Suddenly the sun rose out of the river mists, burning them away quickly, and to the advancing lines the brilliant morning light was like an omen of good fortune. Their cheers rang and resounded again. At seven-thirty, Hardee’s attack faltered slightly as the Federals steadied their defenses, but Bragg’s corps went in like a tornado, screaming the Rebel yell, and the Federals’ brief stand collapsed.
This was the first time Morgan’s squadron had heard the Rebel yell delivered in such concerted volume. But being alligator horses, they recognized its compulsion and its natural origins; most of the boys had developed individual whoops and yawps of their own to be delivered under stress or exultation. The Rebel yell was something primordial, a wild “Haaay-yooch!”—a cry of defiance out of belly and lungs and vocal cords. “A terrible scream and barbarous yowling,” Fitzgerald Ross, the British cavalry officer, described it. He believed the Confederates had learned it from the Indians, but it was more Anglo-Saxon than aboriginal, more like the bloodcurdling “Hoochs!” of the Scottish Highlands, modified by the Southlanders.
At ten-thirty, the colors of Polk’s corps—a blue cross on a red field—began moving forward to join the battle, and the men of Morgan’s squadron knew that they would be next.
For five hours they had waited beside their horses, watching infantry lines march away into the gray-green woods, and some of the boys were beginning to wonder if the fighting would not be all over before the cavalry could get into it. Thus far they had experienced nothing but noise—the sustained volleys of the riflemen, then the artillery joining in the clamor like the growl of an angry monster.
As soon as there was sufficient interval between Polk’s corps and Breckinridge’s reserves, the cavalry moved out platoon front, keeping abreast as best they could through the trees. In a few minutes they were passing over the first contested ground. Many dead and wounded of both armies lay crumpled or crawling on the brown-leaved forest floor, canteens and haversacks scattered among them.
In a grotesque little heap were three dead men in blue, one with a bayonet thrust through his body up to the cross, one with a bloody hole between his eyes, the third with no face at all.
Morgan’s men had seen nothing like this along Green River. “In getting up our glowing anticipation of the day’s programme,” Basil Duke observed, “we had left these items out of the account, and we mournfully recognized the fact, that many who seek military distinction, will obtain it posthumously, if they get it at all. The actual sight of a corpse immediately checks an abstract love of glory.”
When they broke out of the woods into a small open valley, the roar became deafening, the sky filled with artillery shells exploding into puffs of white smoke. Seated unperturbed upon Black Bess, Colonel Morgan began forming the squadron into battle lines across a fallow field.
While they were waiting there for further orders, the 4th Kentucky Infantry Regiment came filing out across their front, the men in close formation, moving with a measured tread. Lieutenant John Churchill of the squadron’s C Company recognized some old friends among these Kentucky foot soldiers, and he saluted them by leading his boys in a rousing version of “Cheer, Boys, Cheer.” The song seemed suited to that suspended moment of tension; it was as if the blended voices defied even the loudest of the artillery bursts. The infantrymen grinned, and waved, and one of them shouted: “Let’s jine the cavalree, boys! Nobody ever saw a dead cavalryman!” And then they, too, joined in the singing: “Cheer, Boys, Cheer, We’ll March Away to Battle!”
“The effect,” Lieutenant Duke recalled, “was animating beyond all description.”
About noon, Colonel Trabue’s brigade was ordered to move to the left and join General Hardee. As Morgan’s troopers came up to the front, a short distance northwest of Shiloh church, the air suddenly filled with the zip-zip of flying Minié balls. Less than a thousand yards ahead of them across a swale, belching flames and smoke clouds obscured a low knoll surrounded by thickets and underbrush. From the flanking positions of the Confederate infantry, Morgan’s men knew immediately that the summit was held by a Federal artillery battery.
A mounted messenger, a lieutenant, appeared abruptly out of the smoke, shouting: “General Hardee wants to know what cavalry this is!” Duke, who was at head of column, replied that it was Morgan’s. The Lieutenant, recognizing Duke, barked back: “General Hardee wants to talk with either you or Morgan.”
