Shiloh, 1862 (31 page)

In the far southeast of the Pittsburg Landing camp a Yankee picket named William Lowe had stationed himself 50 yards from a house and was lost in lonely meditations as the firing neared, when suddenly “a man emerg[ed] from the brush on the right of the road and went to the house. His hat was pulled down over his eyes and he did not see me, but I was pointed out to him by a woman at the door.

“He came over to where I was,” Lowe said. “The tears were coursing down his cheeks. He had been over in the rear of the Confederate army and said they were killing men by thousands. He had been to get their general to move his family back out of the reach of the battle.”

Lowe told the resident that he would be better off moving his family behind the Federal line, but the man demurred, saying he had no preference for either side, he just wanted out. “He insisted on bringing me a chunk of pone and some milk,” Lowe said, “which I declined.” Lowe questioned the man about the size of the Rebel army, “but I could get nothing out of him except that they were ‘a powerful sight.’ ”

As the Battle of Shiloh rolled northward, Beauregard moved his headquarters along behind and by noon was nearing the Shiloh church where Sherman’s headquarters once had been. He continued feeding troops into the cauldron of battle, but by now most units were already committed. Following the practice of his hero Napoleon, Beauregard sent troops marching toward the sound of the loudest fighting, for which he was later criticized, since much of the present fighting was in the Union center and it had been Sidney Johnston’s clear intention to roll up the Yankee left flank, which was
anchored on the river. Johnston’s purpose was to separate the Federals from any escape or reinforcements via Pittsburg Landing and the river transports and drive them to surrender in the swamps of Owl and Snake Creeks. That this was not done owed in part to a lack of concentration of Confederate troops on the far right, and in part to the heroic and sanguinary stand by the shattered scraps of General Prentiss’s and W.H.L Wallace’s divisions, and of Sherman’s isolated brigade on the far left of the Union line. Let us begin with the latter.

By about 10 a.m. it had become apparent that the Confederate line of battle was short by perhaps a mile from reaching the bottoms of Lick Creek and the Tennessee River in order to form a perfect and totally closed front against the Union forces. Not only that, but a Confederate engineer sent to scout the area reported seeing a large Federal force apparently maneuvering for a flank attack on the Rebel army. (This “large Federal force” was actually the isolated brigade of Sherman’s division, which was trying to figure out how to meet the Rebel attack.)

At that point General Johnston himself pulled the second and third brigades of Jones Withers’s division—commanded respectively by Brigadier General Chalmers and Brig. Gen. John K. Jackson—out of the fight where, along with Gladden’s brigade, they had just collapsed Prentiss’s line. Johnston encountered Chalmers’s men in the process of looting the tents of the recently departed 18th Wisconsin, and the commanding general was particularly incensed to see one of his officers, a lieutenant, emerge from a tent with an armload of Yankee booty. He sharply reprimanded the young man, saying, “None of that, Sir, we are not here for plunder!”

In those days and times, for a young officer to be personally censured by someone of Sidney Johnston’s stature would be a fate
almost worse than death, and the lieutenant’s humiliation was palpable. Seeing this, Johnston softened and tried to relieve the lieutenant’s discomfort by taking from him a small tin cup, saying, “Then let this be my share of the spoils today,” he smiled. Afterward, Johnston used the cup for attention, at times lifting it like a sword, and sometimes striking it for emphasis on the bayonets of the soldiers. Johnston personally led Chalmers and Jackson due east to the bottoms of Lick Creek, with orders to sweep north along the Tennessee riverbank to Pittsburg Landing. Like many things, it proved far easier said than done. In fact, nothing was easy that day. Nothing.

Blocking the way was Sherman’s lone Second Brigade that he had posted there weeks earlier to guard approaches near the river before any of the other divisions arrived. For some reason Sherman had left it out there even after McClernand, Prentiss, W.H.L. Wallace, and Hurlbut came up, and with nearly a mile-wide gap between it and Prentiss’s leftmost regiment.

