Grant Moves South (36 page)

It went on for hour after hour, and the Union Army was driven back, closer and closer to the high ground above the steamboat landing—all except the hard core in the hornets' nest, which seemed immovable. Grant visited Prentiss here, late in the afternoon, when the hornets' nest was a blunt salient jutting far out in front of the rest of the line; again he told Prentiss to hold his ground, and rode off to patch up the sagging remainder of the battle line as best he
could. He saw Colonel Chetlain, dismounted and pale from a recent illness, with his badly battered 12th Illinois, coming back out of action; placed the regiment in support of a battery, told Chetlain to go back to the landing and lie down—“You ought not to have come out today”—and then dropped a word of encouragement. “I think they have done all they are going to do,” he said. “We have fresh troops coming, and tomorrow we'll finish them.”
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Yet the fresh troops did not arrive, neither Lew Wallace's division—both Rawlins and McPherson had been sent to hurry it along—nor Buell's men from Savannah, and they were needed desperately. Between heavy casualties, straggling, and the general disorganization, many units had virtually ceased to exist. Colonel Jesse Hildebrand, commanding Sherman's third brigade, found that his brigade had gone almost entirely to pieces; he himself, with no one to command, was serving on McClernand's staff. Colonel Stuart, who commanded Sherman's isolated brigade on the extreme left, had only eight hundred men left from his three regiments—one of these, 54th Ohio, boasting an average age of eighteen, had lost more than 50 per cent—and he led the remnant back toward the landing. Grant rode up, and sent the little brigade off to a new place in the line.
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Grant was placing many troops personally that afternoon. It may be that his biggest single contribution to what was finally classed as a victory was the encouragement he gave to badly beaten troops, simply by his presence and his obstinate refusal to act as if things were going badly.
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The 15th Illinois, driven from its position, badly mauled when a Union battery took it under fire, minus its field officers and able to muster no more than a hundred men, was led by Grant to a new fighting position. The 81st Ohio, driven from the area around the hornets' nest, met Grant and was sent back into the fight; driven back again, the regiment encountered Grant once more and was directed to another place on the firing line. The 11th Iowa, broken and in retreat, managed to reform; as it did so, Grant rode up and ordered it to counterattack. Later, retiring once more, it again met Grant, and was again ordered forward. Grant put Birge's Missouri sharpshooters in line, late in the day, and sent the 15th Iowa up to a weak spot in the line after that regiment had been forced to retreat. He found time to chat with Major Belknap, of this regiment; he asked for his name, and recalled that the Major's father
had been “Colonel Belknap, of the old army,” and added that they had served together in Mexico.
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Briefly, in midafternoon, Grant saw Buell, who had come down from Savannah on a steamboat. The two men talked, and accounts of their conversation conflict, which makes little difference—there was not much for them to say, since the general situation spoke eloquently for itself. Grant wanted Buell's troops at the earliest possible moment, and Buell would get them to the scene as quickly as he could. Rawlins insisted that Buell asked Grant what preparations he had made for retreat, and said that Grant replied he still thought he was going to win; Grant added, according to another account, that if necessary they could make a bridge of boats to the far side of the river and protect it with artillery. The bank above the landing was jammed with stragglers when Buell arrived—five thousand of them, at the least, and possibly more—and Grant believed that the spectacle made Buell feel that the situation was worse than it really was. Buell, for his part, wrote that Grant seemed dull, and he insisted that “there was none of that masterly confidence which has since been assumed with reference to the occasion.” The two men came ashore, mounted, and then went their separate ways. Buell believed that the number of disorganized stragglers may have been as high as fifteen thousand, and said that at the top of the bluff all was confusion.
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The confusion was genuine enough. Most of the men who huddled in the lee of the bank seemed totally demoralized. Wild rumors were in circulation: the whole army had been surrendered, a Rebel officer had been seen paroling a lot of dismounted Federal cavalry, fugitives were going to build rafts and float down the river all the way to Paducah and safety. Here and there officers made earnest but completely fruitless efforts to rally the men. A member of Grant's staff, returning to the landing, saw a mounted officer riding back and forth in the crowd, waving a flag and urging the men to come back and fight; the men heard him, unmoved, and one was heard to remark, casually: “That man talks well, doesn't he?”
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Late in the afternoon there came a lull, right on the heels of disaster.

