Ripples of Battle

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Grant apparently had no idea that just days before the battle his own division commanders had communicated with each other via the Shunpike and planned to use that route if mutual reinforcements were necessary. Due to Grant’s ignorance of the Shunpike, Wallace’s division had now marched nearly seven hours and covered over fourteen miles in the worst of conditions—and was still not in line against the Confederates. Even if Grant had wanted him at Pittsburg Landing, Wallace had nevertheless managed hours earlier to approach the opposite end of the battlefield, and was almost close enough to engage the enemy’s rear when ordered instead to withdraw, retrace his route, and march closely parallel to the river. Had he been allowed to continue, he might have crossed over the Owl Creek bridge and theoretically could have appeared behind the Confederate Army with 7,000 fresh troops, slowing their assault before the collapse of the Union resistance at the Hornet’s Nest. In any case, when he finally arrived at Grant’s confused command post at Pittsburg Landing, Wallace was determined to forget the day’s fiasco and make amends the next morning.

  At 6:30 A.M., Wallace’s 3rd Division counterattacked with the rest of the Union army—his fresh 7,000 soldiers and General Buell’s 20,000-man Army of the Ohio meant that Grant’s army had suddenly doubled in size. Indeed, it now outnumbered the tired Confederates by two to one. Wallace performed adequately on the second day, although his troops were not pitted against the main resistance, suffering only 41 killed and 251 wounded in the steady Union counterattack.

  On the evening of the seventh, with the retreat of the Confederate Army, Wallace, as he had at Fort Donelson, once more proclaimed himself a near hero. After all, he and Buell had purportedly turned the tide, lost few men, and chased the rebels off the battlefield. The mixup the day before was quickly forgotten: the now victorious Union Army no doubt would rapidly chase General Beauregard’s defeated army back to Corinth, destroy what was left of it, and then storm the city, opening all of Mississippi to the advance of a huge force of nearly 100,000 troops. There would be enough laurels for all involved. Wallace was sure that his own timely reinforcement at Shiloh meant that his division would play a prominent part in the final kill. Two days after battle he was near ecstatic, and wrote his wife, “My whole command behaved like heroes, never yielding an inch.”

  At first, a relieved nation bought it and agreed that Wallace’s appearance on the second day had indeed helped turn the tide. He was featured in national magazines like Leslie’s and Harper’s Weekly, which prompted floods of congratulatory letters and gifts from his friends and admirers back home. It was Fort Donelson all over again for the dashing young general. Wallace made no effort to hide his pride, predicting a quick pursuit and, with the destruction of the fleeing Confederates, an early end to the Civil War itself. Yet four days after the battle ended, a strange sequence of events began to unfold that would destroy Wallace’s career. And within weeks of Shiloh the purported hero would find himself in disgrace and removed of major command!

  Wallace’s disaster perhaps began on April 12, with the arrival of the punctilious General Halleck. The latter removed Grant from active control of the Army of the Tennessee, apparently on the grounds that Grant had been negligently surprised at Shiloh. As the new commanding officer of all Western forces, the bookish Halleck was at last ready to lead from the field. Now that the terrible battle was over, he would personally manage the final Union pursuit of the defeated.

  Yet Halleck proved disastrous for the Union effort and ruinous for Wallace himself. At first, the plodding Halleck disingenuously boasted that he had been the mastermind of the entire Western campaign and tried to take credit for the strategic victory of Shiloh. Then he faulted Grant for the high casualties of April 6, only to waste weeks in moving his ponderous army a mere thirty miles to Corinth—to find the Confederate Army long gone and the city largely deserted. What was won at Shiloh by Grant was thrown away by Halleck in the days that followed.

  Demanding that his generals erect breastworks and fortifications each night, the jittery Halleck often made less than a mile’s progress a day—a slow-moving Albert Sidney Johnston had covered the same distance from Corinth to Shiloh in the April rains in little more than three days. Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar had often marched their armies of the preindustrial age thirty miles in less than ten hours. In contrast, Halleck’s progress was almost comical, as his huge confident army timidly crept toward a demoralized and numerically inferior beaten force.

