Shrouds of Glory

by Winston Groom

  By now, Hood had accomplished about all he wished in north Georgia, and with Sherman’s army breathing down his neck, he set out on a southwestward march toward the Alabama state line. Had he intended to move on up into Tennessee at this point, the obvious route would have been simply to keep going north past Chattanooga, where the only federal forces before him would have been three divisions scattered mostly around the Alabama-Tennessee line, plus eight or ten thousand raw recruits under Thomas at Nashville. But Hood seems to have been sticking to the original plan formulated between Davis and himself at Atlanta and reiterated to Beauregard a week earlier, which was to draw Sherman into the open somewhere and give him a fight. This was on his mind as the army plodded over the frosty Appalachian foothills of northern Georgia near the old Chickamauga battlefield, where they had won their first and only major victory of the war a year before. Then, for two days, the 15th and 16th of October, Hood halted his army “in a beautiful valley about nine miles south of Lafayette,” where he lapsed into “serious thought and perplexity.” At first, he recalled later, he thought he had “discovered that improvement in morale of the troops which would justify [him] in delivering battle” against what he estimated to be Sherman’s sixty-five-thousand-man army marching in his pursuit. But then he hit an unpleasant and unexpected snag—or so he said afterward. On the eve of the supposed battle, he took a sort of poll of his commanding officers as to whether or not their troops were “at least hopeful of victory.” Much to his annoyance and disappointment, he said, “The opinion was unanimous that although the Army had much improved in spirit, it was not in condition to risk battle against the numbers reported by General Wheeler.”

  This revelation placed Hood in a serious and crucial dilemma. He reasoned that if all his senior officers felt the army was not up to a fight with Sherman, that option was out. Nor could he simply take position, entrench, and wait for Sherman to come to him, because Sherman would undoubtedly repair his railroad, re-arm and re-supply himself, and arrive on the scene not only with his considerable forces, but with those of Thomas as well—it would be Atlanta all over again. And so while the men basked in the lovely valley of the Chattooga River, the autumn leaves turning gold and red around them, John Bell Hood made a fateful and momentous decision. “I conceived the plan of marching into Tennessee with a hope to establish our line eventually in Kentucky,” he said. The scheme, as it began to take shape in the general’s mind, was to destroy Schofield’s army before it could link up with Thomas’s forces at Nashville, march on, and crush Thomas. Then, resupplied from Nashville’s vast federal stores, the Army of Tennessee would continue to move north. “In this position,” Hood theorized, “I could threaten Cincinnati, and recruit the Army from Kentucky and Tennessee.”

  As the plan started to flicker in Hood’s imagination, it began to assume the dimensions of a grand design to win the war. Marching eastward through the Cumberland Gap, its ranks swelling with reinforcements and new recruits, the Army of Tennessee could come up behind Grant’s host then besieging Lee at Richmond. “This move, I believed, would defeat Grant and allow General Lee, in command of our combined Armies, to march upon Washington or turn upon and annihilate Sherman,” Hood declared later. He had still believed, before he marched, that the twenty thousand reinforcements Davis promised him from Texas and Louisiana would join him any day.

  6

  They Must Be Killed

  Cump Sherman was furious. Here it was past the middle of October, and he and his army were right back in north Georgia, where they had started from last May. Neither Grant nor Halleck nor anyone in Washington would authorize his great march to the sea, and, to make matters worse, though he had chased the Confederate army all over the countryside, he had found nothing but the destruction Hood had left in his wake.

  “The lightness and celerity of his army convinced me that I could not possibly catch him on a stern-chase,” Sherman grumbled, noting that Hood had now crossed the Alabama line and seemed to be headed for the town of Gadsden. On October 17, just beyond the Georgia-Alabama border, Sherman tired of the game and halted the army. He then resumed begging Washington to let him turn around and “move through the bowels [of the South] and make a trail that would be visible for fifty years.”

  Sherman seemed fond of such pronunciations, probably stemming from his view even before the outbreak of hostilities that “secession was treason, was war.” His reasoning from the outset was crouched in legal terms—specifically, that the South was breaking the law and that once war broke out, all constitutional guarantees of the Southerners became null and void. For instance, just before he resigned from the Louisiana Military Academy and went north, Confederates seized the U.S. Arsenal at Baton Rouge and transferred its weapons around the state, including several thousand rifles that soon arrived at Sherman’s school, with orders from the governor for him to take receipt and account for them. “Thus,” Sherman complained, “I was made the receiver of stolen goods.” Six months later, as a colonel commanding a Union brigade, he not only threatened to open up his artillery on one of his own regiments for trying to leave after their enlistments expired, but also told one of his captains he would “shoot [him] down like a dog” for going absent without leave.

  A day or so after that incident—which was brought to the attention of Abraham Lincoln himself—Sherman was promoted to brigadier general. He was subsequently sent west to the Department of the Cumberland, where he got into the big brouhaha about being “insane,” and for a while it looked like his military days might be over. In less than a month, though, his career was partially revived on orders for him to proceed to St. Louis and take charge of a training camp. By February 1862, Sherman had been sent down to Paducah, Kentucky, to organize men and supplies for Generals Grant, Halleck, and C. F. Smith, who were trying to dislodge the Confederates from their forts along the Cumberland River, northwest of Nashville. By the end of the month, those forts were taken, and consequently the Union armies walked triumphantly into Nashville and remained there unmolested until almost the end of the war.

