The Better Angels of Our Nature (18 page)

By 9:00
A.M.
, the Rebel three-line formations had quickly broken down into one extended single line, but still it kept on, relentlessly driving the Yankees back. Sherman, McClernand, and W. H. L. Wallace extended the Union line to Prentiss’s left, while Hurlbut’s men drew it out on the right. However, it was soon clear to Sherman that despite Prentiss’s determined stand he was falling back.

Three Illinois regiments remained to support Waterhouse’s battery, but when their colonel was severely wounded they too fell back in disorder and the battery was captured.

The colonel of the Fifty-third was not the only one to desert his men just when they needed him most. News came that Colonel Mason of the Seventy-first Ohio had taken one look at the oncoming Rebels and spurred his horse for the rear. His second in command had taken up the challenge and almost immediately been killed. The Seventy-first were now in total disarray. Sherman’s left, although offering a furious resistance, had been turned, and the Rebels were pressing the entire Federal line. He sent couriers to colonels Buckland and McDowell to hold their ground, but no sooner had the couriers returned than Sherman was forced to issue new orders. The Rebels had their artillery to the rear of the Union left flank and maneuvering on the part of the Yankees had become vital.

Grabbing Marcus by the shoulder and shouting to be heard above the noise of artillery shells bursting to their rear, the commander instructed him, “Tell Captain Taylor to bring his battery from Shiloh Church and to fall back as far as the Purdy-Hamburg Road.” To Major McCoy he said, “Tell Buckland and McDowell to adopt the Purdy-Hamburg Road as their new line of defense.”

He then rode off with the remainder of his staff to meet Captain Behr. Now it was the fate of his second mount, the one donated by Lieutenant Taylor, to fall, struck by canister as the general greeted the young battery commander at the intersection of the Corinth and Purdy Roads. Ordering him immediately into action, Sherman paused only to help capture a riderless and panicked horse, the mount of an officer who now lay dead upon the ground, his chest a mass of blood and exposed ribs.

Dogged Federal infantrymen loaded and fired as they went, fell back to fire from behind trees and fallen logs, to rally around the batteries, but would not allow themselves to be completely driven from the field, although one after another, they were falling. Cut down also was the young and eager Captain Behr, shot from his horse at the very moment that he was giving the orders for his guns to be unlimbered. With the loss of their captain, the drivers and artillerymen fled, taking with them the caissons, but abandoning five of the six guns to the enemy, without having fired a single shot.

Now Sherman was forced to abandon the line of defense beside the log church and with it all his division’s original camps, and choose another, but he was a man possessed with an unclouded vision.

This morning during his forty-second year, if the insane, nervous, overwrought W. T. Sherman of Kentucky and Missouri had ever existed he was to die on the battlefield at Pittsburg Landing during the first few hours of combat, and a new inspired and inspiring Sherman would be born. At Jones Field, he sent his aides to conduct McDowell and Buckland and their commands to join on McClernand’s right. Not long after this, Sam Grant arrived. It was only 10:
00 A.M.
It seemed as though a day, a year, an entire lifetime had already passed.

With Rawlins’s guiding hand Grant dismounted, snatched the padded crutch off his saddle and hobbled toward a dust-covered Sherman, barely flinching as a shell exploded close to their rear, sending a shower of earth and bark and leaves over their heads, but both making damn sure they saved their segars. This was their first meeting under fire.

“Sherman—” said Grant, incorporating greeting and inquiry in one word, not a man to waste words, even in the heat of battle, especially in the heat of battle.

Jesse, standing behind the Ohioan, heard him reply with steady voice, “The situation is none too bad, Grant. My men have checked the enemy and are holding their ground.”

“Good—” Grant said almost distractedly. “Things do not look too well with Prentiss on your left,” he added, shifting his weight on the crutch and wincing. “He’s been forced slowly backward and has anchored his regiments in a sunken road where he’s fighting like a demon.” To the left of that sunken road was the peach orchard where Jesse had picked the Widow Howell’s fruit. Now they rained their petals, like pink teardrops, onto the broken and lifeless bodies of the rough men who had so recently admired their delicate nature. “I’ve told him to maintain that position at all costs.”

