Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  Compounding these fears was a fresh barrage of rumors that McClellan was playing a double game. At the very moment when the general steamed away from Washington, a letter arrived on Stanton’s desk from Thomas Ewing, an influential former senator and cabinet member. He reported an encounter between his son Philemon and a “reliable” gentleman from New Orleans. In significant detail, the man told Philemon that McClellan had taken the secret oath of the Knights of the Golden Circle in 1860 and that “he is, was, and has been all along a tool of Jeff Davis.”

  Alarmed, Stanton tucked the letter into his pocket and headed to Lincoln’s office, where he found the president meeting with Orville Browning. As it happened, Browning had been asking Lincoln “if he still had confidence in [McClellan’s] fidelity.” Lincoln answered that “he never had any reason to doubt it.” He described the tears in the general’s eyes when he confronted him about the rumors of treason. True, Lincoln continued, McClellan was not “sufficiently energetic and aggressive,” but that was why he had ordered Little Mac to “move now, and he must do it.”

  Into this conversation came Stanton. He pulled the letter from his coat, announcing that it was written by “one of the first men of the Nation,” someone well known to both Lincoln and Browning, though he was not at liberty to say who it was. He described the explosive charges. Lincoln was skeptical, but to Stanton the conspiracy made sense.

  After the meeting, the secretary offered Browning a ride home in his carriage; on the way, Stanton spoke of McClellan’s long relationship with Jefferson Davis. When the Mississippi aristocrat served as U.S. secretary of war, Little Mac was one of his favorite officers. Davis had handpicked the young captain to join two more experienced soldiers as American observers of the Crimean War. In doing so, Davis set McClellan apart from the other ambitious veterans of the Mexican War, and Little Mac had been reaping benefits from the military and from private industry ever since. On the basis of these ties, Stanton concluded that McClellan was hard pressed to “emancipate himself from the influence of Jeff Davis.” And he feared that the general “wasn’t willing to … damage the cause of secession.” McClellan, Stanton declared, “ought to have been removed long ago.”

  The secretary struck an even more ominous note in his reply to Ewing. “Private and confidential,” Stanton scrawled across a page of War Department stationery. “Movements of the last few days have occasioned greater anxiety than ever before. The government seems doomed to some frightful calamity. The remedy is in the hands of the Pres[ident], and no effort of mine can inspire him with any alarm, much less the degree of vigilance and anxiety I think the occasion requires.”

  Lincoln was not easily rattled, but neither was he willing to risk everything on the enigma that was George McClellan. The general now had an army on the peninsula roughly four times the size of the force that Grant took into Tennessee, and that would have to be enough. The president ordered the last of the four corps earmarked for McClellan’s campaign to remain around Manassas instead, as added security for the capital. A last-minute alteration, this change was an unsightly crack in the carefully laid plans of the Young Napoleon.

  * * *

  William Tecumseh Sherman—“Cump” to friends and family—was no longer behind Ulysses Grant pushing supplies in his direction. He was now the lead element in Grant’s army, having taken a division of fresh (and untested) troops down the Tennessee River into southern Tennessee. In late March, near a steamboat dock called Pittsburg Landing not far from the Mississippi border, Sherman stationed his men around a little white church and named the position in its honor: Camp Shiloh. A growing army of Rebels gathered just down the road at Corinth, Mississippi, but Sherman put up no fortifications. He still subscribed to the old-army idea that “such a course would have made our raw men timid.” He waited to be joined by the rest of Grant’s forces and by Buell’s Army of the Ohio, which was marching from Nashville. The plan was to link up and drive the Confederates into the Mississippi River.

  “Indeed all the valley of the Mississippi must be under one Government, otherwise there never can be peace,” Sherman wrote as he waited, “but the task is so gigantic that I am staggered by its cost. To say that the Southern people are reconciled, or likely to be, may be so, but I cannot see it.… The Southern Leaders know the importance of the Mississippi, and will fight for every mile of it.” Grant’s army, he added, was “well fed, clothed and anxious to do something but very few appreciate the difficulties and dangers before us.”

