Nathan Bedford Forrest: First With the Most - Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI
BATTLE AT THE PLACE OF PEACE
March 16, 1862-May 30, 1862

Through the month of March 1862 fighting men were converging from every quarter upon an unknown little log church in the Tennessee woods, bearing the name of Shiloh, which being interpreted means the Place of Peace, there to meet in the early days of April in the bloodiest battle, by far, which up to that time had been fought on the American continent.

Shiloh Church itself was of no military importance. Pittsburg Landing, some three miles to the northeast, was of little more importance-a store and two or three houses on the riverbank where, in prerailroad days, a small area of Tennessee and Mississippi, including the town of Corinth, shipped and received freight by Tennessee River packet.

A few years before, Corinth had become a railroad junction of importance, at the crossing of the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, north and south, and the Memphis & Charleston, east and west. Through connections at Grand Junction, rail transportation reached southward to new Orleans, and at Chattanooga to all of the eastern South. For that reason, Corinth had been chosen by Albert Sidney Johnston as his place of concentration for making a stand below the Tennessee River.

To Corinth he ordered the troops retreating from Bowling Green and Nashville. The frowning fortress at Columbus was evacuated, part of the guns and the garrison sent to New Madrid and Island No. 10 to continue the blockade of the Mississippi, and the remainder, under Major General Leonidas Polk, drawn back along the railroad to Corinth. The zeal and activity of General Beauregard began to bear fruit with the arrival at Corinth of 5,000 men under Brigadier General Daniel Ruggles, "borrowed" from the defenses of New Orleans, and 10,000 more from Mobile and Pensacola, where for nearly a year they had been trained under a strict disciplinarian and drillmaster, Major General Braxton Bragg. Smaller detachments were gathered in from along the line of the Memphis & Charleston, under Brigadier General James R. Chalmers, an able young Mississippi lawyer, and Brigadier General L. P. Walker of Alabama, who had been the first Confederate Secretary of War.

So general was the feeling that the South was to be defended best by concentrating an army at Corinth that the commanders in other sectors and even governors of states were willing to see their own local defenses weakened, or even stripped, to add to Johnston's strength. Governor John Gill Shorter of Alabama, indeed, went so far as actually to urge that troops be sent out of his state, on call from Beauregard.

By the end of March there had been assembled in the vicinity of Conrinth a force of some 40,000 Confederates. Still others had been sent for, notably the 15,000 troops from across the Mississippi under Major General Earl Van Dorn, but due to lack of quick transportation they had not arrived.

From the north, during the same period, two armies were moving on Pittsburg Landing, twenty-two miles northeast of Corinth and across the state line of Tennessee. First to arrive was Grant's victorious force, reinforced to a strength of six divisions instead of the three which had won Fort Donelson, steaming up the Tennessee in an "immense fleet" of transports, convoyed by gunboats. Grant himself being still under suspension as a result of Halleck's displeasure, C. F. Smith led the expedition to Savannah, on the east bank of the Tennessee River, where headquarters were established.

On March sixteenth, the same day on which Forrest reached Iuka, Mississippi, William T. Sherman, command the most advanced division, made camp at Pittsburg Landing, nine miles upstream from Savannah and on the opposite side of the river, toward the Confederate concentration at Corinth. Back from the landing the country rises into a plateau, averaging a hundred or more feet above the water, bounded on the south by the steep valley of Lick Creek and on the north by Owl Creek, flowing into Snake Creek, which in turn flows into the river some four miles below the mouth of Lick. Some five miles back from the river, the headwaters of the two creeks come close together, making a rough quadrilateral of the tableland enclosed between them and the river.

Finding the site high, dry and spacious, "admitting of easy defense by a small force and yet affording admirable camping ground for a hundred thousand men," Sherman urged that the army be concentrated there. Grant, now restored to command, so ordered, except that headquarters were kept at Savannah, the principal town in that section of the river, toward which Buell was marching cross-country from Nashville, 125 miles to the northeast, with four divisions.

