This Great Struggle (18 page)

Johnston’s army was unevenly distributed. Heavy forces still pressed Sherman on the west end of the battlefield, though Johnston had pulled several brigades back to the east side, near the river, to strengthen the push against the surprisingly stubborn Yankees there. In the center, little more than a single Confederate brigade doggedly but vainly attempted to drive a brigade of Iowans out of a patch of thickets that came to be known as the Hornets’ Nest.

Frustrated at the failure of his troops to dislodge Hurlbut’s men from the peach orchard, Johnston personally rallied a regiment and led it halfway across the intervening cotton field in another charge. Turning back, he watched from the rear as his men swept on toward the peach orchard. To a staff officer he commented jubilantly about a Union bullet that had grazed the bottom of his foot, cutting his boot sole but leaving him unscathed. “They almost tripped me up that time,” he joked. He may not have realized it yet, but another bullet had torn through the back of his calf, slicing open a major blood vessel. Had the blood not been flowing into his intact boot, those around him would have seen a steady stream of it pouring to the ground. A few minutes later an aide found him reeling in the saddle and helped him to the ground in a sheltered spot. Minutes later he was dead. In his pocket was a tourniquet that could have saved his life. The time was about 2:30 p.m.

The Confederate attacks continued. The lone Union brigade in the brakes along the river finally gave way. Next in line, Hurlbut had to fall back, giving up the peach orchard. As he retreated, his division broke up in a confused stampede. More than two thousand of William Wallace’s men, along with Prentiss and a handful of his, were cut off and captured as the Federal right collapsed. Wallace himself lay on the field, shot through the head.

Hurlbut’s men rallied on a line of artillery Grant and his staff had put together on the last ridge overlooking Pittsburg Landing, and there Sherman’s and McClernand’s divisions joined them. The sun was dipping toward the western horizon as the Confederates prepared for one more attack, this one aimed at Grant’s last possible line of defense. Lew Wallace’s division was still slogging through the Owl Creek swamps. Buell’s troops were struggling over roads almost as muddy on the east bank of the Tennessee, and even now his lead regiments were nearing the river, where steamboats would ferry them across to Pittsburg Landing. Grant’s tired soldiers would have to receive the attack without the help of reinforcements. Then word passed along the Confederate lines that Beauregard had called a halt for the night. Grant had plenty of artillery, and his troops, though tired, were determined. He would probably have stopped a final push, but history will never know.

Grant’s staff thought he would withdraw the army across the Tennessee during the night. Instead he made plans to strike back. When morning came on April 7, Grant’s army, strengthened at last by Lew Wallace’s division and three divisions of Buell’s troops, went over to the attack and by afternoon had driven Beauregard’s Confederates back through the abandoned and ransacked Union camps to about the place where the fighting had started the previous morning. With his army exhausted and near the point of collapse, Beauregard ordered a retreat back to Corinth. Grant’s army was too spent to pursue.

The Battle of Shiloh was over. It introduced the country to bloodshed on a scale out of proportion to anything it had known before. Casualties had been almost exactly even, with the exception of the extra two thousand Federals captured late in the afternoon of April 6. Just over 1,700 men had been killed on each side, with another eight thousand Federals and eight thousand Confederates wounded. The death toll from the two days of fighting along the Tennessee River quadrupled that of Bull Run and exceeded total U.S. battle deaths in the entire War of 1812 and Mexican War combined. Shortly before his death more than two decades later, Grant reflected on the events that transpired at Shiloh. “Up to the battle of Shiloh I, as well as thousands of other citizens, believed that the rebellion against the Government would collapse suddenly and soon, if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies.” The two days of carnage along the Tennessee began to change his mind. Shiloh was a harbinger of the length and cost of the conflict that was then only just beginning.
²