  Sherman was among the most far-seeing military men in the Union. The previous fall he had suffered terrible embarrassment, enough to make him contemplate suicide, when he was denounced as a lunatic for saying that it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to safeguard Kentucky. Time was vindicating his sanity. But he did not know how quickly the words in his letter would be proven true. The Rebels were indeed going to fight for every mile; in fact, they were marching toward Camp Shiloh even as Sherman folded the paper and addressed the envelope. And they were bringing difficulties and dangers on a scale the North American continent had never seen.

  5

  APRIL

  “If Albert Sidney Johnston is not a general, then I have no general,” said Jefferson Davis, attempting to soothe the outrage in Richmond over Confederate losses in the West. A tall, broad-chested man with blazing eyes, Johnston was a charismatic leader who, by the spring of 1862, was nearly sixty years old and still as tough as a longhorn steak, a veteran of many years’ hard marching and fighting against Indians, Mexicans, and ambitious rivals. Winfield Scott once judged him “more than a good officer—he is a God send to the country.”

  As the war approached, Johnston was promoted to command the Pacific Department of the regular U.S. Army. But when the time came for choosing sides, he went with his adopted state of Texas and joined the Confederacy. Assigned to command the sprawling western theater, Johnston immediately recognized the vulnerability of his long, thin defensive line in Kentucky and Tennessee. Given more time, he might have found a way to strengthen it, but Grant never gave him the chance. Now Johnston had pulled back into a coiled crouch, reconstituting his forces as two clenched fists: one to fend off the Federals on the Mississippi River, the other to deliver a counterpunch intended to send the hero of Fort Donelson reeling.

  Johnston’s left was clenched at a place called Island No. 10, about halfway between St. Louis and Memphis. The prosaically named island provided an excellent spot for blocking river traffic, for here the Mississippi doubled back on itself to flow north a short distance, then kinked again to resume its southward movement. The guns from the abandoned Rebel fortress at Columbus were transferred to the island and to shore batteries near the town of New Madrid, Missouri, on the western bank of the Big Muddy. Together these guns formed a deadly gantlet, ready to blast unwelcome ships to pieces as they snaked through the bends.

  For about a month, Federal forces under Brigadier General John Pope had been working to break this fist. First, Pope captured New Madrid by land; then he cleared a channel through a swamp that allowed a flotilla of small boats to move past Island No. 10 without coming in range of the guns. This put Pope in position to ferry his troops across the river to the eastern shore, where they could cut the line supplying the island. He needed only a couple of Federal gunboats to protect the transports as they crossed. The boats were too large for the improvised channel, but on the night of April 4, after the moon went down and storm clouds darkened the sky, one bold captain slipped his blacked-out steamer past the island batteries. A second boat soon followed, and Pope was ready to finish the job.

  Johnston’s right fist was located in Corinth, Mississippi, a major intersection in the South’s meager network of railroads. During the month of March, Johnston gathered all the Rebel troops he could muster, starting with the army he had led in retreat from Kentucky and Tennessee. To this group he added a large part of the force pulled back from Columbus; he also commandeered reinforcements from the Southern coast, leavi
ng such essential ports as New Orleans and Mobile nearly stripped of infantry. By early April, Johnston had collected some 40,000 men, and he hoped to be joined any day by the army under Earl Van Dorn, summoned from Arkansas after the defeat at Pea Ridge.

  As the month began, Johnston and Grant found themselves in almost identical situations. Grant’s army, camped at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River about twenty miles northeast of Corinth, was roughly the same size as Johnston’s. Both men were waiting for approaching reinforcements; Grant expected Buell to arrive any day. Once strengthened by Buell’s army, Grant intended to march down to Corinth and drive the Rebels out of what he later called “the great strategic position at the West between … Nashville and Vicksburg.”

