Statham’s brigade marched to Spain Field where they were told to rest. “It was very warm,” Mecklin wrote. “The sky was clear but for the horrible monster death … on all sides lay the dead and dying. Before us were the rifle pits dug by the Yankees, behind them lay the camp. While resting here, Gen. Beauregard, as I suppose, came charging by [actually it was General Johnston and his staff, banners flying]. Our men greeted him with a deafening cheer. We were not allowed to rest long,” Mecklin said.
Like so many Mississippians of the era, Augustus Mecklin’s parents had migrated from the Atlantic states during the 1840s—in his case, South Carolina—in hopes of cashing in on the cotton boom. Mecklin instead felt a calling to the Lord, and after college in Tennessee he entered the Theological Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina, studying for the Presbyterian ministry. But when war broke out he immediately returned home to Choctaw County and enlisted in the 15th Mississippi—at the age of 28, older than most of his messmates, and better educated as well.
Colonel Statham formed up his brigade to charge the Yankee position, much of which lay in the Peach Orchard of the widow Bell where the bullets clipped the blossoms, which floated down like pink snowflakes. And here is where something went very wrong that led to tragedy, if it can be called that, on a day when tragedy reigned supreme.
They had no sooner marched over the brow of a hill when “We were saluted by a violent volley from the enemy,” Mecklin wrote. “For the first time in my life I head the whistle of bullets.” Unbeknownst to Mecklin, apparently because he was farther back in the ranks, this “violent volley”—delivered by a thousand-plus muskets of Colonel Pugh’s 41st and 32nd Illinois—blew the head off of Statham’s column and sent it reeling back in confusion.
Mecklin’s company had taken cover in the former camp of the 71st Ohio, from which that regiment had made its disgraceful bugout from Stuart’s brigade when the first shots were fired, and from there Mecklin’s people engaged in a shooting contest with the Illinoisans and Iowans of Hurlbut’s division.
“We took shelter behind the tents and some wagons & a pile of corn & returned the fire of the enemy with spirit,” Mecklin said. “Soon men were falling on all sides. Two in Co. E just in front of me fell dead shot through the brain. I fired until my gun got so foul that I could not get my ball down,” Mecklin told his diary. He got a man nearby to throw him a gun from a wounded soldier and fired until it, too, became hopelessly fouled with powder.
Others however, found this kind of fighting unpalatable and began drifting off individually or in units down the slope and out of close range. Among these was the 45th Tennessee, which had sulkily retreated behind a fence along the Hamburg-Purdy road near the bottom of the hill. “Squads of men would leave the ranks, run up to the fence, fire, and fall back into place; but the regiment would not advance,” said an aide to General Breckinridge. Statham was mortified and did his utmost, talked himself blue in the face, in fact, but the 45th Tennesseans declined to fall in and steadfastly refused to go back up the slope.
This was not an uncommon thing in 19th-century armies. All soldiers are understandably apprehensive when told to form a line and march into certain gunfire, knowing there would be a considerable number of dead and wounded. It was when many, if not most, of the soldiers refused to make the charge that trouble came. Most of the time they responded to pleas and speeches by their officers or higher-up officers. Rarely would a regiment flat out refuse to make a charge, for they would then be sent to the rear in disgrace and become the butt of jokes, antipathy, and condescension by the other regiments in the division.
In any case, “General Breckinridge, foiled and irritated, rode to General Johnston and complained he had a Tennessee regiment that would not fight,” wrote former Union brigadier Manning Force in his history of the battle. Tennesseans who would not fight—it was almost unimaginable.
Watching from a knoll in the distance, Sidney Johnston had seen Statham’s column waver, then bend, and of the Union soldiers he remarked to the Tennessee governor Isham Harris—in exile since Buell took Nashville and serving as an aide to Johnston—“Those fellows are making a stubborn stand here; I’ll have to put the bayonet to them.”
