Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  If Forrest’s relationship to a dead twin sister explains some of his motivations, so may his business career. He advanced from glorified sharecropper to self-proclaimed millionaire in less than two decades. In an antebellum agricultural way, he seems to have embodied in significant measure the traits of rags-to-riches Northern industrial titans—the robber barons of the later part of the century. These tended to be puritanical and pious, discreet in their private lives, and well controlled, lusting mostly after money rather than sex. Most rose from childhood poverty, which made them serious in mind and demeanor. The ubiquitous Protestant Bible inculcated self-discipline and counseled Old Testament ruthlessness, lack of trust, familial insularity, trickery, and the supreme moral worth of thrift, drive, and avoidance of waste.4

  Forrest resembled this robber baron type much more so than not. Dozens of Confederates who rode with and knew him before and after the war characterized him as sympathetic and genial, severe when necessary, temperate, and possessing “no small vices.” He was, wrote one, “not given to levity or common-place small talk, but was frank, candid, and sincere.” His temper, on the other hand, was not well controlled. Under stress, his language was legendarily intemperate. And he had one vice that some accounted large: gambling big sums on cards, even bad cards, fearlessly bluffing opponents. In business, he was a loner, restlessly changing partners as his fortune grew. But his employees or junior partners, being family members, tended to be retained.5

  For a man on America’s southwestern frontier, Forrest was unusually disciplined. He shunned not only tobacco but whisky. He had no time for frivolity or hangovers. Except for gambling and high-stakes trading of real estate and human property, he had a marked degree of frugality, a habit he likely learned as much from making do with little on the farm as from the family Bible. Despite his tendency toward profanity, he showed respect for men of God. Without joining a church, he attracted to his ranks the ministers of several and encouraged them to preach and to say grace over meals in his camps. He often credited his survival of myriad combats to the prayers of his wife and his mother.6

  When Willie and his young friends returned from their shotgun exploit in the Shiloh ravine, they may have mentioned seeing or hearing a commotion down near the river. Or maybe what happened next proceeded solely from Forrest’s own restless drive to always know what was happening.

  Ignoring the onset of night and a dismal, general rain, he ordered scouts to don captured Union overcoats and sneak behind Federal lines near the river. They returned with bad news. Arriving steamboats were disgorging large numbers of fresh Federal troops at Pittsburg Landing, swelling the ranks of the milling fugitives gathered there.7

  Forrest assigned his troops to bivouac that night in the camps that Stephen A. Hurlbut and William H. L. Wallace had abandoned on the Confederate right. The nearest general officer with whom Forrest had had most recent contact was Brigadier James R. Chalmers of Mississippi, whose infantry he had aided in the sunset push against the ridge crowned with the row of Federal cannon. When, on orders from headquarters, troops to the left of him began pulling back into the abandoned Federal camps for the night, Chalmers, farthest to the right, was last to go. He bivouacked near the Federal lines.8

  Beauregard, whose plans had so complicated and delayed the Confederate advance, had been ill for weeks and was near exhaustion. Late in the day, he had heard from officers in nearby Alabama that General Buell’s column had been diverted toward Huntsville. At about 9 p.m., he also heard that Grant was evacuating Pittsburg Landing. The latter report, possibly based on inaccurate conjecture about steamboats ferrying Buell’s troops into Pittsburg Landing, came from a man who had shown a capacity to be cavalier in such matters. Chief Engineer Jeremy Gilmer was already due some of the blame for not placing heavy cannons at Fort Heiman opposite Fort Henry, an omission that probably cost the Confederates the Henry battle. Gilmer also did not push Nashville to fortify itself, leaving it indefensible after the fall of Fort Donelson.9

  Gilmer’s intelligence jibed with the report from Alabama. True, some of Buell’s troops were headed for Huntsville, but only one division. Other information was deliberately false, fed to the Confederates by their prisoners. General Bragg wrote his wife that the captured General Prentiss, who knew from Grant that Buell’s army and Lew Wallace’s division were on their way, indicated to Beauregard that the Federals were skedaddling across the Tennessee River. Beauregard, Bragg told his spouse, “tho’t it best no doubt to spare our men and allow them to go.”10

  Forrest, however, had just received eyewitness information that the Federals were not attempting to escape. Rather, they were arriving from across and down the Tennessee in forbidding numbers. Even as Beauregard interrogated Prentiss, the Federal reinforcements were shoving aside thousands of riverbank skulkers and fattening Grant’s lines at the landing.

