by Jack Hurst
But it was no go. “In attempting to mount the last ridge,” Chalmers reported, “we were met by a fire from a whole line protected by infantry and assisted by shells from the gunboats.” Forty-one cannon aided by infantry units—the Sixth Iowa, for one—had rushed in from the collapsing Union lines for a last stand along the road leading down to the river. The thrown-together mass now erupted in thunderous flame. Bragg and Withers sent for help and ordered Withers’s men forward into the hail of Federal lead. But Polk, to the left, ordered the troops in the ravine to retreat in his direction, away from the river, to avoid the concentrated fire. Chalmers apparently missed this order: “Our men struggled vainly to ascend the hill, which was very steep, making charge after charge without success.”17
Forrest, too, was in the ravine. Polk had already ordered the cavalry to comparative cover there. But Forrest’s men, now dismounted, joined Chalmers, whose brigade was in its sixth head-on clash of the day and still struggling to comply with Bragg’s now obsolete order to advance. But the Confederates were “too much exhausted to storm the batteries on the hill,” Chalmers reported, although they “continued to fight until night closed hostilities on both sides.” Beauregard ordered them to camp beyond easy range of gunboat fire.18
Forrest was alarmed, and not just that the victory had not been finalized. He looked around in vain for Willie. His fifteen-year-old son and the boy’s two young companions had been with him all day—until now.19
6
APRIL 6, AFTERNOON—GRANT
“I Haven’t Despaired of Whipping Them Yet”
Little had gone right for Grant in the morning, and most of the afternoon was worse.
The Union’s only luck lay in the delivery of the Confederate assault. Jerky and piecemeal, it repeatedly balked and wavered as commanders on the ground reworked Beauregard’s unwieldy battle plan. Ill-trained, hungry volunteer troops had to cross terrain gashed by ravines, thickets, swamps, flooded creeks, fierce Federal resistance, and battlefield horror unprecedented in America.
The Confederates were determined though. During the morning, Federals with Sherman and McClernand, northwest of Prentiss and Hurlbut, had their right hammered loose from its Owl Creek anchor. They fell back toward the mobbed banks of the Tennessee and Snake Creek, into which Owl Creek emptied just north of Pittsburg Landing. McClernand requested help, and Grant sent the Iowa regiments he had drafted to stem the straggling. More panicked runaways swelled the horde extending north from the landing.1
Noon came and went. There had been no word, let alone sighting, of the reinforcements Grant had ordered forward that morning. Bull Nelson’s division of Buell’s army, supposedly marching down the east bank of the Tennessee from Savannah, and Lew Wallace’s division from Grant’s own force, summoned at 11 a.m. for what was presumably a two-hour march from the Crump’s Landing area, remained absent. Grant could not know it, but the third Federal division he had ordered forward, Brigadier Thomas Wood’s, was still at Savannah. Grant had directed it to board boats there, but it had arrived to find none.
The outlook kept worsening. Grant sent off a tense message intended for Nelson. It sounded very like another he had written seeking aid from a gunboat captain during his hour of deepest crisis at Fort Donelson. Hurry, he wrote Nelson. The army had been under “spirited” attack, and arrival of “fresh troops on the field now would have a powerful effect, both by inspiring our men and disheartening the enemy.” Nelson should lose no time in crossing the river, “leaving all your baggage on the east bank.” Early arrival “might possibly save the day for us.”2
The first reinforcement to arrive at Pittsburg Landing, around 1 p.m., was Major General Buell with a single staff member. Buell knew the urgency of the situation, having intercepted the dispatch urging Nelson to hurry up, but his arrival turned out to be not even symbolic succor.3
MAJOR GENERAL DON CARLOS BUELL
The two generals, their relationship tense under the best of circumstances, now faced each other in the heat of crisis. They met on Grant’s steamboat, the Tigress, at the edge of the Tennessee River sometime between 1 and 2 p.m. Buell did not appear downcast to see his recently elevated superior in trouble. Grant, perhaps to break the ice, showed Buell his saber scabbard, which had been dented by a shell fragment earlier in the day. The scabbard had prevented a serious wound. Buell later wrote disdainfully that he “took little notice.” He asked Grant about the state of the battle and requested that steamboats be sent back to Savannah to pick up Major General George Crittenden’s just-arriving division. Then, a disputed story goes, Buell eyed the 5,000 to 7,000 crazed fugitives crowding the landing and asked what arrangements Grant had made to retreat. Grant replied that he had made none. “I haven’t despaired of whipping them yet,” he reportedly said.4
That sentence would become part of Grant lore. Buell maintained years later that it was never uttered, claiming that loyal, and sometimes creative, Grant aide John Rawlins had invented the purported exchange. Buell would add that on this day, he saw nothing of Grant’s supposedly characteristic steeliness. Buell’s observation may be partly correct, at least regarding the view he took of Grant at the time. Though possibly an attempt to overcome reticence in the face of Buell’s coldness, Grant’s showing him the damaged scabbard does seem boyishly digressive from the crisis around them. Whatever its cause, it made Grant seem rattled, an impression Buell was glad to receive.
