Young Leander’s father was a strong Union man, but Leander did not respond to Lincoln’s first call for troops, nor to the second; then, after the North’s humiliation at the Battle of Bull Run, like so many others he joined up, unwilling to see the Union split asunder or, more directly, “to be pointed at as a stay-at-home coward.”
Stillwell and his comrades had been enjoying the relaxation of a Sunday morning when their peace was disturbed by the deep pum of artillery somewhere off to the right. “Every man sprung to his feet as if struck with an electric shock,” he said later, “and looked inquiringly into one another’s faces.” Soon enough there came “a low, sullen, continuous roar. There was no mistaking that sound,” he said. The drums beat the long roll, and in due time the 61st Illinois was posted in woods at the southern edge of Spain Field, from where they could see “the blue rings of smoke curling upward among the trees off to the right” (where Peabody was having his fight at Seay’s Field), “and the pungent smell of gunpowder filled the air.”
As they stood waiting for the enemy to appear, Stillwell’s thoughts drifted back to his old log cabin and his father and mother, “who would be getting my little brothers ready for Sunday school; the old dog lying asleep; the hens cackling about the barn.” He did not have long to dwell on these things, however, for within minutes “Suddenly to the right there was a long, wavy flash of bright light, then another, and another! It was the sunlight shining on bayonets—and—they were here at last! A long brown line with muskets at a right shoulder shift, in excellent order, right through the woods they came.” As many in the Federal ranks remarked that morning, when the Rebel lines came crashing through the woods they were preceded by a diaspora of frightened wildlife: bounding rabbits, leaping deer, whirring coveys of quail, even flights of wild turkeys sailing high overhead; it wasn’t as though the Confederates were actually sneaking up on anyone.
The order to open fire was given at once and “from one end of the regiment to the next leaped a red sheet of flame.” At this the Confederates stopped and fired a volley of their own, and the air was suddenly filled with zinging hot lead and a layer of dense white smoke. Stillwell was trying to peer beneath the smoke in hopes of sighting an enemy soldier when he heard someone “in a highly excited tone calling to me from the rear, ‘Shoot! Shoot! Why don’t you shoot!’ ” He looked around to find one of the second lieutenants “fairly wild with excitement, jumping up and down like a hen on a hot griddle.” “Why lieutenant,” Stillwell replied, “I can’t see anything to shoot at,” to which the lieutenant replied, “Shoot! Shoot anyhow!” and shoot he did, thinking, however, “that it was ridiculous to shoot into a cloud of smoke.”
Behind this smoke was the brigade of the Rebel general Gladden, whom General Johnston had directed to the right to close on Lick Creek, the eastern boundary of the cornucopia’s opening, which was supposed to be the far right of the Confederate army. But first it became necessary for Gladden to deal with these Federal troops who were in the way, which happened to be Miller’s brigade of Prentiss’s division, including Leander Stillwell shooting at smoke. Apparently, Gladden’s “blood was up,” along with everybody else’s that morning. After he was informed that Bragg and Johnston wanted Gen. James Chalmers’s brigade to swing out behind him even farther toward Lick Creek, Gladden was overheard saying to the messenger orderly, “Tell General Bragg that I have as keen a scent for Yankees as General Chalmers has.”
This roar of gunfire had no sooner informed Prentiss that his second brigade was now engaged in battle than orders came, “for some reason—I never knew what,” Stillwell said, to fall back across the field to their original positions on the northern side in front of their tent camps. There ensued some of the fiercest fighting of the battle.
Stillwell remembered jumping down behind a tree and thinking he had disturbed a hive or swarm of bees “because of the incessant humming above our heads,” until it dawned on him those were bullets “singing through the air.” This was also where he saw his first man killed that day. The man was hiding behind a tree to load his weapon, then whipped out around the tree, fired, ducked, and reloaded. But the next time Stillwell turned his head the man was “lying there on his back, at the foot of his tree, with his leg doubled under him, motionless—and stone dead. I stared at his body, perfectly horrified,” Stillwell said; he had been hit “square in the head. Only a few seconds ago that man was alive and well.” It came near to “completely upsetting me,” Stillwell said, adding ominously, “I got used to such incidents during the course of the day.” Such was his baptism of fire.
