The Man Who Saved the Union (28 page)

G
rant later tried to conceal his surprise at the nature and ferocity of the Confederate attack. For several days he had been hoping for battle, though the prospect strained his mind and spirit. “
I wish I could make a visit anywhere for a week or two,” he wrote Julia on April 3. “It would be a great relief not to have to think for a short time. Soon I hope to be permitted to move from here, and when I do there will probably be the greatest battle fought of the war. I do not feel that there is the slightest doubt about the result and therefore, individually, feel as unconcerned about it as if nothing more than a review was to take place. Knowing, however, that a terrible sacrifice of life must take place, I feel concerned for my army and their friends at home.”

On the evening of April 4 he heard firing along the front and rode out to take a look. In the dark, amid torrents of rain, he saw little but what the frequent bolts of lightning illuminated. He turned and headed toward camp, giving his horse its head in the blackness. But the horse slipped descending a hill and fell, pinning Grant’s ankle beneath it. Only the softness of the saturated earth prevented a crippling fracture; as it was, Grant suffered a nasty sprain that hobbled him for days.

On April 5 he learned that the outposts of Sherman and McClernand had been attacked in probing force. He gritted his teeth against the pain in his ankle and rode out again to investigate. “
Found all quiet,” he reported to Halleck. The Confederates had captured a handful of prisoners, wounded several and suffered comparable losses in return. The skirmish appeared to be nothing more than that. “I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us, but will be prepared should such a thing take place,” he told Halleck.

Yet when the general attack occurred the next morning he was
not
prepared. He had kept his headquarters at Savannah, several miles downstream from Pittsburg Landing. “
I was intending to remove my headquarters to Pittsburg, but
Buell was expected daily and would come in at Savannah,” he explained. It was at Savannah that Grant first learned of the attack. “
Heavy firing is heard up the river, indicating plainly that an attack has been made up on our most advanced positions,” he hurriedly wrote Buell. “I have been looking for this but did not believe the attack could be made before Monday or Tuesday.” He told Buell he couldn’t wait for their meeting but must get to the scene of the fighting at once. To the commander of Buell’s advance force he scribbled an appeal to hurry. “
The attack on my forces has been very spirited from early this morning. The appearance of fresh troops on the field now would have a powerful effect both by inspiring our men and disheartening the enemy. If you will get upon the field leaving all your baggage on the east bank of the river, it will be a move to our advantage and possibly save the day to us.”

On the dispatch boat that carried him up to Pittsburg he directed the pilot to stop at Crump’s Landing, where Lew Wallace had his division. He told Wallace to make ready to move wherever he was needed and to watch for further orders. When Grant reached Pittsburg and realized that the landing there was the object of the Confederate attack, he sent word to Wallace to come on as soon as he could. Wallace, however, misunderstood the message or was misinformed as to the route he was to follow, and his division lost its way and reached the battlefield only in the late afternoon.

Grant hadn’t intended to fight on the field where the battle now unfolded, but he quickly assessed the terrain and the deployment of his forces. At the center was the Shiloh meetinghouse. “
It stood on the ridge which divides the waters of Snake and Lick creeks,” he recounted afterward. “This was the key to our position and was held by Sherman. His
division was at that time wholly raw, no part of it ever having been in an engagement; but I thought this deficiency was more than made up by the superiority of the commander.” To Sherman’s left was McClernand, with a division that had fought at Forts Henry and Donelson.
Benjamin Prentiss was next to McClernand, with untested troops. Smith’s division was to Sherman’s right, in reserve, although Smith himself was sick; W. H. L. Wallace commanded in Smith’s absence.

The intensity of the Confederate attack surprised Grant as much as its timing. “The Confederate assaults were made with such a disregard of losses on their own side that our line of tents soon fell into their hands,” he said. The rebels tried to turn Sherman’s right flank, despite the troublesome terrain and the full creeks. Sherman’s men, rising to their first challenge, beat back the rebels time and again. “But the front attack was kept up so vigorously that, to prevent the success of these attempts to get on our flanks, the National troops were compelled, several times, to take positions to the rear nearer Pittsburg landing,” Grant wrote. By dusk his line was a mile back from where it had been in the morning.

