Grant headed upstream on March 16 to take active field command of what was named the Army of the Tennessee. A month had passed since Fort Donelson fell and the South had begun scrambling to repair its strategic position. Johnston would soon have forty thousand men at Corinth, with more trying to get there, and the Confederacy’s leaders were in close touch with him. From the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, Jefferson Davis wrote, “You have done wonderfully well, and now I can breathe easier.” An equally encouraging but more specific message came from Johnston’s old West Point classmate and friend Robert E. Lee, who knew that, in addition to the Union force under Sherman that was by this time ashore at Pittsburg Landing, and some other divisions coming up the river, Don Carlos Buell was slowly marching his army across country from Nashville to add to Grant’s command. Lee wrote Johnston: “No one has sympathized with you in the troubles with which you are surrounded more sincerely than myself. I have watched your every movement, and know the difficulties with which you have had to contend … I need not urge you, when your army is united, to deal a blow at the enemy in your front, if possible before his rear gets up from Nashville. You have him divided, keep him so if you can.”
When Grant took over the forces gathering at Pittsburg Landing, where Sherman had arrived with his division, he also became the superior officer of General Charles Smith, the hero of Fort Donelson, who had badly scraped his leg getting into a small boat; while still with the expedition he had led up the river, Smith was suffering from an infection that would cause his death five weeks later. Grant soon inspected the place where Sherman was continuing to prepare the encampment for the rapidly arriving Union divisions. Stretching inland from the wharf and seveny-foot-high bluff on the Tennessee River at Pittsburg Landing, the slightly rolling area combined dense woods and some open fields and orchards, with a number of streams running through it. Laid out like a huge triangle encompassing eighteen square miles, the river formed its eastern side, while the southern side had sentry posts facing in the direction of the enemy, twenty miles away at Corinth. The arriving regiments placed their tents along this line. The final leg of the triangle, nearly six miles long, led back from the inland corner of the encampment to the wharf and wooden warehouses at the landing.
Sherman’s headquarters and sleeping tent stood next to the seldom-used Shiloh Church, at the triangle’s inland corner, in the woods beyond a field serving as a parade ground. In a written report to Grant, who set up his headquarters nine miles downstream to the north at Savannah, Sherman described the camp as being located on a “magnificent plain for camping and drilling, and a military point of great strength.” Confederate cavalry patrols often came up from Corinth, approaching the camp through the woods, and there had been clashes with them.
Even though Halleck had given Grant the day-to-day command of these divisions, Halleck’s slow, cautious nature constantly affected this situation. From hundreds of miles away, he ordered Grant “not to advance” until Buell’s army joined him. Reverting to the philosophy of Jomini, who saw a campaign as being more of a chess game than an all-out attack, Halleck told Grant that “we must strike no blow till we arc strong enough to admit no doubt of defeat” and added that until that time, no one was to bring on “an engagement.” This stricture not only inhibited the Union responses to the increasingly frequent Confederate cavalry probes, but also created worries about what degree of response to any provocation might bring on “an engagement.”
Although Grant wanted to move against Johnston’s army at Corinth, he also wished to avoid another dispute with the ever-bureaucratic Halleck. (An example of Halleck’s overzealous attention to detail was a rebuke to Grant on March 24 for allegedly having as his departmental medical director a doctor who was not also an army officer. Halleck ordered Grant “to discharge him.”) Confident after his victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, Grant felt that in any case he held the initiative in the area. He was prepared to obey Halleck and wait for Buell’s large reinforcements before marching the twenty miles to attack Corinth, but he wrote General Smith that “I am clearly of the opinion that the enemy are gathering strength at Corinth quite as rapidly as we are here, and the sooner we attack, the easier will be the task of taking the place.” Still sure that it was he who would bring on the battle, Grant, who later said that he “had no expectation of needing fortifications” at Pittsburg Landing, built no earthworks.
