Shiloh 1862 Read online

  5 Many southerners, on the other hand, reacted by sending Brooks replacements for the cane, which he had broken during the fracas.

  6 Interestingly, many of the wealthiest southerners were opposed to secession for the simple reason that they had the most to lose if it came to war and the war went badly. But in the end they, like almost everyone else, were swept along on the tide.

  7 Neither Ulysses Grant nor William Tecumseh Sherman, who would be so instrumental in the Shiloh Campaign, voted for Lincoln, for fear that his election would lead to war.

  CHAPTER 2

  YOU MUST BE BADLY SCARED

  BY THE TIME HE REACHED PITTSBURG LANDING Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman was a changed man. That is to say he wasn’t “insane” any more, or a “nervous Nellie,” or “flighty,” which was how the press had portrayed him six months earlier when he lost command at Louisville for expressing fear he was going to be attacked and then having the gall to tell Washington that 200,000 Federal troops would be needed to subdue Rebels in the Mississippi River Valley. Instead, after a period of recuperation, Sherman (“Cump,” to his friends since West Point days) regained his confidence: A sharp, bristling personality, he began to channel the staunch singularity of purpose he would demonstrate for the remainder of the war.

  For now, though, Sherman seemed to be overcompensating for the Louisville disgrace. From the time of his arrival at Pittsburg Landing he refused even to entertain the possibility of an attack by the large Rebel army known to be converging just twenty miles south at Corinth, Mississippi.

  As the senior regular army officer he should have known better. As commander of one of the six Yankee infantry divisions recently arrived at the landing, Brigadier General Sherman was also, nominally, in charge of the day-to-day operations at the encampment, while Ulysses (“Sam” to his West Point classmates) Grant exercised overall control from his headquarters at Savannah, Tennessee, a town located nine miles downstream on the Tennessee River, in an opulent mansion offered to him by William H. Cherry, a wealthy slaveholding planter and Union sympathizer.

  Owing to the riparian topography, the Union position at Pittsburg resembled a giant cornucopia of roughly 12 square miles, with its stem, north of the landing, less than a mile wide, and its mouth opening nearly 3 miles wide to the south between the Tennessee River and Owl Creek. By some amazing blunder, the most inexperienced divisions—those of Sherman and Brig. Gen. Benjamin M. Prentiss1 —were placed in the outer lines at the maw of the cornucopia, close to the Rebel army at Corinth. It was later explained, quite unsatisfactorily, that the encampments were arranged by engineers with regard to sanitation, nearness of water and firewood, and similar conveniences and without concern for their ability to defend the field—in other words, disposed the way a peacetime army might be. The various camps to the south along the cornucopia’s mouth were not even set in a continuous line but placed helter-skelter with huge, heavily forested gaps in between. The whole of the Pittsburg Landing area had become a virtual tent city, with more than 5,000 of the big, conical eight-man Sibley tents occupying the five division encampment areas.

  William Camm, lieutenant colonel of the 14th Illinois, had located for himself a swimming hole in Owl Creek where he liked to bathe. One day while he was enjoying his ablutions, two soldiers appeared, carrying squirrels they had shot for dinner. He inquired if they had seen any pickets protecting the outer edges of the encampment. They had not, they said, and neither had he. “We must have some queer generals,” Camm remarked that night to his diary, “with the enemy in force only eighteen miles away.”

  Even worse, although the Federal army had begun arriving at Pittsburg Landing more than two weeks earlier, neither Sherman, Grant, nor anyone else had made the slightest attempt to entrench or erect fortifications, which in all probability would have deterred a Confederate attack. Instead, they spent their days teaching the men drill formations in the farm fields and holding spit-and-polish dress parades.

  What has never been satisfactorily explained is the role of Grant’s engineering officer, Lt. Col. James Birdseye McPherson, first in his West Point class of 1853 and destined to become a major general and commander of the Army of the Tennessee before his untimely death during the Battle of Atlanta.2 It remains unknown whether McPherson protested the placement of the campsites in such indefensible and unfortified positions, but in any case Grant, as Maj. Gen. Charles F. Smith’s successor, must have approved the arrangement, even tacitly. For his part, Sherman seemed to rely on his original assessment of the area on March 18, not long after his arrival, when he wrote to Grant, “Magnificent plain for camping and drilling, and a military point of great strength.”

