Still, on the morning of April 6, Sherman was well aware that his past pessimism about the conduct of the war had been interpreted in the popular press as timidity, if not outright madness. That the real Sherman his entire life had been a cool risk-taker—whether establishing a new California bank branch in the midst of the Gold Rush or a novel academy in Louisiana on the eve of the Civil War—had been forgotten in the hysteria. Instead, this second and probably last chance under Grant had convinced Sherman of the need for dramatic action to recover his own reputation and his family’s name among fellow officers, politicians, and newsmen, who were all wary of his mercurial past and ignorant of his prior two decades of steady service. His new Ohio recruits, it was said, still whispered that their general was crazy.
The effect of the topsy-turvy past four months on Sherman at Shiloh was thus paradoxical. In one sense, the newspaper slurs that he was insane freed him from worry over career advancement and preserving his reputation: he had none. Sherman accepted the generally held idea that he was going nowhere in the Union Army—and so had nothing to lose. As a result, at no time did he show the slightest fear of the approaching enemy at Shiloh—to the point on the eve of the battle of recklessly dismissing clear reports that he was about to be attacked by a much larger Confederate force. His general ignominy also led Sherman to be unconcerned with his own personal safety: at Shiloh, he determined, he would be a general always at the head of his army. He would either be killed at the front and so escape the disrepute that he had brought to his family, or he would provide a public display of courage and skill that might squelch rumors of his incompetence—if not resurrect his name altogether as he led his troops to victory.
In consequence, on April 6, the morning of the Confederate attack, a fatalistic Sherman deliberately dismissed clear signs of the impending enemy aggression or at least had no intention of adopting a defensive posture. His vulnerable right wing was neither fortified nor even entrenched—an equally surprised Grant had issued no such orders himself. Stung by past criticism of the prior months that he was overly nervous, Sherman now foolishly but calmly ridiculed solid scouting reports that the enemy was on the move and headed in his direction.
For this he was criticized by contemporaries and faulted by biographers, despite his weak protestations in his memoirs that he was never surprised at Shiloh. He most surely was. But historians sometimes fail to point out that it would have made little difference had Sherman ordered his men to entrench, inasmuch as there was no such order to any of the other divisions of the 35,000-man army that morning. An immobile division behind ramparts on the promontory of the Union line would have been quickly surrounded and cut off. And given his prior reputation, such precautionary measures might well have cost a “crazy Sherman” his command on the eve of battle.
Moreover, given Sherman’s vulnerable posting on the extreme right wing, there is no reason to believe his green troops would not have been overrun anyway. Instead, by careful retreats, the use of artillery, and occasional counterattacks, Sherman for most of the day was able to pull his vastly outnumbered division slowly back to the Union base at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. His own shaky defense for not fortifying his position—that to put raw troops in an offensive campaign behind barricades was to create an aura of defeatism and timidity—has some merit.
In any case, the chief cause for the initial Union collapse was not really surprise or faulty generalship, but poor morale. Inexperienced Union troops were assured that the Confederates, beaten at Forts Henry and Donelson, would be on the defensive and not attack. Somewhat understandably their sudden and unexpected charge shattered that Union complacency and very nearly routed the entire army in the first seconds of firing.
It is also forgotten that Sherman had wisely picked the high ground in the days before the battle. His right flank was well protected by a branch of Owl Creek, his left by a smaller swollen stream. Any attacker would have to run uphill without cover through a narrow meadow into Sherman’s guns. And it was Grant’s, not Sherman’s, idea to disperse the army in the narrow confines surrounding Pittsburg Landing, at a distance from Wallace, Buell, and Grant’s own headquarters and yet so near to the Confederate stronghold at Corinth, Mississippi. Strategically Grant’s deployment made little sense; tactically Sherman’s dispositions there were excellent.
By day’s end the Union Army had retreated over two miles to its landing on the Tennessee, lost nearly 10,000 dead, wounded, or missing with another 10,000 to 20,000 scattered, but was nevertheless in an extremely strong last-ditch position. As evening approached, the decimated Union Army, well arranged and awaiting the fresh forces of Generals Wallace and Buell, was oddly in far better shape than the victorious though exhausted Confederates.
The events of the second day of Shiloh on April 7 are famous. Despite the chaos of thousands of terrified Union soldiers at Pittsburg Landing attempting to flee the battlefield, Grant shrugged off his initial surprise and proved unflappable. Both he and a weary Sherman had agreed at 11 P.M. on the sixth that with reinforcements, the Union forces could go on the offensive the next morning. To Grant and Sherman, whichever side took the initiative the next morning would win the battle. The Confederates—through senseless frontal attacks on strong Union positions, especially at the so-called Hornet’s Nest, the loss of their commanding general Albert Sidney Johnston, and the clumsiness of their initial deployments—were worn out, unorganized, and as a result unable to press their victory even another hour to annihilate the Union’s last pocket. By Monday morning it was too late and the tables were turned. The Southerners were now outnumbered by perhaps more than 20,000 men. Some 25,000 remaining Confederates faced a Union army of 50,000—over half of them fresh troops who had not endured the trauma of the first day’s carnage.
If it is true that prior disgrace propelled Sherman to downplay the Confederate menace before Shiloh, and past accusations of anxiety and paranoia led to forced calmness under fire, his cool and reasoned conduct in the battle proper largely ensured at least a tactical standoff for the Union Army. His division—made up exclusively of Ohio natives who had never been in battle—was the first attacked and the last to disengage. It anchored the entire right wing in its steady withdrawal; and Grant’s right was the scene of some of the harshest fighting during the first day.