  Meantime, General Ulysses S. Grant had been ordered to march his Army of the Tennessee down to the Tennessee River near the Mississippi state line to destroy railroad bridges and connections. Sherman was now officially out of the doghouse for being crazy and was given a division to command. On March 10, 1862, he boarded his four brigades of green troops on transports and steamed southward—ostensibly to wreck railroad bridges at Corinth, Mississippi, and Tuscumbia, Alabama—but was forced back by heavy flooding. The place Sherman eventually debarked, in southern Tennessee, was called Pittsburg Landing—or Shiloh—where he received the momentous opening blow of the trap the Confederates had laid there.

  Confederate commander Albert Sidney Johnston had disguised the movements of his army so carefully the five divisions of encamped federals had no idea they were facing anything but a troop of cavalry. In fact, the Southern army had arrived less than a mile from Shiloh the day before but were unable to get organized for attack until too late in the afternoon. Shortly after sunup on April 6, a Sunday, some forty thousand Confederate infantry came screaming out of the woods, line after line, overunning Union camps, driving the surprised blue-coated soldiers before them and, in some cases, even stopping to eat their enemy’s unfinished breakfast or loot his tent. Sherman’s division was posted all around the little log Shiloh church. By midmorning, he had been flanked and driven back half a mile. The grizzled redhead was holding on for dear life without the help of one of his brigades, which had run away at the first of the fight. At 10 A.M. Grant, having rushed to the battlefield from a sickbed upriver, joined Sherman, who by now had been twice slightly wounded. Sherman told his commanding general he thought he could hang on but was worried about running out of ammunition. By noon, he had been forced back again but was giving ground very stubbornly. Still, when sundown ended that day’s battle, Sherman and the rest of Grant’s army had been driven more than two miles and were clustered with their backs to the
foreboding bluffs at Pittsburg Landing, dropping away behind them.

  Grant might have lost the whole Army of the Tennessee when the Confederate attack resumed next morning but for one thing—or perhaps two. While the surgeon’s saws and probes were busy late into the night, General Don Carlos Buell with the Army of the Ohio was hustling down from Nashville to join the fray. This would give Grant thirty thousand more men with which he could then counterattack instead of withdraw.

  Unbeknownst to most of the Confederates and none of the Union soldiers huddling beneath a frightening spring thunderstorm, General Alfred Sidney Johnston was dead—bled to death after a bullet cut a leg artery. The new commander was Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. Unaware that Buell was arriving on the field at that very moment, the Creole general went to sleep, relying on an intercepted telegram that claimed that Buell was marching in an entirely different direction. Before going to bed, Beauregard telegraphed Richmond that the army had achieved “a great victory, driving the enemy from every position.”

  General John Bell Hood

  Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are printed courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.

  The Confederate High Command

  President Jefferson Davis

  General P. G. T. Beauregard

  General Joseph E. Johnston

  The Confederate Corps Commanders

  General Benjamin Franklin Cheatham

  General Stephen Dill Lee

  General Alexander Peter Stewart

  The Confederate Division Commanders

  General Edward C. Walthall

  General William Wing Loring (courtesy of Culver Pictures, Inc.)

  General Samuel French

  General John C. Brown (courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society)

  General William Brimage Bate

  General Edward Johnson

  The Confederate Generals Killed at Franklin

  General Patrick Ronayne Cleburne

  General States Rights Gist

  General Otho French Strahl

  General Hiram B. Granbury

  General John Adams

  General John Carpenter Carter

  General William Tecumseh Sherman

  General George H. Thomas

  General John M. Schofield

  As a cloudy dawn broke behind the federal lines, Confederates were startled to see massive ranks of blue-coated soldiers marching toward them out of the mists. Sherman halted his division near his original camps, where he remained, he said, “patiently awaiting the sound of General Buell’s advance upon the main Corinth road.” When, about 10 A.M., he heard the sound of heavy firing that marked Buell’s arrival, he formed a line of battle and marched forward again. He hadn’t gone far when one regiment, he said, “advanced upon a point of water-oaks and thicket, behind which I knew the enemy was in great strength, and entered it in beautiful style. Then arose the severest musketry-fire I ever heard.”

  This was about five hundred yards east of the Shiloh Church, and Sherman concluded, “It was evident that here was to be the struggle.” All that morning and into the afternoon his division slugged it out, with Sherman personally directing his artillery fire and organizing new attacks. By midafternoon, Beauregard, now fully aware that he was outnumbered three to two and that the future of the fight looked grim, ordered a withdrawal. Grant’s and Buell’s men were too worn out and used up to follow, and then a huge sleet storm descended on the countryside, foreclosing all possibility of close pursuit. Sherman led his division out next morning and discovered abandoned Confederate camps and hospitals; the Army of Tennessee was gone.

