Shiloh, 1862 (43 page)

If there could be any humor in such a sanguinary encounter Bierce was the one who found it, relating the “ludicrous incident of a young officer who had taken part in this affair walking up to his colonel—who had watched the whole thing—and gravely reporting, ‘The enemy is in force just beyond that field, sir.’ ”

From the tangled protection of the Sunken Road the Confederates were giving the Yankees a dose of their own medicine. Advance was impossible for the Federal troops, and the two armies “flamed away at one another with amazing zeal,” Bierce said, “while the riddled bodies of my poor skirmishers were the only ones left on this ‘neutral ground.’ ”

Cannons were brought up. Nelson’s division artillery had been left behind at Savannah because it could not be moved on the mud march through the swamp, but Buell sent him two batteries from elsewhere, including one commanded by Capt. William Terrill, a West Point–educated Virginian, the rest of whose family was in the Rebel army.
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This was a heavy battery consisting of 12-pounder
cannons that “did much execution,” and it fell to Bierce’s platoon to protect, or “support,” them. “The shock of our own pieces nearly deafened us,” Bierce groused while his men lay in the woods with the battle “roaring and stammering” all around them. “Oh, those cursed guns,” he said with trademark sarcasm. “Had it not been for them, we might have died like men.”

What had happened was this. At dawn the noise of heavy firing from the direction of Owl Creek had startled Beauregard, who with almost a sense of leisure savored the notion of finishing off Grant and destroying the main Federal army in the West; in fact, the Great Creole halfway expected to find the Yankees had evacuated downriver during the night.

Grant, of course, had done no such thing, and Beauregard, now alerted that strong reinforcements must be on the field, hastily began assembling a defensive line with which he at least hoped to halt the Federal offensive and turn it into a stalemate. He sent Hardee to the far right, Bragg to the far left, and Polk and Breckinridge to the center to put regiments in place and make a stand.

If Beauregard had sent people to keep close tabs of Buell’s whereabouts, at least he could have ordered the men to construct defensive fortifications during the night, which likely would have made all the difference in the world. Instead, he found himself in the same position that the Yankees had been in yesterday—having to defend against massed assaults with whatever protection was at hand. The fact that the Hornet’s Nest provided good natural cover was some consolation; it would have to be, since Beauregard could scarcely muster 20,000 men of arms in the entire Confederate army.

The main Union thrust would be in the center, around the Hornet’s Nest, just as the Confederates’ efforts had been the day before. There the Rebels had gathered an odd assortment of depleted regiments and the ragtag of a few brigades totaling probably no more than 4,000 men to contend with the roughly 9,000 fresh troops of Nelson’s and Thomas Crittenden’s divisions.

The fighting, some of it hand to hand, seesawed all morning and into the afternoon, with Confederates pushing the Yankees back across farm fields and into woods, only to find themselves ambushed by fresh Federal troops and driven back to their original line. As the day wore on, Beauregard was hard pressed to shuffle regiments from one part of the field to another as more commanders cried for help. It was as maddening as using one’s fingers to plug ever multiplying holes in a bursting dike.

During one of these attacks and counterattacks by the Second Texas Infantry, Sam Houston, Jr., son of the great Texan, found himself face to face with the remnants of Hurlbut’s chewed-up command. He remembered the silence of his brigade marching across a wide, open field “with not a command given, nor a word spoken” as “I kept asking myself, ‘Where is the enemy?’ ” Then a fence line before him “transformed into a wall of flame, and … our line seemed actually to wilter and curl up.”

