would attack, hoping to break the Federal left and drive the whole Federal Army away from the Tennessee River and into the Owl Creek bottomlands, where it could be destroyed.

For a professional army that could move smartly and hold its formation, the scheme might have been sound enough, but for this army it was just too much. Hardly a handful of Johnston's 40,000 had ever seen a battle or made an ordered march to a battlefield, and the chance that they could stick to this tight schedule was remote; it was even less likely that the fragile corps organizations, which had existed for less than a week, could hold together once those long battle lines moved in through woods and ravines on each other's heels. Johnston seems to have supposed that the three corps would attack side by side, which would have been much simpler. Apparently he and Beauregard misunderstood each other; with a slight excess of courtliness, Johnston was giving Beauregard a good deal of scope in his second-in-command function. In any case, as issued the orders embodied Beauregard's ideas, and much confusion attended their execution.¹

Getting out of Corinth was bad enough. Hardee's corps, which was to move first, got tangled up in the streets with other troops and with wagon trains and was unable to leave town until the afternoon of April 3; instead of reaching its destination that night it had to camp along the road, getting to the designated point long after daybreak on April 4. Bragg's corps fell far behind, its road blocked by units that were supposed to follow it, one entire division temporarily lost; Johnston himself had to ride back, dig the missing unit out of Bishop Polk's corps, into which it had strayed, and get the road cleared. On the night of April 4 there was a heavy rain —by this time the attack had been postponed for twenty-four hours—and not until late in the afternoon of April 5 was the army at last in the spot it was supposed to have reached thirty-six hours earlier. The battle lines were drawn, and at dusk Johnston and his corps commanders had an informal conference.

To General Beauregard it was clear that the opportunity had passed. The whole battle plan rested on the belief that the army would make a quick march and take the Yankees by surprise. The march had been unconscionably slow, and it had been so noisy that a surprise seemed out of the question. After the rain the men had blithely fired their muskets to see whether the powder charges had been dampened, so that there had been a constant pop-pop of small-arms fire through the late afternoon and early evening. There had been much cheering and yelling: loud cheers for General Johnston, wild shouts when a startled deer jumped out of a thicket and bounded along the line of troops; enough noise, altogether, to arouse the most unobservant foes. Rations were almost exhausted, much food having been thrown away by boys who felt themselves overloaded. In addition, Buell surely must have arrived by now. The Federals would be on the alert, and the attack ought to be canceled.

Johnston would not hear of it. If rations were low, the Federal camp contained abundant supplies which victorious Confederates could eat. The cavalry said that Buell had not yet appeared. From President Davis there had just come a telegram: "I hope you will be able to close with the enemy before his two columns unite. I anticipate a victory." What President Davis anticipated General Johnston would try to give him. He remarked, "I would fight them if they were a million," and he ended the conference by saying, "Gentlemen, we shall attack at daylight tomorrow." Later that evening he calmly told an aide, "I have ordered a battle for daylight tomorrow, and I intend to hammer 'em!" Many things had gone wrong, but the men in the ranks were keyed up for a fight and so was the commanding general, and a fight there would be as soon as the sun came up on April 6.²

By all logic Beauregard ought to have been right. Yet the astounding fact was that the Federals were woefully, incredibly unready. They were not entrenched (as Beauregard believed they surely must be) and they were not even arranged in line of battle; they were simply in camp, waiting for orders from headquarters, waiting for Buell, waiting for the time when they could march down to Corinth and finish the job that had been begun at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson.

Many things had worked together to create this condition. Halleck's repeated orders to delay the offensive had led Grant and his lieutenants to think of nothing except the restrictions which headquarters had imposed. Impatient to get on with the war, Grant was overlooking the possibility that his rival might get on with it ahead of him. (Those earlier battles unfortunately had led Grant to feel that Johnston's army was discouraged and ready to quit: a point on which he was about to get a world of enlightenment.) Grant himself was still at Savannah, seven miles downstream, waiting for Buell, whose approach was extraordinarily slow. Buell's army had begun leaving Nashville on March 15, impelled by no sense of urgency. It had waited for ten days, rebuilding a bridge—a twenty-four-hour job, if someone had been driving the Engineer Corps to hurry—and it was coming on as if it had all the time in the world. The Federals, in short, had got into a dangerous state of mind, in which it seemed to them that nothing would happen until they themselves made it happen.* In addition, the camp at Shiloh was under the immediate command of William T. Sherman, who had recovered all too well from an abject loss of nerve. During the previous fall, in Kentucky, he had considered Johnston's army much more numerous, aggressive, and dangerous than it really was, and had worried himself into a nervous breakdown and removal from command. Regaining his poise, he had recently been restored to combat duty: and in this first week of April he probably was the last man in the army to take alarm because of enemy activity in his front. He flatly refused to believe that Johnston's army was about to attack (six months earlier, because he did believe it, he had been published to the world as a lunatic) and when his patrols warned him that something ominous was building up, off beyond the tangled forest, he dismissed the warnings with contempt. At the very moment when Johnston was insisting that the attack would be delivered even if all of Lincoln's Yankees were alarmed and ready, Sherman was assuring Grant that although there was a good deal of shooting along the picket lines "I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position." Some of Sherman's officers certainly knew better, but what they knew did not matter. Up to a certain point, in any army, the thoughts of the principal generals are the only thoughts that count.⁴