News of Buell's advance to a junction with Grant was brought back by a timely scout of a detachment of Forrest's newly organized regiment of cavalry into Middle Tennessee, and promptly reported to Johnston. Forrest remained at Iuka and when next Sherman made a reconnaissance toward the railroad, landing troops at Eastport eight miles away, he found Confederate cavalry vigilantly guarding the road. It being no part of Sherman's orders to bring on a fight, he withdrew and dropped back down the river to Pittsburg Landing.

On that day-Tuesday, April 1-the troops at Iuka were the extreme right of Johnston's forces, which were stationed along the railroads from that point to Corinth, and thence northward to Bethel Station in Tennessee-the line roughly conforming to the "corner" made by the Tennessee River where it abruptly changes its westward course to flow north to the Ohio. In number, Johnston's command was about equal to that of Grant encamped on the Shiloh tableland, but it was far from ready to give battle. Some of the commands were described by Bragg as a "mob, miscalled soldiers," while none of the newly named Army of the Mississippi had been properly organized for successful handling in large-scale combat. But, ready or not, Johnston knew that another army, Buell's, almost as large as the one Grant already had, was on the march toward Pittsburg Landing.

Just before midnight of Wednesday, April 2, therefore, Johnston determined to seek out Grant and attack him where he lay, before Buell could come up. Warning orders were issued before 2:00 A.M., to get the troops in readiness for movement "as soon as practicable" on Thursday, with three days' cooked rations in haversacks and forty rounds of ammunition in cartridge boxes. The plan was to have the army in position in the woods below Shiloh, ready to strike at daylight of Saturday, April 5, while Buell was yet too far away to help Grant.

There was delay in getting started on Thursday, however, with the leading corps not getting under way until well into the afternoon. There was crossing of corps in the march order prescribed by Beauregard, second-in-command to Johnston, with consequent blocking of the few narrow and bad roads available for the advance. There were all the things that could and did happen to so large a force making its first combined movement. There was fretting and fuming among the commanders, and a vast lot of standing still waiting for a chance to move on the part of the columns. Instead, therefore, of bivouacking Thursday night beyond the hamlet of Monterey, a dozen miles out of Corinth, as was planned, the various corps were strung out clear back to Corinth. And that night it rained, a torrential downpour which made the bad roads, already cut to pieces by the wheels of wagons and guns, all the worse.

Breckinridge's reserve division, to which Forrest's cavalry was temporarily attached, did not leave Burnsville, a village on the railroad east of Corinth, until the morning of Friday, April. 4, but that day made a good march of twenty-three miles to the vicinity of Monterey. Forrest, being detached from Breckinridge, was sent on the next day to picket the country south of Lick Creek. That night, on the extreme right of the army, he bivouacked within three miles of the river, along the road leading to Hamburg, the next landing upstream from Pittsburg. And that night again the heavens opened and the rain descended upon the Confederates sleeping in the open.

On the following day-Saturday the fifth, when Johnston had planned to fight his battle-the Confederates commands made short marches forward to and beyond "Michi's [or Mickey's] house," and deployed in line of battle. Hardee's corps, the first line, actually deployed before noon within a mile and a half of Shiloh Church, near which Sherman, commanding the most advanced of the Union camps scattered about the tableland, had his headquarters.

Forrest's men, during this day, skirmished with Federal outposts along Lick Creek, driving back a cavalry company which seems to have been the escort to Colonel James B. McPherson, sent to examine the defensibility of the ground at Hamburg and, if advisable, to lay out camps for Buell's four divisions, whom Grant planned to station there, "when they all get here."

Neither the driving in of McPherson's escort, nor the other brushes between advanced Confederate elements, nor the general disturbance created by the deployment of an army within less than two miles of his camps, served to warn Grant of an imminent attack, probably because he was so certain in his own mind that he would make his junction with Buell and then go to seek out again this Confederate force which, for two months, had been falling back before him.

As late as Saturday night, while Forrest's men guarding the fords across Lick Creek were so close to his camps that they enjoyed the music of the Union army's band, Grant was writing Halleck, "I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us, but will be prepared should such a thing take place."

