Also by Winston Groom
Nonfiction
Shrouds of Glory (1995)
The Crimson Tide (2002)
A Storm in Flanders (2002)
1942 (2004)
Patriotic Fire (2006)
Vicksburg, 1863 (2009)
Kearny’s March (2011)
Novels
Better Times Than These (1978)
As Summers Die (1980)
Conversations with the Enemy (1982, with Duncan Spencer)
Only (1984, novel)
Forrest Gump (1986)
Gone the Sun (1988)
Gump and Co. (1995)
Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl (1998)
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v3.1
To Len Riedel, without whom the
Civil War would never be the same.
For Romans, in Rome’s Quarrel,
Spared neither land nor gold.
Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life,
In the brave old days of old.
—THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
from “Horatius” (1842), on civil war
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE
A NOTE ON WEAPONS, TACTICS, UNITS, AND MILITARY CUSTOMS—1862
MAPS
1. April Is the Cruelest Month
2. You Must Be Badly Scared
3. From Failure to Fortune
4. Nothing Can Be Done
5. “Unconditional Surrender” Grant
6. This Cruel War
7. He Looked Like an Old Viking King
8. I Would Fight Them If They Were a Million
9. All the Furies of Hell Broke Loose
10. What Followed, No Man Could Well Describe
11. Like Shooting into a Flock of Sheep
12. It Was All a Glittering Lie
13. I Will Lead You
14. My God, My God, It Is Too Late!
15. I Intend to Withdraw
16. Ah! Tom Grafton—How Mistaken You Were!
17. An Exalted Distinction
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND NOTES ON SOURCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
THE BATTLE OF SHILOH AND THE ORGANIZATIONS ENGAGED
About the Author
MAP SOURCES AND ILLUSTRATIONS CREDITS
Author’s Note
THE BATTLE OF SHILOH, ALSO KNOWN AS PITTSBURG Landing, has intrigued me since my first encounters with Civil War history, but for years I viewed it mostly as some great chunk of pandemonium obscured within the fog of war. More recently, as I began to engross myself in the literature of the battle, what struck me hard was its enormity, its ferocity, and most of all its disorder. As I suspected, it was not an easy story to tell.
My first book of Civil War history sixteen years ago was Shrouds of Glory, about the fateful Battle of Nashville toward the end of the war, which grew, of course, out of the Battle of Atlanta, with Shiloh hovering in the background. After that I wrote about World War I, World War II, and the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 before returning to the Civil War in an account of the Battle of Vicksburg. Many of the same characters who began their Civil War combat careers at Shiloh fought on against one another at Vicksburg, Atlanta, Franklin, and Nashville. For a writer or historian it is both fascinating and astonishing to watch as these reappearing notables are fired, promoted, killed off, celebrated, or removed. The Rebel generals Hardee, Forrest, Wheeler, A. P. Stewart, and Govan come to mind, and Sherman, Grant, and McClernand on the Union side. A. S. Johnston, Polk, Cleburne, and McPherson died on the field. The names drift past, familiar faces and personalities who from time to time inhabited my stories. Each got his start at Shiloh.
Shiloh was different from most large Civil War conflicts in that once the soldiers entered the chaotic terrain of Pittsburg Landing, control became nearly impossible and the battle largely broke down into individual fights between regiments, of which there were some 170 involved.
Some very good historians have attempted to chronicle the battle at this level, and several, noted in my acknowledgments at the end of this book, have been successful. They detail the fighting almost moment to moment on all parts of the field, during all times of the day, quoting manifold sources to frame their narrative. I chose not to try to unravel it that way—first, because it had been done, and second, because I thought I saw a different way to present the essence of the Battle of Shiloh to readers who are not necessarily the kind of Civil War buffs who dote on every minute detail and technical aspect.
There were more than 100,000 soldiers fighting in the 12 square miles that constituted Pittsburg Landing, and every one of them who survived had a story to tell. A great many told it—in books, memoirs, diaries, letters, and other mediums of the day. There are thousands of accounts available through many venues, and I probably went through most of these.
Afterward, it became my thought to tell a good part of this story through the eyes of just a score or so of these participants. I tried to pick sophisticated observers as they endured the battle and the repercussions from it. Foremost, I chose the good writers, and I weighed heavily on what seemed to be the honesty of their accounts. Ambrose Bierce, for instance, who fought for the Union, became one of America’s most well read authors. Henry Morton Stanley, a Confederate soldier, was later celebrated worldwide for his accounts of exploits in Africa and elsewhere. Others became popular journalists, and still others were simply good diarists or memoirists.