  Johnston decided to strike before that could happen. Stinging from the criticism he had received over the sudden loss of the western line, Johnston determined to reverse the setback and restore his reputation. First, he would smash Grant in a surprise attack. Then he would cross the Tennessee River and do the same to Buell’s approaching army. That accomplished, he would have free range all the way north to the Ohio River.

  On April 3, the Texan started his Rebels up the road, hoping Van Dorn would catch up. Johnston’s unseasoned army was so slow and disorderly, however, that the one-day journey turned into a three-day ordeal. As a consequence, the general assumed that his surprise had been spoiled by the time he ordered his troops into position in the quiet predawn of Sunday, April 6. He was wrong: as first light touched the blossoming fruit trees and lit the pale green of the mixed fields and woodlands, the Yankees were indeed surprised. Although they knew that Rebels were in the vicinity, they were unprepared for a ferocious frontal assault. When Union patrols clashed with the lead elements of Johnston’s attacking army, the gray tide rolled over them. One soldier reported that as the Rebels neared the Union camps, “wild birds in great numbers, rabbits in commotion, and numerous squirrels came flocking toward the Union lines as though they were being driven from the woods.”

  Grant’s generation of soldiers grew up in the military church of Napoleon Bonaparte, but the Union commander never imagined he would face an assault modeled on Napoleon’s crashing waves at Waterloo. No American alive or dead had ever fought a battle like the one that began that morning. Proud of his recent successes, Grant made the mistake of underestimating his opponents, believing that the Confederates were dispirited and would simply wait for him at Corinth. He should have been better prepared.

  Shiloh was, as the historian Shelby Foote put it, “the first great modern battle … a cauldron of pure hell.” And because it was an unknown hell, everyone on the battlefield learned as he went, terrible and costly lessons in a classroom of chaos. “I have been anxious to see a [great battle],” one young private reflected after the first few minutes of instruction. “I think I have seen enough of it.” Multitudes of green troops just like him, led by inexperienced regimental officers, fought from dawn to dusk over poorly mapped terrain across a narrow front. Plans that looked elegant on paper were hopelessly tangled by midmorning. Discipline was a shambles, as thousands of advancing Rebels broke ranks to plunder Union camps and thousands of routed Federals fled to the rear. In some cases, frightened commanders led the way. “I had perhaps a dozen officers arrested for cowardice,” Grant later recounted.

  Those who stood fast that day fought with a ferocious will. In the center of the field, a Union division under Brigadier General Benjamin Prentiss, an Illinois lawyer and politician, dug in its heels at a sunken wagon road. Ordered by Grant to hold the position at all costs, Prentiss and his troops repulsed one head-on assault after another—eleven charges in all. The buzzing of grapeshot and bullets was so intense that the place was dubbed the Hornet’s Nest. For the twelfth try, the Rebels assembled sixty-two artillery pieces on the left flank of Prentiss’s position, where one of Lincoln’s political friends from Illinois, Brigadier General Stephen Hurlbut, fought with his division in a peach orchard. Under the murderous barrage, Hurlbut fell back, opening a way for Rebel troops to work in behind the Hornet’s Nest. When the right flank also gave way a bit later, Prentiss and his stalwart soldiers were surrounded, forced to surrender after ten of the longest hours of the war.

  Their valor was not in vain. The hard fighting cost the Confederates valuable hours of daylight. Grant had enough time to collect some fifty guns into a massed battery behind the last ravine separating the Confederate army from his base of supplies, and as the sun went down the first of Buell’s reinforcing troops arrived on the battlefield. The stubborn Union stand also cost the Rebels their handsome general. With so much staked on this daring counterpunch, Johnston insisted on driving his troops from the front, and his cool, fearless presence electrified the Rebels wherever he rode among them. But as he encouraged a brigade to follow him on a charge into the peach orchard, Johnston took a bullet through an artery in the back of his leg and bled to death into his boot. Neither the general nor his army watered their horses in the Tennessee River that night, as Johnston had promised at daybreak. Instead, many of them died, and those who survived slept in the Union camps they had captured, as a cold, hard rain drenched the field.

