Shiloh church, where Beauregard had kept his headquarters since Sherman’s retreat in midmorning, was a good two miles from where Bragg was having it out with Grant’s die-in-the-last-ditch defense. Beauregard had been in command of the army for nearly three hours, and he was deeply concerned that it was falling apart. Aides had reported that, among other things, all the roads were clogged with Confederate stragglers, regiments had been separated from their brigades, and companies from their regiments, and that at least a third of the army was engaged in plundering Yankee tents. Now he could hear with his own ears the tumultuous cannonading by the big Yankee gunboats and became fearful they were slaughtering his troops near the river.
Visitors to Beauregard’s tent during this time were surprised, if not startled, to find the general tending to a large bird sitting on his lap. It was some sort of pheasant, the gift of a soldier who had picked it up on the battlefield that afternoon and offered it to Beauregard as … well, as dinner. Instead, the Creole took pity on the creature, which was dazed and confused by the shelling and suffering from a broken wing. He had taken to stroking it and apparently decided to nurse it back to health, for he had ordered a box to be altered as a cage so he could carry it along with his baggage after the Shiloh fight was finished. At least that was one story; another was that the general intended to save the pheasant and eat him later. In any case, anxiety over the disorganization of the army as well as its safety had become Beauregard’s paramount concerns as darkness fell.
As is usual when matters of great import such as Shiloh are resolved by questionable decisions, memories often become “improved” with time or, put more directly, a great deal of lying goes on. The liar in chief in this case seems to be Beauregard, who, afterward, in justifying his order to stop the fighting, raised all sorts of reasons that he could not possibly have known at the time, sitting in his headquarters at Shiloh church, such as the arrival of Buell’s army and the artillery strength of Grant’s defensive line.
What we do know, however, is that Beauregard had just come into possession of a piece of intelligence that must have made him shiver with delight. A courier had ridden up from Corinth bringing a telegram from the Rebel general Ben Helm5 in north Alabama, which revealed that Buell’s army had been seen marching south toward Decatur, instead of west toward Pittsburg Landing. Actually, it was only one division of Buell’s army that had been spotted by cavalry scouts in Alabama, but it gave Beauregard the false impression that he would have all of tomorrow to finish off Grant before Buell could arrive.
Then there was the matter of Prentiss, who was delivered to Beauregard shortly after he was seized by Rebel troops. Prentiss later boasted that he deceived Beauregard by telling him that Buell was nowhere near Pittsburg Landing, and thus took credit for tricking the Creole into believing that he faced nothing more than Grant’s badly mauled army next morning. But Colonel Jordan tells a different tale. When he rode into Beauregard’s headquarters that evening he was introduced, he said, to a Federal general, who turned out to be Prentiss, and was charged with keeping him prisoner that night.
There was a great deal of jocularity among Jordan, Prentiss, and Col. Jacob Thompson, who had known Prentiss before the war. According to Jordan, as they were bedding down for the night Prentiss, “With a laugh … said, ‘You gentlemen have had your way to-day, but it will be very different tomorrow. You’ll see! Buell will effect a junction with Grant tonight, and we’ll turn the tables on you in the morning.’ ” Jordan, “in the same pleasant spirit,” or so he said, produced a copy of the dispatch from Corinth, but General Prentiss was having none of it. “He insisted it was a mistake, and we would see,” Jordan later wrote in a magazine article, and when the morning broke with heavy firing from the landing, Prentiss exclaimed, “Ah, didn’t I tell you so? There is Buell!” The discrepancy here is too wide for mere misinterpretation. Somebody is lying.
In the half-light while the battle still raged near the landing, Beauregard dictated a telegram to Richmond in which he informed Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government of the death of General Johnston, as well as the “Complete Victory” of Confederate arms that day. The enemy, he said, had been thoroughly beaten and “the remnant of his army driven in utter disorder to the immediate vicinity of Pittsburgh and we remained undisputed masters of his … [camps].” The announcement was premature, of course, and later the Creole lamented, “I thought I had Grant just where I wanted him, and could finish him up next day.”