Actually, though, no real precautions had been taken to observe the approach of the Confederates who, in spite of all orders, had come up in noisy, holiday-soldier fashion, cheering and shouting and blazing away at rabbits scared up out of the brush, or just firing off their guns to see if the nights in the rain had spoiled their charges. No fortified lines had been thrown across the narrow neck between the headwaters of the two creeks which covered the flanks of the Union position-a precaution which would have made it all but impregnable. The divisional camps were scattered about in the area between Shiloh and the Landing with an eye to convenience of camping, not defense against attack.

Beauregard was so convinced that Grant must know the whereabouts and intentions of the 40,000 Confederates who had spent all day Saturday deploying almost in sight of Sherman's camps, that he urged a return to Corinth and abandonment of the attack. At a conference of corps commanders, held at a crossroads less than two miles from Shiloh Church, Johnston quietly announced, "Gentlemen, we shall attack at daylight tomorrow. Before dawn, at a final meeting of the generals at Johnston's campfire, Beauregard renewed his urging of a retreat to Corinth. Firing was heard form the front. "Gentlemen," said Johnston, "the battle has opened. It is too late to change."

It was Sunday morning, April sixth. Just after five o'clock Johnston's army struck. The surprise, so far as attack by the main Confederate army is concerned, was complete. Sherman's men, in front of Johnson's left, were busy about their Sunday morning camp chores. Grant was a dozen miles away from the scene of the blow, at his headquarters in the Cherry House in Savannah. The roar of artillery, reduced to a dull mutter by the distance, was his news that a battle had begun. Brigadier General B. M. Prentiss, a "civilian" general whose division had been at Shiloh only three days, seems to have been the one Union commander who took the trouble to send troops to find out about all the disturbance in the woods.

This regiment of Pretiss, sent out a mile and a half, was the first force struck by the advance of the Confederate line of battle. Prentiss' whole division was soon engaged, along with Sherman's, and both were driven back upon the divisions of McClernand and S. A. Hurlbut and that of C. F. Smith, under the command of W. H. L. Wallace, which were encamped farther to the rear. The Union army, broken into fragments but stubbornly fighting, fell back through the woods, and across the little farm clearings and deep ravines and gullies, toward the Landing.

The exultant Confederates pressed forward, but broken into fragments, too. Their order of battle, prescribed by Beauregard, would have been exceedingly difficult to hold in the best of circumstances-Hardee's corps plus one brigade of Bragg deployed clear across the front of battle as the first line; Bragg's corps deployed 500 yards to the rear as a second line, clear across the front; Polk's corps and Breckinridge's troops, 800 yards behind, as a third line. In the dense country this difficult order of battle, with its lack of channels of command and communication from rear to front, was soon lost.

But in spite of disorganization and confusion, in spite of the gallant futility with which generals railed odd bits of companies and battalions about them to advance in desperate charges behind waving flags, while other and larger units waited in the woods for someone to direct them, in spite of all the things that could and did happen in their first great battle to new troops who could find no room in which to execute the parade-ground maneuvers which made up most of their training, in spite of everything, the tide of battle was pressed northward toward the Landing.

Sherman's division began to give way shortly after eight o'clock, and by ten he had given ground completely, to join forces with McClernand in his rear. Prentiss fell back at nine o'clock, to take position between Hurlbut and W. H. L. Wallace. Wallace was mortally wounded, his division began to retire, and Prentiss was left, all but surrounded, holding the Hornet's Nest-a position which became, for the most of the day, a focal point of the battle, enver to be forgotten by the men of either side.

Under orders received direct from Johnston the night before, Forrest held his men on the south side of Lick Creek during the morning hours, assigned to watch for any possible advance of an enemy force which might have come ashore at Hamburg. Assigned to like duty was Colonel George Maney's First Tennessee Infantry. About eleven in the morning, having satisfied himself that no enemy was approaching from this extreme right flank, Maney started to the main battle, leaving Forrest to guard the fords of the creek. Forrest, riding in from his outposts, assembled his regiment and addressed them.

"Boys, do you hear that musketry and that artillery?