Following close behind the messenger, Duke crossed through two hundred yards of smoke and found Hardee, grizzled and sweated, beside one of the Confederate batteries. “Well, Duke,” said the General, “you young Kentuckians have been anxious to see some war, and I’m going to give you an opportunity. Inform Colonel Morgan that he is to form his squadron and when I send the word, charge that battery on the hill to our right.”
As soon as Duke rejoined the squadron and informed Morgan of the order, the men were dismounted, horse-holders moving to the rear. Duke quietly told his company what to prepare for. “The men looked very grave,” he recalled, “and lost all pleasure in the pyrotechnical spectacle afforded by the enemy batteries.” Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the knoll that resembled some violent outpost of hell. They waited for Hardee’s final order, and as they watched with fingers tight on their rifles, they saw the long leaping flames disappear, the smoke roll away, and a wave of Confederate infantrymen sprang from concealment in the brush and swarmed over the abandoned position.
A horseman swung over toward them; it was Hardee’s Lieutenant. He held his mount only long enough to shout that Hardee’s orders had been changed; Morgan was to take his command to the extreme left and “charge the first enemy you see.”
Remounting, they wheeled off to the left by twos, following a trail no wider than a bridle path. The first open space fronting toward the battle line was a marsh, and they had just turned into the grassy bog when the front platoon sighted a blue-clad infantry regiment dead ahead. “Halt!” The order came back quickly, repeated by the sergeants, the squadron jerking to a jingling stop. Across the sunlit field, the blue companies were forming, a stocky little colonel flourishing a wicked-looking saber, his commands echoing back from the woods ahead.
Morgan’s men, their weapons at ready, were puzzled by the strange accents of the Colonel in blue; they also thought it rather peculiar that the soldiers were facing the wrong way. “First Section, Company A, dismount!” Morgan ordered the dismounted section to approach cautiously. If satisfied the men in blue were enemy troops, they were to open fire and the squadron would immediately support them by coming down on the charge.
As it turned out, the soldiers in blue were not Federals at all; they were Louisianans—Colonel Alfred Mouton’s 18th Louisiana—exceedingly proud of their neat sky-blue militia uniforms. These Louisiana Frenchmen had already had trouble with quick-triggered Confederates who were firing at everything blue on the battlefield; the Louisianans had reached the point where they saw no humor in being mistaken for the enemy, and were prepared to answer fire for fire from friend or foe. “We fire at anybody,” they told Morgan’s men, “who fire at us—God damn!”*
The Louisianans were preparing to charge a Federal camp in a field off to the left, and Morgan decided to join in the assault. While the squadron was circling a deep ravine to get into position for a charge, a company of Texas Rangers came up from the rear: “Hey, Kentucky,” one of the Rangers called, “what’re you going to do?”
“Go in,” was the reply.
“Then we’ll go in, too.”
As the two cavalry commands faced into open ground, sunlight caught the shiny bayonets of the enemy closing upon the Louisianans. For a minute or two, the spouting flashes of musketry fire were so fast and furious, the sound drowned the distant roar of artillery. A Confederate battery, caught in the open field, was in trouble; a line of Federal skirmishers had appeared as if by magic out of the woods ahead, and their hot fire kept the artillerymen pinned down, unable to unlimber their guns.
“Charge!” The al
ligator boys had waited a long time for this command, but now at last they were away; they were really in the battle. Before they had galloped twenty yards, the Federal skirmishers vanished back into the woods, but neither Kentuckians nor Texans would stop now to dismount and fight on foot. Headlong they rode into the thickety wood, forcing their horses over tangles of brush, crowding up into confused masses, losing their straight battle lines. But the Federals also had lost their formations and were scrambling through the brush in panic, some being knocked down by the horses of the mounted Kentuckians.
“We came close upon them,” Lieutenant Duke recorded, “before they fired—one stunning volley, the blaze in our faces, and the roar rang in our ears like thunder. The next moment we rode right through them—some of the men trying to cut them down with the saber, and making ridiculous failures, others doing real execution with gun and pistol.”
