Shiloh, 1862 (35 page)

The regiment stood to the fight for nearly half an hour, firing into the smoke, the men continuing to fall with horrifying regularity. Gibson had his second horse of the day shot from under him. Ultimately this charge also failed.

Col. James F. Fagan of the First Arkansas summed up the experience this way: “Three different times did we go into that valley of death, and as often were forced back by overwhelming numbers entrenched in a strong position.” No matter how well Braxton
Bragg trained his men he was an awful battlefield commander. The Yankees simply could not be dislodged the way Bragg was doing it, sending his forces in piecemeal, one regiment at a time.

What is telling here, however, is that although the fighting at Shiloh was confused it was not always chaotic. Officers would lead their units into battle, most of them conspicuously on horseback, making themselves easy targets. The men would advance until encountering such heavy fire that prudence dictated it was no longer wise to go forward; instead, they halted and returned fire. If the return fire silenced or sharply subdued the enemy, they continued the advance. If not, they would usually stand and fight, shooting at the enemy until it became apparent that nothing was being accomplished, and then they would usually retire, often on the order of their officers.

There were of course times when the men would simply retire on their own. Anyone who has been under fire understands that unless the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness can be overcome, and a fair chance to conquer the enemy is apparent, discretion becomes the better part of valor or, put in the vernacular of the day, “endurance was no longer a virtue.” The role of the officers is paramount here; the men look to them for courage and a sense of security in the belief that their officers are trying their utmost to get them through safely. If the men do not sense this they will not give their best effort

There were units, however, frequently untried or poorly trained, which would not stand up to fire, usually owing to the presence of soldiers or officers who were constitutionally unfit for battle. Experienced combat soldiers know that fortitude is tied directly to their comrades in arms, and that what compels them to persist in
an otherwise perfectly insane act is a combined feeling of allegiance to, and fear of humiliation by, their fellow soldiers.

Of the approximately 2,300 men in Gibson’s brigade who went into action at Shiloh, 682 were killed, wounded, or missing—among the highest Confederate casualty ratios in the battle. But that did not satisfy Bragg, who in his disgust, humiliated the brigade by ordering it to retire behind the line, out of the fight, and in his official report he publicly charged that the failure of Gibson’s brigade to take the Hornet’s Nest was due to “want of proper handling”; privately, he condemned Gibson as “an arrant coward.” Such was the thanks to Randall Lee Gibson and his First Brigade, Ruggles’s division, Bragg’s corps, for their part in the ordeal of April 6, 1862, the first day of the Battle of Shiloh.

M
EANWHILE, NO FEWER THAN TEN
C
ONFEDERATE
brigades were then closing on the Hornet’s Nest; not only had the bishop general Polk come into the fight with his corps, but most of Breckinridge’s reserve corps had also been committed to the battle by Beauregard and Johnston. Bragg—as irate as ever because of the inevitable tangling up of the different corps lines—worked it out with Polk that he would take the right side of the battle line if Polk would take the center, leaving the left to Hardee. Considering earlier casualties, straggling, and other losses, they were together probably 15,000 to 18,000 strong.

One of these brigades belonged to Col. Winfield S. Statham from Breckinridge’s reserve corps, who was about to attack the Federal center-left in a sector just to the east of the outermost point of the Hornet’s Nest salient. It was defended by the Yankee colonel Isaac Pugh commanding—after the wounding of the
previous commander—Hurlbut’s First Brigade, which consisted of three Illinois regiments and one regiment of Iowans. As Statham’s people moved up, they marched over areas where the battle had swept through a short while earlier, and a private in the 15th Mississippi took in the appalling scenery. “Here and there we saw the bodies of dead men—friends and foes lying together—some torn to mincemeat by cannonballs. Some still writhing in the agonies of death,” recorded private Augustus Harvey Mecklin. “The cannon seem to be carrying on this contest wholly among themselves. Though at some distance from us. Some of the balls reached us and while we were halted one struck a tree nearly a foot through & splitting it asunder tore a poor fellow who was behind it into a thousand pieces.”

Statham’s brigade marched to Spain Field where they were told to rest. “It was very warm,” Mecklin wrote. “The sky was clear but for the horrible monster death … on all sides lay the dead and dying. Before us were the rifle pits dug by the Yankees, behind them lay the camp. While resting here, Gen. Beauregard, as I suppose, came charging by [actually it was General Johnston and his staff, banners flying]. Our men greeted him with a deafening cheer. We were not allowed to rest long,” Mecklin said.

Like so many Mississippians of the era, Augustus Mecklin’s parents had migrated from the Atlantic states during the 1840s—in his case, South Carolina—in hopes of cashing in on the cotton boom. Mecklin instead felt a calling to the Lord, and after college in Tennessee he entered the Theological Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina, studying for the Presbyterian ministry. But when war broke out he immediately returned home to Choctaw County and enlisted in the 15th Mississippi—at the
age of 28, older than most of his messmates, and better educated as well.

Colonel Statham formed up his brigade to charge the Yankee position, much of which lay in the Peach Orchard of the widow Bell where the bullets clipped the blossoms, which floated down like pink snowflakes. And here is where something went very wrong that led to tragedy, if it can be called that, on a day when tragedy reigned supreme.

