Terrible Swift Sword (34 page)
Van
Dorn got his army under way on March 3, Pap Price and his men at the head of
the column, McCulloch's division following, Pike and the Indians bringing up
the rear; altogether, there were nearly 15,000 Confederates in the line of
march. (This was one of the few times when
a
major battle saw the Confederates with a
substantial advantage in numbers.) Curtis lay to the north, with part of his
army, under Sigel, thrust forward to the town of Bentonville, and Van Dorn
tried to cut this force off and destroy it. Sigel was alert, fended him off,
and got his command away unscathed; and a measure of the evil nature of Van
Dorn's luck in this campaign is the fact that during this one important week
Franz Sigel behaved like a competent general . . . Van Dorn pursued and found
the Union Army drawn up south of Pea Ridge, back of Little Sugar Creek, facing
south.
Curtis's
troops were astride of the main road into southwestern Missouri—the road to
Springfield, the one both armies had used on their recent march down, known
locally as the Telegraph or Stagecoach Road. This road ran north from Curtis's
camp past a country inn called Elkhorn Tavern, went on over Pea Ridge, dropped
down into Cross Timber Hollow, and in its progress through these back-country
names and places went on to the Missouri line and then continued up to
Springfield. Van Dora proposed to make a wide detour to his left, marching at
night along a byroad that would bring him into the Telegraph Road north of
Elkhorn Tavern first thing in the morning. He would then be in Curtis's rear
and squarely across his supply line and his only avenue of escape, and if the
Confederates moved smartly he ought to disperse or capture the whole Union
Army. Van Dorn put his troops in motion on the night of March 6; by his
timetable, the battle would open shortly after dawn on March 7.
However, there were delays. Curtis had
suspected that something of this kind might be done, and he had had parties out
obstructing the road which Van Dorn had to use—hardworking details directed by
a man skilled at road work, an Iowa colonel named Grenville Dodge, who would be
famous a decade later as one of the chief builders of the Union Pacific
Railroad. Dodge had this byroad pretty well blocked, the march took a good deal
longer than had been planned, and it was midmorning or later before the
Confederates had reached their chosen position. The long column somehow broke
in half during the night, and when Van Dorn and Price were ready to make their
attack by Elkhorn Tavern it developed that McCulloch and the other half of the
army were miles in the rear, only halfway around the long semicircle of the
flanking route. Curtis, meanwhile, had had just time enough to swing his army
around and get ready to meet this attack on his rear; and when McCulloch
attacked along the western end of Pea Ridge, two miles or more from the scene
of Price's attack, Curtis sent divisions under Colonel Peter J. Osterhaus and
Colonel Jefferson C. Davis over to handle him.
If Van Dorn had had a fully trained army
with a competent staff and a little more professional leadership he probably
would have won his battle, but he had none of those things and he did not get
a
victory. McCulloch's cavalry and Pike's
Indians attacked first, captured a three-gun battery, and then came under
artillery fire, which the tribesmen found strange and terrifying: they took to
the woods, where each man got behind
a
tree
in the old wilderness-fighting tradition, and the Indians were of little more
account on this battlefield. McCulloch rode far to the front to get his
division into action and was shot dead by a Northern sharpshooter; his chief
brigadier was killed, another one was captured, his attack broke up in
disorder, and by late afternoon the battle centered around Price's assault along
the road by Elkhorn Tavern. The fight was
a
hard one, and at sundown the Federals had
been forced to retreat half a mile or more, but their line was unbroken and Van
Dorn in effect was fighting with hardly more than half his army.
The
bruised armies spent an uneasy night on the field, the Federals who had fought
McCulloch came up, and in the morning Curtis ordered a counterattack toward
Cross Timber Hollow. Van Dorn, whose men were just about out of ammunition,
discovered that through some misunderstanding his wagon master had sent the
ammunition train off fifteen miles to the east. He ordered a retreat, part of
his line broke under Federal pressure, and before noon the Confederates were
swarming away from the field in disorder, pursued with only moderate diligence
by an exhausted Union Army which had narrowly escaped destruction. Each army
had lost some 1300 men in killed, wounded, and missing: Curtis still held the
road to Missouri, to the railhead and to safety; Van Dorn's army would need to
be reorganized before it could be used again, and it was no longer possible for
its general to contemplate an invasion of Missouri.
