America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  The spirited Confederate onslaught unnerved the exhausted federal troops who were so close to victory just hours earlier. They retreated. In the rear of the Union lines, army teamsters and spectators panicked and dashed toward Washington. The contagion spread to some of the retreating soldiers, who threw down guns, knapsacks, canteens, and blankets. Artillery gunners cut horses loose from the guns and escaped as fast as they could, leaving behind valuable arms for the Confederates.

  In Richmond, the absence of news was maddening. Jefferson Davis lost patience and rode out to the battlefield, joining his troops just as the federal retreat became a rout. The rest of Richmond waited, fearing that Union forces would be upon the city momentarily. Confederate officials milled about Mechanics Hall, the temporary headquarters for the War Department. Suddenly, Judah P. Benjamin, the attorney general, burst into the hall with news that President Davis had sent a telegram from the front: “We have won a glorious but dear-bought victory; the night closed with the enemy in full flight, pursued by our troops.” The hall erupted in celebration. The new nation was now a reality. The Richmond Examiner expressed the feelings of the city: “This blow will shake the Northern Union in every bone; the echo will reverberate round the globe. It secures the independence of the Southern Confederacy. The churches of this city should be open to-day and its inhabitants should render God their thanks for a special providence in their behalf.”40

  President Davis and others wondered why Beauregard did not pursue the scampering Federals back to Washington. The answer was simple, and it was a response that would figure time and again during the war. The Confederates were just as green and just as exhausted as their Union counterparts. As night fell, so did a heavy rain, turning the roads back to the capital into mud pits.

  Bull Run confirmed for many southerners the idea that the Confederacy was God’s Chosen Nation. In a sermon delivered a week after the battle, the Rev. Stephen Elliott of Georgia compared the southern triumph to the deliverance of the Jewish people from Egypt: “It was the crowning token of his love—the most wonderful of all the manifestations of his divine presence with us.” The victory recalled Isaiah 37:26. Though the Confederate soldiers did not turn “defended cities into ruinous heaps” in a literal sense, they had defeated a mightier foe.41

  Southerners assumed too much when they asserted, “By the work of Sunday we have broken the backbone of invasion and utterly broken the spirit of the North.” Embarrassment, despair, but ultimately determination characterized the reaction of northerners to their defeat at Bull Run. New York attorney George Templeton Strong confided to his diary the day after the battle, “Today will be known as BLACK MONDAY.” Lincoln, who had ordered the advance, sighed to a colleague, “If hell is any worse than this, it has no terror for me.” Those in the North who had demanded action now conceded the Union attack was ill timed: “Hereafter our generals must not be hurried into premature demonstrations.” Excuses abounded: ignorance of local topography, the elaborate construction of trenches by the enemy, and the superior training and experience of Confederate soldiers.42

  In the North, the Battle of Bull Run refuted the notion of a quick and easy war, but it did not kindle a movement for peace. An essayist in Harper’s sent a warning: “From the fearful day at Bull Run dates war. Not polite war, not incredulous war, not conciliatory war, but war that breaks hearts and blights homes; war that by bloody and terrible blows teaches causeless rebellion that it shall suffer in mind, body, and estate, and that wherever it can be harmed there the blow shall fall, until, in absolute submission, it shall sue for peace.” This was the war that lay ahead. An illustration of Rebel soldiers bayoneting the Union wounded on the battlefield at Bull Run accompanied the piece. Whether this occurred or not was beside the point. The message to readers was clear: draw no quarter against the enemy.43

  The Battle of Bull Run was a limited affair, with no strategic advantage gained or lost and with both armies remaining intact. It was, however, the first major engagement of the war, the first significant test of theories and presumptions. Union forces came away with the idea that much work remained to be done, but giving up the fight was not an option. The Confederacy concluded that its independence was secure or at least near at hand, that foreign governments would rush to recognize the new nation, and that Yankee troops would run at the first glint of southern steel. It would be another year before the South won a second major victory.