So Beauregard sent a messenger, his old friend Maj. Numa Augustin from New Orleans society days, with an order telling all commanders to call off the battle and withdraw to the shelter of the Yankee camps. It had been Augustin’s arrival at the Dill Branch fight that caused the withdrawal that precipitated General Withers’s “astonishment”—to say nothing of Bragg’s dumbfounded reaction when Augustin finally got around to him. Bragg was convinced, as he stated later in his official report, that he was in the midst of “a movement commenced with every prospect of success.”
“Have you given that order to anyone else?” Bragg demanded. He had been acting, during the attack, as Beauregard’s chief of staff.
“Yes sir, to General Polk, on your left, and if you look, you will see it is being obeyed,” Augustin told him. Bragg was aghast as he watched the gray-clad Confederates fade back from the battle line.
“My God, my God,” Bragg cried. “It is too late!”
1 The Federals also had the camp and tents of W.H.L. Wallace’s division, but everything else was in Confederate hands.
2 Wigwag, or semaphore, is communicating by signal flags, in which messages waved out by a signalman could be conveyed over relatively long distances (with the added use of telescopes).
3 A Northern derogatory term for a Southern secessionist or Rebel.
4 A contemporary report claimed that these 8-inch guns hurled a shell “as big as a full-grown hog.”
5 Benjamin Hardin Helm was, of all things, Abraham Lincoln’s favorite brother-in-law, having married Mary Todd Lincoln’s younger sister Emilie. Helm graduated from West Point in 1851, the same year his father was elected governor of Kentucky. He was killed at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863, sending the President of the United States into deep, but very private, mourning.
CHAPTER 15
I INTEND TO WITHDRAW
GENERAL BRAGG’S LAMENT WAS TOO TRUE. EVERY fifteen minutes or so, steamers brought another several hundred of Buell’s men across to the landing, and before morning he would have more than 17,000 fresh troops on the field. Not only that, but well after dark the much sought division of Lew Wallace at last concluded its bizarre odyssey from Crump’s Landing and emerged from the Owl Creek swamps near Sherman’s position at the far right end of the Union line. This now gave Grant nearly 25,000 completely new troops—more men than Beauregard could muster in the entire Confederate army at that point, considering the casualties and stragglers.
It seems almost a criminal error of military intelligence that nobody—not Sidney Johnston, Beauregard, or anybody else—thought to put a close watch on the routes Buell might have used to march to Grant’s relief. But in those days and times the term “military intelligence,” if not exactly an oxymoron, was at best an expression of a vague and more or less unrefined concept that smacked of being “undignified.” Spying on the enemy—though it is absolutely necessary—was considered somehow “sneaky,” even “ungentlemanly,” and usually was relegated to the cavalry.1
In fact there was somebody watching out for Buell, and for whatever else lurked in the Confederates’ far right quarter, and that somebody was Nathan Bedford Forrest along with his cavalry regiment. All day Colonel Forrest had been itching to do something useful with his horsemen, but in a fight like Shiloh, often the best thing cavalry can do is stay out of the way and guard roads and bridges. Forrest tested that notion once and found that it was held for a good reason. Late in the morning as the battle raged around the Peach Orchard, Forrest chafed at his orders to gu
ard against any Federal attempt to cross Lick Creek, nearby where Stuart and Chalmers would soon be having their fight. As the roar of battle swelled in the west, Forrest reportedly told his men, “Boys, you hear that shooting? And here we are guarding a damn creek! Let’s go and help them!”
Upon reaching the battlefield Forrest rode to the sound of the loudest firing, which, unfortunately, happened to be the Sunken Road in the Hornet’s Nest at its worst, and immediately he sent for permission to charge the enemy. But division commander Ben Cheatham demurred, saying that his infantry brigades had already charged several times without success and needed some rest and reorganization, to which Forrest was reported to have declared, “Then I’ll charge under my own orders.”
