All was shattered by one word. “On!” would have made it history; but the commanding general said, “Retire.” Oh, the power of a general-in-chief. It was all over. That bloody field was to mean nothing in all time but a slain hero, and 25,000 soldiers stretched upon a bloody field—and another day of purposeless slaughter with broken bands of desperate men mangling and slaying to no visible end in all God’s plan of setting up the right. The great forest tract was sinking into darkness, stained, trampled, and echoing with groans. But the victory—its very hope—was gone. “They had watered their horses in the Tennessee River;” but, when he fell who spoke the word, the prediction had lost its meaning.
As the specter of a humiliating Reconstruction spread, the myth grew from Johnston’s death causing the loss of the single battle Shiloh to being responsible for the entire Confederate defeat itself! Jefferson Davis, ever eager to justify secession and his own mediocre direction of the resistance, was to maintain to the end of his life that Johnston’s tragic demise had lost his Confederacy: “When Sidney Johnston fell, it was the turning-point of our fate; for we had no other hand to take up his work in the West.” As early as 1866, Johnston’s home state of Texas rallied to Davis’s notion that their adopted son had nearly won Shiloh before falling at the head of his men—and thus in a few seconds doomed the Confederate cause. A joint resolution of the Texas legislature passed in 1866, a year after the conclusion of the war, remarked of the battle fought four years earlier:
In the saddle, with the harness of a warrior on, the chieftain met the inevitable messenger of Fate. The pitiless musket-ball that pierced him spilled the noblest blood of the South. When he fell, all was from that moment lost! Victory no longer perched on our flag. Less competent hands guided the strife, and a genius of lesser might ruled in his stead. . . . From the fatal hour when the life-blood of the gallant Johnston moistened the earth—from that hour, sir, may be dated that long series of disasters, relieved, it is true, by heroic effort, and brightened from time to time by brilliant but barren victories—but reaching, nevertheless, through the darkness of successive campaigns, until the southern Cross descended forever amid the wall of a people’s agony behind the clouds upon the banks of the Appomattox.