After the smoke drifted away, Houston said, “In front of us, and on both flanks, the very earth swarmed with Federals. So nearly had we approached the enemy that the ornaments on their caps were readily distinguished, and I remember noting even in that terrible moment, that our adversaries were the 3rd Iowa Infantry.” And on the left, in Bragg’s quarter near the Shiloh church, Private
Johnnie Green of Kentucky’s “Orphan Brigade”
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experienced what amounted to a miracle. He was raising his gun to fire when a bullet hit him in the chest, knocking him down. At first he thought he was killed, but on further inspection he found “one piece of the bullet laying against my skin inside my clothes just over my heart. The ball had passed through the stock of my gun, split on the iron ramrod, and the other piece had passed through my jacket and buried itself in a little testament in my jacket pocket.”

The future explorer Henry Morton Stanley, presently of the Dixie Grays, found himself in the unfortunate position of having outrun his company during one of these sorties and was made a Yankee prisoner. “Even to my unexperienced eyes the troops were in ill-condition for repeating the efforts of Sunday,” he said, but in short order they were “moved forward resolutely.” When the shooting began Stanley was “in an open, grassy space, with no convenient tree or stump,” but he quickly spied a shallow hollow in the ground ahead and made a dash for it.

From there he commenced firing and “became so absorbed with some blue figures in front of me” when “to my speechless amazement I found my companions had retreated!” As he rose from his hollow, the next words Stanley heard were, “Down with that gun, Secesh, or I’ll drill a hole through you!” Then, he said, “Two men sprang at my collar, and marched me into the ranks of the terrible Yankees. I was a prisoner.”

It went on like this all morning, small, fierce, desperate attacks—until the weight of numbers began to tell and the Rebels
began to give ground. Back across the bloodstained Peach Orchard they went, across Sunken Road, giving up ground but making the Yankees pay for every yard. Pat Cleburne’s brigade, the mere sight of whose once proud white-moon-on-a-black-field flag had shaken the Yankee soldiers, could now put only 800 men in the line out of his original 2,700.

When Ambrose Bierce’s company of Federals was finally relieved of its support duty at Terrill’s battery, he found himself wandering in a part of the now emptied Hornet’s Nest that had caught fire yesterday, which proved to be a loathsome experience. “Death had put his sickle into this thicket,” Bierce said, “and fire had gleaned the field.” Here lay the bodies, “half buried in ashes; their clothing was half burnt away—their hair and beard entirely,” he said. “Some were swollen to double-girth, others shriveled to manikins.”

As the hours wore on, more were wounded and carried off or killed. Most men in the Confederate ranks began to sense they were fighting a futile battle; by now most everyone knew that Buell and Lew Wallace were on the field, and the implications thereof were clear. Still they persisted, sullen, bitter, and deadly, though without the savage fury of yesterday because they had been simply fought to a frazzle.

The tension mounted as Beauregard watched the Yankee host prepare to drive his troops from the Shiloh church. It was about 2 p.m. and men were streaming back from the roaring, flaming, stinking cauldron of the fight on Bragg’s front. The Creole found himself surrounded by reluctant regiments that balked at returning to the fray. No one wants to be the last man killed in a losing battle, and words could not move these shaken men; their commanders tried, Beauregard tried, Governor Harris of Tennessee tried—to no avail.

So Beauregard “seized the banners of two different regiments and led them forward to the assault in the face of the fire of the enemy,” recorded Colonel Thompson, one of his aides, adding in a pensive note, “I became convinced that our troops were too much exhausted to make a vigorous resistance.” No one could say that Beauregard was not a brave leader. Thompson rode to him with a plea that “you should expose yourself no further, … but to retire from Shiloh Church in good order.”

This seemed the crux of the battle. The Shiloh church soon was recaptured; the Yankees were closing in; nearly all the gains of the previous day had been lost. Still Beauregard fought on, more out of a sense of honor and fury than anything else. Finally Colonel Jordan, the original planner of the battle, rode up and, employing a Napoleonic-sounding military figure of speech, compared the present condition of the Rebel army to “a lump of sugar, thoroughly soaked with water, yet preserving its original shape, though ready to dissolve—would it not be judicious to get away with what we have?” he asked.

