by Alan Axelrod
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Somewhat more than half of the Union army was manned by first-generation immigrants. In contrast, 91 percent of the Confederate army consisted of native-born white men. One of the immigrant minority was a Welsh orphan, who sailed to the United States in 1859 at the age of eighteen, landed in New Orleans, randomly encountered a trader named Stanley, and asked him for a job. He phrased the request as a Welshman of the era would—“Do you want a boy, sir?”—and instead of getting a job, he got informally adopted. Young John Rowlands took the name of his new “father” and, in the fullness of time, made himself famous as a globe-trotting New York Herald journalist-adventurer, Henry Morton Stanley—yes, the man who would in 1871 find, in Africa, David Livingstone, a long-lost Scots missionary, drily greeting him with the phrase, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Stanley sought his first adventure by joining the Confederate army. He found himself at Shiloh, and, in a posthumously published autobiography, wrote of how the two commanding generals, Albert Sidney Johnston and Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, responded to the catalog of Confederate defeats Grant outlined in his own memoir. They “proposed to hurl into the Tennessee River an army of nearly 50,000 [the true number was about 63,000] rested and well-fed [Union] troops, by means of 40,000 [Confederate] soldiers, who, for two days, had subsisted on sodden biscuit and raw bacon, who had been exposed for two nights to rain and dew, and had marched twenty-three miles!” The thing is, Johnston and Beauregard would very nearly succeed.
In the run-up to Shiloh, Grant’s Army of the Tennessee consisted of 44,895 soldiers (one authority puts the number at 48,894) organized into six divisions. He encamped five of his divisions at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, on the west bank of the Tennessee River. The remaining division, under Major General Lew Wallace (who would achieve literary fame in 1880 as the author of the novel Ben-Hur), was positioned on the Tennessee five miles downstream, at a place called Crump’s Landing. Grant planned to launch an attack on the Confederate forces concentrated at Corinth, Mississippi, a short distance to the southwest of Shiloh. Wallace’s division was deployed to prevent the Confederates from positioning artillery along the Tennessee. Grant also wanted Wallace to capture and control the railroad at nearby Bethel Station to prevent transportation of reinforcements.
Grant was anxious to launch his attack. His encampment at Pittsburg Landing was hastily established as a mere bivouac, essentially a platform from which to launch the attack, not a fully prepared defensive position. He had not ordered trenches to be dug or artillery to be emplaced. The rationale behind these decisions was that he wanted his troops to attack, not to dig in and defend. That Grant also neglected to post pickets—guards—out in front of the bivouac cannot be readily justified, however. It was a mistake for which he and his men would pay dearly.
One more unit, about 18,000 men of the Army of the Ohio, operating independently under Don Carlos Buell, were in the vicinity, at Duck River, northeast of Pittsburg Landing and Shiloh.
In his posthumous autobiography, Stanley provided a rare eyewitness account of the opening of the battle from the Confederate perspective. After marching into position with his regiment, Stanley was awakened at 4:00 on the morning of April 6. He and his comrades ate a miserable cold breakfast before forming into line. Stanley’s regiment—the “Dixie Greys”—was positioned at the center of the attack. They loaded their obsolete flintlock muskets and marched to battle, tramping “solemnly and silently through the thin forest, and over its grass, still in its withered and wintry hue.”
Stanley noted “that the sun was not far from appearing, that our regiment was keeping its formation admirably, [and] that the woods would have been a grand place for a picnic.” At about 5:15 a.m., he and his comrades heard “some desultory firing in front.” They “drew nearer to the firing, and soon a sharper rattling of musketry was heard. ‘That is the enemy waking up,’ we said. Within a few minutes, there was another explosive burst of musketry, the air was pierced by many missiles, which hummed and pinged sharply by our ears, pattered through the tree-tops, and brought twigs and leaves down on us.”
What had begun as “desultory” gunfire soon thickened into a murderous hailstorm, through which the Dixie Greys advanced, heads lowered as if against a driving icy rain. It was fearful—yet nothing compared to what the Union troops endured, caught by surprise and virtually defenseless. Awakened from their early morning sleep, Grant’s soldiers saw four divisions arrayed against them from west to east, emerging from the woods with muskets blazing. Instead of returning fire, many of the Union troops broke, ran, and sought cover. Their unpreparedness and absence of discipline made them all the more vulnerable. As Stanley and his fellows overtook their own skirmishers, a call went up: “There they are!” With that, Stanley recalled that “we cracked into them with levelled muskets,” their captain admonishing them, “Aim low, men!”
