Shiloh, 1862 (29 page)

“Firing grew sharp upon the left where the troops were breaking very badly,” according to A. D. Richardson, one of Grant’s early biographers. “Grant and his staff galloped to a little open field in front of a deserted cabin. Across the field was a rebel battery, which instantly opened upon them. The first shell struck just in front of the General.

“ ‘We must ride fast here,’ said Grant.

“They rode behind the cabin a moment, but shells crashed through the roof, covering them with shingles.

“Grant: ‘The old building don’t seem to be a very good shelter; suppose we move on.’

“As they did, a bullet struck the General’s scabbard and threw it up into the air. The sword dropped out and was never recovered,” Richardson wrote.

Lying on one of the hospital ships at the landing was Pvt. Robert Fleming, the clerk in Colonel Hildebrand’s headquarters who had found himself wounded in the fighting and thought he was “done for.” After the surgeon of the field hospital where he’d gone for help had ordered the place evacuated, Fleming made his way to one of the hospital boats at the landing. Men with stretchers were kept busy, Fleming said, carrying the wounded onto the boats, and also “carrying men off the boats as quickly as they succumbed to their wounds, and laying them in a row on a level ledge about halfway up the bank.”

Somehow Fleming found out that his brother, a sergeant two years his senior, was also on the boat, desperately wounded. Fleming went to him but “saw at a glance that death was written on his face.” A doctor had already told Fleming’s brother that his wound was mortal, and there was little Fleming could do but make him a pillow of his own shirt, filled with hay, and wait for him to die.

Fleming also noticed that one of these men being carried to the dead line “attempted to raise his head. Two Sisters of Charity who were on the boat quickly went to his aid, and brought him back aboard.”

The Sisters were among some 600 Catholic nuns from a dozen different orders generically referred to as the Sisters of Charity, who truly were angels of mercy on the battlefields during the Civil War.
They were looked at askance in some quarters because they nursed both Union and Confederate wounded—and some were even accused of spying—but the torn and dying men and boys seemed profoundly grateful to have a woman’s touch in their distress, which often reminded them of home.

The work the Sisters did was not a “proper” type thing that women engaged in during the mid-19th century. One Sister described the deck of a hospital ship she was serving on as “looking like a slaughterhouse, with doctors tossing overboard arms and legs to a watery grave.” When one of the doctors’ wives suggested to a nun that this was not a fit place for women, the Sister paraphrased Jesus from the Bible, “Whatever ye do not doest to the least of these, ye do not doest to me.”

There were women other than the Sisters of Charity at Shiloh that day. Officers’ wives often visited their husbands in the field and even though it would not have been approved of at Pittsburg Landing because of the impending operations, 29-year-old Ann Wallace, wife of one of Grant’s division commanders, General W.H.L. Wallace, had come down by steamer. The trip would become the ordeal of her life.

She had come aboard the steamer
Minnehaha
, which brought a cargo of fresh Iowa troops to Pittsburg Landing before dark. During a brief stop at Savannah, Mrs. Wallace had learned that her husband was now in the field commanding the division of Gen. C. F. Smith, who was lying ill in the Cherry mansion.

Wallace was a 41-year-old Illinois lawyer, Mexican War veteran, and friend of Abraham Lincoln, who had received his military
training in the state militia. He was tall, spare, and balding, with a beaklike nose on a narrow face, a recessed chin, and tufts of hair that stuck out on the top and sides of his head so that he resembled a contemporary image of Washington Irving’s timid schoolteacher Ichabod Crane. But in fact Wallace was a solid, highly competent, and courageous officer who, according to the well-known journalist Charles C. Coffin, “could bring order out of confusion and by a word, a look, or an act, inspire his men.” Unbeknownst to Ann Wallace, as the steamer pulled into Pittsburg Landing, with all of its chaos, her husband, out on the battlefield, was undergoing a trial of the severest nature.

Respectfully, a captain in an Illinois regiment offered to walk Mrs. Wallace out to her husband’s headquarters. “We heard a great deal of firing,” she said, “but it was accounted for by the return of the night pickets and the discharge of their guns.
²
I had put on my hat and gloves, when Captain Coats suggested that perhaps it would be better for him to first find out how far it was, and perhaps I had better ride. So I remained on the boat.

“Before half an hour Captain Coats came back wounded in two places, one painful wound in the hand, but neither of them dangerous. I learned that a big battle was in progress and that my husband had moved with his command to the front. The only thing then to do was to wait where I was. That long day on that steamboat, its scenes and sensations, are beyond description,” Mrs. Wallace said. “The wounded were brought by hundreds onto the boat. I did not hear a groan or murmur except those unconscious under influence
of chloroform or sleep. I passed from place to place holding water and handing bandages for the surgeons until it became so crowded I felt I was in the way.”

Another woman caring for the Union wounded that day was 44-year-old Mary A. Newcomb, whose husband had been in General Wallace’s division before he died of wounds received in the Battle of Fort Henry. She’d had the devil of a time even getting him buried in Effingham County, Illinois; because of the strong Rebel sentiment no Presbyterian minister would preside over the funeral, and she’d had to settle for a Methodist preacher. Mary had become a sort of unofficial nurse and surrogate mother to her dead husband’s regiment, the 11th Illinois Volunteers. Even Grant had joked that he’d commit himself to the hospital if Mary was doing the cooking.