Thus Sherman's caution, which should have been awake but was sound asleep, ran across Beauregard's, which should have been justified but was not; and the battle itself began on this characteristic note of conscientious confusion, which accurately reflected the state of the armies and of the divided nation that had raised the armies. These early battles of the Civil War were not like the ones that came later except in the pain and agony they inflicted. Not only were the officers and men who fought these battles untrained, doomed to make errors which would not be repeated once experience had been gained, the nation itself was in these battles colliding violently, at last, with the reality which it had so long refused to face. It had risked war gaily, had threatened war jauntily, had accepted it with a wild, half-hysterical sense of relief, and it had done all of these things simply because it had known nothing whatever about war. Now—at Shiloh, and at one or two other places—it was going to learn. Here was where (as the saying then went) it would see the elephant. No wonder there was something unreal about the genesis and development of such encounters. Anything else would have been a miracle.

The first sounds of battle came to the Confederate Army like enchanted, beckoning notes of promise. April 5 was bright, clear, and springlike after the storm, and men in the 38th Tennessee, striding along in the woods where new leaves, half-opened, put moving shadows on the roadways, heard gunfire far ahead and "could hardly be restrained from rushing up to the fray." Men looked at one another, laughed, cheered, and remarked that the fun was at last beginning. Fatherless rumors sped down the marching columns—the Yankees had been whipped and were taking to their boats, some of them had been cut off and were fleeing through the woods, this very column would presently go and round up these cowardly fugitives.⁵ . . . Battle was still nearly twenty-four hours away. These boys were hearing the racket that bothered Beauregard so much, the firing of innumerable muskets by soldiers who wanted to know whether these weapons, after a heavy rain, could in fact be fired at all. (A good deal of this came from within the Yankee lines, where equally innocent soldiers, equally soaked by the same storm, were making the same sort of test.)

Give the innocents credit. When the reality came, next day, most of them went into it with the same enthusiasm and stayed in it as long as they were asked to stay. Whatever finally determined the outcome of the battle of Shiloh, the end did not come because either army took fright and ran away or got weary and dogged it. Johnston's soldiers had all of the savage, frightening determination which the Belgian visitor had noted early in the winter; they were no more ready for battle than the Bull Run mobs had been, but when they struck the Federal line of battle they struck it, as Beauregard himself remarked, "like an Alpine avalanche," curing U. S. Grant forever of his notion that the Confederate soldier's heart was not in this fight. Long after the war, when he talked with friends in the Army of the Potomac about such grim fights as Gettysburg and the Wilderness, tough Sherman used to say: "So help me God, you boys never had a fiercer fight than we had there." ⁶

Sunday, April 6, was clear and cool as the day before had been, and just at dawn there was a timeless quiet which reminded one young Confederate of the small-town Sabbath back home, so that he half-expected to hear church bells calling the faithful to worship. Johnston's first line began to move as soon as the light came, and the general was just finishing breakfast when the first spatter of small-arms fire sounded along the front—real shooting, this time, not just the aimless firing of boys testing their powder charges. Various officers were urging him to go back to Corinth and begin all over again, but he swung into the saddle with the comment: "The battle has opened, gentlemen; it is too late to change our dispositions." He rode to the front to take general charge of the assault, while Beauregard went to the rear to see that the support troops came up properly, and the great, shapeless army began to advance through the thickets for its first battle. Men in Breckinridge's reserve corps were told to pile their knapsacks and leave squads to guard them, and men detailed for this noncombatant assignment objected to being kept out of the fight; one soldier offered to give all of his hardtack to any man who would let him have a place in the front line. The sporadic firing up ahead became heavier, solidified into long rolling volleys, expanded with the crash of artillery, and became a consuming, bewildering uproar that would go on without a break all day long.⁷