Had Sherman given in to the growing hysteria, precipitously withdrawn his forces, or insisted on a glorious last stand at his original position, the Confederate Army would have destroyed the Union right and poured into the rear of an unprotected army. Others at Shiloh—especially the stubborn General Prentiss at the Hornet’s Nest—were equally responsible for the salvation of the Union Army on the first day of Shiloh. But no one covered so much ground or had such a psychological effect on the troops as the blood-spattered Sherman.
We can engage in counterfactual speculation that had Sherman either been killed on April 6—and he almost was on at least five or six occasions—or not fought in such a frenzied manner, contemporary observers were quite correct that the Union would have lost Shiloh before the arrival of either Wallace or Buell. Grant’s entire Western campaign would then have stalled—Grant himself disgraced and relieved for being surprised—and the Mississippi River may well have remained in Confederate hands until 1864 or 1865. The North might still have recovered after a defeat at Shiloh, but probably not soon enough to close the war by 1865, nor with Abraham Lincoln reelected in November 1864, nor under terms of a general unconditional surrender of the South. Yet Sherman’s remarkable hours at Shiloh also had even greater ramifications far beyond the salvation of the Union offensive in the West in 1862. In at least three other ways, Sherman’s performance at the battle changed not only the course of the Civil War, but perhaps ultimately the very practice of modern war itself.
The fighting of the Civil War ended in spring 1865 for two reasons: Robert E. Lee could not free his Army of Northern Virginia from the death grip of Grant’s Army of the Potomac, and General Sherman’s Army of the West was rapidly approaching Richmond from the rear. Sherman’s was now a monstrous veteran force of over one hundred thousand seasoned Midwesterners who had destroyed Atlanta, ransacked Georgia, and humiliated the Carolinas in a devastating circular march northward from the interior of the South. In some sense, Lee surrendered not only because his army was on the verge of defeat by Grant, but because thousands of his own veterans were deserting to their families on news that Sherman was loose among homes to the rear. Even those who stayed on the line against Grant realized that they were soon to be caught between two enormous pincers and so likely annihilated.
Key to that finale was the unbelievable three-year campaign of Sherman between Shiloh and Appomattox—and the creation of a strange personal symbiosis between Grant and Sherman. Both developments saved the North and owe their geneses to Sherman’s bravery at Shiloh. Again, other generals were critical to the Union battle victory—Prentiss, McClernand, and Buell—but unlike the fate of Sherman, terribile dictu, it mattered little to the eventual Northern effort whether they were killed or captured at Shiloh or removed from command in the battle’s aftermath.
Sherman never looked back after Shiloh. “I have worked hard to keep down,” he wrote his wife of his promotion to major general after Shiloh, “but somehow I am forced into prominence and might as well submit.” In the months that followed the Union victory, he assumed martial control of Memphis. There he began formulating a general Union blueprint of occupation for Southern cities: generosity to compliant Southerners who disengaged from the Confederate war effort, no quarter for guerrillas and citizens who actively aided the Secessionists. Then, for most of spring 1863, Sherman proved invaluable in Grant’s successful campaign against the Mississippi stronghold of Vicksburg. By early 1864, deeply ensconced in the South, commander of all Northern armies in the West, and causing havoc in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia, he was known as “Uncle Billy” to his fast-moving troops.
Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in autumn 1864 saved Lincoln the presidential election. The March to the Sea in November and early December—entirely Sherman’s own plan and implemented over the objections of his superiors—humiliated the South and wrought an estimated $100 million in damage to the infrastructure of the Confederacy. The even greater trek through the Carolinas in the winter and early spring of 1865—again, initially opposed by Grant—devastated much of what was left of the Confederate economy and proved to the world the impotence of the Southern resistance. Sherman’s vast and seasoned Army of the West that approached Lee’s rear—at war’s end it far overshadowed the rival-but-decimated Army of the Potomac—had become the most terrible modern military force in the history of warfare. While the doggedness of both Generals Grant and Thomas was critical to the Union effort, it was Sherman’s odyssey through the South that turned the tide of the war—a spiritual journey as well that began with his wounds and lost mounts at Shiloh.
Equally important was Sherman’s critical relationship with Grant, which likewise was cemented during the firestorm of Shiloh. In the very worst moments of the fighting, a cool Sherman reported to Captain Wiley, Grant’s aide-de-camp, “Tell Grant, if he has any men to spare I can use them; if not, I will do the best I can. We are holding them pretty well just now—pretty well—but it’s as hot as hell.” The two generals were to meet twice during the battle’s critical first day. At 10 A.M. Grant himself hurried over to his collapsing right with cartridges for Sherman’s Ohioans. There he found his subordinate calm amid his fallen regiments. “In thus moving along the line,” wrote Grant of his morning inspection, “I never deemed it important to stay long with Sherman.”
They bumped into each other again during the evening. Most officers of the Army of the Tennessee were expecting a general retreat across the river; those who were not were clamoring that only the arrival of Buell and Wallace offered a chance for a draw at Shiloh. In the midst of such panic at Pittsburg Landing, Sherman approached Grant. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” “Yes,” Grant offered, “lick ’em tomorrow, though.”
After the fighting, when Grant was determined to resign under General Halleck’s trumped-up insinuations of laxity and drunkenness, it was a reenergized (and now a national hero) Sherman who convinced him to stay. Of their meeting in the aftermath of Shiloh, when Grant was close to quitting, Sherman later wrote:
I begged him to stay, illustrating his case by my own. Before the battle of Shiloh, I had been cast down by a mere newspaper assertion of “crazy”; but that single battle had given me new life, and now I was in high feather; and I argued with him that, if he went away, events would go right along, and he would be left out; whereas, if he remained, some happy accident might restore him to favor and his true place. He certainly appreciated my friendly advice, and promised to wait awhile.
