Shiloh, 1862 (24 page)

Next to Stanley was a boy of 17 named Henry Parker. “I remember it,” Stanley wrote in his memoirs, “because, while we stood-at-ease, he drew my attention to some violets at his feet, and said, it would be a good idea to put a few into my cap,” because “perhaps the Yanks won’t shoot me if they see me wearing such a sign of peace.” They plucked the violets and arranged them in their caps, “while the men in the ranks laughed at our proceedings.”

Evidently these were moments of great clarity for the Rebel soldiers, who, unlike their counterparts across the way—mostly innocent and ignorant at their breakfasts—knew full well they were marching into a terrible battle against what they understood was a Yankee army of 50,000 men. “Newton Story, big, broad, and straight,” Stanley remembered, “bore our company banner of
gay silk, at which the ladies of our neighbourhood had laboured.

“As we tramped solemnly and silently through the thin forest, and over its grass, still in its withered and wintry hue, I noticed that the sun was not far from appearing, that our regiment was keeping its formation, that the woods would have been a grand place for a picnic, and I thought it strange that a Sunday should have been chosen to disturb the holy calm of those woods.”

Preston Johnston dramatized it this way: “The two armies lay face to face: The Federal host, like a wild boar in his lair, stirred, but not aroused by the unseen danger; its foe, like a panther hidden in the jungle, tense in wait to spring … Long before dawn the forest was alive with silent preparations for the contest, and day broke upon a scene so fair that it left its memory on thousands of hearts. The sky was clear overhead, the air fresh, and when the sun rose in full splendor, the advancing host passed the word from lip to lip that it was the ‘Sun of Austerlitz.’ ”
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The initial strike of the Rebel army was less a clash than a collision between Hardee’s corps and the Federals of Prentiss’s division, whose camps were pushed out slightly farther south than Sherman’s, so as to bear the brunt of the initial assault. A Mississippi cavalryman in Ben Cheatham’s Tennessee division sat on his horse watching the attack begin. “We could see the lines of our army for long distances,
right and left,” he said, “as they advanced with marvelous precision, with regimental colors flying, and all the bands playing ‘Dixie.’ ” When the Confederates got within earshot of the Federal camps they began the spine-chilling Rebel yell that so many have told of yet found so hard to define. It has been described variously as high-pitched, frantic, even manic, somehow distantly reminiscent of the native Indians or perhaps a colossal pack of beagles. Whatever it was exactly, it could be terrifying. Now it came from thousands of throats, drawing nearer, drowning out the music of the bands, drowning out everything, even the gunfire, with profound malice. Thus was Hardee’s attack, more than 9,000 strong, launched on Sunday morning, April 6, 1862.

Hardee’s regiments consisted mostly of soldiers from Arkansas and Tennessee, with men from Alabama and Mississippi mixed in. They were typically backwoodsman, or small farmers, who found themselves in the ranks of the Confederate army because their country—or what they considered their country—had been invaded. They had been taught from earliest youth that northerners were their enemies. Now their enemies had come, as General Johnston had warned them, to subjugate—to despoil their liberty, their honor, their homes, and their women—and they intended to dispose of them just as they would the Goths.

The late Civil War historian Shelby Foote liked to tell of the time a Union colonel was interrogating a captured Rebel private after one of the early battles in Virginia, and at one point the officer demanded to know why he was fighting against the Federal soldiers. “Because you are here,” the indignant Confederate replied. These men—most of them—were willing to lay down their lives for a political idea that had set in motion these great armies with banners.

The Federal soldiers in the foremost camps of Prentiss’s division—men from the upper Midwest and from Missouri—had far less time to contemplate their motives and could only look in awe and wonder at the approaching storm.

