Ripples of Battle

by Victor Davis Hanson

  William Wyler’s monumental 1959 remake with Charlton Heston as Ben-Hur (and another 365 speaking roles) was even more successful—nominated for twelve Academy Awards, winning eleven (including Best Picture and Best Actor). The panoramic film grossed over $40 million its first year alone; its primetime television debut in February 1971 (shown over four nights) achieved the highest rating of any movie presented on television up to that time. The Hollywood extravaganzas in turn reignited book sales nearly sixty years after Wallace’s death. By 1960, Ben-Hur had appeared in over sixty English-language editions—and is selling well in its third century of publication.

  Ben-Hur radically affected American popular culture. Everything from bicycles and cigars to toys and drinks—and even towns—were named Ben-Hur. Chariot racing became an American folk spectacle at rodeos and fairs. The modern idea that historical epics—Quo Vadis, Spartacus, or Gone With the Wind—can appeal widely to supposedly ahistorical Americans we owe largely to the popularizer Lew Wallace. But more important, Wallace’s novel began the strange nexus in American life, for good or ill, between literature, motion pictures, advertising, and popular culture. The novel led to the stage and then to the movies, but in the process it spun out entire ancillary industries of songs, skits, ads, clothes, and fan clubs, ensuring that within fifty years of its publication, nearly every American had heard the word “Ben-Hur” without necessarily ever reading the book.

  In that sense, Ben-Hur prefigures the world of The Ten Commandments to Gladiator (the latter’s movie script is hauntingly similar to Wallace’s own play Commodus) and established the now predictable evolution of successful novel to movie blockbuster to advertising gold mine to permanent place in the popular folk tradition of America. Wallace’s brilliant adventure tale accounts for most of the larger Ben-Hur’s mystique—but not quite all. At least some of the novel’s inexplicable popularity was due to the tireless plugging of the author himself, who for two decades made it a point to tour, appear in public, give lectures and signings, oversee dramatic adaptations, answer fan letters, and promote his book with influential Americans (like Garfield, Grant, and Sherman) in a frenzied effort to become known, rich—and so perhaps at last taken seriously in wiping away the stain of Shiloh.

  While America had long honored its gifted men of letters like Longfellow or Twain, the Wallace phenomenon was something entirely different. Wallace’s apotheosis presaged the twentieth century in its transmogrification of the acclaimed writer to popular icon, a literary celebrity whose fame rested not with book reviews in literary journals, but entirely as a result of popular readership and sales figures—and mostly oblivious to the opinion of intellectuals, academics, and other novelists. At his death Wallace had become a national folk hero, one mobbed by the American public, called on tour for an endless series of Ben-Hur lectures, hounded by devoted fan clubs, and canonized by politicians (his likeness sits in Statuary Hall in the Capitol building in Washington).

  Such were the strange wages of the missed road on April 6, 1862. If today most Americans are ignorant of Lew Wallace, it is equally true—and perhaps just as regrettable—that they are far more likely to know something of his Ben-Hur than anything at all of the battle of Shiloh. “My God!” Wallace remarked in 1899 when first examining the stage sets to Ben-Hur. “Did I set all this in motion?” He did—but Shiloh had as well.

  Night: The Klansman

  As Sherman braved fire to reform his perimeter, as Albert Sidney Johnston was bleeding to death in the early afternoon of the first day of the battle, and as Lew Wallace was reversing course and returning to the river route to Pittsburg Landing, Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest joined his cavalry regiment in the furious Confederate assault against the surrounded Union troops in the Hornet’s Nest. Prior to his late entry into the melee, Forrest had become increasingly restless with his assigned minor supporting role. Shiloh was certainly not the colonel’s type of war. He much preferred fluid skirmishing between rapidly moving mounted columns of intrepid rangers. Instead, the morning’s fighting had turned into a static, ugly infantry slugfest. At Shiloh numbers and firepower, not cunning and audacity, were more likely to bring success amid deep mud, thickets, and ravines.