The ensuing trust from “that single battle” ensured Sherman’s command of the Western theater when Grant went east to assume control of all Union armies. Consequently, throughout 1864 and 1865 the two worked independently and yet harmoniously, in dire contrast to the previous destructive rivalries fostered by generals Halleck, McClellan, Buell, Hooker, Pope, Rosecrans, Burnside, and most of the other generals of Lincoln who had nearly ruined the Union cause in the first two years of the war. Throughout the war Sherman defended Grant in print; for the next twenty years he counseled both Generals Buell and Wallace and their numerous supporters not to pursue their vendettas against Grant and to withdraw charges of Grant’s culpability for the atrocious losses at Shiloh. In short, Sherman’s heroism at Shiloh created the Grant-Sherman trust, without which the North would certainly not have won the war within four years.
Yet the most profound ripple from Shiloh was Sherman’s remarkable transformation in his own views concerning the nature and purpose of modern warfare in the new industrial age. Unlike Grant, who was not directly fighting at the front during Shiloh, Sherman was nearly killed so often and saw such carnage about him, that Shiloh’s carnage made a lasting and haunting impression in this first great slaughter of the Civil War. His memoirs and letters are quite clear about his metamorphosis: Shiloh, one of the earliest of all his Civil War experiences, was also his most horrific and remained for the rest of his life the most nightmarish. Four days after the battle he wrote his wife, “The scenes of this field would have cured anybody of war. Mangled bodies, dead, dying, in every conceivable shape, without heads, legs; and horses! . . . I still feel the horrid nature of this war, and the piles of dead Gentlemen & wounded & maimed makes me more anxious than ever for some hope of an End, but I know such a thing cannot be for a long long time.” Grant concurred with Sherman’s assessment, and later wrote that on the day after Shiloh it would have been possible to walk across the battlefield “in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.”
Nearly a quarter century after Shiloh, the memory of the grotesque dead and wounded continued to haunt Sherman. In an address to the Army of the Tennessee in 1881, he somberly began:
Who but a living witness can adequately portray those scenes on Shiloh’s field, when our wounded men, mingled with rebels, charred and blackened by the burning tents and underbrush, were crawling about, begging for someone to end their misery? Who can describe the plunging shot shattering the strong oak as with a thunderbolt, and beating down horse and rider to the ground? Who but one who has heard them can describe the peculiar sizzing of the minie ball, or the crash and roar of a volley fire? Who can describe the last look of the stricken as he appeals for help that no man can give or describe the dread scene of the surgeon’s work, or the burial trench?
After that personal nightmare of Shiloh’s mangled bodies, Sherman was determined not to fight a battle in the style of Grant in which men charged en masse through open fields of point-blank rifle and cannon fire, the victors guaranteed to lose nearly as many as the defeated. Southerners had vulnerabilities, but bravery under fire was not one of them.
Grant, however, learned a quite different lesson from the second-day reinforcements at Shiloh: the North could win through superior manpower in head-on assaults—trading vicious blows with the Confederates in an effort to kill one Southerner for every two Northern fatalities. Sherman, however, left the battlefield convinced that there had to be a better way for a modern army to defeat its adversary than twenty thousand combined casualties in the space of forty-eight hours. In nearly all of his subsequent fighting there would be almost no repeats of the frontal crashes at Shiloh—Sherman’s misguided head-on charge at Kenesaw Mountain in June 1864 is about the sole exception.
In the next three years Sherman would craft the successful strategy of the Union war effort against the South—a call for total war against the entire infrastructure of the enemy that need not entail the killing of innocent civilians or even the destruction of Confederate armies. What enabled the enemy to charge at Shiloh, Sherman saw, were not mere weapons and matériel, but equally the soldiers’ sense that the heart of their Confederacy was impregnable and their homes safe. Should he destroy that myth—and wreck the foundation of land and slaves that fueled the plantationists’ Confederacy—Southern armies would melt away as surely as if their soldiers had been shot down. Let Lee in Virginia fret about the sanctity of his beloved home ground; meanwhile Sherman would ruin the economy of his Confederate states to his rear. In a series of astute letters to Lincoln, to his adversary John Bell Hood at Atlanta, and to Grant, Sherman outlined this remarkably prescient understanding of the new morality of modern war and the rapidly expanding theater of battle.
War was rightly “hell”; yet Sherman did not come away from Shiloh as a pacifist, but as an angel of moral retribution who would wreak vengeance on the higher powers who had sent those poor boys on both sides to their slaughter at Shiloh. “I propose to demonstrate,” he announced before leaving Atlanta, “the vulnerability of the South, and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms.” To the civil authorities of the Confederacy who demanded that he not deport civilians from Atlanta, Sherman later scoffed, “You might as well appeal against the thunder storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace & quiet is to Stop the war, which can alone be done by admitting that it began in Error and is perpetuated in pride.” In rejecting John Bell Hood’s claim to a higher moral ground in the fighting around Atlanta, Sherman lectured, “If we must be Enemies let us be men, and fight it out as we propose to do, and not deal in such hypocritical appeals to God and humanity. God will judge us in due time.”
