Grant himself at last grew tired of such speculation. In his Memoirs, published in 1885, he scoffed:
Some of these critics claim that Shiloh was won when Johnston fell, and that if he had not fallen the army under me would have been annihilated or captured. Ifs defeated the Confederates at Shiloh. There is little doubt that we would have been disgracefully beaten if all the shells and bullets fired by us had passed harmlessly over the enemy and if all of theirs had taken effect.
Had any others of the notable Confederate generals fallen at Shiloh—Bragg, Beauregard, Hardee, or Polk—few would have claimed any monumental significance in their deaths. But Albert Sidney Johnston was a different case altogether—an ideal subject for mythmaking for a variety of reasons that went well beyond his special status as supreme commander of the Confederate forces at Shiloh.
First was the manner of Johnston’s death. In very significant ways both its timing and nature lent credibility to the idea that a great Southern hero was within minutes of ensuring the lasting victory of the cause. Johnston seemed to have expired almost magically. Unlike the thousands of Shiloh dead who went into the night screaming, with ghastly holes to the head and intestines, or lingering for hours with entire limbs blown apart, Albert Sidney Johnston’s wound was nearly invisible and almost instantaneously lethal—no suffering, disfigurement, or last-minute moaning. Few of the Shiloh dying in the arms of friends were politely asked in their last minutes on earth if they were wounded, only equally solicitously to answer, “Yes, and I fear seriously.” Albert Sidney Johnston left the living at Shiloh with dignity, both spiritually and in the flesh. The circumstances of his end only cemented a previous reputation for innate humanity and courage; he had truly earned an immaculate demise through near divine dispensation.
Unlike Beauregard or Grant, Johnston was not merely at the immediate rear; he was, like Sherman, at Ground Zero of the killing. At this early juncture in the war, Lee and Jackson were not yet in the pantheon of Southern heroes. Johnston was better known than both and was considered until the weeks before Shiloh the savior of the Confederate cause. His miraculous escape from Federal agents to join the Confederacy in a long trek from California to Texas was already the stuff of legend. That he had not fought in a major engagement only fueled the fable: no one could deny that, when he fell, Johnston was winning his first and last battle against enormous odds.
Moreover, Southerners in general had special empathy for cavaliers, and so the idea that the ranking general of the entire Confederate Army would fall while mounted, leading his men against fixed positions, was seen as an especially heroic demise, one that likewise tended to overshadow all of Johnston’s prior difficult six months. Pericles, after all, two and a half millennia earlier, had told a grieving Athenian crowd that a soldier’s heroic death tended to wash away all of a man’s prior shortcomings. By some accounts, Johnston’s last charge of his life was the most successful—the wizened general, resplendent in black hat with nodding plume perched on the magnificent, Kentucky-bred Fire-eater. In contrast, had he been decapitated by a cannonball in a sea of shredded horseflesh as his men fled, failure coupled with grotesqueries would have been fatal to the creation of the Johnston romance.
There was also a certain logic to the simplistic Confederate assessment (everything good at Shiloh while he lived, everything bad after he died). Beauregard, remember, sent a telegram claiming in the late afternoon of the first day that the South had obtained a great victory. True, most disinterested students of the battle have made the case that Johnston wasted precious hours in vain assaults against the Hornet’s Nest that depleted Southern manpower and made the final assault on Pittsburg Landing impossible. And they have argued that while Johnston may well have ordered a twilight attack had he lived, it would most likely have been disastrous—given Grant’s concentration of batteries, gunboats, condensed lines, and the general Confederate exhaustion and confusion at dusk. Consequently, it was Albert Sidney Johnston’s good fortune to have perished quite literally at the Confederate high tide of the battle, before a sober realization had set in that already by midafternoon thousands in his army were dead, wounded, missing, or straggling, and that those left were probably too few and too tired either to finish off Grant’s army or survive the inevitable Northern counterattack to come. His previous eight and a half hours of fighting had not cracked the Union Army when he perished—and this ordeal proved that Union morale was not shattered, but often as resolute as the Confederates’.
