Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  Just before all this started, at a meeting of the Confederate leaders in the woods, Beauregard had been telling Johnston once again that they should cancel the attack and take their army back to Corinth. As Johnston heard the crescendo of firing, he said to the officers around him, “The battle has opened, gentlemen; it is too late to change our dispositions now.” At the edge of the Union camp, Colonel Appler of the Fifty-third Ohio, the target of Sherman’s rebuke for being too apprehensive the previous day, saw a man of the Twenty-fifth Missouri come back from the direction of the firing with blood streaming from a wound on his arm; the man shouted, “Get into line—the Rebels are coming!” Sending word to Sherman, Appler turned out his men, only to receive a quick, caustic reply from Sherman, who was already up at his nearby headquarters but skeptical that this rattle of musketry was a major matter: the messenger said Sherman told him to say, “You must be badly scared over there.” Appler, now seeing hundreds of men in gray coming straight at his right flank, shouted, “This is no place for us!” and led a retreat through his regiment’s tents at the dead run, stopping on a ridge, where his men flung themselves down in the brush, pointing their muskets toward the advancing enemy.

  At this point Sherman arrived, riding what he described as “a beautiful sorrel race mare that was fleet as a deer,” and accompanied by his orderly, Private Thomas D. Holliday of the Second Illinois Cavalry, who always had a carbine ready to protect his general. As Sherman raised his field glasses to study the terrain in front of him, Confederate infantrymen sprang out of the bushes fifty yards to one side, their weapons at their shoulders. A Union lieutenant sprinted toward Sherman, yelling, “General, look to your right!” Sherman’s head spun in that direction; as he shouted and threw up his right hand as if to ward off a bullet, a musket ball that he felt sure was meant for him killed his handsome young orderly, while some buckshot slashed open the third finger of Sherman’s right hand. “Appler,” he shouted to the colonel, “hold your position! I will support you!” Sherman wrapped a handkerchief around his bleeding hand and spurred off to organize the defense of the right end of the Union line. Looking in the direction of more firing, Sherman said that “I saw the rebel lines of battle in front coming down on us as far as the eye could reach.” In the meantime, the first wave of Confederates had swept through Sherman’s headquarters; his tent and the Shiloh meetinghouse were in enemy hands. In the gunfire, his two spare horses, tethered under a tree near his tent, were killed.

  Some Union regiments fell back and formed lines to face the advancing enemy, while others, including Appler and most of his men, simply ran away toward the river. Johnston, who had told Beauregard to send men and supplies up from the rear while he directed the battle at the front, rode forward through the trees on his horse Fire-eater, thousands of his Confederate foot soldiers pressing through the woods to either side of him. As the sun rose and burnt through the morning mist, Johnston, convinced that his army would drive all the defenders right through their camp and sweep them into the swamps, said confidently, “Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River.”

  Shortly before this—the hour is not recorded—Ulysses S. Grant was eating what he described as “a very early breakfast” at his headquarters nine miles down the river. He was hoping that Buell would arrive at the end of his long march so that he could confer with him, but now, as Grant put it, “heavy firing was heard in the direction of Pittsburg Landing.” Getting up from the breakfast table, he hobbled out to the porch on his crutches, listened for a moment, and then said to his staff, “Gentlemen, the ball is in motion. Let us be off.”

  By the time Grant arrived at Pittsburg Landing aboard his headquarters paddle-wheeler Tigress, many hundreds of Union soldiers who had fled the battle were milling about aimlessly under the shelter of the steep bluffs along the shore. Riding to the hastily organized front, he came to the division in the center of the line, commanded by Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss, with whom he had had the severest of disputes about seniority in rank the past autumn. Prentiss’s men were falling back through their camps in the face of a Confederate bayonet charge. One of Prentiss’s commanders, Colonel Everett Peabody, whom Prentiss had earlier accused of “bringing on this engagement” by sending forward three hundred men, was riding through the area of his regiment’s tents, trying to rally his troops. Wounded four times as he kept trying to form them up to make a stand, a fifth musket ball hit him in the head, and he fell dead from his horse. Prentiss’s regiments kept falling back, some of them turning to fire as they retreated, while others threw down their arms and ran to the river.