Over in Peabody’s part of the line the fighting had become so severe that from his point of view the issue was in doubt. Confederate Henry Stanley and his regiment had continued to load and fire at Peabody’s men from cover while the officers organized a charge, the only way to break the stalemate. It was near 9 a.m. when the order came, Stanley said, to “Fix Bayonets! On the double-quick! Forward! We continued advancing, loading and firing as we went. The Federals appeared inclined to await us,” he said, “but at this juncture we raised a yell.”
Stanley and thousands of his comrades rushed at Peabody’s line, yelling wildly, stopping occasionally to fire, but pressing forward through the smoke and din. The yelling was good for them, Stanley said, somehow heartening, encouraging, and relieving of the tensions of the battlefield.
As the Rebels attacked and the shooting became heavier and more men began to fall, some of Peabody’s troops began to melt away to the rear. It was difficult to detect them at first because of the woods and underbrush, but the attrition soon became substantial, and roads to the rear were soon clogged with fugitives and stragglers as well as steadily increasing numbers of wounded. Then Peabody himself was killed and the brigade fell apart.
Peabody had sent his aide to ask the colonel of his left regiment if he could hold; meantime Peabody went to find Prentiss to ask for artillery support and troops. Failing to locate the general, he galloped back to his position, where he found that the situation had deteriorated. Men had continued to desert, and those who hadn’t were falling back into their own camp, firing but retreating in the face of heavy Confederate pressure. When Peabody’s aide returned with an affirmative answer as to whether the left regiment could hold, he found his commanding officer sprawled over a log, shot through the head. He had been trying to rally his disheartened troops when suddenly he threw up his hands and reeled backward off his horse, dead.
About a year earlier, not long after he had joined the army, Peabody had had a premonition that he would be killed, and he wrote to a friend about having “a sort of presentiment that I shall go under,” adding that, “If I do, it shall be in a manner that the old family will be proud of it—Good-by old fellow.” Even as he was mustering the brigade to the long roll earlier that very morning he told a fellow officer that he would not live to see the result of it. It was too true. The gallant Peabody had already been shot four times that morning—wounded in the hand, thigh, neck, and body—before meeting the bullet to the brain that killed him. Joseph Ruff, the German private who had accompanied Major Powell on his reconnaissance patrol the night before, came across Peabody’s corpse just to the west of the regimental camps: “He had evidently been shot from his horse for he lay with his legs over a log and his head and shoulders on the ground,” Ruff remembered. At age 32 Peabody was already an exceptional man; there is no telling how far he might have gone.
General Shaver’s charge against the remnants of Peabody’s regiment came roaring and yelling up from the ravine scattering everything in its way. “ ‘They Fly!’ was echoed from lip to lip,” exulted Henry Morton Stanley, who was screaming his lungs out with the rest. “Then I knew what the Berserker passion was … at such a moment, nothing could have stopped us.”5 Of the bluecoats he said, “When we arrived upon the place where they had stood, they had vanished. Then we caught sight of their beautiful array of tents!”
As for Private Ruff, after he returned from
the hazardous patrol he did not seem to grasp the severity of the situation. It was his turn that week to serve as cook for his squad, so when he got back to Peabody’s camp that morning he grabbed a pail and started for a spring about half a mile away to get water to cook with. All along his walk there came the rising noise of battle, and on his return trip he saw Sherman’s troops in great disorder, some running away from the battle sounds, others toward it, and bullets filled the air. When Ruff arrived back at Peabody’s camp the bullets were riddling his own tent, causing him to conclude that “it did not look as though there would be any breakfast” that morning. Ruff set down his pail and picked up his gun just as Prentiss’s line began to break for the rear. As he emerged into the company street he could see “brown and gray-clad soldiers among the big white tents.”