  Around midnight Forrest awoke Chalmers with word of the Federal reinforcements. Chalmers, a diminutive, Charleston-educated Mississippi district attorney and son of an influential antebellum politician, may not have been happy about it. Forrest asked where he could find Beauregard or corps commanders Braxton Bragg and William Hardee. Chalmers professed ignorance and asked what information Forrest had, “if any.” With patent directness, Forrest barked what his scouts had seen. He added his view that the whole Confederate army needed to resume its attack immediately and drive the half-disorganized Federals into the river—or retreat like rabbits. Otherwise, he added, “we’ll be whipped like hell.” Chalmers told him to find someone of higher rank.11

  Forrest tried to do that. Around 1 a.m. he found Breckinridge and General Hardee perhaps a half mile northwest of his camp, but his persistence produced little satisfaction. Hardee, celebrated author of the preeminent Civil War tactics manual, was even less helpful than Chalmers. Hardee obviously did not think Forrest’s report was worth being awakened for; he probably had heard at headquarters that Buell was headed to Alabama. He told Forrest to find Beauregard. But even though he himself had reported to Beauregard earlier that evening in Sherman’s abandoned tent a quarter mile away, Hardee seems, for whatever reason, not to have given Forrest any specifics on how to get there.12

  So, in the woods and thickets, the cold downpour, and darkness slashed regularly by lightning and gunboat fire, Forrest never found headquarters. Anybody trying to find anybody without exact instructions in this place on this night likely could not have done it. Forrest at least found Breckinridge and Hardee, which made him luckier than Colonel Robert P. Trabue, commanding Breckinridge’s First Brigade. Trabue reported that he rode from dark until 11 p.m. trying to find any general at all to report to, then sent an aide riding for the rest of the night on the same mission, with no success—and Trabue, unlike Forrest, was in the Shiloh Church–Sunken Road corridor where Beauregard, Bragg, Breckinridge, and Hardee all had bedded down. On this night the Confederate command structure was in the dark in more ways than one.13

  Forrest went back to his camp and at 2 a.m. sent out more scouts. They returned with the same news: hordes of fresh Federals continued to swell Grant’s lines. Again Forrest sought out generals Chalmers and Hardee, with similar results. Hardee told him to go back to his unit and “keep up a strong, vigilant picket line.”14

  Forrest gave up a couple of hours before dawn. Hardee did not notify Beauregard of Forrest’s news, and neither Hardee nor Chalmers mentioned the cavalryman’s visits in their official reports. Chalmers, for his part, only recalled them a quarter century later.15

  8

  APRIL 6, NIGHT—GRANT

  “Lick ’Em Tomorrow”

  At dusk, Grant knew he had survived. Within another hour, he knew something else that only an extraordinarily bellicose mind could have comprehended. Although 7,000 of his men had been killed, wounded, or captured, he was going to win.

  With darkness falling, Lieutenant Colonel James B. McPherson asked if they should plan a retreat. No, Grant said. He was going to launch a dawn attack “and whip them.” H
e explained to another subordinate, “The enemy has done all he can do today. Tomorrow morning, with General Lew Wallace’s division and fresh troops of the Army of the Ohio, now crossing the river, we will soon finish him up.”1

  As bizarre as this must have sounded, it was typical Grant: dogged optimism based in hard reality. At 7:15 p.m. Wallace’s 6,000 men slogged in from their roundabout hike. Bull Nelson’s 6,000 had been piling off steamboats ferrying them across the Tennessee since an hour or more before that. Around 9:00 another Buell division, Major General Thomas Crittenden’s, began arriving on steamboats from Savannah. A total of 20,000 fresh Union troops would be on hand the next morning. Many of the new arrivals, it is true, were under Buell’s command, but Grant believed—and, given Buell’s demeanor, doubtless hoped—that with the Confederates unreinforced and fought-out, Wallace’s men would be all he needed.