John Breckinridge had fully taken charge of this far right of the Rebel line. He was described by one officer as “the finest-looking man on the field that day, in his shiny jacket of new Kentucky jeans.” Indeed the 41-year-old Princeton graduate and former U.S. Vice President was a daunting figure—tall in the saddle, with a prominent aquiline nose set between piercing blue eyes and a drooping handlebar mustache. Alone among the senior commanders in having no formal military training, Breckinridge was anxious to prove himself and chafed much of the morning as the battle raged in his front and no call came for his brigades.
Now his hour had arrived. He had seen Statham’s line waver and fall back. He had set Gen. John Bowen’s brigade in motion. But here was the rub, as it had rubbed all day. To get at the enemy, Statham’s men would have to cross an exposed ridge, descend one slope, and ascend another into the Peach Orchard—probably 100 yards—all the while “raked by this deadly ambuscade.” Although, as Private Mecklin has testified, the brigade was “delivering and receiving fire” that Governor Harris called “the heaviest as any I saw in the war,” they could not, Preston Johnston wrote, “drive the enemy from his stronghold by fire, nor without a charge that meant death for many.” Breckinridge’s adjutant, Colonel Hodge summed it up: “The crisis of the contest had come; there were no more reserves, and General Breckinridge determined to charge.”
It was near 2 p.m. and General Johnston was confident at last that he had organized a combined force that would drive the Yankees from the Hornet’s Nest. They had been fighting there for four hours straight, during which time the Federal right had been broken and Sherman’s and McClernand’s men pushed nearly into the swamps, while on the Federal left Stuart was making his last stand and was about to be routed.
“Only the center had not been moved,” declared Preston Johnston.
At last a concerted effort was being made. Four Confederate brigades—those of Stephens, Statham, Bowen, and Jackson—were in line of battle, preparing to push the enemy into the swamps or the river to complete the victory. Instead of Bragg’s piecemeal stabs at the Hornet’s Nest, there would now be one grand assault: Johnston had placed the brigades in line himself—on the Rebel right, where there was good fighting ground, away from the left and the dreadful Sunken Road.
A while earlier, talking with his aide Maj. Edward Munford, Johnston expressed confidence that he was closing the ring. “We sat on our horses, side by side, watching [Chalmers’s] brigade as it swept over a ridge,” Munford said, “and, as the colors dipped out of sight, the general said to me, ‘That checkmates them …’ He laughed and said, ‘yes, sir, that mates them.’ ”
And then came Breckinridge to report he had Tennesseans who would not fight. As Sidney Johnston sat astride his horse watching the progress of the battle in the distance, he was anything but pleased by news that his army contained a regiment of cowards. Cowardice was contagious and could not be tolerated. Before Johnston responded, however, Governor Harris became animated and spoke up, “General Breckinridge, show me that regiment.” Breckinridge nodded apologetically toward the commanding general, but it was Johnston’s call; he said, “Let the governor go to them.”
Harris rode off toward the front and “with some difficulty put the regiment in line of battle on the hill,” wrote Preston Johnston, but “after some delay the wavering of the line [was] still increasing.” Johnston had no sooner ordered all brigades to prepare for the charge when General Breckinridge reappeared, “in a highly emotional state,” saying he “feared he could not get his brigade to make the charge.” A regiment was bad enough, but now an entire brigade.
“Then I will help you,” Johnston said, and the two of them rode to the front, soon joined again by Harris. Johnston rode down the line, speaking reassurances in his commanding voic
e. As he had feared, the cowardice of the 45th Tennessee had infected Statham’s other regiments; he sent Breckinridge to speak to one section, accompanied by Breckinridge’s 17-year-old son, whose “beautiful composure and serene fidelity” was remarked on by many eyewitnesses. Down the other way—where the 45th Tennessee was posted—Johnston sent Governor Harris, who “galloped to the right, and after a sharp harangue, dismounted and led them on foot, pistol in hand, up to their alignment, and [was] in the charge when it was made.”
