by Bruce Catton
Smith shared Grant’s impatience, and each man saw an opportunity which needed to be grasped at once—saw it all the more clearly simply because it had gone unexploited for so long. Straining against Halleck’s leash, they had come to believe that the only problem was the problem of getting permission to strike a blow; had reached the point, indeed, where they thought about this almost to the exclusion of everything else. Neither man seems to have reflected that Johnston and Beauregard might be most wakeful, preparing to strike a blow of their own. Grant was looking at the missed opportunity so intently that it was hard for him to see anything else—an extremely dangerous mood for an Army commander deep in the enemy’s country.
That much valuable time had in fact been wasted is undeniable. The victory at Fort Donelson had left the Confederate armies between the Mississippi River and the Alleghenies hopelessly fragmented and badly outnumbered, with powerful Federal forces standing squarely between the fragments. To make any sort of contest for what was left of their western front the Confederates needed, in the third week of February, time that could have been denied them. Yet a free gift of the time had been made, the fragments had been brought together and strengthened to make a new army, and a battle which aggressive Federal strategy might have prevented altogether was now inevitable.
When Fort Donelson fell, on February 16, Johnston’s position was desperate. He had perhaps seventeen thousand men in and around Bowling Green, and he took them south as fast as he could, pausing only briefly at Nashville and moving on, by way of Murfreesboro, Fayetteville, and Decatur, Alabama, to Corinth, the junction town which had been chosen as a rallying point. In the Columbus area—to which Beauregard had been sent as soon as Bowling Green was abandoned—there were something like twenty-three thousand more troops, under Polk. Half of these, or more, had to be left on the river to hold such points as Island Number Ten, New Madrid and Fort Pillow; the rest must be brought down to the neighborhood of Corinth to unite with the force that was coming down from Bowling Green and Nashville. Even should this reunion take place, Johnston would have fewer men than either Grant or Buell had; and, to complete the tale of his predicament, at the end of February both Grant and Buell were closer to Corinth than either Johnston or Beauregard.
When March began, as a result, the Confederacy was facing nothing less than destruction of its power in the West. It reacted with great vigor—Richmond could see, as clearly as anyone else, that the loss of the Mississippi must ultimately be fatal—and reinforcements were summoned, even at the cost of stripping the sea coast of defenders who were badly needed where they were. Five thousand troops were sent to Corinth from New Orleans, and Braxton Bragg was rushed up with ten thousand more from the Gulf Coast; but it took time to move these troops, just as it took time for Beauregard and Polk to come down from Columbus and for Johnston and Hardee to move down from Murfreesboro, and by any logical appraisal of the situation the Confederacy did not have time enough. But in the end it was given forty-nine days—seven weeks, from the fall of Fort Donelson to the opening day of Shiloh—and this was just time enough.23
There were understandable reasons for the Federal delay, of course. Halleck had had many problems. He had to prepare and develop Pope’s advance down the Mississippi, and he had to provide supports for Curtis’s offensive in the far southwestern corner of Missouri, and the combined maneuver of angling for his own advancement and standing Grant in a corner had called for a good deal of attention and energy. Buell, in his turn, had been in a trying position. Naturally cautious, unwilling to move until every preparation had been made, he had been pulled into Nashville against his will, had been unable to arrange the needed conference with Halleck, and had never been given a clear directive from Washington; and McClellan, general in chief during the first weeks of the campaign, had been under such pressure in connection with his handling of the Army of the Potomac that the situation in Tennessee had received only a minor part of his attention. The whole command situation had made swift, decisive movement highly improbable if not actually impossible.
