This Hallowed Ground (20 page)

But the trouble looked worse than it was. Lincoln would always react in favor of a fighting general. The “unconditional surrender” motif was something none of his other generals had yet shown him, and he was not disposed to let Grant be crushed without formal charges and a regular hearing. So on March 10 Halleck got an admonitory note from Lorenzo Thomas, the prim paper-shuffling adjutant general of the army.

By direction of the President, said Thomas, the Secretary of War ordered that Halleck make all of these vague accusations good. There would have to be some specifications: Did Grant leave his command without authority; if so when and why? Had he definitely failed to make proper reports? If he had done anything “not in accordance with military subordination or propriety,” exactly what was it, with dates and details?
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In other words, Halleck was being told from the very top to put up or shut up. If he had something on Grant, now was the time to spell it out; if it could not be spelled out, forget it and get on with the war.

Simultaneously Grant sent Halleck a formal letter asking to be relieved of his command.

Then it all blew over. Halleck could not formulate charges against Grant because there was nothing to formulate. He got out of it, finally, by sending Thomas a letter explaining that if Grant had gone to Nashville he had really done it from the best of intentions and for the good of the service; that any irregularities in his command had taken place in Grant’s absence and in violation of his orders and were doubtless, under the circumstances, regrettable but unavoidable; that Grant had explained everything satisfactorily; that the interruption of telegraphic connections between Grant and St. Louis accounted for the failure to make reports, and that all in all the whole thing had best be forgotten. (Nothing more was said about the resumption of bad habits; a rumor which, incidentally, was completely untrue.) To Grant, Halleck sent a message saying that he could not be relieved from his command, that all anybody asked of him was that he “enforce discipline and punish the disorderly” and that everything now was fine: “Instead of relieving you, I wish you as soon as your new army is in the field to assume the immediate command and lead it on to new victories.”
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If Smith felt any soreness over the role he had been called on to play, he never showed it. He continued to do his job as a soldier, cursing the volunteers in a way they did not mind and teaching them how soldiers should behave, and his junior officers stood in the utmost awe of him. Two of them, one evening, found in somebody’s back yard a flourishing bed of mint, which they plucked and took to their quarters, combining the mint with commissary whiskey and what not to make mint juleps; having done which, it occurred to them that Old Smith would probably appreciate a drink. Filling a tall glass, they set out for the general’s tent.

It was dark, and the tent flaps were drawn. Through them came a gleam of light; Old Smith was in his cot, propped up on pillows,
reading by the light of a bedside candle. The two officers stood in front of the tent, trying to muster nerve to intrude on the august presence. Finally one grew bold enough to rap on the tent pole. From within came a hoarse profane question: Who was it, and why was he bothering?

The officer who was holding the glass quaked, not daring to go inside. He managed at last to part the tent flaps a few inches and thrust his arm inside, the frosted julep glass in his fist. There was a dead silence, while the old soldier stared at this apparition. Finally the beautiful truth dawned on him, and the two officers heard a gruff harrumphing and an amazed “By God, this is kind!” The general’s hand came out and the glass was taken, and there was a sniffing and a tasting and a muttered “Kind indeed!” Then the general drained it, the empty glass came back, and the two officers crept away. To the end of his days Smith never knew where the drink came from.
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Neither Old Smith nor anybody else stayed put very long at Clarksville. They were going on up the river, into the beginning of the Deep South; and it seemed for a time that spring as if the whole war had come loose from its hinges and perhaps a quick ending to it lay not far ahead.

