It was during this slow advance to Corinth that the Union army nearly lost Ulysses Grant. As he sat in his headquarters tent day after day, puffing incessantly on his cigar, Grant finally reached his limit of tolerance for Halleck’s shabby treatment and decided to resign from the service. He made arrangements for a 30-day leave, but when Sherman went to see him he found that Grant’s staff had packed up all his camp desks and trunks and records and stacked them for shipping next morning. “Sherman, you know I am in the way here,” Grant said resignedly. “I have stood it as long as I can.” When Sherman asked where he was going, Grant said St. Louis, and when Sherman inquired if he had any business there, Grant replied, “Not a bit.”
To Sherman, this was the worst possible thing that could happen to the army. He had not only become close to Grant, he had begun to see in him the makings of a great military marshal. The two of them seemed to have a kind of subliminal understanding of each other, and Sherman was determined not to let Grant abandon his career. He insisted that Grant would be miserable sitting on the sidelines while other generals fought the war. He argued that their real problems were nothing more than the made-up lies of his own personal nemesis, the press, which, he reiterated, was “dirty, irresponsible, corrupt, malicious, etc.”
Sherman saved his sharpest invective for the rumors and tales that Grant was a drunkard and forecast that the press would soon “drop back into the abyss of infamy that they deserve.” In fact, he used himself as living proof, noting that only a few months ago he had been pilloried as “crazy,” but now, after the Battle of Shiloh, he was lauded in the newspapers as a great hero and a wise military leader. If Grant remained in the army, Sherman said in conclusion, “some happy accident might restore him to favor and his true place.”
Sherman’s passionate disquisition had the desired effect. Grant canceled his plans to resign and in less than a week the “happy accident” that Sherman had predicted came about after George McClellan suffered a humiliating defeat by Robert E. Lee at the gates of Richmond, and “Old Brains” Halleck was called back to Washington to replace him as general in chief of the army. This, in turn, restored Grant as commander of the Army of the Tennessee, as it had now been formally styled, and ultimately wrote him onto one of the larger pages of history.
While Lee inflicted woeful damages to a series of Union commanders in the East, fortune seemed to smile on the Federal forces in the West. After Island Number 10 fell, Memphis was taken by the gunboat fleet of Commodore Foote, Grant’s old colleague from the Forts Henry and Donelson days. But Foote wasn’t there to celebrate. The wound that he suffered at Fort Donelson never healed well, and he was forced to retire from the active list and later died from complications of the injury. About the same time as Memphis capitulated, Adm. David Farragut steamed his big “salt water” navy up from the Gulf of Mexico and captured New Orleans, the largest city in the Confederacy. That left Vicksburg, then a town of considerable size and strength, as the only bottleneck that prevented the Union from free access to the Mississippi. Grant took it upon himself to rectify that omission.
After nearly half a year of false starts—some of them costly—Grant brought the Vicksburg defenders to bay in a three-month siege that finally ended with surrender on the Fourth of July, 1863—the same day that Lee brought his defeated army south from Gettysburg. Grant was finally hailed as a great hero, and when Lincoln called him East to face Lee he became the fifth commanding general of the Army of the Potomac. It took nearly two more bloodstained years, but Grant finally laid siege to and subdued the Rebel army near Richmond. After the surrender at Appomattox he became not only the man of the hour but the man of the age.
In 1868, after serving as general in chief of the U.S. Army, Ulysses Grant was elected President of the United States on the Republican ticket. His term was generally unremarkable, except that toward the end his administration was wracked by unprecedented scandals and corruption that damaged his personal reputation. For some reason he had allowed cronies to control him, and Reconstruction measures in the South went beyond the punitive into pure dishonesty.
Afterward he and Julia took a world tour during which he was celebrated by kings and emperors as the greatest soldier of his time. When he returned in 1880 he was persuaded to form a brokerage firm, which failed despite his fame and reputation. He was thrown into bankruptcy and forced to give up his trophies, swords, and souvenirs for unpaid loans. He obtained an army pension but remained deeply in debt until Mark Twain encouraged him to write his autobiography. He went to work on what would become The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, which was published in 1885 and became one of the most phenomenal successes in the history of publishing, earning some $450,000 (nearly $10 million in today’s money).
But Grant did not live to enjoy it. His longtime smoking habit (upwards of 12 cigars a day) had brought a diagnosis of throat cancer, which, toward the end, rendered him speechless, and he was forced to write notes to communicate with his editors on the memoirs project. He died on July 23, 1885, and his remains, along with Julia’s, lie in a mausoleum that is still a prominent landmark high above the Hudson River in New York City.
Sherman continued under Grant as a division and later a corps commander, and at one point he was made military commandant of Memphis. There, apparently, he first indulged the pyromaniacal urges that brought him to infamy in Atlanta and other Southern cities, by ordering that if any Union vessel on the Mississippi received gunfire from the shore the nearest town would be burned to the ground.
