Shiloh, 1862 (34 page)

These early good tidings did not last, however, for soon General Hindman’s division of Bragg’s corps also encountered, as Bragg
said, “the most obstinate resistance of the day, the enemy being strongly posted, with infantry and artillery, on an eminence immediately behind a dense thicket. Hindman’s command was gallantly led to the attack, but recoiled under a murderous fire,” Bragg wrote. “The valiant leader fell, severely wounded, and was borne from the field he had illustrated with a heroism rarely equaled.” This was, of course, from Bragg’s official report made some weeks after the battle, but it concisely sums up that quandary of homicidal dismay they named the Hornet’s Nest.

With General Hindman out of the battle, by Bragg’s orders it fell on Shaver’s brigade of his division to attack and dislodge the Federals “posted in considerable force in the dense undergrowth and heavy woods,” where, like Cheatham, General Shaver said the enemy had placed a battery “the presence of which was so completely concealed I was not aware of it until it opened.”
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Shaver marched as Bragg told him, “until my left was in about 50 and my right about 60 yards from their lines when a terrific and murderous fire was poured in on me from their lines and battery. It was impossible to charge through the dense undergrowth,” Shaver said, “and I soon discovered my fire was having no effect upon the enemy, so I had nothing left me but to retire or have my men all shot down.”

Providentially, Pvt. Henry Morton Stanley, of Shaver’s command, had not been dispatched by the bullet to his stomach earlier. Instead, it was mostly spent and had struck his belt buckle, denting it, merely knocking the wind from him. But by the time he
recovered, his brigade had marched on out of sight, and it was left for Stanley to overtake it, which led him on his own chilling odyssey down the butcher’s path. When he recovered from the shock of being struck by the spent bullet, Stanley had remained on the ground for a period of time, exhausted; then he crawled to a tree and ate ravenously from his haversack for the first time since dawn. Now, with the sun high in the sky, he “struck north in the direction which my regiment had taken, over ground strewn with the bodies and the debris of war.

“The ghastly relics,” Stanley said, “appalled every sense.” Somehow he felt curious to see who among his comrades had fallen and quickly came upon the body of “a stout English sergeant of a neighboring company … conspicuous for his good humor, and nicknamed John Bull.” Next to him was a young lieutenant who “judging by the gloss on his uniform must have been some father’s darling. A clean bullet hole in the center of his forehead had ended his career.”

Soon Stanley came upon about 20 bodies, “lying in various postures, each by its own pool of viscous blood, which emitted a peculiar scent, which was new to me then. Beyond these, a still larger group lay, body overlying body. The company opposed to them must have shot straight.” He lumbered on, shuddering at the sight of “those wide open dead eyes,” ruminating much later that this “was the first Field of Glory I had ever seen … and the first time Glory sickened me with its repulsive aspect, and made me suspect it was all a glittering lie.”

Trudging on through the woods toward the racket of gunfire where his brigade was fighting, Stanley “moved, horror-stricken, through the fearful shambles where the dead lay as thick as sleepers in a London Park on a bank holiday.” He noticed from the piles
of dead bodies that “every half mile or so [the Yankees] stood and contested the Confederate advance. I overtook my regiment about one o’clock,” he said, “and found that it was engaged in one of these occasional spurts of fury.”

Stanley’s arrival coincided with Shaver’s repulse at the Hornet’s Nest. Shaver reported to Bragg his “inability to dislodge the enemy, and that his command was very much cut up,” including the death of the colonel of the Seventh Arkansas. He was told to stay put and await orders. “We lay down and availed ourselves of trees, logs, and hollows, and annoyed [the Federals’] upstanding ranks,” Stanley said, “battery pounded battery, and meanwhile, we hugged our resting places closely.” The Hornet’s Nest remained dark, dangerous, and thus far insurmountable.

