Shiloh, 1862 (45 page)

Nothing like it had ever happened before in the Western Hemisphere, and the Northern people’s initial elation at a great Union
victory soon turned to shock, and then to outrage, as the casualty lists came in.

For Grant, it was the end of a grand illusion. Based on the mediocre performance of the Confederates at Bowling Green, Nashville, and Forts Henry and Donelson, Grant, like so many others, had convinced himself that a Union victory in a single great battle would cause the Confederacy to dissolve. However, after Shiloh, he reversed himself entirely with the stark conclusion that the Union could be restored only by the total conquest and subjugation of the South.

The Shiloh story that Whitelaw Reid told was even grimmer than the harsh casualty figures suggested; his was a tale of blundering, stupidity, cowardice, and sloth. All of the mistakes glared out prominently: the failure to fortify, failure to reconnoiter, failure to read the signs of impending attack, failure even to have a battle plan in case of attack—all of this in addition to the sordid spectacle of the cringing masses below the bluff who had deserted the Union lines.

Soon other stories circulated, accusations such as that Grant’s army had been so surprised that hundreds of Union soldiers were bayoneted to death in their tents or while eating their breakfast; that Grant had been dallying at a mansion ten miles from the battlefield instead of staying with his troops; that he had so little control of his army that most of it ran away at the first shot; that he had been saved only by the miraculous, last-moment arrival of Buell; and that he had been negligent in not pursuing Beauregard’s beaten army and destroying it. For his part, Grant did not enhance his reputation when he denied being surprised, telling a newspaper that even if the Rebels had told him where and when they planned to make their
move, “we could not have been better prepared,” nor when he continued to insist that he had been attacked by 70,000 Confederates.

Next were the usual charges of drunkenness and incompetence; references were made to Grant’s indifferent military bearing and his inattention to his troops. Presently the lieutenant governor of Ohio arrived at Pittsburg Landing to report back to the Cincinnati
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that there was an “intense feeling [in the army] against Generals Grant and Prentiss that … they ought to be court-martialed and shot.” (This abrupt public animus against Prentiss appears to have been caused by the fact that in his official report Grant failed to credit Prentiss with stemming the Confederate onslaught by holding out in the Hornet’s Nest until nearly dark; thus, all that most people knew was that Prentiss had surrendered to the enemy with nearly his entire command.)

So, instead of being hailed as the victor of Shiloh, Grant was suddenly denounced from the halls of Congress to the White House as a hapless blunderer and alcoholic, and a chorus arose for his removal. Soon the clamor was such that Lincoln was forced to deal with it. Popular lore has it that he told the critics, “Find out what kind of whiskey Grant drinks and send a barrel of it to my other generals.” There is no firm evidence that he said this, but there
is
evidence that Lincoln said of Grant, “I can’t spare that man, he fights.”

For the most part, Grant sloughed off his detractors, but the furor nearly unhinged Sherman, who wrote a volcanic letter to the offending Ohio lieutenant governor that stopped just short of challenging him to duel. He accused the politician of “preferring camp stories to authentic data then within your reach,” and “circulating libels and falsehoods.”

The fiery Ohioan reserved his most caustic scorn, however, for editors and reporters, who, he claimed in a letter to his wife, “are the chief cause of this unhappy war—they fan the flames of local hatred and keep alive those prejudices which have forced friends into hostile ranks. In the North the people have been made to believe that those of the South are horrid barbarians, unworthy of Christian burials, whilst at the South, the people have been made to believe that we wanted to steal their negros, rob them of their property, pollute their families [an allusion to miscegenation], and to reduce the whites to below the level of their own negros.”

Warming to his subject, Sherman continued, “If the newspapers are to be our government, I would prefer Bragg, Beauregard … or any other high Confederate officers instead.” “The American press,” he wrote his brother Senator John Sherman, “is a shame and a reproach to a civilized people. When a man is too lazy to work, & too cowardly to steal, he becomes an editor & manufactures public opinion.”

Halleck arrived in the middle of this uproar to personally take charge of the army—or, more precisely, three armies: Grant’s, Buell’s, and a third army belonging to newly promoted Maj. Gen. John Pope, who, on the same day as the ordeal at Shiloh, had defeated and captured the Rebel forces at Island Number 10 in the Mississippi and was on his way to Pittsburg Landing.

Grant was rewarded with nothing for his troubles at the Shiloh fight, except what amounted to a demotion. He was named second in command under Halleck, but for all practical purposes the general was shunted aside, since Halleck barely spoke to him and consulted with him not at all. When Grant protested, Halleck slapped him down with this rejoinder, “For the last three months I have done everything in my power to ward off the attacks made upon you.” This
was mostly a gratuitous falsehood, since Halleck himself was behind many of them; for instance, he had just mailed a letter to a fellow general in Washington describing Grant as “little more than a common gambler and drunkard.” Still, when Lincoln had demanded to know the reason for the shocking casualty rate at Shiloh, Halleck at least had the decency not to hold Grant responsible; instead he put the blame on “the Confederate generals and their soldiers.”

Now with an enormous army of some 120,000 men, and 200 guns, Halleck announced to his superiors in Washington that he would “leave here tomorrow morning and our army will be before Corinth by tomorrow night,” a statement that proved to be ridiculous. Whatever compelled Halleck to say such a thing is beyond puzzling, given that it took him a full month to move the army a mere 20 miles to attack the Rebel bastion.

