At length, Malmborg discovered he had gone as far as he could go, finding himself at the brink of an enormous ravine at least a hundred feet deep. There he ordered the hollow square to disburse, cross the ravine, and form in line of battle on an elevation in the rear, which proved to be a perfect defensive position, at least for the next two hours, but it was as bloody a two hours as any on a field where nearly all the fighting was horrific and pitiless.
Pvt. Robert Oliver, of the 55th Illinois, was lying behind a log firing when 2nd Lt. Theodore W. Hodges came up beside him “and knelt on one knee with the point of his sword on the ground, saying, ‘Oliver, as soon as you get your gun loaded take Ainsbury to the rear.’ Then he was hit with a canister shot in the head. He hung to the hilt of his sword until his hand came to the ground, bending the sword double, and when he let go it bounded six feet into the air. That was the last command he ever gave.”
A Rebel soldier remembered that his regiment “fought like Indians,” from behind trees, brush, rocks, and logs. It was here that the Rev. M. L. Weller, chaplain of the Ninth Mississippi, was slain giving succor to the wounded.
After the death of Lieutenant Hodges, Private Oliver located the wounded Ainsbury and turned him over to another soldier headed to the rear. Then he heard the voice of a friend, “who called out, ‘Robert, for God’s sake don’t leave me.’ I looked back and saw James D. Godwin of my regiment,” Oliver said. “He had everything off except his pants, and was as red as if he had been dipped into a barrel of blood. I said, ‘Never—put your arm around me and I will do the best I can for you.’ ” As he lugged Godwin back he felt more bullets slam into his friend, and when he finally found a surgeon, “upon cutting the shirt off, to my horror there were seven bullet holes in that boy, not yet seventeen years old,” Oliver said.
Capt. L. B. Crooker, also of the 55th Illinois, had been hit in the legs and collapsed beneath a large elm tree where he encountered orderly sergeant Parker B. Bagley, who inquired, “Crooker, are you hurt, too?” Crooker asked for water and then, because their position seemed to attract many Rebel bullets, they began to crawl away. But Crooker collapsed again. Bagley took him by the arm and slung him over his shoulder when, Crooker said, “a burning sensation passed along my back, and we both fell together.” The bullet had hit him “crosswise, under the shoulder and passed on, killing poor Bagley. Lying beneath him I could feel his hot blood run down my side, and hear … his dying groan.”
With its superior numbers, Chalmers’s left flank began to wrap around the Federal right, and Stuart ordered a withdrawal across yet another ravine just behind them, to what he thought was a more defensible position. This was accomplished, but not without horrible bloodshed for, as Captain Crooker explained, “Almost instantly the ground [we had] left was occupied by swarms of exultant and yelling rebels, who now, without danger to themselves, poured a shower of bullets down upon and among the fugitives.” A Major Whitfield of the Ninth Mississippi said (after the war), “We were right on top of you. It was like shooting into a flock of sheep.”
Not only that, but a battery from Jackson’s brigade added to the carnage, firing canister and grapeshot point blank at the helpless Yankees, who were trying to scramble up the steep sides of the ravine. One Confederate compared it with shooting “fish in a barrel.” About 200 of Stuart’s men were killed or wounded while fleeing across the ravine, but the remaining 400—who had set up on a rise at the opposite lip of the ravine—gave an excellent account of themselves for yet another hour, bringing the Confederate assault on the far left to a standstill, but not without a price.
“Only the excitement of battle could sustain a man in the midst of such carnage,” wrote Lt. Elijah Lawrence. “As man after man was shot down or mutilated, a feeling of perfect horror came over me at times, and I berated the powers that placed us in such a position and left us alone to our fate. Can it be wondered at when forty-three out of sixty-four of my own company were killed or wounded in that short time?”
The bloodshed continued unabated until near 3 p.m. when Stuart’s men were down to their last bullets and the Confederates had worked their way to within 20 feet of Stuart’s line. Right about that time the Federal gunboat Tyler came alive and began diabolically lobbing its huge nine-inch shells into Chalmers’s positions. Nobody was hurt, but the shock of the explosions gave time for the remnants of Stuart’s brigade to escape through the woods toward Pittsburg Landing, which was the only place they had to go. They had held the line against a combined Confederate force five times their number and, by many accounts, saved the Union’s left flank.
