Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

Grant and Halleck alike had sadly underestimated Albert Sidney Johnston’s determination to win back what he had lost in Kentucky. The ease with which Grant had walked over Fort Henry and Fort Donelson and put half of Johnston’s western army out of commission had frightened and angered the Confederacy, and in this case it galvanized the Confederates into frantic action. Jefferson Davis hurriedly stripped every Confederate garrison along the Gulf coastline, and all other points between there and Corinth, of every soldier he could lay hands on, and concentrated them at Corinth, until by April 1 Johnston had an army of about 40,000 men at his disposal. Additionally, in February Davis sent Johnston the Confederacy’s most successful general to date, P. G. T. Beauregard, as a sort of auxiliary commander to help plan a counterblow at the Federal forces.

Downriver, on the other hand, Grant’s victories bred a slaphappy complacency, which allowed Grant’s command to sit motionless at Pittsburg Landing until the morning of Sunday, April 6, when Johnston’s army came crashing through the underbrush around Shiloh Church and rolled up to within half a mile of the Federals.

What happened over the next forty-eight hours has been sufficient to give the name Shiloh an eerie, wicked ring that still sends shivers down the American spine. In some respects, it was hardly a battle. Johnston had only the barest hold over his green and undisciplined rebel soldiers, and it is one of the great marvels of military history that he ever managed to assemble them at Corinth, get them over the flood-soaked Tennessee roads to Pittsburg Landing, and do it all without inducing much alarm among the Federals, from Grant on down to the lowliest cavalry pickets. But Johnston was a desperate man in a desperate strategic situation, and marvels are sometimes what desperation is capable of conjuring up. In the exact obverse of Grant’s optimism, Johnston knew that unless he got to Grant before Buell and Halleck did, then the war in the west was as good as over.

It was that fear as much as anything else that got Johnston moving and got him to Shiloh Church that morning, while the Federal army was still rubbing sleep from its eyes. “I would fight them if they were a million,” Johnston grimly remarked after one last parley with Beauregard and his subordinates. “The more men they crowd in there, the worse we can make it for them.”31 That determination, and the stupendous indifference of the Federals (Grant was actually nine miles downriver at Savannah, sitting down to breakfast), gave the Confederacy its best and biggest chance of evening up, and maybe bettering, the score set at Henry and Donelson.

Once the battle began, however, the terrain and the rawness of Johnston’s troops took matters out of his hands. Shiloh became a huge grappling match, with disconnected pieces of each army standing, breaking, and running in almost every direction. “Parts of regiments,” wrote an appalled reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, “ran disgracefully.” One Federal division, under Benjamin Prentiss (with half of another commanded by W. H. L. Wallace), backed itself around the lip of a sunken road that became known as “the Hornet’s Nest,” and fought to cover the pell-mell retreat of the other four Union divisions until it was “completely cut off and surrounded,” and finally surrendered. Grant wrote afterward that “more than half the army engaged … was without experience or even drill as soldiers,” while the officers, “except for the division commanders and possibly two or three of the brigade commanders, were equally inexperienced in war.”32

By nightfall, Albert Sidney Johnston himself was dead, killed by a stray bullet that severed an artery and left him to bleed to death, and the two bleary, punch-drunk mobs of soldiers that had been armies that morning now faced each other by the river landing without much idea of what was coming next. More than one high-ranking Union officer thought it was the end and counseled a retreat across the Tennessee. Grant, who raced upriver to Pittsburg Landing by steamboat at the first faint thump of artillery, saw at once that it was the Confederates who had failed, not the Federals. So long as they held the landing, the Federals still had the key to the Shiloh battlefield, and no one was quicker to realize that than Grant. “He had,” said John Russell Young, “the woodcraft of an Indian, knew places, localities, the lay of the ground, what the skies had to say as to the weather and other mysteries,” and it was plain to Grant that the Confederates had spent their last strength just getting as far as they had. One of Grant’s officers, an Ohioan named William Tecumseh Sherman, found Grant that night in the pouring rain, standing under a tree with a cigar clenched between his teeth. Sherman had lost most of his division that morning, and he had come to advise Grant that a pullout was the only hope. Still, Sherman, who had been at West Point with Grant and knew him well enough to nod to before the war, sensed something in Grant’s brooding imperturbability that prompted Sherman to change his tune. “Well, Grant,” Sherman said, “we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we.” “Yes,” Grant replied, “yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”33

By the next morning, Grant had reorganized his forces (as best he could), called in reinforcements (the advance elements of Buell’s column had begun arriving at Savannah the day before), and proceeded to shove back at the battered Confederates. By 3:00 PM on April 7, Beauregard, who had taken over command from the fallen Johnston, had pulled the remains of the Confederate army back onto the road to Corinth. Five days later Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing to take command of Grant’s and Buell’s newly combined armies and to find out exactly what had happened.

The most obvious fact was the casualty list: Grant’s army had lost almost 13,000 men killed, wounded, or missing, more than a third of his