Grant galloped from division to division throughout the day, directing and encouraging the commanders and their men. Sherman received the least attention. “Although his troops were then under fire for the first time, their commander, by his constant presence with them, inspired a confidence in officers and men that enabled them to render services on that bloody battle-field worthy of the best of veterans,” Grant observed. He added: “A casualty to Sherman that would have taken him from the field that day would have been a sad one for the troops engaged at Shiloh.” Grant almost did lose Sherman, who was nicked by flying metal and had a musket ball blow off his hat, besides having three horses shot from under him.

Late in the day Grant got word that
Buell had reached the east bank of the Tennessee. He rode to the river to meet him, and the two generals conferred on a dispatch boat. As they left the boat, Buell observed panic-stricken troops who had fled the fighting and now cowered under the bank of the river. Inferring the state of the rest of the command from this pitiful minority, Buell asked Grant what provisions he had made for a retreat. Grant said he had made none. “
I haven’t despaired of whipping them yet,” he said. Buell insisted: “But if you should be whipped, how will you get your men across the river? These transports will not take ten thousand men.” Buell knew that Grant had thirty thousand in the field.
Grant responded grimly, “If I have to cross the river, ten thousand will be all I shall need transport for.”

Grant’s losses that day were unprecedented in numbers killed, wounded and captured. The captured included most of the division of Benjamin Prentiss, who had become separated from the rest of the Federal line, allowing the Confederates to surround him. The loss of Prentiss took Grant by particular surprise. “
The last time I was with him was about half past four, when his division was standing up firmly and the general was as cool as if expecting victory,” Grant said. But scarcely had they parted than Prentiss was forced to surrender with more than two thousand of his men.

The losses and poor performance of the Federal troops required explanation, which Grant provided over the following decades. “There was no hour during the day when there was not heavy firing and generally hard fighting at some point on the line,” Grant wrote in his memoirs. “It was a case of Southern dash against Northern pluck and endurance. Three of the five divisions engaged on Sunday were entirely raw, and many of the men had only received their arms on the way from their States to the field. Many of them had arrived but a day or two before and were hardly able to load their muskets according to the manual. Their officers were equally ignorant of their duties. Under these circumstances it is not astonishing that many of the regiments broke at the first fire.”

P
.G.T.
Beauregard found himself unexpectedly in command of the Confederate army by the end of Sunday’s fighting. Sidney Johnston had been as active on offense as Grant had been in defense; amid one of the Confederate charges in the afternoon a Union minié ball pierced his leg and severed an artery. He continued to give orders rather than tend to the wound, and he died from the bleeding. “
Staff officers were immediately dispatched to acquaint the corps commanders of this deplorable casualty, with a caution, however, against otherwise promulgating the fact,” Beauregard remembered. “They were also urged to push the battle with renewed vigor and, if possible, to force a speedy close.”

But the Union forces stiffened, bolstered by the arrival of the first of Buell’s brigades and by the covering fire of Federal gunboats on the Tennessee. Beauregard decided to call a halt. “We had now had more than eleven hours of continuous fighting, fighting without food except that
hastily snatched up in the abandoned Federal encampments,” he said. “The Confederate troops were not in a condition to carry such a position as that which confronted them at that late hour.”

Beauregard took satisfaction from making his new headquarters in the same tent near the Shiloh meetinghouse that Sherman had occupied in the morning. His corps and division commanders gathered to learn their latest orders. “All evinced and expressed much satisfaction with the results, while no one was heard to express or suggest that more might have been achieved had the battle been prolonged. All seemed to believe that our troops had accomplished as much as could have been hoped for.”

G
rant later claimed he knew he would win even before Beauregard called off the attack that Sunday evening. The Confederates had thrown everything into the battle and succeeded only in pushing the Union lines back. The lines had not broken, and Grant’s army still held the west bank of the Tennessee. And with the arrival of Buell’s army and the belated appearance of Wallace’s lost division, the Union side was growing much stronger. “
I visited each division commander in person,” Grant recalled. “I directed them to throw out heavy lines of skirmishers in the morning as soon as they could see, and push them forward until they found the enemy, following with their entire divisions in supporting distance, and to engage the enemy as soon as found. To Sherman I told the story of the assault at
Fort Donelson, and said that the same tactics would win at Shiloh.”