  The toll from Bull Run stood at 481 dead on the Union side and 387 Confederates killed in battle. The numbers shocked citizens on both sides. President Davis’s telegram noting a “dear-bought victory” accurately reflected the people’s sentiment. These numbers would prove very modest compared to the casualties in the months and years to come, a mere five to ten minutes’ worth of fighting in some battles. Sullivan Ballou would be spared the horror ahead; he died by the bank of Bull Run on July 21, 1861. For God and country.

  CHAPTER 10

  SHILOH AWAKENING

  SHILOH WAS A BIBLICAL CITY. Its name means “tranquil.” The Children of Israel gathered there to protect the Ark of the Covenant containing the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. The Children, however, slipped in their devotion to God. The Philistines delivered a crushing defeat and carried off the Ark. Eventually, Shiloh was destroyed.

  Shiloh gave its name to several evangelical Christian churches in America. Congregants hoped to emulate the tranquility and sanctity of the biblical place, while admonishing each other to remain righteous unto the Lord. Such was the hope of Shiloh Chapel in southwest Tennessee. On April 6 and 7, 1862, two American armies fought each other near this church in the bloodiest battle in the nation’s history up to that time. The outcome was indecisive and strategically ambiguous. The victors did not carry any priceless religious artifacts from the field. The church survived. How American soldiers and civilians viewed the civil war in their midst, however, changed for all time. And with that altered vision, the nation changed as well.

  The protagonist of this bloody drama hardly seemed the heroic type. As a young man, Ulysses S. Grant wanted to be a high school math teacher but deferred to his father’s wishes that he remain at West Point. He resigned from the army in 1854 after a mediocre military career punctuated by bouts of excessive drinking. Still a relatively young man, at age thirty-two, he returned to his family farm near St. Louis, working it with slaves borrowed from his father-in-law. Farming did not pan out for Grant, nor did a job as a bill collector in St. Louis. By 1860, he was working in his father’s leather shop in Galena, Illinois. He took a perfunctory interest in politics, supporting Democrat Stephen A. Douglas in that year’s presidential race, though he did not bother to vote.1

  When Lincoln called for troops following the Fort Sumter bombardment, Grant offered his services to the governor of Illinois, who authorized him to recruit and train volunteers. He received the commission of colonel and the command of the 21st Illinois Infantry. Deployed to Missouri, it was probably Colonel Grant’s movements toward a Confederate camp rather than the mosquitoes that convinced young Sam Clemens to hightail it to the West. Grant moved up the command ladder quickly, to the rank of brigadier general by the end of July 1861, and soon seized the strategic Ohio River town of Paducah, Kentucky, from Confederate forces.

  Grant looked more like a mathematician than an army officer. Plain, his brown hair and beard streaked with gray, he often appeared to have slept in his uniform, a younger and more unkempt version of his hero, Zachary Taylor. People underestimated his intelligence, sniped at his drinking, and questioned his strategy. Yet Ulysses S. Grant was that rare Union general: he fought.

  As the new year of 1862 unfolded, citizens on both sides wondered if they were really at war. There had not been a major battle since Bull Run in July 1861. Lincoln ordered Union troops under the command of General McClellan to advance toward Richmond on February 22. That date came and went with the Federals marching to and fro but not in any particular direction. President Davis, on the other hand
, was in no hurry to engage the enemy. He knew that as long as Confederate independence remained an open idea, it would, by and by, become a reality.

  Out west, the story was different. By the new year, the Confederates had lost Kentucky and were perilously close to losing Tennessee. Grant, supported by his naval counterpart, Admiral Andrew H. Foote, launched an amphibious assault up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. The objectives were to open the way for Union troops to occupy Nashville, cut an important rail line, and deprive the Confederacy of a rich source of meat and grain. Two forts, twelve miles apart, just south of the Kentucky-Tennessee border, guarded the rivers. The first, Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, fell to the Union team in three hours. Confederates put up a more spirited fight at Fort Donelson on the west bank of the Cumberland River. Rebel sharpshooters hid behind rocks and tree stumps and in trenches above the fort picking off the enemy. This was not warfare from the West Point manual. Some considered such tactics barbaric, but it was well suited to the wooded, sloping terrain, and to the weaponry of the era. Union troops charged entrenched Confederate positions and, predictably, suffered heavy casualties.

