Shiloh, 1862 (6 page)

When the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln as their candidate, the Southern press whipped up its populace to such a pitch of fury it seemed as if John Brown himself had been put on the ticket. Lincoln was lampooned in words and cartoons as an archetypal abolitionist—a kind of Antichrist who would turn loose the slaves to rape, murder, and pillage. This goes a long way in explaining why fewer than one in three Confederate soldiers came from slaveholding families. To them, it wasn’t to keep slaves that they joined the army, it was rather to save their homes and families against the notion of slaves gone wild.
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Meantime, the Northern press was pouring fuel on the fire by
damning southerners as brutal lash-wielding torturers and heartless family separators. By the time hostilities broke out, neither side had much use for the other. One elderly Tennessean later penned this sentiment: “I wish there was a river of fire a mile wide between the North and South, that would burn with unquenchable fury forevermore, and that it could never be passable to the endless ages of eternity by any living creature.” With talk like that it’s a wonder the war didn’t start earlier.

The new alignment of political parties ultimately ensured a 40 percent plurality victory for Lincoln.
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With the inclusion of Minnesota (1858) and Oregon (1859) as free states, the southerners’ worst fears were about to be realized—complete control of both Houses of Congress and the White House by free-state, antislavery politicians.

Much of the Southern apprehension that Lincoln would free the slaves was misplaced. No matter how distasteful he found the practice, the overarching philosophy that drove Lincoln was a hard pragmatism that did not include forcible abolition by the federal government, probably for the simple reason that he could not envision any political way of accomplishing it at the time. By then, though, southerners’ mistrust had degenerated into such a caustic fog of hatred, recrimination, and outrageous statements that most in the South simply did not believe Lincoln when he promised he had no interest in abolishing slavery where it already existed.

However, like a considerable number of Northern people, Lincoln was decidedly against allowing slavery to spread into new states
and territories. By denying slaveholders the right to extend their boundaries he not only would have weakened the slave power in Washington, but over time it would have almost inevitably resulted in the voluntary abolition of slavery, since sooner or later the Southern land would have worn out from overfarming with cotton.

The southerners weren’t sticking around to find out. In short order, pugnacious South Carolina voted to secede from the Union, followed by eight other Deep South states that were heavily invested in cotton. After South Carolina drove Federal forces from Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor, Lincoln called for the other states to produce 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, which resulted in further secession. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined the Confederacy rather than fight against their fellow southerners.

A Southern woman was heard to lament at the time that “Because of incompatibility of temper … we have hated each other so. If we could only separate, a
‘separation a l’agreable,’
as the French say it, and not have a horrid fight for divorce.”

That was not to be. During the early months of 1861 Lincoln was able to quell secession in several of the so-called border states—including Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland—by a combination of politics and force, including suspension of the Bill of Rights. But by the spring of 1862 it was painfully apparent that the “horrid fight for divorce” could not be avoided. To be sure, there had been fighting and killing in 1861, but with the exception of Bull Run and a few others most of those actions were in the nature of skirmishes that did not rise to the dignity of a “battle.”

That was the reason why on Sunday morning, April 6, 1862, tens of thousands of boys in blue were encamped at Pittsburg
Landing, and tens of thousands more dressed in gray or butternut were stealthily marching toward them through the deep Tennessee woods. Everyone knew that a big battle had to be fought; battles were what settled things. The armies had gathered; the line had been drawn. It is impossible to guess how much of the foregoing history these soldiers apprehended, but most of them by then understood they were destined to be part of something very great, and very awful, and that sooner rather than later they were going to see that elephant.

B
Y THE TIME HE REACHED
P
ITTSBURG
L
ANDING
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman was a changed man. That is to say he wasn’t “insane” any more, or a “nervous Nellie,” or “flighty,” which was how the press had portrayed him six months earlier when he lost command at Louisville for expressing fear he was going to be attacked and then having the gall to tell Washington that 200,000 Federal troops would be needed to subdue Rebels in the Mississippi River Valley. Instead, after a period of recuperation, Sherman (“Cump,” to his friends since West Point days) regained his confidence: A sharp, bristling personality, he began to channel the staunch singularity of purpose he would demonstrate for the remainder of the war.

For now, though, Sherman seemed to be overcompensating for the Louisville disgrace. From the time of his arrival at Pittsburg Landing he refused even to entertain the possibility of an attack
by the large Rebel army known to be converging just twenty miles south at Corinth, Mississippi.

As the senior regular army officer he should have known better. As commander of one of the six Yankee infantry divisions recently arrived at the landing, Brigadier General Sherman was also, nominally, in charge of the day-to-day operations at the encampment, while Ulysses (“Sam” to his West Point classmates) Grant exercised overall control from his headquarters at Savannah, Tennessee, a town located nine miles downstream on the Tennessee River, in an opulent mansion offered to him by William H. Cherry, a wealthy slaveholding planter and Union sympathizer.

