Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862

by Edward Cunningham

  More troop trains quickly followed, including one carrying the Seventh Mississippi Infantry, which had also been on coast defense duty at Bay St. Louis. The regiment’s train pulled out of New Orleans at dawn on February 27, with the men all in good spirits. But as the train neared Amite, Louisiana, disaster suddenly struck. Somehow a log train ran into the troop train with devastating results. Heavy timbers ripped through the wooden passenger cars, crushing and mangling soldiers right and left. Brains spattered the interior of several of the demolished coaches, while numerous legs and torsos horribly decorated the scene. Lieutenant N. B. Wilson and eleven enlisted men of Company K were killed outright, as well as ten fellows from Company H, the Pike County Dahlgren Rifles. Between twenty and forty-five men were seriously injured in the mishap. Several other companies had a few slightly injured, but the logs struck only the coaches in which Companies K and H were riding.5 Boarding another train, the remnants of the Seventh Mississippi finally caught up with their friends in the Fourth Louisiana in Jackson, Tennessee, on March 2.6 Al together the New Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern and the Mississippi Central moved up nine regiments and four artillery batteries to either Corinth, Mississippi, or Jackson, Tennessee.7

  From Mobile and Pensacola came the regiments of General Braxton Bragg’s command. Bragg’s first regiment, the Ninth Mississippi Infantry, reached Iuka, Mississippi, on February 14. A number of Mississippi and Alabama regiments followed in the next weeks, perhaps ten thousand men altogether, reaching the Johnston-Beauregard command. General Bragg’s men possessed the special virtue of being well trained as a result of long months of arduous drill at the Gulf cities.8

  Besides these commands, the Confederates also had General Polk’s army, which had been stationed at Columbus, Kentucky. On the last day of February, Confederate combat units began the evacuation of the “Gibraltar of the West.” Additional cavalry, artillery, and infantry units followed in the next two days in a surprisingly orderly evacuation that saw the Southerners able to carry off most of the massive array of big guns stationed at that point.9 But there were a few mistakes in the excitement. As the Thirteenth Louisiana Infantry packed up three days rations in their haversacks on March 1, prior to moving out, the order was given to set fire to some nearby ware houses. Matches were quickly applied, and then as smoke and flame billowed from the buildings, someone suddenly remembered a store of ammunition cached inside one of the structures. Before the flames could set the powder off, Lieutenant Armond Dubroca rounded up a detail from his company, Company C, and entered the building, saving the ammunition for future use and probably preventing some casualties.

  The troops from the Columbus garrison quickly reached Humboldt, Tennessee. Many were badly disorganized by the Donelson disaster and the Columbus evacuation. Confederate discipline, never very strong, began to crack. Wandering off from their units to the Humboldt bars to seek solace from alcohol, some of the men became rowdy. Private John Brannigan, Company A, Thirteenth Louisiana Infantry, was certainly no exception. Brannigan went completely berserk. Grabbing hold of Captain Stephen O’Leary, Company A, Thirteenth Louisiana Infantry, he threw the poor Irish Confederate against a barroom window. Enraged by the attack, O’Leary’s men promptly mobbed Private Brannigan, putting him in irons.10 Temporarily, Polk’s command remained at Humboldt until it was finally ordered to Corinth a few days later.

  The concentration of Confederate forces for the showdown battle was shaping up fairly well, but there was one serious fly in the ointment. West of the Mississippi River, General Van Dorn declined to go along with General Beauregard’s plan of concentration. Instead, Van Dorn proposed to defeat Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis’s Union army in Arkansas. This, believed Van Dorn, would create a diversion that would favor Generals Johnston and Beauregard. On February 24, he notified Johnston that the Confederate army in Arkansas was advancing on Curtis. If General Johnston made any reply to the Mississippian’s message, it has not been preserved. In any event, the diversion failed, for Curtis won the ensuing battle at Pea Ridge, or Elkhorn Tavern.11

  Once Van Dorn had been defeated, the best course of action would have been for him to cross the Mississippi and link up with Johnston and/or Beauregard. Unfortunately General Johnston neglected to issue the necessary orders to the Mississippian. On March 19, General Beauregard again appealed to Van Dorn for reinforcements, but without avail. Only after Johnston reached Corinth and closely discussed the situation with the Creole and Bragg did the Kentuckian finally order Van Dorn to join him.12 Unfortunately the army in Arkansas would not reach Mississippi in time for the forth coming action.