Grant’s letters to Julia reflected both his confidence and his certainty that his army would soon be in a major battle. He told her, “When you will hear of another great and important strike I can[’]t tell you but it will be a big lick as far as numbers engaged is concerned. I have no misgivings myself as to the result and you must not feel the slightest alarm.” In a later letter to her written on March 29, he mentioned that he had been suffering from what he spelled “Diaoreah” (as had Sherman and many others), and added that he thought the impending battle “will be the last in the West. This is all the time supposing that we will be successful which I never doubt for a moment.” A few days later, referring to Halleck’s long-distance restraint upon him, he told Julia, “Soon I hope to be permitted to move from here and when I do there will probably be the greatest battle fought of the War. I do not feel that there is the slightest doubt about the result … Knowing however that a terrible sacrifice of life must take place I feel conserned [sic] for my army and their friends at home.”
While Grant felt in control of events, Sherman had a few moments of uncertainty. On one occasion, when he admitted to visiting war correspondents that the huge camp was vulnerable and they asked why he did not speak up about it, Sherman replied with a shrug, “Oh, they’d call me crazy again,” but most of the time he thought as Grant did. Writing Ellen of the frequent sightings of enemy patrols in the woods just south of the encampment, Sherman told her, “We are constantly in the presence of the enemy’s pickets, but I am satisfied that they will await our coming at Corinth.”
The Confederates at Corinth had no intention of letting Grant decide the time and place of attack. While Grant waited for Buell’s army to join him, Albert Sidney Johnston knew that his friend Robert E. Lee was right: he had to attack Grant before Buell reached Pittsburg Landing. At ten o’clock on the evening of Wednesday, April 2, 1862, Johnston’s second in command, P.G.T. Beauregard, received an intelligence report telling him that the first regiments of Buell’s column of twenty thousand or more men would reach Grant’s army within the next few days. Beauregard immediately sent an orderly to Johnston’s nearby headquarters, carrying this penciled message: “Now is the moment to advance and strike the enemy at Pittsburg Landing.” By midnight, commanders throughout the forty-four-thousand-man Confederate camp started receiving orders: the army had to set out at dawn, march twenty miles during the day, and make a surprise attack on Grant’s unfortified camp early on the following morning of Friday, April 4.
Johnston and his experienced Confederate generals liked the fact that forty thousand federal troops were packed into the triangle by the river at Pittsburg Landing. There were no defensive entrenchments; the hundreds of rows of tents placed just behind the picket line would hinder any swift effort to assemble and face the enemy, when the defenders finally saw thousands of Confederate infantrymen rush at them from the woods. After weeks of this strange situation—two opposing armies, twenty miles apart, spending most of their time carrying out the routine activities of camp life—Johnston’s men had the chance to overrun the camp and drive Grant’s army into the swamps away from Pittsburg Landing.
It was one thing to plan a swift march toward the enemy, and another to execute it. In what proved to be an unwise decision, Johnston decided to lead the march, while Beauregard would for the time being remain at the rear, directing the complicated sequence in which he wanted the different divisions to leave Corinth and move up to Pittsburg Landing. Beauregard told his corps commanders to start the march while his adjutant colonel, Thomas Jordan, began preparing written orders for
the movement, but Confederate general William J. Hardee refused to start off before he had his orders in writing. Because Hardee’s corps was the first major column in Beauregard’s planned line of march, no large force left camp until past noon that day, April 3, and Beauregard postponed the attack from the morning of April 4 until sunrise on Saturday, April 5. On Friday night, a heavy cold rain began to fall on Johnston’s army as his men tried to hurry forward to be ready for the dawn attack. The same kind of downpour that had raised the Tennessee River fifteen feet in a day now turned roads into bogs in which the Confederate artillery pieces and supply wagons sank to their axles. It became clear that no surprise attack could be made the next morning.