But there really was no aiming. Civil War soldiers rarely aimed, except in the most general way. The Confederates this day used “marching fire,” shooting while advancing. To Stanley, “it appeared absurd to be blazing away at shadows,” but, finally, he
saw a row of little globes of pearly smoke streaked with crimson, breaking-out, with sportive quickness, from a long line of bluey figures in front; and, simultaneously, there broke upon our ears an appalling crash of sound, the series of fusillades following one another with startling suddenness, which suggested to my somewhat moidered sense a mountain upheaved, with huge rocks tumbling and thundering down a slope, and the echoes rumbling and receding through space. Again and again, these loud and quick explosions were repeated, seemingly with increased violence, until they rose to the highest pitch of fury, and in unbroken continuity. All the world seemed involved in one tremendous ruin!
The Civil War was fought before the invention of so-called smokeless gunpowder. This meant that, in a pitched battle, the air quickly became so thick with smoke that it was impossible to see the enemy. Confusion reigned. All an advancing soldier could do was load, fire, reload, and fire—fire into the smoke. “My nerves tingled, my pulses beat double-quick, my heart throbbed loudly, and almost painfully; but, amid all the excitement, my thoughts, swift as the flash of lightning, took all sound, and sight, and self, into their purview. I listened to the battle raging far away on the flanks, to the thunder in front, to the various sounds made by the leaden storm.”
By the sound far more than anything conveyed through sight, Stanley concluded that the Federals were pulling back. To the attackers’ “every forward step, they took a backward move, loading and firing as they slowly withdrew. Twenty thousand muskets were being fired at this stage, but, though accuracy of aim was impossible, owing to our labouring hearts, and the jarring and excitement, many bullets found their destined billets on both sides.”
In the end, marching fire could accomplish only so much. The muskets and rifle muskets of the era were muzzle loaders, which made reloading clumsy, time-consuming work. The officers accompanying their men had to judge when the attack had reached a critical point at which there was no time for all this. At that moment, they shouted, Fix bayonets!
When this order was given to the Dixie Greys, there “was a simultaneous bound forward, each soul doing his best for the emergency. The Federals appeared inclined to await us; but, at this juncture, our men raised a yell, thousands responded to it, and burst out into the wildest yelling it has ever been my lot to hear.” This was the celebrated “rebel yell.” Its purpose was to terrorize the enemy, but Stanley felt that its most immediate effect was on him and his fellows. The keening cry “drove all sanity and order from among us. It served the double purpose of relieving pent-up feelings, and transmitting encouragement along the attacking line. I rejoiced in the shouting like the rest. It reminded me that there were about four hundred companies like the Dixie Greys, who shared our feelings.”
“‘They fly!’ was echoed from lip to lip,” Stanley wrote. The exclamation spurr
ed on the advance. “It deluged us with rapture, and transfigured each Southerner into an exulting victor. At such a moment, nothing could have halted us. Those savage yells, and the sight of thousands of racing figures coming towards them, discomfited the blue-coats; and when we arrived upon the place where they had stood, they had vanished.”
In their flight, the Yankees left behind a “beautiful array of tents, before which they had made their stand, after being roused from their Sunday-morning sleep” as well as their “half-dressed dead and wounded …. Military equipments, uniform-coats, half-packed knapsacks, bedding, of a new and superior quality, littered the company streets.”
Stanley’s exultation was tempered by the sight of “a series of other camps” in the near distance, and he realized that the fight this first camp put up, though brief, “enabled the brigades in rear of the advance camp to recover from the shock of the surprise.” Nevertheless, the initial attack had punched holes between the Union divisions. Through these, the rebels now advanced—but soon the Federal lines coalesced as order and discipline were restored. The rout ended by the afternoon, and Grant’s men re-formed in a new line of battle through a dense thicket lying between the Tennessee River to the east and Owl Creek to the west. The Confederates would soon have reason to give this space a painful name: the Hornet’s Nest.
