Grant at Shiloh: Bend, then rebound

Ulysses Grant had been itching for a battle. The Confederate force he was chasing was no match for his Union troops, and he characteristically wanted to close and fight. “Soon I hope to be permitted to move from here,” he wrote to his wife, Julia. “And when I do there will probably be the greatest battle fought of the war. I do not feel that there is the slightest doubt about the result and therefore, individually, feel as unconcerned about it as if nothing more than a review was to take place.”

But it would be an uncomfortable review. The month was April 1862, and southwestern Tennessee was getting its typical share of spring rain. While riding out to inspect his front lines, Grant was caught by a downpour in the dark. His horse slipped in the mud and fell, taking Grant down with it. Grant’s leg was pinned beneath the animal and would have been broken if not for the softness of the mud. Grant escaped with a bad wrench that didn’t keep him off his horse but did keep sleep and comfort at bay.

He rode out again the next evening after reports of skirmishing in the part of the front commanded by William Sherman. “Found all quiet,” he reported to Henry Halleck, his superior. “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.”

In fact Grant was not prepared when the Confederate attack came the next morning. “Heavy firing is heard up the river, indicating plainly that an attack has been made up on our most advanced positions,” he hurriedly wrote that Sunday morning. “I have been looking for this but did not believe the attack could be made before Monday or Tuesday.”

The object of the Confederate attack was Pittsburg Landing, on the west bank of the Tennessee River. Grant ordered his commanders to move their forces quickly to the scene of the fighting. “The attack on my forces has been very spirited from early this morning,” he wrote to one of them. “The appearance of fresh troops on the field now would have a powerful effect both by inspiring our men and disheartening the enemy. If you will get upon the field leaving all your baggage on the east bank of the river, it will be a move to our advantage and possibly save the day to us.”

The enemy attack threatened to carry all before it. “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,” Grant recalled. The Union troops were compelled to fall back lest the rebels break through and seize the river landing. The fighting lasted all day. By the time darkness stilled the guns Grant had lost a mile of ground.

He had lost even more in men killed, wounded or captured. The fighting, which centered on a small church called Shiloh, was the bloodiest in the war to this point. When the battle finally ended, Grant’s side would have suffered some 13,000 casualties, and the Confederates 10,000. “There was no hour during the day when there was not heaving firing and generally hard fighting at some point on the line,” Grant wrote later. “It was a case of Southern dash against Northern pluck and endurance.”

That first day the Southern dash got the better of the contest. Grant never liked retreating. It violated his most basic instinct in battle. But he remained confident. His lines had bent but hadn’t broken. The Confederates had thrown everything into the battle and succeeded only in pushing the Union troops back.

Grant’s confidence was infectious. “It rained hard during the night,” William Sherman remembered. “But our men were in good spirits, lay on their arms, being satisfied with such bread and meat as could be gathered at the neighboring camps, and determined to redeem on Monday the losses of Sunday.”

Grant’s own night was more troubled, his optimism notwithstanding. “Rain fell in torrents and our troops were exposed to the storm without shelter,” he recollected. “I made my headquarters under a tree a few hundred yards back from the river bank. My ankle was so much swollen from the fall of my horse the Friday night preceding, and the bruise was so painful, that I could get no rest.” Between the storm and the pain he decided around midnight to repair to a log house he had used for directing the battle earlier in the day. “This had been taken as a hospital, and all night wounded men were being brought in, their wounds dressed, a leg or an arm amputated as the case might require, and everything being done to save life or alleviate suffering. The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy’s fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain.”

Sherman found him beneath the tree. Sherman couldn’t sleep either. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” he said.

“Yes,” Grant replied, pulling thoughtfully on his cigar. “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

Which was precisely what Grant’s army did the next day. He ordered Sherman and the other division commanders to attack at dawn on Monday, and they responded with vigor. The fighting grew hot, but this time it went the Union’s way. Sherman remembered the moment fondly. “I saw Willich’s regiment advance upon a point of water-oaks and thicket, behind which I knew the enemy was in great strength, and enter it in beautiful style,” he wrote. “Then arose the severest musketry-fire I ever heard, and lasted some twenty minutes, when this splendid regiment had to fall back.” The Union troops kept fighting. “A whole brigade of McCook’s division advanced beautifully, deployed, and entered this dreaded wood.” Sherman brought up some howitzers. “I gave personal direction to the twenty-four-pounder guns, whose well-directed fire first silenced the enemy’s guns to the left, and afterward at the Shiloh meeting-house. Rousseau’s brigade moved in splendid order steadily to the front, sweeping everything before it, and at 4 p.m. we stood upon the ground of our original front line, and the enemy was in full retreat.”

Grant was tempted to give chase and destroy the Confederate force entirely. But he decided he couldn’t ask his men to make the effort, after all they had done and endured. “My force was too much fatigued from two days hard fighting and exposure in the open air to a drenching rain during the intervening night to pursue immediately,” he explained to Henry Halleck.