Shiloh, 1862 (44 page)

The shock of this audacious performance caused the Federal skirmishers to drop their weapons and run away, followed by the Yankee cavalry, as Forrest’s horsemen tore into them too. Sherman suddenly found himself in the unenviable position of a man who has stalked and cornered a beast in the woods, only to find it is meaner than he is. Aghast at the sight of his fleeing men, he ordered the brigade to move quickly into a defensive position.

Known for his almost superhuman courage and daring, Forrest meanwhile had galloped so hard that he had outraced his own men and abruptly discovered he was alone amid the disorganized but still dangerous enemy, who closed in shouting, “Kill him, kill him!” With saber in one hand and blazing pistol in the other, his horse rearing and plunging, Forrest fiendishly slashed out until one blue-coat pushed the barrel of his rifle against Forrest’s side and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet tearing into his back. Enraged, Forrest reached down and snatched one of his tormentors by the collar and jerked him up behind him on the horse. Then, using this startled passenger as a shield, Forrest galloped through the furor of gunfire and bayonets back to his own lines, where he unceremoniously dumped the amazed Yankee soldier on the ground.
⁶
After that, Sherman decided he had had enough, and what was soon known as the Battle of Fallen Timbers became the last engagement of the Shiloh Campaign.

No one could have been more shocked, or more delighted, at Sherman’s return to the old camp at the Shiloh church than musician fourth class John Cockerill, when who should come trotting up at the head of one of Sherman’s regiments but his
own father
, not dead at all but fresh from having served in the Fallen Timbers fiasco. Father and son had not seen each other for three days, and the reunion was dramatic, according to the younger Cockerill, who said his father “Dismounted and gave me the most affectionate embrace my life had ever known.”

As the Confederates retreated the previous afternoon, young Cockerill had left his position in the lines and, with nowhere else to go, found the road leading back to the old camps of the 17th Ohio, his father’s regiment, which had just been recaptured from the Confederates. The camp was deserted, the regiment gone, vanished, and “no one could tell me when it would return,” he said. The tents were riddled with bullet and shrapnel holes and completely pillaged, including Cockerill’s own personal possessions, but there was likely no happier boy on the battlefield, or, for that matter, on earth, now that his father had returned from the dead.

It did not always turn out that way. Ann Wallace, following her dreadful night on the
Minnehaha
, received stupendously uplifting news at ten o’clock next morning when her brother Cyrus Dickey arrived with word that her precious “Will had been brought in (after the rebels had been put to flight) and, Oh joy! He was
breathing. I flew to the adjoining boat where he was,” she said, and found him on a narrow mattress on the floor. “His face was flushed, but he was breathing naturally, so like himself, save for that fearful wound in his temple.” He seemed to recognize Ann’s voice and squeezed her hand. “He knows me! He knows me!” she exclaimed. “I could appreciate all the feelings of Mary and Martha at the tomb of Lazarus.”

The boat took the Wallace party to Savannah, to Grant’s headquarters at the Cherry mansion, in the same room where lay the injured general Charles F. Smith, now gravely ill. Ann Wallace sat by her husband’s side for three more days, holding his hand and trying to speak with him. Others of his staff and his brothers held his hand as well, but he responded only to Ann, she thought, because his touch recognized her wedding bands. Predictably, infection set in and hope faded. Wallace became delirious, and on Thursday “he pressed my hand long and fondly to his heart,” she said, “then he waved me away and said, ‘We meet in heaven.’ ” He died shortly afterward.

“Those last days had been so cherished, so unexpected,” Ann wrote later. “I raised my heart in grateful thanks for this, and also that [his] dearest friends were with him at his death. God had led me there so that I should not meet the great sorrow alone.”

The sorrow of course was not confined to the Wallace family. Captain Thruston recalled the sad discovery of the body of his friend Captain Battle the evening of the second day of Shiloh. Two of his college roommates had found him and notified a third, Maj. John R. Chamberlain of the 81st Ohio. “The last time I saw Allen Battle alive was in June, 1858, at Miami University, the year I graduated,” Chamberlain wrote. “When I saw him next it was April 8,
1862, dead in the camp of Hurlbut’s division on the battlefield of Shiloh.” Two of his classmates were watching over him, Chamberlain said. “There was a smile on his face, his right hand was raised, the forefinger extended as if pointing to some object, when the fatal bullet struck him down.”

