Wallace’s division countermarched for nearly three hours before reaching a side road that would carry it into River Road, down which Grant had expected them to march in the first place. By then it was 3:30 p.m. and they were still about four and a half miles from the battlefield. At the intersection of this side road, Wallace was intercepted by Colonel McPherson and Adjutant General Rawlins, who had subsequently been sent by Grant after Wallace still had not shown up.
“I understood him [Wallace] to say that his guide had led him wrong,” McPherson said in his official report. In any event, Wallace had marched a good ten miles out of the way—five miles down the wrong road and five miles back. McPherson told him to “For God’s sake move forward rapidly,” but it seems Wallace was cursed with the slows that day. For one thing, he was marching with his artillery—by far the least hasty of his components—in between his First and Second Brigades, so that the entire column was compelled to move at the pace of the artillery.
When McPherson pointed this out, Wallace had the artillery move off the road so the brigades could pass on, but this, according to Rawlins, occasioned a delay of “a full half an hour, during which time he [Wallace] was dismounted and sitting down.” No sooner had the column gotten under way again than a report came that the bridge over Snake Creek was in the possession of the Rebels. The column was again halted while this information was investigated and proved false.
In the meantime, according to Rawlins, “the artillery firing at Pittsburg Landing became terrific, and we who had been there knew it was our heavy guns,” by which he meant the big siege guns that were posted right above the landing itself, suggesting that the army was at its last extremities and in danger of being driven into the river. Such was the state of affairs vis-à-vis General Lew Wallace and his missing infantry division as the sun began to sink over Pittsburg Landing and the Battle of Shiloh approached its dramatic climax.
Even while the battle had seemed to slow down in midafternoon, at the same time emotions and impelling motions were building up like an enormous head of steam in a boiler, and then, “about half-past-three o’clock, the struggle at the centre, which had been going on for five hours with fitful violence, was renewed with the utmost fury,” wrote William Preston Johnston. “Polk’s and Bragg’s corps, intermingled, were engaged in a death grapple with the sturdy commands of Wallace and Prentiss.” The lull, it seemed, was over.
This latest eruption at the Hornet’s Nest almost had to be endured to be believed, so ferocious was the fighting. It had been precipitated by the Rebel general Daniel Ruggles, the irascible 52-year-old Massachusetts-born, West Point–educated Mexican War veteran, with a head as bald as an egg and a long, white beard like an Old Testament prophet.
As the stalemate at the Hornet’s Nest continued to confound, Ruggles had impetuously commanded his aides to, “Bring forward every gun you can find,” on the theory that if the Confederates were unable to shoot the Yankees out of the nest with their rifles, or to prod them out with their bayonets, then by damn they would literally blow them out of it with the most spectacular concentration of artillery yet seen on the American continent.
By half past four Ruggles’s people had assembled some 62 cannons of various weights and calibers, which he lined up and pointed at the Hornet’s Nest in general and the Sunken Road in particular. When Ruggles gave the order to fire they said the whole ground shook as in an earthquake, and “the sky lit up in a blaze of unearthly fire.” What is more, this stupendous demonstration of firepower coincided with the simultaneous (“though unconcerted”) advance of the whole Confederate line.4
The artillery barrage utterly stupefied the defenders of the Hornet’s Nest, prompting 26-year-old Corp. Leonard B. Houston of the Second Iowa, W.H.L. Wallace’s division, to write his friends, “I don’t know how our Regiment escaped … it seemed like a mighty hurricane sweeping everything before it when men and horses were dying; at this moment of horror … the little birds were singing in the green trees over our heads! They were as happy as if all were perfect calmness beneath them.”
If the birds seemed happy, the Confederates were decidedly not, emerging as they were from the tree line across a broad expanse of field, thousands upon thousands of bayonets at the ends of their gun barrels gleaming menacingly in the afternoon sun. It takes a great deal of single-minded determination—let alone raw courage—to behold such a sight and not feel a strong urge to flee, which is what the Yankees in the Hornet’s Nest finally did after fighting valiantly for six long and ghastly hours. The very primitiveness of so many men headed straight for them, bearing long gleaming knives come to kill them close-on, was apparently more than they could bear.
