At just this juncture Colonel Moore’s relief column collided with the head of Powell’s withdrawal. Before noticing the Rebel battle line, Moore began to rebuke Powell’s men for running away. “He rated us cowards for retreating,” said Private Ruff. “We warned him not to be too bold or he would get into trouble.” Moore rejected this perfectly sound advice, and pressed on—dragooning Powell’s unwounded men to accompany him until he, too, encountered the Confederate attack in motion.
Moore quickly sized up the situation and became intent on buying time for the unsuspecting Union ranks back in the camps. After sending for reinforcements, he and the remnants of Major Powell’s command fought a tooth-and-nail delaying action that cost Moore his leg and Major Powell his life and saw most of their force “nearly annihilated or put to rout.” But the 25 minutes that their lopsided little battle lasted was worth a thousand times the effort in blood and tears, because Moore and Powell had bought enough time to prevent the Rebel attack from falling on Prentiss’s division completely unexpected.
Over in his own camp Sherman had heard the commotion and decided to investigate. A few minutes earlier, a messenger sent by Moore had warned Sherman that Rebel units were marching toward his front. Barely an hour earlier he had discounted a similar alarm sent by the ever anxious Colonel Appler, but all these reports had finally spurred the nervous-natured Sherman to action despite his best efforts to remain calm in the face of whatever was causing everybody else to be so jumpy.
In most of his sector it had been, thus far, a typical Sunday morning on the “plain of Pittsburg Landing,” as Sherman had dubbed it. Soldiers had finished their breakfast and were attending to routine tasks such as washing clothes or writing letters or simply lounging around; some were engaged in playing cards or other games of chance, while still others attended services conducted by brigade chaplains on the lovely Sabbath day. It was cool, bright, clear, and too early in the year for bugs. The orchards were in full blossom, oaks were tasseling, dogwoods and redbuds were blooming, and an inordinate number of those on hand recorded in diaries and memoirs how many birds were singing in the trees; some singled out robins, some bluebirds or mourning doves. Others noted the disharmony of the sounds of the birds and the distant spatter of gunfire.
Accompanied by his staff, Sherman shortly after 7 a.m. rode out into farmer Rhea’s open field in front of the 53rd Ohio, Colonel Appler’s bothersome regiment. Appler himself had been fretting half the night as he listened to the sporadic firing somewhere out in the darkness. About six, one of Major Powell’s men came staggering wild-eyed and bloody into his camp shouting, “Get into line, the Rebels are coming!” Appler once more ordered the long roll drumbeat and sent his quartermaster to alert Sherman. As the 53rd Ohio’s bedraggled officers and men began falling into line, the quartermaster returned with a sarcastic message that he delivered to Appler confidentially: “General Sherman says you must be badly scared over there.”
There was barely time to process this deflating reply when one of two companies Appler had sent out earlier to check on the picket line returned with a report that “the Rebels out there are thicker than fleas on a dog’s back.” Appler ordered his men to load up and form in a line of battle. It was about this time that Sherman’s party appeared in Rhea’s field in front of Appler’s position and the general halted to take out his spyglass and begin studying what appeared to be a large body of enemy troops marching diagonally across the south end of the field half a mile away.
Someone in Appler’s regiment suddenly glimpsed a line of Rebel skirmishers5 emerge from the brush close by on Sherman’s right, opposite from the direction he was looking; they halted and raised their weapons to aim. A warning was shouted out but not in time. Sherman started and threw up his hands before his face, exclaiming, “My God, we are attacked!” An instant later the flash and crash of fire from the Rebel volley killed Sherman’s orderly right next to him—blew him off his horse and onto his back on the ground spouting blood. Sherman himself was struck in the hand, apparently from buckshot, then wheeled his horse with the rest of his staff, dashing away from the field, yelling to Appler as he passed by, “Hold your position, I will support you.”