But the excuses are not good enough. From first to last the triumvirate had seen the map rather than the battlefield—the map, and “strategic points” which must be occupied, and not the broken Confederate Armies which were hurrying off in retreat, three hundred miles apart, inviting destruction. Early in March Halleck had complained: “I cannot make Buell understand the importance of strategic points till it is too late.”24 Buell actually understood this just as well as Halleck did, and their only real difference of opinion had to do with the precise location of these points and the way in which they should be seized. These generals believed in positional warfare. A careful study of the map would disclose certain places whose retention was vital to the enemy; take those points and the enemy would then become helpless. This was clear enough; but men like Grant and Foote and Smith felt that a surer way to make the enemy helpless was to push on without delay and destroy his armies in the field. After Donelson fell and Nashville was taken, Halleck had ordered a raid up the Tennessee to break the Memphis and Charleston railroad. While the raid was under way he had broadened his plan to allow for the occupation of Corinth, where he would concentrate a vast army which Johnston must face with the odds against him. This strategic plan was limited, and it had assumed that time was on the side of the Federals. As a result, one of the brightest chances of the war had been missed.
One thing in all of this figuring had been correct. Johnston would indeed fight for Corinth. But he would not wait until the place was held by an army twice the size of his own. He would fight before that army had been put together; and when March came to an end Johnston was about to regain the initiative. Six weeks earlier his position had been all but hopeless; now he was going to call the signals, and if his luck was in he might with one blow undo most of the damage that had been done in February along the Tennessee-Kentucky border.
As April began, Johnston had between forty and forty-five thousand men at Corinth, with able lieutenants to lead them—Beauregard, Bragg, Polk and Hardee. Twenty-five miles away was Grant, with a slightly smaller army; coming down from Nashville was Buell, with an army about the size of Grant’s. Johnston’s only chance was to beat Grant before Buell arrived, and when April began he undertook to do this. His army had been hastily put together, most of his soldiers had never been under fire before and were imperfectly trained, and staff organization was so poor that, when the advance began, the different divisions got into one another’s way, straggled all over the landscape, and made such bad progress that Beauregard, in despair, wanted to cancel the whole operation, on the logical ground that such a stumbling, disorganized offensive could not possibly succeed. But Johnston’s mind was made up. He muttered grimly, “I would fight them if they were a million,” and he drove his men on toward Pittsburg Landing.25
So a Confederate army, which had been considered too weak and dispirited to do anything better than await destruction, was about to launch a sudden, shattering offensive; and in the ironic chance of war the offensive was to strike the one Union Army commander in Tennessee who, in the campaign now approaching its surprising climax, had been trying without success to bring on a fight. Striking him, it would find him unready—as if the hoped-for battle were inconceivable unless it were imposed by him on his opponent. Grant had learned much in war’s brutal school, but his military education was still incomplete. Now he was about to learn a great deal more—at prodigious cost to himself and to some thousands of young men who, without quite realizing it, had joined the Union Army in order to pay for his education. (The peach trees near Shiloh meetinghouse were in pink blossom, the clear streams ran down the ravines to the flooded river, and between Snake Creek and Lick Creek the high ground was waiting to absorb the blood that would flow so soon and so copiously; and farmboys who were proud of their new blue uniforms, and never had been taught which end of a rifled musket is which, were lolling innocently in their camps, enjoying the spring sunshine and writing letters ho
me about the power and the glory of male youth in time of war.)26
Grant was developing as a military realist. The war had taught him a few good lessons: that when untrained armies face each other, neither general gains by deferring a fight until the training of his own men is perfected; that in any hard battle there comes a time when both armies are ready to quit, and that the one which can nerve itself for one more attack at such a time is very likely to win; that troop morale is better in an active campaign than in training camp; that war means fighting, so that feints and demonstrations accomplish little, and the real object of a campaign is not to make the enemy retreat but to destroy him root and branch.
These were good things to learn, and in learning them Grant had done little more than sharpen his naturally aggressive instincts. But he had the defects of his qualities, and experience had not yet applied a corrective. He underestimated both the fighting heart and the initiative of his enemy, believing that a Confederate army in his front was likely to be very passive, and in his devotion to the offensive he was likely to overlook defense. He was still an optimist—a week ahead of time he had promised to take Fort Donelson “tomorrow,” and when he was warned about muddy roads he had blithely remarked that they would be worse for the enemy than for him—and now he had spent a month and a half trying in vain to win permission to strike the enemy. Apparently he was only slightly impressed by the possibility that the enemy might strike first.