The victory at Fort Donelson stirred people. So far the people of the North had had Bull Run defeats, and losing battles at Wilson’s Creek, and reasonless Ball’s Bluff tragedies, and cautious McClellan had gone on with drilling and preparation as if a long war lay ahead. Here, suddenly, was a reversal. Fifteen thousand armed Confederates had been swallowed at a gulp, the war had been pushed from mid-Kentucky all the way back below Tennessee, and in Grant’s curt “unconditional surrender” note there had been a sure, confident note that Northerners had not yet heard. Off in Missouri the 15th Illinois, which had detested Grant ever since he ordered its colonel about the summer before, began to admit that perhaps this Grant was not so bad after all. It was ordered down to join his army now, and when it got to Fort Henry and found itself boarding vessels in a fleet of fifty transports and sailing up the Tennessee with colors flying and bands playing, it agreed that the war was fine, exciting, and grand. All through the western theater, regiments that had been doing the drudgery of training-camp or border-patrol duty found themselves hoping to be sent to Grant’s army. Victory lay up the river somewhere and everybody wanted to be in on it.
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Up the river, or down another river; for the Mississippi moved south not too far west from the valley of the Tennessee, and Union strength was being felt there too. Blustering John Pope, for whom Halleck had vainly sought promotion, who despised volunteer troops and seemed
to long for the old-army days of obedient regulars, was taking the Confederate post at New Madrid, Missouri, and with the aid of Foote’s ironclads was putting in motion the offensive that would soon take Island No. Ten and open the river all the way to Memphis. In the southwest a cautious sobersides of a professional soldier named Samuel Curtis was taking an army down to the farthest corner of Missouri, crossing into Arkansas, and routing a Confederate force at Pea Ridge, following Pathfinder Frémont’s old trail and giving the Confederates such a setback that Halleck exultantly (and prematurely, as it turned out) was notifying Washington that the rebellion in Missouri had finally been crushed — “no more insurrections and bridge-burnings and hoisting of Rebel flags.”
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From the Atlantic seaboard the news was equally good. Army and navy together were exploiting the break-through into the North Carolina sounds, hammering Confederate forts into submission, seizing New Bern and Roanoke Island and opening the way for sea-borne invasion. Farther south the navy had broken its way into Port Royal, South Carolina, getting possession of a deep-water base for its whole southern blockading fleet and raising an obvious threat to Charleston. Another amphibious expedition was hitting the Georgia coast and would soon control the sea approaches to Savannah; and in the Gulf, a fleet under a sprightly old salt named David Glasgow Farragut was inside the passes at the mouth of the Mississippi, heading for New Orleans.

There was a feeling of triumph in the air, and no one felt it more than stolid, unemotional Grant himself. Back in command with the blots off his record, Grant was going up the Tennessee, his own headquarters at the town of Savannah, Tennessee, a strong advance-guard posted at Pittsburg Landing, ten miles upstream. He was being reinforced, he would shortly have from forty to forty-five thousand men in his command, and Buell was under orders to march overland to the Tennessee and join him with perhaps thirty thousand more. The objective seemed to be a railroad-junction town, Corinth, Mississippi, twenty miles below Pittsburg Landing, a place where the north-and-south Mobile and Ohio Railroad crossed the all-important Memphis and Charleston. Johnston and Beauregard were pulling their forces together there, and it was clear that the next thing to do was to go down to Corinth and smash them.

Grant believed it would be simple. He was getting, as a matter of fact, a slight case of overconfidence. Donelson had been a hard fight, but it should have been harder, and Grant was beginning to suspect that perhaps the southern heart was not in this war — a gross misconception, as he would find out before he was much older. To Halleck, on March 21, Grant wrote: “The temper of the Rebel troops is such
that there is but little doubt but that Corinth will fall much more that the great mass of the rank and file are heartily tired.”
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Writing to his wife, Grant was even more optimistic. He asserted that “ ‘Sesesch’ is now about on its last legs in Tennessee,” and said that he wanted to push on as rapidly as possible to save hard fighting. There would, he felt, be some more fighting, but not too much more: “A big fight may be looked for someplace before a great while which it appears to me will be the last in the west.” He added: “This is all the time supposing that we will be successful which I never doubt for a single moment.”
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He could not move just yet, however. Halleck was being cautious. He saw Corinth as the objective, but he would not attack it until Grant and Buell’s forces had joined, at which time he himself would come down and take active command. Grant was ordered not on any account to bring on a general engagement until all of this took place.

