Shiloh, 1862 (38 page)

Shortly after noon, Rowley continued, “a cavalry officer rode up and reported to General Grant, stating that General Wallace had positively refused to come up unless he received
written
orders.” Grant all but exploded and ordered Rowley to ride to Lew Wallace and “tell him to come up
at once
,” and that “if he should require a written order of you, you will give him one.” Grant added for Rowley to make sure he had writing materials in his haversack and “see that you don’t spare horse flesh.”

Rowley and the aforementioned cavalry captain hightailed it up toward Crump’s Landing on the River Road but found no sign of Wallace and his division. When they reached his camp, six miles north, he was not there either, except for a lone baggage wagon that was just then moving off. When they inquired of the teamster as to Wallace’s whereabouts, they were told that the division had marched off down the Purdy road, leading toward the southwest, which would have put Wallace on the battlefield near Sherman’s camp at a bridge over Owl Creek—except that Sherman was no longer in his camp, which was now occupied by General Beauregard and about one-third of the Rebel army.

A mile or so down the Purdy road Rowley came across signs that the division had veered off down a road known as the Shunpike. After riding what he estimated as five or six miles, Rowley came upon the rear of Wallace’s division, which was stretched out for nearly two miles.

“They were at rest, sitting on each side of the road,” Rowley later wrote in his official report, “some with their arms stacked in the middle of the road. When I reached the head of the column I found General Wallace sitting upon his horse, surrounded by his staff, some of whom were dismounted and holding their horses by their bridles.”

When Rowley told Wallace it had been reported to Grant that he refused to march without written orders, Wallace “seemed quite indignant, saying it was a ‘damned lie!’ in proof of which he said, ‘Here you find me on the road.’ ”

To which Rowley replied that “I had certainly found him on
a
road, but I hardly thought it was the road to Pittsburg Landing.” In fact, Rowley said later, judging by the sound of the firing, Wallace
was now considerably farther away from the battlefield than he had been at his original camp. Wallace responded that this was the road his cavalry had led him down, “and the
only
road he knew anything about,” and that it led around Snake and Owl Creeks to Sherman’s camps.

“Great God!” Rowley said. “Don’t you know Sherman has been driven back? Why, the whole army is within half a mile of the river, and it’s a question if we are not all going to be driven into it.”

Just then Wallace’s cavalry rode up and delivered the same embarrassing news, that if he kept marching down this road the Confederate army in fact would be between Wallace and the Union army. Digesting this disagreeable turn of affairs, Wallace ordered his division to countermarch. He also ordered Rowley to remain with him as guide, rather than ride back and explain the situation to Grant.

Wallace’s order to countermarch further delayed things, for instead of simply ordering the entire division to about-face so that the last regiment in line became the first, the order to “countermarch” required the head of the column to peel off and march back toward the rear—with the rest of the 7,200 troops waiting, then following, front to rear—so that the original head of the column would remain in the lead. Wallace later explained that he wanted to have “certain regiments whose fighting qualities commanded my confidence” at the front of his columns. Just so, but precious minutes were slipping away, as the fighting at Pittsburg Landing grew more desperate with every tick of the clock.

Wallace’s division countermarched for nearly three hours before reaching a side road that would carry it into River Road, down which Grant had expected them to march in the first place. By then
it was 3:30 p.m. and they were still about four and a half miles from the battlefield. At the intersection of this side road, Wallace was intercepted by Colonel McPherson and Adjutant General Rawlins, who had subsequently been sent by Grant after Wallace still had not shown up.

“I understood him [Wallace] to say that his guide had led him wrong,” McPherson said in his official report. In any event, Wallace had marched a good ten miles out of the way—five miles down the wrong road and five miles back. McPherson told him to “For God’s sake move forward rapidly,” but it seems Wallace was cursed with the slows that day. For one thing, he was marching with his artillery—by far the least hasty of his components—in between his First and Second Brigades, so that the entire column was compelled to move at the pace of the artillery.

When McPherson pointed this out, Wallace had the artillery move off the road so the brigades could pass on, but this, according to Rawlins, occasioned a delay of “a full half an hour, during which time he [Wallace] was dismounted and sitting down.” No sooner had the column gotten under way again than a report came that the bridge over Snake Creek was in the possession of the Rebels. The column was again halted while this information was investigated and proved false.

In the meantime, according to Rawlins, “the artillery firing at Pittsburg Landing became terrific, and we who had been there knew it was our heavy guns,” by which he meant the big siege guns that were posted right above the landing itself, suggesting that the army was at its last extremities and in danger of being driven into the river. Such was the state of affairs vis-à-vis General Lew Wallace and his missing infantry division as the sun began to
sink over Pittsburg Landing and the Battle of Shiloh approached its dramatic climax.

