ONE BATTLE, THREE PERSPECTIVES

HOW THREE LEADING MILITARY HISTORIANS VIEW GRANT'S ROLE IN THE FIRST HOURS OF SHILOH

May 5, 2011

By Jim Werbaneth

The Battle of Shiloh was not just one of the most important of the Civil War, but one instrumental in establishing the reputation, even the legend, Ulysses S. Grant.  Shiloh left history with the image of Grant's army being surprised by a massive Confederate onslaught on April 6, 1862, and being forced back to Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River.  One sees the Army of the Tennessee bending, but not breaking, then taking the offensive the next day, reinforced by units from the newly arriving Army of the Ohio, under Don Carlos Buell.

Central to the story is the role of General Grant.  Imperturbable in the face of crisis, one sees his confident calm as a key factor in the eventual Union victory.

Yet one factor remains; the Union was caught by surprise.  It is a situation that probably should not have occurred, had the commanders posted adequate pickets or conducted sufficient reconnaissance.  One sees the image of an army caught off guard, and unnecessarily at that.

For Civil War historians, this presents something of a problem.  There is no denying that Shiloh was a Federal victory.  Additionally, the overall commander was Ulysses S. Grant, the most renowned leader of the war, credited not just with finding and executing the recipe for victory, but of helping to invent modern, total war as well.  So at least implicitly, Shiloh constitutes an inconvenient blot on Grant's record, one that some might interpret as due to a negligence inconsistent with greatness.

In the end, it is illuminating to examine the perspectives of three important writers: John Keegan, Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote.

Some address the problem of surprise at Shiloh, and Grant's responsibility and response, in different ways.  The British writer John Keegan portrays the early stages of Shiloh as one of Grant's finer hours, while largely avoiding the issue of his responsibility for the surprise.[1]  Keegan contrasts Grant's calm with the less praiseworthy reactions of subordinates, including the colonel of the 53rd Ohio, J.J. Appler,[2] who met with the Confederate tide with howls of "Fall back and save yourselves," followed by headlong and ignominious flight, and the commander of the 71st Ohio, who "put spurs to horseflesh the moment the enemy appeared."[3]

Keegan shows Grant coolly weathering the storm, calling for reinforcements, a decision that would turn the impending defeat into a Union victory.  Until then, Grant "could only gallop here and there, dealing with each crisis as he came to it," and "oppressed by the knowledge that the Union could take 'no backward step' in the struggle with Southern rebellion, banished all thought of retreat and rode like a fury from blind spot to blind spot, keeping his men in place."[4]

In Keegan's view, we see a general not simply immune to the demoralizing influences around him, but one for whom surprise was almost irrelevant.  While others panic, Grant keeps his head along with his composure, making the right decisions, and exercising superior leadership at times and places of danger.  In the end, Keegan shows him to be the indispensable man for his army's survival.

In This Hallowed Ground, Bruce Catton places much of the responsibility for the surprise attack on his subordinates, as well as the inexperience of the soldiers themselves.  He writes of the Union army's condition on the eve of Shiloh:

Officers and men in Grant's army knew that quite a few armed rebels were at their front, but nobody in the green frontline regiments knew anything about outpost duty; reports that went back to the rear were garbled and incomplete, and the notion that the Confederates would obligingly wait to be attacked at Corinth [Mississippi] as overriding.[5]

Then too, Grant and his top subordinates, including William T. Sherman, were in the dark as well.  They had no idea that there was even the remotest chance of an attack at Pittsburg Landing, though Grant did have foresight, while the Confederate army was marching north from Corinth, to tell Sherman to "keep a sharp lookout in that direction."[6]  Yet Sherman was confident enough to send Grant a dispatch indicating that he saw no danger of attack.[7]

Still, according to Catton's description, a dangerous complacency fell over Grant's army.  Regiments would drill, and then break rank for a relaxing swim in Owl Creek.  There had been "intermittent sputterings of rifle fire" on the picket lines for two or three days, but this was no concern of the enlisted me.  Seeing no sense of danger or urgency from their high command, they saw no reason to worry themselves.[8]

Catton offers a more nuanced description than Keegan of the battle's start, depicting it as something other than a massed, totally unforeseen assault on unready regiments, on a par with Stonewall Jackson's last attack at Chancellorsville.  He writes of Union patrols venturing south on the morning of April 6, and encountering the Confederate army's advanced skirmishers, close to their own positions.  Then immediately behind these troops was the main Confederate battle line.  The Union patrols were thrown back into their own camps, giving the soldiers some opportunity to fall into line and ready themselves for defense.[9]  Thus, one could say that the precautions that Grant urged upon Sherman bore some return.

