Shiloh, 1862 (37 page)

In those brief minutes while Johnston, in the front, had led the brigade forward, his horse Fire-Eater had been shot a number of times and Johnston himself had been clipped by bullets in three places, but seemingly he had come through the experience unhurt.

He said, “Governor, they came very near to putting me
hors de combat
¹
in that charge,” and the general pointed to his foot, where a shot had ripped the sole off of his boot from heel to toe and left it flapping. “Are you wounded?” Harris asked; the answer was “No.”

Harris asked if there were any messages he wished delivered; just then Federal artillery opened up, enfilading the new Rebel line that continued to press forward. Johnston told Harris to ride to Statham and tell him to “silence that Yankee battery.” Harris galloped to Statham, no more than 200 yards away, and returned within a few minutes.

As he rode up to Johnston with the news that Statham had set his artillery in motion, the governor saw the general reel in the saddle as if he were about to fall from his horse. Harris grabbed him by the neck and pulled him upright, exclaiming, “General, are you wounded?” to which Johnston replied, “in a very deliberate tone, ‘Yes, and I fear seriously.’ ” These were his last words.

Harris immediately dispatched one of Johnston’s captains for a surgeon. By the sheerest of ironies, earlier that morning Johnston had sent his own surgeon, Dr. D. W. Yandell, to treat wounded Federal prisoners of the 18th Wisconsin. When Yandell protested
that his duty was to serve the commanding general, Johnston told him, “No, those men were our enemies but are our prisoners now, and deserve our protection.” It would prove to be a fatal decision.

Johnston suddenly went slack and dropped his reins. Harris, still supporting him in the saddle, seized the bridle and guided both horses to a ravine about 150 yards behind the lines. He dismounted near a large oak, where he eased Johnston out of the saddle and to the ground, asking, frantically, where he was wounded. But the general gave no reply.

Harris undid Johnston’s cravat and tore his shirt open but found no wound. A “profuse amount of blood” had run out onto the ground from the general’s knee-high right boot, but Harris felt that Johnston’s wound must be something more serious than that. By then several of the general’s aides had arrived. Harris raised Johnston’s head and tried to pour some brandy down his throat, but most of it only dribbled from his lips.

Johnston’s former brother-in-law and best friend, Col. William Preston, leaped from his horse and rushed to the general’s side crying, “Johnston, do you know me?” but the general was unresponsive. Preston also tried pouring brandy into Johnston’s mouth, but it only gurgled in his throat. “He had neither escort nor surgeon near him,” Preston said. “His horse was wounded and bleeding. He breathed for a few minutes after my arrival, but did not recognize me.” Albert Sidney Johnston expired at 2:30 p.m. or thereabouts.

It need not have been so. The “profuse amount” of blood that had run from his boot and pooled up on the leaves beneath the tree told the story. A bullet had clipped his right popliteal artery, which lies behind the knee, and he had bled to death in perhaps 15 minutes. Had Johnston himself or anyone else with the slightest
medical experience known it in time, the field tourniquet that the general carried in his own pocket could have been used to seal off the blood flow above the knee long enough to get him to a surgeon. The circumstances surrounding the death of General Johnston stand out among the many mysteries and contradictions of Shiloh. Eyewitnesses have placed the time between his wounding and his death at anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes. Just who among his aides did what, and when, remains in dispute.
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Terrible shock among the living set in; tears were shed. Johnston was more than a general, he was an icon. His loss, especially at the high tide of battle when Confederate brigades were sweeping the field, was devastating.

Colonel Preston, as chief aide-de-camp, scribbled a note for Harris to carry to Beauregard: “General Johnston has just fallen, mortally wounded, after a victorious attack on the left of the enemy. It is up to you to complete the victory.” Thus command of the army, and the battle, now fell to General P.G.T. Beauregard, the Great Creole.

Governor Harris’s horse had run off in the confusion, and when he mounted Fire-Eater, who had remained beside his master’s body, Harris found him so badly crippled that he dismounted only to discover that the horse had been shot in three legs. Harris was able to obtain a fresh horse from Johnston’s orderly and galloped off to where he had last known Beauregard to be, but by then Beauregard had moved his headquarters forward to Shiloh church.

Stunned at the news of Johnston’s death when Harris finally reached him, the Creole read Preston’s note, then said—much as a question—“Everything else seems to be going on well on the right,” to which Governor Harris “assented.” Then, said Beauregard, according to Preston Johnston’s account, “the battle may as well go on.” It seemed an odd thing to say.

By then it was about 3 p.m. and practically everyone on both sides agreed that a lull had occurred in the fighting. This break lasted for about an hour, a very critical hour, for the sun was now beginning to sink. The pause was attributed to various reasons, the most controversial of which was that Beauregard had somehow “let down”—that he did not press the fight hard enough just as the Yankees were beginning to crack. There is something to be argued along this line of reasoning, mainly because Beauregard remained seriously ill with his throat ailment. His pulse, taken earlier in the day, was said to have been 100, and he was weak and could hardly speak. The surgeons wanted him confined to his ambulance. Clearly the Great Creole was in no condition to take to the field as Johnston had, to rally the troops and lead men in battle charges.

In any case that was not his job, as Beauregard himself was quick to point out in his memoirs. In fact he condemned Johnston’s going to the front as “behav[ing] like a division or corps commander, instead of the commanding general of an army.” After his conversation with Governor Harris, Beauregard sent word to all of his corps commanders telling them of Johnston’s death and that the battle must be vigorously prosecuted. He also told them to keep the death a secret, so as not to alarm or dishearten the troops.