  Soldiers bit off cartridge caps at a furious pace to load and fire their weapons, splaying black powder on their sweaty faces. The sight of suddenly blackened troops startled the new recruits, who did not understand the cause. Ignorance was, initially, bliss. One green soldier marveled, “We discovered that as we moved on, the air was full of objects that flew like birds, and seemed to whisper softly as they went.” It eventually occurred to this young man that these “birds” were Rebel bullets.2

  The costly Union assault paid dividends, as Confederate officers failed to grasp the heavy casualties suffered by the enemy and lost their nerve at the fury of the onslaught. The two most senior Confederate officers absconded with several thousand troops in the middle of the night, leaving a subordinate officer to request surrender terms from Grant, to which the Union general famously replied: “Yours of this date, proposing armistice and appointment of commissioners to settle terms of capitulation, is just received. No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” The Rebels, having no realistic choice, surrendered the fort, along with 11,500 men and forty guns. The loss of Fort Donelson forced Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston to abandon Nashville to Union troops. Grant’s army moved to control the entire Tennessee Valley and its rich grain and livestock resources. By the end of March, his Union forces had reached Pittsburg Landing, a few miles from the Mississippi border. They set up camp at a place some three miles distant, around the small church known in the neighborhood as Shiloh Chapel.3

  The fall of Forts Henry and Donelson was the first in a string of late-winter successes for the western Union armies. On March 6, at the seemingly inconsequential crossroads of Elkhorn Tavern, Arkansas, seventeen thousand Confederate troops under the direction of General Earl Van Dorn attacked eleven thousand Union soldiers led by General Samuel R. Curtis. It was one of the few occasions during the war when Union forces were outnumbered. It didn’t matter. Curtis routed the Rebels on the second day of fighting at what became known as the Battle of Pea Ridge. The Union victory was notable for two reasons. First, the Confederate force included thirty-five hundred mounted Indians led by Colonel Stand Watie, a Cherokee, who achieved one of the rare Rebel triumphs during the two-day battle. The Cherokees joined the Confederate cause in the hopes of securing a better deal than they had received from Washington. Curtis’s report praised the bravery and skill of “the hordes of Indians … that were arrayed against us.”4

  The decisive Union victory at Pea Ridge also secured Missouri and northern Arkansas for federal forces, further diminishing Confederate influence in the Upper South. It enabled federal troops to invade Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) and dislodge the Indians from their Confederate allegiances. President Lincoln endorsed the invasion, asserting, “It is believed that upon the repossession of the country by the federal forces, the Indians will readily cease all hostile demonstrations, and resume their former relations to the government.” To ensure a return to “former relations,” Union forces laid waste to their settlements. The Confederacy never again seriously challenged federal forces in the trans-Mississippi West.5

  Further west, the Confederates had designs on California gold to support their rapidly inflating paper currency. In February, Confederate Brigadier General Henry H. Sibley led four thousand Texans into New Mexico Territory with the vague goal of marching on to California and separating the state from the Union. Sibley’s expedition went well at first, as the Texans took Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and chased off a federal force at Glorieta Pass on March 28. Though the Union troops did not defeat Sibley’s modest band, they managed to destroy the group’s supplies, ending the Confederate threat, such as it was, to the Southwest and California. The Battle of Glorieta Pass makes it into most Civil War books primarily because readers in the Southwest and California want to be included in this great American drama. So here it is. But the battle was meaningless. The Confederacy’s designs on California were far-fetched and ill conceived.

