In any case, the chief cause for the initial Union collapse was not really surprise or faulty generalship, but poor morale. Inexperienced Union troops were assured that the Confederates, beaten at Forts Henry and Donelson, would be on the defensive and not attack. Somewhat understandably their sudden and unexpected charge shattered that Union complacency and very nearly routed the entire army in the first seconds of firing.
It is also forgotten that Sherman had wisely picked the high ground in the days before the battle. His right flank was well protected by a branch of Owl Creek, his left by a smaller swollen stream. Any attacker would have to run uphill without cover through a narrow meadow into Sherman’s guns. And it was Grant’s, not Sherman’s, idea to disperse the army in the narrow confines surrounding Pittsburg Landing, at a distance from Wallace, Buell, and Grant’s own headquarters and yet so near to the Confederate stronghold at Corinth, Mississippi. Strategically Grant’s deployment made little sense; tactically Sherman’s dispositions there were excellent.
By day’s end the Union Army had retreated over two miles to its landing on the Tennessee, lost nearly 10,000 dead, wounded, or missing with another 10,000 to 20,000 scattered, but was nevertheless in an extremely strong last-ditch position. As evening approached, the decimated Union Army, well arranged and awaiting the fresh forces of Generals Wallace and Buell, was oddly in far better shape than the victorious though exhausted Confederates.
The events of the second day of Shiloh on April 7 are famous. Despite the chaos of thousands of terrified Union soldiers at Pittsburg Landing attempting to flee the battlefield, Grant shrugged off his initial surprise and proved unflappable. Both he and a weary Sherman had agreed at 11 P.M. on the sixth that with reinforcements, the Union forces could go on the offensive the next morning. To Grant and Sherman, whichever side took the initiative the next morning would win the battle. The Confederates—through senseless frontal attacks on strong Union positions, especially at the so-called Hornet’s Nest, the loss of their commanding general Albert Sidney Johnston, and the clumsiness of their initial deployments—were worn out, unorganized, and as a result unable to press their victory even another hour to annihilate the Union’s last pocket. By Monday morning it was too late and the tables were turned. The Southerners were now outnumbered by perhaps more than 20,000 men. Some 25,000 remaining Confederates faced a Union army of 50,000—over half of them fresh troops who had not endured the trauma of the first day’s carnage.
If it is true that prior disgrace propelled Sherman to downplay the Confederate menace before Shiloh, and past accusations of anxiety and paranoia led to forced calmness under fire, his cool and reasoned conduct in the battle proper largely ensured at least a tactical standoff for the Union Army. His division—made up exclusively of Ohio natives who had never been in battle—was the first attacked and the last to disengage. It anchored the entire right wing in its steady withdrawal; and Grant’s right was the scene of some of the harshest fighting during the first day.
Had Sherman given in to the growing hysteria, precipitously withdrawn his forces, or insisted on a glorious last stand at his original position, the Confederate Army would have destroyed the Union right and poured into the rear of an unprotected army. Others at Shiloh—especially the stubborn General Prentiss at the Hornet’s Nest—were equally responsible for the salvation of the Union Army on the first day of Shiloh. But no one covered so much ground or had such a psychological effect on the troops as the blood-spattered Sherman.
We can engage in counterfactual speculation that had Sherman either been killed on April 6—and he almost was on at least five or six occasions—or not fought in such a frenzied manner, contemporary observers were quite correct that the Union would have lost Shiloh before the arrival of either Wallace or Buell. Grant’s entire Western campaign would then have stalled—Grant himself disgraced and relieved for being surprised—and the Mississippi River may well have remained in Confederate hands until 1864 or 1865. The North might still have recovered after a defeat at Shiloh, but probably not soon enough to close the war by 1865, nor with Abraham Lincoln reelected in November 1864, nor under terms of a general unconditional surrender of the South. Yet Sherman’s remarkable hours at Shiloh also had even greater ramifications far beyond the salvation of the Union offensive in the West in 1862. In at least three other ways, Sherman’s performance at the battle changed not only the course of the Civil War, but perhaps ultimately the very practice of modern war itself.