Buell’s suggestion of retreat may appear unnecessary, given that his own army was on its way, but Buell knew something Grant didn’t. For several hours, Buell had held at Savannah the very division of Nelson’s that Grant had ordered to hurry to the battlefield. Having no idea of the situation’s urgency, Buell only released Nelson to start down the Tennessee’s east bank when Buell and his chief of staff boarded a battlefield-bound steamboat at noon or after. A Nelson subordinate reported starting at 1 p.m. And while Grant had ordered Nelson to get a local guide, none was available. Nelson had to send a cavalry detail just to find a route down the low, partially flooded east bank—all of which cost Nelson more valuable time.
At Savannah, Buell had bided his time, watching for transport boats he thought Grant might send back from Pittsburg Landing. Like other Federals at the Union headquarters, Buell appeared little concerned. In his sickbed at Savannah, old General Charles Ferguson Smith laughed off the battle sounds as “a hot picket skirmish,” and a naval officer guessed it was just gunboats peppering the riverbank to prevent positioning of Confederate artillery.
But while Buell had tarried, the men Nelson sent to scout out a route, having gotten nearer the din, had become filled with anxiety. They returned at noon from a ride so frantic it had killed some of their horses. They had found no route. A local finally told Nelson of another road. It would accommodate infantry and cavalry, the man said, but not artillery or wagons.5
Buell had finally loosed Nelson and headed toward Pittsburg Landing on a fast steamer. On the way, he met another craft racing north with Grant’s urgent message to Nelson. And before Buell reached the landing, he saw Union fugitives swimming Snake Creek to put it between them and the battle. Habitually defensive minded and now surrounded by runaways bawling disaster, Buell likely wondered if Grant could hold until Nelson arrived. So Buell possibly did make an inquiry about withdrawal. Grant’s memoirs say the scene at Pittsburg Landing probably “impressed General Buell with the idea that a line of retreat would be a good thing just then.” But, he added, “the distant rear of an army engaged in battle is not the best place from which to judge correctly what is going on in front.”6
“I haven’t despaired of whipping them yet.” This would have been the perfect afternoon for despair. Despite his higher rank, Grant’s control over Buell and Buell’s units was nominal at best. But the officer who gave him the greatest anxiety was his own subordinate, Lew Wallace. The Indiana governor’s son and his division of more than 5,000 effectives remained absent, despite their orders to rush to the battlefield.
Wa
llace seemed to have vanished. The newly appointed major general—his three brigades scattered at least nine miles north of the battlefield, at Crump’s Landing and points three and five miles west of there—had first been summoned as soon as Grant reached Pittsburg shortly after their early-morning conference near Crump’s Landing. Grant had called for Wallace again at noon and yet again at 2:30. But the first order did not arrive until 11 a.m., and at their face-to-face meeting that morning, Grant, with typical optimism, had given Wallace no hint of a problem. So instead of marching his westward units back to Crump’s and bringing his force on to Pittsburg by the road along the river, Wallace fed his men a fast lunch and marched for Shiloh Church. Around 2 p.m., Grant aide William Rowley arrived and said the camps around the church had been overrun. Wallace—only now learning Grant was in trouble—turned back to the river road. But instead of putting his erstwhile rear in front, he marched his more-experienced advance units through the rear ones so they would reach the fighting first.7
Mid-afternoon passed with no sign of Wallace. On the Federal right, Sherman and McClernand had countercharged in the late morning during one of the Confederate lulls and retaken nearly a half mile of ground. In the afternoon, though, they had to give it back again. By 3 p.m. they occupied much the same position to which they had been pushed at midday.8
Around 4 p.m., Hurlbut’s southern end of the Hornet’s Nest line began to falter. The Confederates had transferred much of their muscle from the Federal right in front of Sherman and McClernand to the center and left, and Grant faced the mounting possibility that Lew Wallace would not arrive. He put his chief of staff, Colonel Joseph D. Webster, to gathering artillery and arraying it on the ridge just south of the road leading down to Pittsburg Landing. Soon forty-one guns overlooked a hundred-foot gorge on the Federal left. But, for the moment, the guns nearest the river were nearly naked of supporting infantry.
