1
Lieutenant Palmer Metcalfe
Aide-de-Camp Johnston's Staff
The sky had cleared, the clouds raveled to tatters, and at four o’clock the sun broke through, silver on the bright green of grass and leaves and golden on the puddles in the road; all down the column men quickened the step, smiling in the sudden burst of gold and silver weather. They would point at the sky, the shining fields, and call to each other: the sun, the sun! Their uniforms, which had darkened in the rain, began to steam in the April heat, and where formerly they had slogged through the mud, keeping their eyes down on the boots or haversack of the man ahead, now they began to look around and even dance aside with Little prancing steps to avoid the wet places. As we rode past at the side of the road, they cheered and called out to us: "You better keep up there! Don’t get left behind!" Replacing their hats from cheering the general, they jeered at me especially, since I was the youngest and brought up the rear. "Jog on, sonny. If you lose him you’ll never find him again!"
This was mainly a brown country, cluttered with dead leaves from the year before, but the oaks had tasseled and the redbud limbs were like flames in the wind. Fruit trees in cabin yards, peach and pear and occasional quince, were sheathed with bloom, white and pink, twinkling against broken fields and random cuts of new grass washed clean by the rain. Winding over and among the red clay hills, the column had strung out front and rear, accordion action causing it to clot in places and move spasmodically in others, as if the road itself had come alive, had been sowed with the dragon teeth of olden time, and was crawling like an enormous snake toward Pittsburg Landing.
Seen that way, topping a rise and looking back and forward, it was impersonal: an army in motion, so many inspissated tons of flesh and bone and blood and equipment: but seen from close, the mass reduced to company size in a short dip between two hills, it was not that way at all. I could see their faces then, and the army became what it really was: forty thousand men—they were young men mostly, lots of them even younger than myself, and I was nineteen just two weeks before—out on their first march in the crazy weather of early April, going from Mississippi into Tennessee where the Union army was camped between two creeks with its back to a river, inviting destruction. This was the third day out, and their faces showed it. Rain and mud, particularly where artillery and wagon trains had churned the road, had made the march a hard one. Their faces were gay now in the sunlight, but when you looked close you saw the sullen lines of strain about the mouths and the lower eyelids etched with fatigue.
We had doubled back down the column all morning, then retraced, and as we approached the crossroads a few hundred yards west of last night's headquarters we saw General Beauregard standing in one of the angles of a rail fence, talking with two of the corps commanders, Generals Bragg and Polk. Beauregard was wagging his head, his big sad bloodhound eyes rimmed with angry red and his hands fluttering. He was obviously upset, which was understandable, for it was ten hours past the time when we should have been pressing them back against the river.
When we rode up they turned and waited for General Johnston to speak, and when he had greeted them with that careful courtesy he always used, Beauregard began to repeat what he had been saying to the others. He favored canceling the movement, returning to Corinth. Just hearing him say it, I suddenly felt tired all over.
"There is no chance for surprise," he said, shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders with that French way he had. "They’ll be intrenched to the eyes."
General Johnston looked at him for a moment without saying anything, then turned to Bishop Polk (they had roomed together at West Point) and asked what he thought. Men in the passing column turned their heads, watching, but they did not cheer because they could see this was a conference. The bishop said his troops were eager for battle; they had left Corinth on the way to a fight, he said, and if they didn’t find one they would be as demoralized as if they had been whipped. He said it in that deep, pulpit voice of his; it was as if I could hear his vestments rustle; it sounded fine. General Bragg said he felt the same way about it—he would as soon be defeated as return without fighting. General Breckinridge, commander of the reserve, rode up while Bragg was speaking. He lifted his eyebrows, surprised that withdrawal was even being considered; he sided with Bragg and Bishop Polk. General Hardee was the only corps commander not present, but there was no doubt which side he would favor: Hardee was always spoiling for a fight.