  And it might have been, if advantage of the military opportunities had been taken. Since the position was protected on both flanks by water, if either Grant or Sherman had told the engineers that the mouth of the cornucopia must be strongly fortified with embrasures, protected batteries, head logs, abatis,3 with cleared fields of fire and other expedient military architecture, the encampment would have been nearly impregnable. But this was not done, and to Grant, and to a lesser extent Sherman, great blame attaches; their later excuses that it was more desirable for the soldiers to train and learn how to drill than it was for them to fortify seem lame and self-serving, especially in light of what happened. Sherman even went to the point of excusing himself “because [building fortifications] would have made our raw men timid,” as though fortifying would have somehow suggested that the Yankee soldiers were scared of their Rebel adversaries. Equally cavalier was the notion that the Confederate army would never come out from behind its own fortifications at Corinth. In fact, what Sherman and Grant took for a “military point of great strength,” with its flanks protected by water, was viewed by the Rebel generals as a trap for the Yankee army, if they could catch them napping.

  It so happened that among Grant’s orders from higher headquarters in St. Louis was a directive from his superior Maj. Gen. Henry Wager Halleck ordering him not to bring on a general engagement with the enemy until the arrival of the imposingly named general Don Carlos Buell and the 25,000-man army he was marching overland from Nashville. Buell had set his men in motion on March 15 and was supposed to reach Grant at Savannah by April 6. But Grant and Sherman’s determination to wait for Buell led them to ignore any possibility that the enemy might be so obliging, and this seemed to create a kind of blindness even as the evidence of danger mounted.

  There were ample warnings, the first of which should have been that the Rebel army was under Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, whom Winfield Scott, general in chief of the Union armies, had declared to be “the finest soldier I have ever commanded.” All knowledgeable Union officers should have at least calculated that Johnston might not keep his army idling in Corinth like a bunch of cardboard dummies waiting to be attacked or besieged.

  On April 4—two days before the storm—a Yankee lieutenant and half a dozen men on picket duty were captured by Rebel cavalry. When a detachment of the volunteer Fifth Ohio Cavalry went out looking for them, its commander, Maj. Elbridge G. Ricker, rushed back to report encountering a whole Confederate line of battle, complete with artillery, just two miles from Sherman’s headquarters near the little Shiloh church. To prove his point, Major Ricker had brought back ten Confederate prisoners and the splendid saddle of a Rebel cavalry colonel they had killed. Sherman’s response was dismissive: “Oh, tut-tut. You militia officers get scared too easy,” and he chided Ricker for running the risk of drawing the army into a fight before it was ready.

  That same morning, a captain and two sergeants from the 77th Ohio strolled away from their camp to visit a nearby cotton plantation about a quarter mile to the south. As they reached a line of trees they beheld, across a field, “the enemy in force, and to all appearances they were getting breakfast. We saw infantry, cavalry and artillery very plainly.”

  The captain sent one of the sergeants dashing to Sherman’s headquarters, but by this time Sherman was so annoyed that
he ordered the sergeant arrested for sounding a false alarm!

  The next day Col. Jesse Appler, commanding the 53rd Ohio, sent Sherman a report of gray-clad infantry in woods to his front. Appler had already called his soldiers to arms when Sherman responded by having a messenger tell Appler, in front of his men, “Take your damned regiment back to Ohio. There is no enemy nearer than Corinth!”

  Major Ricker’s Rebel prisoners, who had been confined in the Shiloh church, presently became talkative with their guards and boasted that there was a great Confederate army poised to attack next day. In response to a guard’s inquiry as to whether there were enough “greybacks” in the woods to make “interesting hunting,” a resentful Rebel private told him, “Yes, and there’s more than you’uns have ever seen, and if you ain’t mighty careful, they’ll run you into hell or into the river before tomorrow night.”