Second, key to the growing legend was Albert Sidney Johnston’s demeanor and unshakable sense of honor and fairness—attested to well before his death during a lifetime of service for the United States, the Republic of Texas, and the Confederacy. In the bleak weeks before Shiloh, Johnston himself took full responsibility for a series of Southern disasters. When told by his staff that he was unjustly being attacked by the Southern press for his subordinates’ loss of Forts Henry and Donelson and the evacuation of Nashville, Johnston reported to Jefferson Davis, “With the people there is but one test of merit in my profession, that of success. It is a hard rule, but I think it is right.” Because the lesser ranked Beauregard arrived at Corinth with greater forces than those under Johnston, he selflessly offered him command of the entire Southern army at Shiloh. Beauregard later wrote, “I positively declined, on his account and that of the ‘cause,’ telling him that I had come to assist, not to supersede him, and offering to give him all assistance in my power. He then concluded to remain in command. It was one of the most affecting scenes of my life.”
Although his earlier career had been marked, like Grant’s and Sherman’s, with a string of professional and financial failures, Johnston had a well-known propensity to be magnanimous and charitable. He had resigned from the army to nurse his ailing first wife as she died from tuberculosis, and for a time attempted to raise his two children in isolation on a Missouri farm. His decade of politicking in Texas was characterized by repeated rejections of offers to run for state political offices. Despite distinguishing himself in the Black Hawk and Mexican Wars, his seeming lack of careerist ambition meant that he was without major commands until well into middle age. His dreary tenure as a Federal paymaster on the Texas frontier was known chiefly for his courage and honesty in safeguarding the transit of thousands of dollars—but offered little chance for acclaim or advancement. In the meantime his unattended plantation in Texas was nearing bankruptcy. When he was asked to lead an expedition against the Mormons in late 1857, Johnston led Federal forces safely through horrendous winter conditions, hostile Indians, and suspicious Mormons, and then avoided a shooting war through firm but reasoned patrolling outside Salt Lake City.
When the Civil War broke out, Johnston was the United States military commander of the Western theater, stationed in California. Some rumors circulated that he might be offered command of all Federal forces in the field. Yet he did not resign his commission until Texas had at last seceded from the Union—and then he refused to use his position in California to transfer Federal arms to Southern sympathizers. His “escape” to Texas across the deserts of the Southwest was a feat of courage and endurance, more so in that he deliberately sought to avoid conflict with Federal pursuers.
In short, the fifty-nine-year-old Johnston had a wealth of friends and contacts but had found almost no money or fame—suggesting that he had never used his offices for personal profit or notoriety. He was as well respected as Lee, but came across with a frontier accessibility and charm that was without aristocratic distance and formality. Southerners from all classes and regions—Johnston was born of New England parents, grew up in Kentucky, was educated for a time in the North, and lived variously in Missouri, Louisiana, and Texas—were enamored with him despite his propensity to resign jobs, lose money, fail in farming, and pass up promising political and military advancements. Just as martyrdom would later fit well with the pious Stonewall Jackson, and the nobility of the Lost Cause would characterize the long-suffering and noble Lee, so the Lost Opportunity found birth with the much admired Albert Sidney Johnston, in a way impossible with the others at Shiloh—the somewhat shady Nathan Bedford Forrest, the martinet Braxton Bragg, or the vainglorious Beauregard.
Third was Johnston’s intimate relationship with Jefferson Davis, who did much to protect his own record of ineptness by later attributing Confederate setbacks to the tragic loss of Johnston at Shiloh. On Johnston’s death, Davis announced to the Confederate Congress, “Without doing injustice to the living, it may safely be said that our loss is irreplaceable.” The two had known each other since adolescence when they were roommates in the medical school at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1821, been familiar at West Point, and subsequently served together during the Black Hawk War of 1832 and then again at Monterrey, Mexico, during the successful American invasion. Davis, as secretary of war in 1855, had appointed Johnston as a colonel and commander of the 2nd United States Cavalry Regiment stationed in Texas. On the eve of the Civil War, when Johnston arrived in Richmond after his miraculous escape from California, Davis made him full general and commander of all Confederate forces in the West, outranking Joe Johnston, Beauregard, and Robert E. Lee. “I hoped and expected that I had others who would prove generals; but I knew I had one, and that was Sidney Johnston,” Davis wrote, when he learned that Johnston had left Federal service and joined the Confederacy.
There was no doubt that Davis also stuck by Johnston out of long friendship and genuine confidence in his abilities. Shiloh, in Davis’s eyes, confirmed his original trust, proved his sniping critics wrong about Johnston, and of course became the subsequent basis for explaining away much of his own later ruinous conduct of the war. Because the postbellum Davis was an accomplished polemicist, prolific and long-lived, the Lost Opportunity at Shiloh garnered an important voice. Hours before he passed away, Davis still insisted to the end that he had to finish his memoirs and provide more detail about the noble character of his idol, Albert Sidney Johnston. Had Beauregard perished in Johnston’s place at Shiloh, it is more than likely that Davis would have remained silent about the consequences of his demise. Indeed, he probably would have been relieved that his flamboyant subordinate was at last gone.
