Shiloh, 1862 (22 page)

On November 3 Beauregard published a letter in the Richmond
Whig
, which began, “Centerville, Va. Within the hearing of the Enemy’s Guns.”

The dateline itself was enough to start people snickering. The gist of the letter was that he had no intention of running for president against Davis, but it rambled on against the Davis administration in a pretentious, egotistical manner. Clearly, things could not long continue this way.

When the army went into winter quarters, Beauregard’s eclectic mind and unbridled enthusiasm tackled another kind of military quandary—namely, the problem of distinguishing Rebel troops from Yankees in the smoke and fury of battle. At Manassas there had been instances on both sides of troops firing on themselves, and Beauregard concluded that the armies’ flags looked too much alike. Thus he designed a new “battle flag” for the Confederacy: two crossed blue bars with white stars on a bloodred field.
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The last straw broke in Beauregard’s war of words when he submitted his report on the Battle of Manassas to the Confederate Congress. Again it excoriated the Davis administration, and Davis was understandably irate. By then Beauregard had fallen in with a handful of powerful men who disliked Davis and were seeking ways either to thwart him or get him out of office. Among them were Vice President Alexander Stephens; generals Joseph E. Johnston, James Longstreet, Gustavus W. Smith; and several prominent editors in Richmond and Charleston. Another of these was Robert Toombs of Georgia, an upstanding lawyer and Davis’s secretary of state during the first few months of the war. Toombs was one of the fire-eaters, and like Beauregard had believed from the beginning that the South should have waged an aggressive war against the Union and brought it quickly to its knees, rather than sit pompously behind a defensive line giving the North time to organize its vast resources against the Confederacy.

One day in February 1862 a Colonel Pryor arrived at Beauregard’s headquarters with an important question for the Creole. It was not an auspicious time, since Beauregard had recently undergone a serious operation on his throat in Richmond and was still in some pain. History does not tell us what the throat surgery was, but even as a boy there are indications that he had trouble with his throat, and it had become so bad that the doctors had risked this operation, leaving him “swathed in bandages.”
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Colonel Pryor, a member of the Military Committee of the Confederate Congress,
was close to Davis. He had come to get Beauregard’s consent to “a plan under consideration in Richmond.”

The plan was Beauregard’s transfer to the Department of the West. Pryor explained that all the higher authorities, Davis included, were deeply concerned with the situation in Sidney Johnston’s command—the defeat of Zollicoffer in Kentucky and the loss of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee had shaken everyone. Johnston needed help to reverse the tide of defeat and reinvigorate the army. The consensus was that Beauregard was the man to help him do it.

Beauregard asked for time. Toombs had gotten word of the plan and advised him against it. “Once you are ordered away,” he told the Creole, “you will not be ordered back.” Beauregard considered the matter further and accepted his transfer. He might disagree with Jefferson Davis, he might even dislike him, but he refused to believe that Davis was the kind of man who would intentionally hurt the Confederate cause by sending him—or any officer—away from the place he could do the most good. Beauregard prepared immediately to depart.

After ordering the evacuation of Columbus, Kentucky, Beauregard established his headquarters first at Jackson, Tennessee, and then at Corinth, Mississippi, from where he began organizing an army to fight the great battle for the fate of the West. Johnston and his army were on their way via the Memphis and Charleston road. Beauregard immediately wrote the governors of a number of nearby Deep South states, appealing to them for new troops. Davis and the authorities in Richmond recognized that the manpower
shortage was critical and ordered 10,000 men under Braxton Bragg in Pensacola to board cars for Corinth. Likewise 5,000 under Daniel Ruggles in New Orleans were pressed to Beauregard’s command. By the time Johnston reached Corinth on March 22, the Confederate force under Beauregard totaled more than 25,000, and more were arriving every day. Combined with Johnston’s 20,000, they would make a formidable force, but a hitch quickly developed. Corinth, it seemed, was groaning unhealthily under the strain of so many men. Although it was an important rail junction, it had no large sources of fresh water as had Bowling Green or, for that matter, Pittsburg Landing, and sanitary conditions rapidly deteriorated. The sick list expanded until doctors began to fear epidemics of fever, cholera, or worse.

There was, however, a brighter element in the mix. On March 8 Gen. Earl Van Dorn had lost the Battle of Pea Ridge in far northwest Arkansas but was retreating south with at least 10,000 men. Although this force might be dejected after its loss, Van Dorn had telegraphed that he was headed with all possible speed to join the Rebel army at Corinth. It was mainly a matter of getting the troops across the Mississippi where they could be transported to Corinth on the M&C cars. Johnston and Beauregard were delighted. Van Dorn’s arrival would alter the equation in their favor.