As does Keegan, Catton emphasizes the poor performance of some officers under the stress of unexpected combat.  He too cites the leader of the 71st Ohio as a rank coward, in very similar language.[10]  By way of contrast, he credits one Private A.C. Vorhis of the 17th Illinois, a veteran of combat at Fort Donelson, who went along the line, showing nervous recruits how to load, aim and fire their muskets properly, telling them "Why, it's just like shooting squirrels, only these squirrels have guns, that's all."[11]

Catton devotes much less attention to Grant's generalship on the first day of Shiloh than does Keegan.  He writes that the Army of the Tennessee was pushed inexorably back toward the river of the same name, despite the heroic stand of Brigadier General Prentiss's division at the Hornet's Nest.  Of Grant's personal role, he writes simply:

Grant got himself to the scene and was doing all a commander could do to hold the position, but the southern attack was being driven home with a grim determination not to be expected of men who were tired of the war and ready to quit…  He sent for Lew Wallace's division to come up, drew up his siege guns and reserve artillery on the high ground in front of the river landing, and he did his best to get the disorganized fugitives back into battle and bolster his sagging line.[12]

Catton continues that "There was not very much that he could do.  His army had simply been caught off balance, and the Confederates were pressing their advantage."[13]  Thus while Keegan portrays Grant as very much an active participant in the Union stand, Catton casts him as much less able to influence events.  Indeed, by this perspective his most important actions for the day were to set up a "stop line" at Pittsburg Landing, and summon reinforcements.  Even then, Wallace's division became lost or misdirected, and did not arrive in time to influence events that day.[14]  Ultimately it appeared on the battlefield after dark, and took part in the fighting on April 7.[15]

A third, more detailed perspective on the battle comes from Shelby Foote, in the first volume of his trilogy The Civil War: A Narrative.  Foote describes the 53rd Ohio's Colonel Appler, the same officer who fled so quickly as soon as the battle started, as "high strung and jumpy," and "given to imagining that the whole rebel army was just outside his tent flap."[16]  Foote continues that he was so prone to sounding the alarm without warrant that his troops were mocked as the "log roll regiment."  Then, on Friday, April 4, he lost a picket guard of seven men to Confederate cavalry, and in response sent a company south; they encountered scattered firing and returned.  Appler spent the next day communicating his fears to Sherman, his division commander, finishing with a report that a large force of the enemy was bearing down on the army.  Fed up, Sherman mounted his horse to confront Jones, who excitedly informed the general that hordes of rebels were bearing down on the army.  When Appler stopped talking, at long last, Sherman erupted with the words: "Take your damned regiment back to Ohio.  Beauregard is not such a fool as to leave his base of operations and attack us in ours.  There is no enemy nearer than Corinth."[17]

Actually, states Foote, Sherman had additional evidence that there were rebels south of Shiloh, and Foote goes so far as to say that "he knew better" than to disregard the Ohio colonel's accounts out of hand.[18]  There were several encounters between Sherman's units and the Confederates, including one on the evening previous of his snappish meeting with Jones, in which the Federals took ten prisoners.  On the morning of April 5, Sherman notified Grant: "The enemy has cavalry in our front, and I think there are two regiments of infantry and one battery of artillery about 2 miles out.  I will send you 10 prisoners of war and a report of last night's affair in a few minutes."[19]

Foote continues that Grant's mind was already made up anyway; he would attack the Confederates between him and Corinth, and not the other way around.  Physically, he was also largely immobilized from a badly sprained ankle, suffered when his horse slipped and fell, pinning his leg under its body; his ankle was so swollen that Grant had to have his boot cut off.  Sherman reported that all was quiet along his lines, following with his estimate: "I have no doubt that nothing will occur today more than picket firing.  The enemy is saucy, but got the worst of it yesterday, and will not press our pickets far…  I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position."[20]

