Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

force, while the Confederates had lost 10,000 of their own. Wits as well as lives had been lost, as the untested soldiers of both armies were unhinged by the appalling and concentrated carnage. “I have heard of wars & read of wars,” wrote George Asbury Bruton, of the 19th Louisiana, two days after the battle, “but never did I think it would be to my lot to participate in such a horrible scene. … I never want to witness any other such scene. It seems as if I can hear the groans of the dying & wounded men and the cannons roaring all the time worse than any thunderstorms that ever was heard.” Far away, in New York, Herman Melville (who had already sunk into a twilight of critical neglect after the failure of his sprawling novel Moby-Dick, or The White Whale in 1851) wrote of

the pause of night

That followed the Sunday fight

Around the church of Shiloh—

The church, so lone, the log-built one,

That echoed to many a parting groan

And natural prayer

Of dying foeman mingled there—

Foeman at morn, but friends at eve—

Fame or country least their care:

(What like a bullet can undeceive!)34

A sergeant from the 9th Indiana named Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (whom Melville would join in the front rank of American writers once Melville’s reputation was exhumed in the 1920s) went cold with horror when he found that gunfire had ignited the underbrush where part of the battle had raged and incinerated dead and wounded alike: “At every point… lay the bodies, half-buried in the ashes; some in the unlovely looseness of attitude denoting sudden death by the bullet, but by far the greater number in postures of agony that told of the tormenting flame.” Bierce stumbled over another Federal sergeant, shot in the head but still alive, “taking in his breath in convulsive, rattling snorts, and blowing it out in sputters of froth which crawled creamily down his cheeks” while “the brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings.”35

Most of the loss was blamed squarely on Grant’s lack of preparedness. Not only had Grant not organized his camp for defense, but he himself had been nowhere near it when the fighting began, and at that point the old story of Grant’s alcohol problems resurfaced and the word began to circulate that Grant had been drunk. Actually, Grant had been stone sober, and he had been at Savannah for the very good reason that he would be needed there as Buell’s column finally arrived on the Tennessee. Although it was true he had been caught dangerously by surprise, he had nevertheless managed to pull victory out of the jaws of defeat. Shiloh also taught Grant a very effective lesson about the war: that the Confederates were deadly in earnest about winning and were not going to go away merely because a Federal army and a gunboat or two showed up to remind them who was supposed to be in charge. “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,” Grant recollected, but after that, “I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.”36

At the same time, however, Halleck would be taking no more chances. Now that Halleck and Buell were on the scene, Grant ceased to be a semi-independent operator and became just another part of Halleck’s command along with Buell, and the dazzling thrust that had brought a Union army to the Mississippi border in two months slowed to a crawl. Turning inland from the river toward Corinth, Halleck’s advance took a month and a half (during which he stopped every night to entrench) to move over to Corinth, and when Halleck finally arrived there on May 29, Beauregard took the counsel of prudence and abandoned Corinth without a fight. With the fall of Corinth into Federal hands, the Confederacy’s last direct east-west rail line, the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, was cut, and in June the outflanked Confederate garrisons along the Mississippi at Fort Pillow and Memphis collapsed. The Mississippi (at least down to Vicksburg), Tennessee, and Cumberland Rivers were all now securely under Halleck’s control.

At that point the Union army in the west ran out of steam for several reasons, the first and most important of which had to do with the Confederates. In June, the luckless Beauregard fell ill—or at least claimed to be feeling unwell—and departed from the army to go on sick leave. Jefferson Davis, who had grown increasingly unhappy with the Confederacy’s first military hero, gladly replaced Beauregard with a scrappy, hot-tempered regular army veteran named Braxton Bragg. “Tall and erect, with thick, bushy eyebrows and black, fierce eyes” and a “naturally abominable temper,” Bragg fought in Mexico as an artillery officer under Zachary Taylor and quarreled thereafter with nearly every other officer he served beside; John Pope thought Bragg “seemed even to detest himself.” To Davis’s delight, Bragg immediately determined to regain the initiative in the west that summer. He overhauled the organization of Beauregard’s disheveled army, and took what “was little better than a Mob” and put them to five hours of drill a day. Commanding a force of about 30,000 men, Bragg swung around the edges of the Federal penetration into Tennessee and raced up through eastern Tennessee, where he picked up another 18,000 reinforcements under Edmund Kirby Smith. By the end of August, Bragg was aiming at the Kentucky border and stood in a fair way to undo everything that had been won by the Union since February.37

Halleck immediately detached Buell’s troops to try to head off Bragg. But Buell was no faster a mover in the summer of 1862 than he had been the previous winter, and instead of pursuing Bragg pell-mell, Buell proceeded to retrace his original path through Tennessee, rebuilding the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad as he went. That was slow enough work