As Ruff and his comrades fled northward, Shaver’s Confederates stopped to enjoy the fruits that the Union encampment yielded: uniforms, shoes, swords and other weapons, knapsacks, trunks, and utensils—all was plunder—as, in some regiments, was breakfast, still warm upon the table or hot upon the stove or fire, a feast for the famished Confederate soldiers. “I had a momentary impression,” Stanley said, “that with the capture of the first camp the battle was well-nigh over; but it was only a brief prologue of the long and exhaustive series of struggles that day.”
Way out on Peabody’s left, blackened by gunpowder and shaken by the terrific shooting of the six guns of his battery—one shot fired by each gun every 30 seconds or so—Captain Hickenlooper felt close to exhaustion though the fighting had gone on less than an hour. Each of the three times the Confederates charged Miller’s brigade, his gunners had loaded double-shotted canister,6 “which tore great gaps in their ranks and drove them back to cover,” Hickenlooper said. In the meantime, his men were dropping like flies. “Each man and officer takes his assigned position,” then “the minies buzz and sing about their ears.”7 When a gunner “drops from his place, another fills the gap; and thus the work goes on with a system and regularity marvelous in its perfection.”
Attesting to how well this “system” worked was its effect on General Gladden’s Confederate attack, which was thrown back several times as the Rebel soldiers attempted to cross Spain Field. Powder smoke hung so heavily in the air that at one point Gladden rode forward through the jumbled, mangled bodies of his dead and wounded to get a better look at the Union position. He had not gone far when a terrific cannon blast blew him off his horse; members of his staff were horrified to find that his left arm had been shredded and nearly torn from its socket by a ball or exploding shell fragment. He was carried away “pale, faint, but still smiling” to a field hospital in the rear where the arm was amputated, but he died a few days later, the first, though not the last, general officer to be mortally wounded in the battle.
This development left Col. Daniel Adams, a Louisiana lawyer, in charge of what was fast becoming a Rebel calamity. Hickenlooper’s cannon fire had dispirited the Confederates, and they started streaming to the rear, until Adams seized the colors and rode slowly through the retreating troops, crying, “Will you come with me?” Which they did, he reported later, “with great alacrity, and leading them close to the enemy lines I ordered a charge which was promptly and effectively executed.”
As the battle seemed to reach its most pitiless intensity, an order from Prentiss reached Hickenlooper’s battery directing, of all things, a “change of front to the right”—meaning that the guns should be turned 90 degrees, “a difficult movement to execute under fire,” Hickenlooper complained, “in woods filled with dense undergrowth, horses rearing and plunging and dropping in their tracks.” It was a mistake, said the battery captain, “which the enemy immediately took advantage of by a direct charge on our now exposed and defenseless left flank.”
Gladden’s—now Adams’s—men came on in three lines of battle, at last unmolested by Hickenlooper’s cannon fire. Infantrymen who were guarding the battery rose up and fired a volley, which at first caused the Confederates to waver and hesitate. But they soon recovered and came on again “with a Rebel Yell that caused an involuntary thrill of terror to pass like an electric shock through even the bravest hearts,” Hickenlooper said. Another volley from the infantry soldiers produced a similar result. Many Confederates fell, but the companies closed ranks and came on once more, “their colors moving steadily forward.”
Hickenlooper realized that it was time for him to get out, and had just given the order to limber up “when there comes a crashing volley that sweeps our front as with a scythe, a roar that is deafening, and the earth trembles with the shock.” Confederate artillery had been turned upon them. Every horse in that section of the battery went down—as well as most of the men—including Hickenlooper’s own horse, Gray Eagle, upon whom he had been mounted. The infantry guard arose and fled, “in wild dismay, leaving the wounded, the dying and the dead.” Using such horses as remained,8 Hickenlooper managed to get away with four of his guns, abandoning the 6-pounders to the Rebels.
His flight was spectacular, with teams of horses hauling guns and caissons, “bounding through underbrush, over ditches, logs, each driver lashing his team.” Back they raced through their own camps, past the deserters and the stragglers and the wounded, until they found a line about a mile north where Prentiss had planted his colors and intended to make a stand near a peach orchard along an old wagon track that was later called the “Sunken Road,” Hickenlooper recalled, “for its having been cut for some distance through a low hill.”
