Shiloh, 1862 (40 page)

After the breakdown of the Hornet’s Nest, a crisis was at hand for the Union army. Captain Putnam, one of Grant’s aides that day, spoke of “a great disaster that seemed imminent.” Streams of soldiers straggled to the landing in the face of the Rebel onslaught, and the steamer carrying Private Hannaford and the Sixth Ohio was just landing. “How shall I attempt to set that picture forth,” Hannaford wondered. “All about us, thousands of panic-stricken wretches swarmed from the river’s edge far up toward the top of the bluff; a mob in uniform; a surging herd of humanity smitten with a very frenzy of fright and despair; every sense of manly pride, honor, or duty, paralyzed and dead to every feeling except terror.”

“Whenever a steamboat would land,” observed Ambrose Bierce, “this abominable mob had to be kept off her by bayonets; when she pulled away they sprang upon her, and were pushed by scores into the water, where they were suffered to drown one another in their own way. The men disembarking insulted them, struck them. In return they expressed their unholy delight in the certainty of our destruction by the enemy.”

Bull Nelson, who had decorated his hat with a large ostrich feather, dyed black, mounted Ned, at 17 hands high nearly as enormous as his owner, and led the men off the boat, roaring, “Gentlemen, draw your sabers, and trample these sons-of-bitches into the mud! Charge!” According to one of his aides, Lt. Horace C. Fisher, they “cut through the mob of runaways, who tumbled over each other in abject terror,” with Nelson continuing to abuse them, bellowing, “Get out of the way, you damned cowards! If you won’t fight yourselves, let these men off that will!”

With the collapse of the Hornet’s Nest the Yankees were compressed into a half-mile-long line with its left resting on Pittsburg Landing and the gunboats and running almost due west to the Hamburg-Savannah road, their backs against the miry bottoms of Snake Creek. But of the roughly 49,000 men originally under his command, Grant could put up a fighting front of no more than 15,000 to 18,000, and probably not even that many. Since morning, more than 7,000 had been killed or wounded and 3,000 captured. Another 7,000—namely Lew Wallace’s division—had still not arrived on the field. The balance—some 15,000 or more—were either cowering under the bluff at Pittsburg Landing or otherwise absent from their units.

As luck would have it, when it became clear that the collapse of the Hornet’s Nest was imminent, Grant’s chief of staff 51-year-old Joseph D. Webster, a Dartmouth man from New Hampshire and a retired veteran of the army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers, began riding desperately along what he thought would have to become the new Union line, dragooning all the loose artillery batteries he could find and organizing them into some semblance of military order.

When he was finished Webster had actually fashioned a strong position consisting of six depleted brigades consisting of 20 or so regiments that had retained some vestiges of order, all of it protected by—depending on whose version is taken—25, 41, or 60 guns, including a battery of five tremendous 24-pounder siege cannons, each weighing in excess of 3,000 pounds, which had been intended for reduction of the Confederate fortifications at Corinth.

Still, as the Rebel batteries on the hills opposite the Dill Branch ravine poured fire into the Union ranks, men continued to desert
their posts. The steamboat
Rocket
, loaded with ammunition and powder, took off at full speed from the landing to get out of range as the Rebel balls and shells burst around.

“As we sat on our horses we saw the flotsam and jetsam of Gen. Grant’s army drift by in flight toward The Landing,” said Lieutenant Fisher, “we saw double-decked ambulances galloping wildly with well men on the front seats prodding the horses with bayonets and swords, the ghastly load of wounded men inside shrieking in agony as the ambulances collided with each other or with trees in their flight. Shells were shrieking through the air and trees were breaking and casting their branches upon the ground. Nor were the bullets less vicious as they ripped around us. In a word, it was pandemonium broken loose.”

Bull Nelson began deploying his troops on the left of the Union line, near the top of the bluff, telling them, “Don’t stop to form, colonel, don’t stop to form … we shall all be massacred if you do! There isn’t a man out yonder on the left between us and the Rebels! For God’s sake, hurry your men forward!”

Captain Putnam remembered that the artillery, including the fire of the gunboats, “made a noise not exceeded by anything I ever heard afterward.” Grant and his staff were riding along near the bluff when a Captain Carson, one of his cavalry scouts, arrived to make a report. He then dismounted and was holding his horse by the bridle “when a six pound shot carried away all of Carson’s head, bespattering Grant’s clothing with blood.” Lieutenant Fisher, who was present at the grisly incident, later wrote, “I heard a thud and some dark object whizzed over my shoulder. It was Captain Carson’s head.”

As Private Hannaford reached the top of the bluff where the battle was raging he passed a drummer boy furiously beating on
his drum for no apparent reason. Lieutenant Crooker of the 55th Illinois remembered that “the belligerent little drummers nearly all preferred to fight, and were found along the line, gun in hand, as fierce as fighting cocks, with no notion of shirking.”

To Lieutenant Fisher, the Union situation seemed desperate as the battle drew to its violent climax with the sinking of the sun. As the Rebel army, banners flying, began menacing for a final charge, he could hear them yelling and cheering across the ravine.

Grant had asked Nelson for the loan of one of his aides, and Fisher had been selected. As he and Grant rode down the line, “I could see no organized force to resist any serious attack,” Fisher said. As the Confederate brigades appeared on the opposite ridge and he and Grant stopped to watch the attack, Fisher “decided that within a short time all of us would have been captured.” Then, he wrote years later, “I heard [Grant] say something. I rode forward, saluted, and waited for his order. He paid no attention. His eyes were fixed to the front. Again I heard him mutter something without turning, and I saw that he was talking to himself: ‘Not beaten yet by a damned sight,’ ” Grant was muttering.