With this dainty metaphor jangling harshly in his ears, Beauregard surveyed the mounting chaos in front of him, as more and more men straggled out of the fight, and solemnly replied, “I intend to withdraw in a few moments.”

Breckinridge was sent for and told to serve as rear guard. With that, the Confederate army began its painful withdrawal from the Battle of Shiloh. The wounded continued to be carted off in heaps, but much of the captured artillery and other valuable loot from the Yankee camps was lost due to lack of transportation. Beauregard did, however, get away with 34 national, state, and regimental stands of colors to prove the Confederates had not come to the fight as pikers. Night soon closed in over another smoke-stained, fiery
sunset and, as if to add insult to injury, as the Rebel army slouched south toward Corinth a dismal drizzle of rain began to fall.

The march back was excruciating—far more so than when they had marched out of the city four days earlier. Here is Braxton Bragg’s personal assessment in a note to Beauregard written the next morning at 7:30 a.m. “My Dear General: Our condition is horrible. Troops utterly disorganized and demoralized. Road almost impassable. No provisions and no forage; consequently everything is feeble. Straggling parties may get in tonight. Those in rear will suffer much. The rear guard, Breckinridge commanding, is left at Mickey’s in charge of wounded & etc. The enemy, up to daylight, had not pursued. Have ordered Breckinridge to hold on till pressed by the enemy, but he will suffer for want of food. Can any fresh troops, with five days’ rations, be sent to his relief?”

He added, almost as an afterthought, “It is most lamentable to see the state of affairs, but I am powerless and almost exhausted.

“Our artillery is being left along the road by its officers; indeed I find but few officers with their men. Relief of some kind is necessary, but how it is to reach us I can hardly suggest, as no human power or animal power could carry [even] empty wagons over this road with such teams as we have.”

For a man with Bragg’s military decorum and combative disposition to have sent such a plaintive note to his commanding officer more than speaks for itself. A determined effort by Grant to pursue the retreating Confederate army likely would have ended the Civil War in the West in a fell swoop. But when it became apparent that the enemy was withdrawing, Grant—like McClellan later at Antietam and Meade after him at Gettysburg—simply found his army too exhausted to pursue. As if the two sides were warring jungle
beasts, Grant was content to pant and bleed and lick his wounds, still master of his territory, and let the loser slink off, bloodied but unbowed, to fight again another day.

Sherman wasn’t buying it, however, and while he also wasn’t about to try to pursue the Rebel army immediately, by next morning he’d put together a heavy force of two brigades plus a cavalry regiment—strong enough, he felt, to press Beauregard and see what he could see—and maybe even sweep up a Rebel brigade or two and get revenge for his humiliation of the previous day. Instead, Sherman received a lesson from a man who knew how to teach them well.

As he marched his force south down the Corinth road, Sherman found no Confederates to kill but many Rebel hospital tents containing hundreds of dead and dying of both sides and those too injured to be moved. These unfortunates were being tended by overworked surgeons, whom Sherman arrested and then released on a promise that they would continue treating the wounded but, afterward, turn themselves in to General Grant as prisoners.

About five miles out, Sherman encountered a sizable Rebel camp near a clearing consisting of a large number of fallen trees.
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Seeing gray-clad cavalry inside the camp, Sherman ordered an attack; an infantry regiment was sent out as skirmishers, backed up by an infantry brigade in line, plus his own cavalry regiment hovering on the flanks. If Sherman had known who was inside the enemy camp, he might have thought twice about attacking it, or at least proceeded more cautiously, because the man in charge of the Rebel
cavalry was Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose mantra soon engulfed him: “War means fightin’, and fightin’ means killin’.”

Instead of doing the prudent thing and galloping off, Forrest took one look at the Yankee host marching toward him and gathered his own people plus some 220 mounted Texas Rangers, along with several other scattered cavalry companies, and immediately charged pell-mell into Sherman’s advance, shooting, shouting, and slashing with sabers.