Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

  While Rawlins sorted the mail, Grant himself came into the headquarters office on the first floor. Headquarters today was to be moved from Savannah to Pittsburg Landing, and orders had been issued the evening before to prepare an early breakfast and to have the horses saddled and ready to be put aboard Grant’s steamer, Tigress, which lay at the landing with steam up. Ordinarily, Grant would probably have stayed on at Savannah a few days longer; it was the point of contact for Buell’s divisions and for reinforcements coming up the Tennessee from Cairo, and Grant hoped to confer with Buell before going on to Pittsburg Landing. (Actually Buell had arrived the night before, but through some lapse in staff work Grant did not yet know about it.) The afternoon before, Grant had received disturbing news. Major generals’ commissions, Halleck notified him, had been issued to two of Grant’s division commanders, John A. McClernand and Lew Wallace—neither man a professional soldier, each a man with excellent political connections. As a result, these two officers now outranked everybody in Grant’s army except Grant himself (and, of course, Smith, who was on the sicklist), and as long as Grant stayed in Savannah one or the other of them would be in effective command around Shiloh. Grant felt that Wallace was too inexperienced and McClernand too erratic to be entrusted with such authority; consequently, he himself must move on upstream, and today was the day for it.

  Grant went through his mail in the office and chatted casually with an Illinois officer who had just returned from leave, and at six o’clock, or a little later, breakfast was announced. Grant and his officers had just begun the meal when the quiet of the spring morning was unexpectedly broken by the sound of dull concussions from far upstream—cannon firing, somewhere in the vicinity of Pittsburg Landing.

  Grant sat motionless for a moment, an untasted cup of coffee in his hand. A private soldier detailed for headquarters duty came in from outside to confirm what everyone had sensed: judging by the sound, this was a real fight and not just a skirmish. Grant set his cup down, stood up, and said: “Gentlemen, the ball is in motion. Let’s be off.” Within fifteen minutes General, staff, clerks, orderlies and horses were aboard the Tigress, and the steamer was moving upstream.1 Before the boat left, Grant wrote two hasty notes. One, to General Nelson, said simply: “An attack having been made on our forces, you will move your entire command to the river opposite Pittsburg. You can obtain a guide easily in the village.” The other, addressed to Buell—who, as Grant supposed, would be reaching Savannah a little later—was slightly more detailed. It read:

  Heavy firing is heard up the river, indicating plainly that an attack has been made upon our most advanced positions. I have been looking for this, but did not believe the attack could be made before Monday or Tuesday. This necessitates my joining the forces up the river instead of meeting you today, as I had contemplated. I have directed General Nelson to move up the river with his division. He can march to opposite Pittsburg.2

  The note is interesting for its bearing on the puzzling question: Precisely what had Grant been expecting in the way of enemy action? This morning he was writing, “I have been looking for this”; the afternoon before he had assured Halleck that he anticipated nothing like a general attack on his position. Apparently he did feel that Lew Wallace’s force might be attacked, and he may have taken this morning’s gunfire for confirmation of that suspicion. He had warned both Sherman and W. H. L. Wallace that an attack at Crump’s Landing seemed quite likely and that both men should be prepared to reinforce that spot at a moment’s notice. Saturday night he had had Colonel McPherson—who had become one of his most trusted staff members—stay with W. H. L. Wallace at Pittsburg Landing, the significance of this being that this division was the reserve, held ready to reinforce any trouble-spot in case of need. Both Sherman and Prentiss, who had the forward line, sent out patrols very early Sunday morning, to see what might lie in front of them. McPherson wrote that “it was well known that the enemy was approaching our lines,” and on Saturday Grant had notified Halleck that the Confederates in and around Corinth were present in great strength. He believed that Johnston had eighty thousand men with him, and he suspected that some of these were arrayed along the line of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, which ran from Corinth up to the recently-evacuated Confederate stronghold at Columbus—ideally situated, if his suspicion were correct, to strike the Union flank at Crump’s Landing.3 Clearly enough, Grant had believed that some sort of fight might soon be thrust upon him; the one thing he had not anticipated was what was actually happening this morning—a massive drive on the front of his position by the entire Confederate Army.