Grant and his staff had charged up to the top of the bluff at Pittsburg Landing and started inland. They rode perhaps half a mile when they met W.H.L. Wallace, who was trying to support Prentiss in his crisis. From Wallace, Grant received further confirmation that the attack seemed to be the full force of the Confederate army. Grant dispatched Rawlins to hurry back to the landing and direct the quartermaster Capt. A. S. Baxter to hurry
Tigress
down to Crump’s Landing and tell the other Wallace—Lew Wallace—to bring his division to Pittsburg on the double.

Grant’s orders had been verbal, but when Rawlins reached the landing Baxter wanted them written out to eliminate any chance of mistake. The substance of the order was that Wallace would come up by the River Road—the shortest route, about five miles—and “form a line of battle at a right angle with the river and be governed
by circumstances.” This should have been simple to accomplish, but it was not, and so has spawned acrimonious controversy down the years until the present day, as we shall see. In any event Lew Wallace that morning took the wrong road, and with it the critical weight of his 7,200-man infantry division was removed from the battle.

Meantime, Grant continued to visit his divisions, lending encouragement, hastening up ammunition and supplies, and “sending his aides flying over all parts of the field” with orders to commanders or to collect information. The fact that a lot of lead and iron was flying through the air did not seem to deter Grant in the least. Among his aides that morning was Capt. Douglas A. Putnam, a paymaster, who had come up on
Tigress
that morning and volunteered to assist Grant when he got to Pittsburg Landing. Riding after the general with Rawlins, Putnam began to notice the first signs of battle and, “in [his] inexperience,” asked Rawlins if the little pitter-patter he was hearing in the leaves was rain—“to which Rawlins tersely said, ‘No, those are bullets, Douglas.’ ”

According to Putnam Grant had, against his habit, donned his full major general’s uniform that day, “complete with buff sash, making him “very conspicuous,” causing Rawlins and McPherson—who was serving that day as chief of staff—“to remonstrate with him for so unnecessarily exposing himself,” but Grant brushed them off.

He visited Sherman in the bullet-pocked clearing of his old drill field near the peach orchard, and found him grimy, bloodstained, and just as feisty as ever, with his collar pulled around sideways, “so that the part that should have been in front rested under one of his ears,” Putnam said. It was a grim meeting of few words, with Grant asking questions and Sherman vowing to fight on.

The problem was that Sherman’s command simply wasn’t standing up to the Rebel assault. Pat Cleburne’s men were flooding into the ravines leading toward Shiloh church, and Sherman’s brigades were in danger of being cut off—especially McDowell’s men, who were guarding the far right end of the Federal line way out by the Owl Creek bridge. About 10 a.m. Sherman sent orders for the entire division to withdraw to a line farther north. When word of this got to McDowell, he rode out and ordered the brigade to fall back to the new line. As this order was passed down, the lieutenant colonel commanding McDowell’s old regiment, the Sixth Iowa, “about-faced the left wing and marched it back to the field fence, leaving the other four companies standing in line in the woods,” according to the regimental historian. Puzzled by this unusual maneuver, McDowell rode over to the regiment to find out what it meant. “It means, sir, that the colonel is drunk,” was the answer he got, whereupon McDowell had the colonel arrested and relieved of his sword.

Alcohol use on the battlefield was not limited to the Union army alone. Around the time of the Sixth Iowa incident, and just to their left, was a Rebel company in Bushrod Johnson’s brigade consisting of about 60 men from southern Illinois who had sided with the Confederacy. They were protecting Capt. Marshall T. Polk’s Rebel battery of six guns, which was shooting it out with a Yankee battery across the way.

The Illinois men were among a small but defiant group of Illinoisans from the “Egypt” area who identified with the grievances of the South. Known as the Southern Illinois Company, they served in the 15th Tennessee, in Johnson’s brigade, a part of General Polk’s corps.

During the battle that morning the firing became heavy and hot, and it appeared that Sherman’s people, led by Col. Joseph
Cockerill’s 70th Ohio, were going to storm Polk’s battery and possibly capture it. After all other senior officers of the 15th Tennessee were shot down, Johnson told the captain of the Southern Illinois Company to take command and defend the guns, which he did, according to the regimental historian, despite the fact that “Brevet Lieutenant Harvey Hays, who was drunk, did little more than yell a litany of curses at the blue-clads.” The Rebel guns were successfully repositioned in a fierce fight that earned the Illinois Confederates their full “twelve minutes of fame,” or so it was maintained by witnesses at the Battle of Shiloh.

After Sherman, Grant next visited Prentiss, who was in the fight of his life in the center of the line, having been pushed back nearly a mile. Grant told him to hold his position “at all hazards,” and that he would send him reinforcements—meaning from Lew Wallace’s division—soon as it arrived. For better or worse, Prentiss took him to heart. Grant said the same thing to his other division commanders. Lew Wallace was now the army’s reserve, the only large-size unit not then already engaged. Grant insisted to everyone that Wallace was near at hand. His presence on the battlefield was critical, as Grant well knew; it could mean the difference between self-preservation and defeat.