A newspaper correspondent assayed the headquarters feeling correctly when, at the end of March, he wrote that there would be a big fight just as soon as Buell’s army arrived: “Within two weeks, measures will have been accomplished that will render retreat by the Rebel army at Corinth impossible.” Writing to Julia, Grant said that “a big fight may be looked for some place before a great while,” and adding that he believed this would be the last big battle in the West.
Like a great many of his soldiers, Grant had been unwell. Whether, as the men believed, the water supply around Shiloh was contaminated, or whether the standard diet of fried pork and hardtack was having its natural effect, there was a great deal of camp diarrhea, which Grant in a letter referred to as “Dioreah” and which the rank and file commonly mentioned derisively as “the Tennessee quickstep.”27 Grant recovered from this malady, but shortly thereafter he received a painful injury to his leg. On the evening of April 4, Confederate cavalry jumped a picket post on the Corinth road a few miles from the landing, and Grant rode out to see about it. Returning with W. H. L. Wallace and Colonel McPherson, he found the night so impenetrably dark (a heavy rain was coming down) that there was nothing any rider could do but trust to his horse to stay in the road. Grant’s horse lost its footing and fell in the mud, pinning Grant’s leg and wrenching his ankle severely. Grant’s boot had to be cut off, and for the next day or two he needed crutches when he walked. Fortunately, the sort of infection that still kept C. F. Smith off duty did not set in.
On the day after this injury was received, April 5, Grant believed that as soon as Buell’s men arrived the advance could begin. His own army now contained six divisions, the newest of which had been made up from six green regiments that had just reached camp; its command went to the same Brigadier General Prentiss who had disputed Grant’s seniority the summer before, in Missouri. Five divisions, with a total of possibly thirty-seven thousand men, were camped on high ground between the creeks near Pittsburg Landing. The sixth, Lew Wallace’s division of seventy-five hundred, was stationed on the western bank of the Tennessee at Crump’s Landing, half a dozen miles downstream. There had been increasing contacts with aggressive Confederate patrols in the last few days, and these aroused a suspicion that some sort of attack on Wallace’s men might be brewing. Sherman had been alerted to be ready to send help if necessary, but the general assumption was that the Rebels meant no particular harm along the main Federal front. One Federal explained, long afterward, that “the almost absolute necessity that no battle should be fought before the arrival of Buell’s army seemed to forbid scouting or anything that might appear aggressive,” and Sherman said much the same thing when an officer on outpost duty told him he had seen Rebel infantry not far beyond the Union lines. “I have got positive orders,” Sherman told him, “to do nothing that will have a tendency to bring on a general engagement until Buell arrives.” To Colonel Appler of the 53rd Ohio, Sherman was more snappish. Appler formed his regiment in line and sent word to Sherman that the enemy was in sight; for his pains he got the reply—“Take your damn regiment back to Ohio. There is no enemy nearer than Corinth.”28
It took diverse elements to make Shiloh what it was. The Federal Army’s position had been chosen by C. F. Smith, who did not think green soldiers should be ordered to entrench—Smith, whose opinion Grant respected, probably, more than he respected any other man’s. Another element was the fact that Sherman commanded the advance. Sherman’s nervousness in the face of a Confederate advance in Kentucky, six months earlier, had cost him his command and had led the newspapers to deride him as insane; recovering his confidence, he had unquestionably overcompensated, and by now he was probably the last man in the Army to take alarm because Confederates were skirmishing on his front.
