Shiloh, 1862 (27 page)

As a Confederate battery began shelling his camps, Sherman later said—in what must be one of the most profound understatements of the war—“I became satisfied for the first time that the enemy designed a determined attack on our whole camp.” As the historian of one of his regiments later wrote, Sherman’s “great genius finally condescended to notice the practical fact that a great battle had commenced.”

The fidgety Appler had already changed his regiment’s battle line at the Rea family farm three times that morning. First it faced south. When one of his officers, half dressed and just out of bed, came running up hollering, “Colonel, the rebels are crossing the field,” Appler ordered the regiment reoriented toward the east. Just as that had been accomplished, “bright gun barrels of the advancing line shone beneath green leaves” to the south, and Appler’s adjutant told him, “Colonel, look to the right,” whereupon, “with an expression of astonishment,” Appler cried, “This is no place for us!” He ordered the 53rd to about-face and marched it northward, back through its camps, shouting, “Sick men to the rear!” placing the regiment in yet another position in some brush on an elevation behind the officers’ tents, according to the adjutant, 22-year-old Lt. Ephraim Cutler Dawes, who less than a year earlier had graduated from Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio, and was the second youngest officer in the regiment.

After the war, Dawes wrote a comprehensive and intelligent paper entitled “My First Day Under Fire at Shiloh,” which he presented to the Cincinnati chapter of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States. In detailing his own experiences and those of his regiment on that fateful Sunday morning, Dawes’s paper expresses in vivid microcosm the thrust of events affecting
his and the other 11 regiments in Sherman’s 10,557-man division while the Rebel attack unfolded.

The 53rd Ohio was the vanguard of Sherman’s line, with its camp projecting out only slightly less to the south than Peabody’s camp over in Prentiss’s division. It was approximately 7 a.m., Dawes wrote, “and the view from the high ground where I stood at this time was never to be forgotten. In front [Rea Field] were the steadily advancing [Rebel] lines marching in perfect order and extending until lost to sight in the timber on either flank. In an open space on the Corinth Road a [Rebel] battery was unlimbering. Directly in front of the spot where General Sherman’s orderly lay dead there was a group of mounted officers and a peculiar flag—dark blue with a white center.”

Lieutenant (later promoted to major) Dawes was describing the regimental flag of the Rebel general Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, which would be his standard as a brigadier, and later a major general, commanding a division when Cleburne had become known in Southern circles as the “Stonewall of the West.” It was said that as the war wore on, Union soldiers dreaded the sight of Cleburne’s colors, which were almost Arabic-looking, silk and velvet midnight blue with a gleaming moon in the center. The 34-year-old Cleburne, a native of County Cork, Ireland, was six feet tall, slender, and ramrod straight, with striking blue eyes and a rust-colored mustache that tapered into a handsome Vandyke. Orphaned at 18, he had served with the British army in the 41st Foot Infantry regiment, but in 1849 he immigrated to the United States, where he wound up in Helena, Arkansas, becoming in time a lawyer and newspaper owner.

Cleburne could claim some military knowledge from his days as a British soldier, but, like many of Johnston’s officers, this was
his first fight. His most valuable asset was his soon-to-be-legendary personal bravery and almost fanatical determination to win battles. As Cleburne led his brigade forward that morning he soon encountered an “impassable morass” near the confluence of Shiloh Creek and its eastern branch. It was a swampy quagmire of jungly marsh, trees, and brambles so thick a snake could barely wriggle through it, let alone a brigade of infantry, and as Cleburne himself tested it his horse became bogged down and he was thrown headlong into a sea of mud that caked his entire body. Emerging from this indignity, Cleburne extricated himself “with great difficulty,” instructing his commanders to avoid the bog, but in so doing it split his brigade in half so that only two regiments—the 24th Tennessee and the 6th Mississippi—came up in Rea Field. There they found themselves in front of Appler’s 53rd Ohio, lying in wait about 600 strong, posted behind hay bales, stumps, logs, and other cover. Behind this Yankee line were the six rifled cannon of Capt. A. C. Waterhouse’s battery, loaded with canister.

