Shiloh, 1862 (13 page)

In mid-December of that year, a month after Lincoln’s election and a mere week before South Carolina would vote to secede from the Union, Josie and her friend Jane Grider took the train to Memphis to spend the winter with Josie’s sister Jupe, and her husband, William Western, a prosperous lawyer and ardent secessionist, who owned a mansion in the Memphis Garden District. It was Josie’s first time away from home since she became, in her own words, “a full fledged ‘Young lady.’ ” But had it not been for Western’s “general good-naturedness,” her arrival might have invited a level of unwanted tension since, like her father, she remained a Unionist.

This general good nature did not necessarily extend to Memphis’s social circles, however, as Josie would soon discover. She was an attractive young woman and highly sought after by the town’s leading bachelors, especially a 28-year-old lawyer named Thomas Grafton. Josie soon felt herself as much drawn to the wealthy, witty, and handsome Grafton as she was repelled by his political views. He took her to a play, and instead of watching it he watched her; he brought her flowers.

As their relation blossomed it is evident from Josie’s diary how the most basic emotions became cramped, twisted, and too often torn apart by the prospect of secession. As weeks passed during the early winter of 1861, and more Southern states seceded, discussions often turned to arguments—or worse—as became the case with Tom Grafton.

Will Webb, another young lawyer in Memphis, the brother-in-law of William Western’s legal partner, was outspoken in his strong Unionist sentiments and less than circumspect in the way he expressed them. As Josie remarked to her diary, “The subject of secession like Banquo’s ghost
will not die down
but will come
up—no matter what the place or time—especially if Will Webb and Tom Grafton meet.”

The occasion this time and place was the Grand New Year’s Eve Ball at Memphis’s famed Gayosa Hotel,
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at which all of Memphis society turned out. In Josie’s estimation, it was “the most splendid affair I ever attended—my first big
full grown
ball!” With Tom Grafton as her escort, they encountered Will Webb, “whose bad taste started the subject,” she wrote, adding, “I as bad as any of them.” What infuriated her most was that whenever the secession issue came up Tom Grafton—in his most lawyerly fashion—would invariably link her to Lincoln and the abolitionists, who were despised in those parts, referring jokingly to “
your friend
Lincoln.”

Still, of all the young men, “Tom Grafton interests me most,” she admitted. “I don’t know just why.”

It was a scene playing out all over the state. Josie’s cousin, for example, a West Point graduate, was on the verge of becoming engaged to a girl who insisted that he resign his U.S. Army commission and join the Confederacy. Lifelong friends suddenly found themselves not just in opposite political camps but divided by hatreds that transcended politics.

Josie continued her conflicted relationship with Tom Grafton, often at the same time trying to talk herself out of it. “For truly I do not know whether I love him or not,” she wrote in her diary. “I know I don’t feel as I want to feel towards the man I would marry
but maybe there is no such exalted love as I imagine,” she said. “Yet I would not be satisfied with less, and his secessionism is a great barrier between us.”

One day word came that Grafton and Will Webb had become embroiled in a “personal altercation” inside the law offices during which Webb had called Grafton a “traitor” and a “liar,” and Grafton “jerked up a chair and would have killed Mr. Webb” but another of Josie’s cousins, Jack Henry, “sprang forward and caught the chair” and got the matter settled down. Grafton then “marched out glaring at Webb saying, ‘this is not the end. Sir—insignificant as you are, pistols make us even.’ ”

Next day Grafton sent his challenge to Webb, and for the rest of that day and the next the seconds were busy arranging for the duel across the river in Arkansas where such things were routinely conducted. The night before the affair was to take place, Grafton appeared at the Westerns’ residence, where Josie was, by chance, alone. As was the custom, a cloak of silence had descended over the matter of the duel, so neither the authorities nor the ladies, Josie included, were aware of it. There in the parlor Grafton professed his love.

He was an orphan, he said. Both mother and father died when he “was too young to remember,” and there were no siblings, and thus “there was no one to love him, even if he should die.”