A fourth reason for Johnston’s apotheosis was his own genius at repartee and impromptu speech, especially appreciated in a romantic society that valued wit and elegance. An entire corpus of Johnston’s aphorisms survives from his few hours at Shiloh. Many draw allusions from classical literature and reflect his earlier education—he read Latin well enough—and his love of dramatic adages. In the minutes before the battle, legend had it that he rode across the army yelling, “Look along your guns, and fire low.” When the first shots were heard overhead, Johnston calmly remarked, “Note the hour, if you please, gentlemen.” And as the army approached the battlefield, he shouted to his staff, “Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River.” To Colonel Marmaduke, he shouted, “My son, we must this day conquer or perish!”—perhaps a spin on King Leonidas’s admonition to his Spartans at Thermopylae that on the evening of the battle’s last day they would dine in Hades. A few minutes later he advised General Hindman, “You have earned your spurs as Major-General. Let this day’s work win them.” As he rode down the line before the initial charge, he paused at the Arkansas contingent: “Men of Arkansas! They say you boast of your prowess with the bowie-knife. Today you wield a nobler weapon—the bayonet. Employ it well.”
More formally, his last proclamation before the battle resembled something from Napoleon or perhaps an oration from Caesar’s Gallic or Civil Wars, with its references to family, honor, and the homeland:
With the resolution and discipline and valor becoming men fighting, as you are, for all worth living or dying for, you can but march to a decisive victory over the agrarian mercenaries sent to subjugate you and to despoil you of your liberties, your property, and your honor. Remember the precious stake involved; remember the dependence of your mothers, your wives, your sisters, and your children, on the result; remember the fair, broad, abounding land, and the happy homes that would be desolated by your defeat. The eyes and hopes of eight millions of people rest upon you; you are expected to show yourselves worthy of your lineage, worthy of the women of the South, whose noble devotion in this war has never been exceeded in any time.
In the moments before he was killed, he shouted to his officers, “Those fellows are making a stubborn stand here. I’ll have to put the bayonet to them.” Earlier in the morning he had rebuked an officer burdened with Union booty: “None of that, sir; we are not here for plunder!” Then taking up a worthless tin cup, he added, “Let this be my share of the spoils today.” Perhaps his last words to the rank and file were, “I will lead you.” Unlike the unlettered Forrest or the pretentious Beauregard, Johnston revealed a noble eloquence in speech that had the effect of remaining with Confederates for decades after Shiloh—and thus also contributed to the foundation of the martyred hero.
Yet a fifth contributing factor to the miraculous reinvention of Johnston was his physical beauty and rugged physique, which characterized every contemporary description of the general. More than any other commander, North or South, the imposing Johnston looked the part of a general. He had none of the foreboding massive brow of Bragg, nor the dapper almost effeminate appearance of the diminutive Beauregard—much less the suspect shabbiness of the dour Grant and nervous Sherman. As elegant as Lee, he lacked the former’s sense of frailty, and possessed the physicality of Forrest without his sinister stare. Rather at six feet two inches, 200 pounds, and square-jawed, he appeared the epitome of Southern manhood.
Contemporary descriptions, while hagiographic, nevertheless reiterate that common consensus. Veteran of Shiloh Colonel Munford wrote that Johnston “was tall, square-shouldered, full-chested, and muscular. He was neither lean nor fat, but healthily full, without grossness, indicating great bodily strength. His bust was superb, the neck and head mounting upward from the shoulder with majestic grace.” After continuing with a detailed description of Johnston’s mustache, chin, nose, forehead, eyes, skin, and posture, he summarized Johnston as looking near-divine. Munford claimed that while mounted, Johnston was “centaur-like” as if his horse “had grown up part of him.”
Nor were such encomia mere postbellum mythmaking. Well before the war, on the eve of his Mormon command, the Northern Harper’s Weekly reported:
Colonel Johnston is now in the mature vigor of manhood. He is above six feet in height, strongly and powerfully formed, with a grave, dignified, and commanding presence. His features are strongly marked, showing his Scottish lineage, and denote great resolution and composure of character. His complexion, naturally fair, is, from exposure, a deep brown. His habits are abstemious and temperate, and no excess has impaired his powerful constitution. His mind is clear, strong, and well cultivated.