Cheatham’s and Shaver’s Rebel brigades had run up against Col. James Tuttle’s First Brigade of Gen. W.H.L. Wallace’s division, consisting of the 2nd, 7th, 12th, and 14th Iowa regiments, holding tenuously to the Federal right flank of the Hornet’s Nest. They were ensconced along the abandoned wagon track known as the Sunken Road, described thusly by a man who was there: “The old road ran along a slight elevation and was so water washed in places as to afford good shelter to men lying down to fire on an advancing enemy—a sort of natural rifle-pit, though rather thin in places. There was an open [cotton] field extending to the front about 500 yards to the timber occupied by the Confederates.”

Next Bragg ordered Colonel Gibson and his Louisiana brigade to try the Yankee bottleneck. Gibson was a tall, sober-looking, 29-year-old New Orleans lawyer and aristocrat—scion of a prosperous sugar
planter—with intense blue eyes and a handlebar mustache, who had graduated from Yale where he was a member of Scroll and Key, one of the secret societies on campus second only in prestige to the fabled Skull and Bones.

No sooner had Gibson appeared with his brigade in Barnes Field than he found himself in Bragg’s doghouse for seeming to be insufficiently aggressive. In his defense (he later called for a court of inquiry in the matter) Gibson testified that he had been ordered by one of Bragg’s own staff officers “to move more slowly and keep at a greater distance from the front line.” For his part, Bragg claimed Gibson had been holding back. “I had not been able to force [Gibson] into battle up to twelve o’clock.”

Gibson formed his brigade in a line of battle two ranks deep and prepared to send his soldiers across the cotton field, but before this could happen, in the misty haze of the battlefield, a section of Cheatham’s men fired into the rear of Gibson’s far left regiment, the Fourth Louisiana, composed mostly of new troops and commanded by Col. Henry W. Allen, killing and wounding at least 27 men. “This was a terrible blow to the regiment,” Allen said, “far more terrible than any inflicted by the enemy. It almost demoralized the regiment, who from that moment seemed to dread their friends much more than their enemies.” The enraged Louisianans—most of whom were French Creoles who spoke little or no English—were on the verge of firing back at their tormentors when, of all things, a woman wearing a long dress and sunbonnet appeared before them, deliberately crossing the field between the battle lines as if on a vital mission, and the firing died down on both sides for a few moments. Quite possibly this was the distraught woman, alluded to by Elsie Duncan, who was fearful of her sons’ safety on the battlefield.

Like Cheatham and Shaver before him, when Gibson marched his brigade across the field and got within 40 or 50 yards of the thicket where the Yankees lay, he was suddenly greeted with the same lethal sheet of flame and smoke from a dense line of hidden riflemen, and “a murderous fire of grape and canister from the masked batteries and rifle pits.” Two of his regiments actually managed to enter the thicket only to be caught up in a nearly impenetrable tangle of blackjack oak. They undertook to push the thick leafy trees and branches aside with their gun butts and barrels, and even their hands, but sight was lost except for a few feet and control quickly became impossible.

At one point a frantic message was sent from the colonel of Gibson’s First Arkansas to Allen’s Fourth Louisiana, saying, “For God’s sake cease firing,” that “we were killing his men and he was killing ours.”

Col. B. L. Hodge commanding the 19th Louisiana stated afterward that, even while his men were being shot down all around him, he could see none of the enemy in the thick brush, and “from the manner of the men looking through the bushes, as if hunting an object for their aim, it was apparent that they were unable to descry the concealed foe, and were only firing at the flash of the enemy’s pieces.” It was maddening.

The dense canopy of trees kept the wind from blowing the smoke away, and the noxious powder burned the men’s eyes and noses, causing their eyes to water uncontrollably. They kept firing and reloading, firing and reloading, into the thick smoke until their gun barrels became too hot to handle. At one point “a horse galloped through the woods nearby, its belly ripped open and intestines trailing; it became entangled in its own guts and fell to the ground.”