  On the right end of the Union line, Sherman’s men, nearly all of them in their first battle, were slowly falling back, but they kept their lines as they fired at the advancing enemy. Sherman, whose beautiful “race mare” had been wounded and then killed, was now using a horse he had taken over from one of his aides and was riding back and forth along his line, ignoring the danger as he calmly encouraged his men. He had dismounted and was standing, the handkerchief around his hand dark from drying blood, studying the situation and quietly giving orders, when one of Grant’s aides came up to him and said that Grant was in the middle behind Prentiss’s division and wanted to know how things were on this right end of the line. As enemy bullets and cannonballs flew past them, Sherman kept looking forward to where his men had started to hold fast, and said, “Tell Grant if he has any men to spare I can use them; if not, I will do the best I can. We are holding them pretty well just now—pretty well—but it’s hot as hell.”

  In the center where Grant was, the hungry condition of the Confederate troops was giving the Union forces their first good development of the day. Many of the Southerners had not eaten for twenty-four hours or more; coming upon the deserted tent lines of Prentiss’s division, they stopped to eat the food they found there and to loot the tents. By the time they resumed their forward movement, Prentiss had managed to round up a thousand of his soldiers and place them along a slightly sunken old wagon road running along a ridge a mile behind their abandoned camp. This indentation, hardly a trench, quickly became the defensive link between Sherman’s sector on the right, and large federal units that were beginning to settle down to the left, in the area extending to the river.

  Coming along the shaky defensive line from left to right, Grant reached Sherman’s sector at ten in the morning, at a time when Sherman said that he and his men were “desperately engaged.” Grant found that many of Sherman’s soldiers had run off, but that the rest of them, despite being shot at for the first time, were holding where they were. Some had even begun to fight their way back toward the tents from which they had fled.

  Here was Grant and Sherman’s first meeting on a battlefield. Conferring under fire, Sherman told Grant that he needed more ammunition. Grant replied that wagonloads of it were on the way and expressed his admiration for the stand Sherman’s division was making. As Sherman put it, “This gave him great satisfaction, and he told me that things did not look as well over on the left.”

  As Grant rode off, one of his aides remarked that things on Sherman’s front looked “pretty squally.” Grant answered, “Well, not so bad.” Now he had seen Sherman in the midst of a battle, calmly handling everything as well as it could be done, and he liked what he saw. Speaking of the area near Shiloh Church, Grant later said that “this point was the key to our position and was held by Sherman. His division was wholly raw, no part of it ever having been in an engagement; but I thought this deficiency was more than made up by the superiority of the commander.” He added, of this day:

  During the whole of Sunday I was continuously engaged in passing from one part of the field to another, giving directions to division commanders. In thus moving along the line, however, I never deemed it important to stay long with Sherman. Although his troops were then under fire for the first time, their commander, by his constant presence with them, inspired a confidence in officers and men that enabled them to render services on that
bloody battle-field worthy of the best of veterans.

  As Grant indicated, he was not the only one who admired what Sherman did as the day went on. Men who had heard of this “crazy” general, frightened in Kentucky by the ghosts of nonexistent advancing columns, formed an impression that one man summed up this way: “All around him were excited orderlies and officers, but though his face was besmeared with powder and blood, battle seemed to have cooled his usually hot nerves.” However, as he kept moving from place to place, exposing himself to fire as he received reports and gave orders, stopping at artillery batteries to coordinate their fire with that of other Union guns, Sherman did have “trouble keeping his cigar lit and he used up all of his matches and most of the men’s.” Smoking or not, he seemed to have a sense what was coming next, how to get ready for it, and when to use what was needed. When his right wing started falling back, Sherman grinned and said, “I was looking for that,” and told an artillery officer to have his battery fire a prepared cannonade that stopped the Confederate charge in its tracks. The enemy responded to this repulse by sending a cavalry force thundering toward the Union guns in an effort to overrun and capture them, but the horsemen were suddenly blasted and thrown back by volleys from two infantry companies that Sherman had held in reserve for just such a contingency.