"It means that our friends are falling by the hundreds at the hands of the enemy, and we are here guarding a damned creek! Let's go and help them. What do you say?"

With a roar of approval, the regiment started at the gallop for the sounds of the advacing battle, by that time seemingly four or five miles away. Pushing to the scene of the heaviest fighting, Forrest formed his men behind the division of Brigadier General Frank Cheatham, which had just been repulsed in one of the several charges against the Hornet's Nest. Two Federal batteries opened on the newly arrived cavalry.

Forrest felt that he must move his men either forward or back-preferably forward. Cheatham's command, after hours of hard fighting ending in a savage repulse, was in no condition to renew the charge at the moment, nor did Cheatham feel like giving Forrest orders to do so.

"Then I'll charge under my own orders," the intrepid Colonel announced, and away he went against the enemy positions. The mounted men bogged down in a marsh forty yards short of the troublesome batteries, but the horsemen were closely followed by Cheatham's infantry, who pressed home the charge.

By the middle of the afternoon, the Union army, except for Prentiss' force cut off but still fighting, was being pressed back against a convex ridge surrounding the Landing itself, under the protection of a huge battery of more than fifty guns marshaled and emplaced there by a forethoughted staff officer. Under the bluffs and along the riverbank cowered thousands of fugitive soldiers who, according to the reports of men of Buell's command, had given up the fight. At this point of the fight, about 2:30 in the afternoon, General Johnston, bringing forward troops on the right, was struck by a chance ball. An artery in his leg was cut. He did not notice, or disregarded it. Within half an hour he was dead, and command passed to Beauregard.
The fight, however, went on. Forrest, after his charge with Cheatham, moved over to the right and became part of the grouping of troops which cut between Prentiss and his reserves, completely encircling him and, after more hard fighting, bringing that doughty commander to surrender himself and the remnants of his division, 2,200 men, at about 5:30 P.M. Meanwhile, about five o'clock, the first of Buell's brigades had come on the field, ferried across the river after a forced march through the swampy lowlands on the east side from Savannah, where they had camped on Saturday night.

As late in the day as it was, efforts continued to organize a mass Confederate attack on the convex ridge, crowned with its fifty-gun battery, which seemed to be all that stood between the Union forces and final defeat. From taking part in the capture of Prentiss, Forrest passed on to skirmish vigorously against this final Union position, with such results that he sent back word to Polk, commanding in that part of the field, urging a general and rapid advance. Troops under Chalmers and J. K. Jackson tried it but they were small and weary brigades trying to breast a steep and encumbered slope against concentrated fire.

With their repulse, just before dark, ended the fighting of the first day at Shiloh, just as the orders from Beauregard came around to break off the battle to allow a chance to reorganize the commands for another day's fighting. Forrest founds himself at the close of the day's fighting in a wooded ravine partially flooded with backwater, on the extreme Confederate right and near the river.

Having been for hours without news of Willie, his fifteen-year-old son who had followed his father into battle, he started a search of the field, fearing to find him among the dead or wounded. To Mary Montgomery Forrest, with a husband under fire scores of times, and with her one child beside him, the war years must have been one long anguish, but an anguish of which she made no complaint, or none that is recorded, as is the way of women in war. Military risks and dangers for her men she seems to have accepted with the philosophy that the situation enforced, but she did worry about the lack of suitable companionship of his own age for her boy. Not long before Shiloh Forrest rode two days to the headquarters of General Polk to "borrow" two suitable companions for Willie, the young sons of Bishop Otey of the Episcopal Church and of General Daniel S. Donelson of Tennessee.

On the first night of Shiloh Forrest failed to find trace of Willie and his young companions, but eh youngsters turned up safe enough with a batch of a dozen or so Federal stragglers whom they had surprised in one of the deep ravines falling steeply down to the river, and audaciously had made prisoners.

In the course of the evening Colonel Forrest and his scouts-most of them captured blue overcoats-worked well down the riverbank, and in sight of the Landing. There they saw steamboats arriving, and heard the orders given for the unloading of fresh troops-actually, though Forrest did not know it at the time, T. L. Crittenden's command whom he had last seen in January, in his scouting along Green River. Crittenden, who arrived about nine o'clock, was having "great difficulty in landing" because of the "6,000 to 10,000 entirely demoralized soldiery" who packed the bank of the river.

