Shiloh, 1862 (30 page)

By then it was midday and the Rebel attacks were at their most furious intensity. Nothing better illustrates the level of violence and desperation of the attacks—and the Union defense—than the trial of Colonel Camm of the 14th Illinois, whom we first met as he studied the face and the diary of the beautiful dead Rebel soldier at Fort Donelson.

By midmorning the first waves of the Confederate attack—Hardee’s corps and, soon after, Bragg’s—had crested and broken
over the regiments of Prentiss and Sherman, whose divisions had been posted in the southernmost lines of the Union position. In so doing these Confederates had practically sacrificed themselves: The Sixth Tennessee, for instance, endured 70 percent casualties, but they had also taken a fearful toll on the Union defenders, who were falling back in almost as wretched a condition.

However, they were falling back on their second lines, which consisted of the camps of Major General McClernand and Brig. Gen. W.H.L. Wallace’s divisions, and also the division of Brigadier General Hurlbut, who was nearest the landing itself. Now they were being additionally swamped by the Confederate army’s second waves, consisting of Polk’s corps and Breckinridge’s reserve.

In his diary, Camm had written, “April 6th. Began with a bright beautiful morning. The trees were budding, the birds were singing, but none of us dreamed what a dark and bloody ending the day would have. It was a morning for lambs to gambol on. As we saw it last that evening, a great red globe of blood.”

The 14th Illinois was assigned to Hurlbut’s division but soon after the attack started Sherman asked for help from Hurlbut and McClernand, and Camm’s was one of the regiments sent south to plug a gap between Sherman and the hard-pressed Prentiss. Right away Camm “noticed something that I did not like.” Some of the junior officers, he said, were swapping their coats with shoulder straps and insignia for the coats of privates, and when one of them tried to involve Camm in the scheme he replied, “I am proud of my straps,” adding that he would need them in the confusion of battle and “I would die with them on if I have to die.” Thus said, Camm rode off toward the sound of the guns, “which had settled into a steady roar.”

For the remainder of the day we see in Camm’s regiment the difference between how men in desperate battle fight under resolute commanders, as opposed to what we have already seen of the 53rd Ohio, deserted by its colonel.

When Camm rode ahead to clear the road to the battle line so the regiment could pass, he met a wagon carrying, among other baggage, a wounded soldier whose leg had been blown off below the knee. “He stuck the stump, with the shattered bone almost sticking out into my face,” Camm said, and in a strong voice he cried above the din, “Give ’em hell for that, Colonel!”

“The earth was shaking now,” Camm said, “and above the cannon and rifle fire we could hear the treble of the rebel yell as the storm came towards us.” When they came to the Review Field, where they used to drill, “the bullets began to whiz by.” Camm was riding with the regimental chaplain and “admonished him to go to the rear and prepare to succor the wounded; at the same time, “he said, “I handed him my pocket book, which contained several hundred dollars, asking him to send it to my father should I be killed.”

The regiment went into the line south of the Purdy road, facing southwest with a battery of five rifled guns and an old brass howitzer. They were supporting an Ohio regiment and so were told to lie down and wait. Camm noticed that one of his color bearers, a boy named Fletcher Ebey, was kneeling, trying to get a look around, and before Camm could order him down a bullet through the heart “laid him down dead, and bleeding on his flag.” Moments later, Camm said, a lieutenant named Opitz was sitting on a stump, messing with the tobacco in his pipe, when a bullet “struck him in the end of the nose and cut the top of an ear off as it came out. I could see the Jonnies running from tree to tree and popping away
at us as they came. They had driven everything before them so far, and seemed to think they could drive us, too.

“The battery was belching like a volcano, but only seemed to attract the fire of the enemy’s guns and the rush of heavy shot and head-splitting crack of bursting shell all about us were adding to the increasing roar.” Camm heard a bugle and saw the Confederates ahead massing for a charge, and also a tall Union artillery sergeant double-shot the brass cannon. The regiment was ordered forward but did not fire until the Confederates were in close range.

“What followed,” Camm said, “no man could well describe, until the Rebels were repulsed. I saw our handsome orderly of company ‘G’ fall with blood spurting from both temples. Regimental Color Sergeant John E. Kirkman rolled the body of his dead comrade off the national colors and rose with both flags in his hands, and as he did so a shot passed through the folds of the Stars and Stripes, cutting a gap in the staff and then passing through Kirkman’s cap and grazing his head.

“The enemy were checked but were very stubborn, and we murdered each other down at close range,” Camm wrote. “Our brigade commander rode down the line and I asked him to turn us loose with the bayonet. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘you would lose every man.’

“My horse was struck behind the saddle and lunged among the men, so I let him go; I tried to get the men to charge but between us [and the Rebels] was a struggling mass of wild and wounded battery horses, many of them harnessed to the dead, and I could not get them started. But I got far enough forward to see a Confederate soldier trying to lead his men into our line. I covered him with my pistol but he was behaving so bravely that I hesitated firing.

“He pointed me out to a black-bearded soldier on his left,” Camm continued, “and as his piece covered me, a quiet and not unpleasant feeling came over me, and I let the point of my saber drop to the ground. I seemed to hear the bullet hiss.” Just then somebody shot the Rebel officer and, moments later, the soldier with the black beard. Camm, who had dismounted, was hit in the thigh by a shot that glanced off his saber. Walking back across the Union line he encountered two officers, a captain and a lieutenant, who had been shot. “Blood was running through Sibley’s fingers,” Camm said, “and Simpson’s hand was mangled.