At the Cherry mansion in Savannah, nine miles downriver, Ulysses S. Grant was just sitting down to breakfast when an ill-omened boom reverberated from somewhere upstream on the Tennessee River. Perhaps the most lucid description of Grant at this weighty juncture in his career was given 31 years later when Mrs. W. H. Cherry, mistress of the house where Grant was staying, replied to a question posed by one T. M. Hurst, assistant postmaster of Nashville; their exchange was ultimately published in the February 1893 issue of the Confederate Veteran.
“Dear Sir—Your letter of inquiry concerning ‘Gen. Grant’s physical condition on the morning the battle of Shiloh began,’ is received. You will please accept my assurance, gladly given, that on the date mentioned I believe Gen. Grant was thoroughly sober. He was at my breakfast table when he heard the report from a cannon. Holding, untasted, a cup of coffee, he paused in conversation to listen a moment at the report of another cannon. He hastily arose, saying to his staff officers, ‘Gentlemen, the ball is in motion; let’s be off.’ His flagship (as he called his special steamboat) was lying at the wharf, and in fifteen minutes he, staff officers, orderlies, clerks, and horses had embarked.”
While her husband remained loyal to the Union, Mrs. Cherry (née Annie Irwin) was a staunch supporter of the rebellion, and in fact had a brother in the Confederate cavalry. While she evidently loathed the notion of Yankee officers in her home, she was much taken, even then, with Grant’s character and his “magnanimity,” as she put it. The question of Grant’s sobriety, at Shiloh and elsewhere, dogged him even to the grave—and beyond it—as evinced by the inquiry Mrs. Cherry received. It has also dogged historians from that day to this, especially those who do not wish to admit their idols might have feet of clay. But this day in southwest Tennessee was shaping up to be the most trying ever of Grant’s long and illustrious military career, and one thing for certain is that a drunkard could never have made his way through it.
1 In fact, these were brand-new units, filled with raw, untrained, undisciplined recruits.
2 McPherson was so highly thought of that Grant once prophesied to Sherman that McPherson would probably “go all the way,” meaning he would rise to command the entire army. “Yes—if he lives,” was Sherman’s solemn reply.
3 A head log was a large tree limb or trunk placed along and atop a dirt fortification with room to shoot beneath it, while offering some protection to the shooter’s head. An abatis was a device of sharpened stakes that slowed or repelled enemy infantry and functioned similar to the way barbed wire did in the next century.
4 In the slave states, slaves could be rented for about eight dollars to ten dollars per month. Thus the term “slave wages.” Ruff didn’t do much better, but it was a living, at least, and an impetus for the Free Soil Party and others to oppose the spread of slavery, which would have reduced wages for everyone else—especially poor immigrants like Ruff—in any state where it came into existence.
5 On the attack or march, each regiment would throw a company in advance as “skirmishers” to make first contact with the enemy and report on his strength.
CHAPTER 3
FROM FAILURE TO FORTUNE
ULYSSES GRANT IS A CAPTIVATING MILITARY STUDY, if for no other reason than he had earned a reputation as the most unmilitary-looking officer in the army. He often dressed in a plain blue suit and a gray felt hat, prompting one wag to suggest that he looked like a streetcar conductor. On those occasions when he wore a uniform he usually put on a plain private’s tunic unadorned except for his insignia of rank—the gold braid, sashes, and epaulettes he left to French admirals and the like—and sometimes he was even mistaken for a man of the ranks. He was 39 years old when the war started, of medium height and slender build, and his manner was taciturn and unpretentious. In fact there was little in his beari
ng or his upbringing to suggest that he was destined for greatness, except perhaps for the piercing gaze in his blue eyes, which, only later, was interpreted as a determination to succeed. He was an American of his day, with both the strengths and weakness of the American character. Low-keyed, enigmatic, he often frustrated his staff by not communicating his intentions before issuing major battle orders. He was an unusual man, a gifted man, sometimes he was mysterious; perhaps he was a puzzle even to himself.