7
It
had been a near thing. Curtis wrote that during the battle, while his men were
wrestling for the ground around Elkhorn Tavern, time had seemed to stand
still—"I watched the minute hand of my watch a thousand times"—and he
confessed that when the battle ended his army was just about out of provisions
and low on ammunition; if the final Union counterattack had not cleared the
Telegraph Road, the army would have been almost helpless. But if the victory
had been won by a painfully narrow margin, it was decisive when it came.
Missouri would be Federal territory for the rest of the war, subject to alarms
and excursions but not seriously contended for, and Johnston's plan for a
counteroffensive astride the Mississippi would have to be modified. Few Federal
officers ever averted more trouble than Curtis did when he spun his army
around and won his fight at Pea Ridge.
The
man had no eye for glory. When he looked out over the field where so much had
been won he could see only the price that had been paid, by his own men and by
his enemies. A few days after the battle he spoke his mind in a letter to his
brother, writing about "the bold rocky mountain . . . under whose shadow
so many fell," and he brooded thoughtfully: "The scene is silent and
sad. The vulture and the wolf now have the dominion, and the dead friends and
foes sleep in the same lonely graves."
8
Every general moved to
victory across long rows of graves in the trampled earth. Curtis was one who
had to look back afterward and think about how those graves had been filled.
So
Albert Sidney Johnston had lost the first round, far away in the Ozark
foothills. His great counteroffensive could not be won by a swift, dazzling
thrust at the Federal rear; whatever was done would have to be done in the
lonely fields and thickets around Shiloh Church. But it was only the first
round that had been lost. Johnston's big opportunity remained, narrowing day by
day but still open. The Federal move up the Tennessee was marking time, losing
time, permitting the armies of Grant and Buell to remain separated while the
Confederates they had to beat worked desperately to strike them before they
were ready; and as the month of March ended Johnston had in fact performed a
minor miracle. He had created an army, which had come to believe in itself. It
lacked a great many things but somehow it had acquired an immense capacity to
fight, and General Johnston proposed to use it without further delay.
Late in the month he made formal
announcement of his new organization—three army corps, somewhat undersized but
nevertheless duly organized, led by Polk, Hardee, and Bragg, with a small
reserve corps under an impressive new officer who only a few months earlier had
resigned from the United States Senate, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. In
addition to leading one corps Bragg was acting as chief of staff, and he was a
skilled and relentless disciplinarian. He complained that the Army was still
"an heterogeneous mass" containing "more enthusiasm than
discipline, more capacity than knowledge and more valor than instruction,"
and he noted distressing shortcomings in equipment: in most regiments some men
had regular percussion rifles, others had smooth-bore flintlocks and some were
armed with nothing better than country shotguns. Johnston had tried to increase
the number of men in combat assignments by hiring slaves from local planters to
serve as cooks, teamsters and so on, but he had had little luck, and he mused
that the ways of prosperous civilians in wartime are strange: "These
people have given their sons freely, but it is folly to talk to them about a
Negro or a mule." He remarked that one additional brigade might make the
difference between victory and defeat, and he wondered what the planters
thought their precious slaves would be worth if his army should be beaten.
9
Yet even though the deficiencies in supply and training were obvious, an
enormous amount of work had been done. Jefferson Davis sent an encouraging
message: "You have done wonderfully well, and now I breathe easier."
And from General Lee came the appreciative comment of a fellow professional:
"No one has sympathized with you in
the troubles with which you are surrounded more sincerely than myself. I have
watched your every movement, and know the difficulties with which you have had
to contend.
...
I need not urge you,
when your army is united, to deal a blow at the enemy in your front, if
possible before his rear gets up from Nashville. You have him divided, keep him
so if you can."
General
Johnston did not need to be urged. His army was not really in proper shape, and
if he could wait another ten days he would get strong reinforcements from
beyond the Mississippi—he had ordered Van Dorn to come to Tennessee with all
speed, the march was long and the roads were bad, and the move was taking a
good deal of time—but 40,000 men could do now what 60,000 men could not do a
fortnight from now, and the time of preparation was over. Buell's men would
join Grant's by the end of the first week in April, at the latest . . . and, on
the night of April 2, Johnston ordered plans drawn up for an immediate advance
against Grant's army at Pittsburg Landing.
3.
