Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (39 page)

By the next morning, Grant had reorganized his forces (as best he could), called in reinforcements (the advance elements of Buell’s column had begun arriving at Savannah the day before), and proceeded to shove back at the battered Confederates. By 3:00
PM
on April 7, Beauregard, who had taken over command from the fallen Johnston, had pulled the remains of the Confederate army back onto the road to Corinth. Five days later Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing to take command of Grant’s and Buell’s newly combined armies and to find out exactly what had happened.

The most obvious fact was the casualty list: Grant’s army had lost almost 13,000 men killed, wounded, or missing, more than a third of his force, while the Confederates had lost 10,000 of their own. Wits as well as lives had been lost, as the untested soldiers of both armies were unhinged by the appalling and concentrated carnage. “I have heard of wars & read of wars,” wrote George Asbury Bruton, of the 19th Louisiana, two days after the battle, “but never did I think it would be to my lot to participate in such a horrible scene. … I never want to witness any other such scene. It seems as if I can hear the groans of the dying & wounded men and the cannons roaring all the time worse than any thunderstorms that ever was heard.” Far away, in New York, Herman Melville (who had already sunk into a twilight of critical neglect after the failure of his sprawling novel
Moby-Dick, or The White Whale
in 1851) wrote of

the pause of night

That followed the Sunday fight

Around the church of Shiloh—

The church, so lone, the log-built one,

That echoed to many a parting groan

And natural prayer

Of dying foeman mingled there—

Foeman at morn, but friends at eve—

Fame or country least their care:

(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
³⁴

A sergeant from the 9th Indiana named Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (whom Melville would join in the front rank of American writers once Melville’s reputation was exhumed in the 1920s) went cold with horror when he found that gunfire had
ignited the underbrush where part of the battle had raged and incinerated dead and wounded alike: “At every point… lay the bodies, half-buried in the ashes; some in the unlovely looseness of attitude denoting sudden death by the bullet, but by far the greater number in postures of agony that told of the tormenting flame.” Bierce stumbled over another Federal sergeant, shot in the head but still alive, “taking in his breath in convulsive, rattling snorts, and blowing it out in sputters of froth which crawled creamily down his cheeks” while “the brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings.”
³⁵

Most of the loss was blamed squarely on Grant’s lack of preparedness. Not only had Grant not organized his camp for defense, but he himself had been nowhere near it when the fighting began, and at that point the old story of Grant’s alcohol problems resurfaced and the word began to circulate that Grant had been drunk. Actually, Grant had been stone sober, and he had been at Savannah for the very good reason that he would be needed there as Buell’s column finally arrived on the Tennessee. Although it was true he had been caught dangerously by surprise, he had nevertheless managed to pull victory out of the jaws of defeat. Shiloh also taught Grant a very effective lesson about the war: that the Confederates were deadly in earnest about winning and were not going to go away merely because a Federal army and a gunboat or two showed up to remind them who was supposed to be in charge. “Up to the battle of Shiloh, I, as well as thousands of other citizens, believed that the rebellion against the Government would collapse suddenly and soon if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies,” Grant recollected, but after that, “I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.”
³⁶

At the same time, however, Halleck would be taking no more chances. Now that Halleck and Buell were on the scene, Grant ceased to be a semi-independent operator and became just another part of Halleck’s command along with Buell, and the dazzling thrust that had brought a Union army to the Mississippi border in two months slowed to a crawl. Turning inland from the river toward Corinth, Halleck’s advance took a month and a half (during which he stopped every night to entrench) to move over to Corinth, and when Halleck finally arrived there on May 29, Beauregard took the counsel of prudence and abandoned Corinth without a fight. With the fall of Corinth into Federal hands, the Confederacy’s last direct east-west rail line, the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, was cut, and in June the outflanked Confederate garrisons along the Mississippi at Fort Pillow and Memphis collapsed. The Mississippi (at least down to Vicksburg), Tennessee, and Cumberland Rivers were all now securely under Halleck’s control.