  The dawdling Union pursuit, the escape of the defeated Confederate Army, the inexplicable removal of a popular Grant, the mounting criticism of the dilatory Halleck, the final tallying of the horrific Union losses at Shiloh—12,217 casualties with over 1,700 killed—all set the stage for months of controversy and mutual recriminations as Shiloh was reexamined as no American battle before. The press and the War Department in Washington seemed to forget that Shiloh was a tactical victory and a strategic bonanza; instead, both demanded heads for the appalling losses and the escape of the defeated Confederates. Shiloh would have been seen as nothing novel by summer 1864; but in spring 1862 the very idea of well over 10,000 casualties in a single engagement was appalling to the Northern populace and demanded punitive measures. Had Halleck destroyed the vulnerable retreating Confederates, the mistakes of April 6 would have been forgotten; instead, the Northern public gradually was told that its youth had been butchered without a sure victory or indeed much discernable change in the immediate strategic picture in the West at large.

  Worse still for Wallace, the mounting tension between Halleck and Grant would soon make his own position nearly untenable. After Halleck’s laggard generalship eventually led to his transfer back east, Grant by midsummer was returned to command of the Western theater—with the endorsement of Lincoln (“I can’t spare this man, he fights”). Although Grant had survived Halleck’s efforts to sabotage his career, he was nevertheless still shocked by the fury of public criticism of his conduct at Shiloh among the Northern press and politicians. Especially galling were the often wild charges that he had been absent from the battlefield when the shooting started, may well have been drunk, was completely surprised, had ordered no entrenchments, and thus was responsible for the first day’s shocking casualties.

  In reaction, slowly Grant directed his wrath onto Wallace and subtly began to suggest a scenario that might account for the near fiasco of the first day: had his orders only been followed by Wallace, the Union losses were entirely avoidable. Seven thousand reinforcements, as he had planned, would have arrived by 2 to 3 P.M. at the latest. Their surprise appearance would have stopped the Confederate onslaught cold. The Hornet’s Nest would not have fallen. General Buell’s help would not have been necessary. If any general was responsible for the shocking butchery, perhaps it was the young, amateur, and flamboyant Lew Wallace, not himself.

  Three other events conspired to aid Grant’s defense. First, Halleck, who had come off the worse in his duplicitous efforts to besmear Grant, was wary of tangling further with the hero of Fort Donelson—and was only too happy to join in to deflect Grant’s wrath from himself onto Wallace. Thus he would henceforth prove deaf to all of Wallace’s appeals for an inquiry into the battle. So too, Sherman, the newfound hero of Shiloh, was not eager to enter the controversy. He also had been surprised the first day and had no wish to reexamine the issue of culpability in any great detail. Moreover, he was now a friend of Grant’s and owed his resurrection in part to Grant’s support; in turn, Sherman had been instrumental in persuading Grant not to quit after Halleck took command of his army in the battle’s aftermath. Neither Halleck nor Sherman then had any desire to defend the mercurial Wallace against a national hero. Wallace somehow had found himself without a friend: of the three most powerful men in the Union Army, two were openly hostile, and one at best neutral.

  Third and most grievously, Wallace’s own obstreperous character and reckless talk now cemented his demise. In his official report after the battle, Wallace was careful to defend hi
s actions, but in a way that only made Grant look worse, especially through his emphasis that he was not ordered to the battlefield until 11:30 A.M. By whatever route he took, Wallace reasonably pointed out, Grant’s initial delay ensured that seven thousand men would miss the critical first eight hours of the fighting. And even if he had taken a route different from what Grant purportedly ordered, his own march was nearly completed and had resulted in placing his army unknown at the enemy’s rear—and perhaps poised for a critical counterattack that might have saved the Union forces.