The Federals were not ready, but they were not exactly caught asleep in their tents, either. They had sent patrols forward at dawn, and these collided with the Confederate skirmishers in the woodland twilight and formed tough knots of resistance. They were pushed back as Hardee's main line came up, but they had given the alarm, and battle lines were formed in front of the camps. The real trouble was that of the six divisions in Grant's army, only two were up in front when the fighting began, and nobody had told them to entrench. Sherman had his division around Shiloh Church with his right touching the Owl Creek Valley, and off to his left, somewhat out of touch with him, was a new division under Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss, a former militia colonel who was about to display a talent for determined fighting. Farther back were three more divisions—McClernand's, which had learned its trade at Fort Donelson; another set of Donelson veterans belonging to C. F. Smith, who was absent with an infected leg and had turned his command over to W. H. L. Wallace, an Illinois lawyer who had served in the Mexican War; and three brigades led by still another Illinois lawyer-politician, Brigadier General Stephen A. Hurlbut, South Carolina born, a friend of Abraham Lincoln. Several miles north of these, posted downstream as a sort of flank guard, was the division of the future novelist, Lew Wallace, who never did manage to get his men into action this day. Of the six divisional commanders only Sherman was a West Pointer.

So the Federal front was sketchy, and it remained so even when the troops in the rear were moved forward, because as they moved up the men in front were being pushed back, and there never was a really connected front. There were many battles but no one line of battle; Shiloh was a grab bag full of separate combats in which divisions, brigades, and even regiments fought on their own, each one joined by fragments of other commands that had fallen apart in the shock of action, most of them fighting with their flanks in the air, knowing nothing of any battle except the fragment which possessed them—great waves of sound beating on them, smoke streaking the fields and making blinding clouds under the trees, advance and retreat taking place sometimes because someone had ordered it and sometimes on the impulse of the untaught soldiers who were doing the fighting.

On the Confederate side there was equal confusion. Bragg's second line advanced through Hardee's first line so that the elements of the two commands were completely intermingled, with the men of Polk and Breckinridge coming up to infiltrate the disordered lines. Command arrangements dissolved entirely, and at last the corps commanders made spur-of-the-moment plans: Bragg would take the right, Polk the center, and Hardee the left, with Breckinridge operating wherever he seemed to be needed. Troop movements were utterly disordered. One soldier wrote after the battle that "we fooled around for 5 or 6 hours before we got to see a Yankee, although the battle was raging not more than half a mile from us." He added that when his regiment at last did get into action "I tell you they made us fight a while before they let us quit." ⁸

This was happening, remember, to men who (save for the Donelson veterans in Grant's army, and a scattering of Polk's men who had been at Belmont) had never fought before and who were most inadequately trained for fighting, and whose company and regimental officers were in no better case than themselves. Many of them, naturally, cut and ran for it without delay. Part of Sherman's division simply disappeared, and by noon there were thousands of Union fugitives glued to the ground on the river bank at Pittsburg Landing, men so overwhelmed by terror that no conceivable effort could get them back into action: Grant estimated later that at no time during the day were more than 25,000 Federals actually fighting. Many Confederates were beguiled by the fact that the camps they captured had abundant food lying ready to hand, the breakfasts which the Yankees had not had time to eat; hungry soldiers paused to fill their bellies and drifted out of any man's control. A nephew of Varina Davis, an officer in a Mississippi regiment, told about finding a crowd of 300 men or more lounging about in the rear. These men explained that "we are all smashed," although they had lost no more than three or four killed and two dozen wounded, and he wrote angrily: "These are the kind of troops of which you read gallant deeds and reckless conduct, they lose half a dozen, retire in time to save their haversacks and are puffed accordingly." ⁹

Yet the stragglers and the incontinent foragers and the faint-hearts were, incredibly enough, in the minority. Sherman's division broke, retreated, arid reformed its fragments with McClernand's men, but the records showed that it had 1900 casualties, which proves that it did a good deal of fighting. If many Confederates left the ranks to sack the Yankee camps, more of them stopped only long enough to pick up modern muskets to replace their own antiquated weapons; the rear was disorder raised to the nth power, but on the firing line everything was strictly business, and men who were frightened almost out of their wits managed to keep on fighting. Wholly characteristic was the breathless comment in one Confederate's letter: "It was an awful thing to hear no intermission in firing and hear the clatter of small arms and the whizing minny balls and rifle shot and the sing of grape shot the hum of canon balls and the roaring of the bomb shell and explosion of the same seaming to be a thousand every minute . . . O God forever keep me out of such another fight. I was not scared I was just in danger." ¹⁰