Later, another contemporary of the general confirmed the view:
General Johnston reminded us of the pictures of Washington. He was very large and massive in figure, and finely proportioned. He measured six feet two inches in height, and had flesh to give him perfect symmetry. His face was large, broad, and high, and beamed with a look of striking benignity. His features were handsomely molded. He was very straight, and carried himself with grace and lofty and simple dignity. . . . His whole appearance indicated, in a marked degree, power, decision, serenity, thought, benevolence. We thought him then at first flush, and thought it unvaryingly afterward, and think now, in the hallowing memory of his noble manhood, made sacred by the consecration of his thrilling and heroic death for the Southern cause, that he was one of the sweetest and most august men we ever met. His character was enhanced by pure nobility. We thought him an object of deep veneration; and, whenever we look at the familiar and majestic features of the great Pater Patriae, we always think of Albert Sidney Johnston.
Like Washington, Johnston looked the part of a heroic general. His appearance complimented the majestic manner of his death, his long career, and his nobility in speech, thus also contributing to the spread of the myth of the Lost Opportunity.
After the initial hysteria over the losses of Forts Henry and Donelson waned, Southerners began to appreciate—and more often exaggerate—Johnston’s almost single-handed efforts to force the issue at Shiloh. He alone had marshaled the army. He had overridden the objections of Beauregard, who panicked on the eve before Shiloh and urged a general withdrawal. In words reminiscent of Don Juan on the eve of Lepanto, who had similarly quashed the prebattle jitters of his generals with a brief admonition, Johnston, it was said, broke up the late-night parley with, “Gentlemen, we shall attack at daylight tomorrow.”
In reply to worries about Grant combining with Buell before he could attack either, he was said to have remarked to Colonel Preston, “I would fight them if they were a million.” Moments before the firing started, Johnston broke up yet another meeting of his wavering generals with, “The battle has opened, gentlemen; it is too late to change our dispositions.” And when Johnston learned of the inability of his poorly trained divisions to form up in Beauregard’s clumsy three-line plan of attack, he scoffed, “This is perfectly puerile. This is not war!”
The Johnston legend had both immediate and long-term effects on the Southern acceptance of their own dilemma. Few appreciated in the weeks after Shiloh that with the loss of Kentucky and Tennessee, the Mississippi was ultimately defenseless to a relentless and determined man like Grant. He, along with Sherman and quite unlike other Federal generals, thought in terms of strategic conquests rather than tactical victories. Southerners seemed blind to the fact that the grubby-looking pair—complete failures in antebellum civilian life—cared little for manners or tradition, or the gentlemanly conduct of war. Both instead counted heads and bullets, and then in tandem planned to kill off and wreck as much Southern manpower and capital as their ever-growing resources would allow under the guidance and sanction of a realist like Lincoln, who lived in a pragmatic universe very different from the mythic realm of Jefferson Davis. There was rarely a serious and sober Confederate assessment that concluded with the depressing truth that vast advantages in manpower, supplies, political leadership, and talent among generals gave the North an insurmountable edge in the West—and that ultimately the war was to be won or lost there. No Southerner ever thought to ask why an entire people might believe that their own salvation hinged on the survival of a single near-sixty-year-old man like Johnston, who had never led a large army into battle.
The death of the general that created the Lost Opportunity fed into the even more attractive—and far more pernicious—Lost Cause, or the larger Southern notion that a tragic mishap had ruined a majestic Confederacy, not the vast superiority of Union arms, soldiers, trained officers, and the moral edge of eliminating rather than championing slavery. Instead, losing for a noble crusade of self-defense was seen as morally preferable to using industrial might to devastate an outnumbered enemy. The postbellum emphasis on Johnston’s character, appearance, and witticisms was entirely in line with this even larger mistaken credo that in the Civil War, chivalry, traditional gallantry, and heroic romanticism should have meant something for the “better men” in a contest against the likes of the rough-looking Lincoln and his equally odious and suspect pair of Grant and Sherman. The former calculated his edge in men and matériel, and then systematically wore down Lee, while the latter envisioned a new war that had nothing to do with battlefield heroics but everything to do with economic power, food, transportation, and the heart of a nation’s spiritual and psychological resistance. Southerners apparently found comfort that their martyred Johnston was a better looking, kinder, more mature, and gentlemanly commander than anyone the North might offer—as if all that should have somehow translated into military advantage in a new war of the machine age.