The fighting of the Civil War ended in spring 1865 for two reasons: Robert E. Lee could not free his Army of Northern Virginia from the death grip of Grant’s Army of the Potomac, and General Sherman’s Army of the West was rapidly approaching Richmond from the rear. Sherman’s was now a monstrous veteran force of over one hundred thousand seasoned Midwesterners who had destroyed Atlanta, ransacked Georgia, and humiliated the Carolinas in a devastating circular march northward from the interior of the South. In some sense, Lee surrendered not only because his army was on the verge of defeat by Grant, but because thousands of his own veterans were deserting to their families on news that Sherman was loose among homes to the rear. Even those who stayed on the line against Grant realized that they were soon to be caught between two enormous pincers and so likely annihilated.
Key to that finale was the unbelievable three-year campaign of Sherman between Shiloh and Appomattox—and the creation of a strange personal symbiosis between Grant and Sherman. Both developments saved the North and owe their geneses to Sherman’s bravery at Shiloh. Again, other generals were critical to the Union battle victory—Prentiss, McClernand, and Buell—but unlike the fate of Sherman, terribile dictu, it mattered little to the eventual Northern effort whether they were killed or captured at Shiloh or removed from command in the battle’s aftermath.
Sherman never looked back after Shiloh. “I have worked hard to keep down,” he wrote his wife of his promotion to major general after Shiloh, “but somehow I am forced into prominence and might as well submit.” In the months that followed the Union victory, he assumed martial control of Memphis. There he began formulating a general Union blueprint of occupation for Southern cities: generosity to compliant Southerners who disengaged from the Confederate war effort, no quarter for guerrillas and citizens who actively aided the Secessionists. Then, for most of spring 1863, Sherman proved invaluable in Grant’s successful campaign against the Mississippi stronghold of Vicksburg. By early 1864, deeply ensconced in the South, commander of all Northern armies in the West, and causing havoc in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia, he was known as “Uncle Billy” to his fast-moving troops.
Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in autumn 1864 saved Lincoln the presidential election. The March to the Sea in November and early December—entirely Sherman’s own plan and implemented over the objections of his superiors—humiliated the South and wrought an estimated $100 million in damage to the infrastructure of the Confederacy. The even greater trek through the Carolinas in the winter and early spring of 1865—again, initially opposed by Grant—devastated much of what was left of the Confederate economy and proved to the world the impotence of the Southern resistance. Sherman’s vast and seasoned Army of the West that approached Lee’s rear—at war’s end it far overshadowed the rival-but-decimated Army of the Potomac—had become the most terrible modern military force in the history of warfare. While the doggedness of both Generals Grant and Thomas was critical to the Union effort, it was Sherman’s odyssey through the South that turned the tide of the war—a spiritual journey as well that began with his wounds and lost mounts at Shiloh.
Equally important was Sherman’s critical relationship with Grant, which likewise was cemented during the firestorm of Shiloh. In the very worst moments of the fighting, a cool Sherman reported to Captain Wiley, Grant’s aide-de-camp, “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 as hot as hell.” The two generals were to meet
twice during the battle’s critical first day. At 10 A.M. Grant himself hurried over to his collapsing right with cartridges for Sherman’s Ohioans. There he found his subordinate calm amid his fallen regiments. “In thus moving along the line,” wrote Grant of his morning inspection, “I never deemed it important to stay long with Sherman.”
They bumped into each other again during the evening. Most officers of the Army of the Tennessee were expecting a general retreat across the river; those who were not were clamoring that only the arrival of Buell and Wallace offered a chance for a draw at Shiloh. In the midst of such panic at Pittsburg Landing, Sherman approached Grant. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” “Yes,” Grant offered, “lick ’em tomorrow, though.”
