Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  With McClellan playing it safe in Virginia, the next significant action took place in the western theater of the war. In Tennessee, Grant’s Federal army was still celebrating capturing Forts Henry and Donelson. They were unaware that a new Confederate line was forming farther south in Corinth, Mississippi, to attack Grant’s army in force and retake Tennessee. A Confederate army of twenty-seven thousand, under the command of Albert Sidney Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard and reinforced by fifteen thousand additional troops from Braxton Bragg’s army in Mobile, Alabama, planned to strike Grant’s army before he could be reinforced by Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio, which was temporarily blocked by flooding rivers and by Buell’s McClellan-like caution. Widely regarded as one of the best and most intrepid commanders in the Confederate army, Johnston ordered a morning attack, hoping to catch the Yankees by surprise.

  The gamble paid off, at least in the short run. Not expecting an attack, Grant had organized his army for convenience rather than a strategic defense. He would pay a stiff price. On the morning of April 6, as Yankees lingered over coffee and breakfast, rebel forces burst through the blooming peach trees at Pittsburg Landing and, to the rebels’ astonishment, caught Grant’s forces almost totally by surprise. To green troops still unaccustomed to “modern” warfare and massive assaults, the surprise unsettled the entire Union army. Grant himself was nine miles below the point of engagement and his disjointed and still untested Federal unit commanders failed to communicate and support one another, allowing the initial momentum to swing decisively in Johnston’s direction.

  The most exposed northern position was near Shiloh Church, about three miles southwest of Pittsburg Landing. Here an unlikely hero saved the day for the Union. Discredited and overly timid in Kentucky, General Sherman returned to active command with a vengeance to serve under his friend Grant.4 He received the full force of Johnston’s assault but held the line for four exhausting hours, “sometimes gaining and at others losing ground.” But stand he did.

  Shiloh proved to be Sherman’s redemption. Terrified troops, some of whom had just received their muskets, ran panic-stricken, unable to fight. But despite being slightly wounded himself, Sherman rallied his troops up and down the line, providing the critical assistance Grant needed to save the day and extend the fight.5 Shiloh marked the cementing of a partnership between Sherman and Grant that grew stronger with each passing battle.

  That night torrential rains pounded the battlefield, compounding the suffering of ten thousand wounded soldiers lying exposed on the killing fields and awaiting the next day’s battle. Sensing blood, Grant launched a massive counterattack at 7:30 the next morning, with fresh divisions aching for payback against the unsuspecting rebels. Again the battle seesawed back and forth around a focal point several hundred yards from Shiloh Church, the two armies slugging it out at the crossroads. At one point Sherman ordered a regiment to “stand fast” even though they were out of ammunition because, as he later explained, “to retire a regiment for any cause, has a bad effect on others.” 6 With Sherman at his soldiers’ backs threatening to shoot any who cut and ran, the rebel offensive bogged down. A dispirited Beauregard disengaged his losing forces and retreated unmolested to his starting point in Corinth.

  The day belonged to Grant and Sherman, and it marked the Union’s conquest of the Tennessee River. But the real news of Shiloh was not the outcome of the battle; it was the carnage. Neither army was decisively defeated and both would live to fight another day. What changed permanently was the scale of combat. From this point on, “proportionality” mattered in command decisions. As news of Shiloh spread, readers in the North and South were staggered at the butcher’s bill. Of 42,000 Federal “effectives” (participants), 1,754 were killed, 8,408 wounded, and 2,885 missing, for a total casualty list of 13,047. For the Confederate army of 40,000, 1,732 were killed, 8,012 wounded, and 950 missing, for a total of 10,694. Included among the killed was General Albert Sidney Johnston. The combined losses at Shiloh totaled 24,500 and rivaled casualties in all previous battles combined. It still stands as the costliest battle ever fought in the western theater, before or after.

