Shiloh, 1862 (25 page)

As they stood waiting for the enemy to appear, Stillwell’s thoughts drifted back to his old log cabin and his father and mother, “who would be getting my little brothers ready for Sunday school; the old dog lying asleep; the hens cackling about the barn.” He did not have long to dwell on these things, however, for within minutes “Suddenly to the right there was a long, wavy flash of bright light, then another, and another! It was the sunlight shining on bayonets—and—they were here at last! A long brown line with muskets at a right shoulder shift, in excellent order, right through the woods they came.” As many in the Federal ranks remarked that morning, when the Rebel lines came crashing through the woods they were preceded by a diaspora of frightened wildlife: bounding rabbits, leaping deer, whirring coveys of quail, even flights of wild turkeys sailing high overhead; it wasn’t as though the Confederates were actually sneaking up on anyone.

The order to open fire was given at once and “from one end of the regiment to the next leaped a red sheet of flame.” At this the Confederates stopped and fired a volley of their own, and the air was suddenly filled with zinging hot lead and a layer of dense white smoke. Stillwell was trying to peer beneath the smoke in hopes of
sighting an enemy soldier when he heard someone “in a highly excited tone calling to me from the rear, ‘Shoot! Shoot! Why don’t you shoot!’ ” He looked around to find one of the second lieutenants “fairly wild with excitement, jumping up and down like a hen on a hot griddle.” “Why lieutenant,” Stillwell replied, “I can’t see anything to shoot at,” to which the lieutenant replied, “Shoot! Shoot anyhow!” and shoot he did, thinking, however, “that it was ridiculous to shoot into a cloud of smoke.”

Behind this smoke was the brigade of the Rebel general Gladden, whom General Johnston had directed to the right to close on Lick Creek, the eastern boundary of the cornucopia’s opening, which was supposed to be the far right of the Confederate army. But first it became necessary for Gladden to deal with these Federal troops who were in the way, which happened to be Miller’s brigade of Prentiss’s division, including Leander Stillwell shooting at smoke. Apparently, Gladden’s “blood was up,” along with everybody else’s that morning. After he was informed that Bragg and Johnston wanted Gen. James Chalmers’s brigade to swing out behind him even farther toward Lick Creek, Gladden was overheard saying to the messenger orderly, “Tell General Bragg that I have as keen a scent for Yankees as General Chalmers has.”

This roar of gunfire had no sooner informed Prentiss that his second brigade was now engaged in battle than orders came, “for some reason—I never knew what,” Stillwell said, to fall back across the field to their original positions on the northern side in front of their tent camps. There ensued some of the fiercest fighting of the battle.

Stillwell remembered jumping down behind a tree and thinking he had disturbed a hive or swarm of bees “because of the incessant humming above our heads,” until it dawned on him those were
bullets “singing through the air.” This was also where he saw his first man killed that day. The man was hiding behind a tree to load his weapon, then whipped out around the tree, fired, ducked, and reloaded. But the next time Stillwell turned his head the man was “lying there on his back, at the foot of his tree, with his leg doubled under him, motionless—and stone dead. I stared at his body, perfectly horrified,” Stillwell said; he had been hit “square in the head. Only a few seconds ago that man was alive and well.” It came near to “completely upsetting me,” Stillwell said, adding ominously, “I got used to such incidents during the course of the day.” Such was his baptism of fire.

Over in Peabody’s part of the line the fighting had become so severe that from his point of view the issue was in doubt. Confederate Henry Stanley and his regiment had continued to load and fire at Peabody’s men from cover while the officers organized a charge, the only way to break the stalemate. It was near 9 a.m. when the order came, Stanley said, to “Fix Bayonets! On the double-quick! Forward! We continued advancing, loading and firing as we went. The Federals appeared inclined to await us,” he said, “but at this juncture we raised a yell.”

Stanley and thousands of his comrades rushed at Peabody’s line, yelling wildly, stopping occasionally to fire, but pressing forward through the smoke and din. The yelling was good for them, Stanley said, somehow heartening, encouraging, and relieving of the tensions of the battlefield.

As the Rebels attacked and the shooting became heavier and more men began to fall, some of Peabody’s troops began to melt
away to the rear. It was difficult to detect them at first because of the woods and underbrush, but the attrition soon became substantial, and roads to the rear were soon clogged with fugitives and stragglers as well as steadily increasing numbers of wounded. Then Peabody himself was killed and the brigade fell apart.