  None of these things seemed to faze Cump Sherman or Sam Grant. From the time the Union forces began arriving at Pittsburg Landing, Confederate cavalry had kept a close eye on them, and skirmishes were inevitable, some of them deadly. But even as the reports began to pile up ominously in the early days of April there was little or no alarm that something besides enemy cavalry or an infantry company or two might be lurking in the deep woods.

  Sherman seemed more determined than ever to put the lie to scaredy-cats. “For weeks,” he scoffed, “old women reported that [the Rebel army] was coming, sometimes with 100,000, sometimes with 300,000.” He brushed off these worried reports by saying that at worst the Confederates were conducting a “reconnaissance in force.” He even estimated its strength as being “two regiments of infantry and an artillery battery.”

  On April 5, the very eve of battle, Sherman sent a note to Grant in response to an inquiry about enemy activity in the army’s front: “I have no doubt that nothing will occur today other than some picket firing. The enemy is saucy, but got the worst of it yesterday and will not press our pickets far. I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position.”

  That evening, secure in his mansion downriver, Grant doubtless relied on Sherman’s appraisal when he sent a telegram to Major General Halleck, his superior in St. Louis, “The main force of the enemy is at Corinth and points east. I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us, but will be prepared should such a thing take place.” As he wrote those lines, the advance regiments of a 40,000-man Rebel army were not a mile away from the Union encampment at Pittsburg Landing.

  All that Saturday, April 5, there was a growing “uneasiness” among the officers and men in the southernmost camps—the men of Sherman’s and Prentiss’s divisions—for it was they who had either seen for themselves or heard animated reports and rumors that the Rebels were in great strength in the woods to their front.They were accustomed to seeing Confederate cavalry watching them at discreet distances from the fringes of the forest, but lately the news was more menacing.

  That afternoon Prentiss, a dour-faced Virginia-born, Missouribred ropemaker, failed Republican politician, Mexican War veteran, and direct Mayflower descendant with dazzling blue eyes and an Amish-style beard, held a review of his division in Spain Field, during which Maj. James. E. Powell, an experienced soldier of the 25th Missouri, spotted a large body of enemy cavalry hovering on the edges of the woods, taking in the proceedings. He notified Prentiss, who decided to investigate with a reconnaissance at 4 p.m. of five companies, commanded by Col. David Moore. This patrol marched about a mile to the southwest where, in Seay Field, they came upon several black slaves who said they had seen about 200 Confederate cavalry a while earlier. By then it was nearly twilight and the men “could hear the enemy moving in every direction,” according to one of the soldiers; that was enough for Moore, and he withdrew the patrol and reported seeing no Rebels.

  After dark, Capt. Gilbert D. Johnson, a company commander in the 12th Michigan who had been sent to reinforce the regiment’s picket lines, reported there was definitely suspicious movement in the woods to his front. He took his story to General Prentiss, who, like Sherman before him, replied, in effect, that there was nothing to worry about.

  No one in high command, it seemed, wanted to upset the applecart and suggest that the Union encampment was in danger, but that did not satisfy Captain Johnson, who, along with the habitually suspicious Major Powell, went to see General Prentiss’s First Brigade commander, Col. Everett Peabody, a six-foot-one, 240-pound bear of a man, with a disposition to match. Peabody was a Massachusetts-born, Harvard-educated engineer who had moved to St. Joseph 11 years earlier and became one of the most prominent rail builders in the West. With his wary New England upbringing and engineer’s practicality Peabody was just skeptical enough to risk the wrath of his superiors. After hearing out Johnson and Powell, Peabody ordered them to muster five companies—some 400 men—from Powell’s 25th Missouri and Johnson’s 12th Michigan and find out just what in hell was going on in the misty dews and damps beyond their encampment.

  It was well past the midnight hour on Sunday, April 6, when Major Powell’s patrol filed out toward the forbidding line of trees to the south. He marched them again toward Seay Field, where earlier they had encountered the slaves. Cautiously feeling their way in the darkness, with the sickle moon just a pale sliver hanging low in the western sky, they reached another clearing.