A few minutes later Duke was seriously wounded. He was in the act of sabering a Federal soldier on his right when an enemy on his left fired point-blank with an “old-fashioned Brown Bess musket, loaded with ball and three buckshot.” One of the shot entered his left shoulder, another tore its way through his right shoulder blade, just missing his spine. As Duke fell unconscious from his horse, Sergeant Pat Gardner shot the assailant through the head with his squirrel rifle.
Dead were Lieutenant James West of A Company, James Chiselin, Archie Moody, and Sam Buckner, the hero of the Minnetonka.
The Texans had suffered worse casualties, dashing blindly into a rail-fence ambuscade, and several of their riderless horses came galloping back over the ground where the Kentuckians had placed their wounded.
But the boys had routed the enemy in their first mounted charge of the battle. From the captured Federals they learned they had defeated Colonel John A. McDowell’s 6th Iowa Infantry, of General Sherman’s 5th Division.
It had been a bad day for Sherman. Although the battle was only hours old, he had already abandoned his headquarters at Shiloh church, which was now occupied for the same purpose by General Beauregard. And Sherman’s best regiments were scattered, driven back into the marshy brakes of Owl Creek.
It was midafternoon when the squadron broke off the fighting, for lack of enemies to shoot at. Morgan dismounted his troops, sent skirmishers forward, and moved slowly along the edges of the Owl Creek thickets. But the Federals seemed to have vanished into the greening brushwood.
Then suddenly they heard the first rumors of Sidney Johnston’s death, the black news sweeping across the tangled, disjointed battlefield, from division to regiment to company. Almost every soldier in the Army of Mississippi had seen the General sometime during the day, dashing about on his bay Thoroughbred, Fire-Eater, unmindful of flying Minié balls and exploding shells as he urged his men on to victory. Johnston was hit three times before receiving his fatal wound—once by a spent bullet, again by a shell fragment, then by a Minié ball which cut his left boot sole in half. He did not feel the fatal wound, a severed leg artery, until he fell fainting from his mount.
Dismaying as was the effect of their leader’s death upon the advancing Confederates, a second piece of news was even more ominous. Late in the afternoon, the first elements of General Buell’s Federal relief column of twenty thousand fresh troops were reported to be crossing the river.
Yet there was good news also, as the day wore to an end. After bitter resistance at a place the soldiers afterward would call the Hornet’s Nest, General Benjamin Prentiss had surrendered his two thousand Federal survivors. Everywhere along the line other Federal divisions seemed ready to yield. General Hardee was exceedingly jubilant: “The captured camps, rich in the spoils of war—in arms, horses, stores, munitions, and baggage—with throngs of prisoners moving to the rear, showed the headlong fury with which our men had crushed the heavy columns of the foe.”
At dusk the fighting ended, the armies disengaging as if by mutual consent. Morgan’s squadron bivouacked in the abandoned camp of the 6th Iowa, along Purdy road near the Owl Creek bridge. From captured stores they enjoyed a bountiful supper, and most of the boys had stretched out for some much-needed sleep when the enemy’s gunboats, the Tyler and Lexington, opened up from the river with a monotonous serenade that was to last out the night. At regular intervals of fifteen minutes, huge shells streaked skyward over the Confederate bivouacs, the missiles “screaming louder than steam whistles.” Usually they struck the tops of trees, filling the air with dense clouds of smoke as they exploded, doing little damage other than badly frightening those nearest the points of explosion, yet serving to keep almost every man in the Confederate Army awake all night.
Before midnight, rain began falling, and the men blamed it on the big guns; soldiers have always believed that booming cannon and rainfall are cause and effect. “We slept on the battleground as best we could with torrents of rain pouring down on us and with the gunboats on the river firing over us all night to disturb our slumbers. Many of the boys visited the sutlers stores that night and helped themselves to the edibles and as much clothing as they could use or carry off.”
While thousands of restless Confederates straggled over the darkened battlefield, tending to their wounded and searching for plunder, their leaders were conferring with the new commanding general, P.GT. Beauregard. The shock of Sidney Johnston’s death was still staggering, and Beauregard was even less sanguine than he had been on the previous day. From the records, it is evident there was indecision in the Confederate high command that night. Certainly, little effort was made to reorganize scattered units and put them into command positions for the morrow’s fighting.