I hope the reader likes this approach. I did, as I wrote it, because it seemed that these observers worked their way at length into the inner seams of the story of Shiloh and propelled it along as the drama unfolded.
In all my previous histories—from the War of 1812 to World War II—I have noted the presence of a direct relative involved in the action. My great-great-great-grandfather, for example, fought in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and was promoted from captain to major by Andrew Jackson himself. My grandfather fought in World War I, and my father served in World War II, and blood relatives also served in the Confederate cavalry during the Civil War. It almost sounds as though we are a family of military people, but we are not; America’s wars just fell at the right (or wrong) age for the men, including me, who had just graduated from college with a second lieutenant’s commission in 1965 when Vi
etnam broke out in earnest.
Alas, neither the 56th Alabama Cavalry of my maternal great-grandfather Fremont Sterling Thrower nor the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry of my great-great-grandfather James Wright Groom were at the Shiloh battle. Apparently these units had not yet been organized in April of 1862, when the fighting broke out, though they were present at Vicksburg, Atlanta, and other campaigns. It always lent a sense of immediacy and distinction to the story to know that I had a relative in the action, and after a while it began to bother me that one day I’d likely write a book of military history with no ancestral connections. Well, here it is, and here I am, and so far as I can tell I don’t think it has hurt the telling of the tale. Besides, I’ll bet those grandfathers at least knew people who were at Shiloh.
Point Clear, Alabama
November 1, 2011
Prologue
THE BATTLE OF SHILOH ON APRIL 6 AND 7, 1862, was the first great and terrible battle of the Civil War and the one that set the stage for those to come. It was so bloody and destructive that in many cases soldiers writing home simply could not find words to describe it. “I cannot bring myself to tell you of the things I saw upon yesterday,” wrote one man, or, another, “The scenes of the past few days beggar description.” Anyone who has seen the violence and death of battle, who has experienced the horrors of war, will understand a person’s reluctance to revisit it, to reengage their feelings in it, but Shiloh elicited a particularly strong response.
One of the early chroniclers of the battle, the historian Otto Eisenschiml, wrote, “I consider Shiloh the most dramatic battle ever fought on American soil; if not the most dramatic battle ever fought anywhere. True, Gettysburg was bigger; Vicksburg was more decisive; Antietam even more bloody, but no other battle was interwoven with so many momentous ifs. If any of these ifs had gone the other way, it would have had incalculable consequences.”
Since the beginning of the war, everyone knew that a big battle in the West was inevitable, even if they did not know where or when. But in early 1862 when Ulysses Grant took an army up the Tennessee River it was apparent that the Confederates could not tolerate this intrusion, and as the months passed by both armies began to build strength. The stakes were enormous—control of the Mississippi River Valley, the heart of the Confederacy.
By the time the Civil War broke out, great advances in weaponry had been made in both artillery and small arms, but both complex strategies and, more important, the field tactics used to carry them out remained Napoleonic, meaning they were outmoded by nearly 50 years. Thus large columns of infantry again and again were needlessly and recklessly exposed to the worst kind of close-on slaughter (there is no other word for it). Nor had medicine made any appreciable inroads other than the invention of crude anesthesia that was often unavailable. The result was a ruthless battlefield butchery almost unimaginable at that day and time. Americans, for instance, suffered more casualties in the daylong fight at Shiloh than all of the casualties during the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined.
The battle was fought on some of the worst imaginable terrain, at least for those on the attack, a site chosen almost by accident—thick, brushy oak and other hardwood forests cut up with ridges, deep ravines, and miry swamps that made control of troops problematical if not impossible. In this small, mean patch of ground in the far southwest corner of Tennessee near the Mississippi border, the Tennessee River hemmed in the battlefield to the east, while the deep, moccasin-infested morass of Owl and Snake Creeks defined the western boundary. There were few cleared areas—farm fields of perhaps 40 acres, or clearings carved out by Indians in earlier times, or natural-made openings created in the past by the violent tornadoes that often tore through that section of the country. Confederate troops on the attack would have to cross these open fields, while Union defenders often had an advantage of being able to hide in the wooded edges, clumped around artillery pieces, the mobility of which, for both sides, presented stern battlefield challenges.
And what of the troops of these two great armies soon to form and fight here? At Shiloh, so early in the war, the vast majority of the soldiers were completely green. Some had never fired their rifles; some had never even been taught to load their rifles; some in fact had no rifles at all. A day before the battle, a Texas regiment unpacked the trunks containing its clothing and discovered, to its horror, that the quartermaster had given them uniforms that were completely white. “It was like wearing your own shroud!” one of the Texans complained. An outfit of Louisiana Confederates went into the battle wearing their prewar state-issue militia uniforms, which were blue, and consequently they were shot down by their own side.