  As the bloodiest battle fought thus far in the war roared on, Beauregard had come up to Shiloh Church and was using Sherman’s tent as part of his headquarters. The Confederate attacks on the Union center encountered withering blasts from Prentiss’s defenders along the old wagon road, who were able to lie with just their heads and arms and muskets above the edge of the indentation in the ground and fire from the prone position at the men running toward them. One Confederate, part of a force that came within ten yards of a brush-covered part of this makeshift trench before a desperate federal volley sent it reeling back, staggered up to a comrade and said, “It’s a hornet’s nest in there.” As the Confederates started referring to that area of the Union line as “the Hornet’s Nest” while the battle raged into the afternoon, both Johnston and Beauregard began calling for reserves to exploit advances at points along the front. They found they had none: all of the forty-four thousand men who had marched up from Corinth were already committed to the fighting along the six-mile line.

  At a point near the old road stood a ten-acre peach orchard, in full bloom with pink petals on this April afternoon. The Union troops were defending a line along its front, and Johnston ordered one of Breckinridge’s brigades to charge and break the line. The Confederates refused to make the attack. When Breckinridge, almost incoherent in his frustration, had to report this to Johnston, the fifty-eight-year-old commander said quietly, “Then I will help you. We can get them to make the charge.”

  Accompanied by his aide, Governor Isham Harris of Tennessee, Johnston began riding his horse Fire-eater slowly along the line of gray-clad infantrymen who were facing the peach orchard, in formation to attack, bayonets fixed on their muskets, but out of firing distance and unwilling to go forward. Reaching over from Fire-eater as he passed, he looked into his soldiers’ eyes and touched their bayonets with a small tin cup that had been captured earlier in the day, saying with each click, “They will do the work.” As he moved past man after man, Harris said, “The line was already thrilling and trembling.” Coming to the middle of the line, Johnston, a commanding general whose traditional position would have been hundreds of yards to the rear, turned, drew his sword, and shouted, “I will lead you!” Screaming the high-pitched “yip-yip-yip!” of the Rebel Yell, the entire brigade dashed forward, with scores of men running right beside Johnston. Within minutes, they cleared the Union defenders out of the peach orchard.

  When Governor Harris came riding up to Johnston after the successful attack, the general beamed at him and said, “Governor, they came near to putting me hors de combat in that charge.” He raised his boot to show that its sole was flapping loose, cut from the rest of it by a musket ball. Johnston’s gray uniform had been slashed by other shots, but he seemed unharmed and exultant. He gave Harris a message to take to another officer; when Harris came back, he found Johnston groggy and about to fall out of his saddle. What Harris did not know was that, in a duel fought in Texas twenty-five years before, a pistol ball cut the sciatic nerve in Johnston’s right leg in a way that left it numb. During the attack just minutes past, a musket ball had severed an artery in that leg, but as he bled profusely, Johnston felt nothing, and in the excitement and confusion of the moment, no one else saw what was happening. By the time Harris and others helped him to the ground, he was in critical condition. Even then the quick application of a tourniquet might have saved him—Johnston carried one in a pocket—but he had sent the nearest surgeon to help wounded men nearby, and none of his staff knew what to do. Within minutes, Albert Sidney Johnston died.

  As soon as that news came to Beauregard, he ordered that Johnston’s body be hidden and that no word of this loss should reach the men. Trying to weather the storm, Confederate brigadier Daniel Ruggles, a veteran twice brevetted for gallantry in the Mexican War, decided that piecemeal attacks by foot soldiers alone could not take the Hornet’s Nest.