Even while the battle had seemed to slow down in midafternoon, at the same time emotions and impelling motions were building up like an enormous head of steam in a boiler, and then, “about half-past-three o’clock, the struggle at the centre, which had been going on for five hours with fitful violence, was renewed with the utmost fury,” wrote William Preston Johnston. “Polk’s and Bragg’s corps, intermingled, were engaged in a death grapple with the sturdy commands of Wallace and Prentiss.” The lull, it seemed, was over.

This latest eruption at the Hornet’s Nest almost had to be endured to be believed, so ferocious was the fighting. It had been precipitated by the Rebel general Daniel Ruggles, the irascible 52-year-old Massachusetts-born, West Point–educated Mexican War veteran, with a head as bald as an egg and a long, white beard like an Old Testament prophet.

As the stalemate at the Hornet’s Nest continued to confound, Ruggles had impetuously commanded his aides to, “Bring forward every gun you can find,” on the theory that if the Confederates were unable to shoot the Yankees out of the nest with their rifles, or to prod them out with their bayonets, then by damn they would literally blow them out of it with the most spectacular concentration of artillery yet seen on the American continent.

By half past four Ruggles’s people had assembled some 62 cannons of various weights and calibers, which he lined up and pointed at the Hornet’s Nest in general and the Sunken Road in
particular. When Ruggles gave the order to fire they said the whole ground shook as in an earthquake, and “the sky lit up in a blaze of unearthly fire.” What is more, this stupendous demonstration of firepower coincided with the simultaneous (“though unconcerted”) advance of the whole Confederate line.
⁴

The artillery barrage utterly stupefied the defenders of the Hornet’s Nest, prompting 26-year-old Corp. Leonard B. Houston of the Second Iowa, W.H.L. Wallace’s division, to write his friends, “I don’t know how our Regiment escaped … it seemed like a mighty hurricane sweeping everything before it when men and horses were dying; at this moment of horror … the
little birds
were singing in the green trees over our heads! They were as happy as if all were perfect calmness beneath them.”

If the birds seemed happy, the Confederates were decidedly not, emerging as they were from the tree line across a broad expanse of field, thousands upon thousands of bayonets at the ends of their gun barrels gleaming menacingly in the afternoon sun. It takes a great deal of single-minded determination—let alone raw courage—to behold such a sight and not feel a strong urge to flee, which is what the Yankees in the Hornet’s Nest finally did after fighting valiantly for six long and ghastly hours. The very primitiveness of so many men headed straight for them, bearing long gleaming knives come to kill them close-on, was apparently more than they could bear.

Worse, not only was the entire Rebel front line moving on them but both flanks had collapsed, as no fewer than seven Rebel brigades closed in on the nest’s tenants from both sides and the rear.

The first to give way was Hurlbut’s division on the Union left, which was being confronted by three brigades under Breckinridge and Bragg—Chalmers’s, Jackson’s, and Bowen’s. Clearly the Federal commanders had gone well past the point when “further endurance was no longer a virtue.” The lines to the left and to the right of them had fallen back, and Hurlbut’s position became a salient that stuck out like a sore thumb.

In taking to heart Grant’s charge to hold out “at all hazards,” Prentiss, and to a lesser extent Hurlbut and Wallace, had essentially outfortituded themselves and now faced total annihilation or surrender. They chose the latter, some deliberately, even with the formality of white flags and officers surrendering their swords, but in many cases the men simply slipped away from the lines after seeing Rebels at their flanks and rear. When the tally count was made, more than 2,200 Yankee soldiers had been made prisoners, including a division commander, Benjamin M. Prentiss himself.

In their official reports, Hornet’s Nest commanders from the top down unanimously registered sentiments to the effect that “It was therefore useless to think of prolonging a resistance which could only have wasted their lives to no purpose.” Or, “To have held out longer would be to suffer complete annihilation.” Still, about half of the Hornet’s Nest defenders, maybe more, made it out of the trap, especially those closer to the landing.

General W.H.L. Wallace nearly got out himself but didn’t. When he was notified of the impending collapse of the brigade on his left flank and Wallace went to see about it, an aide, who was also
his brother-in-law, Lt. Cyrus Dickey, directed the general’s attention to a mass of Confederate infantry about to pitch into his last remaining regiment in that part of the field. As Wallace rose off his saddle to get a better look, a bullet struck him in the back of the head and exited through his left eye, blowing it out. The general fell headlong to the ground, evidently killed.

The horrified Dickey instructed Wallace’s orderlies to conduct the general’s corpse to the rear, but soon the Rebel advance nearly overtook them and they quickly moved the body out of the road, placing it by some ammunition crates to protect it from being trampled. Then all fled the scene. It was then past 5 p.m.—by some accounts, closer to 6—when the Confederate line swept through the Hornet’s Nest.

A regiment was detailed to escort the huge catch of Yankee prisoners back to Corinth, while Prentiss was taken to the Shiloh church to meet General Beauregard. The Rebel line continued on until at last it came upon what remained of Grant’s army, drawn up defiantly for one last stand at Pittsburg Landing.