All morning the Federals were pushed back. Johnston's plan was working . . . except that there was one hard core of Federal resistance, Prentiss's men and some of W. H. L. Wallace's, who took their stand at last in an old country lane that ran along the crest of an almost imperceptible little rise in the ground, with briar patches and underbrush all along the front: the famous "sunken road" of postwar memories, although in actual fact it was not sunken at all and was held, apparently, just because it was a handy place to form a line and because the men who formed the line did not want to go back any farther. Grant rode up once and told Prentiss to hold the line at all hazards, and, after Grant left, the lawyer-soldier and his men obeyed orders literally. This place and the ground in front became known as the hornets' nest; the men beat off repeated Confederate assaults, and hugged the earth grimly when Rebel artillerists put many guns in line and pounded the lane and the trees around it and everything to the sides and in the rear . . . and the Federals stayed and shot the next Confederate attack to bits, and noon passed and the afternoon grew long and the sun dipped down toward the smoky skyline, and but for the stand that was made here General Johnston might have driven Grant's army into the river or into Owl Creek swamp or straight into perdition itself and the victory he wanted so desperately would have been won.

Johnston himself had been up in front all day, riding from this place to that, keeping the attack moving; and at last he came up near a peach orchard, a little to the east of the hornets' nest, and tried to get a new assault organized. The air was full of bullets, and one bullet ripped away the sole of one of his boots: he waggled his foot, laughed, told an aide that this had come pretty close but that he was unhurt; then a bullet struck him in the leg, cutting an artery, and he reeled in the saddle, growing faint from loss of blood before he knew that he had been hit. He was laid on the ground, somebody went to find a surgeon, nobody thought of applying a tourniquet . . . and then, apparently in no pain, speaking no word, he looked up at the sky and died.¹¹

Hope of victory died with him: or, to be more exact, died a little before he died. The stand at the hornets' nest had gained Grant just the respite he had to have. From the beginning, Johnston's only hope had been that he could overwhelm the Federal Army in one shattering assault, and he had not quite made it. Grant's army had been mangled, it had been driven back almost to the edge of the Tennessee, much of it had been put entirely out of action . . . but the hornets' nest had held firm, hour after hour, and as the afternoon passed the Confederacy's dazzling opportunity grew narrower and narrower and at last vanished altogether. Far to the rear, on high ground commanding the steamboat landing, Grant put together an immense rank of artillery, with a reorganized infantry line behind it and on the flank. Farther back, Lew Wallace at last overcame the confusion that had grown out of garbled orders and unfamiliar roads and got his division of 8000 men on the road to the Federal right; they would be on hand shortly after dark, and when they arrived Grant would have the advantage in numbers. Most important of all, Nelson's division of Buell's army had arrived—at last—and the steamboats were bringing his advance guard across the Tennessee, the men kicking the skulking fugitives at the landing as they tramped up to take their place in the new battle line. When Johnston died the Confederacy assuredly lost a soldier it desperately needed, but it had already lost its chance to win the battle of Shiloh.

. . . except, perhaps, for the intangible that cannot be accurately appraised. Just possibly, this man's capacity for firing the spirits of tired soldiers might have been enough to send one final, triumphant assault through the shouting twilight, capturing guns, breaking the last infantry line, destroying the heads of the reinforcing columns and achieving the impossible in the smoky darkness above the deep river. Probably it would not have happened so, but the one man who might conceivably have made it happen was dead.¹²

The hornets' nest was taken at last. All the rest of the Federals had retreated, and the men who had saved Grant's army were cut off, surrounded and made helpless. By five o'clock or thereabouts General Prentiss surrendered, giving the Confederates 2200 prisoners and an empty country lane.

It took time to get his men off to the rear and to reorganize the Southern battle line, and when these things had been done it was too late to fight any more that day. Grant's guns were in action, the new line had been formed, and in the river Federal gunboats were throwing huge shells into the ravines and gullies where the exhausted Confederates were sorting themselves out. Sensibly enough, Beauregard (who had succeeded to the command when Johnston died) pulled his leading units back a few rods and ordered the troops to make the best bivouac they could for the night.

It was a dreadful night. Toward midnight there was a hard thunderstorm, with a downpour to soak the soldiers who slept among so many dead and wounded. Sudden flashes of lightning illuminated hideous scenes—dead men everywhere, pools and creeks given a ghastly tint by the blood of wounded men who had crawled down to drink and had died with their faces in the water, brambly fields carpeted with torn bodies, helpless wounded men lying in the downpour chanting weak calls for help: the memory of it leading one Confederate to write: "O it was too shocking too horrible. God Grant that I may never be the partaker in such scenes again . . . when released from this I shall ever be an advocate of peace."¹⁸