Hodge’s predicament quickly became desperate for, as he said later, “my men were rapidly being shot down, and I [had] no reason to believe we were inflicting equal injury on the enemy.” Therefore, Hodge “gave the order to cease firing and charge bayonets.” This proved even more futile since after his men had plunged 20 or 30 steps into the scrub oak jungle they could still see no enemy other than the flashes of rifle fire that were fast depleting the regiment. At some point a brush fire had started in the dead leaves on the ground and suddenly began sweeping through the woods where many of the wounded and dead lay, burning men alive. Hodge ordered his men to commence shooting again, but also to withdraw across the field to their original positions.

As Colonel Gibson re-formed his brigade he sent an urgent message to Bragg requesting an artillery battery to silence the Union guns that were causing them so much grief. The messenger returned to say not only that the request was denied but that Bragg had ordered them to charge the Hornet’s Nest
again
, immediately. In fact, Bragg even sent one of his staff along to see that it was done correctly.

When this staff officer encountered Colonel Hodge, he was told “to say to the General that I thought it impossible to force the enemy from this strong position by a charge to the front,” adding, helpfully, that an artillery battery “playing on [the enemy] flank, simultaneous with a charge [on the flank], would easily carry the position.”

No dice. They charged again as ordered, headlong, and again were driven back with great loss of life and limb. Colonel Allen, of the Fourth Louisiana, who was shot through both cheeks, would later say, “The brigade was sacrificed by three separate charges, and without the aid of any artillery whatever, although we had it at
hand ready to open on the enemy.” The major commanding the 13th Louisiana had been killed, and the captain succeeding him wounded, and the air filled with Gallic cries and curses as an artillery projectile went clear through each member of a six-man squad, spraying blood and bits of brains and other organs on nearby troops. Hodge’s charge was repulsed.

But Bragg wasn’t through. Apparently he intended to teach Gibson and his brigade some sort of lesson in martial fortitude. Furious at the sight of Colonel Allen’s Fourth Louisiana streaming back in retreat across the Davis Wheat Field, Bragg ordered his engineer officer Captain Lockett (who earlier had mistakenly identified Stuart’s lone brigade as an entire Yankee division) to ride out to the Fourth Louisiana and “take its colors and carry them forward.”

“The flag must not go back again,” Bragg said.

Lockett “dashed through the line of battle, seized the colors from the color bearer, and told him, ‘General Bragg says these colors must not go to the rear.’ ” As he spoke these words, the color bearer was shot down in front of him, leaving Lockett alone on his horse in the middle of the battlefield, holding the regimental colors of the Fourth Louisiana.

A few moments later, Lockett said, “An officer came up to me,” with a bullet hole in each cheek, blood streaming from his mouth, and asked, “What are you doing with my colors, Sir?”

“I am obeying General Bragg’s orders to hold them where they are,” Lockett replied.

“Let me have them,” demanded the officer, “if any man but my color-bearer carries these colors, I am the man. Tell General Bragg I will see that these colors are in the right place. But he must attack this position in flank; we can never carry it alone from the front.”

The officer “was Colonel H. W. Allen, later governor of Louisiana,” Lockett later wrote, then dashed off to deliver another message, while brave, shot-up Henry Allen stood out in front of his lines with bullets whistling around him, holding the colors of the regiment he commanded and defiantly facing the enemy.

Then, in an act of total misunderstanding or breathtaking condescension, Braxton Bragg himself came up to Allen right before he launched the final charge and said, “There will be no faltering now, Colonel Allen.” Rightfully incensed at this utterly thoughtless remark, Allen, a 42-year-old widower, native Virginian, and Harvard Law graduate—transplanted to Louisiana and owner of one of that state’s largest sugar plantations—simply sneered at the corps commander and, with blood still streaming from his cheeks, lifted his sword, shouting, “Forward! Here boys, is as good a place as any to die!”

As they reached the place where the last charge had failed, a Louisiana private named Richardson remembered, “I looked to my left and saw Colonel H. W. Allen with elevated sword, urging his men to stand firm. His chin was bleeding from a wound. There too was my schoolmate, Captain Hilliard, commanding his men to rally when he fell dead.”