It did not always turn out that way. Ann Wallace, following her dreadful night on the Minnehaha, received stupendously uplifting news at ten o’clock next morning when her brother Cyrus Dickey arrived with word that her precious “Will had been brought in (after the rebels had been put to flight) and, Oh joy! He was breathing. I flew to the adjoining boat where he was,” she said, and found him on a narrow mattress on the floor. “His face was flushed, but he was breathing naturally, so like himself, save for that fearful wound in his temple.” He seemed to recognize Ann’s voice and squeezed her hand. “He knows me! He knows me!” she exclaimed. “I could appreciate all the feelings of Mary and Martha at the tomb of Lazarus.”
The boat took the Wallace party to Savannah, to Grant’s headquarters at the Cherry mansion, in the same room where lay the injured general Charles F. Smith, now gravely ill. Ann Wallace sat by her husband’s side for three more days, holding his hand and trying to speak with him. Others of his staff and his brothers held his hand as well, but he responded only to Ann, she thought, because his touch recognized her wedding bands. Predictably, infection set in and hope faded. Wallace became delirious, and on Thursday “he pressed my hand long and fondly to his heart,” she said, “then he waved me away and said, ‘We meet in heaven.’ ” He died shortly afterward.
“Those last days had been so cherished, so unexpected,” Ann wrote later. “I raised my heart in grateful thanks for this, and also that [his] dearest friends were with him at his death. God had led me there so that I should not meet the great sorrow alone.”
The sorrow of course was not confined to the Wallace family. Captain Thruston recalled the sad discovery of the body of his friend Captain Battle the evening of the second day of Shiloh. Two of his college roommates had found him and notified a third, Maj. John R. Chamberlain of the 81st Ohio. “The last time I saw Allen Battle alive was in June, 1858, at Miami University, the year I graduated,” Chamberlain wrote. “When I saw him next it was April 8, 1862, dead in the camp of Hurlbut’s division on the battlefield of Shiloh.” Two of his classmates were watching over him, Chamberlain said. “There was a smile on his face, his right hand was raised, the forefinger extended as if pointing to some object, when the fatal bullet struck him down.”
His friends fashioned a rude coffin made of cracker (hardtack) boxes, and a deep grave was dug on sloping ground in the rear of the 31st Indiana Regiment. Chamberlain used an ax to cut a big chip out of a large black oak tree facing the grave, “so as to guide us to the spot should we ever be required to do so.” As the coffin was lowered into the ground, wrote Captain Thruston, “none of us had any thought other than that we were laying to his last rest a gallant soldier, a sincere man, who thought that the cause for which he fought was the right thing to die for.” At that point the carefree days of college, for these old chums, must have seemed a million miles away.
At last the final results of the Battle of Shiloh reached Richmond. Beauregard had tried to smooth it over by noting all of the enemy regimental colors and Yankee officers the army had captured, and restating at length the “glorious, heroic,” and nearly victorious sweep of the field Sunday, before he retired the army out of “discretion” in the face of a superior enemy force. Now it finally sank in to Jefferson Davis that Albert Sidney Johnston, his friend since boyhood, had indeed been killed, and he wept bitterly in private, moaning, “The cause could have spared a whole state, rather than that great soldier.” Later he wrote, “When he fell, I realized that our strongest pillar had been broken.”
Davis, an accomplished West Point–trained soldier, illustrious colonel in the Mexican conflict, and former U.S. secretary of war, immediately read through all of Beauregard’s latest posturing about “victory,” but he did not retract the promising statement he had read before the Confederate Congress a day earlier, which had been based on Beauregard’s original telegram. Like the Creole, Davis decided to leave the best face on it, for the South needed all the bucking up it could get. George McClellan had recently landed a Yankee army at Hampton Roads, below Richmond, and was slowly working his way up the peninsula toward the Confederate capital with an estimated 120,000 men.
Yet Davis never forgave Beauregard for calling the army back on Sunday evening. In his memoirs he wrote, “At the ensuing nightfall our victorious army retired from the front and abandoned its vantage-ground on the bluffs, which had been won at such a cost of blood. The enemy thereby had room and opportunity to come out from their corner, reoccupy the strong positions from which they had been driven, and dispose their troops on more favorable ground.”