  Grant was furious over Wallace’s implications, and especially any public suggestions that Wallace had played a key role in the victory when he had missed the tough fighting the first day and lost hardly any men the second. Contradicting his first official report written on April 9 that had praised Generals McClernand and Wallace—both “had maintained their places with credit to themselves and the cause”—most of Grant’s numerous later accounts of the battle painted a damning portrait of Wallace’s incompetence. In fact, Grant claimed that he had ordered Wallace to move at 11 A.M., not 11:30—and not once but three times! While his official orders were not written but copied by a messenger, his own staff could “vouch” that he had expressly commanded the use of the river route. Furthermore, common sense should have convinced anyone that a Union general in earshot of the fighting should not have marched in circles for seven hours to cover a mere six miles. Grant’s final account of the battle, reiterated in his memoirs two decades later, would prove Wallace’s undoing.

  Wallace’s shrill counterefforts only made things worse. Earlier during the Donelson campaign he had attacked Gen. Charles F. Smith, Grant’s now-martyred mentor, and took undue credit for the victory. Now in Shiloh’s aftermath, he once again complained publicly that General McClernand, his equal in rank, was wrongly given priority of future action. Worse still, he harped to aides of General Halleck that their commander’s slowness in pursuing the Confederates threatened to throw away the victory gained at Shiloh—astute though unwise criticism that got back to the hypersensitive Halleck within hours. Wallace soon gained a reputation for troublemaking and second-guessing his West Point betters. Before he knew it, by late June, a mere three months after Shiloh, Wallace found himself back home in Indiana and without a division.

  He turned frantic. Desperate to get back into the war, shamed by the sudden reversal of fortune, and near paranoid about the mere suggestion that he was in any way culpable for the hundreds of Union dead on Shiloh’s first day, Wallace now became obsessed with clearing his name. He went first to the papers. But his old friends at the New York Tribune and the Cincinnati Gazette either declined to get involved or offered only meager defenses of a Wallace now out of favor with the powers that be.

  He mailed further accounts to Halleck and the War Department in Washington, replete with maps and detailed exegesis. Halleck, ever the intriguer, simply showed them to a furious Grant, who was further irate and responded with more affidavits from his loyal subordinates “proving” Wallace’s negligence. Wallace in turn applied to Secretary of War Stanton for a formal court of inquiry. He finally approached Sherman, who at least spoke on his behalf to Grant, but to no avail. Yet Sherman ended up giving Wallace the best advice yet: forget the matter, keep quiet, and hope that an increasingly famous Grant would be magnanimous enough to give him a second chance.

  Wallace dropped the formal inquiry but ignored the rest of Sherman’s advice, and seemed to think that the momentous events now unfolding in the war were secondary to a proper audit of a battle long past and better put to rest. He now enlisted surrogate apologists in the popular press, as he himself wrote tirelessly for the next ten years to reporters, editors, biographers, and historians in hopes of restoring the proper picture of Shiloh—one sensitive to his own dilemma with Grant and absolving him of any responsibility for the Union dead. He even published a short treatise, “General Wallace’s Military Record,” in which he claimed with some exaggeration that Grant himself had always found Wallace “blameless.” Unfortunately, Wallace could not help but add that “If my march to the battlefield as I began it had not been countermanded, we would have done more than win a victory the first day—we would have captured a large part of the Confederate Army.”

  That admission—a boast that in theory might well have been true—undermined Wallace’s position in various ways. He now shifted from defense to the attack: Grant’s first order that was garbled by subordinates was not the real problem, but rather his subsequent and quite clear commands to reverse Wallace midroute on the Shunpike. The effect was to allege that the soon-to-be President of the United States had thrown away a decisive Union victory. Second, Wallace’s brag in turn weakened his earlier defense that he took the Shunpike from a natural desire to join Sherman’s last reported position. Now post facto he seemed to be suggesting that all along he might have taken the overland route not merely to bolster the Union line, but rather deliberately to hit the Rebels unexpectedly from the rear. Was Wallace, then, insubordinate the entire time in quests of glory?