Johnston, meantime, rode along past the reluctant ranks, extending his little looted tin cup that he held in his hand and clinking it on the upright bayonets of the men in line, saying to them, “These must do the work! Men, they are stubborn; we must use the bayonet!” When he reached the center, he turned and faced them on his big thoroughbred bay and cried, “I will lead you!”
His son and biographer Preston Johnston spoke to, or corresponded with, many eyewitnesses to the scene and reported that Johnston’s “voice was persuasive, encouraging and compelling (it was also inviting men to death—but they obeyed it). But most of all it was the light in his gray eye, and his splendid presence that wrought them.”
Statham’s men responded with a mighty Rebel yell, and then marched out toward the Hornet’s Nest. Certainly there was no more star-studded brigade charge in the history of the Civil War—leading in the center Albert Sidney Johnston, the highest ranking field officer in the Confederate army; leading on the left the former Vice President of the United States John Cabell Breckinridge, and on the right the Confederate governor of Tennessee, Isham Harris, pistol in hand. As Preston Johnston told it: “A sheet of flame burst from the Federal stronghold, and blazed along the crest of the ridge. The line moved forward at a charge with rapid and restless step. There was a roar of cannon and musketry; a storm of lead and iron hail. The Confederate line withered, and the dead and dying strewed the dark valley. But there was not an instant’s pause. Right up the steep they went. The crest was gained.”
The Peach Orchard lay before them, now almost stripped of blossoms, and they went in at the double-quick, driving the Federal forces with the bayonet. Augustus Mecklin and his 15th Mississippi were among them. “Many of our boys fell in this fatal charge,” he said. “Never was there such firing.”
Among those who fell in the charge was Joel Allen Battle, Jr., a recent graduate of Miami College of Ohio and now adjutant of the 20th Tennessee, which was commanded by his father, a wealthy Nashville planter. All day the younger Battle had galloped the field carrying messages and orders, collecting stragglers, and urging men forward. His arm was in a sling from a wound received in the earlier Battle of Mill Springs, or Fishing Creek, in which General Zollicoffer was killed. It was a sad day for the Battle family. Not only was Joel Allen killed but his younger brother was also, and the elder Colonel Battle was captured. The 20th Tennessee, however, was one of the regiments in Statham’s brigade that stood its ground and did not have to be led to the fight by General Johnston. That fact was recorded many years later by then Gen. G. P. Thruston, whose First Ohio had been opposite his old college friend’s regiment during the fray.
One of those lucky enough to elude the Confederate dragnet was 16-year-old Yankee John A. Cockerill, who shouldn’t have been there at all. Cockerill had enlisted a few months earlier as a musician fourth class in the 24th Ohio Volunteer Regiment of Buell’s army—and he was carefully placed in a company where his brother was a lieutenant and could look after him. But on the morning of April 6, 1862, John Cockerill found himself temporarily assigned to the 70th Ohio of Sherman’s division, in a regiment that was commanded by his own father, Joseph Cockerill. The transfer had been due to young Cockerill’s illness, but on that Sunday morning he had recuperated and was feeling fine and sitting down at the mess table for breakfast “when I heard ominous shots along our picket lines.” Everybody at the table scattered, Cockerill remembered, and “at the first alarm I dropped my knife and fork and ran to my father’s tent, to find him buckling on his sword.”
There, he retrieved his “beautiful Enfield rifle with its beautiful curly maple stock,” which his father had gotten for him, and loaded his cartridge box with ammo. By the time he had finished, “my father was mounted outside and the bullets were whistling through the camp and shell were bursting overhead.”
Uncertain of what to do, Cockerill “ran to the old log Shiloh Church,” from where he beheld “regiment after regiment, and brigade after brigade of Confederate troops” marching toward him. “The sun was just rising in their front and the glittering of their arms made a gorgeous spectacle for me.” It was here that he saw Sherman and his staff pushing on toward the battle—“the splendid soldier, erect in his saddle, his eye bent forward, he looked like a veritable war eagle.” No sooner had Sherman passed than a Union artillery battery began to fire until a Confederate shell blew up in its midst, Cockerill said, killing the captain and a number of horses, and the second in command fled with what remained “and was not seen at any other time, I believe, during the two days’ engagement.”