Sherman did notify headquarters that there was plenty of contact with Rebels on his front, and on the afternoon of April 5 Grant went to the front to see for himself. Everything seemed to be fairly quiet—undeniably there was a good deal of Confederate activity not far off, but it seemed to be mostly reconnaissance parties—and Grant accepted Sherman’s appraisal. When he returned to Savannah, Grant wired to Halleck: “I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us, but will be prepared should such a thing take place.” After the battle had taken place, Grant admitted that his outposts had been skirmishing freely with Confederate patrols for two days: “I did not believe, however, that they intended to make a determined attack but were simply making reconnaissances in force.”29
The head of Buell’s column reached Savannah around noon on April 5. Colonel Jacob Ammen, an old acquaintance of Grant, commanded a brigade in the leading division, which was under the same General Nelson whom Grant had sent off to Nashville more than a month earlier; and at some time during the afternoon Grant and Nelson stopped at Ammen’s tent to discuss plans. Ammen said his men were not tired and could easily march down to Pittsburg Landing that afternoon, if need be. Grant told him to take it easy, and in his diary Ammen recorded Grant’s words this way: “You cannot march through the swamps; make the troops comfortable; I will send boats for you Monday or Tuesday, or some time early in the week. There will be no fight at Pittsburg Landing; we will have to go to Corinth, where the Rebels are fortified. If they come to attack us we can whip them, as I have more than twice as many troops as I had at Fort Donelson.” Then Grant rode off, saying he had an engagement that evening.30
The Union Army’s position at Pittsburg seemed strong, even though the five divisions were arrayed rather loosely. The ground was high, the deep creeks protected both flanks, and if the Confederates did attack they would have to come in head-on in a straight frontal assault. Proper field entrenchments would have made the position invulnerable, but no trenches had been dug—partly because everybody was thinking about offense rather than defense, and partly because professional soldiers just then believed that an army which dug itself in would lose its aggressive touch. Buell and the head of his column were supposed to reach Savannah on Sunday, April 6. Once they arrived things could begin to happen.
The soldiers waited in the Tennessee springtime and admired the budding leaves and the peach-tree blossoms, and bathed in the little streams that ran down to the Tennessee. An Iowa soldier, looking at the innumerable tents scattered through “the delightful Tennessee forest,” felt that this vast camp had the appearance of “a gigantic picnic.” There was a noisy, holiday air over the place. Untrained soldiers kept discharging their muskets in the woods, moved by nothing more than a simple desire to see if the things wou
ld go off after a rain, and regimental bands were playing; on the river, a steam calliope on one of the transports brayed out patriotic tunes. That evening, quite unnoticed, Johnston arrayed his men in order of battle, remarking grimly: “I intend to hammer ’em. I think we will hammer them beyond doubt.” His army was so near that his pickets stood at ease in the dark and enjoyed the music of the Union bands.31
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Guns on the Bluff
John Rawlins was awakened early on the morning of Sunday, April 6. The mail steamer from Cairo reached Savannah at 3 o’clock, disembarking a passenger who came up the hill from the landing to headquarters—Captain W. S. Hillyer, the onetime St. Louis real estate agent who was now a member of Grant’s staff and who had just returned from a trip down-river. Hillyer’s arrival aroused Rawlins, who found himself unable thereafter to go back to sleep, and—since a good deal of activity was scheduled for this day—Rawlins got up and dressed with the first light of dawn and went down to Grant’s office to look at the mail.
Army headquarters was in a fine mansion overlooking the Tennessee, the home of William Harrell Cherry. Cherry was a man of substance, owner of a store and a ferryboat, several thousand acres of farmland, and a good-sized collection of slaves. He was stoutly Unionist in his sympathies (although Mrs. Cherry was inclined to be on the side of the Confederacy), and he was known as a Unionist to President Lincoln himself; Grant, it was said, had made his headquarters in the Cherry mansion because Washington had told him the owner was a loyalist. The fact that the house was roomy enough to accommodate the General and his staff was doubtless a factor, as well; Grant slept here, and his aides; and in an upstairs bedroom was General C. F. Smith, bedridden now with the infected leg that stubbornly refused to heal.