1 The stigma on spying and collecting military intelligence continued way into the 20th century when Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, later Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of war, famously shut down the so-called Black Chamber, in 1929, by declaring, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
2 The tragic opera by Giuseppe Verdi, in which most of the interesting characters are killed off.
3 Terrill rose to the rank of general and was killed six months later at the Battle of Perryville; his brother James, also a brigade commander, was a general in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and was killed in a battle near Richmond in 1864. A third, younger, brother joined the Confederate cavalry and was killed near Winchester, Virginia.
4 There were “orphan” brigades from Kentucky and Missouri, so called because their states were under Union control.
5 This was either an old logging site or, just as likely, a natural clearing made by one of the fierce tornadoes that are so common in that part of the country.
6 Forrest’s wound turned out to be painful but not serious.
CHAPTER 16
AH! TOM GRAFTON—HOW MISTAKEN YOU WERE!
UNLIKE BEAUREGARD, GRANT DID NOT SEND GLOWING reports about the battle either to St. Louis or to his nation’s capital; in fact, according to Halleck’s testimony in the Official Records, Grant’s report of the event did not “give any satisfactory information.”
Furious that a battle had been brought on against his orders, Halleck telegraphed to Grant on April 8, after it was over, “Your army is not now in condition to resist attack. It must be made so without delay.” Halleck also apparently made the recommendation that Grant retreat his army across the river, a suggestion that Grant declined on grounds that it would “demoralize” his soldiers. Then, on April 9, the supreme commander of the Union army in the West boarded a steamboat in St. Louis and proceeded toward Pittsburg Landing to relieve Ulysses Grant and take charge of the army himself.
The report on the battle that Grant submitted begins, “It becomes my duty to report another battle fought between two great armies, one contending for the maintenance of the best government ever devised, the other for its destruction,” but it was painfully short on details, leaving Lincoln and the government to learn the particulars through the newspapers, which of course sensationalized the event. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune complained, “Gen. Grant’s lame dispatch is as foggy as are most others,” and the Cincinnati Commercial condemned Grant’s report as “loose, rambling [and] slovenly.”
Word quickly spread that there had been a terrible battle and a Northern victory at Pittsburg Landing, but the first comprehensive story was written several days after the fighting ended by Whitelaw Reid of the Cincinnati Gazette. The story was widely reprinted in the eastern press. In more than 19,000 words Reid’s gloomy narrative was not about “a great victory for the Union, but a near disaster,” in which he chronicled all the blunders that had nearly shattered Grant’s army. Grant himself came in for his share of the blame, as the North (and the South as well) tried to absorb the mind-numbing slaughter.
When everything was said and done, the combined casualties at Shiloh amounted to 23,741, which is more, as historian Shelby Foote has pointed out, in a single battle than in all America’s previous wars—American Revolution, War of 1812, and Mexican War—combined. The butcher’s bill included 1,754 Union dead, 8,408 wounded, and 2,885 m
issing or captured for a total of 13,047. Confederate losses were 1,723 killed, 8,012 wounded, and 959 missing or captured for a total of 10,694. The casualties at Shiloh were fully twice those in all the earlier battles of the Civil War.
Nothing like it had ever happened before in the Western Hemisphere, and the Northern people’s initial elation at a great Union victory soon turned to shock, and then to outrage, as the casualty lists came in.
For Grant, it was the end of a grand illusion. Based on the mediocre performance of the Confederates at Bowling Green, Nashville, and Forts Henry and Donelson, Grant, like so many others, had convinced himself that a Union victory in a single great battle would cause the Confederacy to dissolve. However, after Shiloh, he reversed himself entirely with the stark conclusion that the Union could be restored only by the total conquest and subjugation of the South.
The Shiloh story that Whitelaw Reid told was even grimmer than the harsh casualty figures suggested; his was a tale of blundering, stupidity, cowardice, and sloth. All of the mistakes glared out prominently: the failure to fortify, failure to reconnoiter, failure to read the signs of impending attack, failure even to have a battle plan in case of attack—all of this in addition to the sordid spectacle of the cringing masses below the bluff who had deserted the Union lines.