  Such was the devastation unleashed at Shiloh that a new industry soon proliferated by the battlefield sites—caskets. Increasingly, ads for embalmment and caskets filled the pages of the religious and secular press. One typical advertisement from John Good, Undertaker, No. 921 Spruce St., Philadelphia, notifies readers of a new “branch” office close to the Virginia battlefields:To the friends of our Patriot Dead. Repeated applications having been made to the subscriber to establish a branch of his business in the vicinity of the late battlefields, with a view of reducing the cost of bringing home the bodies of the dead, he respectfully announces that he has now established a branch at Hagerstown, Md.... Orders from a distance promptly attended to. The BURIAL CASKET furnished by me is equal to any other in use with regard to security, economy, and entire absence of any of the unpleasant circumstances which generally surround similar articles.7

  Good repeated his advertisements in subsequent editions and was soon joined by three other undertakers receiving orders. Despite the presence of embalmers, soldiers frequently had to take the remains of their comrades into their own care. In a letter home, Yankee Private Edwin Wheelock wrote, “The bodies of the two that were killed of our company exhumed day before yesterday ... were put in boxes ready to send home. Their parents were anxious to have the bodies sent home. The bodies were packed in lar[d].”8

  Embalming building and morgue near Fredericksburg, Virginia. An embalming surgeon at work on a soldier’s body. One of the grimmer aspects of the war was handling bodies of the dead hundreds of miles from home. Many dead soldiers never made it home and instead were buried on the battlefields.

  Further defeats followed the Confederates in the West as General Henry Halleck’s Army of Missouri followed up on Grant’s success at Shiloh and marched on Beauregard’s shattered army in Corinth. Like McClellan, General Halleck was, in 1862, still a believer in the West Point Code. In pursuing Beauregard’s forces to Corinth, he refused to “invest” (besiege) the town, which would risk soldiers and civilians alike. Instead he allowed Beauregard an avenue of escape—an option the badly outgunned Beauregard was more than eager to take. Halleck gained control of the strategic territory he sought on the Mississippi without bloodshed.9

  But strategies that sought to avoid bloodbaths if strategic gains could be had in other ways would not survive the war. In fact, neither McClellan’s nor Halleck’s strategies would gain favor with Lincoln and his newly appointed secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, or even with some of McClellan’s own soldiers. In time, Halleck would change as well.

  One Northern soldier recalled that despite McClellan’s orders to avoid civilian goods, “the officers found it impractical, and next to impossible to observe ... as our soldiers could not understand how that we were ever to whip the Rebels without hurting them.”10 Increasingly the more offensive and violent tactics advocated by Clausewitz and determinedly pursued by Grant, Lee, and Jackson would characterize Civil War battles, transforming a “traditional” and limited war into a “modern” war.

  At the same time that Halleck dispatched with Beauregard, Union General John Pope’s Army of the Mississippi—some twenty thousand strong and protected by Admiral Foote’s fleet of gunboats and mortar-boats—moved down the Mississippi and captured Island No. 10, again without bloodshed. Included in the fortress were five thousand prisoners and considerable artillery and ammunition. Pope was not a believer in the West Point Code and proceeded to revile the “enemy” in terms broad enough to include anyone—soldier or civilian—who got in his way. Back in Washington, Lincoln liked the reports that arrived. It also did not hurt that Pope, unlike McClellan, was a Republican.

  But as gratifying as the victories on the Mississippi were, they were not the prize Lincoln most coveted. Whether or not Richmond deserved to be the obsessive strategic point of attraction it became in the North was
beside the point. When not worrying excessively about the safety of Washington, Lincoln was micromanaging the war in Virginia, looking closely over his generals’ shoulders and generally not approving of what he saw. In contrast, Lincoln left his generals in the West to their own devices, and they learned how to fight a new war on its own terms. They would fare better without the president’s close oversight and, in time, bring the lessons they learned back to the East.11