To Sherman it was wrong to fight a Shiloh, in which his Midwesterners—themselves no abolitionists—were blasted apart while shooting down poor Southern boys who owned neither slaves nor much property. Far more humane, he grasped, was to burn the estates of the rich and the buildings of the rebel statesmen who had voted for secession; free the slaves who were critical to the Southern economy and whose enslavement had prompted the rebellion; and demonstrate that no Confederate soldier could charge a Union line with the certainty that his government and homeland far to the rear were safe from fire and ruin. As he wrote Grant, “We cannot change the hearts of the people of the South, but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that however brave and gallant and devoted to their country, still they are mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war.”
In Sherman’s words, Southerners, while they “cannot be made to love us, they can be made to fear us.” The result was that between November 1864 and spring 1865, Sherman suffered almost no casualties in his enormous Army of the West. He killed very few Southerners and made it terribly clear to the ruling minority in the South that their reckless decision to secede would cost them their livelihoods. Sherman not merely destroyed the South, he humiliated it in the process. No wonder that the property destroyer and liberator of slaves, not Grant, the butcher of Confederate manhood, was to be the far more hated by diehard Southerners. Yet Sherman’s bitter truths about modern war neither Grant nor Lee really grasped: the real immorality of war was not the March to the Sea, but the battles to come after and like Shiloh—Antietam, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, the Wilderness—where the young and innocent were massacred while the old and culpable were safely hectoring or even profiting to the rear.
Grant, who won Shiloh through superior manpower, likewise would send thousands to their deaths in Virginia—convinced that Lee’s army might likewise collapse before his own stream of bodies was exhausted. Yet he was often less aware of the larger lessons of the war: the heartland of the South still lay untouched, its citizens unrepentant, while the North would lose more of its precious youth in battlefield “victories” than did the South in “defeats.”
Lee too never really understood Sherman’s strategic notion of war. He went northward in 1863 in search of a head-on collision with the enemy, ruined his army at Gettysburg, killed thousands of Northerners, and prolonged the fighting for another two years. In contrast, Sherman went into the “bowels of Georgia” in 1864 to destroy an economy and an idea, killed few, and lost almost no one—and the war ended in less than a year. Lee perhaps at last realized that Grant could stop his army; but he and his generals never quite understood how and why Sherman had defeated their culture.
Had Sherman been in charge of Lee’s army in June 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia would have sidestepped Meade at Gettysburg, may well have burned Washington, D.C., and crippled the economy of southern Pennsylvania and Maryland—before returning intact to the South and the likelihood of a brokered peace. In contrast, had Lee been Sherman in fall 1864, his army would have sought out Hood, Hardee, and Bragg and never reached Savannah.
Contrary to popular opinion and hysterical slurs, Sherman’s legacy of destroying civic property and morale was not Dresden, Hiroshima, or My Lai. His Army of the West never deliberately killed civilians, raped, or murdered. Rather, Sherman’s war against property and civic infrastructure has now been ingrained as the unofficial policy of the United States military at war—as the recent conflicts in Iraq, the Balkans, and Afghanistan attest. Like Sherman, we prefer to attack the will of a nation to resist through the destruction of its communications and the property of its government and elite without aiming either to kill all its soldiers or randomly target civilians. Sherman alone of nineteenth-century generals understood that wars of the industrial age were fueled by a sophisticated but increasingly vulnerable infrastructure—transportation, communications, manufacturing, government—whose destruction could stall troops in the field and instantaneously strip a newly found affluence away from the promulgators of conflict. Even more brilliantly, he realized that with material progress came at least the pretense of enlightened humanity: eventually the wages of victory in liberal and affluent Western democratic societies would entail that the victor kill few and lose fewer still, an ideal more practicable when the property and capital rather than the lives of the enemy were targeted.
Finally, Sherman developed the idea of collective guilt, or the controversial concept that no population that broadly supports a war should be entirely free of its bitter consequences. The only way to disabuse Southerners of their trust in chattel slavery and secession was to show that eventually such ideologies would lead to the March to the Sea. In the same manner, the Afghans were not entirely blameless for either the Taliban or al-Qaeda, and turned on both only when they saw that the logical wages of their tacit support led to B-52s rather than polite remonstrations from American diplomats and an occasional cruise missile. Whether we like it or not, the multifaceted war conceived by William Tecumseh Sherman between Shiloh and Appomattox is with us Americans today—and it is not, as alleged, simply one of “terror.”
Fortunately for the fate of the Union and the career of Grant, the dozens of Shiloh shots aimed at Sherman hit his flapping coat, hat, shoulder strap, hand, and horses, and not his chest. Unlike Albert Sidney Johnston—who on the other side of the battle line was braving fire at the front after also being unfairly castigated in the press on the eve of the battle—enemy bullets missed Sherman’s arteries and vital organs.
So, unlike the fate of the supreme Confederate commander, Shiloh did not kill, but empowered a once “crazy” and powerless officer. In turn, a now heroic and self-assured Sherman would save Grant both by his conduct at the front and his loyalty in the battle’s postmortem. And the two of them would go on to save the Union and destroy the South. Quite early in the Civil War, Shiloh taught the introspective Sherman—and Sherman alone of all the Civil War generals—how not to wage war, and so the poor South would soon come to learn in Georgia and the Carolinas the real consequences of that awful battle of April 1862.
Afternoon: The Myth of the Lost Opportunity
While the Confederate left battered Sherman, the right wing finally began the long planned sweep to the Tennessee River. It was here that Albert Sidney Johnston—perhaps the most experienced and best known American officer on either side at the battle—had originally envisioned cutting off Grant’s army from its base of supplies at the river. Then he would drive it back toward Owl Creek, where it would then be surrounded and annihilated.