“Any news of Lew Wallace or Nelson?” Sherman shouted above the exploding shells and booming cannon.

“I stopped at Crump’s Landing on the way up here ’bout seven-thirty,” Grant shouted back. The two men, stalwartly, perhaps stubbornly, standing their ground as members of their staff scattered at the telltale sounds of an approaching barrage. The crashing came, the blinding flash, the streaks of flame, fragments struck the earth. When the smoke cleared, there was Grant, still talking, and Sherman, still listening. “And called across to Lew Wallace to hold himself in readiness, send out patrols and await my orders. When I found what was happening here I sent one of my staff officers back to order him to march by the river road and come up on your right. He should be here by now, or near.”

Sherman bent low for Jesse to light his cigar. They heard the rapid-fire of massed muskets and another shower of leaves came down upon their heads. “Good boy,” he said to her. “Running does no good when the whole earth is exploding around you. And Nelson?” the Ohioan asked of Grant and puffed.

The continued absence of the Ohio Army’s brigade commander perplexed Grant even more than Lew Wallace’s whereabouts. “Before I left Savannah I sent him a note ordering him to move his entire command to the river opposite Pittsburg. I told him he could easily obtain a guide in the village. I also sent a note to Buell telling him we are attacked and that I had directed Nelson to move his division up the river.”

“Then we will have to await his arrival with patience.” Waiting was not a virtue normally associated with the redheaded division commander.

“Sherman, what do you need?”

“Ammunition.”

“Arrangements have already been made.”

“Then—” Sherman pushed his cigar between his lips and used the free hand to wipe sweat from his face, blackened by gunpowder. There was blood on his brow, smeared with dust. His coat was gray with dust and his trousers encrusted with mud. He
looked
like a man who had been in the heat of battle for four hours.

Grant suddenly noticed the arm half-concealed inside the older man’s coat and moved his eyes questioningly to the red-bearded face.

“Scratch,” Sherman announced in reply to Grant’s mute inquiry.

“Sherman, take care. A wound that forces you from the field today will be disastrous for us, for the Union cause. If you need to find me send someone to the cabin near the rim of the bluff. We’ll talk later, sir, meanwhile I am needed more elsewhere.”

Sherman looked at the younger man for a moment before his red head snapped in a gesture that said he understood the implication of Grant’s words. The entire exchange took no more than ten minutes. Then Rawlins, who hooked the crutch to the saddle, helped Grant onto his horse. Sherman glanced down at Jesse. She was staring up at him. Briefly, roughly even, he removed some of the broken leaves from her shoulder with a sweep of his good hand. She smiled, her teeth the only white in a near-blackened face, and he nodded reassurance, not merely for her, but for his entire division, his entire country.

Thirty minutes later news came that the enemy had made a furious attack on McClernand’s whole front. Responding to the pressure on this Illinois politician, Sherman moved McDowell’s brigade directly against the Rebels’ left flank, forcing them back some distance. While personally instructing the men of McDowell’s brigade on where to conceal themselves, behind trees, fallen timber, and a wooded valley to their right, Jesse saw the general lose his third horse of the day. The poor stricken animal went down on its forelegs, blood streaming from its mouth, barely giving Sherman a moment to leap clear, before collapsing, the smashed body jerking and shivering for a few seconds, before life deserted it. The loss of another horse seemed strangely poignant in the midst of all this carnage.

Sherman’s new mount was a strong beast, an artillery horse, which Jesse herself proudly helped disentangle from the remains of an overturned caisson.

He now rode up and down the lines re-forming regiments as their numbers dwindled, instructing his raw artillerymen on such shockingly basic skills as how to cut the fuses of their shells. Without a care for his own safety, without apparent cognizance of the Rebel batteries, nor of the volleys of musket balls and buckshot that swept the ground and pattered away at the green leaves overhead, he halted his spurring progress by each battery of guns. Around him, the battle raged but he calmly ordered an artillery battery into position just in time to stop a charging enemy column. When Rebel infantry tried to overrun the guns, he shifted some of his own infantry and beat back the attempt. More than ever now, he seemed to be everywhere, maneuvering companies, complimenting officers, encouraging individuals, his severe features animated with excitement, his red-bearded face easily recognized by his grateful men.