It had not taken Sherman long to become a “hard war” man, whose military philosophy was quite opposite the modern notion of “winning the hearts and minds of the people.” In fact, today’s experts on counterinsurgency would no doubt be dismayed, if not shocked, by Sherman’s attitude toward Southern civilians who, he said in late 1862, must be made to understand that “we will remove & destroy every obstacle, if need be take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, every thing that to us seems proper, and we will not cease till the end is attained, that all who do not aid [us] are enemies, and we will not account to them for our acts. If the people of the South oppose [us] they do so at their peril, and if they stand by, mere lookers on the domestic tragedy, they have no right to immunity, protection, or share in the final result … I would not coax [the South] or even meet them half way,” he said, “but make them so sick & tired of war that generations would pass before they would again appeal to it.”
At Vicksburg Sherman was Grant’s right-hand man, and after Grant was sent east Sherman was given Grant’s job of commanding the Federal armies in the West. His victory at the Battle of Atlanta ensured Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 and, in the North, propelled Sherman into hero status almost equal to that of Grant.
After the Confederate surrender Sherman became magnanimous toward his former enemy, declaring, “The South is broken and ruined, and appeals to our pity. To ride the people down with persecutions and military exactions would be like slashing away at the crew of a sinking ship. I will fight as long as the enemy will fight, but when he gives up and asks quarter, I will go no further.” This earned Sherman the wrath of the radical Republicans in the administration and in Congress. Halleck was so incensed that he leaked to the newspapers that Sherman “must have some screw loose again.”
A despiser of politics, Sherman was granted permission to go west and supervise fighting the wild Indians, whose suppression had been neglected during the war. But when Grant became President, Sherman took over as general in chief of the army, a post he held until 1884. From that position he began to see Grant falling under the influence of unscrupulous politicians, but when Sherman tried to warn him it was to no avail, and in time he distanced himself from his old friend. Still, Sherman retained an abiding affection for his wartime companion, and once he quipped, “Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk.”
Like Grant, Sherman published his memoirs, entitled General William T. Sherman,
by Himself, which to no one’s surprise was controversial but highly entertaining and sold 25,000 copies, earning him $25,000. He lived in New York City after his retirement and maintained a lively social life, especially as guest of honor at countless reunions of the Grand Old Army of the Republic, as the Union veterans called their organization. His wife, Ellen, died in 1888, and he followed her three years later. Of all his pithy sayings, Sherman is perhaps best known for his response to a group of politicians who were pushing him to run for President. “If nominated, I will not run,” he declared, “if elected, I will not serve.”
Of the other notable Union commanders at Shiloh, the much idolized general C. F. Smith died at Savannah just over two weeks after the battle of the leg infection he’d suffered when he scraped his knee getting into a boat. Simple antibiotics that are available today would easily have cured him.
Prentiss spent several months in a Confederate prison before being exchanged. He continued in the army but resigned in 1864, still angry that Grant had slighted his role at Shiloh. Grant, however, rectified the omission in his memoirs, referring to the “valiant” performance of Prentiss’s division.
Stephen Hurlbut replaced Sherman in command of Memphis, but his administration there was tainted by scandal and corruption and he was accused of embezzlement. After the war Hurlbut was named U.S. minister to Colombia and, later, to Peru.
John McClernand went on with the army to Vicksburg but continued to be a thorn in Grant’s side, trying to upstage and sabotage him at the same time. At last Grant had enough and fired him, and McClernand returned to Illinois and to politics, but he became nearly destitute and strings had to be pulled to secure a pension for him before he died in 1900.
Lew Wallace had a most interesting career. Following his tardy performance at Shiloh he was relieved and put in charge of the defenses of Cincinnati, a sinecure. But he managed to get back in good graces and served well throughout the war. He later became governor of the New Mexico Territory, where he had dealings with the notorious Billy the Kid, and served as U.S. minister to the Ottoman Empire. He also became an accomplished poet, playwright, and novelist, and his 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ became the best-selling American novel of the 19th century. It is said to have been partially based on his experiences at the Battle of Shiloh. He spent the rest of his life trying to prove that he had not been dilatory at Shiloh, but the argument continues even today. In his memoirs, however, Grant largely absolves Wallace of blame, observing that if Sherman had not been pushed back more than a mile by the Rebel army the original road Wallace had taken to get to the battlefield would have been the correct one.
The elephantine general William “Bull” Nelson had a stellar but all-too-brief career after Shiloh. His division was the first to march into Corinth after Beauregard’s evacuation, and he later served prominently in Tennessee and Kentucky, where on September 29, 1862, not quite six months after the battle, he was murdered in Louisville’s Galt House hotel by, of all people, a fellow Union general with the ironic name of Jefferson C. Davis. The two men had quarreled earlier, and after Nelson had publicly shamed Davis in the hotel lobby, Davis borrowed a pistol from another officer and shot Nelson through the heart. There was talk of court-martialing Davis but, oddly (and outrageously), nothing came of it, and he served through the rest of the war.