But late in the morning there was something awry with the once promising Confederate blueprint. All morning Johnston rode along the crest of his Confederate wave, worried that his planned critical right advance was lapping around, rather than overwhelming, a last center of resistance anchored by the Union divisions of Generals Hurlbut, Prentiss, and W.H.L. Wallace. Johnston grew increasingly concerned that his victorious troops were plundering Union camps, straggling to the rear with booty, and often charging haphazardly in the wrong direction. They were already dissipating their remarkable initial successes and giving critical time for the stunned Federal troops to retire and regroup!
Protected by a peach orchard and a sunken road, the desperate and surrounded Northerners to the right in the so-called Hornet’s Nest were slaughtering wave after wave of Confederate attackers, and thereby upsetting the entire Southern battle plan at Shiloh. Around noon Johnston himself rode over to inspect the source of enemy resistance and then to direct personally the Southern charges. The attempted destruction of the Union pocket had now taken on a surreal life of its own. Rather than bypassing or outflanking the nest, Johnston and Braxton Bragg began to send hundreds of men to their deaths in vain assaults against Union artillery and sharpshooters—as if the capture of the tiny Federal salient had become a sudden referendum on Southern manhood and courage! Meanwhile precious time was being lost; fleeing Union regiments were reforming defenses to the rear around the Union camp at Pittsburg Landing. The Southern generals were suddenly fighting the wrong battle in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As the Confederate charges withered, it began to seem as if the Southerners themselves had had enough. About 2 P.M., General Breckinridge rode up to Johnston to confess that a regiment of his Tennesseans refused to make any more suicidal attacks. To his plea that he could not make his men budge, Johnston replied, “Oh, yes, General, I think you can.” Finally an exasperated Johnston told an insistent Breckinridge that he would lead the charge in person. He then approached the recalcitrant Tennesseans, touched their bayonets from his horse, and exclaimed, “These will do the work. Men, they are stubborn; we must use the bayonet.” Johnston turned his trusted mount Fire-eater around and rode out at the van, calling to his foot soldiers, “I will lead you.” In the heat of battle, few seemed to note the absurdity that the supreme commander of some forty thousand men, who alone had collected the army and brilliantly brought it undetected to Shiloh, was now leading a near-suicidal charge of a few hundred soldiers—trusting in the bayonet against the mass fire of rifled muskets.
At some point in the onslaught, Johnston faded back through the ranks. Although his men broke their immediate adversaries and sparked the beginning of the collapse of the Hornet’s Nest, Johnston himself uncharacteristically sought relief from the fire. At first he seemed elated that he had escaped death from the murderous Northern broadsides. He even slapped his thigh, remarking of a spent ball that merely stung him and of another that sliced his boot-sole in two, “They didn’t trip me up that time.”
But, in fact, they did. And minutes later the general suddenly seemed hesitant. Had he, in fact, been wounded during his ride into the peach orchard? Fire-eater had tired and seemed to have been hit in at least two places. Besides the boot-heel being shot to pieces, Johnston’s overcoat was now riddled with bullet holes. He sighed to a staff member, Gov. Isham G. Harris of Tennessee, “Governor, they came near putting me hors de combat in that charge.” Moments later Johnston went pale and nearly fell out of his saddle. Harris demanded, “General, are you wounded?” Johnston gasped, “Yes, and I fear seriously.”
A series of further mishaps now transpired that ensured the death of Albert Sidney Johnston. He had been shot during the charge in the popliteal artery, just below the knee on the inside of his right leg—usually a serious but nonlethal wound that could be treated in the field with a simple tourniquet, which Johnston, like many soldiers, carried with him. But unfortunately the general had probably been hit several minutes before he informed Harris, perhaps as much as a quarter hour earlier than his first acknowledgment of injury. In the excitement of battle he had felt little pain. In the meantime he had probably lost over two quarts of blood, enough to send him into irreversible shock. Later it was found that a .577-caliber minié ball had entered behind his right knee, the leg where years earlier he had suffered a serious bullet wound in a duel that had left him with bouts of nerve pain and leg paralysis. Due to the prior (and more serious) injury, had he now simply felt nothing when the stray bullet nicked his artery? Or had the ebullition of the victorious charge dulled the pain? Or finally, was a suffering Johnston simply being stoic even as he bled to death?
Still more unfortunate, the blood from the wound had stealthily oozed down the side of his leg, inside his pant on into the boot. So when his staff—among them Col. William Preston, his brother-in-law—carried the general down from Fire-eater, they saw little trace of bleeding on his person and thus at first could not find the source of Johnston’s fainting. Instead of tourniquets and bandages, they wrongly administered brandy to revive the comatose Johnston.
His own personal physician, Dr. D. W. Yandell, who was nearly always at the general’s side and could have stopped the bleeding in seconds, had a few hours earlier been ordered by Johnston to attend to Union prisoners. “Look after these wounded people, the Yankees among the rest. They were our enemies a moment ago. They are prisoners now.” When Yandell objected about leaving the general, Johnston ordered him to stay with the wounded and dying. In short, Albert Sidney Johnston’s own inability to notice the wound, the misfortune of a major artery being nicked, the fact that the blood had pooled undetected in his boot, the sudden absence of his personal physician, and the panic of his staff who missed the wound, all conspired to ensure his death—and in such a fashion to prompt second-guessing for decades afterward.
The officers around the lifeless Johnston were horrified that their commander, fresh from a successful charge into the Hornet’s Nest, had now mysteriously died within minutes without a visible trace of trauma. They quickly sought to conceal his death from the rank and file to avoid a general panic—especially the knowledge that their beloved leader had died from a wound that need not have killed him. It was now announced that the corpse of a “Colonel Jackson of Texas” was being brought back from the front. Only when Johnston’s remains were taken into the Confederate headquarters did Dr. Chopin, General Beauregard’s personal surgeon, finally discover the source of the fatal blood loss—as well as three other minor wounds and dozens of holes in his uniform and coat.