  The good news from the West in early 1862 dramatically changed the depressive mood in the North. Franklin Dick, a former federal official in Missouri, who had moved back home to Philadelphia, had despaired of ever seeing the Union reunited. In late January, in an angry burst at federal inaction, he confessed his “utter disgust with Lincoln.… He is in my opinion a paltry coward.” On hearing the news from Fort Donelson three weeks later, he celebrated: “This has been the day of days—a great day of rejoicing & hope & thankfulness to the Lord God Almighty.… It looks now as if the rebellion could suddenly crumble away.”6

  The northern press concurred. The war had been in progress less than one year, but editors had become military pundits. Harper’s informed readers that the surrender of Fort Donelson “is probably the culminating point in the struggle between the United States Government and the malcontents.” Veteran Tennessee Unionist editor William Brownlow crowed, “Secession is well-nigh played out—the dog is dead.” In Washington, a grateful president elevated Grant to the rank of major general. Lincoln’s rising spirits crashed on February 20, when his beloved son Willie died of “bilious fever,” most likely typhoid contracted from the White House water supply fouled by the excrement of thousands of troops camped along the Potomac.7

  The northern jubilation was not entirely misplaced. Years later, General Grant argued that had he been in command of all the western armies, he would have proceeded swiftly to the south and west after the victories at Forts Henry and Donelson before Confederate troops could reorganize. He would have taken control of all of the Mississippi River and the rail lines leading to the Lower South, and overrun Chattanooga, opening the road to Georgia. All of that would happen for Union forces, but it would take years, not months, to realize.8

  By late March, spring was well under way in southwestern Tennessee. Peach blossoms dotted the rolling countryside near the river, and torrential rains turned the road to Corinth, Mississippi, an important rail center twenty miles from Pittsburg Landing, into a branch of the Tennessee. Two Union armies, one led by Grant and the other by William T. Sherman, recently returned to military duty after suffering a mental breakdown, waited for the arrival of Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio from Nashville to augment federal forces.

  General Albert Sidney Johnston, still smarting from the loss of the river forts and Nashville, commanded Rebel troops of roughly equal strength located somewhere in the mud between Corinth and Pittsburg Landing. Johnston, a West Pointer to whom Lincoln had offered the second-highest command in the Union army, counted on the inexperience of Union troops and Grant’s overconfidence after his relatively easy victories in his river campaigns. Over six feet tall, dark, and handsome, Johnston seemed born to command. Grant seemed more suited to the leather business.

  Grant had finished near the bottom of his class at West Point, and hi
s position at Pittsburg Landing confirmed it. The Tennessee River was at his back, which meant that in retreat, his army would have no place to go. It is easy to say that Grant never planned to retreat, that had Buell moved with more alacrity the issue of location would never have arisen, but any good general looks for a way out while devising the way in. While Grant waited for Buell, Johnston did not. Johnston formulated a bold, if risky, offensive plan to destroy the Union forces at Shiloh, crush Buell’s army coming down from Nashville, retake Kentucky, and push his army to the banks of the Ohio River.

  The Confederates suddenly bolted out of the woods in the early Sabbath morning of April 6, surprising the raw federal recruits and their officers, who should have known better. Grant would insist later that his troops were not surprised, but his was a lonely opinion. Besides, he was seven miles away from where the initial Confederate offensive occurred.

  The Rebels pushed the shorthanded Federals back toward the river. General Johnston’s prophecy before the morning assault, “Tonight we’ll water our horses in the Tennessee River,” was near fulfillment. As one Union soldier recorded in a letter to his family, “There were three things to do, surrender, swim the river, or fight to the death.” The Confederate attack was uncoordinated, however, typical in an era when verbal commands traveled only so far and often became garbled in the heat of battle. Numerous Rebel soldiers wasted time gaping at and plundering the camp of the better-equipped Union soldiers. Knapsacks, food, rain gear, bedding, blankets, guns, ammunition, and even tents were much more engaging than the frightened federal troops backed up to the river.9

  Those Confederate troops involved in the task at hand—fighting the Federals—discovered that their enemies acquitted themselves courageously considering their lack of preparation for an assault. Rebels could not take advantage of their position. At about two o’clock in the afternoon, a bullet severed an artery in General Johnston’s leg. He refused medical attention, remaining in the saddle until he bled to death. Toward evening, another spring downpour halted military operations, though additional fighting was unlikely as the men on both sides approached sheer exhaustion. Union forces hung on by a thread.