CHAPTER 2
Shiloh’s Ghosts,
April 6–7, 1862
Morning: The Birth of Uncle Billy
Shiloh changed the life of William Tecumseh Sherman, even as he would thereafter go on to alter the course of the Civil War—and do so in a manner that still affects Americans to this day. That miraculous chain of events all started on the morning of April 6, 1862.
The surprise Southern charge at Shiloh began shortly before 7 A.M. The Confederates broke first against William Tecumseh Sherman’s 5th Division of the Army of the Ohio posted on the extreme Union right wing, farthest away from Grant’s base camp at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. Sherman had little idea that the initial waves of attackers marked the onslaught of the greatest Confederate attack of the year-old Civil War. In fact, the day before, Sherman had assured an equally complacent Grant’s staff in written dispatches that the chances of an enemy offensive against the Union positions were virtually nil.
Neither Sherman nor any other officer in the Federal Army realized that Albert Sidney Johnston’s army of over forty thousand Southerners had camped undiscovered a mere two miles from their lines. Now in the early Sunday morning of April 6, 1862, it was planning to smash the division, then across the battlefield turn the Union left flank and drive the smaller Northern army into the Tennessee River. “Take your damned regiment back to Ohio. There is no enemy nearer than Corinth,” Sherman barked out to one of his colonels when he was correctly warned that a large Confederate force was nearing his lines.
Suddenly the advance guard of two regiments of Gen. Patrick Cleburne’s Mississippians and Tennesseans—nearly a thousand men—came out of the thicket. They quickly overran the front line of the Ohioans—most were hurriedly finishing breakfast or just waking up—and headed directly for Sherman himself. They began firing volleys at fifty yards. “Sherman will be shot!” screamed Adjutant Dawes of the 53rd Ohio Regiment as he saw his general about to be overwhelmed.
“My God, we are attacked,” Sherman yelled. The first volley cut down several around him. A few feet away at his side a Private Holliday was killed instantly, among the first officially recorded Union casualties at Shiloh. “The shot that killed him was meant for me,” he wrote a week later of his miraculous escape. As a mounted Sherman raised his hand in defense, a pellet from a .69-caliber round—each such cartridge contained a single ball and three smaller buckshot—struck his hand and passed through. In seconds a stunned Sherman recovered enough to ride through another hail of bullets back to his nearby headquarters at Shiloh Church, trying to mold some type of defensive perimeter before his surprised regiments—none before the battle had ever fired a shot in anger—were completely overwhelmed.
Just before the 53rd Ohio Regiment collapsed, its final volleys, aided by canister shot from Union batteries, for a time slowed the Confederate juggernaut. The surprised Northerners regrouped to inflict 70 percent casualties among the attackers as the Southerners lumbered uphill over the final five hundred yards of open ground. Although Cleburne’s Confederates had surprised Sherman’s regiments, by 8:30 A.M. the first line of Confederate attackers had wilted under the increasing fire of the retiring Union division, bending but not yet breaking the Union ranks.
In support of Cleburne’s initial assault, Braxton Bragg, with nearly ten thousand men, now brought a massive second line of infantry against Sherman’s reeling amateurs. Fortunately for the Union regiments, Bragg’s efforts were anything but orderly. Confusion, misplaced orders, and the wait for tardy artillery support had all combined to delay and then interrupt Bragg’s planned early morning charge. But by 8:30 the huge Confederate mass was finally bringing its weight to bear against the last two surviving regiments of Sherman’s original defensive line. Sherman finally admitted that he was “satisfied for the first time that the enemy designed a determined attack on our whole camp.” Yet he still did not yet appreciate his danger: not just his own seven thousand men, but the entire Union Army—from his own right wing all the way to the Tennessee River—were in danger of being crushed in minutes by simultaneous Confederate charges. For one of the few times in the entire war, there were soon to be more Southerners on a single battlefield than Union troops. Sherman was both completely calm and yet—despite later denials—utterly surprised.