  When the shooting had started, the lowly and mostly unknown Colonel Forrest had been given the ignominious task of protecting the Confederate flank at Lick Creek—largely a safe assignment to the rear and at the periphery of the battlefield. For the first five hours of fighting Forrest waited patiently, obedient to his orders to watch the right flank should any Union reservists come up the river to land at Hamburg and turn the Confederates’ rear. Finally, Forrest had had enough of his inaction. He remarked to his men, “Boys, do you hear that rattle of musketry and the roar of artillery?” When they shouted, “Yes, yes,” he bellowed in reply, “Do you know what it means? It means that our friends and brothers are falling by hundreds at the hands of the enemy and we are here guarding a damned creek. We did not enter the service for such work, and the reputation of the regiment does not justify our commanding officer in leaving us here while we are needed elsewhere. Let’s go and help them. What do you say?”

  When his men roared back in the affirmative, Colonel Forrest rode into the first major pitched battle of his career. Before that decision to disregard orders and gallop toward the firing, Forrest had been relatively ignored among the Southern high command. His sound advice either to defend the garrison or break out en masse was ignored at Fort Donelson, whose timid commanders instead surrendered thousands of valuable soldiers to Grant. Forrest also had no formal, much less military, education. In fact, he was nearly illiterate. He had not been sought out by the new Confederate government, but instead had raised his own brigade of Tennessee horsemen and supplied them with his own weapons. Most likely, his own shady past in slave trading made him suspect among the aristocratic Southern officer corps.

  Yet his dramatic entry into the Hornet’s Nest would mark the first of three remarkable acts at Shiloh, which over the next twenty-four hours would magically transform the Memphis slave trader into the legendary icon Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. Just as Sherman’s near-death experiences at Shiloh would resurrect his professional life with untold misery to come for the South, and as Wallace’s missed route would lead to the creation of the cultural phenomenon of Ben-Hur, so too Forrest’s day at Shiloh would prove the catalyst for a remarkable military career that had consequences for the entire nation well beyond his Civil War years.

  Nothing could have offered a more drastic change of landscape from his previous sentry duty. Forrest’s cavalrymen now went from the quiet of Lick Creek into the inferno of the Hornet’s Nest. Major General Cheatham’s efforts, like most of the previous Confederate piecemeal attacks against the frenzied and surrounded Northerners, had been repulsed with heavy losses. Desperate Union artillerymen firing from the protection of the sunken road continued to rain canister across the approaching Southerners. When Forrest rode up, hundreds of Confederates were reeling backward from another failed charge. The rambunctious Forrest could not find any superior to order him forward. He was instead forced to rely on his own initiative. “I will charge under my own orders,” he told General Cheatham. His nearly five hundred men abruptly galloped into the fire, making their way to within fifty yards of the Union lines before faltering in muddy ground and rough thickets. Yet Forrest’s audacity had emboldened another effort from the exhausted Cheatham’s infantrymen. The latter sensed that the Union circle was at last shrinking ever smaller and on the verge of collapsing altogether. Cheatham’s own subsequent charge, joined in anew by Forrest’s men, helped crack the Union circle.

  For the next three hours Forrest helped in finishing off the Hornet’s Nest and pursuing hundreds of Prentiss’s men who fled toward the refuge of the Tennessee River. And after General Prentiss surrendered the remaining two thousand trapped men in the late afternoon, Forrest pressed his way still forward with other scattered forces to the cliffs above Pittsburg Landing, marking the high-water mark
of the Confederate advance of the first day of Shiloh. It was a spectacular sight! Below, thousands of Union soldiers were rushing to the river in panic, gunboats steaming up to provide some desperate support for thousands more milling around—even as some fifty batteries rushed into position to form a last-ditch perimeter before Grant’s entire shattered command was pushed into the river.