  The Confederate attack came within one or two fortunate strokes of breaking Grant’s army. Even Sherman, who had three horses shot from under him as his division made the Rebels pay for every inch of ground, was thinking of giving up by day’s end. About midnight, with his buckshot-damaged hand wrapped in a bandage, Sherman went looking for Grant to discuss the possibility of falling back behind the river. He found his recently promoted commander huddled beneath a tree, rain streaming from his hat brim.

  “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman began.

  “Yes,” Grant allowed. But with his army reestablished along a tighter line, a division of fresh troops arriving from his right, and Buell’s army coming across the river in ferryboats, Grant was done thinking about today. Ending the exchange, he said simply: “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.” Sherman left without mentioning retreat.

  Lick ’em they did. Through another day of brutally hard fighting on April 7, the strengthened Union line drove the Rebels back, until finally the Confederates began a ragged retreat after losing more than 10,000 killed, wounded, and missing. Grant’s army was too bloodied to follow: it had lost some 13,000 men. Between the two sides, American soldiers suffered more casualties in two days at Shiloh than in all the nation’s previous wars combined.

  * * *

  Even before the Rebels were beaten, a new conflict broke out on the Shiloh battleground, one that would rage for decades. The nation was not yet accustomed to carnage, and the bloodletting at Shiloh was so dramatically worse than anything Americans had experienced before that it seemed obvious to many people that some measure of blame must be assigned. Grant’s partisans once again painted him as a hero who, despite a stunning blow, had kept his wits and salvaged a hard victory from the chaos of a near catastrophe. But against them rose a legion of bitter critics, who charged that Grant’s fatal lassitude at Pittsburg Landing had been redeemed only by the timely arrival of Buell’s rescuing army.

  There was some truth in both views. Grant’s loyalists saw Shiloh from the front, where the Union lines strained terribly but never entirely broke, in part because Grant kept spirits up and communication clear and ammunition flowing. His critics saw the battle from the rear, where thousands of panicked men took shelter under a bluff by the river and told one another exaggerated stories about the failures of their commanders. The frightened stragglers described scenes they never saw because these scenes never happened: Union soldiers surprised in their tents, shot as they slept, bayoneted where they lay. This retreating mob was the first thing Buell’s army met on its way to the battlefield, and it was such an alarming spectacle that the commander of Buell’s lead column, the imposing William “Bull” Nelson, asked permission to begin shooting the stragglers because they were upsetting his men. Naturally Buell’s version of Sh
iloh was a tale of incompetent officers and demoralized troops.

  A volunteer on Grant’s staff, W. C. Carroll, heard some of this wild talk as it circulated through Buell’s command. Carroll knew that Buell might be ready to believe it; understandably, the general was more than a little resentful of Grant as he arrived on the Shiloh plain. In a matter of weeks, the respected Ohio soldier had fallen from commanding an entire department to being the third-ranked general of the combined force on the Tennessee. The top officer was General Halleck, formerly Buell’s equal, who intended to leave St. Louis and assume field command once the armies of Grant and Buell were combined. More galling was that Grant, the store clerk from Illinois, now outranked Buell thanks to his February exploits. During the week before the battle, a feeling had spread within Grant’s army that Buell was taking his sweet time getting to Pittsburg Landing: he and his troops needed twelve days just to cross the Duck River. Carroll, perceiving that Buell would not want his tardy arrival to be blamed for inviting the battle, was convinced that Grant was about to become the target of the “jealousy of Gen. Buell and his officers.”

  Carroll struck preemptively. After hopping a steamer headed downstream, he disembarked at the Fort Henry telegraph office and cabled a fawning and partly imaginary account of Grant’s heroics to the New York Herald. This was how most of the public first received news of the battle of Shiloh. Buell’s version came later.