  MAJOR GENERAL LEW WALLACE

  What Buell did with his own army, which was forming for battle to the left of Grant’s, Grant likely did not know. Buell similarly concerned himself with his own army; he did not look upon Grant “as my commander,” he later wrote. Grant plainly had had his fill of Buell’s lordliness. After dark, he made personal visits to all but one of his division commanders—and none of Buell’s—and ordered them to “throw out heavy lines of skirmishers the next morning” at first light. The division commander he did not visit was Lew Wallace, whom both he and Lieutenant Colonel McPherson could not locate and who apparently could not find Grant. Grant seemingly did not confer at all with Buell, whose men were filing in on the undermanned Federal left, on the ridge overlooking the ravine.2

  The night dragged. Grant’s ankle throbbed. “The drenching rain would have precluded the possibility of sleep without this additional cause,” he wrote. About 10 p.m. the downpour set in. He refused to find shelter on the Tigress after this hellish day. He did consider entering the log house at the landing but found it had become a hospital. Choosing not to attempt to sleep as surgeons sawed arms and legs off screaming men (“the sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy’s fire,” he recalled), he returned to the dripping semishelter of a tree.3

  Near midnight, Sherman encountered him there. Grant’s collar was up, his hat brim low. He held a lantern, and his teeth were clenched on a cigar of the type admirers had sent him since Fort Donelson. The rain was pouring, and lightning flashes and rolling thunder competed with the fire and crash of salvoes from the gunboats in the river.

  Sherman was there to suggest putting the river between themselves and the Confederates. He had followed the order to prepare his men for a dawn offensive and found it nearly impossible. The troops were dispirited, hopeless, mentally beaten. But Grant’s dogged positivism gave Sherman pause. “Well, Grant,” he began more tentatively, “we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?”

  “Yes,” Grant said. Then he quickly blocked the conversational path down which Sherman planned to head: “Lick’em tomorrow, though.”4

  Grant explained. Their situation resembled that on the final day at Fort Donelson, after a Confederate onslaught raged from dawn into the afternoon. The Confederates had taken much ground but had not pushed through to triumph. Victory had hung in the balance between two exhausted armies, Grant said, adding that he had realized then that the one which retook the initiative would win. So he had attacked—and won. The same would happen here.5

  9

  APRIL 7—FORREST

  Prophet Vindicated

  Three hours after his second rousting of General Hardee, Forrest saw his early-morning prophecy begin to materialize.

  On the Confederate right, his pickets—mostly clad in blue overcoats they had scavenged from the overrun Union camps—captured about fifty Federals in the rainy predawn. The captives confirmed what Forrest and his scouts had known since midnight: Buell’s men had been coming ashore at Pittsburg Landing all night.

  Around 5:30 a.m. Forrest himself was with the pickets as Bull Nelson’s Federals counterattacked. Fighting, the cavalrymen withdrew toward the former Federal camps in what was now the Confederate army’s right-center.1

  Behind Forrest’s retreating force, Confederate commanders dealt with disarray. Overnight they had made the same error that other Confederate commanders had made against Grant at Fort Donelson. They assumed they had won. So they pulled back and postponed an attempt to reorganize their intermixed commands until daylight. It was a tall job. They had sustained some 8,000 casualties. At least another 10,000 men were unaccounted for, many still looting the Union camps and sleeping off the liquor they had found there. More, having lost their units in the Shiloh thickets, had celebrated their army’s presumed victory by starting back to Corinth.

