Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  About 8:40 A.M., the four brigades of Pat Cleburne’s division and McNair’s brigade of McCown’s division approach the shaky Union line held by Baldwin, Post, and Carlin south of the Wilkinson Pike. Cleburne dashes from brigade to brigade, trying to keep the line together in the rough terrain. It is a nearly impossible task, and Cleburne fears a Yankee ambush; but Hardee has told him to press the enemy hard, and Cleburne keeps driving ahead.

  The ragtag Federal line holds in the fields below the Gresham house for only a few minutes. Baldwin is still deploying when a cavalry sergeant brings orders to fall back. The sergeant isn’t sure which general gave the order—McCook or the equally revenant Richard Johnson—but swears that the man was indeed a general. Baldwin is tempted to disobey, but he can see a heavy line of Rebel infantry stretching across his entire front to well beyond his flank. He gives the order.

  With Baldwin pulling back, Post and Carlin must retreat or be enveloped. Carlin tries to get Davis’s attention. But Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis is behaving more like a first sergeant than a division commander as he drives men back into ranks with oaths, threats, and the flat of his saber. Carlin pulls a staff officer aside, shouts over the din, “Go to Colonel Woodruff. Tell him that we can’t hold more than a few minutes and that he should prepare to pull back.” When the staff officer is gone, Carlin lights his pipe, wincing involuntarily as a minié ball flicks by his ear. Then he walks, hands behind his back, down the rear of his line, puffing thoughtfully.

  Cheatham again throws the brigades of Vaughan and Manigault against Woodruff and Greusel of Sheridan’s division. Cheatham rides back and forth behind Manigault’s line, yelling: “Give ’em hell, boys!”

  It fancies Bishop Polk to fall into his prelatic identity, though his thoughts are bloody. “Give them what General Cheatham says, men! Give them what he says.” He stifles a smile. How wonderfully preposterous! He who cares nothing any longer for little sins, for little indulgences, to adopt a decorous tone while sending men to their deaths. It is almost too absurd, would make him laugh out loud if he were not enjoying the joke so hugely. He, the eater of souls.

  Behind Sheridan’s line, Bush and Houghtaling shift their guns from supporting Carlin’s line to ripping up Manigault’s attack. Colonel George Roberts, commanding Third Brigade, hurries to Sheridan. “Phil, let me charge,” he pleads. “We can drive them back, knock the pegs clear out from under them.”

  Sheridan stares at Roberts. Phil Sheridan long ago got over any regret for his own lack of size and good looks. But Roberts is all that an adolescent Phil Sheridan, his knuckles scabbed and his jaw swollen from his latest fight, might have hoped to be: a man who truly looks like a warrior. “Go ahead, Colonel. But don’t go too far. I don’t fancy having to advance the rest of the division to rescue you.”

  Roberts leaves one regiment behind to hold his part of the line and leads his other three forward. His adjutant gallops ahead to clear the way. He finds the 88th Illinois hotly engaged behind a rail fence, the shells of Houghtaling’s and Bush’s batteries howling overhead to explode out front in Manigault’s line. He screams to make himself heard, but Colonel Sherman cannot understand. The adjutant runs forward and by gesture shows the men at the fence that they must tear it down to make a passage for Roberts’ regiments. Sherman and his men turn to look, see the precise blue ranks coming as if on parade, battle flags flying, officers on horseback following. Hastily, they tear down the fence and scuttle out of the way.

  The gap in the fence is too small for more than one regiment to pass at a time. The 42nd Illinois squeezes through, halts out front. Roberts—tall, powerful, curly black hair and beard glistening with the mist—rides bareheaded the length of the ranks, sword uplifted, grinning. He does not have to speak and could not be heard if he did over the cheering of his men. He sweeps his sword forward, and the 42nd charges. And even those veterans so horrified by war that in later years they will never speak of it, save to decry its tragedy, will secretly recall the aching glory of this charge.

  The 42nd hurtles forward in a true bayonet charge: a tactic that, though often praised, is becoming a practical rarity. Manigault’s men see the long rows of steel coming at them and, ignoring their officers’ shouts, fall back in a rush more than equaling the speed of the 42nd’s advance. From his position behind Greusel’s line, Sheridan watches what he had feared start to happen: The 42nd will plunge into the maw of the Confederate line, the 51st Illinois and the 22nd Illinois hastening after, all to be swallowed entire. He shouts to his chief of staff: “Go out there and reel them in! They are not to pursue beyond support!”

