Ripples of Battle

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Albert Sidney Johnston and the Lost Opportunity still survive today. The last page of Wiley Sword’s well-researched and sober history of the battle, Shiloh: Bloody April, nevertheless ends with the death of Albert Sidney Johnston: “Like Johnston’s lifeblood, the Southern Confederacy’s hopes also began to ebb rapidly following the momentous events of Shiloh.” Nor is the Lost Opportunity confined to texts alone. Frederick C. Hubbard, sculptor of the Confederate monument at the battlefield, explained how he tried to couple the fall of the angelic Johnston with the accompanying ruin of the entire Confederate cause. “My underlying idea was to have the monument represent Victory defeated by Death and Night. Death took away General Johnston, and Night ended the battle just when Victory was in sight. The woman in the center, who represents the Confederacy, reluctantly relinquishes to Night and Death the wreath of Victory she holds in her hand.”

  Albert Sidney Johnston in a single second at Shiloh had at last become something in death that for all his labors he had never been in life. And so the general who in the flesh had delivered not a single victory for his beloved Southerners, brought to their minds the everlasting reassurance that they had never really been beaten at all. Many today would still agree.

  Evening: Ben-Hur

  Albert Sidney Johnston’s death at 2:30 P.M. had stunned but not stopped the Confederate juggernaut—at least not yet. When the last defenders inside the Hornet’s Nest were finally overwhelmed by late afternoon, the Union Army had less than a third of its original strength—about ten thousand exhausted men—still on the battlefield. In fact, by evening Grant’s army spanned not much more than a semicircle of a few thousand yards surrounding the base at Pittsburg Landing. Where, a nervous Grant wondered, was Gen. Lew Wallace and the seven thousand men of his reserve 3rd Division?

  That very morning on his way up the Tennessee River to Shiloh, Grant had stopped to warn Wallace at Crump’s Landing to be prepared to support his engaged army. But Grant’s verbal orders to Wallace from his gunboat Tigress at about 8:00 A.M. were given at least two hours after Sherman had first been attacked. Only when Grant himself finally arrived at Shiloh and saw the state of his crumbling armies did he send a second, stronger message back to Crump’s Landing sometime around midmorning: Wallace was immediately to march his division the six miles south to Shiloh and join the rest of the Army of the Tennessee.

  That hurried summons must have reached Wallace sometime around 11:30 in the morning—several hours after his restless men had first heard the firing. Had Wallace departed at once, Grant later surmised, he should have been on line and pouring in critical reinforcements by 2:00 P.M.—at precisely the time that the Northern center and left came under the most intense attack by Albert Sidney Johnston. But when Wallace failed to show up on the battlefield in the early afternoon, Grant sent another desperate message to no avail. He finally dispatched his most trusted subordinates, Colonel McPherson and Captain Rawlins, to ride over and personally escort Wallace along the river road to the killing fields.

  But when the two messengers made it back to Grant, they brought back incredible tales of wrong roads, time-consuming countermarching, and cumbersome wagons and caissons. Wallace was no nearer Shiloh than when he had started, and thus Grant’s battle was about to be lost without help! The Union commander was completely dumbfounded: it was now near dark, indeed well past 7:00 P.M.; his army was nearly annihilated—and thousands of his critical reserves mysteriously had disappeared a mere few miles from the battlefield! Where exactly had Lew Wallace taken his men?

  Grant had reason to be worried. He had been caught unaware at Shiloh. On the morning of April 6 he was miles downstream at his headquarters to the north in Savannah, Tennessee, and without a clue that Johnston’s enormous Confederate army had surprised his unprepared divisions. Now his forces had been retreating all day. Nearly half his regiments were no longer in existence. Hundreds of his men were dying. Many were shot down while running away. Rumors circulated that Union soldiers had been bayoneted in their sleep. Without reinforcements he was likely to lose the first great pitched battle of the war in the West—and with it his own future in the Union Army. Although he had sent word to General Buell on the other side of the Tennessee River to march immediately with his supporting 20,000-man Army of the Ohio, Grant was not convinced that those critical divisions could cover the five miles to the river, be ferried across, and fall in line before his own army collapsed. And an earlier midafternoon advance meeting with a grumpy General Buell had not given him confidence about getting any salvation from that quarter.