  Colonel St. John Liddell, of General Hardee’s staff, gave a somewhat interesting account of General Van Dorn’s failure to reach General A. S. Johnston in time, claiming that Governor Moore of Louisiana, who was feuding with President Jefferson Davis, would not help in providing New Orleans-based steamboats to transport General Van Dorn’s army over to Mississippi.13 But even without the Mississippian’s command a considerable Confederate force was being collected in Northern Mississippi and South west Tennessee.

  In their original correspondence on the subject of the war in the West, Generals Johnston and Beauregard had not bothered to spell out exactly where the Southerners would collect. There were several possible meeting places, including Jackson, Tennessee, Decatur, Alabama, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, but the most logical spot for troop concentration lay at the little North Mississippi town of Corinth. Located only twenty miles from the Tennessee River, Corinth was a good centrally located point for a concentration. Its value was enhanced by the town’s situation on the junction of two of the South’s most important railroads, the Mobile and Ohio and the Memphis and Charleston.

  General Beauregard later claimed that he chose Corinth as the point of concentration, and then sent an emissary to Murfreesboro to persuade the Kentuckian to bring his troops there,14 but it is more probable that the two ranking Confederate officers independently selected the little Mississippi town as a point of junction and then arranged the details by means of the Creole’s emissary.

  On March 2, General Beauregard wrote to Albert S. Johnston that the great battle of the war would be fought at or near Corinth, and in subsequent letters he pressed the supreme Confederate commander in the West to move faster.15

  The bulk of Beauregard’s own command was still in Jackson, Tennessee, and even the newly arrived Bragg was making his headquarters there. But on March 13, the Creole started moving his army out of the town along the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, temporarily halting part of the command at Bethel Station, Tennessee, only one day’s march from Pittsburg Landing and Crump’s Landing, Tennessee. After his army remained a week at Bethel, the troops were ordered to go on down to the junction at Corinth.16

  General A. S. Johnston’s army was burdened with large quantities of ammunition, provisions, and artillery. Hampered by a shortage of trained staff officers, the Kentuckian was able to move toward the junction but slowly.17 By not abandoning his encumbrances and making a forced march to Corinth, General Johnston was actually taking a calculated risk that the Federals would not mass their forces and strike at Corinth first.

  From Murfreesboro, Johnston led his column to Shelbyville, Tennessee, on the Duck River, and from there to Fayetteville, in the southern part of that state. Next the Confederates marched to Huntsville, Alabama, where they picked up the Memphis and Charleston Railroad. The army rode from Huntsville to Corinth, Mississippi, on the painfully creaking coaches and boxcars of the overworked and understaffed railroad, arriving in Corinth March 23.18

  Arriving in Corinth on March 23, General Johnston conferred with Generals Beauregard and Bragg, and also with the other senior officers present. In a surprise move, General Johnston then offered the command of the field army to the Creole while he, the supreme commander, would continue as head of the department from headquarters at Memphis or Holly Springs, Mississippi.19 General Beauregard declined the assignment. Albert Sidney Johnston’s gener
ous offer has caused much speculation, but the probable reason for it was that the Kentuckian felt that the army and the people no longer trusted his judgment.20

  Once the army was collected at Corinth and the nearby railroad towns, the problem remained as to what to do with it. Generals Johnston and Beauregard, and just about everybody else, wanted to attack General Grant before Buell could link up with him, but the Confederate army, now renamed the Army of the Mississippi, was in woefully poor condition for an offensive.21

  There were over forty thousand Southerners collected in the Confederate army, and additional individual units wandered in from day to day.22 Thou sands of soldiers had been in the ranks only a few days, or a few weeks, and they were to tally lacking in training. Morale was depressed due to the recent re verses. To try and un scramble this con fused mess, General Johnston authorized Beauregard to draw up a plan of organization.