Thus Foote ultimately puts much of the onus for the Union's surprise of April 6 on William T. Sherman.  He admits that reports of an impending Southern assault, originating with the ill-reputed 53rd Ohio and its panicky commander, lacked full credibility on their own, but the writer relates that these reports were supported by other evidence from other sources.  At best, Sherman badly underestimated the size of the enemy force at his front, as two regiments of infantry, one artillery battery, and some elements of cavalry represented a reinforced brigade, whereas the rebel commanders Albert Sydney Johnston and Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard really had an army that, on April 6, proved a mortal danger to Grant's.  At the worst, Sherman disregarded that there was any danger at all.  One might rationalize that Sherman's evidence lacked the strongest credibility, but the fact remains that there was a major Confederate force in the area ― and events proved, it was large, dangerous, and about to attack.

Foote's account portrays Sherman's stubbornness as persisting even as the battle begins.  When one of Benjamin Prentiss's brigade commanders, uneasy before dawn, sent out a three-company reconnaissance to check out the woods to his front, they encountered Confederate skirmishers, as Catton states.  The Union soldiers confused the Confederates for a scouting party and attacked them, driving them back on the main body.  These soldiers, in turn, directed heavy volleys against the Union troops, who retreated upon their own camps.[21]

Prentiss got his men into position quickly.  Sherman received reports of the encounter, and dramatic descriptions of the Confederate numbers, but according to Foote, still disregarded them, as they came from the 53rd Ohio and its colonel.  When Sherman received a courier from that quarter, his response was a laconic, "You must be badly scared over there."[22]

When it comes to Grant's response, Foote again indulges in much more detail than either Keegan or Catton, and gives him far more credit than the latter ever does.  His account is of an active commander, establishing a straggler line in the rear, and then visiting each of his divisional commanders, ordering Lew Wallace to bring his division forward.  He reassures Sherman that his men would not run out of ammunition, and commands Prentiss, holding a critical position on the Union left, to hold at all costs.  Prentiss did, though his command was destroyed, delaying the Confederates and buying time for the defense line in the rear, augmented by troops summoned by Grant, to coalesce.[23]

By Keegan's account, Grant was a most active commander, going from crisis to crisis with poise and purpose.  According to Catton, he was almost a non-factor.  Foote falls on the side of Keegan, and adds that he made the crucial decision for Prentiss to fight to the very end in the position that would become known as the Hornet's Nest.  By doing this, and calling for reinforcements as well as forming a coherent defense line near Pittsburg Landing, his performance was a key to stopping the attack, and setting the stage for the next day's counterattack.  Far from being a nonentity, he did everything needed to win the Battle of Shiloh.

Reference to the primary sources is enlightening, for their silence as well as what they say.  Though his division absorbed the first attack on April 6, in his memoirs Sherman asserts that there were indeed warning signs of a Confederate presence, pointedly mentioning the loss of the seven-man (plus one officer) picket group mentioned by Foote.  However, he states that the evidence indicated that the force at his front was probably mainly cavalry, with perhaps "a couple of guns" attached to a regiment.[24]

He rights that the day before the battle was quiet, "without any unusual event, the weather being wet and mild, and the roads back to the steamboat-landing [Pittsburg Landing] being heavy with mud."[25]  His account of the start of the battle on April 6 is concise, and does not mention surprise as a significant factor:

[O]n Sunday morning, the 6th, early, there was a good deal of picket-firing, and I got breakfast, rode out along my lines, and, about four hundred yards to the front of Appler's regiment, received from some bushes in a ravine to the left front a volley which killed my orderly, Holliday.  About the same time I saw the rebel lines of battle in front coming down on us as far as the eye could reach.[26]

Sherman continues, not betraying even the minimum of surprise.  Indeed, he portrays his division, and himself, as fully ready for the attack:

All my troops were in line of battle, ready, and the ground was favorable to us.  I gave the necessary orders to the battery (Waterhouse's) attached to Hildebrand's brigade, and cautioned the men to reserve their fire till the rebels had crossed the ravine of Owl Creek, and had begun the ascent; also, sent staff-officers to notify General McClernand and Prentiss of the coming blow.  Indeed, McClernand had already sent three regiments to the support of my left flank, and they were in position when the onset came.[27]

Sherman's memoirs admit only one regret.  He writes, with the clarity of post-war hindsight, that the Union army's position before Shiloh should have been fortified.  In a passage that ends curiously, he writes, "At a later period in the war, could have rendered this position impregnable in one nigh, but at this time we did not do it, and it may be well that we did not."[28]  He does not explain why not fortifying at Shiloh could have been a good choice.