The Federals, meanwhile, were straining every effort to repair their disaster. Lost platoons and frightened fugitives were rounded up and put back into ranks. And most vital of all, boats were kept moving steadily back and forth in the rain across the Tennessee River, bringing Buell’s twenty thousand fresh troops into Pittsburg Landing.
By daylight the rain had stopped. Morgan’s men and the Kentucky regiments near Owl Creek bridge had little ammunition left, but their guns were wet and an order went out to discharge pieces and then clean and dry them as well as could be done. The ordeal of the previous day’s baptism of fire, the miserable sleepless night, and the awareness of their half-empty cartridge boxes had taken the edge off the Army of Mississippi. The men were sluggish as they reported to bugle calls sounding assembly.
At six o’clock the combined armies of Grant and Buell launched a counterattack. One of the Texas Rangers, fighting near Morgan’s squadron, recorded the events of the morning. “The whole face of the earth at that place and time appeared to be blue.…Never did I at any other time hear minié balls seem to fill the air so completely as on this second day’s fight.”
For four hours, the Kentuckians and Texans along Owl Creek held their strong positions, then gradually fell back as the remainder of the line gave way before repeated charges of the reinvigorated Federals. Outnumbered and outgunned, with their ammunition virtually exhausted, the Confederates fought stubbornly all the way.
By noon, however, it was apparent to General Beauregard that the contest was hopeless, and he ordered a retreat. During the early afternoon, the Kentuckians fell back to high ground around Shiloh church, holding positions until a strong line of artillery could be placed along the ridge. While these batteries kept up a constant fire on the woods beyond, the Confederate infantry withdrew. So orderly was the withdrawal, Breckinridge’s scattered command was able to reunite about a mile and a half west of Shiloh church. There at a crossroads, Morgan’s squadron received new orders. They, with the Rangers and Forrest’s regiment, were to cover the retreat of Beauregard’s army.
During the next forty-eight hours the Army of Mississippi was marching back to Corinth—after tasting victory one day, defeat the next. But Grant was unable to pursue, his army being as badly mauled as Beauregard’s, and by midweek the Confederates were digging into solid breastworks around Corinth.
In the meantime Morgan’s tr
oopers moved back to Mickey’s farm, collecting along the way several wounded men who had fallen out of the retreating columns. Late in the afternoon of April 8, an infantry patrol from one of Sherman’s regiments came blundering up the road; the Kentucky boys scattered them back into the woods, netting an easy bag of seventy-five prisoners.
For the next week, the squadron camped around Mickey’s where a temporary hospital for serious casualties had been established. They engaged in two or three minor skirmishes, searched the nearby woods for lost wounded men, and buried the dead from the hospital.
*In his report of the battle, Colonel Mouton said: “Unfortunately our troops on the right mistook us for the enemy, owing, I presume to the blue uniforms of a large number of my men, and opened on us with cannon and musket.” He added that he had some difficulty forcing his own men to stop firing back on other Confederate units.
4
The Lebanon Races
I
FOLLOWING ITS ARMY’S WITHDRAWAL FROM Shiloh, the western Confederacy suffered a series of disheartening reverses. On April 11, General Ormsby Mitchel reached Huntsville, Alabama. Island No. 10 on the Mississippi fell soon afterward, leaving the city of Memphis open to eventual capture, bringing all of Tennessee west of the Cumberlands under Federal control. And General Henry W. Halleck, now commanding the combined Federal armies of Shiloh, was moving slowly down toward the main Confederate forces around Corinth.
If there were some among the Confederates who felt that all was lost in the West, they were not to be found in Colonel John Morgan’s Kentucky cavalry squadron. From their Tennessee experiences during the winter, these horse soldiers were well aware that the Federal armies massed deep in the South were like huge weights supported by strained and attenuated lines. Any serious blow against these lines of supply and communication could create havoc among the Federals.