Shiloh, 1862 (47 page)

Because of his status and credibility as a former Rebel general, Beauregard was offered a post as the drawer of winning tickets in the Louisiana lottery, an organization that was generally considered a hotbed of bribery and other corruption. He nevertheless accepted the position, for which he was paid handsomely, until the U.S. Congress banned the lottery in 1891. Beauregard died at home, in his bed, of heart trouble, in 1893.

For his part in the Shiloh attack, Beauregard’s chief of staff Col. Thomas Jordan, who had devised the battle plans, was made General Thomas Jordan. After Beauregard was relieved, Jordan served as chief of staff for Braxton Bragg, but when Beauregard went to Charleston Jordan accompanied him. After the war he had a somewhat colorful career, becoming editor in chief of the
Memphis Appeal
and writing a popular book titled
The Campaigns of Lieutenant-General Forrest
. In 1868 he became a soldier of fortune, throwing his lot with the Cuban Liberation Army, of which he became general in chief. He resigned in 1870 and returned to New York City, where he became an editor and wrote about the Civil War. He died there in 1895 at the age of 76.

For two years after Beauregard’s departure Braxton Bragg retained command of the Army of Tennessee, as it was known, operating mostly in middle Tennessee and then Chattanooga, from where he constantly sought to regain Nashville and Kentucky. Bragg was a harsh commander disliked by both his men and his officers, but he fought some tremendously tough and bloody battles for the Confederacy, such as Stones River, Perryville, and Chickamauga—winning the last, only to let the Federals slip from his grasp and later
drive him from the state. After that, he stepped down and became a military adviser to Jefferson Davis, one of the few people in Richmond he could get along with. After the war he held several engineering positions, quarreling with everyone, in Texas, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama, where, in 1876, he was buried in the Magnolia Cemetery following a fatal heart attack.

Bishop-General Leonidas Polk never accomplished anything much more notable on the battlefield than getting himself blown nearly in two by a cannonball during the Atlanta Campaign. But he was adored by his men as a brave, industrious, and able commander at Shiloh and afterward. At Pine Mountain, Georgia, on June 14, 1864, while studying an enemy position in company with the army commander Joseph E. Johnston and another corps commander, William Hardee, the group was spotted by Sherman, no less, through his spyglasses. Sherman quickly ordered a nearby artillery battery to fire on these conspicuous Rebel officers, and the somewhat portly Polk was slow in finding cover; the third shot tore through his torso, killing him instantly. His principal legacy is having founded the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, for which he laid the cornerstone in 1860, right before the war broke out.

William J. Hardee remained a competent but uninspired corps commander, nicknamed “Old Reliable” by his troops. He could not abide Bragg and was instrumental in having him relieved after the Battle of Chattanooga. After the war, Hardee decided to become a planter in Alabama where, in 1873, he died, and is buried in Selma.

John Cabell Breckinridge continued to serve in the Rebel army but like so many others he developed an intense distaste for Bragg, who returned the favor by accusing the 14th Vice President of the United States of being a drunkard. Ultimately Breckinridge got
himself assigned to the eastern theater and performed creditably for Lee’s army before resigning his commission in early 1865 to become Confederate secretary of war. After the surrender Breckinridge fled the country, first to Cuba, then England, and then to Canada, until the talk of hanging important Confederate officials died down, when he returned to Lexington, Kentucky, and resumed his law practice, resisting efforts by others to have him again run for office. He vehemently opposed the Ku Klux Klan and became president of a railroad before his end came, in 1875, from cirrhosis of the liver.

The Irish general Pat Cleburne went on after Shiloh to become known as the “Stonewall of the West,” commanding a division through all of the heavy fighting. In 1864, however, he provoked the animosity of many in the high command by circulating a paper recommending that slaves be made into Confederate soldiers in exchange for their freedom. Cleburne had calculated that unless this was done the South would simply run out of manpower by 1864 or 1865. The suggestion proved so outrageous that it prompted the Rebel general Robert Toombs of Georgia, who had been the Confederacy’s first secretary of state, to declare indignantly, “If slaves can be made into soldiers, then our whole
theory
of slavery is wrong.”