  Moving to support Ruggles and the other Confederate infantry brigades in that area of the battle, Beauregard organized a counterattack. After an hour, fifty-three cannon, the largest concentration of guns to be put in line in any American battle fought to that day, had been brought up to face the center of the old road. When the massive Confederate attack struck in the late afternoon, the Northern line broke on both sides of the Hornet’s Nest, and its defenders were surrounded. Some individual Union soldiers escaped the noose, and two Iowa regiments cut their way through to withdraw toward the river, but by six o’clock, after a long and gallant stand, Benjamin Prentiss and twenty-two hundred of his men had surrendered.

  During these bloody hours, Grant had formed a new defensive line running in from the river at Pittsburg Landing, far behind the lines his army occupied at dawn. Now it was Grant’s turn to assemble artillery, and he had fifty guns in place. All afternoon, units had been falling back, some in orderly fashion and some simply collapsing and making for the riverbank, where thousands of Union soldiers—some said five thousand or more—sat shocked and beaten. Grant had been everywhere all day, often placing small units personally during the confusion in the morning and trying to orchestrate the withdrawal to this last-ditch position in the afternoon. At one time, drawn up with his staff on horseback in an open space under fire, he became so intent on studying the battlefield that one of his staff told him that if they did not move from there, “We shall all be dead in five minutes.” Grant came out of his trance, said “I guess that’s so,” and led them to a safer place. By late afternoon, every unit that Grant could rally, including those under Sherman that had finally fallen back from the right flank, was in place along this last defensive line. His artillery threw back one Confederate assault, and he was bracing his weakened army for a final Confederate attack that might drive them over the bluff and into the river.

  It did not come. First, there was a delay while large numbers of Beauregard’s men rounded up the twenty-two hundred prisoners from the Hornet’s Nest and moved them some distance down the road to Corinth. But it was more than that: the Confederates were done for the day. The news of Johnston’s death had reached many of them and, like the Union soldiers facing them, they had experienced hours of what one Confederate described thus: “It was an awful thing to hear no intermission in firing and hear the clatter of small arms and the whizing minny [minié musket] balls and rifle shot and the sing of grape shot the hum of cannon balls and the roar of the bomb shell and explosion of the same seaming to be a thousand every minute … O God forever keep me out of such a fight.”

  The ground at the front was strewn with corpses of men and horses, and from hundreds of thickets the wounded of both sides cried for help. The battle was not over; something had to happen tomorrow, but as the dusk of the spring e
vening closed on the square miles of battlefield and the Union and Confederate artillery continued to fire into each other’s lines, no one had the strength to fight on foot.

  Grant and Sherman had survived this Sunday by near miracles. After Sherman’s fine “race mare” was shot from under him in the morning and he took his aide’s horse, that mount too was killed as he rode it under fire from one position to another, and the horse he then borrowed from a surgeon was also killed later in the day. At one moment a spent bullet cut through the cloth of Sherman’s uniform and bruised his shoulder without breaking the skin.

  At twilight, Grant and Sherman nearly died within a minute of each other. Grant stood beside the road that led down to the wharf at Pittsburg Landing, watching with relief as some of Buell’s reinforcements, ferried from across the river, landed and started marching up to the top of the bluff. An incoming cannonball tore the head off a captain who was standing beside him, cut off the top of a saddle on a horse just behind him, and went on to take off both legs of a soldier marching up from the river. As Sherman swung up into the saddle of the fourth horse he had used that day, with a major holding the horse’s reins to make it easier for Sherman to mount because of his wounded hand, the horse pranced, and the reins became tangled around Sherman’s neck. As Sherman bowed low above the horse’s mane so that the major could lift the reins above his head to straighten them out, a cannonball cut through the reins two inches below the major’s hands and slashed off the crown and back rim of Sherman’s hat.