Pittsburg Landing
Almost everything that could go wrong
went wrong when Johnston's army marched from Corinth to Pittsburg Landing. The
soldiers did not know how to make a cross-country hike and most of their
officers did not know how to direct them. The orders governing the march were
imperfectly drafted and poorly executed, and General Johnston quickly learned
what General McDowell had learned on the way to Bull Run—that the one thing an
untrained army cannot possibly do is to move from here to there efficiently.
The soldiers were in good spirits, and whenever they saw the commanding general
ride by they cheered loudly, but they spent most of their time stumbling into
bewildering traffic jams and waiting for somebody to untangle them, and in the
end it took them three days to go twenty miles. During this time they ate the
last of the five-days' rations they had in their haversacks. General Beauregard
was so discouraged that at last he wanted to cancel the entire movement, go
back to base, and start over again.
General Beauregard was the Army's
second-in-command. He suffered from ill health; also, from a subtler ailment
which impelled him to make grandiose plans for an army which needed exceedingly
simple plans. When he drew up the order of attack for Johnston's signature, he
behaved as if these troops were veterans, used to intricate movement and the
shock of battle, and he asked them to do more than they could do. They were to
leave Corinth on April 3, moving by two roads which converged near a farmhouse
a few miles short of the Federal position. Cavalry had learned that Grant's men
were camped in a loose grouping three miles wide, occupying the high ground
inland from Pittsburg Landing, facing generally toward the west, with the
swampy lowland of Owl Creek on the north and the equally swampy valley of Lick
Creek on the south. Hardee's corps, in the lead, was ordered to march for
sixteen or seventeen miles and bivouac for the night a mile or two away from
the Federal outposts. Before dawn on April 4 this corps would form a line of
battle, covering the whole Federal front. Half a mile behind it Bragg's corps
would form a similar line, with Polk's corps and Breckinridge's reserves
forming behind Bragg. Then the army
would attack, hoping to break the
Federal left and drive the whole Federal Army away from the Tennessee River and
into the Owl Creek bottomlands, where it could be destroyed.
For a professional army that could move
smartly and hold its formation, the scheme might have been sound enough, but
for this army it was just too much. Hardly a handful of Johnston's 40,000 had
ever seen a battle or made an ordered march to a battlefield, and the chance
that they could stick to this tight schedule was remote; it was even less
likely that the fragile corps organizations, which had existed for less than a
week, could hold together once those long battle lines moved in through woods
and ravines on each other's heels. Johnston seems to have supposed that the
three corps would attack side by side, which would have been much simpler.
Apparently he and Beauregard misunderstood each other; with a slight excess of
courtliness, Johnston was giving Beauregard a good deal of scope in his
second-in-command function. In any case, as issued the orders embodied
Beauregard's ideas, and much confusion attended their execution.
1
Getting out of Corinth was bad enough.
Hardee's corps, which was to move first, got tangled up in the streets with
other troops and with wagon trains and was unable to leave town until the
afternoon of April 3; instead of reaching its destination that night it had to
camp along the road, getting to the designated point long after daybreak on
April 4. Bragg's corps fell far behind, its road blocked by units that were supposed
to follow it, one entire division temporarily lost; Johnston himself had to
ride back, dig the missing unit out of Bishop Polk's corps, into which it had
strayed, and get the road cleared. On the night of April 4 there was a heavy
rain —by this time the attack had been postponed for twenty-four hours—and not
until late in the afternoon of April 5 was the army at last in the spot it was
supposed to have reached thirty-six hours earlier. The battle lines were drawn,
and at dusk Johnston and his corps commanders had an informal conference.
To
General Beauregard it was clear that the opportunity had passed. The whole
battle plan rested on the belief that the army would make a quick march and
take the Yankees by surprise. The march had been unconscionably slow, and it
had been so noisy that a surprise seemed out of the question. After the rain
the men had blithely fired their muskets to see whether the powder charges had
been dampened, so that there had been a constant
pop-pop
of small-arms fire through the late afternoon
and early evening. There had been much cheering and yelling: loud cheers for
General Johnston, wild shouts when a startled deer jumped out of a thicket and
bounded along the line of troops; enough noise, altogether, to arouse the most unobservant
foes. Rations were almost exhausted, much food having been thrown away by boys
who felt themselves overloaded. In addition, Buell surely must have arrived by
now. The Federals would be on the alert, and the attack ought to be canceled.