  The Army of the Mississippi was divided into three corps. The first corps was under Major General Leonidas Polk, the second was under Major General Braxton Bragg, and the third was under Major General William J. Hardee. A reserve division was also organized under Major General George Crittenden, who shortly afterwards was replaced by former Vice President of the United States, Brigadier General John Cabell Breckinridge.23 General Beauregard was named as second in command of the army, while General Bragg was appointed chief of staff, besides retaining his position as Second Corps Commander.24

  One of the most serious problems facing the Confederate army was the lack of proper firearms. Indeed, the local blacksmiths were busily turning out pikes to arm some of the Southerners who had no guns.25 Actually General Johnston’s army possessed firearms for most of the men, but they were of a heterogeneous variety. Most of the Confederate cavalry and artillery and at least some of the infantry could only be issued shotguns, in many cases with the men’s own personal weapons.26 Many of the regiments were equipped with a varied mixture of old flintlock smooth bores and civilian squirrel rifles. The differences in caliber of these latter commercial weapons created a tremendous ammunition problem for the Confederate army, since it was impossible to issue standardized cartridges.27

  Other Southern infantry units were equipped with military model percussion smoothbore muskets. Though obsolete and greatly inferior to the modern rifles employed by most of the Union army, they were still fairly effective at a range less than a hundred yards.28 Still other Confederate units, such as the Eighteenth Louisiana, Third Kentucky, and Bate’s Second Tennessee, possessed both modern army rifles, sporting guns, and percussion cap or flintlock smoothbores.29 A very few infantry regiments were equipped solely with modern rifles. The Twentieth Tennessee was one such lucky group. Armed with in effective flintlocks at the disastrous Battle of Fishing Creek, Kentucky, the regiment received a shipment of .577 caliber British Enfields while en route to Corinth, courtesy of the recent arrival of a blockade runner.30

  If there were inadequacies in most of the Confederate soldiers’ shoulder arms, this was at least slightly compensated for in the wide variety of side arms carried by even the enlisted men. Most of the officers and noncoms carried revolvers, and many of the former carried swords, and almost everyone from private to general seems to have carried some kind of knife, whether a simple Bowie or a more sophisticated Arkansas toothpick. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of enlisted men carried revolvers or some sort of pistol stuffed in their pockets or in the waist bands of their pants.31

  As bad as the weapon situation was in the Confederate army, the standards of training were generally even worse, excepting General Bragg’s soldiers. The chief of staff described Generals Polk’s and Breckinridge’s soldiers as a “heterogeneous mass in which there was more enthusiasm than discipline, more capacity than knowledge, and more valor than instructions.”32 One of Bragg’s biggest problems in trying to discipline the army lay in the lack of trained officers. Most of the senior officers were either professionals or experienced amateurs, but at the company and regimental level the bulk of officers were ex-civilians. A very few regiments had trained senior officers.

  The Seventh Kentucky was very fortunate in possessing Colonel Charles Wickliffe, West Point class of 1839. Wickliffe had three years of frontier duty behind him, and he had served as a captain in the Sixteenth U. S. Infantry and major of the Fourteenth during the Mexican War. After that conflict, he left the army to enter the Kentucky legislature, later serving four years as commonwealth attorney.33

  Colonel Joe Wheeler, Nineteenth Alabama, was another good example of the professional soldier placed in command of a volunteer regiment. A West Point graduate of 1859 and a veteran of one Indian action, the twenty-five year old Wheeler had been colonel of the Nineteenth Alabama since September of the previous year, turning it into one of the best trained organizations in Bragg’s command.34

  Colonel Jean Jacque Alexandre Alfred Mouton, Eighteenth Louisiana, was also a West Point graduate, but for ten years before the Civil War he spent his time as a railroad engineer (although he did serve as a militia officer).

  John S. Marmaduke, colonel of the Third Confederate Infantry Regiment, was also a graduate of the West Point class of 1857, besides possessing four years of command experience in the peacetime U. S. Army, while Colonel John C. Moore, Second Texas, possessed the most experience of any of General Albert Sidney Johnston’s regimental commanders. A member of the class of 1849 at West Point, Moore had served against the Seminoles in Florida as well as in the territory of New Mexico.

