Shiloh, 1862 (41 page)

It fell to Chalmers’s brigade, which had been fighting since 8 or 9 a.m. and now anchored the Confederate right along the river, to cross Dill Branch nearest the gunboats. Colonel Camm, who had just escaped capture in the Hornet’s Nest and was positioned opposite Chalmers’s men in the Union line, peered out into the impending gloom as the Rebel line massed for its charge: “Again the battle was opened afresh, but for a time nothing was used but cannon; the sun looked like a ball of fire as it went out of sight, and the clouds of powder smoke hastened the gloaming. The scene was grand but fearful and the thunder terrific. We could see the red flashes of our own and the enemy’s guns, and shells burst all about us. A mounted man had his buttocks cut off and the horse’s back broken. I saw one cannon shot that seemed to jump out of the ground. It cut the top out of a bush my hungry horse was biting at, brushed my body and mangled a soldier sitting on a log a hundred feet or so behind me. One could not help wondering how any living thing could escape wounds or death.

“The Confederates attacked from the southwest,” Camm said, “the worst point they could have chosen, for it forced them to cross a hollow that opened into the river, and exposed them to the fire of the gun boats
Tyler
and
Connestoga
.” (In fact it was the
Lexington
.) The large-bore guns aboard the boats had been double-shotted with canister and “the execution was dreadful,” said one Rebel who watched the charge. The cannon fire from the vessels, he said, was “continuous.”

Farther to the Confederate left, things were not much better. Captain Gage’s Mobile, Alabama, battery unlimbered on a prominent ridge and began to pour shot and shell into the Federal line. It was struck so many times by counterbattery fire, however, that it was forced to retire. Jackson’s and Anderson’s brigades had to descend the 60-foot-deep ravine in front of the center of Grant’s line, which was protected by the battery of siege guns that had also been double-shotted with canister. Many of the men were out of ammunition but, as daylight was fast fading, they were instructed to charge with bayonets alone. As soon as the Rebel line appeared over the crest of the ravine they were slaughtered by close-quarter artillery fire in their faces.

The commanders managed to get the men to charge two more times, but after each their ranks were so decimated by gunfire that the charge stalled, then failed. The ravine began to fill with dead and wounded, and some of the wounded drowned in the bloody water that had backed up from the river. At last the exhausted men retired below the lip of the ravine and refused to continue unless there was “support” by strong reinforcements. General Withers was in the process of ordering these reinforcements when, he said in his official report, “to my astonishment, a large portion of the
command to my left was observed to move rapidly from under the fire of the enemy.”

Withers immediately ordered his adjutant to “go and arrest the commanding officers, and place the troops in position for charging the batteries.” Word soon returned, however, that General Beauregard himself had ordered the army to retire for the night, a decision that became as controversial as Lee’s so-called Lost Order at Antietam, or Longstreet’s tardiness on the second day at Gettysburg. Among the famous what-ifs of the war, Beauregard’s directive soon entered Confederate lore as the “Lost Opportunity.”

Shiloh church, where Beauregard had kept his headquarters since Sherman’s retreat in midmorning, was a good two miles from where Bragg was having it out with Grant’s die-in-the-last-ditch defense. Beauregard had been in command of the army for nearly three hours, and he was deeply concerned that it was falling apart. Aides had reported that, among other things, all the roads were clogged with Confederate stragglers, regiments had been separated from their brigades, and companies from their regiments, and that at least a third of the army was engaged in plundering Yankee tents. Now he could hear with his own ears the tumultuous cannonading by the big Yankee gunboats and became fearful they were slaughtering his troops near the river.

Visitors to Beauregard’s tent during this time were surprised, if not startled, to find the general tending to a large bird sitting on his lap. It was some sort of pheasant, the gift of a soldier who had picked it up on the battlefield that afternoon and offered it to Beauregard as … well, as dinner. Instead, the Creole took pity on the creature,
which was dazed and confused by the shelling and suffering from a broken wing. He had taken to stroking it and apparently decided to nurse it back to health, for he had ordered a box to be altered as a cage so he could carry it along with his baggage after the Shiloh fight was finished. At least that was one story; another was that the general intended to save the pheasant and eat him later. In any case, anxiety over the disorganization of the army as well as its safety had become Beauregard’s paramount concerns as darkness fell.

As is usual when matters of great import such as Shiloh are resolved by questionable decisions, memories often become “improved” with time or, put more directly, a great deal of lying goes on. The liar in chief in this case seems to be Beauregard, who, afterward, in justifying his order to stop the fighting, raised all sorts of reasons that he could not possibly have known at the time, sitting in his headquarters at Shiloh church, such as the arrival of Buell’s army and the artillery strength of Grant’s defensive line.

What we do know, however, is that Beauregard had just come into possession of a piece of intelligence that must have made him shiver with delight. A courier had ridden up from Corinth bringing a telegram from the Rebel general Ben Helm
⁵
in north Alabama, which revealed that Buell’s army had been seen marching south toward Decatur, instead of west toward Pittsburg Landing.
Actually, it was only one division of Buell’s army that had been spotted by cavalry scouts in Alabama, but it gave Beauregard the false impression that he would have all of tomorrow to finish off Grant before Buell could arrive.