Worse, not only was the entire Rebel front line moving on them but both flanks had collapsed, as no fewer than seven Rebel brigades closed in on the nest’s tenants from both sides and the rear.
The first to give way was Hurlbut’s division on the Union left, which was being confronted by three brigades under Breckinridge and Bragg—Chalmers’s, Jackson’s, and Bowen’s. Clearly the Federal commanders had gone well past the point when “further endurance was no longer a virtue.” The lines to the left and to the right of them had fallen back, and Hurlbut’s position became a salient that stuck out like a sore thumb.
In taking to heart Grant’s charge to hold out “at all hazards,” Prentiss, and to a lesser extent Hurlbut and Wallace, had essentially outfortituded themselves and now faced total annihilation or surrender. They chose the latter, some deliberately, even with the formality of white flags and officers surrendering their swords, but in many cases the men simply slipped away from the lines after seeing Rebels at their flanks and rear. When the tally count was made, more than 2,200 Yankee soldiers had been made prisoners, including a division commander, Benjamin M. Prentiss himself.
In their official reports, Hornet’s Nest commanders from the top down unanimously registered sentiments to the effect that “It was therefore useless to think of prolonging a resistance which could only have wasted their lives to no purpose.” Or, “To have held out longer would be to suffer complete annihilation.” Still, about half of the Hornet’s Nest defenders, maybe more, made it out of the trap, especially those closer to the landing.
General W.H.L. Wallace nearly got out himself but didn’t. When he was notified of the impending collapse of the brigade on his left flank and Wallace went to see about it, an aide, who was also his brother-in-law, Lt. Cyrus Dickey, directed the general’s attention to a mass of Confederate infantry about to pitch into his last remaining regiment in that part of the field. As Wallace rose off his saddle to get a better look, a bullet struck him in the back of the head and exited through his left eye, blowing it out. The general fell headlong to the ground, evidently killed.
The horrified Dickey instructed Wallace’s orderlies to conduct the general’s corpse to the rear, but soon the Rebel advance nearly overtook them and they quickly moved the body out of the road, placing it by some ammunition crates to protect it from being trampled. Then all fled the scene. It was then past 5 p.m.—by some accounts, closer to 6—when the Confederate line swept through the Hornet’s Nest.
A regiment was detailed to escort the huge catch of Yankee prisoners back to Corinth, while Prentiss was taken to the Shiloh church to meet General Beauregard. The Rebel line continued on until at last it came upon what remained of Grant’s army, drawn up defiantly for one last stand at Pittsburg Landing.
1 From the French, meaning “out of the battle” or disabled.
2 For years it was assumed the fatal shot was fired by a Yankee soldier, but some modern historians now contend that Johnston was accidentally shot by his own men. Considering the amount of firing that was going on, and absent any concrete proof, any such speculation would seem to be just that.
3 A cousin to both President James K. Polk and the Rebel bishop and general Leonidas Polk.
4 In recent years there has been some disagreement among historians over the precise number of
guns in Ruggles’s gigantic battery. For more than a hundred years the figure stood at 62. Some now argue 50-something, others 60-something; I say after all this time it probably doesn’t matter.
CHAPTER 14
MY GOD, MY GOD, IT IS TOO LATE!
AT LONG LAST, MUSICIAN FOURTH CLASS JOHN Cockerill reached Pittsburg Landing, “almost too scared to be put on any sort of duty.” From the crest of the bluff he looked down upon a hive of breathtaking commotion, which he compared to a disturbed bed of ants. “Below lay thirty transports, at least,” he remembered, “all being loaded with the wounded, and all around me were baggage wagons, mule teams, disabled artillery teams and thousands of panic-stricken men. Some of the stragglers were being forced to carry sandbags up to fortify batteries of heavy siege guns.”