Beauregard himself was in near shock. The battle was at a critical phase. The supreme commander and architect of the Confederate advance was now gone. What should the staff do? For well over an hour, between 2:30 P.M.—the approximate time of Johnston’s death—until sometime before 4:00, a lull descended upon the Confederate army. No one on the right wing—neither Generals Cheatham, Withers, nor Breckinridge, or Jackson—had stepped up to replace Johnston to coordinate attacks against the reeling Union troops inside the Hornet’s Nest. Johnston’s final charge had rattled the Union line, and in the Northerners’ confusion a free lane directly ahead of the Confederates seemed to have opened up all the way to Pittsburg Landing.
Yet there was to be no sustained follow-up, at least until Braxton Bragg belatedly and unimaginatively began to send units once again head-on against the Union line. Instead of encircling the Hornet’s Nest, some Southerners had turned obliquely to the northwest, allowing the Union troops in the pocket even more critical time to regroup. In fact, even after Bragg at last regained some semblance of order in his attacks, General Prentiss’s men would not surrender for another hour, sometime around or after 5:00 P.M., nearly three hours after Johnston was carried from the field.
Prentiss capitulated only after some sixty-two Confederate cannon had pulverized his position. But by then it was nearly dusk. As the victorious Southerners at last swarmed over the captured Union left wing, there was little daylight left to complete the annihilation of Grant’s encircled and tottering army. True, dozens of Confederate units were streaming forward. Some were plundering the rich Union camps. Others fired away at the panicking enemy runaways; still more were involved in the mop-up of captives. The feeling among the rank and file was that Bragg and his subordinates could still piece together a final twilight coordinated assault and that way sweep the last remnants of Grant’s army into the river.
But around 6:00, Beauregard abruptly ordered a general withdrawal! Dozens of Confederate officers were aghast—most notably Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was nearing the bluffs above the trapped Union army, convinced that a final dusk charge could scatter the Federals before they could be reinforced during the night by Wallace and Buell. Here was born the idea of the “Lost Opportunity.”
Did Johnston’s sudden demise account for the delay in capturing the last Federal pocket and therein perhaps explain why the Confederates now called off a final assault at Pittsburg Landing? All veterans of the battle agreed that for some seven hours, Prentiss had held his command against overwhelming odds. In the process he prevented the Confederates from nearing Pittsburg Landing until nightfall. The assumption then spread that if only the Union salient had collapsed earlier in midafternoon—at about the time of Johnston’s death—Grant’s camp would have been in enemy hands by 5:00 P.M. Who, then, after the noble sacrifice of the supreme commander, was to blame for allowing a few hundred men to stall the entire Confederate advance? And why was the battle called off when the Union Army was in ruins with its back to the Tennessee River?
Almost immediately, Johnston’s sudden death conveniently answered both those queries and in the process created a Confederate legend that fit in so well with the known Southern affinity for romance and chivalry. In this tradition—I heard a popular version of the story in the early 1960s from my own maternal grandmother, Georgia Way Johnston, whose family claimed to be cousins of Albert Sidney—the Confederacy was on the verge of a momentous “victory” at Shiloh. Then suddenly Johnston, architect of the entire campaign, went down with a minor wound. His unexpected death brought the attack against the Hornet’s Nest to a standstill, giving the Northerners a precious hour or two to regroup, rearm, and be reinforced. By the time the demoralized Southern staff had assembled a new assault group, it was so late in the day that only inspired generalship could have crafted a final winning pursuit. Instead, far to the rear a confused Beauregard ordered a cessation of the advance, and therein for the second time within a few hours threw away the martyred Johnston’s hard-won victory on the first day of Shiloh. Despite Union numerical superiority in the Tennessee theater of at least two to one, overwhelming Federal logistical support, arms, matériel, and the presence of top officers in the West like Grant, Sherman, and Thomas, the South had lost the war due to the chance trajectory of a single stray bullet—itself perhaps ricocheted from a friendly musket.
Had the determined Johnston lived, the Confederate lore further maintains, in a few more minutes he would have blasted apart the Hornet’s Nest. Then he would have ordered a massive charge down the bluffs in the late afternoon, racing forward on Fire-eater to send the last pockets of Northern survivors—less than 10,000 of Grant’s 35,000-man army were still in any organized formation—into the Tennessee River. Then, with Grant’s army destroyed, Buell would never have ventured across the Tennessee. He would have either retired into Kentucky or found himself annihilated by a much larger and victorious Confederate force. And Lew Wallace’s reinforcements of some 7,000 men would have had to retreat back to Crump’s Landing or find themselves colliding in the dark with an enemy army four times their size.
Given the shocking novelty of Shiloh’s carnage at this juncture in the war and the strategic importance of the battle, Johnston’s untimely death only led to even larger “what ifs.” With Grant’s army wrecked and captured at Shiloh, Southerners maintained that the entire course of the Civil War would have been radically altered. An enormous and victorious Confederate army loose in the border states—perhaps reaching 50,000 men when reinforced by Van Dorn’s late-arriving Arkansas divisions—would have forced the North to evacuate Tennessee. Consequently, the story goes, there would have been no assault on Vicksburg for months, if at all. Grant would have been disgraced, Sherman perhaps as well—when it was learned that an entire Federal army had been surprised and then annihilated by Johnston in a few hours. The tottering border state of Kentucky would have returned to its Southern roots and joined the Confederacy. What was left of Union forces would be in the hands of Buell and Halleck—hardly the type of aggressive commanders to ward off a victorious Albert Sidney Johnston. Had only Johnston not fallen at the critical moments of Shiloh!