This same rain was also falling that night farther to the north, severely slowing Buell’s effort to reach and support Grant. As for Grant, there had been so many minor skirmishes during the past two days that he did not go down the river by boat to spend the night at his headquarters at Savannah “until an hour when I felt there would be no further danger before the morning.” Riding through the dark to learn more about a clash with some Confederate cavalry that had been reported to him in a quickly written report from Sherman, Grant had trouble.
The night was one of impenetrable darkness, with rain pouring down in torrents; nothing was visible to the eye except as revealed by the frequent flashes of lightning. Under these circumstances I had to trust the horse, without guidance, to keep the road … On the way back to the boat my horse’s feet slipped from under him, and he fell with my leg under his body. The extreme softness of the ground, from the excessive rains … no doubt saved me from a severe injury and protracted lameness. As it was, my ankle was very much injured, so much so that my boot had to be cut off. For two or three days thereafter I was unable to walk except with crutches.
The next day, Saturday, April 5, able to be lifted onto a horse and with a crutch strapped to his saddle, Grant sent one of his now-frequent reports to Halleck. Not mentioning his injury, he told Halleck that the first division of Buell’s column had arrived in the area of his headquarters downriver from Pittsburg Landing at Savannah, with the additional divisions expected “to-morrow and the next day.” He continued, “I have scarsely [sic] the faintest idea of an attack (general one,) being made upon us but will be prepared should such a thing take place.” He enclosed a two-part report made to him by Sherman, giving the details of the previous day’s skirmish, with Sherman’s additional comment that “the enemy is saucy, but got the worst of it yesterday, and will not press our pickets far—I will not be drawn out far unless with certainty of advantage, and I do not apprehend anything like an attack upon our position.” Once again, Grant and Sherman were telling themselves, and each other, what they wanted to believe.
As these reports from Grant and Sherman went off to Halleck, General Albert Sidney Johnston was riding around among his advancing columns, trying to untangle another snarl in the forward movement of his army. Looking with disbelief at the confusion, he exclaimed, “This is puerile! This is not war!” Nonetheless, with the sun out and the day wearing on, thousands of Confederate soldiers neared the unsuspecting Union camp. The colonel of the Seventieth Ohio was conducting a review of his regiment, complete with its band playing: from a higher place in the woods beyond the camp, dozens of gray-clad Confederates stood quietly watching the parade. The afternoon sun caught the glint of the brass barrels of several Confederate cannon that had been brought forward through the trees and underbrush, but the Union sentries did not understand what they saw.
Even clearer warnings came: a Confederate patrol chased some federal troops from a house just a mile from Sherman’s headquarters next to Shiloh Church, near the end of the encampment farthest from the river. Alarmed when his sentries reported unidentified men moving in the woods, Colonel Jesse J. Appler of the inexperienced Fifty-third Ohio sent a detachment to see what was out there. When he heard shots and his men came running back to report they had come under fire from “a line of men in butternut clothes,” Appler had his musicians beat their drums to turn out his regiment under arms and ordered his quartermaster to report the situation to Sherman at his nearby headquarters. Sherman considered Colonel Appler to be a nervous, frightened old man. Within a few minutes, Appler’s quartermaster reappeared with this message: “General Sherman says, ‘Take your damned regiment back to Ohio. There is no enemy nearer than Corinth.’” Overhearing this, Appler’s young soldiers laughed, broke ranks without being dismissed, and went back to looking for wild onions and turkey peas to add to their kettles for supper.
By dusk, the Confederates were moving into place within two miles of the Union encampment, where thousands of little fires and oil lanterns were lit. It was too late for an attack that day, and as it became dark Johnston held a council of war with his generals, gathering them around a campfire. They made quite a group. Among the men talking in the firelight and shadows with Johnston and Beauregard were Leonidas K. Polk, a graduate of West Point who had left the army and become a bishop of the Episcopal church, taking a Confederate commission when the Southern states seceded; John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, an academy graduate who had served as vice president of the United States under President Buchanan; Braxton Bragg, another West Pointer, brevetted for bravery in Mexico, who had brought ten thousand soldiers up from along the Gulf Coast and now commanded 13,600 men; and William Hardee, a West Pointer who had later returned to the academy as commandant of cadets. One of Johnston’s volunteer aides was Governor Isham Harris of Tennessee, who fled the state capital of Nashville before the Union Army marched in.