On the heels of Hickenlooper’s mad dash Miller’s brigade also collapsed after officers warned that “the troops on our right [Peabody’s regiment] had given way, and we were flanked,” reported Leander Stillwell. He rose from behind his log and had started for the rear when, like Private Ruff, he saw “men in gray and brown clothes running through the camp on our right.” But also, he remembered, “I saw something else, too, that sent a chill all though me. It was a kind of flag I had never seen before; a gaudy sort of thing with red bars. The smoke around it was low and dense and kept me from seeing the man who was carrying it but I plainly saw the banner. It was going fast, with a jerky motion, which told me that the bearer was at the double-quick.” As he ran down his company street Stillwell considered retrieving his knapsack from the mess tent, but “one quick backward glance made me change my mind. I never saw my knapsack or any of its contents afterward.”
Sixteen-year-old private George W. McBride of the 15th Michigan had an even more harrowing tale to tell. His regiment had arrived at Pittsburg Landing only the previous afternoon, and that morning as the fight heated up was led onto the battlefield on the extreme left of Prentiss’s division with no ammunition whatsoever. At one point they found themselves standing at ease and order arms when they observed several long lines of men in brown and gray coming down a slope opposite them. “The first line moves down the hillside, crosses the little creek, enters the clearing, halts, and fires into us,” McBride recalled. “Not a man in our company has a cartridge to use. A few men fall. We are ordered to shoulder arms, about face, and move back, which we do.”
After finally being issued ammunition, McBride’s regiment was put back into the fight. “There was the crash of musketry, the roar of artillery, the yells, the smoke, the jar, the terrible energy. At intervals we can see the faces of the foe, blackened with powder, and glaring with demonic fury, lost to all human impulses, and full of the fiendish desire to kill. Somebody calls out, ‘Everybody for himself!’ ”
As he ran back through the brigade camps, McBride reported that the Confederates “were sweeping the ground with canister; the musket fire was awful. The striking of the shot on the ground threw up little clouds of dust, and the falling of men all around impressed me with the desire to get out of there. The hair commenced to rise on the back of my neck. I felt sure that a cannon ball was close behind me, giving me chase. I never ran fast before, and I never will again. It was a marvel that any of us came out alive.”
Thus, the collapse of Prentiss’s line was complete.
The battle everywhere had now become so intense that it was unsafe in practically the entire battle area, not just where the troops were fighting. Many of the rifles could be deadly, though not accurate, at up to a mile. A rifleman in battle was supposed to be able to load and fire three aimed shots a minute. Theoretically, then, if every rifleman in a brigade fired three times a minute, that would put 12,000 bullets in the air in that single minute, and from that one brigade only. At Shiloh there were more than 30 brigades in the fight, so one can only imagine the amount of deadly metal flying through the air in any given minute.
Our Mississippi cavalryman, for example, who had been observing from his high vantage point on the Confederate left, explained the effects of artillery fire on men standing a mile or more from the main battle line. “We could hear heavy missiles whizzing around and above us; some of them too were distinctly visible. One great solid shot I shall never forget. As it came through the air it was clearly seen. Capt. Foote saw it as it ricocheted, and spurred his horse out of the way. Lieutenant T.J. Deupree was not so fortunate. This same shot grazed his thigh, cut off his sabre hanging at his side, and passed through the flank of his noble stallion which sank lifeless in his tracks. It also killed a second horse in the rear of Lieutenant Deupree and finally, striking a third horse in the shoulder, felled him to the ground without disabling him, and not even breaking the skin. The ball was now spent. My own horse, ‘Bremer,’ in the excitement and joy of battle raised his tail high, and a cannon ball cut away about half of it, bone and all; and ever afterwards he was known as ‘Bob-tailed Bremer.’ Many solid shot we saw strike the ground, bounding like rubber balls, passing over our heads, making hideous music in their course. Colonel Lindsay at this time countermarched the regiment and took shelter in a neighboring ravine.”9