of the battle fought four years earlier:
In the saddle, with the harness of a warrior on, the chieftain met the inevitable messenger of Fate. The pitiless musket-ball that pierced him spilled the noblest blood of the South. When he fell, all was from that moment lost! Victory no longer perched on our flag. Less competent hands guided the strife, and a genius of lesser might ruled in his stead. . . . From the fatal hour when the life-blood of the gallant Johnston moistened the earth—from that hour, sir, may be dated that long series of disasters, relieved, it is true, by heroic effort, and brightened from time to time by brilliant but barren victories—but reaching, nevertheless, through the darkness of successive campaigns, until the southern Cross descended forever amid the wall of a people’s agony behind the clouds upon the banks of the Appomattox.
Grant himself at last grew tired of such speculation. In his Memoirs, published in 1885, he scoffed:
Some of these critics claim that Shiloh was won when Johnston fell, and that if he had not fallen the army under me would have been annihilated or captured. Ifs defeated the Confederates at Shiloh. There is little doubt that we would have been disgracefully beaten if all the shells and bullets fired by us had passed harmlessly over the enemy and if all of theirs had taken effect.
Had any others of the notable Confederate generals fallen at Shiloh—Bragg, Beauregard, Hardee, or Polk—few would have claimed any monumental significance in their deaths. But Albert Sidney Johnston was a different case altogether—an ideal subject for mythmaking for a variety of reasons that went well beyond his special status as supreme commander of the Confederate forces at Shiloh.
First was the manner of Johnston’s death. In very significant ways both its timing and nature lent credibility to the idea that a great Southern hero was within minutes of ensuring the lasting victory of the cause. Johnston seemed to have expired almost magically. Unlike the thousands of Shiloh dead who went into the night screaming, with ghastly holes to the head and intestines, or lingering for hours with entire limbs blown apart, Albert Sidney Johnston’s wound was nearly invisible and almost instantaneously lethal—no suffering, disfigurement, or last-minute moaning. Few of the Shiloh dying in the arms of friends were politely asked in their last minutes on earth if they were wounded, only equally solicitously to answer, “Yes, and I fear seriously.” Albert Sidney Johnston left the living at Shiloh with dignity, both spiritually and in the flesh. The circumstances of his end only cemented a previous reputation for innate humanity and courage; he had truly earned an immaculate demise through near divine dispensation.
Unlike Beauregard or Grant, Johnston was not merely at the immediate rear; he was, like Sherman, at Ground Zero of the killing. At this early juncture in the war, Lee and Jackson were not yet in the pantheon of Southern heroes. Johnston was better known than both and was considered until the weeks before Shiloh the savior of the Confederate cause. His miraculous escape from Federal agents to join the Confederacy in a long trek from California to Texas was already the stuff of legend. That he had not fought in a major engagement only fueled the fable: no one could deny that, when he fell, Johnston was winning his first and last battle against enormous odds.
Moreover, Southerners in general had special empathy for cavaliers, and so the idea that the ranking general of the entire Confederate Army would fall while mounted, leading his men against fixed positions, was seen as an especially heroic demise, one that likewise tended to overshadow all of Johnston’s prior difficult six months. Pericles, after all, two and a half millennia earlier, had told a grieving Athenian crowd that a soldier’s heroic death tended to wash away all of a man’s prior shortcomings. By some accounts, Johnston’s last charge of his life was the most successful—the wizened genera
l, resplendent in black hat with nodding plume perched on the magnificent, Kentucky-bred Fire-eater. In contrast, had he been decapitated by a cannonball in a sea of shredded horseflesh as his men fled, failure coupled with grotesqueries would have been fatal to the creation of the Johnston romance.
There was also a certain logic to the simplistic Confederate assessment (everything good at Shiloh while he lived, everything bad after he died). Beauregard, remember, sent a telegram claiming in the late afternoon of the first day that the South had obtained a great victory. True, most disinterested students of the battle have made the case that Johnston wasted precious hours in vain assaults against the Hornet’s Nest that depleted Southern manpower and made the final assault on Pittsburg Landing impossible. And they have argued that while Johnston may well have ordered a twilight attack had he lived, it would most likely have been disastrous—given Grant’s concentration of batteries, gunboats, condensed lines, and the general Confederate exhaustion and confusion at dusk. Consequently, it was Albert Sidney Johnston’s good fortune to have perished quite literally at the Confederate high tide of the battle, before a sober realization had set in that already by midafternoon thousands in his army were dead, wounded, missing, or straggling, and that those left were probably too few and too tired either to finish off Grant’s army or survive the inevitable Northern counterattack to come. His previous eight and a half hours of fighting had not cracked the Union Army when he perished—and this ordeal proved that Union morale was not shattered, but often as resolute as the Confederates’.
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