He said to her, “Miss Underwood, I generally take life as it comes to me, and waste no time on self pity, but tonight I felt so unutterably lonely … [and] in my loneliness my heart turned to you.” He was leaving town next day, he said, “and then he told me—in words I can’t write—that he loved me—also that it was wrong for him to tell me—as he had already offered himself to his
state as a soldier, … and he could not ask any bright young life to be tied to his, but he found he could not leave me without trying for the happiness of winning a little word of love from me.”

She tried to soothe him but in the end could not bring herself to honor his request. “I don’t know just what to think of myself—whether I am capable of love or not,” she told her diary. “I tried to explain to him that I liked him more than any man I knew, … I don’t feel as he feels toward me—for he seems to be everything a girl might love except, alas! his desire to break up our country.”

He kissed her hand and said goodbye, then asked her “in a solemn sort of way ‘Pray for me tonight—for I have no mother to do it.’ ” And then he was gone.

Next day when Josie went in to breakfast she found that William Western had left early. She “couldn’t help but feel uneasy, just why I couldn’t say.” Her cousin Warner came in and informed everyone that Grafton had challenged Webb to a duel at sunup that morning, and suddenly she realized what all the talk of dying and going away had been about the night before. Her friend Miss Jane asked, “Are they dead?” When Western replied, “No, neither,” Josie’s “heart gave a great throb of joy!” He further explained that “they had gone across the river but with so many interested parties it leaked out and the [law] officers got wind of it and got there just in time to stop the awful murder and suicide, for that is just what a duel is.”

Josie saw Grafton a few times after that. Her stay in Memphis was cut short by the dramatic events surrounding secession and the forming of the Confederacy. “There is so much excitement and nobody knows from one day to another—what will happen next—that I think I must bring my visit to an end soon,” she wrote in
the early days of 1861. “The young men here have organized a company called the Shelby Grays, and all our Secession friends are in it.” That included Tom Grafton, whom she saw for a final time on January 31, 1861. There was a gathering at the Westerns’ “for the girls and gentlemen we have known best—about 30—to spend the evening.” When the evening came to an end Josie noticed Tom Grafton walking out the door and wondered why he had not said goodbye. Suddenly her cousin Jack Henry tugged on her sash from outside one of the tall, open French windows and asked if she “had a pin.” She thought that “he had met with some accident,” and stepped onto the wide veranda. “What can I do?” she asked, to which he replied, “Give it to Grafton.”

Tom Grafton stepped from the shadows. “I could not say good-bye to you in there,” he told her. Then, “with broken sentences, with feeling, repeated what he had before told me and taking my hand—lifted it quickly to his lips and was gone.” Again he’d confided his worry—that there’d be no one to grieve for him if he were killed. She lingered awhile on the veranda, her cheeks flushed, then her cousin came out. “That’s a fine fellow—don’t be too hard on him,” he told her. Josie’s world was quickly falling apart, and her story is intertwined with this tale. We will revisit her as it goes along.

At last, in early February 1862, with Halleck’s approval, Grant got his invasion of the South under way.

The Rebel general Tilghman was in Fort Henry on the Tennessee River with 3,400 Confederates on February 4 when Commodore Foote’s gunboats appeared several miles downstream, followed by a score of Ulysses Grant’s troop transports, whose smoke painted
the northern horizon with dark, warlike clouds “as far as the eye could see.” The men were in awe as they entered the enemy’s lair. They were mystified to see odd bunches of green leaves growing in trees that were supposed to be leafless in February—until someone informed them it was a plant called mistletoe. The body of a dead soldier floated by, whether Northern or Southern they could not tell. Sometimes they shot at people along the banks whom they feared might be Confederates. As they steamed deeper into Rebel territory, one Iowa soldier remarked ominously—if not ironically—to his companions, “The further we go, the larger the elephant gets.”