When General Johnston had heard them out, he drew himself up in the saddle, leather creaking, and said quietly: "Gentlemen, we shall attack at daylight tomorrow." It was as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders and I could breathe. He told them to form their corps according to the order and to have the troops sleep on their arms in line of battle. As he pulled his horse aside, passing me, he spoke to Colonel Preston.
"I would fight them if they were a million," he said. "They can present no greater front between those two creeks than we can, and the more men they crowd in there, the worse we can make it for them."
I never knew anyone who did not think immediately that General Johnston was the finest-looking man he had ever seen, and everyone who ever knew him loved him. He was a big man, well over six feet tall and close to two hundred pounds in weight, neither fat nor lean; he gave at once an impression of strength and gentleness. His expression was calm as we rode away, but his eyes were shining.
That was as it should be. For this was his hour of vindication after two months of retreat and ugly talk which had followed adulation. When he crossed the desert from California in '61, dodging Apaches and Federal squadrons from cavalry posts along the way, and started north for Richmond from New Orleans, he was hailed as the savior of liberty, and when he reported to President Davis in September he was appointed General Commanding the Western Department of the Army of the Confederate States of America—a long title—responsible for maintaining the integrity of a line which stretched from Virginia to Kansas along the northern frontier of our new nation. That was a lot of line, but no one then, so far as I ever heard, doubted his ability to do whatever was required of him. This was largely because they did not know what forces he had to do it with.
He had twenty thousand poorly organized, poorly equipped troops to defend the area between the mountains of eastern Kentucky and the Mississippi River. By January he had managed to double that number, disposing them this way: Polk on the left at Columbus opposing Grant, Hardee in the center at Bowling Green opposing Sherman, and Zollicoffer on the right at Cumberland Gap opposing Thomas. At each of these points his commanders were outnumbered two and three to one. Hoping to hold off the Federal offensive so that he would have more time to build and shape his army, he announced that his situation was good, that he had plenty of troops, and that he had no fears about holding his ground. His statements were printed in all the papers. North and South. These were high times, everyone still drunk on Manassas and politicians talking about whipping the enemy with cornstalks and the only disagreement among our people back home was whether one Southern volunteer was worth ten Yankee hirelings or a dozen—ten was the figure most frequently quoted, for people's minds ran mostly to round numbers in those days. The general must have known that reverses were coming, and he must have known too that, when they came, the people would not understand.
They came soon enough. First, in mid-January at Fishing Creek, his right caved in: Zollicoffer himself was killed when he rode out front in a white rubber raincoat—he lay in a fence corner, muddy and dead, while Union soldiers pulled hairs from his mustache for souvenirs, and his army was broken and scattered deep into Tennessee, demoralized. Early next month Fort Henry fell to Grant's attack, and ten days later Fort Donelson. Bowling Green was evacuated then, outflanked, and Nashville was left to the enemy, the
first real Southern city to be lost. People were outraged. They had been expecting an advance, and now within a month everything had changed; Kentucky and Tennessee were being abandoned without a fight. They yelled for the general's scalp. But when the Tennessee representatives in Richmond went into the President's office to demand that he dismiss the Confederate commander in the West, Mr. Davis told them: "If Sidney Johnston is not a general, we had better give up the war, for we have no general," and bowed them out.
That was low ebb, but General Johnston took the blame just as he had taken the praise. He knew that the only way to regain public favor was to give the nation a victory, and he knew that the only way to halt the Federal advance was to concentrate and strike. He chose Corinth, a railroad junction in North Mississippi, near the Tennessee River, as the place to group his armies. Grant, he believed, would try to break the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, which ran through Corinth, whenever Buell reinforced him. General Johnston planned to destroy Grant before Buell came up, after which he would attend to Buell. It was that simple.