Commanded by Col. David Stuart, a 46-year-old Amherst graduate, Michigan lawyer, and former U.S. congressman, the brigade’s three regiments, 2,335-strong, were well posted on hills and elevations around the intersection of the Hamburg-Purdy and Hamburg-Savannah roads. One of these regiments was the 55th Illinois, camped in the Peach Orchard, which was just coming into its fragrant pink blossoms when war found it.

In the ensuing years there was a great deal of righteous indignation and acrimonious finger-pointing on both sides of the battle, but perhaps none so furious as that of the 55th Illinois and 54th Ohio, which composed the bulk of Stuart’s brigade that morning. Stuart’s shorthandedness was due to the disgraceful bugout of the brigade’s third regiment, the 71st Ohio, which, led by its
commanding officer, “that globule of adipose pomposity, Col. Rodney Mason,”
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ran off in its entirety—never to return—at the first shots from some Rebel skirmishers.

The bulk of the regimental finger-pointing, however, was directed at none other than the division commander himself, General Sherman, who, according to survivors of the battle, “left [the brigade] off two miles, detached from his division—left it during the battle, without artillery, without his orders, and apparently without a thought, and left it in his report, with a mere allusion never after corrected or elaborated.”

There appears to be some justification for this bitterness—especially the part about getting short shrift in Sherman’s after action report, since Stuart’s brigade suffered the second highest casualty rate (340 killed, wounded, and missing) of any of Sherman’s four brigades, and held its position—and the army’s critical left flank—until late in the day.
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The morning had started strangely for the Second Brigade. A day earlier, in an artillery realignment, Grant had stripped Stuart of his battery, which was reassigned to W.H.L. Wallace’s division. From an early hour Stuart’s men had listened apprehensively to
the sounds of battle on their right as the Confederate line crashed into Sherman and Prentiss, but as the minutes, and then the hours ticked by, nothing appeared on their front. As the sun rose in the sky some men began to think the brigade had been bypassed in the attack, but Stuart knew it was just a matter of time—especially after he “discovered the Pelican flag advancing in the rear of General Prentiss’s headquarters.”
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Stuart immediately dispatched a warning to Hurlbut that Prentiss’s front had been turned, and Hurlbut in response sent one of his batteries and two regiments, but they wandered down the wrong road and became lost.

One problem Stuart faced was that the particular spot of ground he had to defend was among the most cut-up terrain of all Pittsburg Landing, broken with steep ravines, creeks, bluffs, and heavy timber, and it was difficult to estimate just where an enemy attack would appear and how to receive it. Thus Stuart spent much of the morning having the brigade change fronts based on the noise of battle on their right.

At one point, after a report that Rebel cavalry had been sighted, a controversial order for a hollow square was issued by the assistant brigade commander, a Swede, whose description in the official regimental history of the 55th Illinois is worth listening to: “As the regiment was filling its ranks [earlier that year] there appeared upon the scene one Oscar Malmborg, around whose name hung a vague mystery of noble lineage and military glory—the former never to be verified and the latter scarcely confirmed. From that time on, the country round
about resounded with such orders as: ‘Column py fyle,’ ‘Charge peanuts,’ with an occasional exasperated inquiry like: ‘What for you face mit your pack?’—all uttered in ferocious tones and foreign accent.”

Malmborg, who had worked in the emigrant department of the Illinois Central Railway, and been schooled in European infantry tactics, ordered the regiments formed up in hollow squares, a favorite European defense by infantry against cavalry attack. But this, according to the sentiments of the men, was “totally ludicrous” under the circumstances—especially since, just as the 71st Ohio was floundering around that morning trying to organize itself into some similarly unwieldy formation, as soon as the first Rebel skirmishers appeared and fired off a few random shots it so spooked that 667-man regiment that the 71st ran off toward the landing, Colonel Mason and all.