At the Union line’s opposite end, two regiments from Missouri and Ohio reanchored Sherman’s right and clung to the Snake Creek Bridge, the sole remaining avenue by which Lew Wallace could reach the battlefield. Then, in the mid-afternoon Grant had to order even the Ohio regiment to the left to aid Hurlbut. At 4:30 he revisited the landing to plead with the straggling mob to return to the fight. When they refused, he loosed cavalry to try to drive them there with the flats of their sabers, to no avail.9
Confederate myopia saved Grant. Beauregard wasted hours blasting the defenders out of the Hornet’s Nest instead of pouring past their flanks and surrounding them. At 5 p.m., as Confederate cannon finally blew the last of Prentiss’s and Hurlbut’s men out of the Sunken Road, Union reinforcements began arriving. Men of Colonel Jacob Ammen’s brigade of Nelson’s division, begrimed with mud from the swamps they had had to cross on their overland scramble from Savannah, burst from the woods on the far side of the Tennessee. They still had to cut a road to the bank, and no transport steamers were yet on that side of the river to meet them, but at least they were finally there.
Nelson himself did not stand on ceremony. A huge, profane former naval officer, he commandeered some merchant steamboats that were hugging the east bank to escape Confederate fire. Taking an initial boatload of two hundred Indiana troops, Nelson crossed the river, ordering the craft’s captain to steam straight for the skulkers in the water. He landed about 5:20 p.m. and accorded similar sneers to the fugitives ashore, directing his mounted officers to descend the gangplank with sabers drawn and “trample these bastards into the mud.” Continuing to bellow, he brought his three companies up the landing road onto the ridge overlooking the ravine. There, at Buell’s order, they took places around the weakly supported cannons that Webster was hurrying into line. On the ridge, Nelson conferred with Grant and Buell. A cannonball interrupted the conversation by taking the head off a Grant aide, splattering Grant with brains.10
At 6 p.m., dusk settled over the bloodiest battlefield American history had yet seen. Around 7,000 Federals lay killed and wounded, maimed and slain in every possible manner and lying and dying in contorted heaps, while another 10,000 wailed in panic at the waterside. But Grant had not lost. His final line of cannon and infantry was a thin ribbon stretching not much more than a mile from the ridge to the west of the landing out onto the Savannah-Hamburg Road toward the Snake Creek Bridge. It was two miles behind where his troops had begun the day, but it had breasted the last fitful Confederate assaults. To a newspaperman who seemed fearful that the Confederates might overrun them in the dark, Grant said no, the enemy could not break their lines, which were finally swelling with reinforcements. He added a sentence that likely made the journalist blink.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “we shall attack . . . with fresh troops and drive them.”11
Grant apparently had seen Buell only twice that afternoon, possibly by choice. The Army of the Ohio commander was not very helpful. Sherman later claimed Buell had acted true to his typically cautious nature and resisted bringing any more of his army than Nelson’s lead elements across the Tennessee because of the dicey “looks of things.”12
SHILOH’S FIRST DAY: This period map reflects (1) Sherman’s initial position near the top and those to which he and his troops fell back during the day; (2) the Sunken Road near “Prentiss”; (3) Forrest’s first post at Lick Creek Ford near the bottom left; and (4) Grant’s final line just left of the road up from the river landing and Forrest’s final position facing the gorge just left of Grant’s line.
