The Shiloh Campaign

8. After Shiloh Grant, Sherman, and Survival

142  after shiloh grant, sherman, and survival Brooks D. Simpson The story is so oft-told that it seems all too familiar, a staple of the traditional Civil War narrative. Immediately after Shiloh, Ulysses S. Grant dropped his previous notion that the war might be a short contest decided in a handful of battles: the Confederate resistance suggested to him that this war might go on for some time. Whether it would go on with him was another matter altogether. He came under criticism so intense that for a while it looked as if he might be removed from command. Only the wisdom of the all-knowing Abraham Lincoln shielded him from his critics: “I can’t spare this man; he fights.” At the same time, Grant bonded with one of the few people willing to be his friend under fire, William Tecumseh Sherman. That friendship proved critical to Union fortunes when Grant, humiliated by the sanctimonious Henry W. Halleck, contemplated going on leave, only to be saved by Sherman. Grant decided to stick around, Halleck left for Washington, and the Union survived what may have been its biggest detour on the road to Appomattox. To be sure, Grant himself was responsible for a good deal of this narrative. “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,” he recalled in his Memoirs. But when the Confederates mounted their attack at Shiloh, “I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.” After an extensive review of what he believed to be misapprehensions and misunderstandings of the battle, he concluded that Shiloh “has been less understood, or, to state the case more accurately, more persistently misunderstood, than any other engagement between National and Confederate forces during the entire rebellion.”1 The impact of Shiloh and its aftermath upon Grant, long a staple of any biographical narrative of his life, deserves closer scrutiny. Some parts of after shiloh 143 the oft-told tale have been challenged by scholars who have perused the evidence with care, but one characteristic of Civil War scholarship seems to be that revised understandings do not always succeed in supplanting the traditional tale. Grant certainly came under criticism after Shiloh and under different circumstances might have lost his command. But did he owe his retention to the intervention of the president? In retrospect, Grant may well have come to see Shiloh as decisive in transforming his understanding of the conflict and in convincing him to wage harsher war against the Confederates. Was that indeed the case at the time? Much would be made of how Shiloh forged a friendship between Grant and Sherman that proved essential to eventual Union victory. How does one explain how that relationship came about? How did Grant come to explain the battle, especially in the light of newspaper criticism? On the evening of April 7, 1862, Ulysses S. Grant was exhausted, as was his command. For two days they had engaged in relentless combat, having been pushed back to the vicinity of Pittsburg Landing on April 6 before receiving reinforcements and counterattacking the following day. At times, it had seemed a close-run thing, for the initial Confederate attack came as a surprise , and it drove several Union divisions back in some disorder before the bluecoats rallied. Even then, several thousand soldiers fled panic-stricken to the landing itself: it took most of the day and into the evening before long-expected reinforcements finally arrived. Moreover, Grant did not enjoy a warm relationship with Don Carlos Buell, whose forces crossed the Tennessee River late on the afternoon of Sunday, April 6, and continued to take up positions during the rainy night, and Grant could not understand why one of his own division commanders, Lew Wallace, had taken so long to arrive. Grant was down one division commander mortally wounded (William H. L. Wallace) and another captured (Benjamin Prentiss), and the Confederates had dealt his command a rather savage blow. Although the Monday counterattack recaptured the ground that had been lost on Sunday, by battle’s end Grant did not mount much of a pursuit, in part because it seemed he was less than sure whether Buell and his commanders would comply with his orders. As it was, these two bloody days, with their astonishing list of losses, had...