  Not everyone was thankful for the course of the war. Ever since Lincoln’s March 6 report to Congress proposing gradual emancipation and compensation for slave owners, The Liberator had issued unrelenting criticism: “His message is wholly destitute of sympathy for the enslaved, of any recognition of the injustice or wrongfulness of slavery, of all moral principle; it is based upon selfish considerations alone.”12 The Liberator followed this up by reprinting Thomas Vickers’s April 10 sermon to Meadville Theological School on the subject of a just war:Tell me not of victories over Southern rebels! I am sick at heart over these victories. I would to Heaven that they had conquered the rebellious North,—rebellious against the law of God. The North is not yet worthy of victory—not morally ready for it. And I pray that God may not withhold his hand, that disaster on disaster may come upon us, until we are ready, nay anxious, to do the right.13

  Vickers’s sentiments were echoed by nonclerical abolitionists. In a letter to her friend Mary Johnson, Martha LeBaron Goddard excoriated the Northern leader’s performance to date: Well! The summer gets on and I wonder whether each day brings us nearer

  to salvation or ruin. What utter blindness and weakness prevail in high

  places. Government seems to earnestly love nothing but slaughter: and I

  don’t wonder enlisting is so backward while men can’t tell whether they are

  going to fight for Jeff. Davis or against him.

  Later in the letter she reflected on the perils of a nonabolitionist command: “I do think the greatest curse we have had is McClellan—and I am fast growing to think Lincoln is almost a match for him. War meetings as they are called are stupid and heavy and spread-eagle and vain attempts to create enthusiasm for the war merely.”14

  The abolitionist chaplain Horace James took these thoughts further. For such a “baptism of blood,” the war ought to have larger moral goals than simply the preservation of a large nation-state. It is not enough, he argued, “to bring this country to its position just before the breaking out of the rebellion.” Only a war for abolition would justify the bloodshed. The stakes, James concluded, were global: “The present country has seen no such opportunity of blessing the world, no such opportunity of kindling a new light in the moral heavens to shine as the stars forever and ever, and may we not lose it by our driveling unbelief.”15

  Despite pockets of criticism, after more than a year of fighting, the mobilization of two massive armies with complex chains of command and coordination was virtually complete. Already in 1862, most citizens on both sides of the conflict knew family or friends called to service. Churches, schools, and town meetings could talk of little but war. Religious press editors feared their papers would not be read (or subscribed to) if the war was not elevated to supreme status and with a patriotic and supportive spin.

  A surprised writer for Philadelphia’s Banner of the Covenant observed:Among the revolutions of this year, that of the literary world is remarkable for its belligerent drift. The press teems with Manuals of Tactics.... Religion has grown warlike. Men have discovered the Book of the Wars of the Lord, and congregations are chanting the war psalms now in all their majesty, that would have been shocked a year ago to hear anything stronger than Watts’dilutions.

  The writer went on to note disapprovingly how even religious publications were festooned with “the stars and stripes in gorgeous red, white and blue.”16

  In the South, a writer for the Richmond Daily Dispatch quoted a Methodist minister hoping that the war would last “ten to fifteen years” so that the South would be forever purged of Northern dependence.17 Patriotism and Christianity were becoming interleaved and virtually inseparable, with patriotism leading and Christian ministers and churches in tow. In fact, Americans of the North and South were discovering a new appetite for war.

  PART III DESCENT

  HARD WAR, SPILLED BLOOD

  APRIL 1862 TO OCTOBER 1862

  CHAPTER 14

  “WHAT SCENES OF BLOODSHED”

  While Union navies and western armies moved relentlessly on Confederate defenses, General McClellan continued to dawdle in Virginia. Even with a massive army of one hundred thousand soldiers, McClellan claimed to be woefully undermanned and requested reinforcements from Lincoln for a show of overwhelming force. In reality, only fifteen thousand Confederate forces under General John Magruder were holding an eight-mile front. Instead of attacking Magruder’s undermanned forces and smashing through to Richmond, McClellan ignored Lincoln’s orders and laid siege to Yorktown from April 5 to May 5.1

  McClellan’s timidity bought precious time for Lee and Davis to bring their numbers closer to parity with McClellan’s. Concurrently, General Joseph E. Johnston redeployed his army from Manassas in a superior defensive position closer to Richmond. Confederate generals were more than willing to grant McClellan his bloodless success while they planned something far more bloody and daring.