  Third, few students of the battle would believe that a single division of less than 7,000 men could have stopped the Confederate advance that was sweeping toward Pittsburg Landing—especially when on the second day of the battle all of Buell’s 20,000, and Wallace’s 3rd Division, joined with Grant’s battered forces, took hours to push the Confederates back without shattering their cohesion or ruining their army. Moreover, Confederates later claimed that they knew of Wallace’s arrival and were prepared to bar his passage over the remaining bridges. In any case, Wallace’s zeal to clear his name more often had the opposite effect of antagonizing far more powerful rivals who were not about to accept any culpability for Shiloh. At the same time he was showing a certain shrillness if not inconsistency in his own purportedly principled defense—all at a time of Grant’s rising power and a general American desire to forget the horrific losses of the recent war.

  Gen. Lew Wallace never recovered from the ignominy of Shiloh nor regained Grant’s confidence. “I could manage him if he had less rank,” Grant wrote back in rebuke of Halleck’s inquiry about bringing Wallace back to frontline command. Although Wallace would later play a key role in the defense of Cincinnati, assume the influential military command of Maryland, help defend Washington from Jubal Early’s raid of July 1864 at the critical battle of Monocacy, and serve on commissions investigating everything from Lincoln’s assassination to the Confederate prison wardens at Andersonville, he could not and would not let go of Shiloh. Before April 6 he had been a rising star and a savior of Union lives; after the battle he was unfairly discredited and blamed for thousands of dead Americans. Others could forget Shiloh, but Lew Wallace would not.

  We shall never know exactly what happened the first day at Shiloh. But the preponderance of evidence, both written records and drawn from later interviews, in fact favors much of Wallace’s account. Most likely, Grant sent an unclear order through an aide without specifying the exact route of advance. He was also probably ignorant of the Shunpike route, and then became so immersed in the chaos of the Union disaster that he felt no need—and had no time—for specifics. The more reflective and occasionally fussy Wallace at the rear logically assumed that he was to take the shorter inland road to arrive at Sherman’s right. Perhaps he also entertained private hopes that his sudden appearance on his “secret” road might surprise the Confederates and gain him renown. In any case, Grant should have ordered Wallace to march much earlier in the day and should have given him precise written orders about the direction and purpose of his mission. His aides should have allowed Wallace’s veteran division in transit to enter the battlefield from the Shunpike and hit the Confederates from the rear.

  All that being said, neither general had accurate information during the confused melee of the first hours at Shiloh, and there were plenty of far greater blunders on both sides during the battle that affected the eventual outcome every bit as much as Wallace’s late arrival on the f
irst evening. Grant, remember, was over ten miles away from his army when it was attacked. He had ordered no entrenchments or even rudimentary precautions, and had allowed an army of forty thousand Confederates to get within rifle shot of his forces without being noticed. And, far worse, Halleck had allowed an entire defeated army to flee.

  Lew Wallace would live for another forty-three years after Shiloh. He became heavily involved in Mexican politics, served as a territorial governor of New Mexico, and was appointed by President Garfield, another Shiloh veteran, as United States minister to the Ottoman court at Constantinople. Yet throughout his long and near storybook career—he dealt on numerous occasions with Billy the Kid, the Apache renegade Victorio, and Abdul-Hamid II, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire—Wallace continued his obsession with Shiloh, all the more desperately so as his chief nemesis, Ulysses S. Grant, grew in stature from General of the Army to President of the United States. In some sense, Lew Wallace’s entire life between 1862 and 1906 is a chronicle of his efforts to pursue the ghost of the Shunpike.

  After Wallace’s victory at the battle of Monocacy that helped save Washington, D.C., he found himself for a time on somewhat better terms with Grant. The latter even purportedly admitted to him in August 1864, “If I had known then what I know now, I would have ordered you where you were marching when stopped”—a belated admission that Wallace would often repeat but could not corroborate. But for all Grant’s talk of bringing Wallace back to frontline action with the Army of the Potomac, Wallace was more or less ostracized and left alone back in Baltimore until the war ended, a general without an army. Shiloh was simply too large an albatross.