Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Grant attacked with troops who were tired but still combat ready. Except for Benjamin Prentiss’s division and William H. L. Wallace’s brigade, most of Grant’s troops, although severely depleted, remained semiorganized. Buell’s and Lew Wallace’s were completely intact. They rushed forward trying to shut their eyes and ears to myriad horrors around them. The battle ground was grotesque with the previous day’s human debris. Dead men and assorted parts of others had been flung about in every pose, the whole ghoulish mosaic alive and pulsating with agony as masses of intermingled wounded groaned and crawled, crying out to horrified onlookers.2

  The Confederates did not fight like overmatched men who realized they had lost. Here and there they launched charges that drove back the Federals. They likely did not know for sure that they had lost until past noon. Then it became obvious to all that, contrary to what they had been told the previous evening by every source except the insistent Colonel Forrest, Grant had indeed been reinforced—overwhelmingly. At 3 p.m. the Confederates began withdrawing under fire. Within two hours they had all but left the field.3

  Grant let them go. He did not seem to care how far they went, sending not even cavalry to see. They might be waiting for him, lying in ambush somewhere down the roads to Corinth. It was raining again, those roads were “almost impassable,” and his units, except maybe for Lew Wallace’s division, were so shot up and frazzled that, Grant later wrote, he “had not the heart to order men who had fought so desperately for two days, lying in the mud and rain whenever not fighting, . . . to pursue.” Nor did he ask Buell to do it. He later all but acknowledged being cowed by Buell, writing that he was so newly senior to the Army of the Ohio chief, who “had been for some time past a department commander, while I commanded only a district,” that he did not feel like asking Buell to do anything.4

  Grant had seen enough fighting in the past forty-eight hours. Americans killed or wounded in those two days all but doubled the total casualties in the war’s four major battles to date: Manassas, Wilson’s Creek, Fort Donelson, and Pea Ridge. And Grant had more reason for pursuing minimally: Major General Henry Halleck had ordered it. Grant expected Halleck to arrive on April 8, and Halleck’s instructions suggested that it was not prudent to go beyond some point “which we can reach and return in a day.” Halleck had reinstated Grant to command of his army just three weeks before Shiloh, and the sin that got him relieved after Fort Donelson had been the mere appearance of disobedience. He had inadvertently made an unauthorized visit to Nashville to reconnoiter the Confederate retreat after informing headquarters that he was going if he got no orders to the contrary; his message, though, was delayed in arriving, and the trip without express permission made Halleck furious. Halleck was similarly upset about not receiving regular reports sent by Grant that were held up by hitches in mail delivery.

  This time, Grant obeyed.5

  Grant’s achievement thus far at Shiloh was already important in ways he could not know. The lesson he gave Sherman on the ghastly overnight of April 6 to 7—that the side attacking first after a spent assault wins—would be critical. It began making, or remaking, the man who would become renowned as the war’s second-greatest Union general.

  All his prior life, Sherman had appeared to need the backstop that fate snatched from him at age nine: a father. At Shiloh he began finding a surrogate, one two years younger than himself. But it would be a two-way street. Old General Smith lay abed in Savannah, rotting away from the infection in his leg. With his sole peer-confidant dying, Grant needed another. Sherman, meanwhile, needed one whose strength of will could dispel his deep doubts that this war to reunite America was winnable.

  The tall, nervous redhead had been three classes ahead of Grant at West Point. There, the plebe had seemed so unexceptional that Sherman barely remembered him. He was scarcely more impressed at seeing Grant again in the 1850s in St. Louis, where Sherman was a struggling banker and Grant a shabby farmer and occasional street seller of wood. But during the Fort Donelson battle, Grant got Sherman’s attention. Senior to Grant, Sherman had been sent by Halleck to Paducah, Kentucky, to push aid on to Donelson. Halleck wanted to send him even farther forward, to replace Grant. But Sherman declined the latter job, doubting both himself and the Union’s capacity to restore itself. But he wanted to believe. With the boats that he pushed hard upriver, he sent unusually supportive letters to Grant. “I will do everything in my power to hurry forward to you reinforcements and supplies, and if I could be of service to you myself would gladly come, without making any question of rank,” Sherman wrote. In a second note that same day, he added, “Command me in any way.” The messages took Grant aback. Such subservience had little military precedent.6

