This Hallowed Ground (21 page)

The Confederate commanders knew perfectly well that the Federals were going to come down to drive them out of Corinth just as soon as Buell’s army joined Grant’s, and Johnston made up his mind to beat the Yankees to the punch. On April 3 he put his army on the road for Pittsburg Landing. The march was slow, disorganized, and noisy, as might have been expected of untrained troops; not until the evening of April 5 did Johnston have his men in position before the Union lines, and the men had made such a racket — whooping, yelling, and firing their muskets just to see if the things would really go off — that Beauregard wanted to cancel the whole plan and go back to Corinth, on the sensible ground that even the most inattentive Yankees could not help knowing that they were about to be attacked.

Beauregard should have been right, but he was not. Amateurish as the Confederate advance was, it was no worse than the state of the Federal defenses. Officers and men in Grant’s army knew that quite a few armed rebels were in their front, but nobody in the green front-line regiments knew anything about outpost duty; reports that went back to the rear were garbled and incomplete, and the notion that the Confederates would obligingly wait to be attacked at Corinth was overriding. Grant had six divisions in his army, five of them sprawled out between Shiloh Church and Pittsburg Landing. The sixth, under Lew Wallace, was placed at Crump’s Landing, four or five miles downstream, on the western side of the Tennessee. It seemed to Grant that the Rebels might be planning to assault this isolated force, and while Johnston’s men were floundering up from Corinth, Grant warned Sherman to “keep a sharp lookout for any movement in that direction” and alerted other division commanders to be ready to send help to Wallace’s men in case help was needed.
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But neither Grant, Sherman,
nor anyone else in authority had any idea that a head-on attack on the Shiloh position was remotely likely. The advance elements of Buell’s approaching army began to reach Savannah on April 5; in a day or two the Federal armies would be in full contact and there would be nothing to worry about.

It rained on April 5, and when the sky cleared at sunset the air was cool, and in the woods and half-cleared fields near Shiloh Church the opening leaves gleamed wet and green. There was a peach orchard a mile east of the church, and a little way back of it there was a country road, worn down by erosion so that its bed was a couple of feet lower than the featureless landscape it crossed; and in the orchard and in front of the sunken road and around the unpainted church thousands of Union soldiers had pitched their tents, with other thousands not far in their rear. The ground was good and the air was clear, the great victory at Fort Donelson lay comfortingly at the back of everybody’s mind, the new leaves and the pink blossoms on the peach trees were good to look at, and an Illinois soldier in Sherman’s division wrote: "We were as happy as mortals could be." Early in the afternoon, with the day’s drill over, regiments broke rank and hundreds of boys scurried down to Owl Creek for a swim. They were wholly unworried. There had been intermittent sputterings of rifle fire out on the picket lines for two or three days, but the men had got used to it; the high command was not fretting about it, so why should they?
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In the Tennessee River the wooden gunboats
Tyler
and
Lexington
lay at anchor not far from the landing. Downstream at Savannah there was Grant, in the house where Old Smith was nursing his infected shin. Grant had just received a dispatch from Sherman saying, “I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position”;
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he endorsed this, saying that he felt the same way, and passed the reassuring news on to Halleck. And over the wooded plateau and the peach orchard and the river there lay an immense quiet and peace, the last hope of a war that would soon be over because the other side had lost the will to fight.

Within a few miles of Shiloh Church, Albert Sidney Johnston had finally shaken off Beauregard’s insistence that he give up the offensive and go back to Corinth, declaring: “I would fight them if they were a million.” His battle orders were drawn and issued: the Confederate army would move forward at dawn.

Five in the morning of April 6; patrols from the Union advance elements had gone forward a mile or two to see whether anything solid lay back of the Rebel skirmish parties that had been so much in evidence lately. As they went, Johnston was giving his general officers final instructions, closing with the remark: “Tonight we will water
our horses in the Tennessee River.” The Union patrols kept on going, and before long they collided with Rebel skirmishers. For a little while there was a spat-spat of casual rifle fire, doing no particular harm, alarming nobody; then, up behind the Confederate advance guard, there came the enormous solid mass of a Confederate battle line, banked up to the full depth of three army corps, extending off to right and left through the woods and the underbrush beyond vision. There came heavy rolling volleys and the sound of thousands of men yelling, with the crash of field artillery exploding sullenly underneath.