From the first day, Halleck marched his army as if he were conducting a kind of long-distance siege. For him the wilderness of northern Mississippi was filled with ghosts and shadows and a Rebel behind every tree. At first Halleck estimated Beauregard’s force at 75,000, but with each day the estimates grew until it became 200,000. In fact, even when the Rebel general Van Dorn finally arrived from Arkansas with his 15,000, Beauregard could muster no more than 52,000 men actually fit for duty, owing to the Shiloh casualties and to a terrifying outbreak of diseases due to lack of sanitary facilities in the cramped town.
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To ward off any chance of being surprised, as Grant had been at Shiloh, Halleck each morning would creep his army less than a mile forward toward Corinth, then spend the rest of the day having it dig in and construct elaborate fortifications along an eight-mile front, as if a Rebel attack were imminent. This nonsense continued day after day under the scorching Mississippi sun, and the men began complaining about the relentless excavations; there was even talk of mutiny. But “Old Brains,” whom one of his colleagues described as “short, stout, and rather stupid-looking,” was taking no chances.

For his part, Beauregard realized he was in a grave situation. With his army wracked by disease and devastated by the fighting at Shiloh, it was certainly in no shape to withstand the ordeal of a siege by the huge Union host now closing in. Likewise, the Creole understood that his army was still the South’s last best hope for staving off the Yankees in the western theater. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and Beauregard, if nothing else, was inventive.

As Halleck’s armies began to converge on Corinth, their cavalry scouts were unsettled by the noise of train whistles and the sounds of cheering within the city, signs that the Rebels were being reinforced. They saw intimidating siege guns protruding from embrasures in the enemy fortifications. When deserters wandered into Federal camps and were placed under interrogation, they told of many new regiments arriving from other Confederate commands. Gen. John Pope reported to Halleck, “The enemy is reinforcing heavily, by trains, in my front and on my left. The cars are running constantly and the cheering is immense every time they unload in
front of me. I have no doubt, from all appearances, that I shall be attacked in heavy force at daylight.”

As Halleck absorbed all of this, his notion of a total envelopment of the city evaporated from his bookish mind. He decided to stay outside the Confederate defenses and await developments, which were not long in coming.

The music of military bands wafted across the parapets of Corinth’s fortifications into the Federal camps close to the front; during pauses in such patriotic or sentimental tunes as “Dixie” or “Sweet Lorena,” the Yankees caught the martial blare of bugles calling men to action. At night they could see Rebel sentries, backlit by campfires, who seemed oddly impervious to sharpshooters’ bullets.

Beauregard, of course, was pulling off the greatest con of the war. Withdrawal in the face of an enemy is among the most difficult and dangerous of military maneuvers, and the Creole did it with such daring and finesse that when Halleck’s men finally entered Corinth they found practically nothing to indicate that the Rebels had even been there.

Most of the sick and wounded had been moved out south on what were supposed to be “reinforcement trains.” Military stores, arms, and artillery had been evacuated as well, and there was nary a man to shoot at. The arriving “troop trains” were the work of a lone Confederate locomotive that ran day and night up and down the various tracks that converged on Corinth. Every so often it would stop and blow its whistle, a signal for everyone in hearing range to start cheering. The bulletproof “sentries” were cornfield scarecrows in worn-out Rebel uniforms, and the fearsome-looking siege guns were only “Quaker” artillery—tree trunks stripped of bark and painted with thick tar pitch, mounted on busted and useless
artillery caissons. The informative Rebel “deserters” were plants sent by Beauregard himself to falsely report heavy reinforcements to the Confederate army. It is ironic that—aside from his performance at First Manassas—the Corinth hoax became, arguably, Beauregard’s finest achievement during the war.

It was during this slow advance to Corinth that the Union army nearly lost Ulysses Grant. As he sat in his headquarters tent day after day, puffing incessantly on his cigar, Grant finally reached his limit of tolerance for Halleck’s shabby treatment and decided to resign from the service. He made arrangements for a 30-day leave, but when Sherman went to see him he found that Grant’s staff had packed up all his camp desks and trunks and records and stacked them for shipping next morning. “Sherman, you know I am in the way here,” Grant said resignedly. “I have stood it as long as I can.” When Sherman asked where he was going, Grant said St. Louis, and when Sherman inquired if he had any business there, Grant replied, “Not a bit.”

To Sherman, this was the worst possible thing that could happen to the army. He had not only become close to Grant, he had begun to see in him the makings of a great military marshal. The two of them seemed to have a kind of subliminal understanding of each other, and Sherman was determined not to let Grant abandon his career. He insisted that Grant would be miserable sitting on the sidelines while other generals fought the war. He argued that their real problems were nothing more than the made-up lies of his own personal nemesis, the press, which, he reiterated, was “dirty, irresponsible, corrupt, malicious, etc.”

Sherman saved his sharpest invective for the rumors and tales that Grant was a drunkard and forecast that the press would soon “drop back into the abyss of infamy that they deserve.” In fact, he used himself as living proof, noting that only a few months ago he had been pilloried as “crazy,” but now, after the Battle of Shiloh, he was lauded in the newspapers as a great hero and a wise military leader. If Grant remained in the army, Sherman said in conclusion, “some happy accident might restore him to favor and his true place.”