In the wake of the battle, Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing as planned and took command. The rest of Buell’s and all of Pope’s army arrived, swelling Union numbers there to more than one hundred thousand men. Halleck shelved Grant in a meaningless assignment as second in command, and Grant, who was receiving severe criticism in the newspapers for being surprised at Shiloh, contemplated resigning but thought better of it. Halleck advanced his ponderous army toward Corinth at a snail’s pace, entrenching at the end of each day’s short advance. Beauregard could find no way to stop him but did manage to get his army out of the path of Halleck’s military glacier as it approached Corinth, leaving the Federals a hollow victory and a dusty and disease-ridden northeastern Mississippi rail junction town that they occupied May 30. By that time, the war was heating up on other fronts as well. On April 23, a U.S. Navy fleet ran the forts blocking passage up the Mississippi River from the Gulf of Mexico and the next day captured New Orleans without a fight, thus taking possession of the largest city and financial capital of the South. And in far-off Virginia, McClellan finally launched his grand campaign.

5

MCCLELLAN’S GREAT CAMPAIGN

MCCLELLAN’S PLANS AND THE NAVAL BATTLE OF HAMPTON ROADS

T
he winter months of 1862 saw Grant and Foote tear open the center of the Confederacy and advance into its heartland. That spring Albert Sidney Johnston first planned and then died trying to carry out his desperate effort to throw back the Yankees at Shiloh. All the while McClellan continued to plan and prepare for his grand offensive in the East. As the months passed without action in the East, Lincoln grew concerned. The Radical Republicans in Congress and their allies grew increasingly impatient. Among the most impatient were Secretary of War Stanton and the members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

In response to Lincoln’s General War Order Number One and his addendum singling out the Army of the Potomac and directing that it advance on the direct route to Richmond via the Rebel encampment near Centerville, McClellan had finally relented and revealed to the president his plan. He would land the army at the town of Urbanna, Virginia, he explained, near the mouth of the Rappahannock. From there it would march west along that river so as to come between Johnston and Richmond, cutting off the Confederate army and forcing its surrender. Then the Rebels would have to abandon Richmond. As McClellan saw it, this would win the war in one brilliant stroke with minimal bloodshed.

Lincoln reluctantly accepted McClellan’s program, though he doubted that the plan would really yield such grand results. As he saw it, the Rebels were going to put up a scrap before they gave up Richmond or their cause. McClellan would have a battle to fight, whether he did it at Centerville or on the Rappahannock. Centerville was more convenient. Nevertheless, Lincoln acquiesced in the plans of the renowned professional soldier and allowed McClellan to continue with his preparations and leave the Army of the Potomac idle in its camps on Washington’s Birthday.

Yet the president continued to have doubts about the way his dashing young general was running the army. For one thing, the Army of the Potomac now consisted of twelve divisions, too many for army headquarters to maneuver efficiently. The obvious solution was to organize the divisions into four corps, an arrangement first devised in France three-quarters of a century before. Napoleon had organized his army in four corps, and it had been one of the keys to his success. McClellan did not wish to do so because, he said, he wanted to see how his generals did in battle before he elevated four of them to the more responsible position of corps commander. It may not have entered into McClellan’s motivation, but it was also a known fact that the army’s senior generals were mostly Republicans, while the more junior division commanders were Democrats and McClellan favorites because their commander shared their political beliefs. These Democratic favorites would have to accomplish something in battle before McClellan could dare to promote them over their Republican seniors.

Of more sinister import, as time passed and McClellan did not move against the Rebels, some influential people in Washington began to question his commitment to the Union cause. Could it be that McClellan did not attack because he did not wish to see the rebellion crushed in a way that might damage the institution of slavery? And what of his Urbanna Plan? If it put McClellan between Johnston and Richmond, it would also put Johnston between McClellan and Washington—and a good deal closer to the latter than McClellan would be to the Rebel capital. Could that be deliberate? Lincoln did not quite share their darkest suspicions, but he did find the matter troubling.

On March 8 Lincoln met with McClellan and the division commanders of the Army of the Potomac. The generals supported McClellan’s plan, and a somewhat reassured Lincoln continued his tentative support. He did, however, issue General War Order Number Two, stipulating that McClellan must leave in and around Washington enough troops to guarantee it against Rebel capture. The following day, without consulting McClellan, the president also issued an order organizing the Army of the Potomac into four corps and appointing its four senior generals, three of whom were Republicans, to command them. McClellan was disgusted at this interference with his genius, but he had no choice but to acquiesce.