“New troops seemed to have come against us. The 15th [Illinois] on our right with Ellis and Goddard both killed, gave way. Our right wing followed. [Colonel] Hall rushed up with orders—‘back, back.’ ” The regiment backed up about a hundred paces and re-formed on the Purdy road. Among the last men to get in line was a sergeant, “well-dressed, almost a dandy. Tears were running over his cheeks and he was exhorting his comrades to die upon the line, rather than to break again.”

At that point there was a lull in the battle, “but before our muskets could cool,” Camm wrote, “the enemy came on again, and the fight became fiercer than ever.” A young man named Noble Stout, “whom the men used to make sport of because of his innocent simplicity,” staggered up to Camm, crying, “Oh, Colonel, I’m shot.” He had been hit in the stomach. Camm led him behind a fallen tree but afterward noticed “the pale face, the closed eyes, the livid parted lips, and supposed him dead. But,” he added, “a burial party tells me they could not find the body.”

A man came up with a rifle whose stock had been shot away, saying, “That is the fourth gun smashed in my hand. What shall
I do?” Camm pointed to a gun on the ground and the man threw down his broken weapon and “was soon blazing away. Nearby stood Hankins, blood spouting from his breast at every inspiration,” said Camm. “He loaded and fired till a shot struck him in the chin and went through the neck killing him.

“Up the road through a rift in the smoke I saw a confederate officer mounted in front of their colors waving a bright sword, leading his men on, but before the smoke hid them again, officer, horse, and colors all went down,” blown apart by a battery of heavy guns in Camm’s rear. Outflanked again, Camm’s regiment again gave ground, with such officers as remained doing all they could to rally the men. Camm grabbed a color bearer and led him on the run to a ravine in the rear where he began to shout for the fleeing men to “rally on the colors.”

This many of them did, and in a short time “the remnant of our regiment was ready for our foes,” said Colonel Camm. They had gone into the battle at 10:30 a.m., and now, at straight-up noon, there was only the glaring sun overhead to remind them that they were not already dead and rotting.

A
S THE
C
ONFEDERATES DROVE
G
RANT’S ARMY
northward, what remained of the civilian population of Pittsburg Landing made do as best they could while the drama unfolded. Shortly before the battle nine-year-old Elsie Duncan had been “sitting outside beneath a blooming hollyhock bush watching the bees on flowers.” The night before the battle, as she tells it, “Mother said that we would have to trust in the Lord to take care of us. Margie [a servant] brought a cat into the room. Mother prayed and she and Margie sang some songs. Then we all went to bed and left everything to the Lord.

“Next morning,” Elsie continued, “when I waked and saw my mother sitting there by the fire with the baby in her lap, it seemed that she was sitting there by the bed when we went to sleep and still sitting there when we got up. I always felt safe when I was with my beautiful mother—with her hazel eyes and black hair,
rosy cheeks and lady-like ways. She had the most beautiful white hands I ever saw.

“And then I jumped out of bed and said ‘Oh Mother, what is that noise!’ With a beating heart I rushed to her side. ‘Is that the fighting?’ I was frightened and I said, ‘Oh mother, do you think that [her brothers and half brothers] Jim and Joe and [illegible] are there?’ She said ‘I’m afraid they are.’ Father, being a chaplain,” Elsie wrote, “we knew he would not be in the battle. But when I heard the cannon roar and the guns popping and the horses screaming it seemed as if everything was lost.”

Elsie left the house for a short while—apparently to seek a safer shelter—for when she returned, she said, “I saw that my father [a local preacher and Confederate army chaplain] had come home. He was bending over the bed and mother was tearing a cloth into strips. I went into the room and saw a rebel soldier boy with his hip all shot up. I gave one look and saw that it was one of our neighbor’s boys. I could not bear to look at him. When they were through with him his folks came and took him home.”

Just where on the battlefield Elsie was located is hard to determine, since the family apparently had several dwellings in the vicinity. Maps show that “Duncan Field” was located just north of the Hamburg-Purdy road near the intersection of the Main Corinth Road, which would have put it close to where Colonel Camm and his 14th Illinois were having the fight of their lives with the men of Hardee’s corps, including Pat Cleburne’s survivors and the brigade of A. P. Stewart. Reports say that “Cleburne joined Stewart at 12 noon in an attack upon positions at Duncan House, where some of Cleburne’s men were taken prisoners by the Seventh Illinois.” Later, the house was in the midst of the Hornet’s Nest fighting.

One shudders to think that a family of civilians was actually in the middle of the kind of fighting that characterized that part of the field, but according to Elsie, wherever it was she called “home” that day saw something of the battle.

“The fighting began at our gate, just past the house,” she wrote. “As the battle raged it got further away leaving dead men and horses behind. My father and other old men were behind the lines helping all they could. I went into one house where they had taken wounded and dead men. The floor was covered with blood. As I went back I saw a woman screaming and wringing her hands and mother was trying to quiet her. She could not do anything with her. She said that she had two sons in that battle—one on each side fighting against each other.”
¹

Harriett Duncan told the woman she had her own children in the battle and that she must “bear up,” but the woman continued on “toward the firing line. We heard that one [of her sons] was killed in his own backyard,” Elsie said. (At least two soldiers’ accounts report a lone woman walking across the battlefield in the midst of heavy fighting.) “Nobody had left their homes,” Elsie said, “they did not expect the battle to be fought there.”

During the day, various people came and went in Elsie’s house. An old man arrived looking for his sons; a slave asked for a drink of water before going off to find his 17-year-old “master” who had gone into battle. Elsie tells of a grandmother who shooed her daughter and two grandchildren to the landing where they cringed under the bluff with the slackers from the Federal ranks. “They stayed
under there three days and two nights without food or water, and only came out Tuesday.”