Union troops under William Tecumseh Sherman had suffered the brunt of the initial attack. Formed up on either side of Shiloh Chapel, on the Union’s west flank, they panicked and ran under the rebel onslaught. Steadfast, Sherman personally rode out to rally his badly shaken men, thereby stemming the entire Union rout and earning Grant’s profound admiration. Of irascible temperament, Sherman had been unpopular in the army ever since he criticized, early on, the military and political leadership for failing to appreciate, as he did, that the war would be long and bloody. He tried in vain to make the case that the nation was experiencing no mere insurrection, but instead all-out warfare on a scale unprecedented in North America. The press, politicians, public, and many of his fellow officers called him unhinged. But Shiloh, bloody Shiloh, would be his vindication.
As Sherman emerged as one of the battle’s fiercest heroes, so the humbler figure of Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss proved the grit of both himself and his command in their defense of the Union’s center as the “Hornet’s Nest” coalesced. His division of the Army of the Tennessee was mauled in the opening hours of the battle, but he restored discipline and was able to buy time for the arrival of Lew Wallace’s division of the Army of the Tennessee, as well as elements of the Army of the Ohio under Major General Buell. Prentiss’s stout resistance cost him dearly. With 2,200 of his troops, he was captured at the Hornet’s Nest and then suffered the indignity of blame by the Northern press, which reported—falsely—that he and his men had been captured in their beds! Personally, Grant had no affection for Prentiss, but he stood up for his subordinate, pointing out the absurdity of the press reports. Had Prentiss and his command been asleep, “there would not have been an all-day struggle, with the loss of thousands killed and wounded on the Confederate side.”
The opening of the battle was nearly catastrophic for the Union, and Confederate Private Stanley can be forgiven for assuming that the fighting was pretty much over. Very quickly, however, he concluded that “it was only a brief prologue of the long and exhaustive series of struggles which took place that day.” Having overrun the first Union encampment, the Dixie Greys advanced beyond it until they beheld another “mass of white tents.” Almost the very minute they saw this encampment, Stanley recalled, they “were met by a furious storm of bullets, poured on us from a long line of blue-coats, whose attitude of assurance proved to us that we should have tough work here.” To Stanley, the world suddenly seemed to be “bursting into fragments. Cannon and musket, shell and bullet, lent their several intensities to the distracting uproar…. I likened the cannon, with their deep bass, to the roaring of a great herd of lions; the ripping, cracking musketry, to the incessant yapping of terriers; the windy whisk of shells, and zipping of minie bullets, to the swoop of eagles, and the buzz of angry wasps. All the opposing armies of Grey and Blue fiercely blazed at each other.”
His company captain shouted the order to lie down and continue firing. Spying a fallen tree “about fifteen inches in diameter, with a narrow strip of light between it and the ground,” Stanley and a dozen others flung themselves behind it. Momentarily, they felt secure—until the “sharp rending explosions and hurtling fragments” of incoming cannonballs, canister shot, and small-arms fire tore through the woods. “I marvelled, as I heard the unintermitting patter, snip, thud, and hum of the bullets, how anyone could live under this raining death.”
The projectiles beat “a merciless tattoo on the outer surface of the log” behind which he and his comrades had taken shelter. They thudded “at the rate of a hundred a second. One, here and there, found its way under the log, and buried itself in a comrade’s body. One man raised his chest, as if to yawn, and jostled me. I turned to him, and saw that a bullet had gored his whole face, and penetrated into his chest. Another ball struck a man a deadly rap on the head, and he turned on his back and showed his ghastly white face to the sky.”
In the midst of this leaden storm of death, the captain ordered his men forward. A young friend of Stanley’s, Henry Parker by name, suddenly cried out: “Oh, stop, please stop a bit, I have been hurt, and can’t move!” He was standing on one leg, his other foot having been smashed by a cannonball. “There was no time to help him.”
Many privates, corporals, and sergeants fell—and at about 2:30 in the afternoon, a general, Albert Sidney Johnston, joined them in death. A Minié ball shattered his leg, tearing the femoral artery. He tried to lead on, but soon wobbled in the saddle.
“General,” an aide called out to him, “are you hurt?”
