Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (84 page)

The small Union army standing in Van Dorn's way just south of Pea Ridge on the Arkansas-Missouri border was commanded by Samuel R. Curtis, a colorless but competent West Pointer who had fought in Mexico and subsequently served three terms as an Iowa congressman. Rather than attack Curtis's entrenched troops frontally, Van Dorn led his army on a long flanking march to cut Union supply lines and attack them from the rear. Alert northern scouts, including "Wild Bill" Hickok, detected the move. When Van Dorn attacked what he expected to be the

11
. Strode,
Davis
, 202;
Richmond Enquirer
, Feb. 18, 1862;
Richmond Examiner
, Feb. 19, 1862.

12
. Robert G. Hartje,
Van Dorn: The Life and Times of a Confederate General
(Nash ville, 1967), 105.

enemy rear on the bleak, overcast morning of March 7, he found that Curtis had faced his troops about and was ready for him. On the Union left, artillery fire scattered the Indian regiments while Yankee riflemen killed McCulloch and his second in command and captured the third-ranking southern officer on that part of the field, taking all the steam out of the rebel attack. Meanwhile, Union infantry on the right three miles to the east, outnumbered by more than two to one, had grudgingly given ground in fierce fighting around Elkhorn Tavern at a critical road junction.

Next morning Van Dorn discovered that when you get in the enemy's rear, he is also in yours. Confederate troops had run short of ammunition but the Union army now stood between them and their ammunition wagons. Both armies concentrated near Elkhorn Tavern, where a Federal artillery barrage knocked out southern batteries that did not have enough shells for effective counterfire. Seven thousand Union infantrymen swept forward in a picture-book charge led by Franz Sigel's division of German-American regiments from Missouri and Illinois. The rebels turned tail and ran. It was as inglorious a rout in reverse as Bull Run. Although each side suffered about 1,300 casualties, the battle of Pea Ridge was the most one-sided victory won by an outnumbered Union army during the war. Van Dorn's forces scattered in every direction. It took nearly two weeks to reassemble them. Johnston then ordered Van Dorn to bring his 15,000 men across the Mississippi to Corinth, a rail junction in northern Mississippi. But they did not arrive in time to take part in the ensuing battle near a small log church named Shiloh.

II

Criticism of Sidney Johnston rose to a crescendo after the losses in Tennessee, almost as if in mockery of the earlier praise for him. Newspapers charged him with incompetence, drunkenness, even treason. Tennessee congressmen petitioned Davis for his removal from command. But Davis was not stampeded by this "senseless clamor." "If Sidney Johnston is not a general," said the president, "we had better give up the war, for we have no general."
¹³
Johnston refused to reply to his critics. "The

13
. James Lee McDonough,
Shiloh
—
In Hell before Night
(Knoxville, 1977), 60; Charles P. Roland,
Albert Sidney Johnston: Soldier of Three Republics
(Austin, Texas, 1964), 299. Davis's charity did not extend to Floyd and Pillow, who had abandoned their post at Fort Donelson. Both were suspended from duty and never again given a field command. Floyd died in 1863.

test of merit, in my profession . . . is success," he wrote privately. "It is a hard rule, but I think it right. . . . What the people want is a battle and a victory."
¹⁴

Depressed in spirit, Johnston seemed to have little hope of achieving that victory. Beauregard stepped into the breach and helped Johnston concentrate 42,000 men at Corinth, Mississippi—27,000 from the reunited wings of Johnston's army plus 15,000 brought up from New Orleans and Mobile. Commander of the latter was Braxton Bragg, a quicktempered martinet whose arrival injected some discipline into an army dispirited by defeat. Bragg's departure from the Gulf Coast left that region denuded of infantry and vulnerable to an amphibious attack, but southern strategists considered it essential to defend Corinth, the junction of the Confederacy's main north-south and east-west railroads in the Mississippi Valley. Beauregard wanted to do more than that; he hoped to march north and sweep the Yankees out of Tennessee. "We must do something," said Beauregard, "or die in the attempt, otherwise, all will be shortly lost."
¹⁵
Johnston caught Beauregard's vision and energy. Together they planned an offensive to regain Tennessee.

Having taken credit (as department commander) for Grant's and Foote's victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, Halleck had been promoted to the command of all Union troops west of the Appalachians. He sent Grant forward to Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, twenty miles north of Corinth, and ordered Buell to join him there with 35,000 additional troops. When the two armies were united, Halleck intended to take field command of their 75,000 men and lead them against Corinth. But the rebels meant to hit Grant before Buell arrived. Beauregard drew up plans for a march by four different corps on converging roads to deploy for battle on April 4. The plans were better suited for veterans than for green troops and inexperienced staff officers. Few of these southern soldiers had made a one-day march of twenty miles, and fewer still had been in combat. In these respects Johnston's troops resembled the Federals that McDowell had led to Bull Run nine months earlier. Their experiences during the next few days also replicated those of McDowell's men. The march turned into a nightmare of confusion and delays as the divisions of one corps blocked the road where divisions of

14
. Foote,
Civil War
, I, 234; Johnston to Davis, March 18, 1862, printed in Wallace, "The Capture of Fort Donelson,"
Battles and Leaders
, I, 399n.

15
. T. Harry Williams,
P.T.G. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray
(Baton Rouge, 1955), 121.

another were supposed to pass, units took wrong turns and got lost, and drenching showers bogged down wagons and artillery. April 4 came and went with almost no Confederates arriving at the designated point; April 5 came and was almost gone before the army had deployed in position.