For his part, when the shells from the gunboats began to land amid his positions, Chalmers “pressed rapidly” out of the area, and toward the Union center, “where the battle seemed to be raging fiercely.” That may have sounded good in his after action report, but why didn’t he pursue Stuart’s people right to Pittsburg Landing? Chalmers doesn’t tell us, nor does anyone else. It may have had to do with exposure to the gunboat firing, or because tactical policy in Johnston’s army always dictated marching “to the sound of the guns.” But one thing for sure was that even as late as 3 p.m. the way to Grant’s supply base and main line of communication had been wide and clear.
Even less clear is what General Jackson and his brigade had contributed to the enterprise. For much of the time Jackson seemed inert. At the beginning Jackson put himself “in support” of Chalmers, but when the fighting was the heaviest, and the weight of his 2,200 men could have changed the balance, he was not in it. Initially, Jackson was ordered by Johnston, who had ridden over for a look-see, to charge the camps of the 55th Illinois in the orchard.7 But the camps proved to be very nearly deserted. After that, Jackson faced a force commanded by the Yankee general John McArthur, whose brigade wore Scottish tams and marched to bagpipe music. But most of the time when Chalmers was having his fight against Stuart, Jackson’s brigade did not seem to do more than exchange fire. Late in the battle, when Chalmers was hard pressed, he rode back to Jackson’s position and got two regiments as reinforcements, and though they helped turn the tide it was becoming very late in the day.
In short, what was later estimated to be no more than 600 Yankees and no artillery held off two Rebel brigades of 3,600 men and two artillery batteries of six guns each. It was one of the oddest, and most unequal, fights of the day, and if the men of Stuart’s brigade had not made their stand the landing might have fallen into Confederate hands. In other words, a checkmate.
After Stuart’s retreat Jackson, like Chalmers, marched his brigade left toward the Union center, to the rising pop-pop-pop and boom of the guns, where both ran straight into the 19th century’s version of a buzz saw. Later it would become known as the Hornet’s Nest.
1 Not unlikely since both Confederate and Union forces recruited heavily from the local area in the days before the battle.
2 This description courtesy of the regimental historian of the 55th Illinois, who also identified Mason as a onetime Ohio attorney general and offspring of a highly prominent Ohio family. Grant himself referred to Mason as a “constitutional coward,” and he was cashiered from the army later that year.
3 To Sherman’s credit he admits in his report that he had not yet received the report of Colonel Stuart, who had been wounded, and was thus unable to account for the activities of the Second Brigade.
4 This was likely the Louisiana state flag carried by the First Louisiana. The 18th Louisiana had its own pelican flag but was in another part of the field.
5 Isaac H. Burch, a Chicago banker, accused Stuart in a divorce proceeding of having had an affair with his wife, a daughter of the influential Corning family from New York. Divorce was quite rare in those times, and the case was prominently celebrated in the newspapers with all the sniggling innuendos of Victorian times.
6 With the exception of two companies “who fought gallantly in the ranks of the Fifth Mississippi Regiment,” according to the Official Records.
7 Johnston had mistakenly called it the 5
9th Illinois.
CHAPTER 12
IT WAS ALL A GLITTERING LIE
BY LATE MORNING THE REBEL ARMY HAD PRESSED the Federals northward all across the wide mouth of the cornucopia for nearly a mile toward its narrowing base. From Sherman’s positions near Owl Creek in the west to Stuart’s ravine along the Tennessee River the Federals were giving way.
By noon the line of battle had assumed the shape of a boomerang, in which the remnants of Prentiss’s division—now barely a regiment—bulged out in the center, with Hurlbut’s brigades slanting away slightly to the Union left and W.H.L. Wallace’s slanting away slightly right. It finally began to look as if the conflict was sorting itself out from the earlier chaos and confusion. But this was not so.