The panic likewise infected the other two regiments, the 55th Illinois and the 54th Ohio, which, caught by skirmish fire in the middle of a turning movement, began a dash to the rear only to be outrun by Stuart himself, on horseback, who galloped ahead, then wheeled and drew himself up to face them. “Halt, men!” he cried; his stentorian voice cut the air like a saw. “Halt!” He swung his sword “like a medieval knight” and swore oaths at them and called them cowards. “Halt!” Whereupon they stopped running and “froze in their tracks, and shamefacedly returned to the fight.”

Stuart had saved the day; in fact, he held powerful sway over the men of the regiment. He was a stern taskmaster but fair and a man of good humor, but behind this lay the stain of a great pubic shame for which he was trying to atone, and the brigade too would find itself drawn in to the atonement. The fact was, Colonel Stuart was a man with a past.

In 1855, Stuart had moved his law practice from Detroit to Chicago, and in a short time he became one of the city’s wealthiest and most socially prominent citizens. Then, in 1860, he became entangled in an infamous scandal. He was named as correspondent in one of the most notorious divorce cases of the century, which ruined him socially and politically, and when war broke out the following year he saw it as the only way to redemption.
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Stuart pledged to personally raise and equip a regiment but was thwarted by the Illinois governor, who was pressured by the Chicago Bar Association, the press, and public outrage against Stuart. He then went to the War Department and offered to raise an entire brigade. He was granted authority to do this but was able to organize only one regiment—the 55th Illinois—before the war in the West required putting troops in the field. In time he was given command of Sherman’s Second Brigade, of which his 55th Illinois was part.

His men came to adore him. He could talk their turkey. On the steamer trip up to Pittsburg Landing, according to the regimental history, Stuart, “magnificently dressed, walking the decks like a king,” gathered the men together on the hurricane deck to deliver a lecture against drunkenness, promising that at the end of the war he would take them to New Orleans “where we would all get drunk together.” In an incident described in the annals of the regiment’s history, Stuart set an example of the evils of intemperance by posting one Private Welsh, of B Company, upon the hull of an
upturned ship’s boat to stand in the sun in penitence for his insobriety and for the amusement of the men who packed the decks.

Suddenly wheeling upon the culprit, Stuart puffed himself up in the manner of an actor and vehemently proclaimed: “ ‘There is Welsh; he got drunk last night, fell into the river, and lost his gun. He is his own horrid example of intemperance.’ Addressing Welsh directly, Stuart demanded accusingly, ‘Welsh, you were drunk last night, weren’t you?’ Welsh replied, ‘Yeas, about half-drunk,’ whereat the colonel roared, ‘Half-drunk—damn you! Well, why didn’t you get whole drunk like a man?’ ”

The men ate it up. They respected him, even though they all knew about his disgrace because so many of them were from Chicago where it had been front-page news for months. It was this kind of closeness that allowed Stuart to give his noncommissioned officers what surely must rank as one of the strangest speeches in military history. Shortly after they had encamped at Pittsburg Landing Stuart minced no words: “I am a man of somewhat damaged reputation, as you all well know. And I came into the army solely to retrieve that reputation, and I depend upon this regiment to do it.”

Doubtless this news had spread down to the ranks, for as they streamed past him that Sunday morning of battle they took him in, seated upon his horse in the middle of the tall oak forest, “his voice bellowing like a trumpet” for them to halt. Even the dimmest among them must have felt a sense of loyalty to the man, some kindle of his authority and his magnetic personality that caused them to rally upon him; otherwise, they simply would have kept on running. “If Stuart had died then,” the regimental biographer wrote, “he would have been canonized in the hearts of his men.” They were young and full of life and had it all before them, and inexperienced
as they were as soldiers they knew that this was not just a fracas, or push-shove, or even a fistfight; here their very lives and limbs were at stake. Otherwise, they would have kept on running.