Nor does Sherman address the question of Grant's level of surprise and early actions on April 6.  Yet this is entirely natural, as Sherman would have been too concerned with his own role in the battle to take note of Grant's.  As a measure of his activity in the battle Major General Henry W. Halleck, not exactly the quickest man to offer fulsome praise of a subordinate, wrote to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton commending Sherman for his actions at Shiloh, noting that he had three horses shot from under him, and further recommending him for promotion to Major General of Volunteers, effective April 6.[29]

Even more crucial than Sherman's voice in understanding the battle, and its interpretations, is that of Ulysses S. Grant himself.  His memoirs necessarily cover the Battle of Shiloh and his role in it.

Grant admits that at the end of the week before Shiloh, he did not consider Pittsburg Landing to be threatened.  He was more worried about Crump's Landing, guarded by Lew Wallace, and possibly threatened by a Confederate force operating along the Mobile and Ohio Railroad.  Yet he did not believe that either site was in real danger:

I had no apprehension that the enemy could really capture either place.  But I feared it was possible that he might make a rapid dash upon Crump's and destroy our transports and stores, most of which were kept at that point, and then retreat before Wallace could be reinforced.  Lew. Wallace's position I regarded as so well chosen that he was not removed.[30]

Grant's description of the early stages of the battle is even more calm than Sherman's.  By his account, he was at breakfast when he heard the sounds of battle on the morning of April 6.  He immediately moved to Pittsburg Landing, cancelled a planned meeting with Don Carlos Buell at Savannah, Tennessee, and opened communications with Lew Wallace, taking a dispatch boat toward Crump's Landing.  "I found him waiting on a boat apparently expecting to see me," writes Grant, "and I directed him to get his troops in line ready to execute any orders that he might receive.  He replied that his troops were already under arms and prepared to move."[31]

To that point, Grant confesses, he was "by no means certain that Crump's landing might not be the point of attack.  On reaching the front, however, about eight A.M., I found that the attack on Pittsburg was unmistakable, and that nothing more than a small guard, protect our transports and stores, was needed at Crump's."[32]  Accordingly, he sent an aide to Wallace, and directed him to march by the road along the Tennessee River toward Pittsburg Landing, and the battle.[33]

Grant credits the early Confederate success not to the advantage of surprise, but Southern courage and determination: "The Confederate assaults were made with such a disregard of losses on their own side that our line of tents soon fell into their hands."[34]  Furthermore, he writes that the rebels repeated attempted to outflank the Union positions, compelling them to retreat.[35]

By Grant's account, the desperate fight of General Prentiss at the Hornet's Nest was not the result of surprise or a deliberate decision on his or Prentiss's part, but of the friction of war.  While the Union divisions were falling back, deliberately as Grant infers, Prentiss failed to do so with the others, and was thus left in an exposed, forward position.  As for the element of surprise, Grant bluntly rejects stories that Prentiss' men were captured in their beds, backing it up with the evidence of the general's surrender in late afternoon, as late as five o'clock, and by the "thousands killed and wounded on the Confederate side" by Prentiss and his men.[36]  It is a story fostered by General John Alexander McClernand in his self-serving report, and which Grant bluntly refutes in his own correspondence, within weeks of the battle.[37]

Interestingly, Keegan gives a description of Prentiss' stand that runs counter to Grant's portrayal of a division that did not retreat on a pace that would have saved it, though he does give a dramatic account of its lethal courage.  Keegan writes that:

Grant's centre division [Prentiss'] had been driven back early in the day but had then rooted itself on a spot that favoured defense.  Its strength was whittled away in a succession of Confederate attacks.  Its dead strewed its front, its wounded straggled away to the makeshift hospitals hastily organized in the army's rear.  But its line remained unbroken.  Grant visited it several times during the afternoon, bringing reinforcements when he could find them and heartening its commander with words of encouragement.  But as the day wore on, its flanks became exposed, the Southerners working around on the left and right to separate the division from its neighbours.  Eventually it stood almost surrounded, reduced from 5,000 fighting men to little more than 2,000 and, when the enemy ran guns forward to sweep its front at close range, it could resist no longer.  Grant had last visited it at 4.30.  At 5.30 the white flag was raised and the survivors gave themselves up.[38]

When Grant does broach the element of surprise, it is to address the quality of his units.  He cites the preponderance of raw troops, "many of whom were hardly able to load their muskets according to the manual" before the battle, in some cases led by "officers equally ignorant of their duties."[39]  He writes that the it was no wonder that some regiments broke at first contact with the enemy, but is much harsher toward two unidentified regiments led by "constitutional cowards, unfit for any military position," colonels who fled ignominiously at the start of combat.[40]  He had to have been thinking of the miserable Appler, whom even his second in command said rode for the rear, taking his regiment with him, adding that it was right after Sherman ordered Appler to stand, promising support too. [41]  In general though, Grant praises the steadfastness of his green soldiers and inexperienced officers, at least the officers who stayed and fought.[42]

Of Grant's own role, he portrays himself as actively involved in the events on the morning of April 6.  He writes that he was continuously on move, giving directions to his division commanders,[43] a far cry from Catton's description of a general born along by events.  He does say though that he spent little time with Sherman, as that subordinate was unusually effective in leader his highly inexperienced soldiers without the assistance or direction of his own commander.  As Grant says, "I never deemed it important to stay long with Sherman."[44]

Remembrance of the Battle of Shiloh was influenced by some less than benign efforts to twist the journalistic and historical record.  McClernand's report is a prime example, though he did give some credit to Sherman and his division, while slandering Prentiss and congratulating himself and his command inordinately.[45]  Later, McClernand would make this a habit, earning Grant's wrath in the Vicksburg Campaign, rendering accounts that inflated his dubious ability and achievement.[46]

Sherman relates that after the battle the Union army benefited from an influx of civilian volunteers, including medical personnel, who arrived to aid wounded soldiers.  However, in  his words, they "caught up camp-stories, which on their return home they retailed through their local papers, usually elevating their own neighbors into heroes, but decrying all others."[47]

He cites the lieutenant governor of Ohio, Benjamin Stanton, as the worst offender, stating that he published a particularly abusive article about Grant and his subordinates in a newspaper in Belfontaine, Ohio.  Characteristically, Sherman writes, "As General Grant did not and would not take up the cudgels, I did so."[48]  In June, the General replied in a letter to the Cincinnati Commercial, and claimed that by this time, the people of the North were more ready to give the army their faith and confidence.  Never one to shrink from a fight, or deny a victory, Sherman writes:

Stanton was never again elected to any public office, and was commonly spoken of as "the late Mr. Stanton."  He is now dead, and I doubt not in life he often regretted his mistake in attempting to gain popular fame by abusing the army-leaders, then as now an easy and favorite mode of gaining notoriety, if not popularity.  Of course subsequent events gave General Grant and most of the other actors in that battle their appropriate place in history, but the danger of sudden popular clamors is well illustrated by this case.[49]

Shelby Foote goes even further than General Sherman.  Foote writes that Stanton was dispatched to Tennessee by Governor David Tod.  Ohio's soldiers had been hard hit with casualties at Shiloh, and the start was also sensitive that some of its regiments had run for the rear without firing a shot.  Foote's version has Stanton going among the Ohio soldiers and hearing that their views corresponded with those of the governor.  He returned home, and in April railed against "the blundering stupidity and negligence of the general in command," that is Grant, adding that there was "a general feeling among the most intelligent men that Grant and Prentiss ought to be court-martialed or shot."[50]  Hence Sherman's anger, and his response.