Peabody had sent his aide to ask the colonel of his left regiment if he could hold; meantime Peabody went to find Prentiss to ask for artillery support and troops. Failing to locate the general, he galloped back to his position, where he found that the situation had deteriorated. Men had continued to desert, and those who hadn’t were falling back into their own camp, firing but retreating in the face of heavy Confederate pressure. When Peabody’s aide returned with an affirmative answer as to whether the left regiment could hold, he found his commanding officer sprawled over a log, shot through the head. He had been trying to rally his disheartened troops when suddenly he threw up his hands and reeled backward off his horse, dead.

About a year earlier, not long after he had joined the army, Peabody had had a premonition that he would be killed, and he wrote to a friend about having “a sort of presentiment that I shall go under,” adding that, “If I do, it shall be in a manner that the old family will be proud of it—Good-by old fellow.” Even as he was mustering the brigade to the long roll earlier that very morning he told a fellow officer that he would not live to see the result of it. It was too true. The gallant Peabody had already been shot four times that morning—wounded in the hand, thigh, neck, and body—before meeting the bullet to the brain that killed him. Joseph Ruff, the German private who had accompanied Major Powell on his reconnaissance patrol the night before, came across Peabody’s
corpse just to the west of the regimental camps: “He had evidently been shot from his horse for he lay with his legs over a log and his head and shoulders on the ground,” Ruff remembered. At age 32 Peabody was already an exceptional man; there is no telling how far he might have gone.

General Shaver’s charge against the remnants of Peabody’s regiment came roaring and yelling up from the ravine scattering everything in its way. “ ‘They Fly!’ was echoed from lip to lip,” exulted Henry Morton Stanley, who was screaming his lungs out with the rest. “Then I knew what the Berserker passion was … at such a moment, nothing could have stopped us.”
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Of the bluecoats he said, “When we arrived upon the place where they had stood, they had vanished. Then we caught sight of their beautiful array of tents!”

As for Private Ruff, after he returned from the hazardous patrol he did not seem to grasp the severity of the situation. It was his turn that week to serve as cook for his squad, so when he got back to Peabody’s camp that morning he grabbed a pail and started for a spring about half a mile away to get water to cook with. All along his walk there came the rising noise of battle, and on his return trip he saw Sherman’s troops in great disorder, some running away from the battle sounds, others toward it, and bullets filled the air. When Ruff arrived back at Peabody’s camp the bullets were riddling his own tent, causing him to conclude that “it did not look as though
there would be any breakfast” that morning. Ruff set down his pail and picked up his gun just as Prentiss’s line began to break for the rear. As he emerged into the company street he could see “brown and gray-clad soldiers among the big white tents.”

As Ruff and his comrades fled northward, Shaver’s Confederates stopped to enjoy the fruits that the Union encampment yielded: uniforms, shoes, swords and other weapons, knapsacks, trunks, and utensils—all was plunder—as, in some regiments, was breakfast, still warm upon the table or hot upon the stove or fire, a feast for the famished Confederate soldiers. “I had a momentary impression,” Stanley said, “that with the capture of the first camp the battle was well-nigh over; but it was only a brief prologue of the long and exhaustive series of struggles that day.”

Way out on Peabody’s left, blackened by gunpowder and shaken by the terrific shooting of the six guns of his battery—one shot fired by each gun every 30 seconds or so—Captain Hickenlooper felt close to exhaustion though the fighting had gone on less than an hour. Each of the three times the Confederates charged Miller’s brigade, his gunners had loaded double-shotted canister,
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“which tore great gaps in their ranks and drove them back to cover,” Hickenlooper said. In the meantime, his men were dropping like flies. “Each man and officer takes his assigned position,” then “the
minies buzz and sing about their ears.”
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When a gunner “drops from his place, another fills the gap; and thus the work goes on with a system and regularity marvelous in its perfection.”

Attesting to how well this “system” worked was its effect on General Gladden’s Confederate attack, which was thrown back several times as the Rebel soldiers attempted to cross Spain Field. Powder smoke hung so heavily in the air that at one point Gladden rode forward through the jumbled, mangled bodies of his dead and wounded to get a better look at the Union position. He had not gone far when a terrific cannon blast blew him off his horse; members of his staff were horrified to find that his left arm had been shredded and nearly torn from its socket by a ball or exploding shell fragment. He was carried away “pale, faint, but still smiling” to a field hospital in the rear where the arm was amputated, but he died a few days later, the first, though not the last, general officer to be mortally wounded in the battle.

This development left Col. Daniel Adams, a Louisiana lawyer, in charge of what was fast becoming a Rebel calamity. Hickenlooper’s cannon fire had dispirited the Confederates, and they started streaming to the rear, until Adams seized the colors and rode slowly through the retreating troops, crying, “Will you come with me?” Which they did, he reported later, “with great alacrity, and leading them close to the enemy lines I ordered a charge which was promptly and effectively executed.”