The cabin on the bluff that had once been used as Grant’s headquarters was “turned into a temporary field hospital,” Cockerill said, grisly as a charnel house, “where hundreds of wounded men, brought down in wagons and ambulances, were being unloaded, and where their arms and legs were cut off and thrown out to form gory, ghastly heaps.”
It seemed to Cockerill that everyone was yelling at once, and the air continued to fume with curses and threats by officers who were variously ordering or pleading with the thousands of fugitives to return for the one final stand against the Rebel onslaught. Even Grant joined in this effort, Cockerill said, yelling at the men that “Buell’s army would soon be on the field, and he did not want to see his men disgraced.”
Cockerill said that Grant told them if they did not return to the fight, “he would send his cavalry down to the river to drive them out,” and indeed did just that, for “a squadron of cavalry soon appeared, divided at either end of the landing, and riding toward each other with sabers drawn. The majority of the skulkers climbed up the bank,” Cockerill said, “hanging by the roots of the trees, and after the cavalry had passed they were back in their old places again.”
About that same time, said Cockerill, a most welcome sight appeared on the opposite side of the river, “where I saw a body of horsemen emerging from the low canebrakes back of the river. In a moment I saw a man waving a white flag with a red square in the center. I knew that he was signaling, and a few minutes later, I saw the head of a column of blue emerge from the woods beyond.” It was Buell, and they were saved, or so Cockerill believed.
Twenty-nine-year-old Ann Wallace had remained aboard the Minnehaha all through that Dantesque day, while teamsters loaded wounded men aboard the steamboats that were, in fact, about the only structures at Shiloh remaining in Union hands.1 Buell’s men on the far side of the river had to make a road down to the water, but soon all the steamers at the landing, including the Minnehaha, were going “over and back, over and back,” Ann Wallace recorded, ferrying fresh troops to the battlefield. Overtaxed surgeons on the upper, or hurricane, decks were tending to the wounded, while Buell’s soldiers were loaded below.
Half of Ann Wallace’s family was on that fatal battlefield, or so it seemed, and she was nearly beside herself because of it. In addition to her husband, the general, her father, a colonel, and both of her brothers as officers, two of her husband’s brothers, as well as a number of more distant relatives, were in the fight. The noise of the battle had been drawing ominously nearer throughout the day and was now practically on top of her.
“As I sat there I saw these shells strike the sides of other steamers and cut off limbs of trees near where the road was made, and pass buzzing across our deck,” she wrote in a letter shortly after the battle. Adding to the beastliness of the scene were the shrieks and moans of wounded who faced the surgeon’s saw, or the frightened, searching eyes of silent sufferers. “I felt dazed and horrified, yet enthused by some means,” said Ann Wallace, “so I was not afraid … I knew the danger, but felt lifted above fear of it.
“The panic-stricken raw troops seemed perfectly insane,” she remembered. “The steamer would have to keep a slight distance from the shore, or it would have been swamped by the rush of officers and men.” At one point a Union officer, half crazed with fear, somehow got aboard and came into the pilothouse where Ann Wallace was sitting. He produced a revolver and threatened to kill the pilot if he did not take his men aboard. The pilot stalled, pretending to obey, “giving the frenzied man time to come to his senses” and put his pistol down. “I felt it would be safer below,” she said, “but the feeling that exhibition of fear on my part would make it a little harder for that pilot to stand at his post kept me from going down.”
As the battle seemed to be nearing a wild, frantic peak, Ann Wallace turned to see the Rev. Charles Button, whom she knew from Springfield and as chaplain and elder of her husband’s former regiment, “with a worn and depressed look,” coming up the gangway, partially disabled by a spent bullet while he had been tending to the wounded.
“This is an awful battle,” he said to her. She replied, “Yes, but these fresh troops will yet win the day.” He hesitated. “You have a great many relations on this field, you cannot hope to see them all come in safe.” Ann somehow deflected the statement, but he had come up behind her, where she was sitting, and once more said, “It is an awful battle.”