To Forrest's mind, everything was clear. Action was demanded. Back he went, hunting for forces with which to act. The nearest command was Chalmers' brigade, sleeping on the ground where Prentiss had been captured. To Chalmers, then, he went, to tell him of the landing of reinforcements by the thousands, and of the need to strike and strike now.

"About midnight," Chalmers said, "Forrest awoke me, inquiring for Generals Beauregard, Bragg and Hardee, and when I could not tell him the headquarters of either, he said, in profane but prophetic language, 'If the enemy come on us in the morning, we'll be whipped like hell.' With promptness he carried the information to headquarters-" although as appears from other accounts he was not able to find General Beauregard, such was the confusion of the Confederate bivouacs on the field of battle-"and, with military genius, suggested a renewal at once of our attack; but the unlettered Colonel was ordered back to his regiment 'to keep up a strong and vigilant picket line,' which he did. . . ."

Forrest and his men must have slept little that night, for scouting down the river continued until two in the morning, at which time reinforcements were still pouring up the river, while Forrest himself is noted as having reported during the night to General Breckinridge and twice to General Hardee, as well as to Chalmers.

Monday morning came-the second day of Shiloh, a day of lowering clouds and spiteful storms. During the night Lew Wallace's Union division arrived, and the rest of Buell's fresh army of 30,000 men. Worn and now hopelessly outnumbered, the Confederate stubbornly fought from half past five in the morning until two in the afternoon, and then, quietly and determinedly, started back to Corinth.

The first movement of the morning, a swarm of skirmishers thrown out by Buell's fresh troops who had come in during the night, came against Forrest's picket line. For an hour and a half Forrest held them off, slowly falling back, to gain time for the lining up of the infantry a little to the rear. At seven o'clock, under orders from Hardee, Forrest's cavalry retired through the infantry to form in the rear what would now be known as a "straggler line." Through the morning hours the Confederates held their own with astonishing steadiness. About eleven o'clock Forrest and his improvised "military police" were send by Breckinridge to the right flank, where, within the next two hours, they had three brisk brushes with Union forces attempting advances. Toward one o'clock, under orders from Beauregard, Forrest moved to the center, dismounted his men, and fought them as infantry in helping to turn back the last heavy Federal attack before the retreat began.

In the retreat from the scene of Sunday's victories there was nothing of the rout. It was an orderly withdrawal, with face to the enemy. Breckinrirdge's division, covering the retreat, established a line in the vicinity of the little church of Shiloh, the Place of Peace around which, in two days, 20,000 men had suffered wounds or death in battle. Toward evening, the Confederate line was withdrawn some three-quarters of a mile, and there, still in advance of the jump-off line of Sunday morning, the Confederates bivouacked on Monday night.

Tuesday morning, the eighth, Breckinridge withdrew his line another three miles, leaving behind to check pursuit a collection of fragments of cavalry commands-part of Forrest's regiment, Wirt Adams' Mississippians, Wharton's Texas Rangers, and Captain John Morgan's Kentuckians-numbering in all only about 350 men, under command of Colonel Forrest.

That morning Brigadier General William T. Sherman led the pursuit, "advancing . . . cautiously" along two roads. Finding a camp of Confederate cavalry in his way, he sent forward an Ohio regiment of infantry which "he took for granted . . . would clean the camp," and held a regiment of Illinois cavalry in readiness to follow up with a charge.

But Forrest, true to his instinct, had no idea of awaiting a charge. As the advancing enemy crossed a small stream, they fell into momentary disorder. Forrest's quick eye saw his opportunity and he charge first. "The enemy's cavalry came down boldly to the charge," Sherman reported, "breaking through the line of skirmishers, when the regiment of infantry, without cause, broke, threw away their muskets, and fled."