In the final year of the war, Jefferson Davis at last came around to Cleburne’s way of thinking and slaves were offered positions in the Confederate army. When Toombs raised his objection again, Davis countered with his own declaration, stating, “If the Confederacy dies, then its tombstone should read: ‘Died of a Theory.’ ”

Many think that Cleburne’s impolitic slavery proposal was responsible for his rising no higher than division commander
instead of being given a corps, or even an army. It may also have been his death warrant, since corps and army commanders are not nearly so exposed to fire as generals commanding divisions and brigades.

Not long after the Battle of Atlanta Cleburne found himself riding north in middle Tennessee toward a rendezvous with the Yankee army at the terrible Battle of Franklin. When they passed by Ashwood, near Columbia, ancestral home of Leonidas Polk’s family, Cleburne noticed a lovely ivy-covered brick Episcopal chapel on the property and remarked to one of his staff that “The church is so beautiful that to be buried there would almost be worth dying for.” Next afternoon Cleburne, along with four other Rebel generals, were slain on the field at Franklin, and soon enough Pat Cleburne got his wish of being laid to rest in the cemetery of the lovely brick chapel at Ashwood, Tennessee.
²

Nathan Bedford Forrest survived the war but no one knows how. One of his staff remarked that he fights “as if he courts death.” He soon gained his own large cavalry command in the West and outfoxed his Yankee opposition at almost every turn, causing Jefferson Davis in his memoirs to lament that he did not realize just how great a general Forrest was until nearly the end of the war. His reputation was tarnished, however, by the infamous slaughter by his troops of black soldiers during the Battle of Fort Pillow on the Tennessee River in April 1864.

At war’s end, Forrest dismissed his command with a brief farewell speech in which he told them, “You have been good soldiers,
you can be good citizens.” In the first year after the war, however, Forrest joined the newly organized Ku Klux Klan, rising to its leadership until the Klan’s activities became so obnoxious to him that in 1869 he issued an order for the society to disband itself, which it did.
³
He became a Presbyterian, returned to farming, and died peacefully in his bed in 1877 at the age of 56.

Colonel David Stuart, whose Illinoisans held so bravely on the Union left at Shiloh, could never escape the adultery scandal that embroiled him in Chicago. He went on with Grant to fight at Vicksburg and on Grant’s personal recommendation was nominated to brigadier general by President Lincoln, which at least to Stuart’s mind would have vindicated him. But Chicago politics and vengeful social connections had a long political reach, and his nomination was denied by Congress, prompting Stuart to resign from the army in 1863. Grant, furious, lambasted the politicians who were responsible, but to no avail. Unable to fulfill his promise of taking his brigade to get drunk in New Orleans, Stuart instead opened a law practice in Detroit, where he died in 1868 at the age of 52.

Six months after Shiloh, William Camm of the 14th Illinois, whom we first met at Fort Donelson over the body of the beautiful dead Confederate boy, returned to Winchester, Illinois, and married his hometown sweetheart, Miss Kitty Mason, who produced a child that died in infancy, followed by her own death in 1864.

Afterward Camm became a kind of Renaissance man, teaching, writing, painting—at which he was accomplished
⁴
—and dabbling in the quasi-socialist philosophy of Henry George, the “single-tax” man. In 1865 he remarried, fathered five children, and died in 1906 at the age of 69.

Of our correspondents in the front lines, Private Henry Morton Stanley, after his capture by the Yankees, was consigned to the dismal Camp Douglas near Chicago, where dead Confederate prisoners were carted off daily by the wagonload, and himself nearly died of disease, before talking his way out by enlisting in the U.S. Navy, from which he deserted as soon as possible. Stanley made his way back to his native Wales, only to have his mother disown him at the doorstep. Without resources, he managed to make a career as an explorer during the age of the great African explorations and began a lucrative business enterprise by selling accounts of his exploits to newspapers. In 1869 James Gordon Bennett, Jr., of the
New York Herald
employed him exclusively to find the Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who had gone to Africa in 1866 and not been heard from since. Stanley found him in 1871, living happily in what is now Tanzania, which, almost overnight, made Stanley a world hero. In 1899 he was knighted in London, where he died five years later, one of the most prominent, and most controversial,
⁵
of the 19th-century explorers.

