Grant Moves South (38 page)

More than this, under the circumstances, Grant probably could not have done. Yet from this distance it seems clear that the great missed opportunity at Shiloh was the failure to press the retiring Confederates pitilessly during the twenty-four hours following Beauregard's withdrawal. The Union Army was worn out, and its command arrangements were very imperfect; but the Confederates' plight was desperate. They were, in short, ready to be had, and a driving chase down the muddy roads to Corinth might have knocked them out of the war for good. Braxton Bragg, who was one of the most dour pessimists in either army but who nevertheless had
a clear military eye, wrote to Beauregard on the morning after the battle: “Our condition is horrible. Troops utterly disorganized and demoralized. Road almost impassable. No provisions and no forage; consequently everything is feeble.… Our artillery is being left all along the road by its officers; indeed, I find but few officers with their men.” A few hours later he sent in another gloomy report: “If we are pursued by a vigorous force we will lose all in our rear. The whole road presents the scene of a rout, and no mortal power could restrain it.”
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One solid blow on April 8 could have shattered the Confederate Army beyond repair, but the Federal Army was not up to it. The Federals followed their foes just long enough to make sure that they had actually left the premises and then stopped, and although Grant exhorted both Sherman and McClernand to jam the Rebel rear guard with cavalry and infantry in hot pursuit,
⁹
nothing much came of it. The Unionists went into the camps they had occupied before the battle began, the Confederates loitered just out of gunshot range, and the terrible battle of Shiloh was over. Between them, Grant and Buell had lost more than 13,000 men, Beauregard had lost more than 10,000, and the greatest battle ever fought on the North American Continent up to that date had come to a conclusion.

It had been a very near thing indeed, and the most that could be said for the Northerners was that they had beaten off an unexpected attack; and yet one of the decisive struggles of the Civil War had been won. The end of the war was a long way off, in April of 1862, yet when the exhausted Confederates drifted southwest from Pittsburg Landing a faint foreknowledge of what that end would be went down the road with them. The Northern victory had been purely negative, but it was of far-reaching consequence.
¹⁰
For this was one battle which the Confederacy had had to win in order to survive, and the Confederacy had not quite been able to win it. In the long run many things killed the dream of Southern independence; one of them, compacted in the wilderness above the Tennessee River, was made up of the desperate fighting of many Middle Western soldiers, the power of the row of guns on the bluff in the twilight … and, with these, the unbreakable stubbornness of Ulysses S. Grant.

Beauregard had a stubbornness of his own, and he was in no haste
to get back to Corinth. On Tuesday he was still close enough to the battlefield to send a note to Grant, under flag of truce, proposing that a Confederate burial detail be allowed to go back to the Shiloh area to bury the Confederate dead. Grant sent a reply the following morning, remarking that because of the warmth of the weather he had promptly assigned heavy details to such duty and that the dead of both armies were already under the sod.
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The work was not done quite as rapidly as Grant may have imagined. An Iowa soldier said that his regiment was kept busy on this assignment for most of the week, wrote that “it is an awful sight to see the dead lying all about,” and remembered that seven hundred dead Confederates were put in one enormous grave. An Indiana cavalry colonel wrote home in mid-April saying that “men who were killed a week ago are still unburied,” and he added that many wounded had not yet been given medical attention.
¹²

There was a great deal to be done, for the formless battle of Sunday had revealed gross imperfections in Federal drill and discipline. The thousands who had strayed from their commands had to be brought back into camp and kept there. Officers who had fled incontinently had to be sent home, and the dismayingly large number of wounded had to be cared for. Hospital boats were coming upstream, and Halleck wired that arrangements had been made to care for 10,000 casualties in hospitals at Cincinnati; in addition to the wounded, the army had many men down with illness, and volunteer Samaritans of high and low degree from the Middle Western states were hurrying to the scene to help them. Once the pursuit had been halted, Grant issued orders prohibiting soldiers or citizens from passing picket lines, stationing cavalry details on all approaches to the camps, tightening the regulations about sanitation, and cracking down on one of the oddest habits of this poorly trained army—the custom of promiscuously firing muskets on any and all occasions. In wet weather, a whole regiment might discharge its muskets in the air just to see whether the powder charges had dampened; a newspaper correspondent referred to “this abominable habit,” and said there had been such a continual pop-popping of firearms before the battle that men in camp paid no attention to a skirmish-line clash, so that when the battle began on Sunday many soldiers assumed that it
was nothing more than the casual routine of firing muskets at nothing. Grant's order specified:

All firing by the troops is positively prohibited in camp. Where it is necessary to discharge fire-arms it will be done under proper regulations, made by division commanders, and such men as are to discharge their pieces will be marched in an orderly manner to the front of the outguards for that purpose and back to their camps.
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The mere fact that such an order was necessary tells a good deal about the carefree, happy-go-lucky atmosphere that had prevailed before the battle.

Shortly after this, Grant followed with another order: each division commander was to detail ten mounted men, under a commissioned officer, to patrol the camp and arrest all officers and men who fired their weapons in disregard of this regulation. All enlisted men found outside their proper camps were to be arrested, as were all civilians who could not display passes signed either by the Departmental Commander or by a general commanding an army corps. There was to be more work, too, and Grant's order frankly admitted the need for it: “Most of the command being deficient in drill and discipline, division commanders will see that as many hours per day as is consistent with the health of the men be devoted to drill and that company commanders excuse no soldier from any part of his duties.”
¹⁴

With all of this, Grant was considering the next move. On April 9, forty-eight hours after the battle ended, he sent this dispatch to Halleck:

There is but little doubt but that the enemy intend concentrating upon the railroad at and near Corinth all the force possible leaving many points heretofore guarded entirely without troops. I learn this through Southern papers and from a spy who was in Corinth after the rebel Army left.

They have sent steamers up White river to bring down Van Dorn's and Price's commands. They are also bringing forces from the East—Prisoners also confirm this information.

I do not like to suggest but it appears to me that it would be
demoralizing upon our troops here to be forced to retire upon the opposite bank of the river and unsafe to remain on this, many weeks, without large reinforcements.

The attack on Sunday was made, according to the best evidence I have, by one hundred & sixty-two regiments. Of these many were lost by killed, wounded and desertions.

They are at present very badly crippled and cannot recover under two or three weeks. Of this matter you may be better able to judge than I am.
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Halleck, meanwhile, was on his way to Pittsburg Landing, to exercise active command in the field. Powerful reinforcements would be available. John Pope had finally taken New Madrid and Island Number 10, and his strong army could be used; for a time Halleck was uncertain whether to send it straight down the Mississippi toward Memphis or to bring it around and up the Tennessee to join Grant and Buell, and he told Secretary of War Stanton that he could not decide until he learned more about Rebel strength at Corinth. He concluded presently that Pittsburg Landing was the place, and Pope was ordered to bring his army to the scene without delay, leaving enough men with Commodore Foote, on the Mississippi, to enable that officer to land troops and occupy Fort Pillow if the Confederates should evacuate that post.
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On April 9, Halleck notified Grant that he was leaving St. Louis, and that substantial reinforcements were coming. He added the warning: “Avoid another battle, if you can, till all arrive. We then shall be able to beat them without fail.”
¹⁷

Halleck arrived without much delay, and on April 13 he issued General Orders Number 16, officially thanking Grant and Buell and their soldiers for the victory. His order remarked that “The soldiers of the great West have added new laurels to those which they had already won on numerous fields,” emphasized the need for greater discipline and order, and stated that Grant and Buell would retain the immediate command of their respective armies in the field. On the heels of this Halleck sent Grant a stiff but not unfriendly note demanding that he get his troops into better shape:

Immediate and active measures must be taken to put your command in condition to resist another attack by the enemy.
Fractions of batteries will be united temporarily under competent officers, supplied with ammunition, and placed in position for service. Divisions and brigades should, where necessary, be reorganized and put in position, and all stragglers returned to their companies and regiments. Your army is not now in condition to resist an attack. It must be made so without delay. Staff officers must be sent out to obtain returns from division commanders and assist in supplying all deficiencies.
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The interesting thing about this note—in view of Halleck's readiness to cast blame on a subordinate—is the fact that it was not a great deal sharper; for Grant was coming under heavy criticism by newspapers and by politicians for his handling of the first day's fight at Shiloh. At no time in the war was he more bitterly attacked, publicly, than now, and the accusations ranged all the way from the old charge of drunkenness to the allegation that through blind incompetence he had allowed his army to be caught completely by surprise.

The country got its first news about the battle from a dispatch which the
New York Herald
published on April 10—a clean “beat,” scored apparently by an enterprising character named W. C. Carroll who got downstream to the telegraph station at Fort Henry ahead of all the other correspondents and sent the
Herald
an enthusiastic and inaccurate account of a massive victory which reflected unsullied glory on the national arms. Carroll had been serving briefly as a volunteer aide on Grant's staff—it was not uncommon then for a correspondent to wangle such a position with some general—and he was frankly out to present the General and his accomplishments in a favorable light. Months afterward, he wrote that at the close of the battle he had appraised “the bitterness of feeling and jealousy of Gen. Buell and his officers toward General Grant and the Illinois troops,” and had concluded that they would try to bring General and Illinoisans “into disrepute by a series of false and slanderous reports”; as a result, he raced for the telegraph office determined to get a properly oriented account before the public.
¹⁹

His story made a huge splash. It began by asserting that “one of the greatest and bloodiest battles of modern times” had just ended in complete rout of the enemy; it contained a fantastic overestimate of the number of casualties (from 18 to 20 thousands of Federals,
and between 35 and 40 thousands of Confederates) and it contained no hint that the Confederate attack had not been fully expected and prepared for. It also included the completely false assertion that Grant in person had turned the tide, on the second day, by himself leading a desperate charge on the Rebel position, brandishing his sword “while cannon balls were falling like hail around him.”

Carroll's story was not very long, and there was not actually a great deal of meat in it, but the
Herald
played it as a magnificent scoop and fleshed it out by printing, with the runover, nearly a solid page of secondary material—biographical sketches of the leading generals, an account of the strategic significance of the Corinth area, and so on. Its Washington bureau got busy, a copy of the dispatch was sent to the White House, and the document was read aloud to an enthusiastic House of Representatives. Secretary Stanton issued a statement congratulating generals and troops for this and other victories, and ordering every regiment in the nation's armies to convene on the following Sunday and listen to prayers of thanksgiving. Other newspapers all around the country reprinted the
Herald
's dispatch, after the fashion of that day, New York City was bedecked with flags and bunting, and reporters who came north from Shiloh a day or so later found victory celebrations going on in towns in southern Indiana and Ohio.
²⁰

This did not last very long. One correspondent at Shiloh was young Whitelaw Reid, who wrote dispatches for the
Cincinnati Gazette
under the pen name A
GATE
. Reid was with Lew Wallace at Crump's Landing when Grant's steamer came up the river on the morning of April 6, and he slipped on board while Grant was talking over the railing with Wallace, rode on upstream, and got off at Pittsburg Landing at the same time Grant did. He spent two days in the battle area, doing a good reporter's best to get a comprehensive account of everything, and what he learned appalled him. (Sherman bitterly declared, later, that Reid got a highly slanted version of the battle from Buell and Nelson.) Reid lost the race to the telegraph station, and went on all the way to Cincinnati, where, almost exhausted, he worked at prodigious speed to write out a complete story. The
Gazette
promptly put it into type, the
Herald
reprinted it on April 14, and the gloss permanently vanished from Carroll's jubilant and sketchy story.