That the infantry broke "without cause" is not strictly true, for it appears that Forrest's men "in superb order and spirit" were upon them almost before they realized it, let them have a volley from shotguns at twenty paces and kept coming right on into their ranks, with pistol and saber.

As the infantry broke, the Union cavalry "began to discharge their carbines and fell into disorder." In a moment, Forrest and his men were upon them, also, and for a few minutes drove them, in wild disorder, through a stretch of miry ground and across a belt of fallen timber, right back against the brigade which Sherman had drawn up as a rallying line.

In the thick of it all, cutting and slashing, and firing away with his pistol, charged Forrest. In his impetuous ardor he charged beyond his own men who, at sign of Sherman's steady brigade drawn up to receive them, turned back, gathered up the seventy prisoners whom they had taken, and retired. Forrest, keeping up the pursuit until he was within fifty yards of the battle line, found himself surrounded by the very men he had been chasing, and being fired upon from all directions. One ball struck him in the left side just at the point of the hipbone, and plowed through to the spine. Another struck and mortally wounded his horse, as Forrest turned to shoot and slash his way out of the predicament into which he had charged. Clearing a way with his pistol, he started back. To protect his rear from the shower of bullets aimed at him, he seized a hapless bluecoat as he dashed by, and swung him up behind-to be dropped when the horse and his two riders were out of range.

"The check sustained by us at the fallen timbers," Sherman wrote, "delayed our advance so that night came upon us before the wounded were provided for and dead buried, and our troops being fagged out by three days' hard fighting, exposure and privation, I ordered them back to camp, where all now are."

This little affair on the Corinth Road was the closing act of the great Battle of Shiloh. Back toward Corinth that night, Confederate wagons were lurching and struggling through the quagmires of roads, pelted with rain and hail, burdened with untended wounded. Forrest, with a wound which the surgeons thought would be fatal, started back to Corinth on horseback. Intense pain forced him to give up his horse for a buggy. Excruciating agony drove him back to his horse, on which, after an all-night ride, he staggered into Corinth, where the poor horse sank and died of its wounds.

Corinth had become one vast hospital. Schools, churches, the Tishomingo Hotel by the railroad depot, the depot itself, all were filled with wounded awaiting treatment. Trains were sent off with the overflow to Memphis. On one of them went Colonel Forrest, with a sixty-day leave of absence.

But, wounded or not, Forrest did not rest easy in his leave at home. Word came to him from Corinth of disaffection in his regiment due to dissatisfaction with camp conditions and subsistence-the sort of thing which to his practiced business eye was always of such importance. On April twenty-ninth, therefore, only three weeks after he was wounded, and while he still carried the Union Minie ball embedded near his spine, he was back in camp. As good a commissary and quartermaster as he was a fighter, he was soon able to remedy conditions and relieve the discontent.

Such was the man's vitality and stoic endurance that he even took to the saddle and resumed active field duty, with a bullet resting against or near his spine. A week later, however, as Halleck's ponderous siege of Corinth was getting well under way, while out on reconnaissance Forrest jumped his horse over a log in the woods and "started" the bullet from its bed, with agonizing results. Dr. J. B. Cowan, his medical officer and kinsman, had to operate without anesthetics to extract it, and Forrest was forced to take another leave of two weeks in Memphis-the last time but one he was to see his home town until the war was over.

While at home recuperating, he seems likewise to have been busy recruiting, to judge from the following advertisement which ran in the Appeal:

200 RECRUITS WATNED!
I will receive 200 able-bodied men if they will present themselves at my headquarters by the first of June with good horse and gun. I wish none but those who desire to be actively engaged. My headquarters for the present is at Corinth, Miss. Come on, boys, if you want a heap of fun and to kill some Yankees.

N. B. FORREST
Colonel, Commanding Forrest's Regiment.

How many recruits presented themselves in response to this double-barreled appeal is not recorded but Forrest himself was back at Corinth not long before the end of May when Beauregard, unable longer to fend off Halleck's ponderous and glacierlike encircling of his position he gave him the slip and fell back down the railroad farther south in Mississippi to Tupelo.

Henry, Robert Selph. "First with the Most" Forrest. 1944.

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