The tragedy of Albert Sidney Johnston dying “at the moment of victory” at Shiloh established a dangerous precedent, and was soon followed by the corollary of Stonewall Jackson being accidentally shot at the climax of Chancellorsville, therein robbing Lee of his “right arm” in the weeks ahead at Gettysburg and allowing a dilatory Longstreet to “lose the war” on Gettysburg’s second day. Ultimately, the embrace of such “second day” scenarios, where victory won was turned into defeat only by a chance event along with a predictable refrain of “almost,” “what if,” and “if only,” made it difficult for the postbellum South to accept, or perhaps even understand, the verdict of the Civil War—with unfortunate ramifications for the ensuing century. Since chattel slavery was outlawed at war’s end and the Union restored, the South often took refuge in the Lost Cause myth that the war had been fought solely over the remaining disagreement and principled issue of states’ rights. The perceived harshness of Reconstruction only added a patina of victimhood: with the Union reunited and all Americans free, what more did the North really want from a prostrate South?
Central to that fable of an aggrieved better people suffering for their principles was the requisite military side of the equation: the Lost Opportunity that in postbellum analyses of defeat swept away all rational social, economic, and military considerations and substituted instead the gallantry and genius of a few irreplaceable Southerners at a few key minutes. If the South, but for fate, could have defeated the North militarily, then perhaps its Cause was the more just after all. Yet if Confederate survival really was contingent on one landmark event, then a single Nathan Bedford Forrest put in independent command of a large army—something easily in the prerogative of Jefferson Davis—would have had far greater consequences on the war’s outcome than the tragic death of Johnston at Shiloh. But that “what if” of not utilizing Forrest properly involved the institutionalized stupidity that actually transpired rather than the romance that did not. Albert Sidney Johnston created a vast ripple at Shiloh that had a marked effect not only on the Civil War, but upon Southern culture itself. Yet it had far more to do with what was imagined than with what really did happen at 2:30 in the afternoon of April 6, 1862.
Albert Sidney Johnston and the Lost Opportunity still survive today. The last page of Wiley Sword’s well-researched and sober history of the battle, Shiloh: Bloody April, nevertheless ends with the death of Albert Sidney Johnston: “Like Johnston’s lifeblood, the Southern Confederacy’s hopes also began to ebb rapidly following the momentous events of Shiloh.” Nor is the Lost Opportunity confined to texts alone. Frederick C. Hubbard, sculptor of the Confederate monument at the battlefield, explained how he tried to couple the fall of the angelic Johnston with the accompanying ruin of the entire Confederate cause. “My underlying idea was to have the monument represent Victory defeated by Death and Night. Death took away General Johnston, and Night ended the battle just when Victory was in sight. The woman in the center, who represents the Confederacy, reluctantly relinquishes to Night and Death the wreath of Victory she holds in her hand.”
Albert Sidney Johnston in a single second at Shiloh had at last become something in death that for all his labors he had never been in life. And so the general who in the flesh had delivered not a single victory for his beloved Southerners, brought to their minds the everlasting reassurance that they had never really been beaten at all. Many today would still agree.
Evening: Ben-Hur
Albert Sidney Johnston’s death at 2:30 P.M. had stunned but not stopped the Confederate juggernaut—at least not yet. When the last defenders inside the Hornet’s Nest were finally overwhelmed by late afternoon, the Union Army had less than a third of its original strength—about ten thousand exhausted men—still on the battlefield. In fact, by evening Grant’s army spanned not much more than a semicircle of a few thousand yards surrounding the base at Pittsburg Landing. Where, a nervous Grant wondered, was Gen. Lew Wallace and the seven thousand men of his reserve 3rd Division?
That very morning on his way up the Tennessee River to Shiloh, Grant had stopped to warn Wallace at Crump’s Landing to be prepared to support his engaged army. But Grant’s verbal orders to Wallace from his gunboat Tigress at about 8:00 A.M. were given at least two hours after Sherman had first been attacked. Only when Grant himself finally arrived at Shiloh and saw the state of his crumbling armies did he send a second, stronger message back to Crump’s Landing sometime around midmorning: Wallace was immediately to march his division the six miles south to Shiloh and join the rest of the Army of the Tennessee.