Grant’s confidence was infectious. “
It rained hard during the night,” Sherman remembered. “But our men were in good spirits, lay on their arms, being satisfied with such bread and meat as could be gathered at the neighboring camps, and determined to redeem on Monday the losses of Sunday.”

Grant’s own night was more troubled, his optimism notwithstanding. “
Rain fell in torrents and our troops were exposed to the storm without shelter,” he recollected. “I made my headquarters under a tree a few hundred yards back from the river bank. My ankle was so much swollen from the fall of my horse the Friday night preceding, and the bruise was so painful, that I could get no rest.” Between the storm and the pain he decided around midnight to repair to a log house he had used for directing the battle earlier in the day. “This had been taken as a hospital, and
all night wounded men were being brought in, their wounds dressed, a leg or an arm amputated as the case might require, and everything being done to save life or alleviate suffering. The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy’s fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain.”

Sherman found him beneath the tree. Sherman couldn’t sleep either. “
Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” he said.

“Yes,” Grant replied, pulling thoughtfully on his cigar. “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

A
nd so they proceeded to do. Grant ordered Sherman and the other division commanders to attack at dawn on Monday, and they responded with a will. The fighting grew hot, but this time all went Grant’s way. Sherman later waxed lyrical in recounting the Union progress. “
I saw Willich’s regiment advance upon a point of water-oaks and thicket, behind which I knew the enemy was in great strength, and enter it in beautiful style,” he wrote. “Then arose the severest musketry-fire I ever heard, and lasted some twenty minutes, when this splendid regiment had to fall back.” The Federals kept fighting. “A whole brigade of McCook’s division advanced beautifully, deployed, and entered this dreaded wood.” Sherman brought up some howitzers. “I gave personal direction to the twenty-four-pounder guns, whose well-directed fire first silenced the enemy’s guns to the left, and afterward at the Shiloh meeting-house. Rousseau’s brigade moved in splendid order steadily to the front, sweeping everything before it, and at 4 p.m. we stood upon the ground of our original front line, and the enemy was in full retreat.”

Grant again spent much of the day galloping back and forth along the front. At one point, while walking his horse with
James McPherson and another officer, to give their mounts a chance to catch their breath, he approached a clearing he thought was beyond Confederate range. Without warning, a hidden battery opened fire on them from a wood across the clearing. Shells and musket balls whistled about their heads until they could scramble to safety. As they assessed the damage, they noticed McPherson’s horse panting badly; seconds later the beast dropped dead from a ball that had passed entirely through its flank. Grant’s sword saved him from a severe wound; a bullet hit the metal scabbard and nearly broke it in two.

By late afternoon that Monday the Federals had driven the Confederates fully from the field. Grant was tempted to try to deliver what
Beauregard had forgone the day before: the coup de grâce against a reeling enemy. But like Beauregard he decided he couldn’t ask the effort of his men. “
My force was too much fatigued from two days hard fighting and exposure in the open air to a drenching rain during the intervening night to pursue immediately,” he explained to Halleck.

25

T
HE BATTLE OF
S
HILOH, OR
P
ITTSBURG
L
ANDING, AT FIRST WON
Grant further accolades. “
More Glorious News,” the
New York Times
proclaimed by way of preface to introducing Grant to readers who didn’t yet know him. “He is a man of plain exterior, light hair, blue eyes, five feet nine in height, plain and retiring in his manners, firm and decisive in character, esteemed by his soldiers, never wastes a word with any one, but pays strict attention to his military duties.… His personal bravery and dash is undoubted.… He is one of the hard-fighting school of Generals.” Some pundits judged that the battle had demoralized the Confederates beyond repair. “Johnston, the best of their generals, is dead,” one wrote, “and if it be correct that
Beauregard is also dead”—as early reports suggested—“it hardly seems likely that there will be any further show of battle in the Southwest other than detached and irregular fighting.”