More sober historians downplay the ultimate significance of Johnston’s death. They attribute the pause in the assault of the Hornet’s Nest more to exhaustion and an absence of ammunition. Scholars also emphasize the earlier tactical blunders of Johnston, who at least sanctioned, if not ordered, wave after wave of Confederate charges against the Union pocket without attempting an early flanking maneuver. Skeptics add that even had the fiery Johnston lived and ordered a general assault on Pittsburg Landing at dusk, Grant’s last line was well organized, occupied the high ground, and was bolstered by artillery and gunboats—making it impossible to be scattered in a mere hour before darkness. Moreover, by nightfall the Confederates were so disorganized and depleted that they may well have been stalemated the next morning by Buell and Lew Wallace, even without Grant’s help.
In any case, we will never know the exact effect or ultimate significance of Johnston’s death on the Confederate cause. The truth perhaps falls well between the Southern claim of catastrophe and Northern insistence on irrelevance. Grant, for example, criticized Johnston’s generalship severely and called him “vacillating and undecided in his actions”—apparently due to the earlier losses by his subordinates of Forts Henry and Donelson, and the inability to move his army rapidly from Corinth, Mississippi, to Shiloh. Whether that harsh verdict reflects sober military analysis or Grant’s own embarrassment at having Johnston maneuver an army of forty thousand undetected to within yards of his lines is still a matter of debate.
In some sense, however, it does not matter what the actual facts were concerning the exact ramifications of Johnston’s demise. Instead, it was the perception in the South about Shiloh’s effect on the Civil War after the battle that was Johnston’s true legacy. Despite what Grant, Sherman, and others maintained, within a decade of the battle, the notion became orthodoxy that Johnston’s sudden death had in a few minutes robbed the Confederates of their success at Shiloh. In turn, that defeat, snatched from the jaws of victory, had allowed a beaten Grant to press on to open the Mississippi and sever the Confederacy. Had Johnston just lived, the war would have ended quite differently.
The first promulgators of the myth were the suspect generals themselves at Shiloh, specifically Braxton Bragg and other subordinates who in retrospect excused their dubious performances by claiming they could have stormed Grant’s redoubt before darkness if not called back. Stung by postbellum criticism of their own unimaginative advance and failures to coordinate piecemeal attacks—and furious over the self-interested efforts of the scapegoat of Shiloh, P. T. Beauregard, to defend his tarnished reputation at their expense—they insisted that the Union survivors in the Hornet’s Nest were given a critical reprieve when Johnston fell. One of the first formal canonizations of “the Lost Opportunity” appeared almost immediately after the battle in July 1862 in the Savannah Republican under the caption “A Lost Opportunity at Shiloh.” The author, Peter Alexander, was one of the South’s foremost military correspondents and drew his evidence from interviews with Southern generals to argue that Beauregard had thrown away Johnston’s hard-fought victory.
General Bragg himself had written that explicitly not long after the battle: In spite of opposition and prediction of failure, Johnston firmly and decidedly ordered and led the attack in the execution of his general plan, and, notwithstanding the faulty arrangement of troops, was eminently successful up to the moment of his fall. The victory was won. How it was lost the official reports will show, and history has already recorded.
Bragg, whom most historians fault for unimaginatively ordering frontal charges against the Hornet’s Nest and thereby dissipating critical time and Confederate strength, had, in fact, advanced two claims. The first was that Johnston’s death had delayed the Confederates’ sure defeat of Prentiss—with fatal ramifications:
But no one cause probably contributed so greatly to our loss of time, which was the loss of success, as the fall of the commanding general. At the moment of this irreplaceable disaster, the plan of battle was rapidly and successfully executed under his immediate eye and lead on the right. For want of a common superior to the different commands on that part of the field, great delay occurred after this misfortune, and that delay prevented the consummation of the work so gallantly and successfully begun and carried on, until the approach of night induced our new commander to recall the exhausted troops for rest and recuperation. . . .
Bragg also later argued that without Johnston’s personal leadership at the front, his trademark aggressiveness, and zeal for total victory, a sickly Beauregard, ensconced at the rear, lost control of the battlefield. Beauregard was no Johnston, and so allowed the Union Army a reprieve by not finishing off the base camp at Pittsburg Landing—with tragic results for the ultimate fate of the Confederacy itself. Johnston, Bragg maintained, alone had mustered the army and insisted on the fight—and alone could have brought his plans to fruition:
Had the first shot of the 5th, on the skirmish line, killed Sidney Johnston, the battle of Shiloh would not have been fought and won by the Confederates. Had the fatal shot which struck him down on the 6th not been fired, Grant and his forces would have been destroyed or captured before sundown, and Buell would never have crossed the Tennessee.
Almost every ranking Confederate veteran of Shiloh, except Beauregard, seconded Bragg’s assessment. Sherman himself acknowledged that he detected a slackening of intensity from his vantage point at about the time Johnston fell. General Gibson, after swearing that the Confederate Army had plenty of light and was ready to charge the Union camp, focused on Beauregard’s failure to finish off Grant’s camp:
My conviction is that, had Johnston survived, the victory would have been complete, and his army would have planted the standard of the Confederacy on the banks of the Ohio. General Johnston’s death was a tremendous catastrophe. There are no words adequate to express my own conception of the immensity of the loss to our country. Sometimes the hopes of millions of people depend upon one head and one arm. The West perished with Albert Sidney Johnston, and the Southern country followed.