It was his tone of voice. “The dread truth fell on my heart like a thunderbolt, like the cold hand of steel,” she cried. “Words needed not to tell it. I was stunned, chilled, almost paralyzed! Suffering came hours afterwards.” Soon Lieutenant Dickey, her brother, arrived and was “spared the task of telling me my life had darkened,” she said. Dickey provided some details of Wallace’s last moments and the attempt to return the body, but to Ann Wallace it was nearly beside the point. “My husband was dead, and the enemy had possession of the ground where he lay. ’Twas all they could tell me, and it was enough.”
Ann Wallace spent the miserable remainder of that night, she wrote later, “bathing the fevered brows and limbs of the sufferers around me. Action was a relief, and it was a slight help to aid men who were suffering in the cause for which Will had given his life.” These were the words of a general’s wife.
Buell’s army arrived on the opposite shore with understandable trepidation. Since late morning they had marched the ten miles from Savannah through the most obnoxious jungles and swamps alongside the Tennessee River, down an old wagon road, in places barely a rut, “dank and unwholesome,” led by a native guide, and impeded by fallen trees, shallow, scummy ponds, and “slippery mire shoe-top deep.” It seemed with each passing minute the noise of the battle was sharpened, said a private from Ohio, naturally reinforcing everyone’s realization that “it was no child’s game going on ahead of us.”
It was about 4:30 p.m. when Buell’s leading regiments emerged from the swamp into a large cornfield and meadow opposite Pittsburg Landing, from which the view across the Tennessee River was appalling.
Ambrose Bierce, destined to become one of America’s best-known literary figures, was a first lieutenant with the Ninth Indiana in Col. William B. Hazen’s brigade of Nelson’s division. As they slogged through the greasy swamps, in his mind the battle became a “dull, distant sound like the heavy breathing of some great animal below the horizon”; then, as they surfaced into the cornfield, “the air was full of thunder and the earth was trembling beneath [our] feet. Below us ran the river, vexed with plunging shells and obscured in spots by blue sheets of low-lying smoke.”
Across the river, the smoke mostly blanked out the landing itself but, on the bluff above, Bierce saw “the battle burning brightly enough; a thousand lights kindled and expired every second. Through the smoke, the branches of the trees showed black; sudden flames burst out, here and there, singly and in dozens, fleeting streaks of fire [that] crossed over to us, followed by the musical humming of the fragments as they struck the ground on every side, making us wince, but doing little harm.”
“The air was full of noises,” Bierce continued, “distant musketry rattled smartly and petulantly, or sighed and growled when closer. There were deep shaking explos
ions and smart shocks. The death-line was an arc of which the river was the chord, filled with the whisper of stray bullets and the hurtle of conical shells; the rush of round shot. There were faint, desultory cheers. Occasionally, against the glare behind the trees, could be seen moving black figures, distinct, but no larger than a thumb; they seemed to be like the figures of demons in old allegorical prints of hell.”
Such was Bierce’s first impression of the unearthly spectacle unfolding before Buell’s army as it reached its place opposite the landing—a vivid, articulate account of what it must have been like to see the very gates of hell across the river Styx. One of Buell’s signalmen set up a wigwag2 station, which is what 16-year-old John Cockerill saw from his perch atop the opposing bluff where the battle raged in earnest. Soon a transport, and then another, emerged from the blanket of sulfurous, flame-stabbed smoke around Pittsburg Landing and steamed toward them.
As more Federal regiments began to arrive at the cornfield they found themselves sharing space with a sizable gathering of local “country folks,” who exhibited “an intense anxiety to see every movement visible on the farther side of the river.
“One of these worthies,” wrote a private in the Sixth Ohio, “was hailed by our company,” whose members apparently held the locals in fairly low esteem. “Say, old feller!” he was asked. “How’s the fight going on over there?”
The man, the soldier said, was “an old and somewhat diminutive specimen, grizzle-haired, stoop shouldered, and withered from the effects of the sun and tobacco.” After hesitating for a moment he turned and, “with a side-long glance of his eyes, answered slowly: ‘Well, it are’nt hardly decided yet, I reckon; but they’re driving your folks—some.’ ”