Two days later came a further blow. Lincoln removed McClellan from the position of general in chief of all the Union armies. McClellan had previously held that job along with his position as commander of the Army of the Potomac. In removing McClellan as general in chief, Lincoln explained that in his campaign on the Virginia coast, McClellan would be far from Washington. Communications would have to go a long way around to reach him—down the Rappahannock, up Chesapeake Bay, and then up the Potomac. In addition, with the Army of the Potomac actively engaging the enemy, it would be better for McClellan to focus his attention on its operations. All of this was true, but removing McClellan as general in chief was certainly not a vote of confidence, and the general knew it. The Young Napoleon fumed and raged against Lincoln “the gorilla” in letters to his wife and conversations with his friends, but he could do nothing about it. This was in any case turning out to be an exceptionally bad week for “Little Mac,” as his soldiers affectionately called him (behind his back).

On March 8, the same day that Lincoln had held his conference with McClellan and the other generals, the Confederacy had unveiled its long-rumored wonder weapon. When Virginia had seceded back in April 1861, rebellious Virginia militia had seized the U.S. Navy yard at Norfolk. The officer in charge of defending or evacuating the post had not done a very good job. His biggest blunder was failing to extract the most powerful ship in the yard—and one of the five most powerful in the U.S. Navy—the fifty-gun steam frigate
Merrimack
. Two hundred seventy-five feet long and thirty-eight and a half feet wide, the
Merrimack
displaced 3,200 tons and drew twenty-four feet of water. She had been laid up at Norfolk for the repair of her unreliable steam engine. When it became apparent that there would not be time to get her out of the yard before the Rebels took over, retreating U.S. forces set fire to her on their way out. Since she had been carrying no ammunition at the time,
Merrimack
burned down to the waterline and then sank.

The Confederates raised the hulk and began to rebuild her not as the graceful frigate she had once been but as something much more modern and deadly. The idea of putting iron plates on ships was not entirely new. Designer Samuel M. Pook and builder James B. Eads were by late summer 1861 working on the river gunboats that would later take Fort Henry. The French navy had seven years earlier built a class of armored flat-bottomed barges called floating batteries, self-propelled by steam engines at very low speed and designed for shore bombardment in coastal waters. In 1858 the French had laid down what would become the world’s first ironclad oceangoing warship,
La Gloire
, commissioned in the summer of 1860. The British had commissioned their answer to
La Gloire
the following year, the nine-thousand-ton, iron-hulled monster
Warrior
.

What Confederate naval captain French Forrest and Lieutenant Catesby ap Roger Jones planned to make of the hulk of
Merrimack
was modest by comparison. Following plans drawn up by Lieutenant John M. Brooke, CSN, Forrest and Jones built a weather deck where the
Merrimack
’s surviving hull stopped at the waterline, and atop it they built a casemate extending most of its length and all of its breadth. The casemate’s sides were made of twenty-four inches of oak and pine covered with four inches of iron and sloped steeply inward. Firing out through narrow gun ports in the casemate were ten heavy cannon. To her bow the builders affixed an iron beak for ramming. The resultant warship looked like a barn roof floating downriver in a flood. It was sluggish and hard to maneuver, and its theoretical top speed of nine knots was provided by the
Merrimack
’s condemned engine, which had not been improved by several weeks’ immersion in salt water. The Confederates christened their new naval behemoth
Virginia
.

Word of what the Confederates were up to at Norfolk had leaked out, as such information almost invariably did during the Civil War, and the U.S. Navy Department had sought designs for ironclads of its own, finally selecting three. One was the big, bluff, 3,500-ton frigate
New Ironsides
. Another, USS
Galena
, was a seven-hundred-ton sloop of war with an experimental system of armor plates. The third was something absolutely revolutionary.