  The two Ohio natives seemed like opposites. Sherman was tall, wildly demonstrative, a frequently provocative blusterer; Grant was mild and diminutive, a near sphinx. Sherman hailed from the upper class, Grant from well below.7

  BRIGADIER GENERAL WILLIAM T. SHERMAN

  But life’s scourges had already lashed both men before the great leveler of this war swept over them. Each had experienced the psychological devastation of failure and poverty. Sherman’s birth father, a respectable lawyer and judge, had suffered financial disaster and died penniless when the son was nine. Most of the eleven Sherman children were farmed out to relatives and friends, and young Cump, short for Tecumseh, trudged next door to live with the rich Ewings. The poor nonrelation grew up privileged in this lofty second family, into which he then married. But he seems never to have overcome a fear of the kind of financial calamity that collapsed his boyhood world. Like Grant, he had left the old army and failed—at banking and business—before doing time in a concern owned by his foster father. Grant, who hit bottom working for his father, at least was the man’s actual son.8

  Sherman had labored under a military cloud as dark as Grant’s. But Grant at least was not crazy, as Sherman had been alleged to be in Kentucky in the summer and fall of 1861. Sherman needed to get to a battlefield to erase his Kentucky repute. Grant, surrounded by actual or suspected enemies in his ranks, surely saw in Sherman’s Washington connections—his foster father had been US secretary of the interior and a brother was a sitting US senator from Ohio—a possible counterbalance to the clout of such ambitious subordinates as John McClernand and Lew Wallace and his doubting superiors Halleck in St. Louis and General in Chief George McClellan in Washington. McClellan had been livid at seeing Grant drunk in the old army, and Halleck was sitting on those shameful charges, likely inspired by McClernand, that Grant’s thirst was chronic.9

  So Grant and Sherman needed each other. Neither yet knew how much.

  11

  APRIL 8—FORREST

  “Shoot That Man!”

  The day after Shiloh, with the Confederates streaming back toward Corinth, Grant finally told Sherman to pursue. He wanted more of a gingerly probe than an attempt to run them to ground, but even that was delayed by a phantom battle. An Ohio unit testing rifles after another night’s rain triggered more shooting as Federals traumatized by American history’s most horrific battle up to that time rushed whole brigades into line. For fifteen minutes, they blazed away at empty woods.1

  Near noon, Sherman got going. With two brigades, he headed down Ridge Road to perhaps two miles from the crossroads that had so snarled the Confederate march to Pittsburg Landing on April 5. At the crossroads, called Mickey after the adjacent farm of James Michie, the dregs of Beauregard’s Confederate infantry—1,200 frazzled men of Breckinridge’s corps—had reached a house converted into a hospital. The facility contained about four hundred wounded. Arms, legs, hands, and feet littered its yard.2

  Sherman’s advance had passed abandoned camps containing dead and wounded. White-and-yellow hospital flags flew over them. Now, two miles from the crossroads, they saw another a half mile or so farther on. Here Breckinridge’s cavalry rear guard had gathered more wounded, and toward their makeshift aid station trudged a line of dismounted men leading horses. The Federals
proceeded warily. They approached a patch of recently cut timber scattered for two hundred yards around a winding creek. It was the site of the skirmish that had brought Grant out to wrench his ankle on the rainy night of April 4. Beyond the felled trees, the enemy now was crossing a rain-soaked cotton field toward a rise. When the Federal cavalry reported the sight to Sherman, he ordered forward 240 skirmishers—two companies of the Seventy-seventh Ohio Infantry—and posted cavalry to their rear to charge the Confederates at contact. Behind the horsemen he positioned the rest of the Seventy-seventh Ohio. He deemed the total force enough, in his words, to “clean the camp.”3

  The creek and strewn logs were slowing the Federal advance when, suddenly, Confederate cavalrymen burst from behind a ridge. Brandishing shotguns and pistols and yelling, they charged pell-mell and broke the Federal skirmish line. Sherman reported that the Union cavalry galloped rearward, and the Ohio infantrymen “broke, threw away their muskets, and fled.”