Johnston
would not hear of it. If rations were low, the Federal camp contained abundant
supplies which victorious Confederates could eat. The cavalry said that Buell
had not yet appeared. From President Davis there had just come a telegram:
"I hope you will be able to close with the enemy before his two columns
unite. I anticipate a victory." What President Davis anticipated General
Johnston would try to give him. He remarked, "I would fight them if they
were a million," and he ended the conference by saying, "Gentlemen,
we shall attack at daylight tomorrow." Later that evening he calmly told
an aide, "I have ordered a battle for daylight tomorrow, and I intend to
hammer 'em!" Many things had gone wrong, but the men in the ranks were
keyed up for a fight and so was the commanding general, and a fight there would
be as soon as the sun came up on April 6.
2
By
all logic Beauregard ought to have been right. Yet the astounding fact was that
the Federals were woefully, incredibly unready. They were not entrenched (as Beauregard
believed they surely must be) and they were not even arranged in line of
battle; they were simply in camp, waiting for orders from headquarters, waiting
for Buell, waiting for the time when they could march down to Corinth and
finish the job that had been begun at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson.
Many
things had worked together to create this condition. Halleck's repeated orders
to delay the offensive had led Grant and his lieutenants to think of nothing
except the restrictions which headquarters had imposed. Impatient to get on
with the war, Grant was overlooking the possibility that his rival might get on
with it ahead of him. (Those earlier battles unfortunately had led Grant to
feel that Johnston's army was discouraged and ready to quit: a point on which
he was about to get a world of enlightenment.) Grant himself was still at
Savannah, seven miles downstream, waiting for Buell, whose approach was
extraordinarily slow. Buell's army had begun leaving Nashville on March 15,
impelled by no sense of urgency. It had waited for ten days, rebuilding a
bridge—a twenty-four-hour job, if someone had been driving the Engineer Corps
to hurry—and it was coming on as if it had all the time in the world. The
Federals, in short, had got into a dangerous state of mind, in which it seemed
to them that nothing would happen until they themselves made it happen.* In
addition, the camp at Shiloh was under the immediate command of William T.
Sherman, who had recovered all too well from an abject loss of nerve. During the
previous fall, in Kentucky, he had considered Johnston's army much more
numerous, aggressive, and dangerous than it really was, and had worried himself
into a nervous breakdown and removal from command. Regaining his poise, he had
recently been restored to combat duty: and in this first week of April he
probably was the last man in the army to take alarm because of enemy activity
in his front. He flatly refused to believe that Johnston's army was about to
attack (six months earlier, because he did believe it, he had been published
to the world as a lunatic) and when his patrols warned him that something
ominous was building up, off beyond the tangled forest, he dismissed the
warnings with contempt. At the very moment when Johnston was insisting that the
attack would be delivered even if all of Lincoln's Yankees were alarmed and
ready, Sherman was assuring Grant that although there was a good deal of
shooting along the picket lines "I do not apprehend anything like an
attack on our position." Some of Sherman's officers certainly knew better,
but what they knew did not matter. Up to a certain point, in any army, the
thoughts of the principal generals are the only thoughts that count.
4
Thus Sherman's caution, which should
have been awake but was sound asleep, ran across Beauregard's, which should
have been justified but was not; and the battle itself began on this
characteristic note of conscientious confusion, which accurately reflected the
state of the armies and of the divided nation that had raised the armies. These
early battles of the Civil War were not like the ones that came later except in
the pain and agony they inflicted. Not only were the officers and men who
fought these battles untrained, doomed to make errors which would not be
repeated once experience had been gained, the nation itself was in these
battles colliding violently, at last, with the reality which it had so long
refused to face. It had risked war gaily, had threatened war jauntily, had accepted
it with a wild, half-hysterical sense of relief, and it had done all of these
things simply because it had known nothing whatever about war. Now—at Shiloh,
and at one or two other places—it was going to learn. Here was where (as the
saying then went) it would see the elephant. No wonder there was something
unreal about the genesis and development of such encounters. Anything else
would have been a miracle.
The first sounds of battle came to the
Confederate Army like enchanted, beckoning notes of promise. April 5 was
bright, clear, and springlike after the storm, and men in the 38th Tennessee,
striding along in the woods where new leaves, half-opened, put moving shadows
on the roadways, heard gunfire far ahead and "could hardly be restrained
from rushing up to the fray." Men looked at one another, laughed,
cheered, and remarked that the fun was at last beginning. Fatherless rumors
sped down the marching columns—the Yankees had been whipped and were taking to
their boats, some of them had been cut off and were fleeing through the woods,
this very column would presently go and round up these cowardly fugitives.