Halleck had finally won what he wanted most — top command in the West. Washington was reshuffling its command setup this spring. McClellan’s reluctance to move against Richmond (despite his statement to Buell that he expected to be there soon after the Federals were in Nashville) had worn the administration’s patience too thin; he was no longer top commander of all the country’s armies but was leader of the Army of the Potomac alone; and as it demoted him the administration gave Halleck control over Buell’s department as well as Halleck’s own. On paper it seemed a logical move, for Halleck’s forces were winning victories as winter ended.

Grant was getting one welcome addition to his command this March, although he did not yet know how welcome it would finally be. William Tecumseh Sherman, who had been funneling troops to him from Paducah, brought an untrained new division up the river and took his post at Pittsburg Landing — took post there just in time to exercise command, for Old Smith had skinned his leg jumping from a steamer to a rowboat, the insignificant hurt had become infected, and he was now hospitalized in Savannah in the fine old mansion that Grant had taken over for headquarters.

The Sherman who took over at Pittsburg Landing was a different sort of man from the nervous, jittery Sherman who had lost his poise and his command in Kentucky. Halleck had not known how to handle Grant — had done his best to drive him clear out of the army — but he had found the right touch with Sherman, and that effervescent soldier’s self-confidence had returned. In Kentucky he had fretted and worried over reports of Confederate activity, fearing that each thrust by a half-organized cavalry patrol betokened an immediate attack in force. Now, holding the advance and peering south from his
tent pitched near gaunt Shiloh meeting house a few miles from the landing, Sherman was less than a score of miles away from the main Confederate army, but he was taking no alarm. Confederate skirmishers were infesting his front, but he was calmly reporting that they were simply trying to find out how many Yankees there were around Pittsburg Landing. He was scorning to entrench his command, and Grant was not telling him to entrench, either; there was no need for it — before long Buell’s army would arrive, and then Halleck would come, and they would sweep grandly down and whip the Rebels at Corinth.

Spring was coming on, southern winter was balmy, and a soldier in the newly arrived 11th Iowa doubtless spoke for all of his fellows when he wrote in his diary: “It is warm and dry — it is delightful. There is nothing of importance going on.”
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S
HILOH CHURCH
had been built for the Prince of Peace and it had been named for an Israelite town in Ephraim, where the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant had stood and where the boy Samuel had heard voices and seen a mighty vision. It was a bleak frame building on a hillside in a clearing, with the road from the steamboat landing going past on its way to Corinth, and like the peach trees whose pink blossoms caught the April sunlight, the little church had been put there as a hint that life was not all bleak and barren. But Shiloh would get a terrible name now, for armies with banners had gathered around it and in thousands of families it would become a name for horror and desolation.

They were not really armies, although that is what men called them. They were just collections of very young men, most of whom knew nothing at all about the grim profession they had engaged in, all of them calling themselves soldiers but ignorant of what the word really meant. Day after tomorrow they would be soldiers, but now they were civilians, gawky in their new uniforms, each one dreaming that battle would be splendid and exciting and that he himself would survive; and they came from North and South, from farm and cane-brake cabin and from small town and busy city, trudging the dusty roads and tensing themselves for the great test of manhood which seemed to lie just ahead.

General Johnston and General Beauregard had joined forces at Corinth, and they had brought forty-five thousand men up to smite the Yankees in the fields and woodlots above Pittsburg Landing and drive them into the river. Grant had about the same number of men, waiting in their camps for the word to move down to Corinth and
win the last great battle in the West. With a few exceptions — each army had a sprinkling of men who could call themselves veterans, because they had been in one fight — these soldiers were completely green. A Confederate brigadier confessed later that until he got to Shiloh he had never seen a gun fired, nor had he heard a lecture or read a book on warfare; and there were Confederate batteries whose members had never even heard the sound of their own guns, ammunition having been too scarce to permit target practice. In the Union army conditions were little better. The colonel of an Ohio regiment remarked that before Shiloh his men had not put in as much as ten hours on battalion drill, and there were many regiments whose men had received their muskets while on the way to the field and who had never so much as loaded and fired them until the battle began. Not even at Bull Run had two more pathetically untrained bodies of men been thrown into combat.
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