As Sherman’s division slowly crumbled under the Southern weight, his aide-de-camp, John Taylor, remarked that its general was “smoking a cigar, cool and unperturbed.” His complete mastery of fear “soon instilled a feeling that it was grand to be there with him.” Even so, by 9:30 A.M. the Union lines were falling back thousands of yards to their support camp at Shiloh Church. Many of their precious batteries were already overwhelmed and captured. And some of the Ohioans had no intention of stopping there to form a new line of defense. Instead, an increasing number headed for the last refuge of the Union base at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, about a mile farther to the east. By late afternoon some 10,000 to 15,000 Northerners—well over a third of the army—were either missing or congregating beneath the cliffs, trembling in panic. Sherman rode among these collapsing companies, striving to halt the fleeing small groups of terrified soldiers as bullets whizzed in from both sides.
Regiments to his immediate left—belonging to John McClernand’s 1st Division—now came up to the front to plug gaps arising between Sherman and Benjamin Prentiss’s 6th Division before the second Confederate wave broke the Union line entirely. Then John Taylor saw Sherman go down as his wounded horse stumbled and fell dead. The stunned general himself somehow jumped clear from the horse, leaving his saddle and holster beneath the carcass. He raced over to Taylor, grabbed his aide’s mount, and returned to the fray. “Well, my boy, didn’t I promise you all the fighting you could do?” Sherman screamed as he rode off. He was in his element.
His efforts to make a stand at Shiloh Church and preserve the divisional headquarters were now doomed, as it became clear that even further retreat was necessary. Both his immediate right and left flanks were crumbling under the pressure. By 10 A.M. Sherman was trying to bring what was left of his division to a new line of defense even farther to the rear at the Purdy-Hamburg road. The general himself was helping to position a battery when his second horse was shot.
Lieutenant Taylor found his stunned superior once more on the ground facing a wave of advancing Confederates. Somehow he helped him catch one of the stricken battery horses. Sherman had mounted three different horses in less than an hour. Now his hand was bleeding profusely, his coat was riddled with bullet holes, and a ball had passed through his hat. Was he trying to get shot? It did not seem that way to observers on the battlefield, who found him collected rather than reckless. One of his artillery commanders, Lt. Patrick White, remarked of the muddy and bloodstained general that he was “the coolest man I saw that day.”
And he was. Within minutes yet another bullet hit his shoulder strap. Apparently it was a ricochet and did not penetrate deeply into the flesh. Hand bleeding, shoulder in a sling, bruised from two falls from his horses, and filthy dirty, Sherman still continued to ride his third mount along the lines amid a hail of gunfire, encouraging his green troops to buy time for the Union Army with their lives. He later wrote his wife of these nightmarish moments, “I did the best I could with what remained, and all admit I was of good service—I noticed that when we were enveloped and death stared us all in the face my seniors in rank leaned on me.”
In the heat of battle Sherman realized instantaneously that if his flank could retire without collapsing, there might soon be help from over 25,000 fresh Union reinforcements that were within a ten-mile radius of Shiloh. But for now the battered Union Army on the battlefield was outnumbered by anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 troops, more so as the Sunday morning wore on and thousands of Northerners fled their positions to find safety at Pittsburg Landing. By noon Grant’s wonderful Army of the Tennessee was nearly wrecked.
Fortunately for the Northerners, the Confederates were just as shocked that their initial assaults had caught the enemy completely surprised, unentrenched, and outnumbered. Thus they had no contingency plan for rapidly moving successive waves of reinforcements to finish off Sherman’s distraught division before turning to their right to cut the Union Army off from its supply base at Pittsburg Landing.
Such good fortune was rare for the usually outmanned and outsupplied Confederates during early 1862. For the last six months the war in the West had gone disastrously. By February 1862 the losses of Forts Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers respectively, together with the easy capture of over fifteen thousand Southern prisoners—irreplaceable soldiers who might have turned the tide at Shiloh—were followed by the Union occupation of Nashville, the second largest Confederate city in the West after New Orleans. As Albert Sidney Johnston fled south in retreat, Memphis and the entire Mississippi Valley were now undefended and vulnerable, raising the specter that the critical nexus of the Western states of Texas and Arkansas might be severed by both water and rail connection from the rest of the Confederate nation. Johnston, once thought the savior of the Confederacy, was now bitterly pilloried in Southern newspapers as either incompetent or cowardly.