  Time was now critical. The rambunctious Forrest was adamant that there was only a window of a few minutes to crush the dazed Northerners before darkness—and before reinforcements from across the river, and the increasing fire of dozens of Union cannon, would put an end to the Confederate advance. But by the time Forrest’s request to storm Pittsburg Landing was forwarded to Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk, it was nearly dark, and the advanced Confederate companies on the ridge were coming under steady artillery assault.

  Still, as he retreated for the night to safer ground, Forrest was even more convinced that the landing had to be assaulted sometime that very evening, before reinforcements swelled the Union army at sunrise. At the very outset, Albert Sidney Johnston and his generals had envisioned crushing Grant’s army through a flank attack on the right aimed at the Union base at Pittsburg Landing, a sudden stroke designed to finish the Army of the Tennessee before it united with the Army of the Ohio. Now it seemed that a nondescript colonel alone of the Southern command wished to follow the original intent of the Confederate tactical and strategic plan by sweeping down to the river before Buell’s army crossed.

  Unfortunately, Forrest’s request to crash into the last Union position was rejected by Polk. The general countered that the night, the exhaustion of his men, the sudden arrival of Union batteries and gunboats at the landing, and the apparent expectation of an easy final assault the next morning, all that made such a risky assault unnecessary, if not unwise. Forrest was dumbfounded—but still convinced that Union reinforcements during the night might the next day nullify all of the Confederate gains. Below—even as Grant was meeting Sherman to assure him of a victorious counterattack the next morning, as Lew Wallace finally pulled in from Crump’s Landing with his fresh division, as rumors began to spread that the corpse brought out of the Hornet’s Nest was not a Colonel “Jackson,” but none other than the supreme commander, Albert Sidney Johnston himself, and as the tempestuous General Buell ferried his massive 20,000-man Army of the Ohio across the Tennessee River—an exasperated Nathan Bedford Forrest began to stalk the shadows in desperation.

  Events that night would prove his worst fears correct. As the exhausted Confederate Army slept or scrounged among the captured opulent Union camps, and as its stupefied command retired for the evening, Forrest began to reconnoiter the Union lines. What he discovered was frightening. His patrols, many disguised in blue Union overcoats, in early evening brought back disturbing news. The Army of the Ohio was not miles away—as faulty Confederate intelligence had claimed during the morning. In fact, it was now crossing the Tennessee and pouring thousands of men into the Union camp at Pittsburg Landing!

  Whole fresh regiments were streaming into Grant’s demoralized and beaten army while the confident though exhausted Southerners slept. General Prentiss, captured with the collapse of the Hornet’s Nest, was prescient, not boasting, when he had matter-of-factly related to his captors that the Union Army would return in renewed fury on early Monday morning. The South unfortunately was now fighting a rare man in Ulysses S. Grant. Far from being stunned by the near collapse of his army, the Union commander was not licking his considerable wounds, but eager to launch an offensive before sunrise of the second day of battle.

  Forrest, however, found no one to share his amazing intelligence coup. His immediate superior, Brigade Gen. James R. Chalmers, was of no help. While sympathetic, Chalmers possessed insufficient rank to call out the troops. He had no idea where Generals Hardee, Bragg, and Beauregard were anyway. Forrest remarked to Chalmers, “You are the first general I have found who knows where his men are!” The barely literate Colonel Forrest’s warning went unheeded:

  I have been way down along the river-bank, close to the enemy. I could see the lights on the steamboats and hear distinctively the orders given in the disembarkation of the troops. They are receiving reinforcements by the thousands, and if this army does not move and attack them between now and daylight, and before other reinforcements arrive, it will be whipped like hell before ten o’clock tomorrow.

  Chalmers later reported that when Forrest at last hunted down the Confederate leadership and presented the same disturbing news to Generals Breckinridge and Hardee, “the unlettered colonel was told to go back to his regiment.” In any case, it was now too late—nearly 3 A.M., with a renewed Union attack less than three hours away. The supposedly crushed Grant, not the victorious Beauregard, was eager to renew hostilities. Forrest’s second legendary feat at Shiloh—roaming the battlefield into the early morning Cassandra-like in making desperate pleas to rouse the Confederates to preempt the Union counterattack—like his earlier charge into the Hornet’s Nest, would later raise the obscure colonel to heroic status within the army. Yet both experiences also soured him on the competence and bravery of the far better bred and educated Southern high command.