James B. McPherson, Grant’s chief engineer at Shiloh, rose rapidly, as predicted, in the officer corps, succeeding Sherman to command the Army of the Tennessee. But Sherman’s earlier foreboding that McPherson would rise to the top of the army only “if he lives” proved eerily true. During a reconnaissance at the Battle of Atlanta McPherson blundered into the Rebel lines and was shot to death trying to escape. Sherman broke into tears when the body of his friend was brought into his headquarters. He had it laid out on an unhinged door placed between two benches and grieved over it the rest of the day. McPherson, as commander of an army, has the dubious distinction of being the highest ranking Union officer killed in the war.
Henry Halleck received public condemnation for letting the Confederate army escape at Corinth, but he served in Washington after being named general in chief until Grant superseded him. After the war, and presumably at Grant’s pleasure, he was put in charge of a military division headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, where he died in 1872. Grant was President by then, and apparently he had learned from military correspondence of Halleck’s earlier double-dealings. Halleck was never a leader of men but more of a manager, and he did not command their respect even in headquarters positions. Lincoln, in fact, regarded him as “nothing more than a first rate clerk.”
Of the prominent Confederate commanders at Shiloh who lived through the war, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard probably suffered the most. Jefferson Davis, who disliked the Creole anyway, was furious when he learned that Beauregard had called off the Shiloh assault just as the Confederates seemed poised to force a surrender, and doubly so when he heard the Creole had abandoned the critical rail junction at Corinth. Under the best circumstances, communications between Richmond and the West were never good, and Davis’s opinion was doubtless clouded by letters and other exchanges from officers who were unsatisfied with Beauregard’s performance.
Not long after Corinth was evacuated, Beauregard took a leave of absence (without consulting authorities in Richmond) in hopes of curing his still ailing throat. When Davis learned of this, he immediately appointed Braxton Bragg to command the army. Efforts by Beauregard’s political friends to have him restored proved futile, and he was sent to command the coastal defenses of South Carolina and Georgia, a second tier position. Even while he fumed in private, Beauregard did a creditable job, all the while dreaming up fantastic schemes for the South to win the war with submarines, unique warships from England, and initiating secret treaties with supposedly disaffected midwestern states such as Indiana. Nothing came of them, of course, as Beauregard remained on Jefferson Davis’s blacklist. In 1864, however, Davis brought him to Virginia to assist in the final stand that Lee presided over at Petersburg, and he and Joe Johnston, who had begun the war together at First Bull Run, were among the last of the senior officers of the Confederacy to surrender.
After the war Beauregard worked as an executive for Louisiana railroads, but these enterprises ultimately failed. During this time he submitted his entry in what became known as the War of the Books by surreptitiously co-authoring, in 1884, The Military Operations of General Beauregard During the War Between the States, and from the 1880s until his death he carried on a bitter and unseemly public fight with Jefferson Davis and others over who lost the war.
Because of his status and credibility as a former Rebel general, Beauregard was offered a post as the drawer of winning tickets in the Louisiana lottery, an organization that was generally considered a hotbed of bribery and other corruption. He nevertheless accepted the position, for which he was paid handsomely, until the U.S. Congress banned the lottery in 1891. Beauregard died at home, in his bed, of heart trouble, in 1893.
For his part in the Shiloh attack, Beauregard’s chief of staff Col. Thomas Jordan, who had devised the battle plans, was made General Thomas Jordan. After Beauregard was relieved, Jordan served as chief of staff for Braxton Bragg, but when Beauregard went to Charleston Jordan accompanied him. After the war he had a somewhat colorful career, becoming editor in chief of the Memphis Appeal and writing a popular book titled The Campaigns of Lieutenant-General Forrest. In 1868 he became a soldier of fortune, throwing his lot with the Cuban Liberation Army, of which he became general in chief. He resigned in 1870 and returned to New York City, where he became an editor and wrote about the Civil War. He died there in 1895 at the age of 76.
For two years after Beauregard’s departure Braxton Bragg retained command of the Army of Tennessee, as it was known, operating mostly in middle Tennessee and then Chattanooga, from where he constantly sought to regain Nashville and Kentucky. Bragg was a harsh commander disliked by both his men and his officers, but he
fought some tremendously tough and bloody battles for the Confederacy, such as Stones River, Perryville, and Chickamauga—winning the last, only to let the Federals slip from his grasp and later drive him from the state. After that, he stepped down and became a military adviser to Jefferson Davis, one of the few people in Richmond he could get along with. After the war he held several engineering positions, quarreling with everyone, in Texas, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama, where, in 1876, he was buried in the Magnolia Cemetery following a fatal heart attack.
Bishop-General Leonidas Polk never accomplished anything much more notable on the battlefield than getting himself blown nearly in two by a cannonball during the Atlanta Campaign. But he was adored by his men as a brave, industrious, and able commander at Shiloh and afterward. At Pine Mountain, Georgia, on June 14, 1864, while studying an enemy position in company with the army commander Joseph E. Johnston and another corps commander, William Hardee, the group was spotted by Sherman, no less, through his spyglasses. Sherman quickly ordered a nearby artillery battery to fire on these conspicuous Rebel officers, and the somewhat portly Polk was slow in finding cover; the third shot tore through his torso, killing him instantly. His principal legacy is having founded the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, for which he laid the cornerstone in 1860, right before the war broke out.