The difficulty was that the topography rendered Pittsburg Landing as inefficient a place imaginable to launch an offensive attack and nearly impossible for a commander to keep under control. What had been intended by Beauregard and Johnston as an orderly battle had devolved into a series of individual fights, mostly between brigades, of which there were 33 total for both sides at the height of the Shiloh fight on Sunday. It would seem then that Grant’s ground had been chosen well, but this was not so either, even if it was better suited for defense than attack. In short, generalship on both sides was problematic; it had become mostly a fight between colonels commanding regiments.
Ever since he arrived on the battlefield, Grant had been seeing to his various division commanders. He’d told Prentiss in the late morning that he must hold his ground in the Union center “at all extremities.” Prentiss then formed an obstinate defense about half a mile in length, with the remnants of his division, along with Hurlbut and W.H.L Wallace—about 5,700 men at the peak, all that remained of their once powerful divisions—in a wooded thicket along an old wagon rut, which came to be known as the Sunken Road. It was a strong, protected position, defended by six batteries containing 25 guns. Here was the so-called Hornet’s Nest, a place of dark horrors where the most awful slaughter of the Battle of Shiloh took place.
Private Henry Morton Stanley, who had been in the vanguard of Shaver’s Confederate brigade when it overran the camps of Prentiss’ division about 9 a.m., had been briefly under the impression that the Battle of Shiloh “was well nigh over.” But he had barely found time to start ransacking Yankee loot from the big white tents of Peabody’s routed regiment when he discovered that the fight he’d just been in “was only the brief prologue of the long and exhaustive struggles which took place that day.”
Line officers began forming up the men for a further advance, and soon Stanley reported, “We came in view of the tops of another mass of white tents and, at almost the same time, we were met with a furious storm of bullets, poured on us from a long line of blue coats, whose attitude of assurance proved that we should have tough work here. After a few seconds we heard the order ‘Lie down men and continue your firing.’ ”
Stanley found a large fallen tree to hide behind, where “the shells plunged and bounded and flew with screeching hisses over us,” he wrote many years later in his autobiography. Spellbound by the tumult around him, Stanley fancied that the cannonading was like “the roaring of a great herd of lions,” the rifle fire like “the yapping of terriers,” the whisk of shells like “the swoop of eagles,” and the zipping of bullets like “the buzz of angry wasps.”
He wrote, “I marveled, as I heard the unremitting patter, snip, thud, and hum of bullets, how anyone could live under this raining death. I could hear the bullets beating a merciless tattoo on the outer surface of the log, pinging viciously as they flew off at a tangent to it, and thudding into something or other at the rate of a hundred a second. One here, one there found its way under the log and buried itself in a comrade’s body.
“One man,” Stanley said, “raised his chest as if to yawn and jostled me. I turned to him and saw that a bullet had gored his whole face and penetrated into his chest. Another ball struck a man a deadly rap on the head, and he turned on his back and showed his ghastly white face to the sky.” Another cursed the enemy and “raised his head a little too high, when a bullet skimmed over the top of the log and hit him fairly in the center of his forehead and he fell on his face.”
Stanley and the rest of Shaver’s brigade were undergoing one of the most vexing of infantry predicaments—a large body of men exposed and pinned down by enemy fire, with casualties mounting. To remain there was suicide, to retreat unthinkable. There was but one choice and the difficulty of executing it was testimony to the valor necessary among the officers and noncommissioned officers of that day and time. Slowly, agonizingly, with jaws clenched and muscles tensed, the officers rose up from their hiding places and stood to the front. “Forward, forward!” they cried. “Charge!”
“Just as we bent our bodies for the onset,” Stanley said, “a boy’s voice cried out, ‘Oh stop, please, I’ve been hurt.’ ” It was Stanley’s squad mate and friend, the 17-year-old Henry Parker, who had picked the violets for their caps, “standing on one leg, and dolefully regarding his smashed foot on the other.” Stanley looked at him and turned away. “In another second we were striding impetuously toward the enemy,” Stanley said, loading and firing as they went.
A Rebel battery galloped up, halted in a cloud of dust, and opened fire on the blue line with canister and shell, resulting in a slackening of Yankee fire. Big Newton Story, the flag bearer marching forward with the colors, had advanced so fast he found himself 60 yards ahead of the Dixie Grays. He stopped and looked back with a smile, shouting, “Why don’t you come on, boys?” Their response was the Rebel yell, “taken up by the thousands,” according to Stanley, “and the advance then moved forward at quick-time.”