5
. . . Battle was still nearly twenty-four hours away. These boys were hearing
the racket that bothered Beauregard so much, the firing of innumerable muskets
by soldiers who wanted to know whether these weapons, after a heavy rain,
could in fact be fired at all. (A good deal of this came from within the Yankee
lines, where equally innocent soldiers, equally soaked by the same storm, were
making the same sort of test.)
Give the innocents credit. When the
reality came, next day, most of them went into it with the same enthusiasm and
stayed in it as long as they were asked to stay. Whatever finally determined
the outcome of the battle of Shiloh, the end did not come because either army
took fright and ran away or got weary and dogged it. Johnston's soldiers had
all of the savage, frightening determination which the Belgian visitor had
noted early in the winter; they were no more ready for battle than the Bull Run
mobs had been, but when they struck the Federal line of battle they struck it,
as Beauregard himself remarked, "like an Alpine avalanche," curing U.
S. Grant forever of his notion that the Confederate soldier's heart was not in
this fight. Long after the war, when he talked with friends in the Army of the
Potomac about such grim fights as Gettysburg and the Wilderness, tough Sherman
used to say: "So help me God, you boys never had a fiercer fight than we
had there."
6
Sunday, April 6, was
clear and cool as the day before had been, and just at dawn there was a
timeless quiet which reminded one young Confederate of the small-town Sabbath
back home, so that he half-expected to hear church bells calling the faithful
to worship. Johnston's first line began to move as soon as the light came, and
the general was just finishing breakfast when the first spatter of small-arms
fire sounded along the front—real shooting, this time, not just the aimless
firing of boys testing their powder charges. Various officers were urging him
to go back to Corinth and begin all over again, but he swung into the saddle
with the comment: "The battle has opened, gentlemen; it is too late to
change our dispositions." He rode to the front to take general charge of
the assault, while Beauregard went to the rear to see that the support troops
came up properly, and the great, shapeless army began to advance through the
thickets for its first battle. Men in Breckinridge's reserve corps were told to
pile their knapsacks and leave squads to guard them, and men detailed for this
noncombatant assignment objected to being kept out of the fight; one soldier
offered to give all of his hardtack to any man who would let him have a place
in the front line. The sporadic firing up ahead became heavier, solidified into
long rolling volleys, expanded with the crash of artillery, and became a
consuming, bewildering uproar that would go on without a break all day long.
7
The Federals were not ready, but they
were not exactly caught asleep in their tents, either. They had sent patrols
forward at dawn, and these collided with the Confederate skirmishers in the
woodland twilight and formed tough knots of resistance. They were pushed back
as Hardee's main line came up, but they had given the alarm, and battle lines
were formed in front of the camps. The real trouble was that of the six
divisions in Grant's army, only two were up in front when the fighting began,
and nobody had told them to entrench. Sherman had his division around Shiloh
Church with his right touching the Owl Creek Valley, and off to his left,
somewhat out of touch with him, was a new division under Brigadier General
Benjamin M. Prentiss, a former militia colonel who was about to display a
talent for determined fighting. Farther back were three more divisions—McClernand's,
which had learned its trade at Fort Donelson; another set of Donelson veterans
belonging to C. F. Smith, who was absent with an infected leg and had turned
his command over to W. H. L. Wallace, an Illinois lawyer who had served in the
Mexican War; and three brigades led by still another Illinois
lawyer-politician, Brigadier General Stephen A. Hurlbut, South Carolina born, a
friend of Abraham Lincoln. Several miles north of these, posted downstream as a
sort of flank guard, was the division of the future novelist, Lew Wallace, who
never did manage to get his men into action this day. Of the six divisional
commanders only Sherman was a West Pointer.
So the Federal front was sketchy, and it
remained so even when the troops in the rear were moved forward, because as
they moved up the men in front were being pushed back, and there never was a
really connected front. There were many battles but no one line of battle;
Shiloh was a grab bag full of separate combats in which divisions, brigades,
and even regiments fought on their own, each one joined by fragments of other
commands that had fallen apart in the shock of action, most of them fighting
with their flanks in the air, knowing nothing of any battle except the
fragment which possessed them—great waves of sound beating on them, smoke
streaking the fields and making blinding clouds under the trees, advance and
retreat taking place sometimes because someone had ordered it and sometimes on
the impulse of the untaught soldiers who were doing the fighting.