  The Tigress went on up the river, the sound of cannon and musket fire coming in more and more clearly, and somewhere between seven and 7:30 the steamer closed in by the bank at Crump’s Landing, next to Lew Wallace’s headquarters boat. Wallace was on deck, waiting, and Grant leaned over the railing of his own boat and called out his orders: Wallace was to hold his division ready to march on receipt of orders, and he was also to send patrols out to the west to see whether the Confederates were moving toward him as well as toward the troops around Shiloh church. Wallace agreed. He was an ambitious man, deeply wanting to win fame as a soldier. What would happen in the next twenty-four hours would put military fame out of his reach, although fame at last would be his: Ben Hur would come out of the brain that could not quite create victory in battle. To the end of his days he would try to explain the baffling things that went wrong on this sixth of April. So far, none of them had gone wrong, and Wallace faced the day with confidence. Tigress swung away from the bank and went on upstream, and at eight o’clock or a little later nosed into the bank at Pittsburg Landing.4 Grant got on his horse and went ashore, to ride straight into the middle of the great Battle of Shiloh.

  At the moment of going ashore, it was evident that an enormous fight was going on and that it was not going well for the Union Army.

  Off to the southwest—not two miles away, and obviously drawing closer—there was a tremendous noise of battle, continuous racket of rifle fire, heavy thud of artillery, the sound of thousands of men shouting. Smoke was drifting up from the woods, and a dismaying crowd of stragglers, weaponless and winded, was knotting up on the hillside that went from the river to the high ground; panicky men, disorganized and unmanned, who had been shoved unready into their first battle and who had gone for the rear in wild desperation, officers of rank among them. There were hordes of stragglers in the rear of every army in every battle in the Civil War, but Shiloh was the one battle that put them on display: a man running from the battle area here was in effect a man running down a funnel, for even the dullest fugitive could see that the only road to safety was the road to the steamboat landing, and men who in any other fight would be drifting across square miles of open country were packed in a solid mass, cowering under the lee of the bluff above the river. They were beginning to assemble, now, with the day hardly more than begun, and they would continue to assemble all day long, pathetic evidence that troops with inadequate training and no battle experience whatever had been called on to stand up to one of the worst combats of the entire war.

  There was a great deal for the Commanding General to do, and Grant promptly set about it. The volume of firing warned that the men up front would need ammunition, and Grant put his staff to work to organize an ammunition train so that there might be a steady supply of cartridges. The job was intricate: the Union Army’s weapons had not yet been standardized, and in Sherman’s division alone cartridges of six different calibers must be supplied. Another staff officer was sent downstream on the Tigress, with orders for Lew Wallace to bring up his division as fast as possible.5 Something had to be done about the stragglers, and Grant seized two Iowa regiments which, having disembarked a few minutes earlier, were lined up on the bluff awaiting orders; as soon as they had been given ammunition they were to form across the roads a little way from the landing and halt all fugitives, holding themselves ready at the same time to obey further orders. The Colonel of one of these
regiments, James T. Reid of the 15th Iowa, looked blank when Grant gave him these instructions, and Grant had to identify himself with the remark: “I am General Grant.” Then, having sent most of his staff off on various tasks, Grant set out for the front to see for himself what was happening.6

  What was happening was both simple and complex, confusing in its innumerable details but appallingly clear in its general drift. This was not one battle but a vast number of intense and bewildering small battles, each one overlapping with its neighbors and yet strangely isolated, the only true pattern coming from the inexorable application of overwhelming force on a loose battle line which had come into being without any central direction but solely in response to immense pressure. Of the five Federal divisional commanders involved, only one had been a professional soldier. The two divisions which had been hit first and hardest and which, on Grant’s arrival, had been fighting the longest, contained few regiments that had ever fought before. Reinforcements had gone forward, not in response to any general plan, but simply because officers at the front were Calling desperately for help. Fugitives from the combat area were coming to the rear almost as fast as the new troops were going forward; as the two tides flowed past and through each other, Grant lost forever the belief that he had held thus far—that the ordinary soldiers of the Confederacy were halfheartedly serving a cause that never fired their inmost loyalties. The one unmistakable fact, now, was that these ordinary soldiers of the Confederacy—no better trained and no more experienced than Grant’s own men—were fighting with a sustained fury and were giving his army the worst of it. His immediate and most pressing task was to stave off unredeemed disaster.