That hurried summons must have reached Wallace sometime around 11:30 in the morning—several hours after his restless men had first heard the firing. Had Wallace departed at once, Grant later surmised, he should have been on line and pouring in critical reinforcements by 2:00 P.M.—at precisely the time that the Northern center and left came under the most intense attack by Albert Sidney Johnston. But when Wallace failed to show up on the battlefield in the early afternoon, Grant sent another desperate message to no avail. He finally dispatched his most trusted subordinates, Colonel McPherson and Captain Rawlins, to ride over and personally escort Wallace along the river road to the killing fields.
But when the two messengers made it back to Grant, they brought back incredible tales of wrong roads, time-consuming countermarching, and cumbersome wagons and caissons. Wallace was no nearer Shiloh than when he had started, and thus Grant’s battle was about to be lost without help! The Union commander was completely dumbfounded: it was now near dark, indeed well past 7:00 P.M.; his army was nearly annihilated—and thousands of his critical reserves mysteriously had disappeared a mere few miles from the battlefield! Where exactly had Lew Wallace taken his men?
Grant had reason to be worried. He had been caught unaware at Shiloh. On the morning of April 6 he was miles downstream at his headquarters to the north in Savannah, Tennessee, and without a clue that Johnston’s enormous Confederate army had surprised his unprepared divisions. Now his forces had been retreating all day. Nearly half his regiments were no longer in existence. Hundreds of his men were dying. Many were shot down while running away. Rumors circulated that Union soldiers had been bayoneted in their sleep. Without reinforcements he was likely to lose the first great pitched battle of the war in the West—and with it his own future in the Union Army. Although he had sent word to General Buell on the other side of the Tennessee River to march immediately with his supporting 20,000-man Army of the Ohio, Grant was not convinced that those critical divisions could cover the five miles to the river, be ferried across, and fall in line before his own army collapsed. And an earlier midafternoon advance meeting with a grumpy General Buell had not given him confidence about getting any salvation from that quarter.
There was also bad blood between the Armies of the Tennessee and the Ohio. Both generals knew that their near-independent commands within the Western theater were impractical and could not last. The older Buell resented the astonishing rise of the younger and once obscure Grant after his victories at Forts Henry and Donelson. And his doubts about his reckless rival were now apparently confirmed as he crossed the river at about 1:00 P.M. for a preliminary inspection of the growing mess at Pittsburg Landing. What he saw was shocking: thousands from Grant’s shattered army cowering in fright under the cliffs next to the water, apparently after running pell-mell from the battlefield. Terrified men yelled out, “We’re whipped! The fight is lost! We’re cut to pieces!”
If the now smug Buell were to be late with his twenty thousand men, Grant would be finished both at Shiloh and for good. Yet if the Army of the Ohio pranced in that evening to stave off a Confederate victory, the salvation of the first day’s disaster at Shiloh might be Buell’s alone. Some even wondered whether Buell was worried about putting his men at the rear of a collapsing army with the river at their backs—throwing good men after bad as it were—and thus despaired he just might not cross the Tennessee in time after all. In any case, the roads from Buell’s headquarters to the west bank of the river opposite Grant were in terrible shape. That meant no reinforcements until the evening at the earliest. So now Grant desperately turned to Lew Wallace, his own division commander, to march the six miles from Crump’s Landing and save the tottering Army of the Tennessee.
Yet Grant had problems with Lew Wallace as well. At thirty-five he was the youngest general in the Union Army. Wallace was a political appointee without much military experience and no formal training at West Point, who nevertheless was enjoying a meteoric career of his own, beginning with proven gallantry at Bull Run. As a major general, in theory he had no real superiors in rank. The dashing Wallace also had a tendency to be theatrical. At Fort Donelson he had magnified his role to reporters and claimed key responsibility for much of Grant’s victory. He bragged to his wife, “I saved the whole army from rout.”
Among the West Point generals, the amateur but cocky Wallace was hardly popular, due to his innate talent as well as his self-serving dispatches to reporters, his airs of intellectual superiority—he was said to write and paint—and his hypersensitivity to any perceived slight. Recently in his official report concerning the fighting at Fort Donelson, Wallace had left out mention of two of Grant’s personal aides, who were furious about the oversight.
Who knew where the flamboyant Wallace had gone, Grant steamed. It was nearing nightfall, nearly seven hours after his first message must have reached Crump’s Landing, a mere six miles away—and still no Wallace!
If Shiloh resurrected the professional life of a down-and-out Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and ended the worldly existence of Albert Sidney Johnston, it simply ruined the army career of an ascendant Gen. Lewis Wallace. In fact, April 6 would turn out to be the worst day in Lew Wallace’s long life. At dawn he was confused, by early morning somewhat annoyed, and now in later afternoon incensed.