Back at the death scene, beneath the tree in the ravine, Johnston’s aides concealed the general’s body in a blanket and carried
it to his headquarters in the rear. An examination was performed, which concluded that Johnston had been hit four times that day: Marks from two spent bullets were found on his legs, plus the one that had cut his boot sole, and then the fatal one behind the knee, which he himself apparently did not feel.

Next day the body was escorted to Corinth by his entire staff, Colonel Preston leading the way, back to his headquarters before the battle, which was the home of Mrs. William Inge, the admiring lady who had secreted the little lunch parcel in the general’s coat. In 1925, on her deathbed, 91-year-old Augusta Evans Inge recalled the scene for the notable Shiloh historian Otto Eisenschiml.

“They brought his body back to my house, wrapped in a muddy blanket,” she said. “Together with an old friend of mine, Ellen Polk,
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I cleaned his face and uniform, and in his pocket I found half of one sandwich and a small piece of cake. He had eaten most of it.”

They laid the body out in the front parlor of the cottage, and his orderlies stood guard over it while they waited for the train to New Orleans. Sixty-three years later, Mrs. Inge reached out to Eisenschiml, trembling. “Look at these hands,” she said. More than half a century after his death Albert Sidney Johnston remained a great Southern hero. “These are the hands that wrapped the Confederate flag around the body of General Johnston, before they took him South.”

The lull in the battle continued until half past three in the afternoon. Not a complete lull, of course; tens of thousands of men
continued to shoot at one another, but a relative break, nonetheless. Past the Peach Orchard there was a swale out of immediate firing range where Statham’s exhausted Confederates fell down, wretched with thirst after their successful charge. Near it was a large pond around which “the dead of the enemy lay thickly, & down in the bottom of the pool of clear blue water there was a dead man in one edge of it,” Augustus Mecklin wrote in his diary. “Our boys rushed to the water and with their cups drank deeply. If the water had been mixed with blood it [was] all the same.” This became known as the Bloody Pond, and during the day men of both sides used its waters to drink, or soak, or wash off wounds, with an unspoken agreement not to kill each other there.

Referring to the lull, Basil W. Duke, the famed Kentucky cavalryman and later brigadier general who was shot in the shoulder at Shiloh while attempting to saber a Union soldier, made this colorful analogy: “It went on all day like the regular stroke of some tremendous machine. There would be a rapid charge and fierce fight—the wild yell that would announce a Confederate success—then would ensue a comparative lull, broken again in a few minutes, and the charge, struggle, and horrible din would recommence.”

After Sidney Johnston fell, though, Preston Johnston wrote, “There was no general direction nor concerted movements. The spring and alertness of the onset flagged. The determinate purpose was lost sight of.”

Here Preston Johnston seems to be blaming Beauregard, but he might as easily have blamed the corps commanders, especially Breckinridge, who commanded the right. One explanation for the lull, however, was that the Yankees on the right had withdrawn nearly half a mile after Statham’s charge, and it took time to catch
up with them and renew the fight; besides, the Rebel soldiers were exhausted and out of ammunition.

Still, they were without Johnston’s imposing presence at the front and a vacuum had arisen with his loss and no one, neither Breckinridge, nor Bragg, nor Polk, nor Hardee, nor Beauregard, could fill the empty space. Time was now working against them; the sun was three-quarters down in the western sky. And what they did not know was that, in those very same moments, Buell’s army of some 20,000 was close to crossing the Tennessee and swarming onto the field, and that Don Carlos Buell himself was at Pittsburg Landing.

Buell had reached the landing “midway in the afternoon,” furious, as he steamed up from Savannah, at the “stream of fugitives that poured in a constantly swelling current along the west bank of the river.” The mouth of Snake Creek, he said, “was full of them swimming across. The face of the bluff was crowded with stragglers from the battle. The number there has been estimated at from five thousand in the morning to fifteen thousand in the evening,” the outraged Buell complained.

At the landing he found Grant and several of his staff “on his boat, in the ladies’ cabin,” Buell wrote curtly in the 1880s, after Grant was dead. According to Buell, “There was none of that masterly confidence [by Grant] which has since been assumed with reference to the occasion.” Grant, Buell continued, “appeared to realize that he was beset by a pressing danger,” and seemed “much relieved” by Buell’s arrival. “He held out his sword,” Buell snipped, “to call my attention to an indentation which he said the scabbard
had received from a shot.” However, according to John Rawlins, then Grant’s adjutant general, when Buell inquired of Grant, “What preparations have you made for retreating,” Grant responded, “I have not yet despaired of whipping them, General” and told Buell that he expected the arrival of Lew Wallace’s 7,200 fresh troops at any moment, which would allow him to regain the momentum.

Buell wrote that he “proposed [to Grant] that we should go ashore, but as we reached the gangway I noticed that the horses of himself and his staff were being taken ashore. He mounted and rode away, while I walked up the hill; so that I saw him no more until the attack occurred at the Landing late in the evening.” So stated Major General Buell 20 years after the war.

Grant had in fact become increasingly anxious about the whereabouts of Lew Wallace since midmorning. His aide Captain Rowley remembered that about 11 a.m., two hours or more after he had sent Captain Baxter with orders for Wallace to move to Pittsburg Landing
immediately
, Grant had “expressed considerable solicitude [i.e., anxious concern] at the non-appearance of General Wallace, and sent an orderly dashing off to the extreme right to see if he could see anything of him, remarking that it could not
possibly
be many minutes before he would arrive.” In this Grant was quite wrong.