In response, the march up the Tennessee River to Shiloh was to be the Confederates’ grand offensive, as their woefully unprepared armies were hastily thrown together to prevent the coalescence of two Union forces under Grant and Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell from finishing the occupation of Tennessee and the upper Mississippi River altogether. The Southerners had a vague sense that, Napoleon-like, they might occupy the central position, destroying Grant and Buell separately before the two combined to crush them through sheer numbers and matériel. For their part, the North vastly overestimated the size of their Confederate enemies. In their nervousness they had no appreciation that a desperate Southern move on either the Army of the Tennessee or the Army of the Ohio could easily prove suicidal, allowing Grant or Buell to reinforce each other under attack. In Tennessee alone the North held at least a two-to-one edge in manpower.
It was, of course, miraculous that a host of squabbling Southern generals finally brought their forty-thousand-man force undetected to within yards of Grant’s outnumbered army. Yet once they arrived, there was still no ironclad agreement concerning the method of assault. Nor was there any consensus on the best way to dislodge the Northerners—and there was little hope that a surprise attack might succeed. Indeed, just hours before the charge, a large contingent of jittery officers favored pulling back to Corinth, Mississippi, to regroup and form a defensive perimeter. Wild rumors were circulating that the armies of Grant and Buell had already united and were in fact entrenched and waiting at Shiloh. Only Albert Sidney Johnston’s adamant insistence that there should be no cancellation in plans of hitting Grant held the Southern army together.
In fact, the Confederates were a disparate group of separate forces nominally under the command of General Johnston, who in turn relied heavily on the advice of P. T. Beauregard in organizing four armies totaling around forty thousand men. Although on paper the four corps commanders—Generals Polk, Bragg, Hardee, and Breckinridge—took their orders from Johnston, most operated and were supplied independently. Even within moments of the first shooting they were rarely in direct communication with either Johnston or Beauregard—much less with each other. The Southern army was a microcosm of the loosely organized Confederacy itself, and so its commanders enjoyed no shared mechanism of how to capitalize on the initial astounding success.
Rather than outflank the Union line with two crushing pincers, the armies instead clumsily charged head-on against the Union right in three successive lines, reminiscent of Napoleon’s textbook columns or perhaps the old triplex Roman plan of legionary advance. When the exhausted and hungry men finally did overrun Sherman’s camps, they stopped to pillage and eat, again wasting critical minutes in which the retreating Northerners regained their composure and scurried to find new defensive positions. Johnston had performed brilliantly in collecting a massive army of forty thousand and marching them undetected to within a few thousand yards of the Union lines. But he was a less competent tactician. And his subordinates, especially Beauregard, lacked even his battle sense. In addition, Johnston’s troops were fundamentally ill-equipped, often without training, experience, or the uniformity of organization and cohesiveness of Grant’s army.
Sherman’s heroic efforts at resistance forced his enemies to commit thousands of men against his right wing. Yet the Confederates’ better hope was to focus on the opposite end of the battlefield against the weaker Union left, and therein cut off the entire army’s line of retreat to Pittsburg Landing. Consequently, most of the first day, Shiloh was characterized by gruesome but largely detached confrontations. Confederate corps quite independently battered down the Union line without any concentration of force to blow apart Grant’s army. The result was that the Southerners were mostly successful in dozens of isolated firefights, slowly cutting off pockets of Union resistance but losing too many men and too much time in the ordeal to achieve the desired general collapse.
Sherman soon had only half a division left. Yet he was determined to stay with his retreating men in hopes of slowing down the Confederate avalanche until Union reinforcements could craft a line of resistance. By 10:30 A.M. he finally reorganized what was left of his command at least a half mile to the rear of his original camp. He would stay there for the next four hours. Grant, who met him in midmorning, found that Sherman’s fragmented right wing could hold and retreat in order to form a perimeter around Pittsburg Landing.
By day’s end Sherman had linked up with the other surviving Union divisions in a horseshoe line of defense while Grant awaited the arrival of twenty-seven thousand reinforcements from generals Lew Wallace and Buell. Sherman would go on the offensive the next morning. For the rest of the battle he would play a key role in the Union’s remarkable reversal of fortune on April 7 and lead the limited Union pursuit of the defeated Confederates on the morning of the eighth—once again nearly to be shot down at the head of his troops by the furious and final rear guard of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Sherman’s remarkable conduct at Shiloh was well recorded by a number of his superiors—Grant especially—and it is described in detail in his own memoirs and letters. General Nelson, a division commander in Buell’s Army of the Ohio that entered the battle on the second day, and no friend of either Grant or Sherman, remarked, “If General Sherman had fallen, the army would have been captured or destroyed.” After collating eyewitness accounts of the battle, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck later confirmed to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, “It is the unanimous opinion here that Brig. Gen. W. T. Sherman saved the fortune of the day on the 6th instance, and contributed largely to the glorious victory on the 7th. He was in the thickest of the fight on both days.”