It was bad enough that when the battle started, his battle-ready division was left isolated and without communications, guarding the army’s supplies down the Tennessee River at Crump’s Landing. Now with the sound of fire a few miles away, it was apparently to be held in reserve and out of the fighting altogether. At 8:00 A.M. a shocked Grant had steamed by Crump’s Landing on his way to the battle without even disembarking to give Wallace any clear-cut directions. He had merely yelled to Wallace on the deck of his riverboat to get his division ready should the early morning sounds of firing turn out to be a real battle:
“Well, hold yourself in readiness to march upon orders received.”
A disappointed Wallace answered, “But, general, I ordered a concentration about six o’clock. The division must be at Stoney Lonesome [the point of departure for the inland route to Shiloh]. I am ready now.” Grant, Wallace reported later, hesitated and did not take up the offer to order an immediate march. Instead the supreme commander finished with a cursory, “Very well. Hold the division ready to march in any direction.” Then he steamed in the Tigress on to Shiloh.
Wallace’s 3rd Division had heard gunfire at daybreak and been ready to march in that direction for at least two hours prior to Grant’s brief appearance. Now it would wait in readiness for another critical three hours for further orders—while a mere six miles away Sherman’s men were being slaughtered. At 11:30 a Captain Baxter, Grant’s quartermaster, finally arrived with the anticipated command to move. But for some reason the commands were not signed. Stranger yet, the orders had simply been poorly copied in pencil on lined paper:
You will leave a sufficient force at Crump’s Landing to guard the public property there; with the rest of the division march and form junction with the right of the army. Form line of battle at right angle with the river, and be governed by circumstances.
After asking Baxter a few more details about the murky, unsigned orders, Wallace was wrongly told that the Union forces were “repulsing the enemy”—when, in fact, the Union Army was in retreat!
It was now nearly noon. Wallace quickly was forced to make a decision about these strange ad hoc mandates from his commander. Did his superiors realize that there were not one, but two roads to Shiloh? True, the one course along the Tennessee River was the quickest to Grant’s base at Pittsburg Landing. But it did not end up at the “right” of the Union Army, where Wallace thought he had been ordered to deploy his reserves. And in many places that river path was swampy, nearly impassable for wagons and caissons, and indeed sometimes underwater altogether. In contrast, the inland route—the so-called Shunpike—led directly to Sherman’s right wing. It was also at least two miles shorter to that destination and a much better road. Wallace himself had previously repaired and reconnoitered it in the weeks before the battle just for the purpose of reinforcing the Union right wing should a crisis arise.
So now Wallace wondered about this vague order scrawled on ordinary ruled paper: was he to take the shortest route to Grant’s camp or the most direct way to the right wing of Grant’s army? After all, he had positioned his army at Stoney Lonesome in between the two roads to be prepared to depart to Shiloh in either direction. Was he to march thousands of men and their guns along a partly submerged road or over a route he had previously corduroyed and knew to be passable? Was he to arrive to join a victorious army in pursuit, as Baxter had (wrongly) implied, or to save a defeated force from annihilation? Which leg of the triangle was he to follow to its base of the Union battle line?
Wallace gave his men a mere half hour to eat. At noon he ordered them to set out to Shiloh along the inland route to join Sherman’s right wing: “So, to save the two and three-quarter miles,” Wallace wrote of his fatal choice, “and because it was nearer the right and in better condition, I decided to go by the Shunpike.” That decision in and of itself changed the life of General Wallace and ensured that the Union Army could not win the battle outright on the first day.
Be this as it may, Wallace’s division was nevertheless making record time along the Shunpike. To Grant he may have been lost and marching along the wrong side of the battlefield, but at least Lew Wallace was getting to Shiloh via the quickest route. In a mere hour and a half the 3rd Division had covered some five miles, and its advance guard was at last set to cross Owl Creek a few thousand yards from Sherman’s last reported position. In fact, in terms of ground covered, he had made much better time than any of General Buell’s generals, who were still on the wrong side of the Tennessee River. By 2 P.M., Wallace was at last about to send at least five thousand of his men to the Union right when a dispatch rider galloped up from his rear. “General Grant sends his compliments. He would like you to hurry up.”