But some of what Grant did see of his aloof, contemptuous fellow general reflected the differences between the two men. Grant later claimed that after their first brief meeting around 2 p.m., he noticed Buell shouting at the skulkers along the river and threatening to have the gunboats shell them. Grant’s contrasting actions—eventually begging the fugitives to fight and then rounding them up with cavalry—separate him at this point in the war from Buell and most of the Union high command. Whereas Buell felt distrust and contempt for volunteers, Grant did not consider blasting them with cannons. His recent rank notwithstanding, he was more like them than like Buell—and he knew it. He could imagine what it must have been like to witness a battle as large as Shiloh through the eyes of men who had never participated in armed combat before. “Most of these men afterward proved themselves as gallant as any of those who saved the battle from which they had deserted,” Grant would write.13
At Shiloh, Grant could only intuit, rather than know, that the Federal deserters would later prove their worth. But his postwar spelling out of the disparity between his own and Buell’s views of volunteers reflects a lifelong philosophy. In a later article he suggested that Buell, looking down on volunteers as somehow different from professional soldiers, “did not distinguish sufficiently” what the difference consisted of. Wartime volunteer soldiers were “men who risked life for a principle, and often men of . . . independence of character.” Peacetime professionals, as a rule, were “only men who could not do as well in any other occupation.”
He knew, of course, what he was talking about. That last line perfectly described his antebellum self.14
7
APRIL 6, NIGHT—FORREST
“We’ll Be Whipped Like Hell”
Forrest ignored Beauregard’s order to the frazzled Confederates to rest until daylight. He was not a man to sleep much until a fight ended. In cheerless darkness haunted by the agonies of thousands of wounded, he became a nocturnal hunter. First, he had to find Willie.
Lieutenant William Montgomery Forrest apparently retained, in his mid-teens, some impetuous, unsoldierly boyishness. Now he and the two teenaged companions his father had procured for him some days earlier—progeny of Episcopal bishop James H. Otey, a fellow resident of Memphis, and Brigadier General Daniel S. Donelson, the Tennessee legislature’s recent Speaker of the House—were missing in this colossal battle, perhaps separated from Forrest’s staff during the dash to the river following General Prentiss’s surrender at the Hornet’s Nest.
Forrest searched in vain; the boys ultimat
ely showed up on their own. They turned over to the provost marshal a few Federal prisoners—skulkers, surely—whom they had captured after charging them with blazing shotguns in a ravine near the river. So the boys were safe, the relieved colonel could tell Willie’s mother.1
Forrest was a family man in the clannish way of rural Americans or Old Country immigrants. There were a lot of Forrests, and they were close. Around the time the Shiloh colonel turned twenty-one, his uncle Jonathan provided the sharp young farmer his entrée into the outside world: a junior partnership in the uncle’s modest mercantile, livery, and livestock-trading business in Hernando, Mississippi. Forrest eventually offered a similar leg up to his younger brothers. The closest to him in age, John, partially paralyzed in the Mexican War, ran the Memphis slave jail that was the base of the Forrest business. The other brothers—Bill, Aaron, Jesse, and Jeffrey—also apparently worked in the firm, Bill in St. Louis and the others in Memphis or in its satellite office downriver in Vicksburg. The youngest sibling, Jeffrey, twenty-three at the start of the war, had lived for much of his youth in Forrest’s home, reared alongside his nephew, Willie.2
It was likely more than the custom of the time that motivated Forrest, the eldest brother, to take so many siblings under his wing. Nathan Bedford Forrest had a twin sister who did not survive to adulthood. Nothing he said about his sister remains, but she was named Frances, or Fanny, after a maternal aunt. It seems significant that Forrest named his own daughter Fanny. (That daughter, like his sister, died young; fever killed her at age six.) The relationship between male and female twins is thought to include something of protector and protected; the male losing his twin can be left with a void and tend to seek others to protect. Forrest acted that way, and not just within his family. After shepherding his mother and siblings following the death of his father and drawing a gun in behalf of his uncle on the Hernando town square, he became constable in Hernando and, within a few more years, a rising and similarly bellicose defender of Memphians in need. Twice in the spring and summer of 1857 alone, the Memphis Daily Appeal cited him as a member of small municipal committees to dissuade and dispel lynch mobs that formed to avenge the murder of a Memphis businessman by a gambler.3