At that point the Union army in the west ran out of steam for several reasons, the first and most important of which had to do with the Confederates. In June, the luckless Beauregard fell ill—or at least claimed to be feeling unwell—and departed from the army to go on sick leave. Jefferson Davis, who had grown increasingly unhappy with the Confederacy’s first military hero, gladly replaced Beauregard with a scrappy, hot-tempered regular army veteran named Braxton Bragg. “Tall and erect, with thick, bushy eyebrows and black, fierce eyes” and a “naturally abominable temper,” Bragg fought in Mexico as an artillery officer under Zachary Taylor and quarreled thereafter with nearly every other officer he served beside; John Pope thought Bragg “seemed even to detest himself.” To Davis’s delight, Bragg immediately determined to regain the initiative in the west that summer. He overhauled the organization of Beauregard’s disheveled army, and took what “was little better than a Mob” and put them to five hours of drill a day. Commanding a force of about 30,000 men, Bragg swung around the edges of the Federal penetration into Tennessee and raced up through eastern Tennessee, where he picked up another 18,000 reinforcements under Edmund Kirby Smith. By the end of August, Bragg was aiming at the Kentucky border and stood in a fair way to undo everything that had been won by the Union since February.
³⁷

Halleck immediately detached Buell’s troops to try to head off Bragg. But Buell was no faster a mover in the summer of 1862 than he had been the previous winter, and instead of pursuing Bragg pell-mell, Buell proceeded to retrace his original path through Tennessee, rebuilding the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad as he went. That was slow enough work on its own terms, but it was made slower by the activities of two of the Confederacy’s most successful raiders, John Hunt Morgan and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Bragg had given both Morgan and Forrest cavalry brigades and orders to create as much havoc as possible between himself and Buell. This Forrest and Morgan did effortlessly. Forrest, a former millionaire slave trader, was a natural military genius who possessed the killer instinct in spades, and in the middle of July Forrest’s raiders struck at Buell’s patiently rebuilt railroad line at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and put it out of commission for two weeks. Meanwhile, Morgan swept up through Nashville in August, destroying rail lines and a railroad tunnel and further delaying Buell. Bragg, meanwhile, rolled into Kentucky and occupied Glasgow, Kentucky, on September 14. He then began recruiting volunteers for the Confederate army and commenced a leisurely move on Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, where he scattered the Unionist legislature and inaugurated a Confederate governor on October 4, 1862.

By that time, Buell had finally managed to catch up with Bragg, and on October 8 the two armies collided near Perryville, Kentucky. The battle that resulted was a happenstance affair, like Shiloh, with neither Bragg nor Buell fully in control of the day’s events. After a day of pitiless slugging, the battle of Perryville ended with Buell
in command of the field, while Bragg withdrew into Tennessee. Buell had saved the Ohio River for the Union, but he received small thanks for it. Like McClellan, he failed to pursue the fleeing Confederates. Even more like McClellan, Buell unwisely announced that he “would not lend his hand to such an act as the emancipation of the slave,” and on October 24, 1862, he was relieved of his command.
³⁸

If the distraction afforded by Bragg’s abortive offensive into Kentucky was one reason why the Federal offensive in the west came to halt, then the other reason was Halleck himself. Once Halleck occupied Corinth, he was determined not to risk the troops under his command on further offensive moves, and began parceling up his forces into small garrisons to keep the likes of Forrest and Morgan away from his supply lines. Although Halleck retained Grant as his deputy, Grant fumed and sputtered in frustration, his mind burdened with the tide of press criticism still flowing in his direction over Shiloh. One of Halleck’s subordinates complained that, after Corinth, “this great army… could have marched anywhere through the South without effective opposition… yet in less than two months,” Halleck had dissipated its strength in penny-ante garrison duties “to such an extent that the war was half over before it was again reunited.” In June, feeling that “I am in the way here” and “can endure it no longer,” Grant would have resigned his commission had not Sherman talked him out of it. Then, in July, Halleck was called to Washington to assume the post of general in chief of the Federal armies, the job Lincoln had taken away from McClellan in March. Halleck reconfigured the departmental boundaries and in October designated Grant as commander of the Department of the Tennessee (effectively this meant that Grant was responsible for policing all the newly occupied Confederate territory between the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers).
³⁹