Hurry up? Wallace was dumbfounded. Had he not left on first notice of Grant’s order? Was he not as they spoke almost at the battlefield? His army was marching in perfect unison, formed to fall in proper battle array next to General Sherman on the right of the Union battle line as ordered. Wallace dismissed the confused messenger. But then a second rider, a Captain Rowley of Grant’s personal staff, brought even worse news: “Where are you going, anyhow?”
“To join Sherman,” Wallace answered.
“Sherman! Great God! Don’t you know Sherman has been driven back? Why, the whole army is within half a mile of the river, and it’s a question if we are not all going to be driven into it.”
Instead of coming to the rescue of the Union right wing, Wallace was now on the verge of arriving behind the Confederate Army! “Fortunately for me,” Wallace later recalled of his stunned surprise, “the eclipse of my faculties did not last long, and I was able presently to comprehend that, with my division, I was actually in rear of the whole Confederate army!”
Why, Rowley wondered, had Wallace taken the inland route when Grant must have told him to march roughly along the river to what was left of the Union base camp? Incredibly, almost in sight of the battlefield, Wallace was now ordered to turn his army completely around, march back up the Shunpike the way he had come, cross over to the river route, and then go back around to Pittsburg Landing! This meant a circular route entailing perhaps another ten miles—in addition to the four to five he had already traveled. “Grant,” Rowley exclaimed to Wallace, “wants you at Pittsburg Landing—and he wants you there like hell.”
Somehow Grant’s earlier unwritten orders had become copied wrongly and perhaps disastrously garbled. Later in the battle’s aftermath the commanding general felt sure that he had ordered Wallace explicitly to use the river road and meet him at the Union base camp, a five-mile march that would have had the reserves arrive at Pittsburg Landing sometime around 2 P.M., just prior to the furious charges of Albert Sidney Johnston. As the afternoon wore on and the Union Army crumbled, a desperate Grant was irate that Wallace’s reinforcements had not arrived—completely ignorant of the fact that Wallace was nearly already at Shiloh, but out of sight, on the opposite side of the battlefield, and about to march into the enemy’s unexpected rear. It was a chance of a lifetime in some sense to send a fresh Union division at the backside of a tired Confederate wing.
Yet Grant later grumbled, “I never could see, and do not now see, why any order was necessary further than to direct him to come to Pittsburg Landing, without specifying by what route. His was one of three veteran divisions that had been in battle, and its absence was severely felt.” Grant finished with a sneer, “I presume his idea was that by taking the route he did, he would be able to come around on the flank or rear of the enemy, and thus perform an act of heroism that would rebound to the credit of his command, as well as to the benefit of his company.”
A taken-aback Wallace now wondered what to do. In sight of the battlefield, he was without warning ordered to retrace his steps to his original camp miles away and then turn back again to follow a marshy and nearly submerged road. Worse, to keep the proper order of his division, Wallace did not order an about-face, the rear now becoming the front. Rather he countermarched the entire division brigade by brigade! The complicated turning maneuver required a painful delay of nearly an hour as the confused army sorted itself out. Unfortunately, Grant’s latest frantic messengers, Colonel McPherson and Captain Rawlins, caught up with Wallace just as he reached the crossroads that morning, and turned to make his way over to the river road—not far from the very spot he had departed over three hours earlier.
Thousands of Union soldiers were wounded and dying, and Lew Wallace’s relief division was no closer to the battlefield than when it had first left hours earlier. Grant’s panicky messengers demanded that Wallace now abandon his batteries and march his division the rest of the way on the double to Pittsburg Landing. He refused, insisting that his division must arrive fully armed, in close order, and ready for battle. The panicked McPherson and Rawlins rode back in disgust—with wild tales of Wallace’s incompetence and insubordination. His army was marching in circles!
Wallace finally arrived at the landing in the rain after dark and groped his way through the mess of Union fugitives, wounded, and dead. No one from Grant’s staff even met him; he spent most of the night getting his division to the right of Sherman on the Union’s last-ditch circumference. Rawlins later wrote to Grant of his encounter that afternoon with Wallace, when the division had finally turned on to the river route:
Colonel McPherson and I came up to him about 3:30 o’clock P.M. He was then not to exceed four or four and a half miles from the scene of action; the roads were in fine condition; he was marching light; his men were in buoyant spirits, within hearing of the musketry, and eager to get forward. He did not make a mile and a half an hour, although urged and appealed to, to push forward. Had he moved with the rapidity his command were able and anxious to have moved after we overtook him, he would have reached you in time to have engaged the enemy before the close of Sunday’s fight.