They had no sooner marched over the brow of a hill when “We were saluted by a violent volley from the enemy,” Mecklin wrote. “For the first time in my life I head the whistle of bullets.” Unbeknownst to Mecklin, apparently because he was farther back in the ranks, this “violent volley”—delivered by a thousand-plus muskets of Colonel Pugh’s 41st and 32nd Illinois—blew the head off of Statham’s column and sent it reeling back in confusion.

Mecklin’s company had taken cover in the former camp of the 71st Ohio, from which that regiment had made its disgraceful bugout from Stuart’s brigade when the first shots were fired, and from there Mecklin’s people engaged in a shooting contest with the Illinoisans and Iowans of Hurlbut’s division.

“We took shelter behind the tents and some wagons & a pile of corn & returned the fire of the enemy with spirit,” Mecklin said. “Soon men were falling on all sides. Two in Co. E just in front of me fell dead shot through the brain. I fired until my gun got so foul that I could not get my ball down,” Mecklin told his diary. He got a man nearby to throw him a gun from a wounded soldier and fired until it, too, became hopelessly fouled with powder.

Others however, found this kind of fighting unpalatable and began drifting off individually or in units down the slope and out
of close range. Among these was the 45th Tennessee, which had sulkily retreated behind a fence along the Hamburg-Purdy road near the bottom of the hill. “Squads of men would leave the ranks, run up to the fence, fire, and fall back into place; but the regiment would not advance,” said an aide to General Breckinridge. Statham was mortified and did his utmost, talked himself blue in the face, in fact, but the 45th Tennesseans declined to fall in and steadfastly refused to go back up the slope.

This was not an uncommon thing in 19th-century armies. All soldiers are understandably apprehensive when told to form a line and march into certain gunfire, knowing there would be a considerable number of dead and wounded. It was when many, if not most, of the soldiers refused to make the charge that trouble came. Most of the time they responded to pleas and speeches by their officers or higher-up officers. Rarely would a regiment flat out refuse to make a charge, for they would then be sent to the rear in disgrace and become the butt of jokes, antipathy, and condescension by the other regiments in the division.

In any case, “General Breckinridge, foiled and irritated, rode to General Johnston and complained he had a Tennessee regiment that would not fight,” wrote former Union brigadier Manning Force in his history of the battle. Tennesseans who would not fight—it was almost unimaginable.

Watching from a knoll in the distance, Sidney Johnston had seen Statham’s column waver, then bend, and of the Union soldiers he remarked to the Tennessee governor Isham Harris—in exile since Buell took Nashville and serving as an aide to Johnston—“Those fellows are making a stubborn stand here; I’ll have to put the bayonet to them.”

John Breckinridge had fully taken charge of this far right of the Rebel line. He was described by one officer as “the finest-looking man on the field that day, in his shiny jacket of new Kentucky jeans.” Indeed the 41-year-old Princeton graduate and former U.S. Vice President was a daunting figure—tall in the saddle, with a prominent aquiline nose set between piercing blue eyes and a drooping handlebar mustache. Alone among the senior commanders in having no formal military training, Breckinridge was anxious to prove himself and chafed much of the morning as the battle raged in his front and no call came for his brigades.

Now his hour had arrived. He had seen Statham’s line waver and fall back. He had set Gen. John Bowen’s brigade in motion. But here was the rub, as it had rubbed all day. To get at the enemy, Statham’s men would have to cross an exposed ridge, descend one slope, and ascend another into the Peach Orchard—probably 100 yards—all the while “raked by this deadly ambuscade.” Although, as Private Mecklin has testified, the brigade was “delivering and receiving fire” that Governor Harris called “the heaviest as any I saw in the war,” they could not, Preston Johnston wrote, “drive the enemy from his stronghold by fire, nor without a charge that meant death for many.” Breckinridge’s adjutant, Colonel Hodge summed it up: “The crisis of the contest had come; there were no more reserves, and General Breckinridge determined to charge.”

It was near 2 p.m. and General Johnston was confident at last that he had organized a combined force that would drive the Yankees from the Hornet’s Nest. They had been fighting there for four hours straight, during which time the Federal right had been broken and Sherman’s and McClernand’s men pushed nearly into the
swamps, while on the Federal left Stuart was making his last stand and was about to be routed.

“Only the center had not been moved,” declared Preston Johnston.

At last a concerted effort was being made. Four Confederate brigades—those of Stephens, Statham, Bowen, and Jackson—were in line of battle, preparing to push the enemy into the swamps or the river to complete the victory. Instead of Bragg’s piecemeal stabs at the Hornet’s Nest, there would now be one grand assault: Johnston had placed the brigades in line himself—on the Rebel right, where there was good fighting ground, away from the left and the dreadful Sunken Road.

A while earlier, talking with his aide Maj. Edward Munford, Johnston expressed confidence that he was closing the ring. “We sat on our horses, side by side, watching [Chalmers’s] brigade as it swept over a ridge,” Munford said, “and, as the colors dipped out of sight, the general said to me, ‘That checkmates them …’ He laughed and said, ‘yes, sir, that mates them.’ ”

And then came Breckinridge to report he had Tennesseans who would not fight. As Sidney Johnston sat astride his horse watching the progress of the battle in the distance, he was anything but pleased by news that his army contained a regiment of cowards. Cowardice was contagious and could not be tolerated. Before Johnston responded, however, Governor Harris became animated and spoke up, “General Breckinridge, show
me
that regiment.” Breckinridge nodded apologetically toward the commanding general, but it was Johnston’s call; he said, “Let the governor go to them.”