The men in the hornets' nest were still fighting, but by now they
were isolated. They had killed General Johnston himself, when that energetic leader exposed himself too bravely in their front, but they had lost contact with the troops to their right and left, and now they were all but surrounded. W. H. L. Wallace undertook to pull his men out, and was mortally wounded; most of his soldiers got away, and went off toward the landing badly disorganized. At one open place, a disorganized crowd of soldiers heading for the rear was overtaken by a single gun galloping toward the landing; they assumed it was one of their own pieces joining in the retreat. Suddenly the gun wheeled, the gun crew dismounted and unlimbered it, and it began to fire rapidly into the backs of the fugitives: this was part of a Confederate battery, spear-heading a new attack. One Federal in the crowd said that the Confederates coolly went on loading and firing, while fugitives continued to scamper past. There were enough Union soldiers present, he said, “to pick up gun, carriage, caisson and horses and hurl them into the Tennessee,” but no one made any effort to capture the gun or silence the gunners.
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The hornets' nest finally caved in. Prentiss had done precisely what he had been told to do—hold on at all hazards—and so had his men, but now the end came. After Wallace's men left, the little division was surrounded. A long line of Confederate guns plastered the front at close range, and infantry swept past the flanks and got into the rear. Survivors dimly recalled a scene of complete confusion. A Texas colonel recalled that when Prentiss's lines finally cracked, a Federal officer galloped forward to meet the Confederate line of battle, crying: “Boys, for God's sake stop firing, you are killing your friends!” He and his horse were shot dead, and the line came sweeping on. Another Federal officer was killed as he rode toward the rear in, of all things, a buggy; then, while the Southerners regrouped for a new assault, there was a general cry of “White flag!” and “Cease firing!” and the uproar of battle died. Prentiss had surrendered, with approximately twenty-two hundred men. With the surrender, a half hour of comparative silence came down on the field.
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The Federals did not realize it, but conditions in the Confederate Army—it was Beauregard's army, now that Johnston was dead—were just about as disorganized as in their own. During much of the
battle, effective control of the Confederate attack had been exercised by a group of staff officers from the three Confederate corps, the corps commanders having been thrown out of effective touch with most of their troops. At the time Johnston lost his life, Beauregard had Hardee and a handful of staff officers rounding up stragglers to form improvised battalions to renew the attack on the Federal right—just as Grant, at about the same moment, had me creating similar formations out of disorganized men in his own rea After Prentiss's surrender, crowds of Confederates wandere through the hornets' nest, gaping at the prisoners, picking up souvenirs, and acting as if the battle had ended. At this particular stage, it is probable that neither army had more than half of its men on the firing line. Dour Braxton Bragg, commenting on the lack of discipline in the Gray ranks, wrote bitterly: “This is one of the evils of raw troops, imperfectly organized and badly commanded; a tribute, it seems, we must continue to pay to universal suffrage, the bane of our military organization.”
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The lull came just in time. Grant had Colonel Webster assembling all the siege guns and field artillery he could find in a compact line, a quarter of a mile inland from the landing, overlooking a ravine formed by a backwater that came in from the Tennessee; and Webster was working hard at his job—he had fifty guns, or more, arranged in a great shallow crescent, and if Beauregard's troops were going to reach the river they would have to overrun this powerful battery. Off in the woods, Confederate artillery was still firing, and shells were striking around the landing—so many that the ammunition-supply steamer
Rocket
cast off its lines and steamed down-river to get out of range. Webster's guns began firing in reply, and gunboats
Tyler
and
Lexington
moved in near the mouth of the backwater and opened fire with their heavy naval guns; the whole, said a staff officer, making “a noise not exceeded by anything I ever heard afterward.” A staff officer at Grant's side was killed by one of the Confederate missiles.
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A newspaper correspondent saw Grant sitting his horse in the midst of all of this, apparently unruffled. News of Prentiss's surrender had spread, and most of the men around the landing were very gloomy, and someone found the nerve to ask Grant if he did not think the situation extremely dark.

