The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  As it swung west, the Corinth Road cut through Duncan Field, in the center of which stood a farmhouse and some small outbuildings. Its gunners striding briskly beside their pieces, Powell’s battery approached the farm to support McClernand’s foundering left. The timing could not have been worse: Just as Powell’s men rolled forward, the center Union front collapsed. Battery F came up directly against Confederate regiments from Mississippi and Tennessee. A volley dropped the horse of the sergeant riding next to Powell, badly injuring its rider. The screams of the battery’s wounded horses rent the air; another man fell. Powell looked to see where he might unlimber his guns and make a stand but, at that very moment, hundreds of demoralized Union men broke to run back behind the Duncan house, then crossed the field in headlong flight.

  Battery F now lay terribly exposed. Powell ordered it to fall back. Unhitching the dead and dying horses, the cannoneers swung their cumbersome guns around under unremitting fire. All their training threatened to disintegrate in one shrill instant in the hysteria inflamed by the screams of horses and men and the hiss of minié balls. But Powell rode up and down and kept his head, and the men struggled on. They abandoned one cannon, its horses substituting for the disabled animals on the other guns and caisson wagons—a black mark indeed for an artillery unit—but Powell counted it lucky to escape with the other five pieces.

  Battery F pulled back four hundred yards behind the original line, then moved a few hundred more feet south down Eastern Corinth Road before pulling in behind Minnesota and Missouri batteries. Powell galloped off, quickly encountering his fellow Illinoisan Brigadier General W. H. L. Wallace, who agreed to incorporate Battery F into his division.

  Spurring back to the guns as his men unlimbered them, Powell examined the patch of woods in front of them, which ran a ragged half mile along the rutted secondary road. Soon some eleven thousand men would jam these woods, a spot that became known as the Hornet’s Nest. Powell had landed himself and his battery in one of the war’s fiercest actions, the epicenter of a battle in which more men died in two days than in all previous American military encounters combined. The cannon sounded like “the roaring of a great herd of lions,” noted Confederate private Henry Morton Stanley, who would famously go on to meet Livingston in the African jungle. Battery F lay seventy-five to one hundred yards immediately behind the Hornet’s Nest front line.

  Around midday, Grant rode up, instructing his divisional generals to hold the position at all costs. Over the course of the early afternoon, men from fourteen of the sixteen Confederate brigades hammered the Hornet’s Nest in eight furious charges. “Men fell around us as leaves from the trees,” recalled a terrified private. The men of one Ohio battery simply abandoned everything and fled the scene.

  Powell held firm. His five guns methodically poured fire over and through slight gaps in the trees. Confederates came within sixty paces of the Union infantry before steady fire forced them back. The scream of cannons and the cries of the wounded rent the smoky air. Grant’s division commanders had taken his orders to heart, continuing to hold the line at the Hornet’s Nest even as their flanks began to cave in. They now manned a bulge, or salient, deeply vulnerable to being cut off. Wallace ordered Battery F to support the collapsing left flank in a peach orchard. Powell leaped off his horse as his men readied the cannon, directing them to aim at the enemy right where Confederate soldiers had taken cover behind a fence. He ordered the men to load solid shot so as to knock the railings down. He raised his right arm to signal his gunners to commence firing.

  A musket ball from some two hundred yards away struck Powell just above the wrist, the soft lead shattering hard bone, flattening, and then plowing down his forearm. In the chaos of the battle, he barely noticed the wound, realizing its severity only when he tried to mount his horse. Under a nearby tree, now bereft of most branches, he examined his crushed hand, but the sight of more Union soldiers running from the field drew his attention. A terrible anger boiled within him at their apparent cowardice. Only then did he see three Confederate brigades in hasty pursuit. The Union left center now teetered on the edge of collapse.

  * * *

  Light-headed with shock, Powell did not shake off a medical officer who rushed to cut away his sleeve. But before the medic could finish, General Wallace galloped up, dismounted, and in one fluid motion swung Powell onto the saddle of a nearby horse, barking at a sergeant to accompany Powell back to the Landing. Powell could do little more than weakly nod his thanks. Just minutes later, an enemy ball would smash into the back of Wallace’s head and exit his eye. He would fall to the ground, apparently dead. The Confederates pressing in, his men left him.