After the fighting, when Grant was determined to resign under General Halleck’s trumped-up insinuations of laxity and drunkenness, it was a reenergized (and now a national hero) Sherman who convinced him to stay. Of their meeting in the aftermath of Shiloh, when Grant was close to quitting, Sherman later wrote:
I begged him to stay, illustrating his case by my own. Before the battle of Shiloh, I had been cast down by a mere newspaper assertion of “crazy”; but that single battle had given me new life, and now I was in high feather; and I argued with him that, if he went away, events would go right along, and he would be left out; whereas, if he remained, some happy accident might restore him to favor and his true place. He certainly appreciated my friendly advice, and promised to wait awhile.
The ensuing trust from “that single battle” ensured Sherman’s command of the Western theater when Grant went east to assume control of all Union armies. Consequently, throughout 1864 and 1865 the two worked independently and yet harmoniously, in dire contrast to the previous destructive rivalries fostered by generals Halleck, McClellan, Buell, Hooker, Pope, Rosecrans, Burnside, and most of the other generals of Lincoln who had nearly ruined the Union cause in the first two years of the war. Throughout the war Sherman defended Grant in print; for the next twenty years he counseled both Generals Buell and Wallace and their numerous supporters not to pursue their vendettas against Grant and to withdraw charges of Grant’s culpability for the atrocious losses at Shiloh. In short, Sherman’s heroism at Shiloh created the Grant-Sherman trust, without which the North would certainly not have won the war within four years.
Yet the most profound ripple from Shiloh was Sherman’s remarkable transformation in his own views concerning the nature and purpose of modern warfare in the new industrial age. Unlike Grant, who was not directly fighting at the front during Shiloh, Sherman was nearly killed so often and saw such carnage about him, that Shiloh’s carnage made a lasting and haunting impression in this first great slaughter of the Civil War. His memoirs and letters are quite clear about his metamorphosis: Shiloh, one of the earliest of all his Civil War experiences, was also his most horrific and remained for the rest of his life the most nightmarish. Four days after the battle he wrote his wife, “The scenes of this field would have cured anybody of war. Mangled bodies, dead, dying, in every conceivable shape, without heads, legs; and horses! . . . I still feel the horrid nature of this war, and the piles of dead Gentlemen & wounded & maimed makes me more anxious than ever for some hope of an End, but I know such a thing cannot be for a long long time.” Grant concurred with Sherman’s assessment, and later wrote that on the day after Shiloh it would have been possible to walk across the battlefield “in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.”
Nearly a quarter century after Shiloh, the memory of the grotesque dead and wounded continued to haunt Sherman. In an address to the Army of the Tennessee in 1881, he somberly began:
Who but a living witness can adequately portray those scenes on Shiloh’s field, when our wounded men, mingled with rebels, charred and blackened by the burning tents and underbrush, were crawling about, begging for someone to end their misery? Who can describe the plunging shot shattering the strong oak as with a thunderbolt, and beating down horse and rider to the ground? Who but one who has heard them can describe the peculiar sizzing of the minie ball, or the crash and roar of a volley fire? Who can describe the last look of the stricken as he appeals for help that no man can give or describe the dread scene of the surgeon’s work, or the burial trench?
After that personal nightmare of Shiloh’s mangled bodies, Sherman was determined not to fight a battle in the style of Grant in which men charged en masse through open fields of point-blank rifle and cannon fire, the victors guaranteed to lose nearly as many as the defeated. Southerners had vulnerabilities, but bravery under fire was not one of them.
Grant, however, learned a quite different lesson from the second-day reinforcements at Shiloh: the North could win through superior manpower in head-on assaults—trading vicious blows with the Confederates in an effort to kill one Southerner for every two Northern fatalities. Sherman, however, left the battlefield convinced that there had to be a better way for a modern army to defeat its adversary than twenty thousand combined casualties in the space of forty-eight hours. In nearly all of his subsequent fighting there would be almost no repeats of the frontal crashes at Shiloh—Sherman’s misguided head-on charge at Kenesaw Mountain in June 1864 is about the sole exception.