He formed his command into a column of fours in support of a regiment of Alabama infantry that was trying to drive a body of Federals from a fencerow and charged toward the Sunken Road. Blasted by massed artillery and infantry fire—both of which are anathema to cavalry—Forrest’s bold riders lurched into the knotty thickets of the Hornet’s Nest and immediately found themselves and their mounts hopelessly entangled in the branches of the thick scrub oak. They—most of them, anyway—somehow managed to extricate themselves from the jungled thicket, but it was obvious now, if it wasn’t before, that mounted cavalry has little business in the middle of a serious infantry fight.
After that, Forrest led his regiment to the far Confederate right and hovered behind a series of Indian mounds along the Tennessee River, watching for trouble, of which Buell’s army was the paramount example. In the distance Forrest’s scouts could see some kind of activity on the far shore of the river, and the moving of steamboats, but when they attempted to get closer one of the Federal gunboats opened up and drove them back into the woods.
Night found Forrest suspended between curiosity and suspicion, and he ordered a squadron to strip a dozen dead Federals of their uniforms and sent a reconnaissance team under a Lieutenant Sheridan, dressed in Yankee blue, to get a better look at Pittsburg Landing. Soon they returned during a tremendous rain and electrical storm with news that was at once ominous and promising. Buell’s army had indeed arrived and was crossing the river, Sheridan said, but in his opinion there was such disorder at the landing that a surprise night attack might end the affair on the spot.
Forrest immediately set out in search of a superior officer, the closest being Brigadier General Chalmers, who was asleep. After being awakened he replied that Forrest needed to find a corps commander, if not Beauregard himself, for such a portentous operation. Continuing on, Forrest came upon corps commander Hardee and told him that if the Rebel army did not immediately launch a night attack, “[We] will be whipped like hell before ten o’clock tomorrow.” Hardee replied that Beauregard was the man to see, but somehow, in the rainstorm and the dark, Forrest was unable to locate Beauregard’s headquarters at the Shiloh church. About 2 a.m. he returned to Hardee but was told only to “maintain his pickets.” If there was in fact a “lost opportunity” for the Confederacy at Shiloh that was probably it.
For most of the men, that night must have been at the least an absorbing experience. The storm drenched everyone to the bone—even the Confederates who were now occupying the Yankees’ Sibley tents were soaked, for the canvas had been riddled with holes during the day’s fighting. All had been up since daybreak and were completely exhausted, and now even sleep was denied them. From the woods and the fields there came a kind of low, constant, monosyllabic sighing from the wounded, interspersed with the screams of those in acute agony. All day hundreds of wagons had been carting the wounded off toward Corinth, but it had not been enough. In places where the fighting had been heaviest, the wounded and the dead lay thick like a carpet, their countenances made more ghastly by the lightning flashes. As the storms broke up, a pale moon shone between the racing clouds, basking the horrid tableaux in an unearthly shade of yellowish blue.
Even more nauseating was the appearance of feral hogs, which began eating the dead and the wounded alike. Augustus Mecklin, who had survived the charge of Statham’s brigade at the Peach Orchard, heard them, “unmistakable, quarreling over their carnival feast.” Bierce, too, later told of recoiling in horror at the droves of man-eating hogs on the battlefield.
All of this was punctuated throughout the night by terrific explosions from the big 8-inch cannons of the gunboats, which had been firing at 10- or 15-minute intervals since sundown to harass the Rebel army. Confederates hid in hastily scraped-out pits or beneath houses and corncribs; one even told of crawling into a hollow tree trunk. Since it was unaimed fire, most of the shells fell harmlessly in the woods, but some did not. Four Rebel soldiers were found next day, stone dead but completely intact and without apparent wounds, seated around an oilcloth they had spread on the ground in a Sibley tent to play cards. A burned-out candle sat atop a bayonet stuck in the ground. “Each had three cards in his hand,” said one of the soldiers who found them, “and four cards lay in the middle of the blanket.” The mere proximity to such huge explosions was enough to fatally stop the human heart.