Gen. J. F. Gilmer summed up the consensus best in a letter to Albert Sidney Johnston’s son, “It is my well-considered opinion that, if your father had survived the day, he would have crushed and captured General Grant’s army before the setting of the sun on the 6th. In fact, at the time your father received the mortal wound advancing with General Breckenridge’s command, the day was ours.”
Gen. Basil W. Duke sketched out even larger counterfactual claims had Johnston survived, alleging that his victorious army would subsequently have been invincible after Shiloh:
The army remaining upon the banks of the Tennessee for a few days, would have been reorganized and recovered from the exhausting effects of the battle. The slightly wounded, returning to the ranks, would have made the muster-role full thirty thousand effectives. Price and Van Dorn, coming with about fifteen thousand, and the levies from all quarters which were hastening to Corinth, would have given General Johnston nearly sixty thousand men.
As the tradition of a stolen victory grew, former critics of Johnston reexamined his generalship before and during Shiloh and found the posthumous hero for the first time blameless! It was Beauregard, not Johnston, who had made the critical errors. A jittery Beauregard had opposed fighting on the first day at Shiloh; now it was Beauregard who had insisted on the clumsy attack with three successive lines, an impractical formation that had delayed bringing on the battle by a critical day; and Beauregard had ignored Johnston’s original orders of outflanking the Union left and cutting them off from the Tennessee River, by instead pouring men against Sherman on the enemy right.
Nor, the revisionists argued, was Johnston to blame for the prior catastrophe in the West. Even the earlier losses of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, and the precipitous surrender of Nashville, were hardly due to any error on Johnston’s part. General Tighman had been lax in his preparations at Fort Henry. Generals Buckner, Floyd, and Pillow had cowardly given Donelson away—despite plentiful arms, provisions, and men, and a proven record of repelling the Union besiegers. Especially regrettable were the fifteen thousand frontline Confederates needlessly surrendered at Donelson, veterans who a few weeks later could have turned the tide at Shiloh.
Johnston’s plans to defend Tennessee, recapture Kentucky, and keep the Mississippi secure were in fact inspired; his subordinates’ were not. The proof of the pudding was in the eating: on Johnston’s first chance to command himself, he had almost single-handedly and unnoticed created a massive force of resistance at Corinth, Mississippi; brought it in secret to within yards of the Union Army; and then in some eight and a half hours nearly destroyed the illustrious Ulysses S. Grant before falling to a chance wound from a spent bullet. Gen. Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor, concluded, “Albert Sidney Johnston was the foremost man of all the South; and had it been possible for one heart, one mind, and one arm, to save her cause, she lost them when he fell on the field of Shiloh.”
But the belief in the Lost Opportunity soon grew well beyond the circle of Southern generals, for it tapped something inherent in the Southern psyche itself: despite the guns and numbers of the North, the courage of Southern soldiers and the genius of their generals really could have nullified the odds—if only fate had not intervened. Thus the Lost Opportunity of Shiloh spread widely, especially in the decade and a half between 1866 and 1880 when defeated and impoverished Southerners latched onto any explanation to make sense of their present humiliating predicament. A year after the war, Edward Pollard, a Virginia newspaper editor, published The Lost Cause and wrote of Johnston’s death at Shiloh, “Alas! The story of Shiloh was to be that not only of another lost opportunity for the South, but one of a reversion of fortune, in which a splendid victory changed into something very like a defeat!”
To accept the reality that the Southern elite had waged a precipitous and unwise war—one poorly conducted against a far stronger, far larger, and far wealthier industrial nation, fought with limited resources in defense of African slavery—would have been an admission of either rashness, amorality, or abject stupidity. Far easier it was to praise Southern manhood and blame fate. So Pollard concluded his Lost Cause: “Civil wars, like private quarrels, are likely to repeat themselves, where the unsuccessful party has lost the contest only through accident or inadvertence. The Confederates have gone out of this war, with the proud, secret, deathless, dangerous consciousness that they are THE BETTER MEN, and there was nothing wanting but a change in a set of circumstances. . . .”
Fewer still wished to acknowledge that the Union had, in fact, adopted a brilliant strategy of blockading Confederate ports, tying Lee down in Virginia, splitting the South asunder at the Mississippi, and turning Sherman loose behind the lines—resulting in the invasion and complete conquest of a country the size of Western Europe within just four years. The North not merely had defeated the Confederacy on the battlefield and obliterated her military forces, but also had killed one-quarter of her white men between age 20 and 40, cut down a fourth of her officers—many of them in the high echelons of Southern aristocracy—and completely ruined her economy. Rarely in the annals of military history has one power so utterly demolished its adversary in so short a period.
But to account for an Armageddon rather than mere military defeat, Southern society spread the myth that the moral crusade against the Northern invader was nearly won on the home soil at Shiloh—until Fate and Chance, not Confederate incompetence coupled with Northern skill and multitudes, doomed the Cause. In 1878 an article published in the Southern Historical Society Papers argued, “Shiloh was a great misfortune. At the moment of his fall, Sidney Johnston with all the energy of his nature, was pressing on the routed foe. Crouching under the bank of the Tennessee River, Grant was helpless. One short hour more of life to Johnston would have completed his destruction.”
Johnston’s son, in a widely read biography of his father written in 1879, seventeen years after Shiloh—The Life of Albert Sidney Johnston: Embracing His Service in the Armies of the United States, The Republic of Texas, and The Confederate States—displayed how attractive the myth of the Lost Opportunity had now become. Writing of the failure to attack immediately after the fall of the Hornet’s Nest, William Preston Johnston waxed eloquently about what might have been.