Shiloh, 1862 (28 page)

This had been a mistake; there were still about 400 men left (of the brigade’s original 2,467 who had been present for duty at the start of the battle), and they wanted a leader. By then, Dawes said, “bullets came from many points of the compass,” which was aptly illustrated by a man who was shot in the shin of his leg. “Go to the rear,” said Captain Jones, and the man staggered off into the brush. Presently he staggered back, saying, “Cap’n. Give me a gun. This blamed fight ain’t
got
any rear!”

Dawes and the other Federal units continued a fighting retreat with the Rebels pressing upon them like a fiery hot breath. “The Confederates charged; there was a brisk fire for a few moments. Our line gave way at all points,” Dawes said. When the lieutenant was finally able to survey the situation he found that the 53rd Ohio had been reduced to himself and seven men. As they struggled northward they came upon a brass cannon that had somehow got stuck between two trees, and upon one of the horses that was hauling it sat a man, crying. Dawes detailed his men to free the piece and moved on.

“I had no idea where we were, and I think no one else had,” Dawes continued. “All around was the roar of musketry, but immediately about us was literally the silence of death. The ground was strewn with the slain of both armies.” Then up ahead Dawes saw
the sergeant major of the 77th and called out to ask him if he knew where his regiment was.

“I don’t know,” the sergeant major replied. “I was captured this morning and just escaped.”

“Come with us,” shouted Dawes.

“No,” he said, “I am going with this regiment,” pointing to “a regiment in full ranks, marching through a field on lower ground, uniformed in blue, marching smartly by flank to a drum beat.” Dawes was suddenly perplexed. “It did not seem possible,” he said, “that a Union regiment in such condition could be coming from the battle line.” He moved nearer and took a closer look, then tugged at the sergeant major, and hissed, “They are Rebels.”

“They are not,” insisted the sergeant major, but just then “the wind lifted the silken folds of their banner. It was the Louisiana State flag!” This was, in fact, the illustrious Orleans Guards battalion Gardes d’Orle’ans, the Louisiana French-Creole regiment mentioned earlier who went into battle in their prewar blue Federal militia uniforms and at one point were attacked by soldiers from their own side.

Dawes and his little band of fugitives continued to wander north, seeking some sign of their regiment or brigade—even their division. Someone pointed out a man on a horse wearing a long brown duster, about 200 yards distant, and said, “There is major Sauger” (one of Sherman’s staff officers). “I ran towards him (wherever I went the seven men of our regiment followed),” Dawes said, “waving my hat to attract his attention. I came up with him and [saluting] said, ‘Major, where is our brigade?’ ”

“I don’t know where anybody is,” came the reply, and as the officer turned Dawes was startled to see revealed a uniform of Confederate gray under his long, brown duster.

“At just that moment,” said Dawes, “a stand of grape [shot] came whirring through the air and struck just under his horse, the horse ran away and I never heard the rest of the story.” It was only afterward Dawes learned that he had just reported to the Rebel general Thomas Hindman.

At that point a Confederate battery set up uncomfortably close and began throwing shot and shell Dawes’s way. “It did not seem best to try to drive it away with seven men,” he said, but concluded that its line of fire was most likely pointed to where the Union troops were, so Dawes decided that, “if we could follow [the Rebel shells] and not get shot, we could surely find somebody.”

By this point it must have seemed like they were marching toward the end of the world, but about half a mile down an old farm road they came upon Colonel Hildebrand, their erstwhile brigade commander, “sitting on his horse by an old log barn, intently watching the swaying lines and waving banners of troops fighting in a long open field to the south.”

“Now we are all right,” Dawes told his men, and he went up to the old colonel, asking, “Where is the brigade?”

“I don’t know,” was the reply. “Go along down that road and I guess you may find some of them.”

Dawes suddenly became indignant, and then insubordinate. “Why don’t you come with us, get the men together and do something?” he demanded.

“Go along down that road,” Hildebrand snapped. “I want to watch this fight.”

“Cannon shot were whizzing through the air, bullets were spatting against the old barn,” Dawes said. “It was not an ideal place to tarry.” He marched his seven men down the road that the colonel
had suggested, presently coming upon a fellow officer, Lieutenant Henrickle, “a typical battle picture. His arm and shoulder were covered with blood where a wounded man had fallen against him. His coat was torn by a bullet; his face was stained with powder; his lips were blackened by biting cartridges; he carried a gun. His eyes shone like fire. He was the man we had long sought. I said to him, ‘Jack, where is the brigade?’ He pointed across a ravine and said, ‘Part of your regiment and part of mine are right down this way a little.’

“I felt like falling on his neck and weeping for joy,” Dawes said.

Captain Dawes’s odyssey that morning, or something like it, was being played out all through the rest of Sherman’s brigades and regiments, who were being driven relentlessly back by the Rebel onslaught. Men lost, men confused, men frightened; men surrounded by death and hating themselves for becoming inured to it, or for being scared by it; men who were trying to do their duty and men who had abandoned it. They were not ready for this contest—but the Confederates were just as green. Death was in the air, and there was nothing left but to fight it out and let the devil take the hindmost.

Very soon after rejoining the 53rd Ohio, now reduced to 250, Dawes and his seven faithful men were placed in a long, jagged line containing the remnants of Sherman’s and Prentiss’s divisions, as well as men from the divisions of W.H.L. Wallace, McClernand, and Stephen Hurlbut, who were girding themselves for a last stand along a stretch of the battlefield more than a mile back from their original line. What would happen during these next few hours would stand prominent in history alongside Gettysburg’s Cemetery Hill, Pickett’s Charge, and the Bloody Lane at Antietam. But those things were all in the future, including the next two hours at
Shiloh, and the American people at that point had no idea, no context, for grasping the scope of the devastation and the overwhelming suffering caused by this civil war. They would learn it, though, as it hit them periodically, like terrible shock waves, one after the other, when the battle news came in.