In the next three years Sherman would craft the successful strategy of the Union war effort against the South—a call for total war against the entire infrastructure of the enemy that need not entail the killing of innocent civilians or even the destruction of Confederate armies. What enabled the enemy to charge at Shiloh, Sherman saw, were not mere weapons and matériel, but equally the soldiers’ sense that the heart of their Confederacy was impregnable and their homes safe. Should he destroy that myth—and wreck the foundation of land and slaves that fueled the plantationists’ Confederacy—Southern armies would melt away as surely as if their soldiers had been shot down. Let Lee in Virginia fret about the sanctity of his beloved home ground; meanwhile Sherman would ruin the economy of his Confederate states to his rear. In a series of astute letters to Lincoln, to his adversary John Bell Hood at Atlanta, and to Grant, Sherman outlined this remarkably prescient understanding of the new morality of modern war and the rapidly expanding theater of battle.
War was rightly “hell”; yet Sherman did not come away from Shiloh as a pacifist, but as an angel of moral retribution who would wreak vengeance on the higher powers who had sent those poor boys on both sides to their slaughter at Shiloh. “I propose to demonstrate,” he announced before leaving Atlanta, “the vulnerability of the South, and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms.” To the civil authorities of the Confederacy who demanded that he not deport civilians from Atlanta, Sherman later scoffed, “You might as well appeal against the thunder storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace & quiet is to Stop the war, which can alone be done by admitting that it began in Error and is perpetuated in pride.” In rejecting John Bell Hood’s claim to a higher moral ground in the fighting around Atlanta, Sherman lectured, “If we must be Enemies let us be men, and fight it out as we propose to do, and not deal in such hypocritical appeals to God and humanity. God will judge us in due time.”
To Sherman it was wrong to fight a Shiloh, in which his Midwesterners—themselves no abolitionists—were blasted apart while shooting down poor Southern boys who owned neither slaves nor much property. Far more humane, he grasped, was to burn the estates of the rich and the buildings of the rebel statesmen who had voted for secession; free the slaves who were critical to the Southern economy and whose enslavement had prompted the rebellion; and demonstrate that no Confederate soldier could charge a Union line with the certainty that his government and homeland far to the rear were safe from fire and ruin. As he wrote Grant, “We cannot change the hearts of the people of the South, but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that however brave and gallant and
devoted to their country, still they are mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war.”
In Sherman’s words, Southerners, while they “cannot be made to love us, they can be made to fear us.” The result was that between November 1864 and spring 1865, Sherman suffered almost no casualties in his enormous Army of the West. He killed very few Southerners and made it terribly clear to the ruling minority in the South that their reckless decision to secede would cost them their livelihoods. Sherman not merely destroyed the South, he humiliated it in the process. No wonder that the property destroyer and liberator of slaves, not Grant, the butcher of Confederate manhood, was to be the far more hated by diehard Southerners. Yet Sherman’s bitter truths about modern war neither Grant nor Lee really grasped: the real immorality of war was not the March to the Sea, but the battles to come after and like Shiloh—Antietam, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, the Wilderness—where the young and innocent were massacred while the old and culpable were safely hectoring or even profiting to the rear.
Grant, who won Shiloh through superior manpower, likewise would send thousands to their deaths in Virginia—convinced that Lee’s army might likewise collapse before his own stream of bodies was exhausted. Yet he was often less aware of the larger lessons of the war: the heartland of the South still lay untouched, its citizens unrepentant, while the North would lose more of its precious youth in battlefield “victories” than did the South in “defeats.”
Lee too never really understood Sherman’s strategic notion of war. He went northward in 1863 in search of a head-on collision with the enemy, ruined his army at Gettysburg, killed thousands of Northerners, and prolonged the fighting for another two years. In contrast, Sherman went into the “bowels of Georgia” in 1864 to destroy an economy and an idea, killed few, and lost almost no one—and the war ended in less than a year. Lee perhaps at last realized that Grant could stop his army; but he and his generals never quite understood how and why Sherman had defeated their culture.
Ripples of Battle Page 11
