Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

  All firing by the troops is positively prohibited in camp. Where it is necessary to discharge fire-arms it will be done under proper regulations, made by division commanders, and such men as are to discharge their pieces will be marched in an orderly manner to the front of the outguards for that purpose and back to their camps.13

  The mere fact that such an order was necessary tells a good deal about the carefree, happy-go-lucky atmosphere that had prevailed before the battle.

  Shortly after this, Grant followed with another order: each division commander was to detail ten mounted men, under a commissioned officer, to patrol the camp and arrest all officers and men who fired their weapons in disregard of this regulation. All enlisted men found outside their proper camps were to be arrested, as were all civilians who could not display passes signed either by the Departmental Commander or by a general commanding an army corps. There was to be more work, too, and Grant’s order frankly admitted the need for it: “Most of the command being deficient in drill and discipline, division commanders will see that as many hours per day as is consistent with the health of the men be devoted to drill and that company commanders excuse no soldier from any part of his duties.”14

  With all of this, Grant was considering the next move. On April 9, forty-eight hours after the battle ended, he sent this dispatch to Halleck:

  There is but little doubt but that the enemy intend concentrating upon the railroad at and near Corinth all the force possible leaving many points heretofore guarded entirely without troops. I learn this through Southern papers and from a spy who was in Corinth after the rebel Army left.

  They have sent steamers up White river to bring down Van Dorn’s and Price’s commands. They are also bringing forces from the East—Prisoners also confirm this information.

  I do not like to suggest but it appears to me that it would be demoralizing upon our troops here to be forced to retire upon the opposite bank of the river and unsafe to remain on this, many weeks, without large reinforcements.

  The attack on Sunday was made, according to the best evidence I have, by one hundred & sixty-two regiments. Of these many were lost by killed, wounded and desertions.

  They are at present very badly crippled and cannot recover under two or three weeks. Of this matter you may be better able to judge than I am.15

  Halleck, meanwhile, was on his way to Pittsburg Landing, to exercise active command in the field. Powerful reinforcements would be available. John Pope had finally taken New Madrid and Island Number 10, and his strong army could be used; for a time Halleck was uncertain whether to send it straight down the Mississippi toward Memphis or to bring it around and up the Tennessee to join Grant and Buell, and he told Secretary of War Stanton that he could not decide until he learned more about Rebel strength at Corinth. He concluded presently that Pittsburg Landing was the place, and Pope was ordered to bring his army to the scene without delay, leaving enough men with Commodore Foote, on the Mississippi, to enable that officer to land troops and occupy Fort Pillow if the Confederates should evacuate that post.16 On April 9, Halleck notified Grant that he was leaving St. Louis, and that substantial reinforcements were coming. He added the warning: “Avoid another battle, if you can, till all arrive. We then shall be able to beat them without fail.”17

  Halleck arrived without much delay, and on April 13 he issued General Orders Number 16, officially thanking Grant and Buell and their soldiers for the victory. His order remarked that “The soldiers of the great West have added new laurels to those which they had already won on numerous fields,” emphasized the need for greater discipline and order, and stated that Grant and Buell would retain the immediate command of their respective armies in the field. On the heels of this Halleck sent Grant a stiff but not unfriendly note demanding that he get his troops into better shape:

  Immediate and active measures must be taken to put your command in condition to resist another attack by the enemy. Fractions of batteries will be united temporarily under competent officers, supplied with ammunition, and placed in position for service. Divisions and brigades should, where necessary, be reorganized and put in position, and all stragglers returned to their companies and regiments. Your army is not now in condition to resist an attack. It must be made so without delay. Staff officers must be sent out to obtain returns from division commanders and assist in supplying all deficiencies.18

  The interesting thing about this note—in view of Halleck’s readiness to cast blame on a subordinate—is the fact that it was not a great deal sharper; for Grant was coming under heavy criticism by newspapers and by politicians for his handling of the first day’s fight at Shiloh. At no time in the war was he more bitterly attacked, publicly, than now, and the accusations ranged all the way from the old charge of drunkenness to the allegation that through blind incompetence he had allowed his army to be caught completely by surprise.