By that time Grant was ready to approach Halleck with a proposal for a new campaign. During the spring campaign up the Tennessee, the upper stretches of the Mississippi River had fallen into Union hands simply because the Confederates could no longer hold them once they had lost the Tennessee River. What was worse for the Confederates was that they had also lost New Orleans. The Federal navy had been planning its own operation against New Orleans as early as November 1861, and in February 1862 command of an assault flotilla was given to a hard-eyed and aggressive fleet captain named David Glasgow Farragut. With four steam-powered sloops—the
Hartford, Brooklyn, Richmond
, and
Pensacola
—and a collection of small gunboats and mortar schooners, Farragut began the ascent of the Mississippi on April 16, stopping below New Orleans on the eighteenth for six days so that his mortar schooners could pound the two forts that guarded the river.

Impatient with the results of the bombardment, at two in the morning of the twenty-fourth Farragut arranged his ships in two columns and swept up the river past the fire of the forts. Farragut anchored for the day just above the forts, and the next morning he ran his ships past the last small Confederate batteries below New Orleans. At noon on April 25, Farragut dropped anchor in the river by the city and sent ashore an officer to raise the United States flag over the New Orleans mint. The downriver forts, abandoned by most of their disheartened garrisons, surrendered on April 28.
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The fall of New Orleans was probably the severest single blow the Confederacy sustained in the war. New Orleans was the Confederacy’s great port, its doorway to the rest of the world, and its commercial and financial equivalent of New York City. In addition to losing the city itself, 15,000 bales of cotton (worth over $1.5 million) were burned by the retreating Confederates, along with more than a dozen river steamboats, a half-completed ironclad gunboat, and the entire city dock area. “The extent of the disaster is not to be disguised,” wrote Edward Pollard of the
Richmond Examiner
. “It annihilated us in Louisiana… led by plain and irresistible conclusion to our virtual abandonment of the great and fruitful Valley of the Mississippi,” and cost the Confederacy “a city which was the commercial capital of the South, which contained a population of one hundred and seventy thousand souls, and which was the largest
exporting
city in the world.”
⁴¹

Serious though the loss of Tennessee was that spring, the Confederacy could have survived it so long as it held New Orleans and the lifeline New Orleans offered to the outside world. However, Albert Sidney Johnston had convinced Jefferson Davis that the real threat to New Orleans was from the Yankees on the Tennessee River and the upper Mississippi, and Johnston’s determination to throw Grant and Halleck out of Tennessee had led him to clear out all the Gulf coast garrisons, including New Orleans, of men and equipment, including a squadron of river gunboats that might have made a significant difference in Farragut’s ability to maneuver upriver. When the Federal navy burst through the back door into New Orleans only two weeks after Shiloh, New Orleans was simply too weak to defend itself.

With the Union suddenly holding both the upper and lower ends of the river, it seemed to Ulysses Simpson Grant a worthwhile effort to move over and seize the remaining parts in the middle, around the fortified town of Vicksburg. Grant could not have known it, but at that very moment Halleck was already under pressure from Lincoln to make precisely that kind of move. The November midterm congressional elections would soon be upon Lincoln, and the farmers of the Union West were restless at the prospect of a longer and longer war that kept the Mississippi shipping network closed to them. John A. McClernand, a powerful Illinois Democrat and
now a major general of volunteers in Grant’s district, had gone off on his own to Washington demanding that Lincoln let him recruit his own army to take down the Mississippi and blow open the Vicksburg bottleneck; to placate the Northern Democrats, Lincoln had given him a curiously worded authorization in October to raise a force of volunteers. Halleck looked upon McClernand as a nuisance, and rather than take the risk that Lincoln would actually allow an inexperienced politician to take a Federal army on a joyride down the Mississippi, Halleck sanctioned Grant’s plan to move on Vicksburg, with McClernand parked safely under Grant’s command.