  The sergeant led Powell through the gauntlet formed now by the two Confederate wings pressing pincerlike on the flanks of the ragged Union salient, rounds flying all around them. They made the Landing just in time. At 5:45 p.m., the Confederates cut off the Hornet’s Nest, leaving 2,250 soldiers prisoner. But the Union’s stubborn resistance had given Grant sufficient time to assemble a formidable defensive line along the bluff commanding the Landing. Without their captain, Battery F had hastily retreated and now took up their position there.

  The Confederates suffered their own crippling loss that day when their talented commander General Johnston took a ball to his left calf and bled to death. Southern assaults continued, but they were poorly coordinated and ultimately collapsed under the fire from the guns amassed above the Landing. After this long, bloody day, the Confederates had little will or energy left to sustain the offensive. Johnston’s successor, General P. G. T. Beauregard, called off the attack as night fell, telegraphing Richmond that his army had won a “complete victory.”

  At the Landing, Powell watched dazedly as wagons delivered load after load of wounded to an old warehouse, now a temporary hospital, where a ghastly heap of amputated arms and legs steadily grew. The river below the bluff was crowded with dozens of requisitioned boats of every size and shape, each inch jammed with the stricken. Powell squeezed aboard a craft, which steamed off to Savannah. Emma met her delirious husband on the bankside. “Now, now,” gasped Powell in response to Emma’s tears. “Everything is going to be all right.”

  The army had turned nearly every structure into makeshift hospitals, Powell winding up in a bed on the second floor of the town hall. The American continent had never seen such a concentration of catastrophically wounded soldiers. The medical staff was simply overwhelmed. Of the eleven thousand nominal surgeons attached to the entire Union forces, only five hundred had performed operations in civilian life. That day, many became surgeons on the job by trial and, too often, error. “Amputations were abundant,” wrote a federal surgeon, “and, as usual in very many cases in the upper extremities, entirely unnecessary.” Yet a decision to amputate was less capricious than it might have seemed. Unlike a high-velocity rifle bullet, a relatively slow-moving, yet heavy and soft lead minié ball crashes into the human body, flattening and deforming upon impact. It did not just break bone, but splintered it, not only puncturing the tissue but shredding it, driving dirt and sweaty scraps of clothing into the opening it created.

  Doctors often probed wounds with unwashed fingers to find the lead, moving along the line of shrieking patients, reusing sponges from previous procedures. Under these Dantesque conditions and well before the development of antibiotics, wounds were invaded by every form of microorganism; sepsis alone killed more than 90 percent of those it afflicted. Without the time, the tools, or the most basic skills to attempt reconstructive surgery, the medical staff correctly saw amputation as the most effective means to stave off death.

  Surgeon William H. Medcalfe of the 49th Illinois Volunteers attended the delirious Powell, with Emma at his side. Powell was lucky: The forty-year-old University of Pennsylvania Medical School graduate boasted more surgical experience than most of his peers. During his civilian practice in Olney, Illinois, he had performed, among other operations, the complicated facial
reconstruction of a girl shot by accident. Medcalfe cleaned Powell’s wound, then extracted the spent round and bandaged the mangled hand and wrist. Samuel Gross’s then standard on the subject, A Manual of Military Surgery, which Medcalfe carried with him, recommended against amputation until the patient could bear the shock and loss of blood. Powell’s complexion remained deadly pale, his pulse small and threading. Medcalfe gave him laudanum and instructed Emma to force tea into him. All Saturday night she attended to her husband of only four months, amid the groans and cries of the wounded.

  The evening turned chilly and a heavy rain set in, amplifying the unimaginable misery of the wounded left on the field of battle. All of Grant’s divisional commanders, even the indomitable Sherman, felt that the day had been lost, urging their leader to put the river between them and the victorious enemy. When Major General James B. McPherson articulated plans for pulling back, Grant exploded. “Retreat? No. I propose to attack at daylight and whip them.” With Major General Lew Wallace’s division now arrived, plus some elements of Buell’s Army of the Ohio, Grant could bring reinforcements onto the still confused battlefield.