His friends fashioned a rude coffin made of cracker (hardtack) boxes, and a deep grave was dug on sloping ground in the rear of the 31st Indiana Regiment. Chamberlain used an ax to cut a big chip out of a large black oak tree facing the grave, “so as to guide us to the spot should we ever be required to do so.” As the coffin was lowered into the ground, wrote Captain Thruston, “none of us had any thought other than that we were laying to his last rest a gallant soldier, a sincere man, who thought that the cause for which he fought was the right thing to die for.” At that point the carefree days of college, for these old chums, must have seemed a million miles away.

At last the final results of the Battle of Shiloh reached Richmond. Beauregard had tried to smooth it over by noting all of the enemy regimental colors and Yankee officers the army had captured, and restating at length the “glorious, heroic,” and nearly victorious sweep of the field Sunday, before he retired the army out of “discretion” in the face of a superior enemy force. Now it finally sank in to Jefferson Davis that Albert Sidney Johnston, his friend since boyhood, had indeed been killed, and he wept bitterly in private, moaning, “The cause could have spared a whole state, rather than that great soldier.” Later he wrote, “When he fell, I realized that our strongest pillar had been broken.”

Davis, an accomplished West Point–trained soldier, illustrious colonel in the Mexican conflict, and former U.S. secretary of war, immediately read through all of Beauregard’s latest posturing about “victory,” but he did not retract the promising statement he had read before the Confederate Congress a day earlier, which had been based on Beauregard’s original telegram. Like the Creole, Davis decided to leave the best face on it, for the South needed all the bucking up it could get. George McClellan had recently landed a Yankee army at Hampton Roads, below Richmond, and was slowly working his way up the peninsula toward the Confederate capital with an estimated 120,000 men.

Yet Davis never forgave Beauregard for calling the army back on Sunday evening. In his memoirs he wrote, “At the ensuing nightfall our victorious army retired from the front and abandoned its vantage-ground on the bluffs, which had been won at such a cost of blood. The enemy thereby had room and opportunity to come out from their corner, reoccupy the strong positions from which they had been driven, and dispose their troops on more favorable ground.”

U
NLIKE
B
EAUREGARD
, G
RANT DID NOT SEND GLOWING
reports about the battle either to St. Louis or to his nation’s capital; in fact, according to Halleck’s testimony in the Official Records, Grant’s report of the event did not “give any satisfactory information.”

Furious that a battle had been brought on against his orders, Halleck telegraphed to Grant on April 8, after it was over, “Your army is not now in condition to resist attack. It must be made so without delay.” Halleck also apparently made the recommendation that Grant retreat his army across the river, a suggestion that Grant declined on grounds that it would “demoralize” his soldiers. Then, on April 9, the supreme commander of the Union army in the West boarded a steamboat in St. Louis and proceeded toward Pittsburg Landing to relieve Ulysses Grant and take charge of the army himself.

The report on the battle that Grant submitted begins, “It becomes my duty to report another battle fought between two great armies, one contending for the maintenance of the best government ever devised, the other for its destruction,” but it was painfully short on details, leaving Lincoln and the government to learn the particulars through the newspapers, which of course sensationalized the event. Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
complained, “Gen. Grant’s lame dispatch is as foggy as are most others,” and the
Cincinnati Commercial
condemned Grant’s report as “loose, rambling [and] slovenly.”

Word quickly spread that there had been a terrible battle and a Northern victory at Pittsburg Landing, but the first comprehensive story was written several days after the fighting ended by Whitelaw Reid of the
Cincinnati Gazette
. The story was widely reprinted in the eastern press. In more than 19,000 words Reid’s gloomy narrative was not about “a great victory for the Union, but a near disaster,” in which he chronicled all the blunders that had nearly shattered Grant’s army. Grant himself came in for his share of the blame, as the North (and the South as well) tried to absorb the mind-numbing slaughter.

When everything was said and done, the combined casualties at Shiloh amounted to 23,741, which is more, as historian Shelby Foote has pointed out, in a single battle than in all America’s previous wars—American Revolution, War of 1812, and Mexican War—
combined
. The butcher’s bill included 1,754 Union dead, 8,408 wounded, and 2,885 missing or captured for a total of 13,047. Confederate losses were 1,723 killed, 8,012 wounded, and 959 missing or captured for a total of 10,694. The casualties at Shiloh were fully
twice
those in all the earlier battles of the Civil War.