At last, in the vesperal twilight, Beauregard had cornered the beast. In 13 relentless hours of savage combat the Confederate army had driven Grant back on himself, to the very edge of the Tennessee River and the Snake Creek swamps, where he’d first come ashore and where his army may have been hanging on by a fingernail—though it was a sharp fingernail, as we shall see. Grant’s situation at this point was most precarious, and yet the only person in the Federal army who didn’t think so seemed to be Grant.

In the gathering dusk McPherson, his engineering officer, returned from an assignment to assess the condition of the army and reported that fully one-third was hors de combat, and the rest “much dispirited.” Grant merely nodded. “Well, General Grant,” McPherson asked, “under this condition of affairs, what do you propose to do, Sir? Shall I make preparations for a retreat?” Grant’s reply was short and quick. He had fought in the Mexican War and at Belmont, been the victor at Forts Henry and Donelson; he was no greenhorn, no amateur. “
Retreat?
” he blurted out, “
No!
I propose to attack at daylight, and whip them.”

Experienced hunters say the most dangerous time to stalk a wounded animal is when he goes into his lair; there he somehow gathers unnatural strength, ferocity, and a singular resolve. Grant seemed to feel or sense this strength, the saving of his best blow for last, and he so remarked to others. But there are different analogies for his situation, and one that might have been more appealing to Beauregard and the Confederates comes from bullfighting lore.

Soon after the bull enters the ring he will select a spot for himself known to matadors as the
querencia
, to which the bull will return when he feels threatened. As the fight progresses, and the bull is worn down or wounded by the picadors’ lances, after each encounter he will always go back to his querencia. Often it is located near the entrance to the ring, where he came in, as though the bull somehow feels the gate will be opened and he can escape. But he can never escape, and each time he returns to his querencia he becomes more predictable, more vulnerable, so that in the end the matador is able to kill him because he always goes back to the place where he feels most secure.

There is no evidence of course that Beauregard ever heard of this analogy, let alone employed it as a military tactic. Still, it was an
inescapable fact that all day his army had been driving the Federals toward Pittsburg Landing, and now, in their last extremity, the Yankees had drawn up for one last stand. From the Rebel side of things the position looked formidable enough, but neither unassailable nor impenetrable, because they had been assailing and penetrating Grant’s defenses all day, up to and including the impenetrable Hornet’s Nest. Too much blood had been shed—the countryside all around was fairly saturated with it—and now was the time for conclusions, to close it out.

That theme was on Braxton Bragg’s mind. The querulous general had been vexed all day by the tendency of his victorious soldiers to stop and plunder enemy camps or forage for food (never mind that most hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast), and Bragg had expended a good deal of energy pushing commanders to keep hammering, move forward, drive the enemy. But now the men were at the very edge of their endurance. The physical exertion associated with rushing forward, crawling, dodging bullets, and even hand-to-hand fighting is nothing compared with the toll exerted by the mental exhaustion of battle. The terror, exhilaration, horror, and revulsion of just a few minutes in combat—to say nothing of a full day’s worth of it—overtaxes the body’s adrenaline and drastically drains the soldier of energy.

At the fall of the Hornet’s Nest, as surrenders had to be taken and prisoners dealt with, rumors circulated that the whole Yankee army had surrendered. Out of this disorder Bragg now anxiously tried to reassemble a fighting front to push through to the landing and complete the victory. “One more charge, my men, and we shall capture them all!” he cried.

Closest at hand Bragg had Withers’s division, consisting of Chalmers’s and Jackson’s brigades plus the survivors of Gladden’s
brigade, now down to a mere 220 men commanded by Col. Zach C. Deas, after Gladden’s successor Dan Adams was shot in the head during the melee at the Hornet’s Nest. Also there was Patton Anderson’s brigade from Ruggles’s division as well as the lone remnants of Wood’s brigade from Hardee’s corps and about 30 guns—20 of them commanded by Maj. Francis A. Shoup, which had been part of Ruggles’s grand battery at the Hornet’s Nest. For some reason, none of the other corps commanders nearby—neither Polk nor Breckinridge—was able or willing to produce forces to join Bragg in the final assault. Bowen’s and Robert Trabue’s brigades were several hundred yards to the rear and far right of Bragg’s line, while on the left Preston Pond’s brigade was too far away and too isolated to participate in the assault. The other brigades simply had not come up.

Bragg drew up this Confederate line of battle—eight or ten emaciated regiments, certainly fewer than 5,000 men—at Dill Branch, a stream at the bottom of a steep ravine that emptied into the Tennessee less than a quarter mile south of Pittsburg Landing. Unfortunately for the Rebels, the recent flooding of the river—the same flood that had drowned out Fort Henry—also worked against them here.

In slack times the river ran 16 feet lower, which would have drained the Dill Branch ravine nearly empty. Now the river flooded the mouth of the ravine, not only making it impassable but raising the level of the river, which lifted the Yankee gunboats
Lexington
and
Tyler
to point-blank range straight down the gap in the bluff where Bragg’s men would have to cross to get at Grant’s army.

These powerful “timberclads” were the first of the river gunboats acquired by the U.S. Army and crewed by the navy and were old
friends of Grant, having participated in his seizure of Paducah and the attack on the Confederates at Belmont and Fort Henry. Their monster 32-pounder guns were many times more powerful than the standard army field cannons, but they were not very accurate at long range.
⁴
Nevertheless, the mere sounds of their shells passing over and the superviolent explosions that followed took a severe psychological toll on the Confederate troops—and now, as Bragg’s men prepared to charge down into the hollow of Dill Branch, the Union gunboats in fact had the close range they required.