So Polk fell back from Columbus, leaving a strong garrison at Island Number lo, and Bragg came up from Pensacola and Ruggles from New Orleans, and Van Dorn was told to march from Arkansas and cross the river near Memphis—he was expected any day. Grant's army was in camp at Pittsburg Landing, on the near bank of the Tennessee River about twenty miles from Corinth. While General Johnston was concentrating, scouts and spies brought him full reports on Grant's strength and dispositions. He knew what he would find at Pittsburg: an army no larger than his own, with its back to the river, unfortified—the only digging they did was for straddle trenches—hemmed in by boggy creeks, disposed for comfort, and scattered the peacetime way. He went on with his plans; he would strike as soon as possible.
By the end of March we were almost ready. The Army of the Mississippi (Beauregard had named it) was divided into four corps: 10,000 under Polk, 16,000 under Bragg, 7000 under Hardee, and 7000 under Breckinridge. We were as strong as Grant and stronger than Buell. Everything was set except for the delay of Van Dorn, who had run into some trouble getting transportation across the river. We waited. On the second of April, Polk sent word that one of the enemy divisions was advancing from the river—heading for Memphis maybe, we thought, though later we found this was not true—and that night a cavalry scout reported that Buell's army was marching hard from Columbia to join Grant. Within two hours of the time the scout reached headquarters General Johnston ordered the advance on Pittsburg Landing. Van Dorn or no Van Dorn, the march would begin Thursday and we would strike Grant at daybreak Saturday, April fifth.
I worked all Wednesday night with Colonel Jordan, assistant adjutant general on Beauregard's staff, preparing the march order. We used the opening section of Napoleon's Waterloo order as a guide—there was always plenty of material about Napoleon wherever Beauregard pitched his tent. First we sent out a warning note for all commanders to have their troops assembled for the march with three days' cooked rations in their haversacks. Then the colonel hunched over the map with a sheaf of notes General Beauregard had written for him to follow. It wasn’t much map, really; when I first looked at it, all I saw was a wriggle of lines and a welter of longhand notations, some of them even written upside-down. But as the colonel went on dictating it became simple enough, and after a while it even became clear. I didn’t know which I admired the most. Napoleon or Colonel Jordan. I was proud to be working with him.
Two roads ran from Corinth up to Pittsburg. On the map they resembled a strung bow, with the two armies at the top and bottom tips. The southern route, through Monterey, was the string; the northern route, through Mickey's, was the bow. Bragg and Breckinridge were to travel the string, Hardee and Polk the bow. Beyond Mickey's, within charging distance of the Federal outposts, they were to form for battle in successive lines, Hardee across the front with one brigade from Bragg, who was to form the second line five hundred yards in rear. Polk was to march half a mile behind Bragg, supporting him, and Breckinridge was to mass the reserve corps in Polk's rear. The flanks of the army, with the three lead corps extended individually across the entire front, rested on the two creeks which hemmed Grant in. As we advanced, each line would support the line in front and the reserve corps would feed troops from the rear toward those points where resistance was stiffest. That way, the Federal army would be jammed into the northward loop of the creek on the left, or back against the Tennessee itself.
It was the first battle order I had ever seen, and it certainly seemed complicated. But once you understood what it was saying, it was simple enough. I had had a share in composing it, watching it grow from notes and discussion into what it finally became: a simple list of instructions which, if followed, would result in the annihilation of an army that had come with arrogance into our country to destroy us and deny our people their independence: but even though I'd watched it grow line by line, myself supplying the commas and semicolons which made it clearer, when it was complete I could look at it as if it had been done without my help; and it was so good, so beautifully simple, it made me catch my breath. It did occur to me, even then, that all battle orders did this—they would all result in victory if they were followed. But this one seemed so simple, somehow so right that I began to understand how Shakespeare must have felt when he finished Macbeth, even if I had only supplied the punctuation. Colonel Jordan was proud of it, too: I believe he really thought it was better than the one by Napoleon he had used as a model, though of course he didn’t say so.