The line of bluecoats seemed “scornfully unconcerned,” at first, Stanley said, but as they took in the “leaping tide coming at a tremendous pace, their front dissolved and they fled in double-quick retreat.” As the Rebel attack rushed through the second camp of white tents, Stanley became physically exhausted; they’d been fighting for five hours, and as he paused a bullet struck him in the stomach and he tumbled to the ground.
These white tent camps represented the far left of General McClernand’s line—four Illinois regiments under Col. Julius Raith, who found that command of the brigade had devolved upon him by default after two senior colonels were either absent or ill. A prosperous Illinois flour mill owner and Mexican War veteran, Raith was a popular officer among his fellow Illinoisans, but he found that his sudden authority did not command the requisite respect necessary to conduct matters in the present emergency. First of all, when he sent orders for his regiments to fall in for battle that morning, he was scoffed at, much as Sherman scoffed to the worrywarts in his lines and insisted that the shooting in front was only picket firing. When the command was at last organized it was positioned too late and too far back to prevent the flanking and shameful rout of Hildebrand’s brigade over in Sherman’s division, which had resulted in the dismal odyssey of Lieutenant Dawes and his little band of fugitives from the 53rd Ohio after their colonel had deserted them.
Things did not go perfectly for the Confederates either as the morning progressed. In the Federal center and right the forest was more tangled with thick scrub underbrush. As the melee raged on, no breeze blew, and the gun smoke pancaked upon the battlefield like a London fog, making control of troops more a matter of instinct than anything else. Rebel units marching at various angles to get to “the sound of the heaviest fighting” wound up firing into each other with devastating effect, causing regiments and entire brigades to halt, and even withdraw, until the situation clarified itself.
For example, in the brigade of the Rebel general Sterling A. M. (SAM) Wood, which was advancing just west of Shaver, two regiments, one Alabama, the other Tennessee, were in the process of charging and routing a Federal battery and capturing its six guns when a line of Confederates—possibly from A. P. Stewart’s brigade—appeared in their rear, “and as they reached the crest of a hill the
men (as their officers said) without orders, fired into us, killing at first fire 5 in Major Kelly’s battalion, a lieutenant in the Eighth Arkansas, and wounding many others,” according to the official report of General Wood.
When the alarmed and outraged Wood galloped toward them shouting cease fire, “another volley from this entire line was hurled on us.” Wood’s horse was shot, panicked, and threw him, but Wood’s foot caught in the stirrup and he was dragged at length through the Federal encampment of General McClernand with serious injuries that kept him out of the fight for much of the afternoon. This was but one of the foul-ups of the Confederate attack as it advanced relentlessly northward, in bloody fits and starts.
Ben Cheatham’s division encountered the Hornet’s Nest as it was beginning to form about 10 a.m. He had been ordered by Beauregard to “ascertain the point where the firing was heaviest and there engage the enemy at once.” Marching east, from the far left of the Rebel line, Cheatham came to an open cotton field on the other side of which he “discovered the enemy in strong force behind a fence and an abandoned road.” For an hour Cheatham’s artillery tried without success to silence a Yankee artillery battery that covered their approach; then Colonel Jordan (of Beauregard’s staff and the author of the attack plan) appeared on behalf of Beauregard and ordered Cheatham to charge the battery.
Cheatham put his Second Brigade in motion across the field, 300 yards wide, whereupon “the enemy open upon us from his entire front a terrible fire of artillery and musketry.” The brigade continued through this maelstrom until the men reached the center of the field and “another part of the enemy’s force, concealed and protected by the fence and thicket to our left, opened a murderous cross-fire on our lines, which caused my command to halt, and return their fire. After a short time, I fell back to our original position,” Cheatham said. He had lost many of his best officers in the charge, including, apparently, a young boy, John Campbell, whom Cheatham described as being part of “my military family.” While acting as aide-de-camp that day, “he fell dead, his entire head having been carried away by a cannonball.” Cheatham stated later in his official report of the battle that “He was a noble boy, and showed the qualities of a brilliant and useful soldier.” So ended the first Rebel encounter with the Yankee’s Hornet’s Nest.