  Throughout the spring, Stonewall Jackson’s hard-driving infantry had been busy tearing up Federal forces in the Shenandoah Valley and striking terror everywhere. In a rash decision, Lincoln redirected General McDowell’s corps from McClellan’s Army of the Potomac to the valley, hoping to catch Jackson by surprise. Instead, Lincoln and McDowell played right into the rebels’ hands. Jackson’s “foot cavalry” was simply too elusive and fast to be caught. But by sequestering McDowell on a fruitless chase, the Army of the Potomac was left at reduced strength. To compound the problem, Lincoln’s excessive estimation of Jackson’s prowess led him to withhold forty-five thousand men to protect Washington, D.C., from an attack that would never come.

  With Robert E. Lee still in the shadows as a military adviser to President Davis, there was only Jackson. Richmond newspapers, which were read throughout the Confederacy, led the way in praising their native son.2 Southern evangelicals and the Richmond religious weeklies also cooperated in the mythmaking that focused on Jackson’s all-consuming personal faith and his acknowledgment of God as the giver of victory to his troops at Manassas.

  Confederate soldiers, sensing another side to Jackson, admired his stated preference for “taking no prisoners” and absorbed his almost manic obsession with destruction and glory even at the cost of unprecedented casualties. Jackson’s imperious style took in generals no less than soldiers. He had General Richard Garnett, commander of the “Stonewall Brigade,” arrested in the Shenandoah Valley for not charging Union General James Shields’s victorious army with the bayonet when his ammunition ran out. Garnett was later released only to die in Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. Jackson also had Provost Marshall General Charles Winder arrested and, amazingly, arrested the veteran commander General A. P. Hill twice (with whom Jackson eventually reconciled only after Lee’s intervention).

  In her diary, Mary Chesnut quoted a frank assessment of Jackson’s fiery character by General Alexander Lawton, who served under Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. Lawton noted that Jackson rarely slept. To train his troops for battle, he would wake them at all hours, send them out marching for a few miles, and bring them back. “All this,” said Lawton, “was to make us always ready, ever on the alert.” Jackson never asked for his men’s love, only their respect. “He gave his orders rapidly and distinctly and rode away. Never allowing answer nor remonstrance ... When you failed, you were apt to be put under arrest. When you reported the place taken, he only said ‘Good.’ ”

  Lawton continued:He had no sympathy with human infirmity. He was a one-idea’d man. He looked upon broken-down men and stragglers as the same thing. He classed all who were weak and weary, who fai
nted by the wayside, as men wanting in patriotism. If a man’s face was as white as cotton and his pulse so low that you could not feel it, he merely looked upon him impatiently as an inefficient soldier and rode off, out of patience. He was the true type of all great soldiers. The successful warrior of the world, he did not value human life where he had an object to accomplish. He could order men to their death as a matter of course.3

  In the spring of 1862, Jackson embodied all that Sherman would eventually become.

  Even Lincoln and Northern soldiers were awed (and intimidated) by Jackson. Jackson himself remained resolutely Calvinist. In his eyes, the glory of the coming of a vengeful Lord was before him. In time, he was certain, his ravaging army would be moving north. In a letter to the Reverend Robert Dabney, who had joined Jackson’s army as a preacher and staff member of the adjutant general, Jackson wrote: “In God’s own time I hope that He will send an army North and crown it with victory, and make its fruits peace, but let us pray that He send it not, except he goes with it.”4

  By the end of May 1862, McClellan’s moment of absolute superiority had passed. Confederate reinforcements continued to pour into Virginia, narrowing the odds between the two armies. A writer for the Richmond Daily Dispatch commented on May 21: “The Critical Moment. The enemy is near the city.... Let us bear it like a people conscious of right and relying implicitly upon that Providence which fails not in the end to secure the triumph of justice.”5