  There was also bad blood between the Armies of the Tennessee and the Ohio. Both generals knew that their near-independent commands within the Western theater were impractical and could not last. The older Buell resented the astonishing rise of the younger and once obscure Grant after his victories at Forts Henry and Donelson. And his doubts about his reckless rival were now apparently confirmed as he crossed the river at about 1:00 P.M. for a preliminary inspection of the growing mess at Pittsburg Landing. What he saw was shocking: thousands from Grant’s shattered army cowering in fright under the cliffs next to the water, apparently after running pell-mell from the battlefield. Terrified men yelled out, “We’re whipped! The fight is lost! We’re cut to pieces!”

  If the now smug Buell were to be late with his twenty thousand men, Grant would be finished both at Shiloh and for good. Yet if the Army of the Ohio pranced in that evening to stave off a Confederate victory, the salvation of the first day’s disaster at Shiloh might be Buell’s alone. Some even wondered whether Buell was worried about putting his men at the rear of a collapsing army with the river at their backs—throwing good men after bad as it were—and thus despaired he just might not cross the Tennessee in time after all. In any case, the roads from Buell’s headquarters to the west bank of the river opposite Grant were in terrible shape. That meant no reinforcements until the evening at the earliest. So now Grant desperately turned to Lew Wallace, his own division commander, to march the six miles from Crump’s Landing and save the tottering Army of the Tennessee.

  Yet Grant had problems with Lew Wallace as well. At thirty-five he was the youngest general in the Union Army. Wallace was a political appointee without much military experience and no formal training at West Point, who nevertheless was enjoying a meteoric career of his own, beginning with proven gallantry at Bull Run. As a major general, in theory he had no real superiors in rank. The dashing Wallace also had a tendency to be theatrical. At Fort Donelson he had magnified his role to reporters and claimed key responsibility for much of Grant’s victory. He bragged to his wife, “I saved the whole army from rout.”

  Among the West Point generals, the amateur but cocky Wallace was hardly popular, due to his innate talent as well as his self-serving dispatches to reporters, his airs of intellectual superiority—he was said to write and paint—and his hypersensitivity to any perceived slight. Recently in his official report concerning the fighting at Fort Donelson, Wallace had left out mention of two of Grant’s personal aides, who were furious about the oversight.

  Who knew where the flamboyant Wallace had gone, Grant steamed. It was nearing nightfall, nearly seven hours after his first message must have reached Crump’s Landing, a mere six miles away—and still no Wallace!

  If Shiloh resurrected the professional life of a down-and-out Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and ended the worldly existence of Albert Sidney Johnston, it simply ruined the army career of an ascendant Gen. Lewis Wallace. In fact, April 6 would turn out to be the worst day in Lew Wallace’s long life. At dawn he was confused, by early morning somewhat annoyed, and now in later afternoon incensed.

  It was bad enough that when the battle started, his battle-ready division was left isolated and without communications, guarding the army’s supplies down the Tennessee River at Crump’s Landing. Now with the sound of fire a few miles away, it was apparently to be held in reserve and out of the fighting altogether. At 8:00 A.M. a shocked Grant had steamed by C
rump’s Landing on his way to the battle without even disembarking to give Wallace any clear-cut directions. He had merely yelled to Wallace on the deck of his riverboat to get his division ready should the early morning sounds of firing turn out to be a real battle:

  “Well, hold yourself in readiness to march upon orders received.”

  A disappointed Wallace answered, “But, general, I ordered a concentration about six o’clock. The division must be at Stoney Lonesome [the point of departure for the inland route to Shiloh]. I am ready now.” Grant, Wallace reported later, hesitated and did not take up the offer to order an immediate march. Instead the supreme commander finished with a cursory, “Very well. Hold the division ready to march in any direction.” Then he steamed in the Tigress on to Shiloh.

