Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (38 page)

Almost from the start, Grant sized up the capacity of the telegraph to gather and transmit information, and to allow generals to coordinate and redeploy scattered forces. He stayed in telegraphic communication with Halleck all during the HenryDonelson campaign, laying down miles of telegraph wire as he advanced, and in later campaigns Grant stayed in constant touch with his subordinates over telegraph networks as long as 1,500 miles. Grant also grasped the potential of the railroads, largely because Grant was a mover. Indeed, hardly anyone in the Civil War demonstrated a greater skill in swiftly moving large bodies of infantry from one place to another. When Dr. John Brinton asked Grant, early in the war, what he thought of great tactical theorists such as Baron Jomini, Grant surprised him by claiming that he had never read Jomini. Rather, he had his own self-hewn alternative: “The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”
²³

In the West, he had fewer rail lines to rely upon, but much more in the way of riverborne transport, and of all the major commanders in the Civil War, only Grant and McClellan seem to have had a real grasp of how to use the rivers and inland
waterways in conjunction with the army. (If only McClellan had also had a little of Grant’s combativeness, it would have been McClellan who ended the war in 1862, and McClellan’s name rather than Grant’s would be the one celebrated in the textbooks.) The river lines became Grant’s way of overcoming the Confederacy’s advantage of interior lines, and his cooperation with Foote in the movement down the Tennessee and Cumberland was so smooth that the sheer innovation of using the navy to transport troops on the inland rivers often gets overlooked. Later in the war, when his campaigns took him away from the rivers to the East, Grant would turn to the railroads to give him the same edge, and in almost every case they would get Grant and his men to a particular point before the Confederates ever had any notion of movement. In 1864, he would supply his troops with a purpose-built military railroad, twenty-one miles long, with twenty-five locomotives and 275 cars, connecting a 3,500-acre supply zone with his front lines.
²⁴

Grant also possessed an advantage over other old regulars such as Winfield Scott in his commonsense empathy for the volunteer. Although Grant was a West Point man and an ex-regular himself, he conceded from the start that the real burden of the war was going to have to be carried by the volunteers—by civilians in uniform who remained civilians in temperament even after they donned their uniforms. Unlike the regulars, the volunteers could not simply be expected to shoot straight, keep clean, and obey orders. They would have to be reasoned with, sorted out gently, and kept from turning a parade ground into a debating society. Yet, as Grant quickly realized, for all his pigheaded independence the volunteer soldier really wanted to get on with the war, finish it up, and go home, and he would do so if only he could be put into the right hands.

When Grant was made colonel of the 21st Illinois, he learned that he had been put there to replace an earlier colonel, foolishly elected by popular ballot of the regiment, who had done nothing to teach them anything useful. To bring the regiment around, Grant was careful to appeal to the volunteers’ desire to be led, not driven, into battle. “My regiment was composed in large part of young men of as good social position as any in their section of the State,” Grant wrote. “It embraced the sons of farmers, lawyers, physicians, politicians, merchants, bankers, and ministers, and some men of maturer years who had filled such positions themselves.” These men knew nothing of discipline, and in their own democratic way, they all imagined that they were the equal of any officer. Grant “found it very hard work for a few days to bring all the men into anything like subordination.” Once Grant made it clear that discipline in battle was what saved lives and won wars—and that discipline was not the humiliating business of kowtowing to some idiot in shoulder straps—then “the great majority favored discipline, and by the application of a little regular army
punishment all were reduced to as good discipline as one could ask.” What marked Grant from the beginning, wrote the editors of the
Chicago Tribune
, was that “he understands Northern character, and reposes entire confidence in the pluck and endurance of his soldiers.”
²⁵

The question now for Grant was whether his immediate superior in St. Louis, Henry Wager Halleck, would let him keep on moving, for in this spring of 1862, Grant was as optimistic as nearly everyone else in the North that with a little energy the war could be wrapped up right then, and especially on the rivers. “‘Secesh’ is about on its last legs in Tennessee,” Grant calmly predicted, and he clearly remembered twenty-five years later the confidence he had had then that “after the fall of Fort Donelson the way was opened to the National forces all over the South-west without much resistance.”
²⁶