  Sheridan knows that he has made a mistake. Under George Roberts’s spell he has given way to a romantic inclination that no commander can long afford. There is no place for the glorious charge in this war. That is the stuff of generations gone. War fought with rifled muskets and rifled cannon must be logical. That is how Phil Sheridan would wage war, with a rationality molten-hot, inevitable—as he and his kind are inevitable and George Roberts, Pat Cleburne, and theirs inevitably doomed. Again Sheridan hears Sill’s voice whispering that he has overstayed his time. He orders the triumphant Roberts into a new position just south of the Wilkinson Pike, then begins pulling back the other brigades, placing Schaefer to the right of Roberts and Greusel to the right of Schaefer. Hescock’s battery sets up on a knoll to protect Roberts’s right, while Houghtaling’s and Bush’s batteries keep blazing away at the Rebels to the front.

  Colonel Arthur Manigault supposes that he cannot blame every reverse on the inefficiency of army professionals. His men have run like sheep before Roberts’s bayonet charge. But, goddamn it, they would have held if it hadn’t been for the pounding they’d already taken from the infernal Yankee artillery. And the lack of battery counterfire he can blame on the unbusinesslike behavior of the professionals.

  Manigault is leading his shame-faced men back to the far side of the valley, the Union cannon fire still raining down, when he meets Brigadier General George Maney bringing his Tennessee brigade up in support. “You’re late, General!” Manigault snaps.

  “No, Colonel, I’m not. I just received orders from General Cheatham to advance to your support.”

  Manigault grumbles, waves a hand as if to erase his impoliteness. “I’m sorry, George. We just took a drubbing and didn’t look good taking it. It’s the damned Yankee cannon. We won’t break that line until we either get some decent artillery support or take those batteries ourselves.”

  One of Houghtaling’s shells explodes fifty yards to the right, just short of Manigault’s ranks. “Yes,” Maney says. “I noticed that they don’t seem short of ammunition.”

  “No, they’re not. Nor are they short of skill. Now I say we forget about support from our artillery and try taking those guns ourselves. If you… .”

  For the next twenty minutes, Colonel Arthur Manigault sketches his plan, interspersing its steps with diatribes against military inefficiency. All the while, the Yankee batteries rain shells on Manigault’s and Maney’s men, exposed on the field, the earth jarring beneath them. But despite the absurd vulnerability of their position, the soldiers do not break ranks and run, but hold, compelled by something more than bravado and less than insanity, something inexplicable in the custom of heedless Southern valor.

  A plan agreed to, Manigault and Maney start their brigades forward a few minutes before 9:00 A.M. Maney has chosen as his objective Bush’s battery, which is still firing from its forward position just south of the Harding house. Simultaneously, Manigault will sweep wide of the brick kiln southeast of the house to capture Houghtaling’s battery.

  Released from their long wait under the fire of the Yankee guns, Maney’s men go forward almost jauntily. Ahead, Bush’s battery ceases fire and limbers up, the two regiments in support falling back over a low ridge. Maney’s men cheer, break into a run. Cresting the ridge, they are greeted by a barrage from Houghtaling’s reinforced battery of eight guns.

  The Yankee gunners hav
e had a long minute to refine their aim while Bush’s battery and infantry support are getting clear, and the eight rounds of rifled case explode from eighteen to twenty-four feet above the heads of the Rebels silhouetted atop the ridge. The hundreds of lead balls and the even more numerous splinters of casing tear through Maney’s ranks. Still, the momentum of the Rebel rush is sufficient to propel the survivors over the top of the hill. They manage to re-form at the bottom as Houghtaling’s guns shift to solid shot and canister. “You’re shooting at your own men!” a Rebel colonel shouts and the cry is taken up by the men in the ranks. They believe it, too, for shouldn’t Manigault’s brigade have gobbled up the Yankee battery in rear of the ridge? This must be a Secesh battery, rushed forward in the wake of Manigault’s charge, and turned now, by terrible accident, on its friends.

  The Yankee gunners hear a faint wail from the butternut lines, glance at each other, shrug, keep firing. They are all nearly deaf by now anyway, and would not believe if they could hear.