To those who knew him young, it was a wonder that he accomplished anything at all; to a nation that ultimately worshipped him it remained a wonder how, in the space of a decade, he rose from failed soldier, unsuccessful farmer, hardscrabble wood peddler, lack-luster store clerk, and notorious drunkard to the most celebrated military hero of the age and President of the United States. In fact, the most remarkable thing about Grant was that, by all accounts, he was so unremarkable.
Grant’s father, Jesse, was a tannery worker in Point Pleasant, Ohio, when Grant was born on April 27, 1822. Over time, Jesse worked his way up to start his own tannery and slaughterhouse, and in later years he owned a leather goods store and haberdashery. In the meantime he dabbled in local politics and was acknowledged about town as a kind of self-educated know-it-all, widely read in everything from the classics to contemporary politics. He frequently bombarded local newspapers with abolitionist-style editorial letters, though such sentiments never rubbed off on Grant. What did rub off on him from those early years, however, was a lifelong revulsion at the sight of blood, in consequence of frequent exposure to his father’s tanning operations. In fact, he was unable to eat even a rare-cooked piece of meat and always ordered his “charred gray.”
As a baby, Grant went unnamed for a month before the family selected as a middle name Ulysses—after the fabulous Greek hero who conquered Troy by hiding his soldiers inside a giant wooden horse—by drawing choices out of a hat. In homage to Grant’s mother, Hannah, they selected as a first name Hiram, after the biblical king who built the temple of Solomon, which made Grant’s initials H.U.G. and set him up for a bit of consternation down the road.
During the languid years of the 1830s about the only thing Grant seemed interested in were horses, with which he appeared to share some kind of hidden understanding. His equestrianship led people to remark that in the saddle Grant seemed “as one” with his horse. At the age of six he earned money using his father’s horses to haul brush for his neighbors and by his teens he was breaking and training horses for sale and had set up carriage teams to take passengers to nearby towns.
When Grant reached his teens his father began trying to secure for him a West Point education on grounds that the young man was beginning to show an aptitude for mathematics—about the only thing that interested him aside from horses—but more important, because it was free. A congressional appointment came in due time, and Grant entered the United States Military Academy in 1839 at the age of 17. Before he left, Grant’s cousins carved his initials into his luggage, but for some reason Grant decided he had had enough of H.U.G. He promptly reversed his first and second names to become Ulysses Hiram Grant, which lasted only until he arrived at “the gray castle” on the Hudson, whereupon an adjutant supervising admissions noted that he had been nominated as Ulysses Simpson Grant—Simpson being his mother’s maiden name. In typical army fashion it was put to Grant that he would either become Ulysses Simpson Grant or board a steamer back downriver, never to see West Point again. Thus the legend of U. S. Grant was born, and in time his friends began calling him Sam, after “Uncle Sam.”
From the beginning, Grant was an indifferent student. He nearly flunked French and languished in the library reading romantic fiction, at one point writing home, “I do love the place, it seems as though I could live here forever if my friends would only come too.” He did make one friend, Fred Dent of Missouri, who would have a lasting impact on his life, but he excelled only in math and drawing, barely getting by in other subjects. He could not have known it then, of course—none of them could—but the acquaintances and friendship of those days would furnish the cream of the officer corps of the Civil War, including Union generals William Tecumseh Sherman, George B. McClellan, Don Carlos Buell, John Pope, George Thomas, and William Rosecrans, as well as the Confederate generals James Longstreet, George Pickett, and Thomas (“Stonewall”) Jackson.
Despite Grant’s lackadaisical academic performance, as a West Point equestrian he was peerless. To see him riding, said one student, was “to watch a circus,” and he set a record for the equestrian high jump at West Point that would stand for the next 25 years.
In 1843 Grant graduated in the bottom half of his class and was stuck in the infantry because the elite Corps of Engineers would not have him and there was no room in the cavalry. He received a further humiliation when he went home to Ohio on leave before reporting to his first post. He had put on his fancy new uniform only to learn that people were making fun of him because of his clothes. It seems to have been a seminal moment for him with regard to military dress. As his biographer Brooks Simpson put it, “The new brevet second lieutenant never liked wearing a full-dress uniform. The memory of being laughed at … never quite faded away.”