The Confederate forces in the West were thrown into a panic by the speed of Grant’s movement and the embarrassing loss of Forts Henry and Donelson. The Confederates had pinned their hopes on using the Ohio River as their northern line of defense, and their eagerness to stake out the Ohio line as a Confederate moat was what had led them to take the risk of violating Kentucky’s neutrality in 1861. Once having invaded Kentucky, the Confederates tried to make sure they could hold it. All Confederate forces between the Mississippi and the Appalachians were consolidated into one department, and overall command of that department was given in September 1861 to Albert Sidney Johnston, one of the most highly regarded officers of the old regular army and one of the dearest military friends of Jefferson Davis. “If he is not a general,” said Davis, “we have no general.” With 43,000 men at his disposal, with the two forts (Henry and Donelson) on the Tennessee and Cumberland, with another fort on Island No. 10 in the Mississippi, with Confederate forces already holding the Ohio River line at Columbus, and with convenient railroad links along the Memphis & Ohio to assure him of the advantage of interior lines—with all this, Johnston certainly began the war in the west holding what appeared like the all the best strategic cards.
²⁷

The problem was that Johnston’s cards were actually of less value than they seemed. Johnston’s forts were either incomplete or poorly constructed, his men and his officers were badly undertrained and underequipped, and Johnston himself turned out to be something less of a general than his reputation had suggested. He failed utterly to anticipate Grant’s vicious strike at Henry and Donelson, and by the time
Johnston realized what had happened, Federal gunboats were controlling the Tennessee and Cumberland, the Memphis & Ohio had been cut, and Johnston had lost all ability to concentrate his troops anywhere in Kentucky or Tennessee. Recalling the garrisons at Columbus and Bowling Green, and hastily gathering what forces he could lay his hands on, Johnston abandoned all of Kentucky and what remained to him of Tennessee, and selected as a concentration point the town of Corinth, a railroad junction just below the Tennessee-Mississippi border on the last remaining east-west Confederate rail line, the Memphis & Charleston.

The other Confederate outposts left in Tennessee, including Island No. 10 in the Mississippi River, simply dropped into the hands of Halleck’s other forces. “Secession is well-nigh played out—the dog is dead,” trumpeted “Parson” William G. Brownlow, who defied Confederate authorities in Tennessee to stop publication of his pro-Union newspaper, the
Knoxville Whig
. “Their demoralized army are on their way back to the Cotton States,” Brownlow advised Halleck, “where they can look back at you, as you approach their scattered lines. … You will overtake them at the Tennessee River,—sooner if they come with new supplies of mean whiskey.”
²⁸

The jubilation Halleck felt at these military successes was matched only by the pleasure of the political rewards he reaped. The afternoon after Fort Donelson surrendered, Halleck wired McClellan: “Give me command in the West. I ask this for Forts Henry and Donelson.”
²⁹
The War Department did even better: it promoted Halleck to the top Federal command in the west
and
demoted McClellan to field command in the East. Don Carlos Buell, who was supposed to be carrying the real war in the west into eastern Tennessee, suddenly became Halleck’s subordinate, and Halleck was now set free to prosecute the western war as he wished—not by invading the mountains of eastern Tennessee and rallying some vague body of Tennessee Unionists, but by pursuing the Confederacy’s western army down to Corinth and smashing it up for good. With that tantalizing object in mind, Halleck ordered Grant to push south along the Tennessee River toward Corinth with the force he had used to capture Henry and Donelson. At the same time, and with ill-concealed satisfaction, Halleck ordered Buell to bring his men down to the Tennessee River for a rendezvous with Grant. By the time the two forces had rendezvoused on the Tennessee, Halleck would have come up the river by steamboat to take personal command and push on overland to Corinth.

The Federal army began moving up the Tennessee River on March 5, unloading first at Savannah, Tennessee, on the east bank of the river. On March 17 Grant began moving them again and steamed nine miles further upstream to a scrawny little steamboat tie-up called Pittsburg Landing on the west bank of the Tennessee,
which Halleck had designated as the rendezvous point with Buell and the forward depot for the big push on Corinth. There Grant sat, waiting for Halleck to come up from departmental headquarters in St. Louis, and waiting for Buell (who spent twelve days building a bridge across the Duck River) to make it to the ferry point at Savannah. In the meantime, Grant’s 33,000 men were allowed to sprawl out from the river landing, in no particular order, for almost three miles (all the way to a little log meetinghouse innocently known as Shiloh Church), just as though there were no Confederates worthy of notice within a thousand miles.
³⁰