Back came the Union patrols, and in the camps men fell in line and made ready. The advancing Confederates could see white tents on the hillsides, with ordered ranks drawn up in front of them, guns on higher ground, and all along the front they settled down to a savage fire-fight at the closest range. Great banks of dirty-white smoke hung in the air, caught by the foliage, seeping up above the tree tops as if the wilderness were on fire, and a prodigious fury of noise rocked and thundered, to be heard at army headquarters far downstream.
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Grant was at breakfast. He cocked an ear, quit his breakfast, got his staff and horses down to a steamboat, and took off for Pittsburg Landing with all speed. One of Buell’s brigadiers had just come up, and at the headquarters house he listened uneasily to the rising noise off beyond the horizon. He had gone up to Old Smith’s bedroom, to call on that disabled warrior, and Smith chaffed him, laughing at him for imagining that a real battle was in progress. This, he said, was just an affair of the pickets; green soldiers who had never fought before must not worry so, down here they were used to operations on a large scale. But the racket did not die down; it became an unbroken muffled roar, it sounded louder moment by moment and seemed to be getting nearer. At last Old Smith admitted that it might be a little more than skirmish-line stuff; part of the main army might be engaged.
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Part of the army was indeed engaged — all of it that was within range of Confederate weapons. Grant had had two divisions in front, and these offered a furious resistance, slowing down the Rebel assault and here and there driving it back with heavy loss, while the troops in the rear were hurried forward. In many of the Federal front-line regiments the men had heard the outpost firing and had assumed that the pickets were simply discharging their muskets to see if the previous day’s rain had dampened the powder charges — that was a common affair in this undrilled army. But they sent men forward to investigate, and the men came scampering back, reporting that “the Johnnies are there thicker than Spanish needles in a fence corner,” and in no time the fighting became general.
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Some units broke apart at the first shock, losing all cohesion and
running for the rear, every man for himself. The colonel of the 71st Ohio took one look at the oncoming battle line, put spurs to his horse, and galloped back for the river landing and safety. The lieutenant colonel tried to rally the crumbling regiment as an Alabama regiment came shouldering its way through the saplings; he was killed, and the 71st ceased to exist as a fighting force. Sherman rode up to the 53rd Ohio, told its colonel to hold his ground and he would be supported, and rode off to another part of the field. His face gray as ashes, the colonel lay down behind a log; then, springing to his feet, yelled, “Fall back and save yourselves,” and headed for the rear. Most of the men followed him. Officers rallied a handful and got help from an enlisted man, Private A. C. Voris of the 17th Illinois, who had fought at Fort Donelson and knew about battle. Voris came over and went along the line, showing nervous recruits how to load, aim, and fire, telling them: “Why, it’s just like shooting squirrels, only these squirrels have guns, that’s all.” The fragment finally fell in with an Illinois regiment and fought the rest of the day.
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The Confederate attack was being driven home with fury, and the Union line could not hold long. Regiments that were not entirely routed fell back doggedly, firing from behind trees and logs, rallying briefly around the batteries; they were driven from their camps, and the jubilant Rebels ran on through the tented streets, some of them pausing to pick up loot and souvenirs. The first resistance had been spirited, despite the runaways; one Union brigadier reported that he lost more men in the first five minutes of the fighting than he lost all the rest of the day.
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Green troops, one officer said after the war, had this characteristic; they usually would either run away at once or not at all. Both armies were leaking men to the rear at a prodigious rate, but the men who did not run were fighting like veterans. The division that had been posted in front of the sunken road fell back to that eroded lane, found it a made-to-order trench, and got down in it to make a new stand. Wave after wave of Confederate troops charged them, running in through the brambles and the tangled woods, and were driven back by a deadly fire. The 15th Iowa, which had reached Pittsburg Landing that morning, found itself in this road, the men loading their weapons there for the first time in their lives; they had come up through a disorderly crowd of fugitives, who cried out that this was the Bull Run story all over again and that everything up front had been cut to pieces, but the Iowans were game enough and they hugged the ground in the road and opened fire. One private, apparently convinced that he would never get out of this place alive, was heard to call despairingly to his company commander: “Captain, if I’m killed, don’t
bury me with a Republican!” In the peach orchard men lay flat to fire, and such a stream of Rebel bullets came in that the blossoms were all cut to pieces and floated down on the firing line like a gentle pink rain.
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Most of the soldiers knew nothing of tactics, and when they had to go from place to place they simply went as the spirit moved them: a charge was a wild rush forward, a retreat was a similar rush to the rear, and the only rule was to keep an eye on the regimental flag and go where it went. Brigade and regimental organization was lost, and men fell in with the first fighting group they came to and fought without orders. An Ohio soldier, wounded, was told to go to the rear. He wandered off, found fighting going on wherever he turned, and came back at last to tell his company commander: “Cap, give me a gun — this blamed fight ain’t got any rear.” The 15th Illinois came up from the river, fell in beside a six-gun battery, and found the rifle fire heavier than anything it had dreamed of; one man, getting ready to fight, found his musket stock shattered by a bullet, saw another bullet puncture his canteen, and was relieved of his knapsack when a bullet cut its strap. An Iowa boy, lost from his own outfit and fighting with the Illinois soldiers, got a bullet through the creased crown of his hat, looked at the hat and saw four neat holes in it, and hoisted it gaily on his ramrod for his comrades to see; then a shell burst overhead and he was killed, the Confederates swept in and captured the guns, the Illinois regiment broke, and the survivors fell in with scattered men from other broken regiments a quarter of a mile to the rear and began to fight all over again.
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Behind the lines there was complete chaos. On the roads leading back to the river landing there was an immense disorganized huddle of routed men, teamsters and their wagons, dismounted cavalrymen, reserve artillery, ambulance details bringing back wounded, artillerymen who had lost their guns. The wildest rumors were afloat: half of the army had gone, the Rebels had reached the river landing, there were no officers left, the whole army had been surrendered. One panicky soldier at the landing tried to get others to help him fell trees and build a raft; perhaps they could float down the river to Paducah and safety.
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The panic and the scare stories were all at the rear. Many men were gathered there — before the day was over a good fourth of Grant’s army was huddling under the riverbank or wandering about in a vain hunt for someone who could turn chaos into order — but up front some of the deadliest fighting in American history was going on, and the terrible clamor of battle kept mounting to a higher pitch while all the woodland smoked and flamed.