  The country got its first news about the battle from a dispatch which the New York Herald published on April 10—a clean “beat,” scored apparently by an enterprising character named W. C. Carroll who got downstream to the telegraph station at Fort Henry ahead of all the other correspondents and sent the Herald an enthusiastic and inaccurate account of a massive victory which reflected unsullied glory on the national arms. Carroll had been serving briefly as a volunteer aide on Grant’s staff—it was not uncommon then for a correspondent to wangle such a position with some general—and he was frankly out to present the General and his accomplishments in a favorable light. Months afterward, he wrote that at the close of the battle he had appraised “the bitterness of feeling and jealousy of Gen. Buell and his officers toward General Grant and the Illinois troops,” and had concluded that they would try to bring General and Illinoisans “into disrepute by a series of false and slanderous reports”; as a result, he raced for the telegraph office determined to get a properly oriented account before the public.19

  His story made a huge splash. It began by asserting that “one of the greatest and bloodiest battles of modern times” had just ended in complete rout of the enemy; it contained a fantastic overestimate of the number of casualties (from 18 to 20 thousands of Federals, and between 35 and 40 thousands of Confederates) and it contained no hint that the Confederate attack had not been fully expected and prepared for. It also included the completely false assertion that Grant in person had turned the tide, on the second day, by himself leading a desperate charge on the Rebel position, brandishing his sword “while cannon balls were falling like hail around him.”

  Carroll’s story was not very long, and there was not actually a great deal of meat in it, but the Herald played it as a magnificent scoop and fleshed it out by printing, with the runover, nearly a solid page of secondary material—biographical sketches of the leading generals, an account of the strategic significance of the Corinth area, and so on. Its Washington bureau got busy, a copy of the dispatch was sent to the White House, and the document was read aloud to an enthusiastic House of Representatives. Secretary Stanton issued a statement congratulating generals and troops for this and other victories, and ordering every regiment in the nation’s armies to convene on the following Sunday and listen to prayers of thanksgiving. Other newspapers all around the country reprinted the Herald’s dispatch, after the fashion of that day, New York City was bedecked with flags and bunting, and reporters who came north from Shiloh a day or so later found victory celebrations going on in towns in southern Indiana and Ohio.20

  This did not last very long. One correspondent at Shiloh was young Whitelaw Reid, who wrote dispatches for the Cincinnati Gazette under the pen name AGATE. Reid was with Lew Wallace at Crump’s Landing when Grant’s steamer came up the river on the morning of April 6, and he slipped on board while Grant was talking over the railing with Wallace, rode on upstream, and got off at Pittsburg Landing at the same time Grant did. He spent two days in the battle area, doing a good reporter’s best to get a comprehensive account of everything, and what he learned appalled him. (Sherman bitte
rly declared, later, that Reid got a highly slanted version of the battle from Buell and Nelson.) Reid lost the race to the telegraph station, and went on all the way to Cincinnati, where, almost exhausted, he worked at prodigious speed to write out a complete story. The Gazette promptly put it into type, the Herald reprinted it on April 14, and the gloss permanently vanished from Carroll’s jubilant and sketchy story.

  Reid’s story was a shocker. The man was convinced that the army had been miserably taken by surprise, that its generalship had been all but nonexistent, that a ruinous defeat had been averted by the narrowest of margins, and that nothing about the whole affair could be considered with pride except for the bravery of some of the common soldiers and a few subordinate generals. He began in the breathless, involved manner of the times: “Fresh from the field of the great battle, with its pounding and roaring of artillery, and its keener voiced rattle of musketry still sounding in my wearied ears; with all its visions of horror still seeming seared upon my eyeballs, while scenes of panic-stricken rout and brilliant charges, and obstinate defences, and succor, and intoxicating success are burned alike confusedly and indelibly upon the brain, I essay to write what I know of the battle of Pittsburg Landing.” Then, after plowing his way through a few more paragraphs of similar tenor, he got down to cases and presented a workmanlike account of what had really been going on at Shiloh. He had infinitely more detail than the Herald man had bothered to collect, and in column after column he presented to the country a convincing picture of a military debacle as humiliating and as disgraceful, in all but its final scenes, as the disaster of Bull Run itself. In the end it was his story that the country took to heart.