  The ensuing Union assault that Monday morning caught the exhausted Confederates completely off guard. While their lines did not break, they fell back. Just after 2 p.m., a staff officer asked Beauregard: “General, do you not think our troops are in the condition of a lump of sugar thoroughly soaked with water, but yet preserving its original shape, though ready to dissolve?” Beauregard agreed. Pessimistic about the offensive in the first place, he ordered his worn-out army back to Corinth.

  “I wanted to pursue,” wrote Grant, “but had not the heart to order the men who had fought desperately for two days.” On the battlefield, soldiers retrieved the soaked, shivering, and bloody Brigadier General W. H. L. Wallace, who had lifted the wounded Powell onto a horse the day before. Somehow he had survived through the night. Wallace ended up under his wife’s care in Grant’s headquarters at Savannah but died in her arms several days later.

  Surgeon Medcalfe waited through Monday, regularly stumbling in to check on Powell, but must have had many more terribly critical cases to contend with. Powell’s wound was not so frightful as to make amputation absolutely necessary right away. Indeed Emma may herself have urged delay. Even so, Medcalfe was risking much by waiting. Amputations performed within forty-eight hours offered a 25 percent likelihood of mortality, but rose to 50 percent subsequently.

  Finally, on Tuesday, April 8, just as forty-eight hours had elapsed since Powell took the bullet, Medcalfe prepared him for surgery, pouring chloroform onto a sponge that he placed over the shallowly breathing face. The anesthetic proved a lifesaver, not only dulling the pain but giving, as one fellow amputee testified, the sensation of a “vessel sailing through the air.” Medcalfe deployed his bone saw with speed, finishing the procedure in the fewest possible minutes to minimize shock and blood loss. During a similar amputation, General “Stonewall” Jackson—Lee’s most effective lieutenant—remembered hearing the most beautiful violin music, only to wake up and realize that the sound had been that of a saw on the bone of his left arm. He died of pneumonia nine days later.

  Medcalfe tied off the arteries with threads, then rasped and scraped the bone edges, pulled a flap of skin over the stump below the elbow, and sewed it closed. He did little to the nerve ends. Neuralgic pain would haunt Powell for the rest of his life. But he was alive.

  * * *

  The Union’s remarkable turnaround at Shiloh dealt the Confederates a hard blow in the western theater. At first, Northern newspapers hailed Grant as a hero, Congress suspending business and Lincoln declaring a national day of thanksgiving. But rejoicing soon turned to shock as the horrifying enormity of the butcher’s bill emerged. Any smug certainty that an overall Union victory must come soon also died in the aftermath of that grim battle. Scrutiny turned upon Grant, particularly on his neglecting to build defensive positions at Pittsburg Landing. Rumors of his drinking at Shiloh swept north.

  One evening at the White House, a group of advisers and friends pressed Lincoln to fire the beset general. The president listened with characteristic care, then stood and simply replied, “I can’t spare this man; he fights.”

  As soon as he was able, Powell scrawled a letter with his remaining hand to his mother back in Illinois. The script may have been boyish and straggly, but it displayed indomitable spirit in its simple acknowledgment that liberty comes at a price. People from all over town dropped in to witness this inspiring document with their own eyes.

  Powell had come of age that bloody week. Emma did her best to buoy his spirits, keeping a sharp eye out for those tiny dark spots that marked the first sign of gangrene. No longer could he wash his own hand or button his shirt. Emma faithfully attended to these prosaic transactions: keeping the wound clean, washing his clothes, and generally serving as his lost right hand. Powell later credited her continued presence, fortitude, and unwearied devotion with keeping him alive.

  * * *

  Four months later, Powell reported to Springfield with orders to keep a more active convalescence as a recruiting officer—of course, accompanied by Emma. Here he worked on writing legibly with his left hand. Even though a committed, even ardent, recruiter, the sight of a still-pale amputee must have engendered some misgivings among possible recruits. But Powell longed to get back to the action. By March 1863, he and Emma had rejoined his men at Lake Providence, Louisiana, where Grant’s forces were mobilizing to assault Vicksburg, the “Gibraltar of the South.”