Nor was Ohio alone, in Foote's view.  An Iowa Congressmen argued that Grant had bungled every battle he had fought so far, and had to be rescued by others each time.  He stated that "those who continue General Grant in active command will in my opinion carry on their skirts the blood of thousands of their slaughtered countrymen."[51]

Another man, speaking for Pennsylvania, went to the White House and gave Abraham Lincoln a summary of the charges.  Grant had been surprised because he had disregarded orders from the eternally cautious Halleck to entrench at Pittsburg Landing, and that he suffered from a pronounced lack of vigilance.  Plus, he was drunk.  The public had lost trust in him, and echoing the Iowan's words, any future blood lost due to Grant's shortcomings would be on the hands of those who sustained him.  To this Lincoln responded with one of the most memorable statements of confidence ever expressed of a military leader: "I can't spare this man.  He fights."[52]

Unfortunately Grant was removed from the war, temporarily, by Halleck.  In a command reorganization, Grant's army command went to George Thomas, and Grant was relegated to an advisory capacity to Halleck.[53]

Thus Grant's record did suffer, at least in the short term, from negative interpretations of Shiloh.  Even Foote equivocates about the worst charge, that he was intoxicated on the morning of the Confederate attack,[54] and despite the backing of the President, his removal from command would give credence to many that his performance at Shiloh was less than sterling.

Nor did the slings and arrows against Grant end with the war.  Don Carlos Buell wrote a damning "review" of the battle, and Grant's alleged mistakes for Century magazine, republished in the first volume of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War in 1887.[55]

Of the three major historians studied ― Keegan, Catton, and Foote ― Foote's interpretation of the first day of Shiloh is the detailed and favorable to Grant, and probably the most accurate.  He depicts an army that was taken by surprise, and that if anyone bears the blame, it is Sherman, though one has to temper this with the realization it was Grant who had overall command, and therefore overall responsibility, for the Army of the Tennessee.  One sees Sherman obstinately clinging to the belief that there is no danger to his front, and adopting a sense of security wholly incompatible with leading soldiers into enemy territory, with imperfect intelligence.  When given the opportunity to explain his actions in his memoirs, Sherman denies the issue almost altogether.

Foote's analysis of Grant's activity, and ability to influence the battle on the morning of April 6, conforms with Grant's own recollections.  Crucially, Grant does not portray himself in heroic terms; there is a matter of fact, almost humble tone to his memoirs' treatment of Shiloh, one that shows him making decisions and visiting divisional commanders, but not acting as the indispensable man.  Grant's account of his actions on April 6 are entirely credible.

However, he treats the issue of surprise with silence.  Then again, Grant was in the rear when the battle erupted, and was not in a position to see first hand whether or not his soldiers were caught off guard.  His most striking and heartfelt words on this involve his refutation that Prentiss' division was overrun by surprise in the first stages of the battle, and his evidence is compelling: Had Prentiss been truly surprised, as his and Grant's detractors insisted, then his division would have been destroyed in the morning, not late afternoon.

Keegan definitely follows Foote's lead, but with less detail and more hyperbole.  His account is credible, though one wonders if Ulysses S. Grant would have been fully comfortable with John Keegan's level of praise.

Catton's description of Grant on the first day of Shiloh is curious.  His description of the general is strangely passive, something of a prisoner of events.  Whereas Keegan makes Grant indispensable, Catton comes close to making him a non-factor.  This does not conform with the Union army's primary sources.

Yet Catton is not necessarily a Grant critic.  In A Stillness at Appomattox, Catton depicts Grant, upon joining the Army of the Potomac in Virginia, to be an unpretentious, competent, determined man of common sense.[56]  Considering the parade of vainglorious, incompetent, and passive commanders inflicted on the Army of the Potomac for much of its existence, Catton's description of the 1864 Grant is an even higher honor.  Echoing Lincoln's post-Shiloh endorsement, Catton writes that "Men seemed ready to call Grant the hammerer before he even began to hammer."[57]

In the end, that is a much more lasting, and accurate, characterization than Catton leaves in This Hallowed Ground of the man buffeted at Shiloh.  In A Stillness at Appomattox, he comes much closer to the consensus view, as backed by primary sources, than he does in This Hallowed Ground, published three years later.  It is a most curious divergence in conclusions that draws one to ask as many questions about the historians and his evidence as it does about his subject.  The "Hammer" of 1953 becomes the rather passive general, more commanded by events than in command, in 1956.  Fortunately though, the verdict of other historians thirty years later returns Grant to his place of trial and victory at Shiloh.