Grant Moves South (39 page)

Reid's story was a shocker. The man was convinced that the army had been miserably taken by surprise, that its generalship had been all but nonexistent, that a ruinous defeat had been averted by the narrowest of margins, and that nothing about the whole affair could be considered with pride except for the bravery of some of the common soldiers and a few subordinate generals. He began in the breathless, involved manner of the times: “Fresh from the field of the great battle, with its pounding and roaring of artillery, and its keener voiced rattle of musketry still sounding in my wearied ears; with all its visions of horror still seeming seared upon my eyeballs, while scenes of panic-stricken rout and brilliant charges, and obstinate defences, and succor, and intoxicating success are burned alike confusedly and indelibly upon the brain, I essay to write what I know of the battle of Pittsburg Landing.” Then, after plowing his way through a few more paragraphs of similar tenor, he got down to cases and presented a workmanlike account of what had really been going on at Shiloh. He had infinitely more detail than the
Herald
man had bothered to collect, and in column after column he presented to the country a convincing picture of a military debacle as humiliating and as disgraceful, in all but its final scenes, as the disaster of Bull Run itself. In the end it was his story that the country took to heart.

The army, he said flatly, had been surprised in its camps. Many officers and men were not out of bed when the Confederate attack struck, others were washing or getting dressed, some were at breakfast, and organized musket and artillery fire swept through the camps before the men even fell into line. Some men were shot dead in their tents, others were bayoneted while still in bed; everybody retreated in haste, and although a new line was patched up many of the fugitives continued all the way to the river and refused to return to the fight. Prentiss's division was swept away and was captured by ten o'clock in the morning. Heroic resistance was described here and there, but in the main the narrative was one of unrelieved bungling and retreat.

The story made little mention of Grant himself; when he was mentioned, the reference was highly critical, and the entire article was searing in its implications. Grant did not even arrive on the field “until after nearly all these disasters had crowded upon us”—Sherman
and McClernand routed, most of Prentiss's division captured, most of the camps taken—and there had been shameful neglect in regard to Lew Wallace: his division, drawn up and ready to march all morning, “was not ordered to Pittsburg Landing until nearly if not quite twelve o'clock.” There was no evidence that any general control was exercised over any part of the battle; a council of war was held Sunday night, “but if the Major General commanding developed any plans there beyond the simple arrangement of our line of battle, I am very certain that some of the division commanders didn't find it out.” Reid gave his readers the impression that Buell's troops and the guidance of Buell himself won most of whatever was won on Monday.
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Others joined in the chorus. Many men had run away at the first shock of battle; some of these were officers, men of prominence in their Middle Western home towns, and they tried to prove their innocence by showing that the army had been surprised because of lack of leadership. The Governor of Ohio—two of whose regiments had practically dissolved once the shooting started—said that these men were not cowards: they had been surprised because of the “criminal negligence” of the top command, and the lieutenant governor of the same state cried that most of the soldiers felt that “Grant and Prentiss ought to be courtmartialed or shot.” The
Chicago Times
announced solemnly that “the neglect of one man, intrusted with high responsibilities, has left fearful, heartrending testimonials on the savage battlefield of Pittsburg Landing,” and the
Cincinnati Commercial
editorialized: “There was something in the management of that great, destructive and indecisive battle that has caused apprehensions to be felt as to the competency of the then commanding general, and while several ugly-looking points have been explained away, public opinion demands something more than even General Halleck's endorsement to reconcile it to the retention of Gen. Grant in command.” A
New York Herald
correspondent at Pittsburg Landing wrote shortly after the battle about the “universality of sentiment that Grant was accountable for the reverse of Sunday,” and went on to assert: “Probably 60 officers, brigade and regimental, have expressed themselves to that effect, while a word in his defense is scarcely to be heard in any quarter. What the General
's defense may be is therefore not public, but if he is not amenable to the charges so freely promulgated and discussed he is the best abused man in the country.” The 35th Ohio, which reached Shiloh shortly after the battle, found that the camps were full of stories of bad generalship, and a veteran remembered: “These rumors were generally accepted as fact by us.… We were in a humor to believe any kind of a report that reflected on our regular army officers. Volunteer troops at that stage of the contest were impressed with the idea that regular army officers were tyrannical and devoted more time to good drinks than to required military duty.”
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The Middle West was in a somber mood; the steamboats were bringing north thousands upon thousands of wounded men, and in Indiana and Ohio and Illinois people began to feel the tragic impact of what had in truth been the bloodiest battle yet fought in the New World.

Shiloh casts a long shadow, in whose dusk it is hard to see the precise truth. Of all the complaints about folly and fumbling leadership, the one which is the clearest, and which has lived the longest, is the dispatch which Reid wrote out of his fury and his disillusionment—a dispatch which is a singular blend of great reporting and abysmally bad reporting. It gave the nation the truth about this battle, but it also gave it certain untruths, which have lived to this day; and in what they said when they tried to reply to the untruths, both Grant and Sherman now seem to have been trying to disown the truth itself. Their statements appear either willfully false or wildly incomprehensible to anyone who has not examined Reid's story and compared it with the record.

Reid was wrong on several counts. He had the bulk of Prentiss's division captured by 10 in the morning, although it held out until 5 in the evening and by its heroic resistance kept the army from complete ruin. He said that Grant did not reach the field until after the worst had happened, although—since he himself reached the landing on Grant's own steamboat—Reid was fully aware that Grant got to the scene promptly and went immediately to the front. He said that there was unconscionable delay in ordering Lew Wallace to the battlefield, although the orders were sent as soon as Grant arrived at Pittsburg Landing and were repeated, with much urgency,
several times thereafter. Altogether, there was enough bias in Reid's dispatch to give a hot-tempered man like Sherman some reason to suspect that the jealousy of the Buell faction had been at work.