  Sitting on a hairpin bend of the Mississippi, forty miles west of the state’s capital, Jackson, its mansions perched on high, steep bluffs, the town served as “the nailhead that held the South’s two halves together,” Jefferson Davis had explained. Its fall would cripple the Confederacy, perhaps fatally. But taking this citadel remained no easy task. Treacherous wetlands bogged down anyone who approached by land. The formidable heights gave its batteries a deadly vantage against gunboats.

  Grant moved most of his army to Milliken’s Bend and Young’s Point, small Louisiana towns on the west bank to the northeast of Vicksburg. In his first action for nearly a year with Battery F, Powell took the company from Lake Providence to Milliken’s Bend in late March. Several Union attempts on Vicksburg had failed badly already, so Grant devised a brilliant plan that would yield one of the fastest, most successful, and unorthodox campaigns of the war. Wetlands prevented an approach from the north, so Grant’s most effective gambit was to send the Union army south along the east bank of the Mississippi to well below Vicksburg. There they would cross the river, then work their way back north to attack. This massive logistical undertaking would rely on his moving the Union ships down past the fortress to the ferry point. Otherwise he could not move his men across the river.

  In mid-April the Union forces began their march south, working their way along Walnut Bayou Road, which ran atop the natural levees skirting Roundaway Bayou between Richmond, Louisiana, and New Carthage. The heat had already risen, and sweat quickly soaked the men’s wool uniforms. The spring rains were heavy that year, creating vast lakes out of swamps and bayous. Ground travel proved possible only along the tops of narrow levees, but these were thick with deep mud and periodically riven by great, flood-torn cuts. “I look upon the Whole thing as one of the most hazardous & desperate moves of this or any war,” wrote Sherman to his wife. The troops lit bales of cotton to drive away the clouds of gnats. The coughing, exhausted men kept a sharp lookout for water snakes and the occasional alligator.

  Powell and his command were constantly forced to improvise methods for moving their heavy guns along these awful tracks, often assembling corduroy roads—lines of felled trees packed side by side—to secure footing for their animals and the wagon wheels. The road ran through an interminable bog, intersected by numerous half-flooded bayous. They threw up bridges of lumber they cut themselves, jury-rigging and gerrymandering their way over the br
oken landscape. They reassembled their gun carriages and mustered whatever they could to pull their big pieces out of the muddy pits. Powell closely monitored the condition of the exhausted horses and kept his men focused.

  While his army wearily marched toward the obscure Bruinsburg Landing, Grant persuaded the acting rear admiral David D. Porter, his equal in rank and commander of the gunboats, to take the squadron by night on a hair-raising dash past Vicksburg’s batteries. Porter brought off the maneuver brilliantly, escaping with far fewer casualties than anticipated. Several days later, an armada of leased army steamboats again rushed southward past the guns to fulfill Grant’s ambitious plans.

  Six days after breaking camp, after seventy miles of marching, Powell brought Battery F to the designated river crossing. On April 30, the ramshackle flotilla ferried 24,000 men and sixty guns across the Mississippi, the nation’s largest amphibious operation until Normandy in World War II. A vast river to their back and the stronghold of Vicksburg across their land route now separated the Union army from its base of supplies, but at least they had found dry land. After months of repulses, Grant’s men now had the mighty citadel in their sights.

  A direct drive north upon Vicksburg was ruled out by the absence of roads and the need to cross at least four major waterways to knock aside the garrisons of the forward Confederate positions. Instead, Grant decided to push west toward Jackson and cut off the railway that carried critical supplies to his objective. In doing so, he would brook conventional military wisdom, forgoing the traditional supply chain, which supported an advancing army. Without the cumbersome wagon train, the army could move fast, but now faced the chance of being cut off by Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton’s Confederate Army of Mississippi. Powell and Battery F, who depended on more than a hundred horses to move their guns and powder, now found themselves foraging for the two dozen pounds of grain and hay that each animal required daily. When the soldiers butchered more meat than they could eat, they impaled what remained on their bayonets, shouldered their rifles, and marched off.