In the 16th Wisconsin, made up of backwoodsmen, the men said they were going out on a turkey shoot when they went up to the front. A private found himself in line beside the colonel, who had picked up a musket and was firing with the rest, and the private asked how many rebels the colonel had shot. Pausing to make a careful reply, the colonel said that he had fired thirty-seven cartridges and so of course should have hit thirty-seven men, “but I don’t feel certain of six.” In a lull that descended on one part of the field an Illinois captain found himself commanding his regiment, all superior officers having been shot, and since both his division and brigade commanders had also been hit there did not seem to be anybody to tell him what to do. He heard very heavy firing in the woods somewhere off to the right, so he collected what was left of the command and moved over to get in on the fight. An Iowa colonel came to the field drunk, maneuvered his regiment with reckless inconsequence, and was removed by his brigadier from command and placed under arrest; sobering somewhat, he picked up a musket and fell in with another Iowa regiment. Someone recognized him and asked him what he thought he was doing. He replied simply: “I am under arrest and hunting a place to fight.” He stayed and fought, too, acting as private soldier for the rest of the day. An army surgeon who had once served in an artillery company found four guns standing idle on a hill, dead and wounded men lying all around, surviving gunners having fled. He rounded up men from a nearby infantry regiment and got the guns back into action; they fought for half an hour, until a caisson was exploded and two of the guns were disabled.
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