The usually taciturn Grant was just as complimentary, “I feel it a duty . . . to a gallant and able officer, Brig. Gen. W. T. Sherman, to make a special mention. He was not only with his command during the entire two-day action, but displayed judgement and skill in the management of his men. Although severely wounded in the hand the first day his place was never vacant.” Grant added in his memoirs that “a casualty to Sherman that would have taken him from the field that day would have been a sad one for the troops engaged at Shiloh. And how near we came to this!”
Just as William Tecumseh Sherman, alone of the great Union generals, fought at both the first and last battles of the Civil War—Bull Run and Bentonville—so too was he at the front in the very beginning and ending minutes of Shiloh, crisscrossing the battlefield for nearly forty-eight hours, rallying his green Ohio Division that anchored the beleaguered right wing of the Army of the Tennessee. He may well have been among the very first Union officers hit at Shiloh. He tangled with the last man wounded at the battle, the brilliant and infamous Confederate cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest. Sherman’s biographers usually devote an entire chapter to his astounding heroism at Shiloh, using phrases like “reborn,” “transformation,” “second-chance,” and “never looked back” to mark the battle as a dividing line between his prior disgrace and subsequent greatness.
What then really happened to Sherman at Shiloh? Neither his prominent and well-documented role in the fighting there nor the magnitude and importance of the battle can in themselves explain his magical and lasting transformation. Shiloh in itself did not end the war, or even mark an end to the fighting in the West. And Sherman did not fight at Shiloh as a major general of an army, but rather served as one of at least ten divisional commanders in the field, themselves all subordinate in rank and authority to Generals Grant, Buell, and Halleck. He had no responsibility for the Union strategy that led to Shiloh. Nor did he exercise any overall tactical command of the battle itself. In the aftermath of the fighting, the newly famous Sherman did largely what he was told.
But a strange sequence of events unfolded at Shiloh around Sherman that in a few hours altered both his own career and the next decade of his nation at large. Nothing in his immediate prequel to Shiloh presaged Sherman’s astounding success. In fact, his entire career twenty years prior to Shiloh—he was forty-one at the battle—had been ostensibly characterized by only an adequate military record. Although sixth in his 1840 class at West Point, Sherman had held a series of nondescript postings through some fifteen years of military service throughout the South and West in a variety of commands. He had missed out entirely on the Mexican War by being stationed in California.
In disgust, Sherman finally resigned from the army in 1853 in order to start up a bank branch in San Francisco. In contrast to the obscure security of his military assignments, his subsequent seven years in private business were an unmitigated disaster: regional director of a failing financial institution, mounting debts, and finally living apart from his family in a series of low-paying and temporary jobs. Sherman’s near decade of ignominy was only heightened by the contrast with the success and riches of his wife’s family, especially the fame of his father-in-law (Thomas Ewing, the leading barrister in America and also Sherman’s stepfather), coupled with the meteoric rise of his own brother John to the U.S. Senate as a Republican from Ohio.
Worse still, when Sherman at last reentered military life, he experienced a roller-coaster series of events in the two years directly prior to Shiloh, capped by devastating failure. He spent much of 1860 as a civilian organizing the new Louisiana State Military Academy (the future Louisiana State University) as its first superintendent, in charge of hiring faculty, organizing a curriculum, and literally building the infrastructure of a new campus. By all accounts he was enormously successful. In spite of being a Northerner from Ohio and brother of a Yankee senator, Sherman was well liked by his Southern hosts. Indeed, he was later purportedly offered a high command in the Confederate Army at the outbreak of the war. But his academic tenure would end abruptly in February 1861 with the pending secession of Louisiana and the awful knowledge that the arms and cadets of his own military academy would shortly aid the Confederate cause. Consequently, after years of failure, Sherman saw his greatest triumph—he had been well paid as the academy’s superintendent and was planning to build an elegant home on the campus when he resigned—vanish after a year, terminated by events well beyond his own control. In desperation and broke, he quietly headed back north in the wake of secession.