“The camps of Buckland’s and Hildebrand’s brigades were in sight,” Dawes wrote, “and all the regiments were in line.” Sherman had arrayed three of his brigades across the southwestern mouth of the cornucopia as follows: McDowell’s was posted on the far right near Owl Creek; Col. Jesse Hildebrand’s—to which Dawes’s 53rd Ohio belonged—was to the east with its left flank resting on the Shiloh church; Col. Ralph Buckland’s was farther east across the Corinth Road with its right flank resting on the church. (By an odd fluke, Sherman’s remaining brigade, David Stuart’s, was detached from the rest, far away to the east on the left of Prentiss near the Tennessee River, and would have to fight its long fight alone.)

“From the rear of all the camps,” Dawes said, “hundreds of men were hastening to the rear. These were the sick, the hospital attendants, the teamsters, the cooks, the officers’ servants, and some who should have been in the line. There was a sharp rattle of musketry far to the left on General Prentiss’ front [this was the beginning of Shaver’s and Wood’s attack on Peabody]. The long roll was beating in McClernand’s camp. The Confederate battery fired, its first shot cutting off a tree top above our Company A.
¹

As Cleburne’s men came through the line of the Union officers’ tents, Colonel Appler gave the command to fire, and there was an enormous crash of musketry along the whole front of Hildebrand’s and Buckland’s brigades. “The battle was fairly on,” said Dawes.

Up close, it felt considerably more personal. When Appler’s gunfire and artillery opened up at short range, Cleburne said, “It swept the open spaces between his tents with an iron storm that threatened certain destruction to every living thing that would dare to cross them.” It was about that time that Cleburne lost his artillery support because the men were unable to see the Yankee lines or artillery positions. The consequence was a “terrible fire, and a quick and bloody repulse” of the two regiments.

The 23rd Tennessee retreated about a hundred yards before staff officers—including their old commander, a Col. Matt Martin (later badly wounded)—managed to round up perhaps 20 percent of
them. On the other hand, the Sixth Mississippi rallied on its own, re-formed with about 100 men fewer, and made another charge with even more disastrous results. As the regiment emerged past the tents of the 53rd Ohio, the blue-clad line rose up in a tremendous blast of rifle fire that left the entire Confederate attack line writhing with bloody Mississippians. Out of a force of 425 who had gone into the fight a few minutes earlier, some 300 officers and men were left dead or wounded on the battlefield, including its colonel and its second in command, and the Sixth Mississippi, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist.

But here something bizarre happened—Colonel Appler lost his nerve. Dawes reported: “The first fire of our men was quite effective. The Confederate line fell back, rallied, came forward, received another volley, and again fell back, when our colonel cried out, ‘Retreat, and save yourselves!’ ”

Several companies immediately skedaddled to the rear, but several others did not hear Appler’s order and stayed fighting until they realized they were alone, whereupon they retreated to a ravine farther north. At this point General McClernand appeared and ordered Appler’s fugitive companies to make a line with men from his division in front of Sherman’s headquarters by the Shiloh chapel. Here the fight became hot and heavy. “Waterhouse’s battery was firing down a ravine between our camp and the 57th Ohio Camp. A good many men in our left were shot here by a fire which they could not return because of McClernand’s regiment in our front,” Dawes wrote.

“As I turned to go back to the right,” continued Dawes, “I saw the 57th Ohio falling back, despite the efforts of the gallant lieutenant colonel, A. V. Rice, the only field officer with it.” It seemed to Dawes that even what was left of his regiment might save the line by
moving to the right, and he ran “to where the colonel [Appler] was lying on the ground behind a tree, and stooping over, said, ‘Colonel, let us go and help the fifty-seventh. They are falling back.’ He looked up; his face was like ashes; the fear of death was upon it; he pointed over his shoulder in an indefinite direction and squeaked out in a trembling voice: ‘No, form the men back here.’ ”

The young lieutenant was already shaken and now appalled. “Our miserable position flashed upon me. We were in the front of a great battle. Our regiment never had a battalion drill. Some men in it had never fired a gun. Our Lieutenant Colonel had been lost in the confusion of the first retreat. Our major was in the hospital, and our colonel was a coward. I said to him, with an adjective not necessary to repeat here, ‘Colonel, I will not do it.’ He jumped to his feet and literally ran away,” Dawes testified.