  Despite all evidence of deadly intent on the part of Houghtaling’s battery and its two regiments of infantry support, Maney’s men are in the grip of a fundamental derangement of reality so intense as to border on mass psychosis. Colonel H. R. Field, commanding the 1st–27th Tennessee, is one of the few skeptics. “Lieutenant James,” he shouts. “Go find out who owns those guns.”

  James kicks his mount into a gallop toward the guns, only to take a canister ball through the chest before he can make a determination. He falls from his horse, dying in the back yard of the Harding house, the dwelling of his maternal grandparents until war drove them away. A second officer immediately rides out to complete the mission, coming within forty yards of the battery and returning unharmed through a cloud of canister and minié balls to tell Colonel Field that the guns are decidedly Yankee. But even when Field’s men open fire, Maney’s other regimental commanders remain unconvinced. The color sergeant of the 4th Tennessee marches ten paces to the front of the line, waving the unit’s colors. For ten minutes he stands there, minié balls pocking the ground about him. Still the colonels are unconvinced. The color sergeant of the 6th–9th Tennessee mounts a feed crib, waves the regimental colors. A shell from one of Houghtaling’s Parrotts blows the crib from under him. And at last the colonels are convinced. Yet Maney does not charge. Instead, he brings up Smith’s Mississippi Battery to duel with Houghtaling, and the men must hug the earth under the fire of the guns.

  Phil Sheridan is streaming with sweat, the rivulets stinging the abrasions below his armpits caused by the too-tight fit of Sill’s uniform blouse. He shrugs it off, tears out the offending seams, pulls it back on, all the while gauging the firing left and right. His own line is holding, but pressure is building beyond his right flank, where the brigades of Bushrod Johnson, Lucius Polk, and S.A.M. Wood of Cleburne’s division are wheeling in on Woodruff, Carlin, and the few other survivors of Davis’s and Johnson’s divisions.

  Again the dead Sill’s voice whispers of discretion, of falling back. But Sheridan is not ready. He kicks his horse into a gallop, rides to see for certain the situation to his right. He finds only a thin screen remaining to oppose Cleburne’s division. Baldwin’s brigade is gone, Post’s nearly so. Of Carlin’s brigade, only Hans Heg’s stalwart 15th Wisconsin remains largely intact. Heg’s Norwegians and Swedes turn when the short, stumpy officer on the big horse explodes from the cedars to survey their thin line with fierce, protuberant eyes. Sheridan swears mightily, spins his horse, and gallops back the way he came. Heg’s men turn back to watching the approaching butternut line in the fields to their front. They have Hans Heg, are unimpressed by anyone else.

  Riding behind Woodruff’s line, Sheridan has to push through a steady stream of exhausted men—cartridge boxes empty and muskets fouled— trudging to the rear. Woodruff himself is sitting on a stump watching them go. He looks up at Sheridan. “They’re finished up, General. No force on earth can turn them around.”

  I could turn them if they were mine, Sheridan thinks, but he does not disdain Woodruff for not being Phil Sheridan. “Never mind, Colonel. Once they have cartridges they will feel more like fighting. You should go find General Davis.”

  Colonel Nicholas Greusel, commanding Sill’s brigade, has his men searching the cartridge boxes and pockets of the dead and wounded for ammunition when he feels a tug on his sleeve. He turns to find an ashen-faced corporal holding out a Springfield to him. “Colonel, I come to return my gun to you, for I suppose that I shall go on furlough now.”

  Greusel looks down, is horrified to see that the boy is hugging a bluewhite mass of intestines to his midriff. He fights down the urge to vomit, accepts the musket. “Very good, Corporal. Report to the nearest hospital. They will treat your wound and give you furlough papers.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.” The corporal gives a shaky salute. Greusel returns it, watches as the boy shuffles off toward the rear.

  Greusel is still watching when Sheridan rides up. “Don’t carry a musket, Colonel. Your men will interpret it as a sign of extremis. Don’t even draw your pistol unless the quarters are very close.”

  Greusel looks at the Springfield. “Yes, of course. That boy just gave it to me and I’d forgotten I was holding it.”