Soon other stories circulated, accusations such as that Grant’s army had been so surprised that hundreds of Union soldiers were bayoneted to death in their tents or while eating their breakfast; that Grant had been dallying at a mansion ten miles from the battlefield instead of staying with his troops; that he had so little control of his army that most of it ran away at the first shot; that he had been saved only by the miraculous, last-moment arrival of Buell; and that he had been negligent in not pursuing Beauregard’s beaten army and destroying it. For his part, Grant did not enhance his reputation when he denied being surprised, telling a newspaper that even if the Rebels had told him where and when they planned to make their move, “we could not have been better prepared,” nor when he continued to insist that he had been attacked by 70,000 Confederates.
Next were the usual charges of drunkenness and incompetence; references were made to Grant’s indifferent military bearing and his inattention to his troops. Presently the lieutenant governor of Ohio arrived at Pittsburg Landing to report back to the Cincinnati Commercial Appeal that there was an “intense feeling [in the army] against Generals Grant and Prentiss that … they ought to be court-martialed and shot.” (This abrupt public animus against Prentiss appears to have been caused by the fact that in his official report Grant failed to credit Prentiss with stemming the Confederate onslaught by holding out in the Hornet’s Nest until nearly dark; thus, all that most people knew was that Prentiss had surrendered to the enemy with nearly his entire command.)
So, instead of being hailed as the victor of Shiloh, Grant was suddenly denounced from the halls of Congress to the White House as a hapless blunderer and alcoholic, and a chorus arose for his removal. Soon the clamor was such that Lincoln was forced to deal with it. Popular lore has it that he told the critics, “Find out what kind of whiskey Grant drinks and send a barrel of it to my other generals.” There is no firm evidence that he said this, but there is evidence that Lincoln said of Grant, “I can’t spare that man, he fights.”
For the most part, Grant sloughed off his detractors, but the furor nearly unhinged Sherman, who wrote a volcanic letter to the offending Ohio lieutenant governor that stopped just short of challenging him to duel. He accused the politician of “preferring camp stories to authentic data then within your reach,” and “circulating libels and falsehoods.”
The fiery Ohioan reserved his most caustic scorn, however, for editors and reporters, who, he claimed in a letter to his wife, “are the chief cause of this unhappy war—they fan the flames of local hatred and keep alive those prejudices which have forced friends into hostile ranks. In the North the people have been made to believe that those of the South are horrid barbarians, unworthy of Christian burials, whilst at the South, the people have been made to believe that we wanted to steal their negros, rob them of their property, pollute their families [an allusion to miscegenation], and to reduce the whites to below the level of their own negros.”
Warming to his subject, Sherman continued, “If the newspapers are to be our government, I would prefer Bragg, Beauregard … or any other high Confederate officers instead.” “The American press,” he wrote his brother Senator John Sherman, “is a shame and a reproach to a civilized people. When a man is too lazy to work, & too cowardly to steal, he becomes an editor & manufactures public opinion.”
Halleck arrived in the middle of this uproar to personally take charge of the army—or, more precisely, three armies: Grant’s, Buell’s, and a third army belonging to newly promoted Maj. Gen. John Pope, who, on the same day as the ordeal at Shiloh, had defeated and captured the Rebel forces at Island Number 10 in the Mississippi and was on his way to Pittsburg Landing.
Grant was rewarded with nothing for his troubles at the Shiloh fight, except what amounted to a demotion. He was named second in command under Halleck, but for all practical purposes the general was shunted aside, since Halleck barely spoke to him and consulted with him not at all. When Grant protested, Halleck slapped him down with this rejoinder, “For the last three months I have done everything in my power to ward off the attacks made upon you.” This was mostly a gratuitous falsehood, since Halleck himself was behind many of them; for instance, he had just mailed a letter to a fellow general in Washington describing Grant as “little more than a common gambler and drunkard.” Still, when Lincoln had demanded to know the reason for the shocking casualty rate at Shiloh, Halleck at least had the decency not to hold Grant responsible; instead he put the blame on “the Confederate generals and their soldiers.”