Owing to the riparian topography, the Union position at Pittsburg resembled a giant cornucopia of roughly 12 square miles, with its stem, north of the landing, less than a mile wide, and its mouth opening nearly 3 miles wide to the south between the Tennessee River and Owl Creek. By some amazing blunder, the most inexperienced divisions—those of Sherman and Brig. Gen. Benjamin M. Prentiss
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—were placed in the outer lines at the maw of the cornucopia, close to the Rebel army at Corinth. It was later explained, quite unsatisfactorily, that the encampments were arranged by engineers with regard to sanitation, nearness of water and firewood, and similar conveniences and without concern for their ability to defend the field—in other words, disposed the way a peacetime army might be. The various camps to the south along the cornucopia’s mouth were not even set in a continuous line but placed helter-skelter with huge, heavily forested gaps in between. The whole of the Pittsburg
Landing area had become a virtual tent city, with more than 5,000 of the big, conical eight-man Sibley tents occupying the five division encampment areas.

William Camm, lieutenant colonel of the 14th Illinois, had located for himself a swimming hole in Owl Creek where he liked to bathe. One day while he was enjoying his ablutions, two soldiers appeared, carrying squirrels they had shot for dinner. He inquired if they had seen any pickets protecting the outer edges of the encampment. They had not, they said, and neither had he. “We must have some queer generals,” Camm remarked that night to his diary, “with the enemy in force only eighteen miles away.”

Even worse, although the Federal army had begun arriving at Pittsburg Landing more than two weeks earlier, neither Sherman, Grant, nor anyone else had made the slightest attempt to entrench or erect fortifications, which in all probability would have deterred a Confederate attack. Instead, they spent their days teaching the men drill formations in the farm fields and holding spit-and-polish dress parades.

What has never been satisfactorily explained is the role of Grant’s engineering officer, Lt. Col. James Birdseye McPherson, first in his West Point class of 1853 and destined to become a major general and commander of the Army of the Tennessee before his untimely death during the Battle of Atlanta.
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It remains unknown whether McPherson protested the placement of the campsites in
such indefensible and unfortified positions, but in any case Grant, as Maj. Gen. Charles F. Smith’s successor, must have approved the arrangement, even tacitly. For his part, Sherman seemed to rely on his original assessment of the area on March 18, not long after his arrival, when he wrote to Grant, “Magnificent plain for camping and drilling, and a military point of great strength.”

And it might have been, if advantage of the military opportunities had been taken. Since the position was protected on both flanks by water, if either Grant or Sherman had told the engineers that the mouth of the cornucopia must be strongly fortified with embrasures, protected batteries, head logs, abatis,
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with cleared fields of fire and other expedient military architecture, the encampment would have been nearly impregnable. But this was not done, and to Grant, and to a lesser extent Sherman, great blame attaches; their later excuses that it was more desirable for the soldiers to train and learn how to drill than it was for them to fortify seem lame and self-serving, especially in light of what happened. Sherman even went to the point of excusing himself “because [building fortifications] would have made our raw men timid,” as though fortifying would have somehow suggested that the Yankee soldiers were scared of their Rebel adversaries. Equally cavalier was the notion that the Confederate army would never come out from behind its own fortifications at Corinth. In fact, what Sherman and Grant
took for a “military point of great strength,” with its flanks protected by water, was viewed by the Rebel generals as a trap for the Yankee army, if they could catch them napping.

It so happened that among Grant’s orders from higher headquarters in St. Louis was a directive from his superior Maj. Gen. Henry Wager Halleck ordering him not to bring on a general engagement with the enemy until the arrival of the imposingly named general Don Carlos Buell and the 25,000-man army he was marching overland from Nashville. Buell had set his men in motion on March 15 and was supposed to reach Grant at Savannah by April 6. But Grant and Sherman’s determination to wait for Buell led them to ignore any possibility that the enemy might be so obliging, and this seemed to create a kind of blindness even as the evidence of danger mounted.

There were ample warnings, the first of which should have been that the Rebel army was under Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, whom Winfield Scott, general in chief of the Union armies, had declared to be “the finest soldier I have ever commanded.” All knowledgeable Union officers should have at least calculated that Johnston might not keep his army idling in Corinth like a bunch of cardboard dummies waiting to be attacked or besieged.

On April 4—two days before the storm—a Yankee lieutenant and half a dozen men on picket duty were captured by Rebel cavalry. When a detachment of the volunteer Fifth Ohio Cavalry went out looking for them, its commander, Maj. Elbridge G. Ricker, rushed back to report encountering a whole Confederate line of battle, complete with artillery, just two miles from Sherman’s headquarters near the little Shiloh church. To prove his point, Major Ricker had brought back ten Confederate prisoners and the splendid saddle of a Rebel cavalry colonel they had killed. Sherman’s
response was dismissive: “Oh, tut-tut. You militia officers get scared too easy,” and he chided Ricker for running the risk of drawing the army into a fight before it was ready.