  GENERAL P. G. T. BEAUREGARD

  Beauregard could field only 20,000 men, at best, on April 7. The sole reinforcement he had received overnight was the Forty-seventh Tennessee Infantry, six hundred new recruits who had marched all night from their Tennessee training camp and did not arrive until 8 a.m. So at dawn Beauregard and his generals found themselves as surprised and hard-pressed as their foes had been twenty-four hours earlier. The supposedly whipped Federals were attacking.

  Command control was makeshift. Brigadier generals Patrick R. Cleburne and Alexander P. Stewart were just two of the prominent subordinate commanders who had gotten separated from the bulk of their units and were leading remnants of their own men and a patchwork of others. A mistake in orders, or in understanding them, had sent General Cheatham and his comparatively organized division retreating four miles from Pittsburg Landing. Cheatham’s men were camped on the site of their preattack bivouac.2

  This morning, Forrest’s men held their slowly retiring line intact against Bull Nelson’s advance for an hour and a half. At 7 a.m. infantrymen of Chalmers’s brigade, with elements of several other units, rushed in to relieve the cavalry. Forrest then got orders to form a straggler line to stop unauthorized retreating. At 11 a.m. more orders shifted his men farther left, where he dismounted some of his companies to fight as infantry. This tactic, still uncommon in America, Forrest had already used at Fort Donelson and in the ravine fronting Pittsburg Landing the previous day.3

  Union pressure persisted all morning and well into afternoon. Because of the disorganization of his command, Beauregard had to scramble to cobble together a defense. Until around 10:30 a.m., he later claimed, he could field only some 10,000 infantry and artillery under Breckinridge and Hardee on his right and center against Buell’s fresh troops. On the left Bragg had to face Grant’s 20,000 or so with only about 7,500. By 11:30 Beauregard had to pull some of Bragg’s men away to plug the hole in his line left by Cheatham’s complete withdrawal from the battlefield overnight.4

  The vastly outnumbered Confederates contended for the plundered Union camps as fiercely and tenaciously as the Federals had defended them the day before. It was useless, though. The South had missed whatever chance it might have had at Shiloh, and at mid-afternoon Beauregard acknowledged the fact. Around 3 p.m. he ordered a retreat. Forrest’s cavalry helped cover the rear.5

  A hastily gathered Southern army that was rushed into combat half ready had fought and nearly beaten a force heavily leavened with veterans from the Federal victory at Fort Donelson. But one of the Confederates’ most highly regarded generals, Braxton Bragg, who during the battle had decimated some of his own brigades by insisting on assaulting strong positions with outflanked or badly outnumbered units, characteristically seemed not to notice his own mistakes. Instead, always ready to look down his nose at volunteers, he threw the whole blame on the democratic system that the American—and perhaps especially Dixie’s—elite viewed with contempt and fear. He would write a few days later that some of his troops and the civilian officers elected to command their companies and regiments had run out of ammunition during the battle but had been “too lazy to hunt the enemy’s camps” for “millions of cartridges” that lay all around them there.

  “Our failure is entirely due to a want
of discipline and a want of [trained] officers,” he decreed. “Universal suffrage, furloughs and whisky have ruined us.”6

  10

  APRIL 7—GRANT

  Another Prophecy Fulfilled

  As April 7 dawned, Grant grabbed the initiative. His Army of the

  Tennessee to the right and Buell’s Army of the Ohio to the left advanced over lightly defended ground the Confederates had all but abandoned in search of camps the previous evening.

  The ease of it mystified Grant. He wondered if the Confederates had sought the shelter of the captured Federal camps to escape the downpour and the nightlong barrages of the gunboats. Had roles been reversed, he never would have done it. Like most men in the ranks on both sides, he had spent most of his years depending on his wits for survival. To trade a dry night’s sleep for ground that might need reconquering with bullets and bayonets risked wasting a lot of blood.1