  Grant went first to W. H. L. Wallace, commanding what was supposed to be the reserve division, and got from him a sketchy picture of what had happened so far.

  At dawn, the Union Army had been grouped loosely in preparation for a march on Corinth. Up in front, nearest the Confederates, were the divisions of Sherman and Prentiss, with McClernand’s and Hurlbut’s divisions lined up back of them and Wallace’s division in the rear. At three in the morning, Prentiss—no professional, but a stout fighter with combat experience in the Mexican War—had sent three companies from the 25th Missouri out on a long reconnaissance. These soldiers, groping past the Federal picket line, and drifting to the right, in front of Sherman’s division, had bumped into Confederate skirmishers at five o’clock, or thereabouts. They had attacked at once, and before long Prentiss had sent other Missourians forward to support them. Meanwhile, Sherman’s 77th Ohio had also gone forward on the prowl, and it too had kicked up a fight with unidentified Rebels in the murky woodlands.7 (One of the many oddities about this battle was that it began with Federals attacking Confederates.) The advance elements had fought hard for a short time, and then the Confederate offensive had begun to roll, and ever since then the men in blue had tried desperately to hold on to what they had.

  Sherman was on the right. Prentiss was to his left, not in immediate contact, and isolated on Prentiss’s left was a lone brigade from Sherman’s division, three Midwestern regiments under Colonel David Stuart. Albert Sidney Johnston was attacking with his entire army, less three brigades held back as reserve, an army massed in three consecutive battle lines, each line following closely behind the one ahead; a defective tactical arrangement, because it meant that Confederate troops would be hopelessly scrambled, once the fighting became intimate, but a powerhouse nonetheless, because it put more than thirty thousand men in a broad mass to attack little more than a third of their own number.

  Sherman’s men got it first. Unluckiest of all the new regiments, on a day when everybody’s luck was bad, was the 53rd Ohio. It got into line, fired two volleys, then heard its colonel howl: “Fall back and save yourselves!” The Colonel ran for the rear and cowered behind a log, white-faced; two companies of the 53rd stayed and fought and the rest lit out for the steamboat landing. By the end of the day, scattered portions of this regiment were fighting in three separate Union regiments. The 71st Ohio also lost its colonel, who spurred his horse for the rear the moment the fighting began. In the confusion that followed, the 71st was hit hard by an Alabama regiment and fled in a wild, disorganized stampede. The 6th Iowa, doing its best in its first fight, found that its colonel was drunk. He tried to put the regiment through pointless, impossible maneuvers in the face of a Confederate attack, and was placed under arrest by the brigade commander. (Growing sober a bit later, he took a musket and fought in the ranks of some other regiment as a private soldier.)8 Sherman’s division was driven back and so was Prentiss’s, and when McClernand and Hurlbut got their men in beside them the Confederate attack seemed to increase in intensity. One of McClernand’s brigadiers said later that his troops lost more men in their first five minutes of action than in all the rest of the day.9 Now Wallace’s troops were going into action, and by 10 in the morning practically all of Grant’s army was strung out in a loose uneven front, fighting desperately.