The officers were likewise untested. With the exception of Ulysses Grant and several of his brigades that had recently stood some combat downriver, few on either side had heard a shot fired in anger except some of the older men during the war with Mexico in 1846. With the Civil War still young, even many regimental officers on both sides offered themselves up as unmistakable targets by riding their horses into battle within clear range of enemy fire. There were West Point graduates in both armies, but most of the senior and practically all of the junior officers were, until recently, civilians, whose only experience was with their hometown guard or militia. A considerable number of these turned out to be lawyers, who tended to insist that everything be put down in writing.
Grant himself was an enigmatic study, as we shall see, undistinguished, accused of dereliction, and certainly at that point an unlikely candidate for command of such an important army in such an important battle, which was viewed far and wide in the North as a great showdown, the battle that would end the war. There was some justification for this notion, since if the Rebel army was destroyed at Shiloh there would be nothing between the South and ruin. Federal forces so deep in Confederate territory would have had their choice of which Southern cities and capitals to capture or destroy before marching east to converge on Richmond, then in the early stages of a siege by George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac.
Apart from the horror, “confusion” might be the most accurate description applied to the battle itself. The Confederates were confused simply getting to the battlefield, struggling in violent rainstorms along roads that were barely ruts in the ground, and wondering once they arrived if the enemy was not alerted and waiting for them, as in a trap. The Yankees, for the most part, were blissfully unaware that a great Rebel army had come out of its lair seeking a war of annihilation. In the case of commander Grant, it was the first and, essentially, the last time he was ever surprised in battle.
Many of the soldiers, on both sides, had come “to see the elephant,” a quaint expression of the times that implied confronting something novel, huge, and terrible—something few if any of them had seen before. It was a lively turn of phrase with grave implications.
All battles are tragic. The larger the battle, the greater the tragedy. And Shiloh ranks high on the list of the largest Civil War engagements. In human suffering it left many widows and orphans and mothers to weep. It almost on its own account changed the mind-set of the military, the politicians, and the American people—North and South—regarding what they had unleashed in creating a civil war.
In the months before war came, many in Congress and elsewhere had predicted a future “drenched in blood.” Yet few, it seemed, had actually believed or fully understood their rhetoric. Most Americans thought that if it came to blows, a relatively small fight or two would settle the thing, and life would return to normal. They simply could not comprehend a European-style conflict here in America, complete with “terrible armies with banners.”
But that is precisely what they got. Twenty years of unabated name-calling and hatred building had created a generation of young men who could be turned into raw killers—a recipe for tragedy. Shiloh was an early, stark, and frightening symbol of it, and rather than a finale that finished the war quickly the battle ended in cataclysmic failure on both sides. True, the North sti
ll held the ground, but only by an eyelash, and everyone knew it. Even Grant now conceded that the only way to restore the Union was by the total subjugation of the South—a colossal undertaking.
For their part, the Southern fire-eaters were forced to admit that one Confederate soldier could not, in fact, lick ten Yankees and, more ominously, that those selfsame Yankees remained deep in Dixieland, a new and undeniable menace.
As for the men—not just the soldiers, but the ranking officers, and the politicians, and the editors and stump speakers, the pulpit preachers, and the eggers-on from all over the land—when the results of Shiloh were in they, too, had at last “seen the elephant” and were alarmed by what they saw, because their neat, easy plans now lay askew. Far from being over, the Civil War, it seemed, had barely gotten under way.
A Note on Weapons, Tactics, Units, and Military Customs—1862
ARMIES OF THE MID-19TH CENTURY WERE GENERALLY organized on the Napoleonic model, and for purposes of command and control were broken down into the following units, with many variations, depending on manpower, including absences from illness, casualties, and other causes, details, and the like.
Company 100 men composed of squads and platoons, commanded by a captain
Regiment (ten companies) 1,000 men, commanded by a colonel
Brigade (four to six regiments) 4,000 men, commanded by a brigadier general
Division (three or four brigades) 12,000 men, commanded by a major general
Army Corps (three to six divisions) 36,000 to 72,000 men, commanded by a lieutenant general
Army several corps 100,000 men and more, commanded by a full general1
Rarely, if ever, did either army in the Civil War reach the full manpower of this table of organization, often lucky to have half the numbers shown here when going into battle.