During all of that violent and gory morning Sherman had been riding around his collapsing lines trying to shore people up and redirecting traffic as best he could. He had been shot twice, including the painful wound in his hand he’d got in his original encounter. He had wrapped it in a handkerchief and stuck it inside his tunic and kept going. Three horses, including his favorite mare, had been shot from under him.

An aide from headquarters who appeared at midmorning to check on how things were going found Sherman resting briefly beneath a tree. “Tell Grant if he has any men to spare I can use them. If not, I will do the best I can. We are holding them pretty well just now, but it’s hot as hell.”

U
LYSSES
S. G
RANT, FROM HIS HEADQUARTERS
at Savannah, Tennessee, had boarded the steamboat
Tigress
for Pittsburg Landing. By most reckonings that would have been between 7 and 7:30 a.m., and it would probably have taken
Tigress
about two hours to make the nine-mile trip upstream against the swift current of the flooded river.
¹

Before leaving, Grant fired off a message to Buell, who had arrived during the night on the outskirts of town with an advance party, saying there was a battle in the works and he had best prepare
to march his men toward a spot opposite Pittsburg Landing where they could be ferried across by the available steamboats. Meantime, Maj. Gen. “Bull” Nelson—the gigantic Kentuckian and Annapolis graduate whom Grant had sent to take Nashville after the fall of Fort Donelson—was stewing in his own juice. Nelson’s division, the vanguard of Buell’s army, had arrived just outside Savannah the afternoon before, where Nelson somehow developed a premonition of a Confederate attack on Grant’s army.

On Sunday morning, just as his troops were preparing for inspection, the noise of battle began to drift from Pittsburg Landing toward Savannah and stirred Nelson into action. “He had not yet arisen,” recalled an aide, when “he sprang from his couch. He called for Lieutenant Southgate … and ordered him to have the brigade commanders to have their men in readiness to move at any moment.” Then he sent another aide to see if any transports had arrived during the night. As the firing continued, the aide said, Nelson, “still awaiting Grant’s orders, chafed like a lion caged. He ate no breakfast, paced up and down before his tent, could not be pacified, and would not be pleased with anything or anybody.”

Finally, “unwilling to endure his torturing suspense, he mounted his horse and galloped to Grant’s headquarters,” only to find that the commanding general had left. But soon after that—the aide gives the hour at a little past 8 a.m.—Nelson received Grant’s orders to march his division “to a point opposite Pittsburg,” saying, “You can easily find a guide in the city.” It was a good thing, too, that Grant had thought to set these people in motion; he was going to need all the infantry divisions he could get.

A little less than halfway up the Tennessee from Savannah to Pittsburg was Crump’s Landing, where the division of Lew Wallace
had been parked because it was felt there was not enough room for it to camp at Pittsburg. As they neared Crump’s Grant told the steamer skipper to run in close. There, in anticipation, Lew Wallace was waiting on the shore and shouted out, “My division is in line, waiting for orders.”

Grant hollered back that as soon as he reached Pittsburg Landing and found out where and what the attack was he would send him orders. This Grant did, but for reasons never quite fully explained Lew Wallace’s division never arrived on the battlefield that day.

Grant continued on toward the sounds of the firing, which became alarmingly heavy the farther south they steamed. It was going to be a difficult day all around for Grant: Two nights earlier when his horse slipped in the darkness of a rainstorm he’d fallen on his ankle, badly spraining it, and he was reduced to using crutches.

When he reached Pittsburg Landing, Grant was mortified by what he saw. Streams of stretcher bearers were carrying wounded to hospital boats. Officers were shouting madly to get men moving off of other boats, and even to keep boats from fleeing. Horse and mule wagons hauling cases of cartridges and artillery ammunition were driven in clouds of astonishing profanity to the top of the bluff where they could be distributed along the fighting front.

Most galling, the entire slope from brow to basin was thronged with thousands of panic-stricken shirkers and stragglers who were cowering beneath the cover of the bluff—and more coming in all the time—many of them crying out to anyone who would listen, “We are whipped! We have been cut to pieces!” Grant seemed to exhibit a rare sort of sympathy toward them, unlike some of the officers in his and Buell’s armies who threatened to have them
hanged or shot or (Buell’s own preference) have the navy gunboats turn loose their cannons on them.

“It was a case of Southern dash against Northern pluck and endurance,” Grant wrote later in his memoirs. “Three of the five divisions engaged on Sunday were entirely raw, and many of the men had only received their arms on their way from their states to the field. Many of them had arrived but a day or two before and were hardly able to load their muskets according to the manual.”

In any case, Grant realized that most of these men “would rather be shot where they lay” than return to the fight, and he wasted no time on them. Hoisted upon his horse with the crutches strapped to his saddle, he rode off the steamer plank where he was met by his adjutant John A. Rawlins, who told him the attack was general, all along the Union lines. Thus informed, Grant and his staff rode up the hill toward the shooting.

Lt. William R. Rowley, one of Grant’s aides, trotted up after watching the influx of stragglers and other fugitives from the fighting.

“General, this thing looks pretty squally, don’t’ it?” he asked.

“Well, not so very bad,” Grant replied. “We’ve got to fight against time now. [Lew] Wallace must be here very soon.”