Beauregard, meanwhile, continued to erupt with innovative notions, one of which earned him a measure of ridicule from some of his fellow officers. This was the famous bells-into-cannon appeal that he made to the planters of the Mississippi River Valley. Somewhere in his military history reading Beauregard had been informed that in times of war Europeans often melted down large bronze
bells to make cannons, and in times of peace the reverse was true.
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Beauregard suggested melting down church bells and courthouse bells, and in fact an artillery battery was formed after that fashion in 1861 called the Edenton Bells, out of Edenton, North Carolina. He composed an exhortation to the planters of the Mississippi valley that appeared prominently in newspapers from Memphis to New Orleans. It was pure Beauregard: “We want cannon as greatly as any people … I, your general, entrusted with the command of your army embodied of your sons, your kinsman and your neighbors, do now call upon you to send your plantation bells to the nearest railroad depot, to be melted into cannon for the defense of your plantations … Who will not cheerfully send me his bells under such circumstances?”

Surprised and delighted at this startling request, the poets went to work.

Braxton Bragg was disdainful, saying they already had more metal in New Orleans than they could use, which was not really so, since the Confederates were reduced to using cotton bales instead of iron plate to protect their gunboats (“cottonclads”). Stories circulated that some 500 bells were found in the former U.S. customs house when New Orleans fell to Union forces, and that they were sent to Boston by the Yankee commander Gen. Benjamin “Beast” Butler to be auctioned off. Documents uncovered later, however, suggest that far fewer bells were collected.

When Sidney Johnston arrived in Corinth and was briefed on the military situation, he immediately agreed with Beauregard that they must strike Grant at Pittsburg Landing before Buell came up with his army of 25,000. Reports from scouts and spies had Buell about two weeks’ march from Grant. Then Johnston did a strange thing. Noting the dark cloud of opprobrium that surrounded him after the loss of Kentucky and Tennessee, he offered Beauregard command of the army.

Beauregard naturally was surprised at this turn of events, and he declined the offer. He later said in his memoir of the battle that Johnston made the gesture “to restore the confidence of the people and the army, so greatly impaired by reason of the recent disasters.”

In a letter to Johnston’s son Preston after the war Beauregard recounted his conversation with Johnston on the subject of command.

“I came to help you,” Beauregard said, “not to supersede you. You owe it to your country, and to your own reputation, to remain at the head of this army. We are now concentrated and can strike a decisive blow. The enemy is not prepared for it. This is not the
time to resign. One great victory and everything will be changed for you.”

Beauregard then said that Johnson agreed. “Well, be it so, Together we will do our best to insure success.”

Preston Johnston in his biography disputes this version and says Beauregard “misinterpreted the spirit and intention” of his father’s offer. Preston Johnston says his father offered Beauregard the army because he was already presiding over most of it at Corinth and knew more of the ground firsthand and of the enemy lying at Pittsburg Landing. “The truth was that, coming into this district which he had assigned to Beauregard, Johnston felt disinclined to deprive him of any reputation he might acquire from a victory,” the younger Johnston wrote.

Whatever the reasons, the matter was settled. Beauregard would act as second in command and also be responsible for drawing up the attack order against Grant. To this latter task Beauregard detailed his chief of staff, Colonel Jordan, who had organized and operated the Rose Greenhow spy ring in Washington, D.C., and had been Cump Sherman’s West Point roommate. Like Beauregard, Jordan was a student of Napoleon Bonaparte, and thus the battle plan he drew was essentially Napoleonic in its character and design. It was said that he kept on his desk a copy of Napoleon’s marching orders at the Battle of Waterloo—not, perhaps, a good sign.

First, the army was to be reorganized into four division-size corps. The I Corps was composed of 9,136 men under the bishop general Leonidas Polk; the II Corps, 13,589 under Braxton Bragg, who would also serve as Johnston’s chief of staff during the planning; III Corps, 6,789 under the tactician William Hardee; IV Corps, 6,439 under John Breckinridge of Kentucky, formerly
the Vice President of the United States. All were West Pointers except Breckinridge, a Princeton man who was also a lawyer.
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The plan itself was straightforward. The corps would make their way north toward Pittsburg Landing by various country roads and, once there, assemble in successive lines of battle across the front of the mouth of the cornucopia, inside which Grant’s army was blissfully encamped. Hardee’s III Corps would strike first along the three-mile front, followed closely by Bragg’s large II Corps and, behind that, Polk’s 9,000-man I Corps. Breckinridge’s IV Corps would be held in reserve to take advantage of enemy weaknesses or to shore up, if necessary—these latter movements to be directed by Beauregard.

The main thrust of the attack was to fall on the Union left, the object being to drive a wedge between Grant’s army and the river, rolling up the Yankee army northwestward until it was floundering in irretrievable disorder in the miry wastes of Owl Creek, cut off from the landing and any hope of escape. That, anyway, was the plan on paper.