Now with an enormous army of some 120,000 men, and 200 guns, Halleck announced to his superiors in Washington that he would “leave here tomorrow morning and our army will be before Corinth by tomorrow night,” a statement that proved to be ridiculous. Whatever compelled Halleck to say such a thing is beyond puzzling, given that it took him a full month to move the army a mere 20 miles to attack the Rebel bastion.
From the first day, Halleck marched his army as if he were conducting a kind of long-distance siege. For him the wilderness of northern Mississippi was filled with ghosts and shadows and a Rebel behind every tree. At first Halleck estimated Beauregard’s force at 75,000, but with each day the estimates grew until it became 200,000. In fact, even when the Rebel general Van Dorn finally arrived from Arkansas with his 15,000, Beauregard could muster no more than 52,000 men actually fit for duty, owing to the Shiloh casualties and to a terrifying outbreak of diseases due to lack of sanitary facilities in the cramped town.1 To ward off any chance of being surprised, as Grant had been at Shiloh, Halleck each morning would creep his army less than a mile forward toward Corinth, then spend the rest of the day having it dig in and construct elaborate fortifications along an eight-mile front, as if a Rebel attack were imminent. This nonsense continued day after day under the scorching Mississippi sun, and the men began complaining about the relentless excavations; there was even talk of mutiny. But “Old Brains,” whom one of his colleagues described as “short, stout, and rather stupid-looking,” was taking no chances.
For his part, Beauregard realized he was in a grave situation. With his army wracked by disease and devastated by the fighting at Shiloh, it was certainly in no shape to withstand the ordeal of a siege by the huge Union host now closing in. Likewise, the Creole understood that his army was still the South’s last best hope for staving off the Yankees in the western theater. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and Beauregard, if nothing else, was inventive.
As Halleck’s armies began to converge on Corinth, their cavalry scouts were unsettled by the noise of train whistles and the sounds of cheering within the city, signs that the Rebels were being reinforced. They saw intimidating siege guns protruding
from embrasures in the enemy fortifications. When deserters wandered into Federal camps and were placed under interrogation, they told of many new regiments arriving from other Confederate commands. Gen. John Pope reported to Halleck, “The enemy is reinforcing heavily, by trains, in my front and on my left. The cars are running constantly and the cheering is immense every time they unload in front of me. I have no doubt, from all appearances, that I shall be attacked in heavy force at daylight.”
As Halleck absorbed all of this, his notion of a total envelopment of the city evaporated from his bookish mind. He decided to stay outside the Confederate defenses and await developments, which were not long in coming.
The music of military bands wafted across the parapets of Corinth’s fortifications into the Federal camps close to the front; during pauses in such patriotic or sentimental tunes as “Dixie” or “Sweet Lorena,” the Yankees caught the martial blare of bugles calling men to action. At night they could see Rebel sentries, backlit by campfires, who seemed oddly impervious to sharpshooters’ bullets.
Beauregard, of course, was pulling off the greatest con of the war. Withdrawal in the face of an enemy is among the most difficult and dangerous of military maneuvers, and the Creole did it with such daring and finesse that when Halleck’s men finally entered Corinth they found practically nothing to indicate that the Rebels had even been there.
Most of the sick and wounded had been moved out south on what were supposed to be “reinforcement trains.” Military stores, arms, and artillery had been evacuated as well, and there was nary a man to shoot at. The arriving “troop trains” were the work of a lone Confederate locomotive that ran day and night up and down the various tracks that converged on Corinth. Every so often it would stop and blow its whistle, a signal for everyone in hearing range to start cheering. The bulletproof “sentries” were cornfield scarecrows in worn-out Rebel uniforms, and the fearsome-looking siege guns were only “Quaker” artillery—tree trunks stripped of bark and painted with thick tar pitch, mounted on busted and useless artillery caissons. The informative Rebel “deserters” were plants sent by Beauregard himself to falsely report heavy reinforcements to the Confederate army. It is ironic that—aside from his performance at First Manassas—the Corinth hoax became, arguably, Beauregard’s finest achievement during the war.