  Wallace’s 3rd Division had heard gunfire at daybreak and been ready to march in that direction for at least two hours prior to Grant’s brief appearance. Now it would wait in readiness for another critical three hours for further orders—while a mere six miles away Sherman’s men were being slaughtered. At 11:30 a Captain Baxter, Grant’s quartermaster, finally arrived with the anticipated command to move. But for some reason the commands were not signed. Stranger yet, the orders had simply been poorly copied in pencil on lined paper:

  You will leave a sufficient force at Crump’s Landing to guard the public property there; with the rest of the division march and form junction with the right of the army. Form line of battle at right angle with the river, and be governed by circumstances.

  After asking Baxter a few more details about the murky, unsigned orders, Wallace was wrongly told that the Union forces were “repulsing the enemy”—when, in fact, the Union Army was in retreat!

  It was now nearly noon. Wallace quickly was forced to make a decision about these strange ad hoc mandates from his commander. Did his superiors realize that there were not one, but two roads to Shiloh? True, the one course along the Tennessee River was the quickest to Grant’s base at Pittsburg Landing. But it did not end up at the “right” of the Union Army, where Wallace thought he had been ordered to deploy his reserves. And in many places that river path was swampy, nearly impassable for wagons and caissons, and indeed sometimes underwater altogether. In contrast, the inland route—the so-called Shunpike—led directly to Sherman’s right wing. It was also at least two miles shorter to that destination and a much better road. Wallace himself had previously repaired and reconnoitered it in the weeks before the battle just for the purpose of reinforcing the Union right wing should a crisis arise.

  So now Wallace wondered about this vague order scrawled on ordinary ruled paper: was he to take the shortest route to Grant’s camp or the most direct way to the right wing of Grant’s army? After all, he had positioned his army at Stoney Lonesome in between the two roads to be prepared to depart to Shiloh in either direction. Was he to march thousands of men and their guns along a partly submerged road or over a route he had previously corduroyed and knew to be passable? Was he to arrive to join a victorious army in pursuit, as Baxter had (wrongly) implied, or to save a defeated force from annihilation? Which leg of the triangle was he to follow to its base of the Union battle line?

  Wallace gave his men a mere half hour to eat. At noon he ordered them to set out to Shiloh along the inland route to join Sherman’s right wing: “So, to save the two and three-quarter miles,” Wallace wrote of his fatal choice, “and because it was nearer the right and in better condition, I decided to go by the Shunpike.” That decision in and of itself changed the life of General Wallace and ensured that the Union Army could not win the battle outright on the first day.

  Be this as it may, Wallace’s division was nevertheless making record time along the Shunpike. To Grant he may have been lost and marching along the wrong side of the battlefield, but at least Lew Wallace was getting to Shiloh via the quickest route. In a mere hour and a half the 3rd Division had covered some five miles, and its advance guard was at last set to cross Owl Creek a few thousand yards from Sherman’s last reported position. In fact, in terms of ground covered, he had made much better time than any of General Buell’s generals, who were still on the wrong side of the Tennessee River. By 2 P.M., Wallace was at last about to send at least five thousand of his men to the Union right when a dispatch rider galloped up from his rear. “General Grant sends his compliments. He would like you to hurry up.”

  Hurry up? Wallace was dumbfounded. Had he not left on first notice of Grant’s order? Was he not as they spoke almost at the battlefield? His army was marching in perfect unison, formed to fall in proper battle array next to General Sherman on the right of the Union battle line as ordered. Wallace dismissed the confused messenger. But then a second rider, a Captain Rowley of Grant’s personal staff, brought even worse news: “Where are you going, anyhow?”

  “To join Sherman,” Wallace answered.

  “Sherman! Great God! Don’t you know Sherman has been driven back? Why, the whole army is within half a mile of the river, and it’s a question if we are not all going to be driven into it.”

  Instead of coming to the rescue of the Union right wing, Wallace was now on the verge of arriving behind the Confederate Army! “Fortunately for me,” Wallace later recalled of his stunned surprise, “the eclipse of my faculties did not last long, and I was able presently to comprehend that, with my division, I was actually in rear of the whole Confederate army!”