By this time Beauregard was in despair and wanted to call off the attack. The two-day delay, he said, would mean that Buell had reinforced Grant. Beauregard was also certain that the noise made by rebel soldiers firing off their guns to see if rain-dampened powder still worked had eliminated all chance of surprise.
¹⁶
But at a council of war on the afternoon of April 5, Johnston overruled his objections. Having finally gotten the army into position to fight, Johnston was not about to back down. Confederate colonels had already read out to their regiments Johnston's address pledging to lead them to "a decisive victory over agrarian mercenaries, sent to subjugate and despoil you of your liberties, property, and honor. . . . Remember the dependence of your mothers, your wives, your sisters, and your children on the result. . . . With such incentives to brave deeds . . . your generals will lead you confidently to the combat." No matter if Buell had reinforced Grant, said Johnston, "I would fight them if they were a million." He ordered his corps commanders to finish their preparations: "Gentlemen, we shall attack at daylight tomorrow."
¹⁷

The facts on which Beauregard based his counsel of caution should have been true—but they were not. Buell's lead division had indeed arrived at Savannah, Grant's headquarters nine miles downriver from Pittsburg Landing. But neither Grant nor Buell felt a sense of urgency, so they did not send this division forward or hurry the arrival of the others. Five of Grant's six divisions were camped on the tableland west of Pittsburg Landing. The sixth, under General Lew Wallace (future author of
Ben-Hur
), was stationed five miles to the north guarding the army's supply depots at another river landing. Grant had evidently forgotten the lesson of Fort Donelson, for once again he focused his mind so intently on plans for attacking the rebels that he could spare no thoughts for what the rebels might be planning to do to him. Grant's whole army was equally offensive-minded. They shared their commander's conviction that defeat had so demoralized Johnston's army that "Corinth will fall much more easily than Donelson did when we do move. All accounts

16
. Since northern soldiers were doing the same, however, the noise of such shots would not necessarily have aroused suspicions among Union officers.

17
.
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 10, pt. 1, pp. 396–97; McDonough,
Shiloh
, 81.

agree in saying that the great mass of the rank and file are heartily tired."
¹⁸

Grant did not entrench his men at Pittsburg Landing because he did not expect to fight there and did not want to rob them of their aggressive spirit. Regiments laid out their camps with no idea of forming a defensive line. Their picket posts and patrols were inadequate to detect enemy movements more than a few hundred yards away. The two divisions nearest Corinth, which would receive the first thrust of any attack, were composed of new troops untried by combat. Commanding one of these divisions was William Tecumseh Sherman, recently restored to command. Like Grant, Sherman was overconfident. Five months earlier the press had labeled him insane because he had exaggerated the rebel threat in Kentucky. Now, perhaps to prove that he had recovered from his attack of nerves, Sherman underestimated the enemy threat. Some of his front-line colonels thought that the increased noise and activity off to the south on April 4 and 5 indicated the buildup of something big. But Sherman dismissed this activity as nothing more "than some picket firing. . . . I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position." To one colonel who chattered nervously about thousands of rebels out there in the woods, Sherman reportedly said: "Take your damned regiment back to Ohio. Beauregard is not such a fool as to leave his base of operations and attack us in ours."
¹⁹
For his part, Grant interpreted the signs of rebel movements as a possible threat to Wallace's isolated division downriver, and warned Wallace to be alert. Grant wrote to Halleck on April 5 that he had "scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us, but will be prepared should such a thing take place."
²⁰

But he was not prepared for the thousands of screaming rebels who burst out of the woods near Shiloh church next morning. They hit first the two green divisions of Sherman and of Benjamin M. Prentiss, an Illinois political general with Mexican War experience. Against all odds, Johnston had achieved a surprise—but not a total one, despite later sensationalist stories in northern newspapers that Union camps were overrun while soldiers were still asleep. Long before dawn one of Prentiss's brigade commanders had sent out a patrol that discovered advance

18
. Grant to Halleck, March 21, 1862,
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 10, pt. 2, p. 55.

19
.
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 10, pt. 2, p. 94; John K. Duke,
History of the
53rd
Ohio Volunteer Infantry
(Portsmouth, Ohio, 1900), 41.

20
.
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 10, pt. 1, p. 89.

units of the Confederate battle line. The patrol fell back slowly, skirmishing noisily to warn Prentiss's division, which scrambled into formation. Sherman's men also jumped up from breakfast and grabbed their muskets. As their commander rode forward to see what was happening, a volley rang out and Sherman's orderly fell dead at his side. "My God, we're attacked!" cried the general, finally convinced. After the initial shock, Sherman performed this day with coolness and courage. The next twelve hours proved to be the turning point of his life. What he learned that day at Shiloh—about war and about himself—helped to make him one of the North's premier generals. Sherman was everywhere along his lines at Shiloh, shoring up his raw troops and inspiring them to hurl back the initial assaults—with staggering losses on both sides. Sherman himself was wounded slightly (twice) and had three horses shot under him. On his left Prentiss's men also stood fast at first, while up from the rear came reinforcements from the other three divisions, two of which had fought at Donelson.

Waiting for Buell's arrival at army headquarters nine miles downriver, Grant heard the firing as he sat down to breakfast. Commandeering a dispatch boat, he steamed up to Pittsburg Landing and arrived on the battlefield about 9:00 a.m. The fighting by this time had reached a level unprecedented in the war. Johnston and Beauregard committed all six of their divisions early in the day; all of Grant's soldiers in the vicinity also double-timed to the front, which stretched six miles between the Tennessee River on the Union left and Owl Creek on the right. Grant sent a courier to summon Lew Wallace's division to the battlefield. But Wallace took the wrong road and had to countermarch, arriving too late to participate in the battle on April 6. For better or worse, Grant's five divisions on the field had to do all the fighting that first day at Shiloh.