  The army, he said flatly, had been surprised in its camps. Many officers and men were not out of bed when the Confederate attack struck, others were washing or getting dressed, some were at breakfast, and organized musket and artillery fire swept through the camps before the men even fell into line. Some men were shot dead in their tents, others were bayoneted while still in bed; everybody retreated in haste, and although a new line was patched up many of the fugitives continued all the way to the river and refused to return to the fight. Prentiss’s division was swept away and was captured by ten o’clock in the morning. Heroic resistance was described here and there, but in the main the narrative was one of unrelieved bungling and retreat.

  The story made little mention of Grant himself; when he was mentioned, the reference was highly critical, and the entire article was searing in its implications. Grant did not even arrive on the field “until after nearly all these disasters had crowded upon us”—Sherman and McClernand routed, most of Prentiss’s division captured, most of the camps taken—and there had been shameful neglect in regard to Lew Wallace: his division, drawn up and ready to march all morning, “was not ordered to Pittsburg Landing until nearly if not quite twelve o’clock.” There was no evidence that any general control was exercised over any part of the battle; a council of war was held Sunday night, “but if the Major General commanding developed any plans there beyond the simple arrangement of our line of battle, I am very certain that some of the division commanders didn’t find it out.” Reid gave his readers the impression that Buell’s troops and the guidance of Buell himself won most of whatever was won on Monday.21

  Others joined in the chorus. Many men had run away at the first shock of battle; some of these were officers, men of prominence in their Middle Western home towns, and they tried to prove their innocence by showing that the army had been surprised because of lack of leadership. The Governor of Ohio—two of whose regiments had practically dissolved once the shooting started—said that these men were not cowards: they had been surprised because of the “criminal negligence” of the top command, and the lieutenant governor of the same state cried that most of the soldiers felt that “Grant and Prentiss ought to be courtmartialed or shot.” The Chicago Times announced solemnly that “the neglect of one man, intrusted with high responsibilities, has left fearful, heartrending testimonials on the savage battlefield of Pittsburg Landing,” and the Cincinnati Commercial editorialized: “There was something in the management of that great, destructive and indecisive battle that has caused apprehensions to be felt as to the competency of the then commanding general, and while several ugly-looking points have been explained away, public opinion demands something more than even General Halleck’s endorsement to reconcile it to the retention of Gen. Grant in command.” A New York Herald correspondent at Pittsburg Landing wrote shortly after the battle about the “universality of sentiment that Grant was accountable for the reverse of Sunday,” and went on to assert: “Probably 60 officers, brigade and regimental, have expressed themselves to that effect, while a word in his defense is scarcely to be heard in any quarter. What the General’s defense may be is therefore not public, but if he is not amenable to the charges so freely promulgated and discussed he is the best abused man in the country.” The 35th Ohio, which reached Shiloh shortly after the battle, found that the camps were full of stories of bad generalship, and a veteran remembered: “These rumors were generally accepted as fact by us.… We were in a humor to believe any kind of a report that reflected on our regular army officers. Volunteer troops at that stage of the contest were impressed with the idea that regular army officers were tyrannical and devoted more time to good drinks than to required military duty.”22 The Middle West was in a somber mood; the steamboats were bringing north thousands upon thousands of wounded men, and in Indiana and Ohio and Illinois people began to feel the tragic impact of what had in truth been the bloodiest battle yet fought in the New World.