The transports put in to the bank about three miles below the fort, out of artillery range, and began debarking the troops under the firing cover of Foote’s four ironclads—the
Essex, Carondelet, St. Louis
, and the commodore’s flagship,
Cincinnati
—then returned to Paducah, 50 miles downstream, for more soldiers.

By the morning of February 6 all was in place. While Grant’s 15,000 soldiers floundered through the miry marshes toward Fort Henry, Foote’s big black ironclads steamed upriver in line of battle, four abreast. The firing commenced at a range of about one mile.

Inside Fort Henry there was an air of “unwonted animation,” according to Capt. Jesse Taylor of the Confederate States Navy—late of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis—who had been tapped to train the artillerists within Fort Henry in the management of large, anti-warship cannons. Artillery for the Confederacy was a major problem at that stage of the war. The Rebels had only what they had seized from Federal arsenals located in the South, which consisted mainly of field guns and the larger caliber cannons from shore batteries along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. When war broke out there were no cannon foundries in
the South, and it would be some time before the Confederates got these up and running.

Just before the Yankee onslaught General Tilghman had called together his senior commanders, including the enigmatic cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest, and all agreed that their 3,500 or so men, “armed with shot-guns and hunting rifles,” would be no match for Grant’s thousands. The sensible plan, then, was to evacuate the men to Fort Donelson and combine with its 12,000 troops to make a stand on the Cumberland. In the meantime, “recognizing the difficulty of withdrawing undisciplined troops from the front of an active and superior opponent,” Tilghman turned to Captain Taylor with a question: “Can you hold out for one hour against a determined attack?” When the reply was affirmative, Tilghman began preparing his men for the 12-mile march to Fort Donelson, leaving Taylor and his 54 artillerists to their fate.

When he first arrived at the fort Taylor had felt an ill-omened shiver of fear after noticing “a high water mark that the river had left on a tree which convinced me that we had a more dangerous foe to contend with than the Federals—namely, the river itself.” When he began directing his gunners toward Foote’s attack, the river was running 14 feet higher than normal. It had risen nearly to the mouths of the cannons and was threatening the ammunition magazine itself. Many of the gunners were up to their knees in water while they waited for the range to close.

As the gunboats “slowly passed up this narrow stream” the tension aboard the Yankee warships was acute. In the wheelhouse of
Carondelet
, her captain, Henry Walke, recorded that “not a sound could be heard or a moving object seen in the dense woods which
overhung the dark and swollen river.” The gun crews of
Carondelet
stood silent at their posts. “About noon,” Walke said, “the fort and the Confederate flag came suddenly into view, the barracks, the new earthworks, and the great guns well-manned.”
Cincinnati
, Foote’s flagship, fired the first shot, which was a signal for all to commence firing.

Watching from the ramparts of Fort Henry, where he had taken personal charge of a powerful 6-inch Whitworth rifle, Captain Taylor later wrote: “As [the ironclads] swung into the main channel they showed one broad and leaping sheet of flame. The command was given to commence firing from the fort. The action now became general, and for the next twenty or thirty minutes was, on both sides, as deliberate, rapid, and accurate as a heart could wish, and apparently inclined in favor of the fort.”

Aboard the hard-fighting but luckless
Essex
the steering apparatus had been shot away and she turned broadside in the river. Seventy shots had been fired from her 9-inch guns when calamity struck. A shell from the fort pierced the iron casemate—which was thinner amidships—decapitated the master’s mate, and went on to strike the middle boiler, releasing a horrible cloud of scalding steam. The captain, who had been standing nearby, was fearfully burned and leaped out a porthole. A number of officers and crew were killed outright at their posts, while many others were “writhing in their last agony.” In the pilothouse the steersman was found scalded to death, “standing erect, his left hand holding the spoke and his right hand grasping the signal-bell rope.” Everyone else in the wheelhouse was scalded to death, including an ammunition bearer who was found still on his knees, “in the act of taking a shell from the box to hand to the loader. The escaping steam had
struck him square in the face, and he met death in that position.”
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