Then there was the matter of Prentiss, who was delivered to Beauregard shortly after he was seized by Rebel troops. Prentiss later boasted that he deceived Beauregard by telling him that Buell was nowhere near Pittsburg Landing, and thus took credit for tricking the Creole into believing that he faced nothing more than Grant’s badly mauled army next morning. But Colonel Jordan tells a different tale. When he rode into Beauregard’s headquarters that evening he was introduced, he said, to a Federal general, who turned out to be Prentiss, and was charged with keeping him prisoner that night.

There was a great deal of jocularity among Jordan, Prentiss, and Col. Jacob Thompson, who had known Prentiss before the war. According to Jordan, as they were bedding down for the night Prentiss, “With a laugh … said, ‘You gentlemen have had your way to-day, but it will be very different tomorrow. You’ll see! Buell will effect a junction with Grant tonight, and we’ll turn the tables on you in the morning.’ ” Jordan, “in the same pleasant spirit,” or so he said, produced a copy of the dispatch from Corinth, but General Prentiss was having none of it. “He insisted it was a mistake, and we would see,” Jordan later wrote in a magazine article, and when the morning broke with heavy firing from the landing, Prentiss exclaimed, “Ah, didn’t I tell you so? There is Buell!” The discrepancy here is too wide for mere misinterpretation. Somebody is lying.

In the half-light while the battle still raged near the landing, Beauregard dictated a telegram to Richmond in which he informed Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government of the death of
General Johnston, as well as the “Complete Victory” of Confederate arms that day. The enemy, he said, had been thoroughly beaten and “the remnant of his army driven in utter disorder to the immediate vicinity of Pittsburgh and we remained undisputed masters of his … [camps].” The announcement was premature, of course, and later the Creole lamented, “I thought I had Grant just where I wanted him, and could finish him up next day.”

So Beauregard sent a messenger, his old friend Maj. Numa Augustin from New Orleans society days, with an order telling all commanders to call off the battle and withdraw to the shelter of the Yankee camps. It had been Augustin’s arrival at the Dill Branch fight that caused the withdrawal that precipitated General Withers’s “astonishment”—to say nothing of Bragg’s dumbfounded reaction when Augustin finally got around to him. Bragg was convinced, as he stated later in his official report, that he was in the midst of “a movement commenced with every prospect of success.”

“Have you given that order to anyone else?” Bragg demanded. He had been acting, during the attack, as Beauregard’s chief of staff.

“Yes sir, to General Polk, on your left, and if you look, you will see it is being obeyed,” Augustin told him. Bragg was aghast as he watched the gray-clad Confederates fade back from the battle line.

“My God, my God,” Bragg cried. “It is too late!”

G
ENERAL
B
RAGG’S LAMENT WAS TOO TRUE
. E
VERY
fifteen minutes or so, steamers brought another several hundred of Buell’s men across to the landing, and before morning he would have more than 17,000 fresh troops on the field. Not only that, but well after dark the much sought division of Lew Wallace at last concluded its bizarre odyssey from Crump’s Landing and emerged from the Owl Creek swamps near Sherman’s position at the far right end of the Union line. This now gave Grant nearly 25,000 completely new troops—more men than Beauregard could muster in the entire Confederate army at that point, considering the casualties and stragglers.

It seems almost a criminal error of military intelligence that nobody—not Sidney Johnston, Beauregard, or anybody else—thought to put a close watch on the routes Buell might have used to march to Grant’s relief. But in those days and times the term
“military intelligence,” if not exactly an oxymoron, was at best an expression of a vague and more or less unrefined concept that smacked of being “undignified.” Spying on the enemy—though it is absolutely necessary—was considered somehow “sneaky,” even “ungentlemanly,” and usually was relegated to the cavalry.
¹

In fact there
was
somebody watching out for Buell, and for whatever else lurked in the Confederates’ far right quarter, and that somebody was Nathan Bedford Forrest along with his cavalry regiment. All day Colonel Forrest had been itching to do something useful with his horsemen, but in a fight like Shiloh, often the best thing cavalry can do is stay out of the way and guard roads and bridges. Forrest tested that notion once and found that it was held for a good reason. Late in the morning as the battle raged around the Peach Orchard, Forrest chafed at his orders to guard against any Federal attempt to cross Lick Creek, nearby where Stuart and Chalmers would soon be having their fight. As the roar of battle swelled in the west, Forrest reportedly told his men, “Boys, you hear that shooting? And here we are guarding a damn
creek!
Let’s go and help them!”

Upon reaching the battlefield Forrest rode to the sound of the loudest firing, which, unfortunately, happened to be the Sunken Road in the Hornet’s Nest at its worst, and immediately he sent for permission to charge the enemy. But division commander Ben Cheatham demurred, saying that his infantry brigades had already charged several times without success and needed some rest and
reorganization, to which Forrest was reported to have declared, “Then I’ll charge under my own orders.”