But things are seldom all of one pattern. There were men who ate well and slept well that night. After all, the Federal camps were there to be looted, and many of the tired Confederates feasted and told one another that there would be nothing to do tomorrow but bury the dead and finish raking in the Yankee supplies; no doubt the enemy had all gone across the river. A Tennessee soldier recalled that "our mess had that night all the tea, coffee, sugar, cheese, hardtack and bacon they could want," and remembered that wine and liquor were found among the surgeons' stores; in the morning one stout foot soldier tried to go into battle with a huge cheese impaled on his bayonet. Some men became so interested in the spoils that they forgot about the unfinished battle, and one Confederate officer wrote bitterly that if the high command had had the sense to burn all of the captured stores that night the army might have won the fight next day. All through the Federal camps, he said, Confederate soldiers were picking up valuables, and by midnight "half of our army was straggling back to Corinth loaded down with belts, sashes, swords, officers' uniforms, Yankee letters, daguerreotypes of Yankee sweethearts, likenesses of Grant, Buell, Smith, Prentiss, McClellan, Lincoln, etc., some on Yankee mules and horses, some on foot, some on the ground prostrate with Cincinnati whiskey." General Bragg told his wife that Shiloh was lost because of lack of discipline and lack of good officers, concluding savagely: "Universal suffrage, furloughs & whiskey have ruined us."¹⁴

That looting, straggling, and lack of discipline harmed the army is beyond question, but the plain fact is that regardless of these things the army had had it. That it had done as much as it had done was one of the marvels of the war; to do anything more was wholly out of the question. Grant's army had been shaken to its shoetops but it had never quite been broken; Grant himself had never had any notion of retreating, even when things were at their worst; Lew Wallace's division reached him not long after dark, and during the night 20,000 of Buell's soldiers came across the river—and when the morning of April 7 came there was nothing Beauregard could do but get his men back to Corinth as best he could.

He did not do this at once. The fighting began all over again soon after sunrise, and for most of the morning it was a hard, stubborn battle, the Federals attacking now, the Confederates disputing every inch of the ground. Not until after noon did Beauregard accept the inevitable and order a retreat, and when his army withdrew the Federals made no more than a gesture of pursuit. Grant's army had been fought out. Buell's troops were fresh enough, but Buell was only partly under Grant's orders, the relationship between the two generals was exceedingly delicate, and each man apparently felt that it would be just as well to let the soldiers catch their breath and think about going after this Confederate Army at some later date.

It is clear enough now that a hard, vigorous pursuit might have destroyed Beauregard's army. But the controlling fact undoubtedly was that this battle had brought utter exhaustion to the victor as well as to the defeated. The Unionists had lost upwards of 13,000 men, the Confederates more than 10,000, and the figures call for a little reflection. The armies that met on April 6 were larger than the armies that met at Bull Run, but—it can stand one more repetition—they were hardly in the slightest degree better trained or organized. They had fought three times as long as the Bull Run armies had fought, and had suffered approximately five times the losses, and although there had been heavy straggling on both sides there had been no actual rout.¹⁵ If in the end they drifted apart, it is no wonder. In all American history, no more amazing battle was ever fought than this one.

Nor have many battles been more decisive, in their effect on the course of a war. Shiloh represented a supreme effort on the part of the Confederacy to turn the tables, to recoup what had been lost along the Tennessee-Kentucky line, to win a new chance to wage war west of the Appalachians on an equal footing. It failed. After this, the Southern nation could do no more than fight an uphill fight to save part of the Mississippi Valley—the great valley of American empire without which the war could not be won.

4. Threat to New Orleans

When General Beauregard pulled his men away from Shiloh Church and took them stumbling back toward Corinth, on the afternoon of April 7, a door which the Confederacy for its life's sake had to keep open began to swing shut. The hinge was Pittsburg Landing, where more than 20,000 Americans had been shot, where Albert Sidney Johnston looked at the sky and died; and the final, echoing slam of the door's closing sounded just a few hours later, 110 miles to the northwest, when other Confederates surrendered their stronghold at Island Number Ten and gave the Federal invader, once and for all, the means to control the middle Mississippi River.

Island Number Ten no longer exists. Long ago the Mississippi rolled over it, washed part of it away, joined what was left to the Missouri shore and cut a new channel elsewhere; as if when the guns were stilled the place was no longer worth preserving. In 1862 the island was a two-and-one-half-mile-long mud patch lying in a great loop of the river, rimmed with strong ramparts and heavy guns, so menacing that even Flag Officer Andrew Foote was afraid of it. It blocked the river. The island and the army together kept the Confederate west alive. But the army was beaten and the strong point was taken, and on the day these things happened the Confederate west began to die. The fall of Island Number Ten was the essential postscript to Shiloh.