  Sherman’s first taste of major combat—he had been at Bull Run, but that was child’s play compared with this—had given him a sobering revelation on how the war must be fought. Thirteen thousand Union soldiers had fallen and more than ten thousand Confederates, and, aside from spilling blood by the barrelful, nothing much had been settled. If it didn’t occur to him at that moment, it surely did shortly afterward, that the North could not win the war merely by locking horns with the Confederate armies on some meaningless killing ground. No—the only way to save the South for the nation was to first destroy it, a notion that ironically became unofficial American policy a hundred years later in Southeast Asia.

  Soon after the battle, Sherman was at it again with the press—with which he was still irate for calling him a nut—for publishing “wild and damaging reports” of the engagement at Shiloh. “It was publicly asserted at the North that our army was taken completely by surprise; that the rebels caught us in our tents, bayoneted the men in their beds; that General Grant was drunk,” and so forth, Sherman wrote, railing that “the danger of sudden popular clamors is well illustrated by this case.”

  Possibly the most important feature of Sherman’s service at Shiloh was the close personal relationship he made with Grant. While it seemed that every other Union commander—McDowell, McClellan, Pope, and, later, Burnside, Hooker, and Meade—was allowed to have his star both rise and fall in the east, these two determined old soldiers were socked away in a remote theater of the war far from the glory (and shame) that befell those fighting close to Washington. Through all their trouble they grew to trust and rely on each other’s abilities. Two years later, when they finally emerged as commanders of the two huge Union armies converging on the remains of the Confederacy, Sherman could sit back and say, “Well, Grant, you supported me when I was crazy and I supported you when you were drunk.”

  Meantime, Grant had gotten himself on the bad side of the theater commander, General Henry Halleck, who, apparently believing the stories in the press, came down from St. Louis after the battle and took charge of all the western armies himself, making Grant second in command, a do-nothing job sort of like vice president. Sherman recorded that while his friend suffered the affront without complaint, “I could see that he felt deeply the indignity, if not insult, heaped upon him.” Grant had decided to leave the army, but Sherman persuaded him to bide his time and wait for “some happy accident to restore him to favor”—as in fact had happened with Sherman following the accusations that he was crazy.

  The army—now swelled to more than one hundred thousand—began to move on Corinth, Mississippi, thirty miles to the south, where Beauregard had reformed the Army of Tennessee. When the federals arrived, however, they found that Beauregard had withdrawn further south again. And as the army languished in and about Corinth, Sher man’s “happy accident” occurred for Grant. Halleck—known popularly as “Old Brains”—was ordered to Washington to become chief of staff for all the federal armies, and Grant was restored to command of the Army of the Tennessee. Soon afterward, on the 21st of July, Sherman was sent to occupy Memphis with his division, and this effectively placed him in the role of military governor.

  It was Sherman’s first taste of control over civilians, and he exercised it with a stony harshness tempered by a chilling logic. Entering Memphis, he found the city all but closed down, and he immediately ordered everything—businesses, schools, churches—to begin operating again. He rounded up all the fugitive slaves he found in the city and put them to work on his fortifications. Next, he began expelling the wives and families of Confederate soldiers and sympathizers from their homes in reprisal for Confederate fire on Union gunboats operating on the Mississippi. On September 24, he ordered the town of Randolph, Tennessee, burned to the ground in retaliation for firing on U.S. vessels and also commanded the destruction of all homes, farms, and farm buildings for fifteen miles down the Arkansas side of the river opposite Memphis.

  These seem the earliest of Sherman’s pyromaniacal urges in connection with southern civilians and their property, but by a long shot they were not his last. He had by now refined his philosophy regarding the civilian population of the South, which he expressed bluntly in a letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase three weeks after taking over in Memphis. Noting that the war was thus far “complicated with the belief on the on
e hand that all on the other side are not enemies,” Sherman branded this a “mistake” and declared, “The Government of the United States may now safely proceed on the proper rule that all in the South are enemies.”

  By early 1863, the principal Union objective in the west was to reclaim the Mississippi River, the main artery of commercial transportation in the heartland. To that end, federal troops had secured the river from its source down to near Vicksburg and from its mouth north, to above Baton Rouge. But there still remained hundreds of twisting river miles in between that were firmly in Confederate hands, and Washington was determined to wrest them away, splitting the Confederacy in two. It was a tall order. Vicksburg was stoutly defended by a Confederate army under General John Pemberton, and its two-hundred-foot bluffs were frowning with sinister artillery of all sizes and shapes. Be that as it was, Vicksburg had to be taken, and to that end, in December, Grant ordered Sherman to steam downriver and land a dozen miles above the city along the Chickasaw Bayou, then move on Vicksburg from the rear.

  By the day after Christmas, Sherman had landed his thirty-threethousand-man task force and during the next week floundered southeastward through the tangled swamps of the Mississippi Delta harassed by snipers, the weather, and unfordable streams and bogs. Two days before New Year’s Sherman encountered a steep ridge called the Walnut Hills, manned by what he estimated to be a Confederate force at least half his size under General Stephen D. Lee. He immediately ordered an attack, which quickly turned into a disaster.