Don Carlos Buell was a stern old martinet with a superiority complex who from the beginning did not like Grant or anything else about the Battle of Shiloh. He was most especially disturbed by the horde of stragglers at Pittsburg Landing and hinted—or so Sherman claimed—that he was considering not bringing his army across at all rather than have it mingle with such cowardly riffraff. To Sherman it suggested that the ever cautious Buell didn’t want to risk the possibility of his army getting whipped by the Confederates, just like Grant’s had been. But Buell rebutted this years later by pointing out that he began bringing his army across to the landing as soon as it arrived on the opposite bank of the river. Brig. Gen. Thomas Crittenden, however, one of Buell’s division commanders, worried that the cowardice in Grant’s army would be contagious and found himself “so disgusted” by the mob at the landing that “I asked General Buell to let me land a regiment and drive them away. I did not wish my troops to come in contact with them.”
Grant seemed unperturbed by any of this. When the rainstorm began he sought shelter in the cabin atop the bluff, which had once been his headquarters, but found that it had been turned into a surgery that was still operating at full capacity. Repelled by the gory work, he returned to the tempest and took refuge beneath a large oak tree, which is where Sherman found him in the pouring rain stretched out in his overcoat, his slouch hat pulled down, and smoking his eternal cigar.
“Well Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman remarked.
“Yes,” replied Grant. “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”
There were many in the army, if not most, who would have declared that Grant was living in a fool’s paradise—but not all. Colonel Camm at least was confident that they were safe from the Rebel onslaught.
“For the first time we had a continuous line,” he wrote in his diary. “There was no chance to flank us, and of the men who bore the brunt that day there was none left in the ranks that would not have died on the line.”
For the Yankee army, April 7, 1862, began before sunrise, which was slightly after 5 a.m. What Grant had in store for the Confederates was almost the exact opposite of what they had planned to do to him the day before. Starting from Pittsburg Landing, the Union line would attack in a giant wheeling motion, pivoting on Sherman and Lew Wallace, who held down the far western end of the line, sweeping across the battlefield until they drove the Rebel army against the boggy wilds of Owl Creek, where it would have to surrender. As with everything else at Shiloh, this was easier said than done. Unlike yesterday’s fighting, though, at least it was a plan.
Buell’s divisions, which were nearest the landing, moved out first, crossing Dill Branch, now deserted except for the dead. Musician fourth class John Cockerill, who had been told that his father, the colonel of his regiment, was shot and killed on Sunday, had a miserable night at the landing. He had been near enough to witness the grisly beheading of Capt
ain Carson by the cannonball and had curled up in the rain beside a hay bale but was unable to sleep because of the constant firing of the gunboats.
“There was never a night so long, so hideous, or so utterly uncomfortable,” he wrote later. At dawn, however, young Cockerill was awakened by, of all things, strains of the overture from Il Trovatore,2 “magnificent[ly]” rendered by the 15th Infantry Regiment band, serenading from the top deck of the steamboat War Eagle.
“How inspiring that music was!” wrote Cockerill. “Even the poor wounded men lying on the shore seemed to be lifted up, and every soldier received an impetus”—including Cockerill himself, who grabbed a rifle and, after a jolt from a swig of “Cincinnati whisky,” joined up with the 15th Infantry Regiment and marched on the enemy. As they crossed Dill Branch, it didn’t look like the same ground anymore—and it wasn’t.
Cockerill noted that “the underbrush had been literally mowed off by the bullets, and great trees had been shattered by artillery fire.” Moving on, he found “In places the bodies of the slain lay upon the ground so thick that I could step from one to the other … I remember a poor Confederate lying on his back, while by his side was a heap of ginger cakes and bologna sausage. [He] had evidently filled his pockets the day before with edibles from a sutler’s tent, and had been killed before he had the opportunity to enjoy [them].”
Farther on, Cockerill “passed the corpse of a beautiful boy in gray, who lay with his blond curls scattered about his face, and his hands folded peacefully about his chest. He was clad in a bright, neat uniform, well garnished with gold, which seemed to tell the story of a loving mother and sisters who had sent their household pet to the field of war. He was about my age,” Cockerill said wistfully, and later, when reminded of it, he broke into tears.