  The next morning, events transpired precisely as Forrest had feared. Grant’s surviving army was joined by Buell and Wallace. A combined force of well over 40,000 Union soldiers—well over half of them fresh—now poured into the Confederate lines, steadily driving them back beyond the original demarcation lines of the prior morning. All ground won on Sunday was lost in Monday’s first hours. A dispirited Forrest spent the morning rounding up stragglers, protecting infantry from flank attacks, and occasionally dismounting to join in sporadic Confederate counterattacks. But by noon, less than 15,000 remaining able-bodied Confederates were now on the verge of being demolished by the Union juggernaut.

  Wisely, Beauregard at last ordered a general retreat, as artillery and cavalry—Forrest’s regiment especially was preeminent—disguised the withdrawal with vigorous skirmishing. By Monday afternoon, what was left of the Southern army was at last safely detached and on its way back to Corinth, Mississippi. It took hours for the bewildered advancing Union army to grasp that its tenacious enemy was in fact retreating rather than readying for yet another murderous counterassault. By Monday evening, both sides were disengaged. The battle of Shiloh was over.

  Or almost over. When Grant at last realized that his enemy was shattered and retreating, on Tuesday morning he ordered the redoubtable Sherman to pursue the demoralized Southerners. About four miles distant from his original headquarters at Shiloh Church, Sherman at last came upon the Confederate rear guard at a former logging camp called Fallen Timbers. Here Forrest seems to have left the world of Confederate gallantry and entered the realm of heroic myth where gods traverse the battlefield slaying with impunity mere mortals. We have a fairly accurate account of what happened next, inasmuch as both Union and Confederate witnesses—among them William Tecumseh Sherman—agree on most of the events.

  Sherman caught up with the rear guard of the Confederate Army sometime on the morning of Tuesday, April 8. The terrain—muddy and covered with rotten timber—favored Sherman’s infantrymen. They vastly outnumbered Forrest’s skeleton rearguard force of some 150 cavalrymen aided by a motley assortment of 200 rangers from various scattered companies. Inexplicably, Forrest ordered his ragtag band to charge directly against the advancing Union infantry, who now numbered over 400 and were supported by another 200 cavalry—and in turn bolstered by an entire brigade in reserve.

  Sherman in his memoirs matter-of-factly chronicled the sudden collapse of his men:

  The enemy’s cavalry came down boldly at a charge, led by General Forrest in person, breaking through our line of skirmishers; when the regiment of infantry, without cause, broke, threw away their muskets, and fled. The ground was admirably adapted for a defense of infantry against cavalry, being miry and covered with fallen timber. . . .

  In a private letter to his brother John, he wa
s more direct:

  The Regiment did break, move to the rear and gather behind the flanks of a Brigade I held in reserve. We afterwards gathered up the muskets on the ground. I only found 3 dead secessionists on the ground, killed by the skirmishers in advance. The Regiment itself killed none.

  Despite the uneven ground, the sheer fury of Forrest’s first charge scattered both the Union infantry regiment and its supporting cavalry. But then Forrest refused to halt and rode into Sherman’s entire reserve brigade. Suddenly he found himself quite alone, far in front of his retreating rangers—and now surrounded by hundreds of Union riflemen. “Shoot him! Stick him! Knock him off his horse,” they yelled as dozens rushed Forrest. He fired off his pistol and wheeled around—only to be showered with a hail of bullets that rent his coat and slammed into his horse. Then one soldier ran up and shot his rifle point-blank into Forrest’s hip, the bullet driving up through his lower back to lodge next to the spine. His right leg went immediately numb and useless. Forrest was about to be dragged off his mortally wounded mount, no doubt to be summarily executed by hordes of furious bluecoats.