  Shiloh casts a long shadow, in whose dusk it is hard to see the precise truth. Of all the complaints about folly and fumbling leadership, the one which is the clearest, and which has lived the longest, is the dispatch which Reid wrote out of his fury and his disillusionment—a dispatch which is a singular blend of great reporting and abysmally bad reporting. It gave the nation the truth about this battle, but it also gave it certain untruths, which have lived to this day; and in what they said when they tried to reply to the untruths, both Grant and Sherman now seem to have been trying to disown the truth itself. Their statements appear either willfully false or wildly incomprehensible to anyone who has not examined Reid’s story and compared it with the record.

  Reid was wrong on several counts. He had the bulk of Prentiss’s division captured by 10 in the morning, although it held out until 5 in the evening and by its heroic resistance kept the army from complete ruin. He said that Grant did not reach the field until after the worst had happened, although—since he himself reached the landing on Grant’s own steamboat—Reid was fully aware that Grant got to the scene promptly and went immediately to the front. He said that there was unconscionable delay in ordering Lew Wallace to the battlefield, although the orders were sent as soon as Grant arrived at Pittsburg Landing and were repeated, with much urgency, several times thereafter. Altogether, there was enough bias in Reid’s dispatch to give a hot-tempered man like Sherman some reason to suspect that the jealousy of the Buell faction had been at work.

  But it was in what he said about the surprise that Reid did the most damage—and, doing it, led Grant and Sherman into a defense which a later generation has found quite unacceptable.

  Reid said flatly that the men in their camps, especially the men in Sherman’s and Prentiss’s divisions, were taken wholly by surprise, with Confederate battle lines charging in on them before they were up and dressed, and he wrote scathingly about mismanagement which caused men to be shot in their tents and bayoneted while still in bed. In substance, his story said that the forward portion of the army had been overwhelmed and routed before the men could even get their muskets and face the enemy; the damage was done, according to Reid, before the army had so much as got ready to fight.

  Now all of this, quite simply and demonstrably, is not true. The battle began in the very earliest light, with Prentiss’s forward elements—and, soon afterward, Sherman’
s—pitching into the Confederate advance. No Federal camp was overrun before battle lines had been formed, and some of the sharpest fighting of the entire day took place before any camp had been taken. No one was bayoneted while in bed or shot while in his tent. Both Union and Confederate records make this clear.23 In collecting his facts here, Reid obviously had absorbed the wild tales told by panicky fugitives at the landing.

  It was this part of Reid’s dispatch which Grant and his defenders—including above all others Sherman, who would be Grant’s man forever from now on—were most anxious to knock down. In their desperate attempt to show that there had been no surprise as Reid used the word, in which they were entirely correct, they seemed to be saying that there had been no surprise at all at Shiloh, and beyond all argument there had been one. None of their statements about what happened at Shiloh makes any sense unless it is remembered that they were trying to reply to one particular segment of the Reid dispatch.

  That the criticism stung Grant painfully is obvious. Not long after the battle he did something which he did rarely, if ever, at any other time in his military career: he wrote a letter to an editor in reply to newspaper criticism. On May 3 the Chicago Times and other papers reprinted a letter which Grant had sent to the Cincinnati Commercial. In it, after asserting that he would continue to do his best to bring the war to a speedy close and that he himself was “not an aspirant for anything at the close of the war”—this was a point on which he seems to have been especially touchy—Grant wrote:

  There is one thing I feel assured of; that is the confidence of every brave man of my command, and those who showed the white feather will do all in their power to attract attention from themselves. I had perhaps a dozen officers arrested for cowardice in the first day’s fight. These men are necessarily my enemies. As to the talk about a surprise here, nothing could be more false. If the enemy had sent word when and how they would attack we could not have been better prepared. Skirmishing had been going on for two days between our reconnoitering parties and the enemy’s advance. I did not believe, however, that they intended to make a determined attack, but were simply making reconnoissances in force. My headquarters were at Savannah, though usually I spent the day at Pittsburg. Troops were constantly arriving to be assigned brigades and divisions, all ordered to report at Savannah, making it necessary to keep an office and someone there. I was also looking for Buell to arrive, and it was important that I should have every arrangement complete for his speedy transit to this side of the river.24