  Sheridan turns to look at the corporal, who has stopped now, stands leaning against a tree, a double rope of intestines falling to his knees. Sheridan makes a small sound, for he is not without sympathy, then turns to Greusel. “The line’s just about gone to our right. Begin falling back into the cedars north of the pike. We’ll make our stand there.”

  When Sheridan is gone, Greusel leans the Springfield against a tree. The wounded corporal has laboriously gathered up his intestines and stumbled on into the trees.

  By 9:30 A.M., Bragg’s attack has folded the Union line into the shape of a jackknife with the blade two-thirds closed and at the point of snapping into the handle. Sheridan’s three brigades form the acute angle at the hinge: Houghtaling’s battery at the apex, Schaefer’s and Greusel’s brigades along the blade to the right, Roberts’s brigade along the handle to the left. Holding the line beyond Roberts is Negley’s division of Thomas’s corps, still largely unengaged but much depleted by the shifting of regiments elsewhere. On Sheridan’s right, beyond Greusel’s brigade, Rousseau’s division of Thomas’s corps is moving up, but the going is slow through the wreckage of McCook’s right wing.

  Fortunately for Rosecrans’s army, the Rebels give Sheridan and Rousseau nearly half an hour to redeploy. The brigades of Vaughan, Maney, Manigault, and Loomis stand stalled in the fields and woods to the front of Sheridan, waiting for guidance from Bishop Polk and Ben Cheatham. This inactivity forces Cleburne to halt his division at the Wilkinson Pike, his right flank dangerously uncovered. Hardee, who might get Polk to move, is nowhere in evidence, probably off to the left trying to regain control of McCown’s wandering division. And Braxton Bragg stands aloof, somewhere behind the lines, lost in his own counsel and the laborious process of trying to grasp the battle in its every detail.

  Sheridan takes his fourth position of the morning in cedars so thick that men have to use their bayonets to slash emplacements for the guns. If the confounded Pioneers didn’t have most of the tools and most of the experienced swampers, the task would be easier, but the men manage. They gouge rifle pits from the thin soil, find firing positions among the immense slabs of limestone rock scattered about like the fallen walls of an ancient castle. Sheridan dismounts, strides among the slabs. Here I will make my stand, he thinks. Here we will win or die.

  The Rebel attacks resume a few minutes later. What happens in the cedars of Sheridan’s position over the next hour and a half becomes blurred even in the minds of the most objective survivors. The assaults fall on Sheridan’s salient like hammerblows struck by half a dozen different blacksmiths, all elbowing in to swing at the anvil. Brigadier General S.A.M. Wood, least favored and least able of Cleburne’s brigade commanders, is the first, charging across the pike and the open field fro
nting Schaefer’s line. Houghtaling’s gunners manhandle their Parrotts around to fire on Wood’s right flank while Greusel’s infantry enfilades its left. Caught in a converging fire from the front and both flanks, Wood’s men go to ground, empty their cartridge boxes bullet by bullet. Cleburne pushes through the ranks, orders Wood to fall back before he loses more good men to no purpose.

  Irish Pat Cleburne is angry with Wood for staying too long, furious with Cheatham for failing to support the attack. He vents his frustration with a half dozen of the epithets he has eschewed since the day he and the mare bogged in the swamp at Shiloh and made pathetic fools of themselves. He orders Bushrod Johnson and Lucius Polk forward, covering their advance with Darden’s and Calvert’s batteries.

  With Houghtaling’s guns locked in a duel with the Rebel batteries, Johnson and Polk should be able to drive home the attack against Greusel and Schaefer. But Johnson wanders off course, losing contact with Polk’s flank. Suddenly his skirmishers open fire on shadowy forms ahead in the cedars. Of all the things that plague the night rest of Brigadier General Bushrod Johnson, Southerner by choice not birth, the most disturbing is the thought of firing on friends. He orders the skirmishers to cease fire and goes in person to investigate.

  Ahead the woods are quiet. Has he missed Polk’s flank entirely and come into his rear? He rides forward with Major J. T. McReynolds, who commands the 37th Tennessee. There is a sudden ripple of fire, no more than a dozen muskets. McReynolds lurches in his saddle, stares for a moment bugeyed at Johnson, then spits out his tongue in a mouthful of blood before pitching forward over his horse’s neck. Johnson spins his mount, canters back to the line, gesturing the skirmishers forward to kill Yankees.