In just a few minutes Hardee’s line emerged from the wood and crossed into open fields named for the families that farmed them—Seay Field, Fraley Field, Rea Field, Spain Field. The Mississippi cavalryman who had been watching from a high piece of ground as the line emerged to the tune of “Dixie” observed that “the engagement soon became general and the enemy were evidently yielding to the hammer strokes.” From his vantage point he took in “the roar and rattle of musketry, the belching of cannon, the screaming of shells, the whistling bullets, all united to beget emotions which words cannot describe. The deafening sounds, the stunning explosions, and the fiery flames of battle seemed to pass along the line in great billows from right to left.”

Down in the din the racket and the violence was, of course, far more shocking and horrifying. In the nearest Union camp Colonel Peabody, who when we last left him was riding toward the sound of the guns after being chastised by General Prentiss for starting the battle in the first place, had led about 1,200 of his 12th Michigan and 25th Missouri regiments to the northern lip of a wooded and brambled ravine that he expected the Confederate troops would have to cross to get to the Federal camps. No sooner had he formed them in a quarter-mile-long fighting line than Major Powell arrived from his harrowing reconnaissance excursion. When Powell informed Peabody that the Rebels were breathing down his neck and crossing Seay Field just beyond the woods, the 31-year-old engineer told him to have his men fall in and prepare for a fight.

About 7:30 a.m., without forewarning, a large body of Confederates appeared atop the opposite crest and began a double-quick descent into the ravine. This was the brigade of Col. Robert G. “Fighting Bob” Shaver, an Arkansas lawyer who believed in hitting the enemy hard and quick. The Dixie Grays, including Henry Morton Stanley, were among the troops who had gone into the ravine armed with out-of-date smoothbore muskets that were loaded with “buck and ball”—three buckshot and one large .50-caliber lead ball, a deadly enough combination for the kind of close-up work they would be doing today.

Stanley described the terrifying exhilaration as they surged into the ravine: “We trampled recklessly over the grass and young sprouts. Beams of sunlight stole athwart our course. The sun was up above the horizon … A dreadful roar of musketry broke out from a regiment adjoining ours. It was followed by another further off, and the sound had scarcely died away when regiment after regiment blazed away and made a continuous roll of sound.”

People found various ways to describe the racket of massed rifle fire. Some likened it to the crackle of wildfire sweeping through a thicket of dry cane; others said it sounded like heavy hail falling on a tin roof. Up close it simply drowned out everything else. As they reached the bottom of the ravine Stanley’s friend Henry Parker remarked, “We are in for it now.” But so far they had “seen nothing.” Beyond a thicket the regiment overtook its skirmishers when suddenly there was a cry, “There they are!” and a shout from the captain, “Aim low men!”

Stanley saw nothing to shoot at but was still advancing. “I at last saw a row of little globes of pearly smoke streaked with crimson, breaking out, with spurtive quickness, from a long line of bluey
figures in front; and, simultaneously, there broke upon our ears an appalling crash of sound, the series of fusillades following one another with startling suddenness, which suggested a mountain upheaved, with huge rocks tumbling and thundering down a slope. Again and again these loud, quick explosions were repeated with increased violence until they rose to the highest pitch of fury. All the world seemed involved in one tremendous ruin!”

Peabody’s audacious stand blunted Shaver’s attack, but soon Shaver was joined on the right by the brigade of the 51–year-old general Adley H. Gladden, a South Carolinian turned New Orleans merchant who had fought with valor in the fabled Palmetto Regiment in the Mexican War and reached the top of New Orleans society by becoming president of that city’s exclusive Boston Club. When at the last moment it became apparent that Hardee’s corps was not large enough to cover the entire front, General Johnston had personally ordered Gladden—who belonged to Bragg—to extend Hardee’s line toward the Tennessee River.

Consisting of four Alabama regiments plus Gladden’s old First Louisiana, this brigade had come up from Bragg’s second line, which had been following 500 yards behind Hardee’s corps before Shaver’s men were halted by Peabody’s fire. And on Shaver’s left the large seven-regiment brigade of 38-year-old Alabama lawyer and editor Sterling A. M. Wood added its weight to the fray.