  Why, Rowley wondered, had Wallace taken the inland route when Grant must have told him to march roughly along the river to what was left of the Union base camp? Incredibly, almost in sight of the battlefield, Wallace was now ordered to turn his army completely around, march back up the Shunpike the way he had come, cross over to the river route, and then go back around to Pittsburg Landing! This meant a circular route entailing perhaps another ten miles—in addition to the four to five he had already traveled. “Grant,” Rowley exclaimed to Wallace, “wants you at Pittsburg Landing—and he wants you there like hell.”

  Somehow Grant’s earlier unwritten orders had become copied wrongly and perhaps disastrously garbled. Later in the battle’s aftermath the commanding general felt sure that he had ordered Wallace explicitly to use the river road and meet him at the Union base camp, a five-mile march that would have had the reserves arrive at Pittsburg Landing sometime around 2 P.M., just prior to the furious charges of Albert Sidney Johnston. As the afternoon wore on and the Union Army crumbled, a desperate Grant was irate that Wallace’s reinforcements had not arrived—completely ignorant of the fact that Wallace was nearly already at Shiloh, but out of sight, on the opposite side of the battlefield, and about to march into the enemy’s unexpected rear. It was a chance of a lifetime in some sense to send a fresh Union division at the backside of a tired Confederate wing.

  Yet Grant later grumbled, “I never could see, and do not now see, why any order was necessary further than to direct him to come to Pittsburg Landing, without specifying by what route. His was one of three veteran divisions that had been in battle, and its absence was severely felt.” Grant finished with a sneer, “I presume his idea was that by taking the route he did, he would be able to come around on the flank or rear of the enemy, and thus perform an act of heroism that would rebound to the credit of his command, as well as to the benefit of his company.”

  A taken-aback Wallace now wondered what to do. In sight of the battlefield, he was without warning ordered to retrace his steps to his original camp miles away and then turn back again to follow a marshy and nearly submerged road. Worse, to keep the proper order of his division, Wallace did not order an about-face, the rear now becoming the front. Rather he countermarched the entire division brigade by brigade! The complicated turning maneuver required a painful delay of nearly an hour as the confused army sorted itself out. Unfortunately, Grant’s latest frantic messengers, Colonel McPherson and Captain Rawlins, caught up with Wallace just as he reached the crossroads that morning, and turned to make his way over to the river road—not far from the very spot he had
departed over three hours earlier.

  Thousands of Union soldiers were wounded and dying, and Lew Wallace’s relief division was no closer to the battlefield than when it had first left hours earlier. Grant’s panicky messengers demanded that Wallace now abandon his batteries and march his division the rest of the way on the double to Pittsburg Landing. He refused, insisting that his division must arrive fully armed, in close order, and ready for battle. The panicked McPherson and Rawlins rode back in disgust—with wild tales of Wallace’s incompetence and insubordination. His army was marching in circles!

  Wallace finally arrived at the landing in the rain after dark and groped his way through the mess of Union fugitives, wounded, and dead. No one from Grant’s staff even met him; he spent most of the night getting his division to the right of Sherman on the Union’s last-ditch circumference. Rawlins later wrote to Grant of his encounter that afternoon with Wallace, when the division had finally turned on to the river route:

  Colonel McPherson and I came up to him about 3:30 o’clock P.M. He was then not to exceed four or four and a half miles from the scene of action; the roads were in fine condition; he was marching light; his men were in buoyant spirits, within hearing of the musketry, and eager to get forward. He did not make a mile and a half an hour, although urged and appealed to, to push forward. Had he moved with the rapidity his command were able and anxious to have moved after we overtook him, he would have reached you in time to have engaged the enemy before the close of Sunday’s fight.

  To Wallace nothing was further from the truth. The first day of Shiloh had been a complete frustration. He had been ordered far too late to advance to the battlefield. Grant’s written orders were unintelligible, poorly copied, and unsigned. A succession of messengers brought contradictory and often inaccurate reports of the fighting. His poor men had been forced to march in a near-circle over fourteen miles in a wild goose chase to arrive late at a battlefield a mere six miles away. His army arrived wet, cold, and in the dark—an object of derision rather than celebration.