The months immediately prior to the outbreak of the Civil War boded no better. Despite the North’s dire need for experienced officers and a scarcity of West Point graduates—by far the best of whom had enlisted in the Confederate Army—Sherman was passed over for higher command by both those officers of less rank and politicos who had no military training at all. Finally, his cool performance as a colonel and brigade commander at Bull Run in July 1861, together with his political connections, brought Sherman to Lincoln’s attention. Miraculously he was promoted to a large command of the Cumberland theater in the West, in charge of the protection of all Union interests in the border state of Kentucky. Sherman was at last given responsibility commensurate with his innate talent—though not with either his experience or confidence. Hence here in Kentucky catastrophe struck in late 1861.
After a propitious beginning in organizing defenses and raising troops, Sherman found himself utterly exhausted and demoralized. It soon dawned on him that he was obligated to protect a 300-mile front with only 18,000 raw troops, in a border state where the zeal of Southern sympathizers and Confederate raiders grew in reverse proportion to the general neglect of the West by the Union command in Washington. Overworked and suffering from chronic asthma, Sherman grew increasingly pessimistic as he neared physical collapse, unaware that the enemy was probably in worse shape even than he. By October 1861 he was writing gloomy letters to Lincoln, cabinet officers, and his military superiors—and foolishly giving candid and thoroughly depressing lectures to visiting reporters.
Finally, in a meeting in Louisville on October 17, 1861, with Secretary of War Simon Cameron, other Union military leaders, and unidentified newsmen, Sherman poured out his frustrations. To defend Kentucky alone he would need immediately 60,000 troops. And to mount a theater offensive to clear the Confederates from the entire Mississippi Valley at least 200,000 Union recruits would eventually be required! His hearers were astounded. The fantastic numbers bandied about made a most disheartening prognosis even worse. Later events, in fact, would prove Sherman’s realistic figures prescient.
The general Union orthodoxy at the time was that a single rather dramatic victory in Kentucky or Tennessee—Grant’s “one great battle”—might so demoralize the South as to bring on a general armistice. Now the theater commander was instead predicting years of conflict with armies in the hundreds of thousands that would cost millions of dollars to raise. Not surprisingly, within a month after Sherman’s depressing interview, gossip flew that Sherman was at best exhausted and ill, at worse delusional and insane—and either way liable through his defeatist rantings to lose northern Kentucky if not southern Ohio. By December 11, 1861, the Cincinnati Commercial printed the alarming headline about their native son: “General William T. Sherman Insane,” and then further pontificated about his removal:
The harsh criticisms that have been lavished on this gentleman, provoked by his strange conduct, will now give way to feelings of deepest sympathy for him in his great calamity. It seems providential that the country has not to mourn the loss of an army through the loss of mind of a great general into whose hands was committed the vast responsibility of the command of Kentucky.
In disgrace, and suffering what seemed to be classic symptoms of clinical depression, coupled with physical exhaustion, Sherman spent much of December 1861 and January 1862 in isolation, relieved of command in Kentucky, and generally discredited. “I am so sensible now of my disgrace from having exaggerated the force of our enemy in Kentucky that I do think I should have committed suicide were it not for my children,” he wrote his brother in the midst of exile. Most newspaper observers believed that his briefly resurrected career had now ended in infamy.
Only lobbying efforts by his wife, father-in-law, and brother led Lincoln and Halleck to give a shaky and reluctant Sherman a second chance. By mid-February he received a lowly assignment in western Kentucky, training recruits for the newly appointed general Ulysses S. Grant’s proposed campaigns against Fort Donelson and Fort Henry. Without the pressure of running an entire theater and bolstered by reports of Grant’s aggressive competence, Sherman slowly began to regain his health and some of his former assurance. When Grant’s two victories not only secured Kentucky but opened Tennessee to Federal advance, Sherman was buoyed by the chance to raise his own division of inexperienced Ohio recruits to join Grant’s new Army of the Tennessee. So by early April, as a division commander at Shiloh, a steadier Sherman was part of a huge Union effort to pacify southern Tennessee and clear the upper Mississippi River.