  Sherman watched in dismay. The Ohioans fired prematurely, and the colonel of the Seventy-seventh reported that the headlong Confederate charge gave his men no time to reload. They tried to stand with fixed bayonets, but Dixie shotguns blew them backward. When they turned to run, the pursuers rode them down. Sherman himself turned tail.The Ohioans’ colonel reported that fifty-seven of his men were killed, wounded, or captured.

  When the rear brigade formed for battle to stop the rout, the Confederates slowed to round up prisoners. One tall Confederate did not stop. He crashed against and into the bayonet-bristling battle line. “Kill him!” Federals shouted. “Shoot that man!” “Stick him!” “Knock him off his horse!”

  The solitary rider was Forrest. Either his horse had run away with him, or, more likely, battle fervor had made him oblivious. He was unaware that his comrades had not followed until he chased the fleeing skirmishers and cavalry to the battle line, and they turned to fight. Only then did he yank his reins. Realizing his fix, he turned and spurred his mount toward safety, clearing a path with his pistol. His horse was shot but kept moving. One of the nearest Federal soldiers rammed a musket against the rider’s right side and fired. The ball lifted Forrest from the saddle and lodged near his spine. With his right leg limp in the stirrup, he held on and vanished, Sherman later recalled, “into the woods to the south.”

  By then, the remnant of Breckinridge’s infantry had abandoned the camp and hospital at Mickey, farther to Sherman’s front. The Union cavalry, sent a mile or more beyond the Seventy-seventh Ohio, entered Mickey with caution. Sherman ordered burial of his dead, gathered up his wounded, counted his missing, and got a pledge from a hospital doctor in Mickey that Union wounded there would be treated until ambulances could come next day. He got back to camp after nightfall.4

  Forrest’s lonely dash into massed Federals at what became known as Fallen Timbers would become one of his most fabled exploits. As years passed, it would be enhanced. One version would say he stopped only one minié ball because he had snatched a Federal up onto the horse behind him to ward off shots in the back, casting the man aside when out of range. All versions would portray him as leading the charge and masterminding the ambush—all versions, that is, except every official one.5

  Some 350 Confederate cavalry made the charge alongside Forrest that day, only about forty of them Forrest’s. Kentuckians led by Captain John Hunt Morgan and Mississippians under Colonel Wirt Adams also participated, but two-thirds, or 220, were members of the Eighth Texas of Colonel John Wharton. Wharton’s wounding on April 7 put Major Thomas Harrison over the Texans on this day. Hard fighters, they called themselves Terry’s Texas Rangers after their first colonel, who died in battle in 1861.6

  Wharton’s report briefly referred to the “brilliant charge gallantly led” by Harrison, not mentioning Forrest. Harrison reported he made the charge after consulting Forrest, but the report made plain that Harrison did not consider Forrest his commander. From Harrison’s report it is not clear who proposed the charge, a fact that suggests Forrest did. One of Forrest’s homemade precepts was that, with charges, it was better to give than receive. Harrison referred to Forrest’s unit merely as “one of the companies cooperating with me” and indicated he ordered the retreat that left Forrest on his own—without mentioning Forrest at that point at all. He said he did so because his men had exhausted the ammunition in their weapons and did not have sabers. Harrison reported capturing forty-three prisoners, killing between forty and fifty Federals, wounding many others, and incurring nine casualties. He added, seemingly offhand, “I cannot state the loss of the companies co-operating with me. Colonel Forrest, I learn, was slightly wounded.”7

  Harrison plainly had little to do with Forrest after their initial “consultation,” and his report indicates disdain for the Tennessean. Harrison’s background surely contributed to this; he and Wharton were both Houston-area attorneys leading a distinguished regiment. They likely considered themselves superior to the Memphis ex–slave trader best-known so far in this war for fleeing Fort Donelson with the scorned brigadiers John Floyd and Gideon Pillow.8

  Even if the charge was Harrison’s idea, it would have been characteristic of Forrest to go flying independently to the front of the fight.9