That autumn Grant reported to the Fourth U.S. Infantry Regiment at Jefferson Barracks, which was near St. Louis and the home of his West Point roommate Fred Dent, who happened to have a sister, Julia, just returned from boarding school, who “was possessed of a lively and pleasing countenance,” according to one observer. Grant promptly became fascinated with her. The Dents were well-to-do slaveholders who kept a large plantation in the country in addition to their fashionable town house in St. Louis. Before long, Grant and Julia were riding together over the 1,200 acres of White Haven, which had been built by her father, “Colonel” Fredrick Dent—after which the young lieutenant and the old “colonel” would often engage in spirited though affable conversations over what had now become the overarching topic of the day: the future of African slavery.
The calls that handsome Lieutenant Grant paid to the Dents must have been refreshing interludes from the drudgery of Jefferson Barracks, and he made the most of them, riding with Julia through meadows “knee deep in bluegrass and clover” and along the banks of sparkling, pebbly Gravois Creek. And before that winter of 1846 faded into spring, Grant’s fancy had turned to love. But just as quickly fate snatched him away to the wilds of western Louisiana, right on the Texas border, where his regiment had been ordered to join a new “U.S. Army of Observation” that would remain as a deterrent force in the ongoing disputes between Texas and Mexico. Less than a decade earlier Texas had gained its independence from Mexico—though Mexico refused to admit it—and was currently in the process of becoming a U.S. state, though the Mexicans promised war if that occurred.
Grant had been on leave with his family in Illinois when news of his assignment reached him, and he rushed back to ask Julia to marry him. He did this in a way that Julia characterized as “awkward,” and she demurred, mainly because old Colonel Dent had sensed what was going on and had spoken with his daughter of the vicissitudes of marrying an ill-paid, low-ranking military officer, whose very career demanded that upon any whim of the War Department he could be seized up and posted hundreds or even thousands of miles away. So Julia did not say yes, but neither did she say no, and there things stood for the next two years while Grant stewed in Louisiana until the long-expected war with Mexico became reality.
Grant was afforded a brief leave and he immediately caught a steamer back to St. Louis. Old man Dent was still against a marriage, but he softened somewhat when Grant informed him that once the war was over he planned to resign from the army and take up teaching, preferably at West Point, where he believed his skills in mathematics would be put to good and profitable use. Colonel Dent relented to the extent that Grant was now permitted to write “courting letters” to Julia.
With that arrangement behind him, Grant returned to the army, only to be informed he had been
assigned as quartermaster for his regiment, which was basically a noncombat position. His West Point training, of course, would have made Grant aware that the duties of quartermasters included such critical responsibilities as providing food, ammunition, transportation, living accommodations, pay, and other services fundamental to keeping troops in the field. Grant, however, received the news of his assignment with mixed feelings, since promotion in the army was almost always tied to experience under fire. On the other hand, Grant—like any sane person—had a fear of combat, a shortcoming that he shared in a letter to Julia.
Be that as it may, Grant somehow managed to find his way into nearly every big fight of the Mexican War. His friend James Longstreet recalled, “You could not keep him out of battle … [He] was everywhere on the field.” During the bloody house-to-house fighting at the Battle of Monterrey, Grant’s regiment was running out of ammunition and a trip to the rear where the supply dumps were located meant riding a lethal gauntlet of Mexican gunfire from every roof and window. Afterward it became the talk of the regiment how young Lieutenant Grant had leapt upon his horse and, clinging Indian-style to the neck and one side, galloped up one street and down the other, dodging bullets until he reached the rear. In his memoirs he modestly recalled going so fast that “generally, I was past and under the cover of the next block before the enemy fired.”
Despite the early American victories, the Mexican War dragged on for 16 more bloody months, during which Grant lost a number of friends and grew disenchanted with the conflict. Nevertheless, in the last days of the final Battle of Mexico City, he managed to drag a small cannon to the bell tower of a church, where he and a squad of men placed fire into the rear of a Mexican column, breaking up their formation.