  Grant went on to see the other divisional commanders. Iowa soldiers in Hurlbut’s division saw him riding up, attended by two or three staff officers. He was wearing a sword, today, and a buff sash; one officer said Grant’s face “wore an anxious look, yet bore no evidence of excitement or trepidation,” and he trotted forward with a leisurely air. Another soldier said Grant was smoking a cigar, seemingly as cool as if he were making a routine inspection, and he believed that the sight reassured the men, who felt that the worst must be over.10 Grant visited Sherman briefly. Sherman’s horse had been shot, he had a minor wound in one hand, he was covered with dust, and his tie had worked around to the side so that it stuck out under one ear; but this man who had been so nervous in the early days at Kentucky that he lost his command and was called insane was cool and at his ease in the heat of actual battle, and when Grant asked how things were going Sherman said the situation was not too bad, except that he did need more ammunition. Grant told him arrangements for ammunition had already been made, and cantered off to see Prentiss. When he wrote of the battle, long afterward, Grant remarked that on this first day at Shiloh “I never deemed it important to stay long with Sherman.”11 The intimacy that would bind these two men together all the rest of the war was born this day at Shiloh.

  Prentiss had been driven back into an eroded lane that ran parallel with the Confederate front, with a stretch of woodland behind it and a nondescript field overgrown with brambles out in front, and here his raw troops were making a determined stand. W. H. L. Wallace and most of his division joined them here, now or a little later, and the resistance these soldiers put up was so effective that the Confederates were held at bay for five or six hours; they referred to this section, ever after, as the hornets’ nest. Grant told Prentiss to hold his ground at all hazards—an order which Prentiss would obey with dogged fidelity—and cantered off. As Grant and his escort rode past the 5th Ohio battery, the captain of the battery saw his own father riding along as a member of Grant’s cavalry escort.12

  Off to the right and rear there was an important bridge, where a road that passed the rear of the Federal position crossed Owl Creek and went north to Crump’s Landing. Here Grant found a cavalry detachment and two regiments of infantry. He posted the infantry to hold the bridge, and sent a cavalry officer with a company of cavalry to ride to Crump’s Landing and guide Lew Wallace’s division to the field.13 Then he wrote a note to Buell and gave it to a staff officer to take to Savannah. It was an anxious appeal not unlike the one he had sent to Foote during the crisis at Fort Donelson:

  The attack on my forces has been very spirited from early this morning. The appearance of fresh troops on the field now would have a powerful effect both by inspiring our men and disheartening the enemy. If you can get upon the field, leaving all your baggage on the east bank of the river, it will be a move to our advantage and possibly save the day to us. The rebel force is estimated at over 100,000 men. [The fury and effectiveness of the Confederate attack apparently had made a great impression on Grant
; not often did he so greatly overestimate the forces against him.] My headquarters will be in the log building on top of the hill, where you will be furnished a staff officer to guide you to your place on the field.

  Still uncertain whether Buell was actually at Savannah, Grant addressed the dispatch to Comdg Officer Advance Forces Near Pittsburg, Tenn.14

  At some time in the middle of the morning, Rawlins and a lieutenant colonel in the paymaster’s department rode up from the landing to find Grant. They did not know exactly where he was, but Rawlins confidently told his comrade, “We’ll find him where the firing is heaviest.” The firing, as the paymaster remembered it, was extremely heavy. As they trotted up a forest lane he heard a steady pattering in the leaves overhead, and asked Rawlins if it was raining. Rawlins replied: “Those are bullets, Douglas.” (An Iowa soldier wrote that at one time this morning he saw what he never saw before or afterward—swarms of musket bullets in flight, overhead, visible like buzzing insects.) They found Grant, as Rawlins had predicted, in the thick of things, and both Rawlins and McPherson urged Grant not to expose himself so much; Grant replied that he had to see and know what was going on.15

  Once Grant and his staff drew up in an open space, while Grant studied the situation. The fire was heavy, and Captain Hillyer, who never pretended to be the stoical military type, confessed that he and most of the others were in an agony of apprehension. Grant seemed almost to enjoy it, as a man might enjoy being out in the rain on a hot day. One staff officer nudged Hillyer and begged: “Go tell the Old Man to leave here, for God’s sake!” Hillyer shook his head: “Tell him yourself. He’ll think me afraid, and so I am, but he shan’t think so.” At last someone mustered the nerve to ride up and tell Grant: “General, we must leave this place. It isn’t necessary to stay here. If we do we shall all be dead in five minutes.” Grant looked about him, muttered, “I guess that’s so,” and led the cavalcade away.16