  It was typical, too, that Forrest would gallop into an enemy mob with such abandon that he neglected to notice his men were not following. Forrest came from fearless stock. His mother once took a panther’s mauling rather than drop a basket of baby chickens a neighbor gave her. On what was then called the southwest frontier, settlers could force themselves to be brave, to challenge danger and vanquish it, protecting themselves and their own or dying fast—or they could cower and permit themselves and their own to die slowly by letting others take all they had. Fast was better. While he surely felt fear in deadly circumstances, Forrest habitually sublimated his fright in ubiquitous bellicosity whenever challenged—whether on the battlefield or in the street.10

  He had in fact devoted much thought to fear and to learning to deal with it. In boyhood, a half-broken colt had thrown him off its back into a pack of vicious dogs. He recalled expecting to be torn to pieces—only to see the dogs scatter, terrified of this human mass hurled so suddenly among them. Seeing they were as afraid as he, he realized that the difference between the fearful and the feared is psychological. So Forrest developed his habit of all-out aggression to deal with foes. His second in command, Lieutenant Colonel David C. Kelley, wrote that early in the war Forrest in a fight was “so fierce . . . that he was almost equally dangerous to friend or foe, and . . . seemed . . . too wildly excitable to be capable of judicious command.”11

  But the passion Forrest fought with was partly for show. His goal, he would one day explain to a fellow Confederate, was to shock, stagger, and demoralize opponents by fiercely throwing everything he had at them at the outset. Then, allowing them no respite, he would furiously continue to attack until he was “killing, capturing, and driving them with . . . little difficulty.” Usually, though, he put it more succinctly: “Git’em skeered, then keep the skeer on ’em.”12

  12

  APRIL 8—GRANT

  “This Man . . . Fights”

  By the time Sherman got back to camp from the Fallen Timbers battle on April 8, whispers of the butchery at Pittsburg Landing had reached Washington. A wire to the New York Herald ’s capital bureau the next morning confirmed them. The Senate halted regular business to read the Herald report of “the bloodiest battle of modern times.” It said the Confederates had retreated, and the New York Times reported a “glorious victory” for the North. Grant returned to the national hero’s spotlight that he had occupied after Fort Donelson.1

  Then came the casualty list. Nearly 24,000 Americans—Federals and Confederates—were dead, wounded, or missing at Shiloh. A firestorm of outrage swept the North. Both truth and lies fed the flames. The main truth, contrary to Grant’s protests, was that his army had been unready for the all-out Confederate attack.The lies were almost innumerable.The New York Tribune sto
rmed that Grant had devoted no more thought to readiness than to “a Fourth of July Frolic.” A novella-length article by reporter Whitelaw Reid in the Cincinnati Gazette claimed Grant’s troops were so cavalierly unguarded that some had been bayoneted in their tents.2

  Some of the lies were Grant’s. He had warned Julia in a letter on April 15 that “I will come in again for . . . abuse from persons who were not here,” but in fact many of his detractors were there. These he dismissed as having disgraced themselves in the fighting; they were criticizing him now, he said, to deflect infamy from themselves. This letter highlighted Grant’s least attractive trait, one ubiquitous among officers on both sides. This battler whom a fellow Mexican War veteran described as a “man of fire” because of his cool efficiency where bullets flew was not so unflinching under public criticism. Like many of his more timid peers, he tended in such circumstances to get creative with facts.3

  As criticism of Grant mounted in the aftermath of Shiloh, he resorted to blatant misrepresentation in order to defend himself. He told his congressional patron, Illinois representative Elihu Washburne, that at Shiloh he had had 30,000 men against 70,000 Confederates; to a prospective subordinate he wrote that “the papers are giving me fits” despite his army of 35,000’s having battled Confederates numbering “over 80,000” on April 6. With Lew Wallace’s division missing for the first day of the battle, Grant’s own numbers could be rounded down to around 40,000, but the Confederates never totaled much more than that, and Grant surely knew it. He also claimed so much skirmishing was going on for two days before Shiloh that he “could have brought on the battle either Friday or Saturday if I had chosen” but elected “to keep it off until Buell arrived.” Only in a letter to his father twenty days after the battle would he admit he had no idea the Confederates would attack in force.4