To an impartial onlooker he must have appeared like a man who believes himself arrogantly invincible. This was untrue. He simply cared least of all for his own safety and knew that his men would do their best, risk their lives for a commander who led by example.

Up and down he rode, the men inspired by the sight of their commander, face blackened by gunpowder, streaked with sweat and blood from his wound, whose seriousness they could only speculate upon, since he kept the injured hand concealed inside his frock coat. Some said the hand had been shattered, others whispered that it was completely gone and that the frock coat concealed a bloody stump.

For the next four hours Sherman’s divisions held their position, at one time gaining ground, at other times losing it. Sherman himself remained a model of intense concentration. He rallied his forces and they gave ground grudgingly. He did not puff on those interminable cigars with his usual fury, he had no choice, they kept going out as he spurred his horse up and down the lines of infantry and cannon. He ceased to wave his arms when he talked, nor did he talk much, except to issue orders, clear-cut and curt, anticipating everything that happened. When a line broke he was there, tight-lipped, his eyes narrowed to slits, urging his men into the breach, and when the Rebels swept over and by his cannon he had those guns turned around to fire on the enemy as they surged forward. He seemed to be in rapture, finding himself, for the first time, a man suddenly, miraculously face-to-face with his own destiny.

During this time Captain Rowley, one of Grant’s aides, arrived to ask, on behalf of his chief, how the battle was progressing and to tell him that both Colonel McPherson
and
Captain Rawlins had now been urgently dispatched by General Grant to find out what had happened to Lew Wallace and his division. Sherman chewed a cigar stub and without removing his eyes from the field of combat said, “Tell Grant, if he has men to spare I can use them, if not, I will do the best I can. We are holding them pretty well just now—pretty well—but it’s hot as hell.”

At midafternoon, they had another visit from Grant. This time, however, he did not even deem it necessary to dismount as he told the Ohioan, “I sent another note to Buell telling him we’ve been attacked since early morning and suggesting that the sight of fresh troops on the field now would raise the spirit of our men and greatly dishearten the enemy. I still don’t know if Buell is actually at Savannah. I’d hoped to talk with him before coming up here.”

Buell had a rank commensurate with Grant’s: They were both commanders of powerful Federal armies. To anyone listening it would have seemed quite clear that Grant was loath, if not unwilling, to
order
the Ohio Army chief to bring the remainder of his considerable force up to Pittsburg Landing to join with Nelson’s division and support Grant’s army. Whether or not the bombastic Buell would have obeyed a direct order, even if it had come from a Federal major general and meant the difference between victory and defeat for his side, remained an unanswered question. Perhaps Grant felt that a request might more quickly induce Buell to come to the support of a fellow general under pressure, whereas an order might encourage him to dally. Though surely a man of Buell’s experience did not need to be ordered or even advised, surely he would fairly rush to support his suffering comrades under arms?

When General McClernand rode up around 3:30, looking bemused and alarmed and accompanied by an entire entourage of staff and orderlies, all wearing equally despairing faces, to tell of how Hurlbut’s line had been driven back to the river, Sherman assured him most vigorously that
they
could hold until Lew Wallace appeared, whenever that might be.

“But we
must
hold the bridge we built over Snake Creek for just such a purpose ’til he does get here.” Sherman used Jesse’s back to open a map, select and point out to McClernand where the new line of defense was to be placed, with its right covering the bridge. Finished, he thrust the map at her chest and went on talking to McClernand, gave a short speech to his staff officers about the importance of knowing when one is beaten and retreating with dignity. He ceased only when Sherman interrupted to state most categorically that surrender was an option that neither he nor Grant would even consider. Finally the political general rode off, convinced, for the moment at least, that he should be in control of his own men, not hanging onto Sherman’s coattails.

Sherman’s brief but telling lecture had evidently had the desired effect, for in due course the word came through that McClernand’s First Division had made a fine show against the enemy and driven him back with a bayonet charge. The Ohioan looked relieved, if not gratified, as he listened to this news.