Wells S. Jones was the senior captain commanding a company in the line when Dawes informed him, “Captain, you are in command; Appler has run away; I have ordered the regiment to close up to the right; let us help the fifty-seventh.” Jones agreed and Dawes went down the line telling the company commanders what had happened. The first one he came to, “brave old captain Percy of Company F, swung his sword in the air and said: ‘Tell Captain Jones I am with him! Let us charge!’ ”

Dawes considered it would be better to get everyone together before doing anything like that, but right then the regiment from McClernand’s division ahead of them broke to the rear, and the retreat continued with the Rebels in hot pursuit. Soon Dawes and what was left of the 53rd Ohio encountered the remnants of the 77th Ohio, which had been likewise mauled “by a series of sledgehammer blows, kept up almost incessantly,” according to
18-year-old Pvt. Robert H. Fleming, a brigade clerk who found himself on the firing line with his regiment when the battle began. Fleming was one of those disturbed by the effect of artillery fire in trees, noting, “My particular fear at that time was being killed by a falling limb.”

As the battle heated up, “the artillery fire trebled in volume,” Fleming remembered, “and all the furies of hell broke loose at once could not have made more din.” When Appler’s 53rd Ohio gave way it left the 77th with its left flank “in the air,” or unprotected, and, according to Fleming, “the men in the left companies were firing at the enemy in the
rear
of the position once occupied by the fifty-seventh Ohio,” which meant the 77th had been completely outflanked.

At that point Fleming himself was shot, “And as I fell, I felt that deathly shiver, and felt the blood spurting out and I thought I was done for.” But Fleming was not done for, and he made his way to a field hospital just as the chief surgeon ordered it evacuated in the face of the Rebel assault.

Other Confederate brigades had come up from Braxton Bragg’s second Rebel line to press Sherman’s shattered ranks. Cleburne’s men had been sacrificed in the first wave and many of his regiments, in the hyperbolic words of one historian, “were reduced to a burial squad.” Most of the survivors were sent to the rear “to reorganize,” some weeping, some cursing, all gasping, horrified at what they had just been through. But the damage they had done to Sherman’s men was palpable; the Yankees had been very roughly handled and knew they were not up against pushovers. In the words of one Yankee soldier who had watched the Confederate lines storm forward into almost certain death: “If they were willing to do that to themselves, what would they have done to us?”

Dawes, with what was left of the 53rd Ohio (by then eight companies—most of the regiment—had fled to the landing), found himself in a dangerous position. Prentiss’s retreating soldiers were passing behind him on the run, and he was taking fire from both east and west. From the ranks of the retreating 17th Illinois Dawes plucked a man he knew to be a veteran of earlier battles and hoped he might help shore up Dawes’s wavering greenhorns. “He was a brave, cool man,” Dawes said. “First he found some Enfield rifle cartridges for company A, and filled their nearly empty boxes. Next he went along the line, telling the men he had seen the elephant before, and had learned that the way to meet him was to keep cool, shoot slow, aim low. He said, ‘Why it’s just like shooting squirrels—only these squirrels have guns, that’s all!’ Pretty soon he called out, ‘Good-bye,’ and as he hurried to his company I saw his regiment moving by the left flank.”

But Sherman’s line continued to collapse. By then the Rebels had captured three of Captain Waterhouse’s guns and seriously wounded Waterhouse himself. “They were swarming around them like bees,” Dawes remembered. “They jumped upon the guns and upon the hay bales and yelled like crazy men.” Forty soldiers were all that remained of the 53rd Ohio, and Captain Jones was trying desperately to join them with the remnants of the 57th Ohio, which was still making some kind of fight around the Shiloh church.

“No orders had been issued in our brigade in regard to the care of the wounded,” Dawes complained. “No stretcher bearers had been detailed. When a man was wounded, his comrades took him to the rear, and thus many good soldiers were lost to the firing line.” Disorder ruled, remembered Dawes, observing that many of the men were nearly out of ammunition and that “there were three
different kinds of guns in our brigade and six within the division, all requiring ammunition of a different caliber.”

Hildebrand, the 61-year-old brigade commander, “had disappeared,” according to Dawes, who conceded that “during the fight he had displayed the most reckless gallantry, but when the 57th and the 53rd were driven from their camps he assumed that their usefulness was at an end, and rode away and tendered his services to General McClernand for staff duty.”