Grant was wrong. In fact, he had committed the worst error in strategic judgment he would ever make during the war, for Grant and Halleck alike had sadly underestimated Albert Sidney Johnston’s determination to win back what he had lost in Kentucky. The ease with which Grant had walked over Fort Henry and Fort Donelson and put half of Johnston’s western army out of commission had frightened and angered the Confederacy, and in this case it galvanized the Confederates into frantic action. Jefferson Davis hurriedly stripped every Confederate garrison along the Gulf coastline, and all other points between there and Corinth, of every soldier he could lay hands on, and concentrated them at Corinth, until by April 1 Johnston had an army of about 40,000 men at his disposal. Additionally, in February Davis sent Johnston the Confederacy’s most successful general to date, P. G. T. Beauregard, as a sort of auxiliary commander to help plan a counterblow at the Federal forces.

Downriver, on the other hand, Grant’s victories bred a slaphappy complacency, which allowed Grant’s command to sit motionless at Pittsburg Landing until the morning of Sunday, April 6, when Johnston’s army came crashing through the underbrush around Shiloh Church and rolled up to within half a mile of the Federals.

What happened over the next forty-eight hours has been sufficient to give the name
Shiloh
an eerie, wicked ring that still sends shivers down the American spine. In some respects, it was hardly a battle. Johnston had only the barest hold over his green and undisciplined rebel soldiers, and it is one of the great marvels of military history that he ever managed to assemble them at Corinth, get them over the flood-soaked Tennessee roads to Pittsburg Landing, and do it all without inducing much alarm among the Federals, from Grant on down to the lowliest cavalry pickets. But Johnston was a desperate man in a desperate strategic situation, and marvels are sometimes what desperation is capable of conjuring up. In the exact obverse of Grant’s optimism, Johnston knew that unless he got to Grant before Buell and Halleck did, then the war in the west was as good as over.

It was that fear as much as anything else that got Johnston moving and got him to Shiloh Church that morning, while the Federal army was still rubbing sleep from its eyes. “I would fight them if they were a million,” Johnston grimly remarked after one last parley with Beauregard and his subordinates. “The more men they
crowd in there, the worse we can make it for them.”
³¹
That determination, and the stupendous indifference of the Federals (Grant was actually nine miles downriver at Savannah, sitting down to breakfast), gave the Confederacy its best and biggest chance of evening up, and maybe bettering, the score set at Henry and Donelson.

Once the battle began, however, the terrain and the rawness of Johnston’s troops took matters out of his hands. Shiloh became a huge grappling match, with disconnected pieces of each army standing, breaking, and running in almost every direction. “Parts of regiments,” wrote an appalled reporter for the
Cincinnati Enquirer
, “ran disgracefully.” One Federal division, under Benjamin Prentiss (with half of another commanded by W. H. L. Wallace), backed itself around the lip of a sunken road that became known as “the Hornet’s Nest,” and fought to cover the pell-mell retreat of the other four Union divisions until it was “completely cut off and surrounded,” and finally surrendered. Grant wrote afterward that “more than half the army engaged … was without experience or even drill as soldiers,” while the officers, “except for the division commanders and possibly two or three of the brigade commanders, were equally inexperienced in war.”
³²

By nightfall, Albert Sidney Johnston himself was dead, killed by a stray bullet that severed an artery and left him to bleed to death, and the two bleary, punch-drunk mobs of soldiers that had been armies that morning now faced each other by the river landing without much idea of what was coming next. More than one high-ranking Union officer thought it was the end and counseled a retreat across the Tennessee. Grant, who raced upriver to Pittsburg Landing by steamboat at the first faint thump of artillery, saw at once that it was the Confederates who had failed, not the Federals. So long as they held the landing, the Federals still had the key to the Shiloh battlefield, and no one was quicker to realize that than Grant. “He had,” said John Russell Young, “the woodcraft of an Indian, knew places, localities, the lay of the ground, what the skies had to say as to the weather and other mysteries,” and it was plain to Grant that the Confederates had spent their last strength just getting as far as they had. One of Grant’s officers, an Ohioan named William Tecumseh Sherman, found Grant that night in the pouring rain, standing under a tree with a cigar clenched between his teeth. Sherman had lost most of his division that morning, and he had come to advise Grant that a pullout was the only hope. Still, Sherman, who had been at West Point with Grant and knew him well enough to nod to before the
war, sensed something in Grant’s brooding imperturbability that prompted Sherman to change his tune. “Well, Grant,” Sherman said, “we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we.” “Yes,” Grant replied, “yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”
³³