  Suddenly shots rang out, then the sound of horses’ hooves: Rebel cavalry. Powell ordered the patrol to form a skirmish line and pressed forward. If he had known what he was headed for, he would have been horrified—as any sane man would—for he was marching nearly straight into the 10,000-man corps of the Rebel general William J. Hardee, who in the Old Army had written the standard West Point textbook Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics and was now waiting patiently for daylight to launch his attack.

  Joseph Ruff was a 20-year-old German immigrant who had hired himself out to Michigan farmers for $16 a month4 before he joined the army and landed as a private in the 12th Michigan Volunteer Infantry. He had just been detailed as cook for the week, but when Captain Johnson commenced rounding up men for the reconnaissance patrol Ruff decided to join up. Now he was fumbling along in the false dawn past deserted log cabins disturbed only by “the crowing of fowls,” until they came to that 40-acre open spot in the timber beyond Seay Field, which turned out to be farmer Fraley’s field.

  “When we halted the first streak of daylight had appeared,” Ruff remembered. “As we watched, we noticed something white moving through the brush and in another moment we spied a horseman whose movements we made out to be those of an enemy,” he said. Then, suddenly, came “the crack of several muskets, and bullets were soon whizzing after us.”

  Ruff and the others began forming in line and advancing, firing at the unseen Rebels as the sky first paled gray, then pink, and the landscape revealed “a rise of ground which seemed to be covered with thick underbrush,” from which they could see “the flashes of Rebel guns.” Several of the Michiganders were wounded, one mortally as the fire became thicker and faster. Ruff took cover, only to have “several enemy bullets driven into the tree about the line of my head. One just clipped by my right ear,” he said. Around him, men began to fall in irregular ways; some uttered peculiar noises. The world was suddenly out of kilter, as though the beauty of the bright Tennessee sunrise was merely a prelude to death, and that nature, with all her morning splendor, was mocking mankind’s folly.

  Major Powell’s patrol had disturbed a picket outpost of Mississippians from Hardee’s corps, and their compatriots responded like an angry swarm of bees. As daylight finally came streaming through the woods, this savage little fight at last touched off what was to be thus far the bloodiest battle in American military history. It would be remembered as the most brutal battle in the West during the entire Civil War.

  As the weight of the Confederate force began to tell, Powell sent a note with a messenger telling Colonel Peabody that they had encountered a Rebel force of 3,000 and were being driven back. Just
as the New Englander was digesting this news, his division commander, General Prentiss, who had heard the shooting in the woods, rode into camp wondering what all the racket was about. When he learned that Peabody had sent out a reconnaissance, Prentiss became irate, accusing him of starting a battle without permission. Peabody retorted, “You’ll soon see that I am not mistaken.” Prentiss then ordered Colonel Moore, who had led yesterday’s patrol, to take another five infantry companies out to reinforce Powell, who was clearly involved in some kind of fight. Prentiss then moved on.

  It seemed to several observers on the scene that Moore and his force had barely disappeared across the field and into the woods before the racket of the skirmishing quickly “doubled in intensity.” Men listened and glanced at one other in alarm. Peabody then ordered his drummer to beat the long roll. He was taking no chances.

  As the soldiers began to fall in and Peabody called for his horse, Prentiss reappeared in a cloud of dust and high dudgeon, confronting him from the height of his mount. “Colonel Peabody,” he cried, “I will hold you personally responsible for bringing on this engagement.” No doubt Prentiss was infuriated that he, himself, would be held responsible by Grant and the others. Peabody replied with a defiant salute and an unmistakable air of disgust—“If I brought on the fight, I am to lead the van”—and without further adieu he cantered away toward the sound of the firing.

  Back at Fraley Field Major Powell’s patrol had taken a serious fright. As they stubbornly withdrew into the forest away from the mounting Confederate opposition, those men who looked back were stunned to behold an entire Rebel line of battle emerge from the woods and fields—21 regiments—nearly 10,000 men, many flags flying, officers on horseback, swords drawn, gun barrels glinting, sergeants shouting orders. Their breaths caught tight as they watched this Rebel line come crashing toward them.