But it was in what he said about the surprise that Reid did the most damage—and, doing it, led Grant and Sherman into a defense which a later generation has found quite unacceptable.

Reid said flatly that the men in their camps, especially the men in Sherman's and Prentiss's divisions, were taken wholly by surprise, with Confederate battle lines charging in on them before they were up and dressed, and he wrote scathingly about mismanagement which caused men to be shot in their tents and bayoneted while still in bed. In substance, his story said that the forward portion of the army had been overwhelmed and routed before the men could even get their muskets and face the enemy; the damage was done, according to Reid, before the army had so much as got ready to fight.

Now all of this, quite simply and demonstrably, is not true. The battle began in the very earliest light, with Prentiss's forward elements—and, soon afterward, Sherman's—pitching into the Confederate advance. No Federal camp was overrun before battle lines had been formed, and some of the sharpest fighting of the entire day took place before any camp had been taken. No one was bayoneted while in bed or shot while in his tent. Both Union and Confederate records make this clear.
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In collecting his facts here, Reid obviously had absorbed the wild tales told by panicky fugitives at the landing.

It was this part of Reid's dispatch which Grant and his defenders—including above all others Sherman, who would be Grant's man forever from now on—were most anxious to knock down. In their desperate attempt to show that there had been no surprise as Reid used the word, in which they were entirely correct, they seemed to be saying that there had been no surprise at all at Shiloh, and beyond all argument there had been one. None of their statements about what happened at Shiloh makes any sense unless it is remembered that they were trying to reply to one particular segment of the Reid dispatch.

That the criticism stung Grant painfully is obvious. Not long after the battle he did something which he did rarely, if ever, at any other time in his military career: he wrote a letter to an editor in reply
to newspaper criticism. On May 3 the
Chicago Times
and other papers reprinted a letter which Grant had sent to the
Cincinnati Commercial
. In it, after asserting that he would continue to do his best to bring the war to a speedy close and that he himself was “not an aspirant for anything at the close of the war”—this was a point on which he seems to have been especially touchy—Grant wrote:

There is one thing I feel assured of; that is the confidence of every brave man of my command, and those who showed the white feather will do all in their power to attract attention from themselves. I had perhaps a dozen officers arrested for cowardice in the first day's fight. These men are necessarily my enemies. As to the talk about a surprise here, nothing could be more false. If the enemy had sent word when and how they would attack we could not have been better prepared. Skirmishing had been going on for two days between our reconnoitering parties and the enemy's advance. I did not believe, however, that they intended to make a determined attack, but were simply making reconnoissances in force. My headquarters were at Savannah, though usually I spent the day at Pittsburg. Troops were constantly arriving to be assigned brigades and divisions, all ordered to report at Savannah, making it necessary to keep an office and someone there. I was also looking for Buell to arrive, and it was important that I should have every arrangement complete for his speedy transit to this side of the river.
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Grant's writing usually is very clear, but in this case it is uncommonly opaque and it obviously reflects confused thinking. In one breath Grant says that he could not have been better prepared if he had known precisely when and how Johnston was going to hit him; in the next he confesses that he had misinterpreted all of the omens and that Johnston had deceived him. He had anticipated an attack, but he had not anticipated the kind of attack that was actually made. That the attack failed and that the Union army was able to win a victory the next day apparently was all that mattered; but the talk about “surprise” obviously rubbed him where he was raw.

His reaction was mild compared to that of Sherman. Sherman's case was a good deal tougher. He had been in immediate command at the front and had refused to admit that a Confederate offensive was impending, and his contemptuous “Take your damn regiment
back to Ohio. There is no enemy nearer than Corinth” was a revealing remark that could not be explained away. In his fury at the Reid dispatch Sherman hit back with a vigor that put his own costly misappraisal of enemy intentions entirely out of his mind.

To his brother, Senator John Sherman, Sherman wrote that the worst complaints were “made by people who ran away and had to excuse their cowardice by charging bad management on the part of leaders,” and he noted that the two runaway Ohio regiments which were being so stoutly defended by homestate officials had done almost no fighting; one had lost seven men, the other, nine. A few days later he wrote furiously:

The scoundrels who fled their ranks and left about half of their number to do their work have succeeded in establishing their story of surprise, stuck with bayonets and swords in their tents, and all that stuff.
They
were surprised, astonished and disgusted at the utter want of respect for life on the part of the Confederates, whom they have been taught to regard as inferior to them, and were surprised to see them approach with banners fluttering, bayonets glistening and lines dressed on the center. It was a beautiful and dreadful sight and I was prepared for and freely overlooked the fact that many wilted and fled, but gradually recovering rejoined our ranks. But those who did not recover, their astonishment has to cast about for a legitimate excuse; and the cheapest one was to accuse their officers, and strange to say this story is believed before ours who fought two whole days.

For two days they hung about the river bank filling the ears of newspaper reporters with their tales of horrid surprise, regiments all cut up,
they
the only survivors and to our utter amazement we find it settling down as history.

More soberly, he wrote shortly after this:

All I know is we had our entire front covered by pickets, intermediate guards & grand guards and I had my command in line of battle well situated long before we had seen an infantry soldier of the enemy.… Nor was Prentiss surprised … all his men were drawn up in line of battle before the enemy was seen in columns of attack.
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Inevitably, times being as they were, the attack on Grant moved no more than a few millimeters before it picked up, embroidered and disseminated the charge that Grant had been drunk. To this charge, the officers who had been with Grant during the battle reacted with immediate fury.