“Oh no,” said Grant. “They can't break our lines tonight—it is too late. Tomorrow we shall attack them with fresh troops and drive them, of course.”

The correspondent, describing this incident, said long afterward that “from that moment I never doubted Grant would be recognized not only as a great soldier but a great man.”
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And now, with the fragmented Union Army backed up almost to the river's edge, the long-awaited help arrived. Nelson's division appeared on the far side of the Tennessee, and steamboats began to bring the men to the landing.

Nelson's men had had a time of it. The original march down from Nashville to Savannah had been rather leisurely, since, as one officer wrote, “It was considered that there was no occasion for haste.” Several days had been spent getting across the Duck River, at Columbia; pontoons were not at hand, and the Army had not yet learned the art of building improvised bridges in a hurry. Most of the men waded, carrying their pants on their bayonets, their knapsacks loaded in wagons: one wrote after the war that by 1864 this business of the Duck River would hardly have caused a halt. Reaching Savannah, the men had gone into camp Saturday afternoon, and, although on Sunday morning they could hear firing up the river, no one had seemed in a great hurry. An Indiana soldier wrote that Buell seemed quite unconcerned, and said that men in his regiment paced impatiently up and down the bank “like so many caged animals.” One captain shouted that Buell was a Rebel; Buell, sitting his horse not forty yards away, seems to have heard the remark, but he ignored it. During the wait Colonel Ammen, commanding one of Nelson's brigades, went to the sickroom in the Cherry mansion to visit with old C. F. Smith. Smith was jovial, and laughed at Ammen for thinking that there was a great battle going on; it was only a picket-line skirmish, Smith insisted, but Buell's soldiers were accustomed to small affairs. As the racket went on, swelling and thundering all morning long, Smith changed his tune a bit, Ammen remembered, and admitted finally that “a part of the army” might be engaged.
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In any case, the march down the eastern bank of the Tennessee began around 1:30 in the afternoon. It had been hard to find good guides, and the roads were atrocious, but once the column got moving Nelson did his best to drive the men along fast. Ammen reflected
that of the three regiments in his brigade, one had been in action before and the other two had not; and the two regiments which had never fought were full of enthusiasm, crowding along impatiently and expressing the hope that the fight would not end before they got there. The veteran regiment was less impetuous, and seemed quite willing to let events take their natural course.
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Now, at last, Nelson's division was on the scene, and the men came ashore proudly, with bands playing, through the depressing backwash of stragglers, teamsters, dismounted cavalry and men whose fighting instincts had evaporated. Some of these seemed to be quite unmoved by the arrival of the fresh troops. Leading his brigade ashore, Ammen had to crowd through a huge mass of listless soldiers; an earnest chaplain was exhorting these men, “in whang-doodle style,” repeating in frantic voice: “Rally, men, rally and we may yet be saved! O rally, for God and your country's sake, rally …” No one was paying the least attention, and Ammen broke in: “Shut up, you Goddamned old fool, or I'll break your head. Get out of the way.” Some of the rear guard took new heart when they saw Nelson's men marching in. One of Grant's soldiers wrote that he could never forget the new hope that came to him when he heard Nelson's bands playing “Hail Columbia,” and he said the men all around him cheered “'till the whole woods on either bank fairly shook for joy.”
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The moment of crisis was over. Nelson's men were assigned to support Webster's immense battery, General Hurlbut was put to work organizing temporary units of stragglers, the still unbroken parts of Grant's army were drawn up to the right, and the artillery opened a stupendous cannonade. The Confederate attack, as a matter of fact, was about over for the day; a brigade or two had got into the ravine in front of the heavy guns and was trying in vain to renew the fight, but Beauregard could see that for the time being his army was utterly fought out, and he was ordering a halt and a general regrouping in preparation for another fight in the morning.
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