It worked so well on paper—the flat, clean paper. On paper, in the colonel's lamp-lit office, when we saw a problem it was easy to fix; all we had to do was direct that corps commanders regulate their columns so as not to delay each other, halting until crossroads were cleared, keeping their files well closed, and so forth. It didn’t work out that way on the ground, which was neither flat nor clean—nor, as it turned out, dry. The troops were green. Most of them had never been on a real tactical march before, and many of them received their arms for the first time when they assembled in their camps that Thursday morning; frequently, during halts, I saw sergeants showing recruits how to load their muskets the regulation way. They were in high spirits, advancing on an enemy who for the past three months had been pushing us steadily backward over hundreds of miles of our own country, and they marched with a holiday air, carrying their muskets like hunters, so that the column bristled with gunbarrels glinting at jaunty angles like pins in a cushion.
I stood with General Johnston beside the road and watched them go past, men of all ages and from all sections of the country, wearing homemade uniforms, many of them, and carrying every kind of firearm, from modem Springfields and Enfields, back to smoothbore flintlock muskets which were fired last in the War of 1812. When the 9th Texas swung past, we saw an elderly private who marched with the firm step of the oldtime regular. He was singing.
"I’ve shot at many a Mexican
And many a Injun too
But I never thought I'd draw a bead
On Yankee-Doodle-Do."
The general turned to me with a smile. He too was marching against the flag he had served most of his life. During the period when he was being hailed as the savior of liberty there were page-long biographies of him in all the newspapers, but they were as full of errors as they were of praise. I know because I had the true story from my father, who spent many a night beside a campfire with him down in Texas.
Albert Sidney Johnston had just passed his fifty-ninth birthday at the time of the battle. He was born in Kentucky, the youngest son of a doctor. After two years at Transylvania University he went to West Point. He was nineteen, older than most of the cadets and more serious. Leonidas Polk, the future bishop-general, was his roommate. Jefferson Davis, who also had followed him at Transylvania, was two classes below him. Johnston graduated high in his class and thus was privileged to choose his branch of service. He declined a position as aide to General Scott and chose the infantry. That was characte
ristic, as you’ll see— sometimes he behaved like a man in search of death.
While he was a young Lieutenant, stationed at Jefferson Barracks, he attended a ball in St Louis where he met the girl he married a year later. She was from Louisville, and I have heard my father say she had the loveliest singing voice he ever heard. In the spring and summer of 1832 she stayed home with her parents while her husband went to fight in the Black Hawk War. When he returned he found her dying. Physicians pronounced her lungs weak, bled her freely and often, and put her on a diet of goat's milk and Iceland moss.
Johnston resigned from the army and came home to nurse her. That was 1833, the year the stars fell. In late summer of the second year she died. After her death he retired to a farm near St Louis where they had intended to live when he left the army. But life was intolerable there, too filled with memories of the things they had planned together. It was at this time that he heard Stephen Austin speak in Louisville and threw in with the Texas revolutionists.
He joined as a private trooper but soon he was appointed adjutant general. When he was made commander of the Texas army and proceeded to his post, he found that Felix Huston, who was serving as acting commander—Old Leather Britches, he was called— felt that being superseded was an affront he couldn’t abide with honor. Though he did not blame Johnston personally, he decided his only redress was to challenge him to a duel. He sent Johnston the following note: I really esteem your character, & know that you must be sensible of the delicacy of my situation. I therefore propose a meeting between us, in as short a period as you can make convenient.
Johnston replied: After reciprocating the sentiments of respect and esteem which you have been pleased to express toward me, it only remains to accord you the meeting proposed. I have designated 7 o’clock, a.m., tomorrow —and signed it: Your most obedient servant, A. S. Johnston.
He had the choice of weapons, by the code, but as there were no dueling pistols available and as Huston had no experience with rapiers, with which Johnston himself was an expert, he agreed to use Huston's horse pistols. They were hair-trigger weapons: Huston had a reputation for being able to light matches with them at fifty feet. So Johnston watched Huston's trigger finger and every time Huston was about to line up the sights, Johnston would fire without taking aim, causing Huston's finger to twitch and the shot to go astray. After five wild shots Huston was boiling mad;