  Twenty year old John Herbert Kelly, Ninth Arkansas Battalion, was the youngest field officer with the Army of the Mississippi. After three years at West Point, Kelly resigned to enter the Confederate Army as major of the Fourteenth Arkansas Infantry in September 1861.35

  Excepting the West Pointers most of Johnston’s regimental commanders had only service experience in the Mexican War. Colonel George Maney, First Tennessee, Colonel W. B. Bate, Second Tennessee, and Colonel John H. Clanton, First Alabama Cavalry, were all three Mexican War veterans. Colonel Robert Tyler, Fifteenth Tennessee, represented a different type of military experience. Twenty-eight years old, Tyler was a veteran of William Walker’s first filibustering expedition to Nicaragua. Tyler had ably commanded his regiment at the Battle of Belmont, and this dual experience helped mark him as one of the better regimental leaders.36

  The bulk of the regimental commanders were men of a completely civilian background, appointed colonels because of political influence or organizational ability. One of the most able of these was the commander of the Fourth Louisiana Infantry, Henry Watkins Allen, a lawyer, politician, and sometimes European traveler who originally won the election as lieutenant colonel of the regiment.37

  Colonel John J. Thornton, Sixth Mississippi, did have several months experience as a colonel of Mississippi militia. A resident of Brandon, Mississippi, he was the one member of the state constitutional convention who refused to sign the ordinance of secession.38

  Forty-six year old Thomas Hart Hunt of the Sixth Kentucky was a native of Lexington, a businessman, and a former officer of the state guard,39 while of a slightly different tradition, Colonel Daniel Weisiger Adams, First Louisiana Infantry, had at least been under fire, although not on the battlefield. In a duel in Louisiana, the high-spirited Adams had killed a newspaper editor who had criticized his Federal judge-father.40

  Most of the regimental commanders of the Confederacy fell into some sort of category between Adams, the duelist civilian, and the ex-militia officer John Thornton. The majority of the lower grade officers lacked any military experience, although there were a few notable exceptions such as Leon von Zinken, major of the Twentieth Louisiana. An ex-Prussian officer, von Zinken was himself the son of a Prussian general. Although he spoke only clumsy English, he was usually able to make his point to his part German, part Irish regiment.41

  First Lieutenant William Moon, Company A, Seventeenth Alabama, had served in the Mexican War and with William Walker in Nicaragua before being elected to his pos
ition in September 1861.42

  Some of the regimental commanders were either inept or simply completely unreliable. Colonel Thomas Hill Watts, Seventeenth Alabama, was by profession a lawyer, and he tended to carry his legal training over into his military career. Watts was persistently wrangling with General Bragg over some minor points of order. While at Corinth, he also refused to obey an order from his brigade commander, General Adley H. Gladden. The lawyer-soldier also persuaded his senior officers to join with him in his ill-conceived mutiny. The upshot of the affair was that Watts and the others were placed under arrest until they wrote an apology to General Gladden, admitting they had done wrong in refusing a lawful order from a superior officer. A few days later Watts was appointed Attorney General of the Confederate States, and upon accepting the appointment left the regiment forever, entrusting it to Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Fariss.43

  A much more serious disciplinary affair was that occurring between General Bragg and Generals George Crittenden and William Carroll. Reports circulated at Bragg’s headquarters that the two latter officers were neglecting their duties and spending too much time drinking. Crittenden was already under a cloud for the Fishing Creek debacle, at which it was commonly charged that he had been drunk.44 On General Bragg’s orders, Hardee visited Crittenden’s command and had the two men arrested, Crittenden for drunkenness and Carroll for the same violation, plus additional charges of neglect and in competence.45 For both officers it was the end as far as their military careers went. Crittenden resigned his command as major general and spent the rest of the war in various administrative capacities. Carroll resigned and went to Canada. Crittenden’s loss was an especially sad one, for that officer was one of the most experienced in the Confederate army. West Point trained, he had fought in the Black Hawk War, with the Texas Republic Army, and in the Mexican War. His brother was Thomas Leonidas Crittenden, Major General, United States Volunteers.