Down in the ravine in the midst of all the banging and whizzing and roaring Stanley lay flat, shaken and terrified, but continued to load and fire “as if it depended on each of us how soon this fiendish uproar would be hushed.” The man behind Stanley was lying so close that the muzzle of his gun stuck out in front of Stanley’s face, “mak[ing] my eyes smart with powder. I felt like cuffing him.”
He looked forward and “saw the banner raised over Newton Story’s head, and all hands were behaving as though they knew how long all this would last.”—which remains the eternal question on the mind of every infantryman in battle since time immemorial.

On Shaver’s left a disaster was in the making. From some particularly thick woods two regiments—one Mississippi, the other Tennessee—had just emerged onto more open ground when hundreds of Peabody’s ranks suddenly rose up from cover and let off a horrific blast of fire almost in their faces. These were new men, raw recruits, who immediately panicked and ran away screaming “Retreat!” As they passed through another Rebel regiment coming up from behind, their wild behavior became infectious and nearly started a general stampede before it was checked by quick action from the higher ranking officers and their staffs bringing up the rear. Brigade commander Wood, division commander Hindman, and General Johnston himself—accompanied by the now exiled Tennessee governor Isham Harris, who had attached himself to the commanding officer as an aide during the battle—galloped forward to halt the fugitives, re-formed them into ranks, and ushered them back into the advance with encouraging words and ferocious threats.

In the Union lines on the left of Peabody’s brigade stood 2,000 men of Prentiss’s other brigade, composed of regiments from Wisconsin, Missouri, and Illinois and commanded by 51-year-old Madison Miller, another former Mexican War hero who had been wounded at Buena Vista, was president of a Missouri railroad and a Missouri state legislator, and was formerly the mayor of Carondelet, Missouri. For some reason unknown to military science, Prentiss
had posted Miller’s people at the edge of woods astride the eastern Corinth Road at the
southern
end of Spain Field, instead of behind good natural cover at the northern end, where they would have had all day to shoot at any Confederates crossing into the open to get at their camps. Posted a good 500 yards to Miller’s rear were the two six-gun artillery batteries of Emil Munch and Andrew Hickenlooper. Only the day before, Munch’s Minnesotans had been transferred from Sherman’s division to Prentiss’s, and Hickenlooper’s Ohioans had literally just gotten off the boat at Pittsburg Landing.

Off to their right Miller’s infantrymen and the artillerists could see and hear the smoke and din of Peabody’s fight, but where they now stood nothing stirred, not the faintest breeze, and no birds sang. But each man knew or at least must have suspected what was coming and wondered what it would be like when it did.

An 18-year-old corporal named Leander Stillwell of the 61st Illinois was among those waiting. Until recently he had been a farm boy raised in a log cabin in the fertile southern tip of Illinois known as “Egypt” for the way the Mississippi flooded over each spring like the Nile. Nearly all of that section of the state had been settled by southerners or their descendants and leaned toward the Confederacy—even sent soldiers to the Rebel army, as we soon shall see.

Young Leander’s father was a strong Union man, but Leander did not respond to Lincoln’s first call for troops, nor to the second; then, after the North’s humiliation at the Battle of Bull Run, like so many others he joined up, unwilling to see the Union split asunder or, more directly, “to be pointed at as a stay-at-home coward.”

Stillwell and his comrades had been enjoying the relaxation of a Sunday morning when their peace was disturbed by the deep
pum
of artillery somewhere off to the right. “Every man sprung to his
feet as if struck with an electric shock,” he said later, “and looked inquiringly into one another’s faces.” Soon enough there came “a low, sullen, continuous roar. There was no mistaking that sound,” he said. The drums beat the long roll, and in due time the 61st Illinois was posted in woods at the southern edge of Spain Field, from where they could see “the blue rings of smoke curling upward among the trees off to the right” (where Peabody was having his fight at Seay’s Field), “and the pungent smell of gunpowder filled the air.”