Ambrose Bierce fought the war to the end and was discharged with the rank of major. He settled afterward in San Francisco, where he became one of America’s most prominent (and cynical) authors. His most distinguished works had roots in his experiences in the Civil War, including the story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” whose title, at least, probably comes from the Shiloh battle. Some of his books still remain popular in print, including the acerbic
Devil’s Dictionary
. In December 1913 Bierce disappeared into the chaos of the Mexican revolution and was never heard from again.

Another who gained notoriety as a journalist was 16-year-old musician fourth class John A. Cockerill, who after the war established himself prominently at midwestern newspapers before becoming editor in chief of Joseph Pulitzer’s sensational
New York World
. Other diarists or memoirists attained rank; Pvt. Robert H. Fleming, for instance, who was wounded and found his way to the hospital boat only to discover his dying brother was aboard, became a captain before the war ended. (His older brother died in his arms while the Monday battle raged, and even in the confusion Fleming somehow persuaded the boat’s carpenter to cobble together a rude coffin, in which he buried his brother in a proper grave that he dug himself atop the bluff instead of in the common pit where the Union slain were laid.)

Almost immediately word began to filter back north, far from the gunfire and the madding crowd at Shiloh, that a great battle was in progress along the Tennessee River. It reached Bowling Green, Kentucky, and 21-year-old Josie Underwood’s family on April 6, while the first day’s slaughter was still in progress, but details were sparse until
the following week, when the fuller picture was drawn. On that Sunday, April 6, Josie wrote in her diary, “We are horribly uneasy. There were rumors today of a big battle. If there was, all we love on both sides must be in it. God have mercy and stop this cruel war—I pray—”

By April 15 there was definite confirmation: “The rumor is true!” Josie wrote. “Oh, the horror of it! Every soul I know on either side was in that battle!”

Josie’s 15-year-old brother Warner had received a bad gunshot wound in his arm while wearing Yankee blue. He staggered home still in uniform, the right coat sleeve split in two and wrapped in bandages that had been applied on the battlefield. Josie tried to dress his gash, she said, but “When I unwound the dirty bandages—
maggots
fell out, and the wound itself was full of them and stunk so—it nearly knocked me down.” It was hard, she said, to keep from fainting, and all Warner would say was, “God pity the poor fellows who are wounded so much worse and can’t come home.”

As more reports of the battle came in Josie’s mother, who at the first hint of trouble had imprudently gone on a steamboat to Pittsburg Landing to look for Warner, told of “much indignation against Gen. Grant. Instead of being on the field or wherever [he] should have been, he was on a boat
drunk
—and but for Buell’s army reaching there by forced marches, the result of the battle would have been a terrible defeat for Union army.” These were the first impressions of Josie’s mother upon arriving at Pittsburg Landing.

“The feeling between the rebel and Union people gets bitterer, and bitterer as the war goes on,” Josie lamented. “Lizzy Wright sits on her front porch across the street and I on ours and merely the coldest bows and never a visit now.”

A few days later came news that Josie’s favorite cousin, Jack Henry, had been killed at Shiloh fighting as a captain with the Memphis Grays. His brother Gus got there in time to have him die in his arms. Jack Henry had been a close friend and law partner of Tom Grafton and was the one who had arranged the little charade on Josie’s last night in Memphis so that she and Grafton could say goodbye alone. “A nobler, sweet soul never entered Heaven,” Josie told her diary, “no matter how wrong the cause for which he died, he believed in it—to him it was sacred. Oh! The
crime
of the men on both sides. Fanatics North and South who brought about this cruel war.”