It fast became obvious to Cockerill that remaining at the church would probably be injurious to his health, and so he hightailed it back to his regiment’s camp, where he found the tents shot to rags and a mass of wounded men being carried to the rear. Since, as a musician, Cockerill was technically a noncombatant, and responsible during battle for care of the wounded, he joined a carrying party that was moving a badly wounded officer to the rear. With that duty fulfilled, Cockerill became uncertain of what to do, and, finding himself comparatively alone, he started for Pittsburg Landing on the river.
He had gone perhaps a mile when he encountered the Highland brigade of General McArthur, wearing their Scottish tams, with their regimental bands playing and their flags flying. Young Cockerill found them “the handsomest body of troops I ever saw.”
“As I sauntered by, a chipper young lieutenant, sword in hand, stopped me and said: “Where do you belong?’ ”
He replied, “I belong to Ohio,” to which the lieutenant answered, “Well, Ohio is making a bad show of itself here to-day. Do you want to come and fight with us?”
Not knowing what else to do, Cockerill nodded his assent. The lieutenant took out a notebook and wrote down his name and regiment, “in case anything should happen to me,” which is how a 16-year-old Ohio boy found himself fighting with a brigade of Illinois Scotsmen on the far, far left flank of the Hornet’s Nest.
Cockerill stood there for a while bewildered at what he had done. He knew no one, and no one spoke to him. Then one of the bands struck up “Hail Columbia” and the brigade fell in, turned, and marched toward the boom and rattle of the fighting. The first task assigned to Cockerill’s regiment was support of an artillery battery, one of the most disagreeable jobs for infantry troops in battle. This was because the opposing artillery naturally opened “counterbattery” fire at the earliest opportunity, and owing to the imprecision of the artillery of the day a great many of the shells fell among the infantry troops supporting (guarding) the battery. Then, if things went as planned, the enemy would deliberately concentrate its attack so as to fall upon the artillery battery and silence it, which meant hot work for the infantry supports. Suffice it to say there were many groans of profanity whenever it was learned that supporting the artillery would be the fate of the troops that day.
For what seemed like hours Cockerill and his companions hugged ground around the roaring artillery battery on the far Federal left and said whatever passed for prayers. “Everything looked weird and unnatural,” he remembered years later, “the very leaves on the trees seemed greener than I have ever seen leaves, and larger. The wounded and butchered men who came up out of the blue smoke in front of us, and were dragged or sent hobbling to the rear, seemed like bleeding messengers come to tell of the fate awaiting us.”
General McArthur went by, his hand, like Sherman’s, wrapped in a handkerchief from a wound. Suddenly the Rebel charge broke upon them and the e
nemy line stopped to fire. “The bullets shrieked over our heads and in our ranks,” Cockerill said, “soon the dry leaves were on fire, and the smoke added to the general obscurity. At this moment the young lieutenant [the one who took Cockerill’s name and regiment] who was gallantly waving his sword at the front, was struck by a bullet and fell instantly dead, almost at my feet. I shuddered at the thought—dead and unknown.”
By that time the fire “became so terrible that we were driven back into the ravine. I was crouched down loading my piece when a man who had been struck above me, fell on top of me and died by my side.” Cockerill kept firing until he ran out of cartridges, and then he saw the Rebel charge: “I saw the gray dirty uniforms of the enemy. I heard their fierce yells. I saw their flags flapping in the grimy atmosphere. That was a sight I have never forgotten. I can see the tiger ferocity in those faces yet; I can see them in my dreams.”
This proved too much and the blue line wavered, then broke. Everyone turned and ran for the rear. A private fleeing next to Cockerill suddenly “gave a scream of agony” and began dragging one of his legs. Cockerill stopped and the soldier leaned on his shoulder and begged for help. “I half carried and half dragged him for some distance, still holding to my Enfield rifle, with its beautiful curly stock,” Cockerill said, but something between duty and compassion forced upon him a hard choice.