“Yes, and I fear seriously.”
His high-topped “cavalier” cavalry boot overflowed with blood. His own calm self-assessment of his wound were the last words he spoke.
That Sunday night, the night that ended the first day of the Battle of Shiloh, General Beauregard telegraphed Confederate President Jefferson Davis that A. S. Johnston was dead. He added, however, that victory was certain at Shiloh.
Based on the evidence of the first day of battle, Beauregard was not being unreasonably optimistic. Until nightfall, the Confederates continued advancing in several places, and the company of Dixie Greys Stanley served with took the second line of Union encampments, leaving behind such “ghastly relics” as “a young Lieutenant, who, judging by the new gloss on his uniform, must have been some father’s darling. A clean bullet-hole through the centre of his forehead had instantly ended his career.” Elsewhere Stanley came across:
some twenty bodies, lying in various postures, each by its own pool of viscous blood, which emitted a peculiar scent, which was new to me, but which I have since learned is inseparable from a battle-field. Beyond these, a still larger group lay, body overlying body, knees crooked, arms erect, or wide-stretched and rigid, according as the last spasm overtook them. The company opposed to them must have shot straight …. I can never forget the impression those wide-open dead eyes made on me. Each seemed to be starting out of its socket, with a look similar to the fixed wondering gaze of an infant, as though the dying had viewed something appalling at the last moment.
By about four in the afternoon, the Confederate private noted that even “the pluckiest” of his company “lacked the spontaneity and springing ardour which had distinguished them earlier in the day…. As for myself, I had only one wish, and that was for repose.”
And that is what he got, sleeping soundly on the night of April 6 and awakening the next morning believing that the battle was all but won. But the morning roll call revealed that only about half of the Dixie Greys were present. Stanley himself would be captured later in the day as the Union, the Army of the Tennessee now augmented by elements of the Army of the Ohio, counterattacked. Grant
’s forces were arrayed for battle between Owl Creek and the Tennessee River and were joined on the east by Buell, who crossed the Tennessee at Pittsburg Landing. Lew Wallace closed in from the west. Together, five Union generals under Grant and three under Buell pushed southwestward. By 5 a.m. on April 7, they made contact with Confederate units under Generals Braxton Bragg, Leonidas Polk, John C. Breckinridge, and William J. Hardee. Six hours later, the Union counterattack had forced the entire Confederate line back about half way to Shiloh Chapel, the point from which, on the previous day, the Confederates had routed out Grant’s Army of the Tennessee. An hour after this, the rebel line retreated farther, closing back in on Shiloh Chapel. After a two-hour fight on this line, at about two in the afternoon, the Confederate defense broke and withdrew southwest of Shiloh Chapel, falling back toward Corinth, Mississippi. Breckinridge took a blocking position across the Western Corinth Road and the Shiloh Branch. His objective was to cover the retreat of the rest of Beauregard’s army. By the night of April 7–8, that army—except for Breckinridge, who lingered across three roads into Mississippi—had withdrawn into Mississippi.
As for the Union forces, exhausted, they did not pursue the retreating Confederates much farther than their own original Shiloh and Pittsburg Landing encampments. Buell, whose Army of the Ohio was far fresher than Grant’s Army of the Tennessee, would argue endlessly over what he saw as Grant’s “failure” to give chase. As it was, of some 63,000 to 66,000 (estimates vary) Union troops engaged, 1,754 were killed, 8,408 wounded, and 2,885 were captured or went missing. Of roughly 40,000 to more than 44,000 Confederate troops engaged, 1,728 were killed, 8,012 were wounded, and 959 were captured or went missing.
At the time, most Americans found such numbers simply beyond comprehension. Had Lincoln failed to stand behind his general as he endured an assault of public criticism, Shiloh, arguably a pyrrhic victory, might have been counted a massive strategic defeat in the long run. If Lincoln had yielded to popular opinion, Shiloh would have prompted the North to seek a negotiated end to the war. But Ulysses Grant accepted the necessity of his losses, and so did Lincoln. As for the people of the North, they, too, agreed to fight on, even knowing now how determined the Confederacy was and how terrible the cost was certainly going to be. The deadliest battle yet, Shiloh was the prelude to even worse.