Of the twenty-six officers in Johnston’s army who commanded divisions or brigades, ten were graduates of West Point, and eleven had fought in Mexico, several with distinction. They brought a wealth of military experience to the Southern side and had the cavalry leader Nathan Bedford Forrest providing them with a stream of accurate and timely reports from his scouts. A few miles from them were some interesting and able Union officers—including an untried brigadier from Ohio named James A. Garfield—but the leadership of the Union force lacked the experience possessed by the Confederate side. A year before this, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, captains who had resigned from the service and floundered in civilian life, had not yet returned to the army.
As Johnston’s council of war got under way, Beauregard started to speak. Until recently he had hoped to mount a major offensive that would regain much that the South had lost in recent months, but now he began a litany of worries. The enemy had to know they were there: all afternoon, many untested soldiers, wondering if their powder was still dry after the heavy rain, had been firing their muskets. Along the line of march, there had been bugle calls and signals made by beating drums. Young troops had been shouting back and forth to each other; when a deer sprang from the woods beside the road, hundreds of youths cried out at the sight. The Union forces were not deaf, Beauregard argued: “Now they will be entrenched to the eyes!”
He had more to say. Because the march from Corinth had taken two days instead of one (due in good part to his unnecessarily complicated planning), the troops had used up their rations and would sleep hungry tonight and have to go into battle in the morning with empty stomachs. The men were also nervously exhausted by their long sleepless struggle through last night’s rain and mud. The army was in no fit condition to make a do-or-die attack. To Johnston’s amazement, the fiery Creole recommended that they all march back to Corinth and wait for a better opportunity.
Johnston listened patiently until Beauregard finished, and then, as Leonidas Polk wrote about the dramatic moment in the firelight, “remarked that this would never do.” He replied to Beauregard that if the enemy knew they were there in great force, they would be under fire right then. Yes, the men were hungry, but the nearest food was in the Union camp, and the way to get it was to overrun the place in the morning. The meeting was over: “Gentlemen,” Johnston told his generals, “we will attack at daylight tomorrow.” As the leaders dis
persed in the shadows to return to their commands, Johnston turned to an aide and said, “I would fight them if they were a million.” He later added, “I mean to hammer ’em!”
That night, trying to sleep, Beauregard heard a drum beating nearby. Furious at this noise that was both keeping him awake and warning the Northern troops that something was up, he sent an aide to have it stopped. Within minutes the man returned to tell him that the drum was in the enemy camp. That was how close they were.
At three in the morning of Sunday, April 6, Grant was in bed at his headquarters in the house of a Union sympathizer downstream at Savannah, while Sherman slept in his headquarters tent next to the little log Shiloh meetinghouse. At that hour, Colonel Everett Peabody, a heayset thirty-one-year-old Harvard graduate from a distinguished Massachusetts family, became worried about reports of Confederate activity in the woods in front of his brigade. He started assembling a force of three hundred men from one of his regiments, the Twenty-fifth Missouri. When they were ready, Peabody gave the major commanding them orders to take his troops forward and make a reconnaissance in force. Moving cautiously, at dawn the Missourians came to the edge of a clearing half a mile beyond the Union encampment and ran straight into a battalion of Confederates from Mississippi who were quietly coming the other way. As the two sides started firing at each other, thousands more Confederate soldiers began appearing out of the woods all along the six-mile-long edge of the Union camp that ran from the river to the vicinity of Shiloh Church. Jarred from sleep by the sounds of gunfire and the Union regimental drums beating the “long roll” signaling an attack, federal soldiers dashed out of their tents, grabbing their weapons and strapping on their equipment.
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 13
