In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

sheridan holds the line drive them with the bayonet Something had gone wrong in Cheatham’s division. Six o’clock had come and gone, and no movement had occurred; nor would it for nearly an hour. The cause would not come to light until after the battle. In a word, the division commander labored under the influence of alcohol, if not out-andout drunk. Cheatham had ridden along the line of Maney’s and Vaughn’s brigades that morning, waving his hat to inspire his troops, when he unceremoniously fell o≠ his horse, to the utter horror of his on-looking Tennesseans . He laid on the ground “as limp and helpless as a bag [of] meal.” Other eyewitnesses would give testimony to his inebriated state this day. The Tennessean never contested Bragg’s later allegations of drunkenness. If McCown’s failure to incline right caused the first gap in the Confederate line, it was Cheatham’s intemperate state that caused the second gap.1 This appalling state of a≠airs would not in and of itself have delayed the attack, since Cheatham’s division formed in reserve behind Withers’s front line. At the last moment, however, Polk had adjusted the command structure. Due to the rugged terrain and length of the line, the Bishop determined to give the left two brigades in both the front and rear lines to Cheatham, and the right two front and rear brigades to Withers. Given the terrible confusion and mixing of lines that had occurred at Shiloh, the concept was not a bad one, but the time had passed for implementation. Withers and Cheatham should more properly have stacked their brigades in a two-two formation. Polk’s ad-hoc structure would cause confusion and, in the case of Withers’s left two brigades, now under Cheatham, also a delay. None of this seemed to matter as Bragg passed Cheatham’s division on the way to see Polk. In a rarely recorded scene of a≠ection, the Tennes- sheridan holds the line 105 seans greeted the army commander with loud cheers and pressed forward to see him.2 The troops stood patiently in line, listening to the din of battle o≠ to their left. At 7:00 thirty-seven-year-old Colonel John Q. Loomis, like so many other colonels a former lawyer, led his 2,400-man-brigade en echelon —one Louisiana and five Alabama regiments, northwesterly from a strip of woods east of the Widow Smith House and into a two-hundredyard -wide cottonfield. The enemy, supported by artillery, held the wooded area lining the opposite end of the field.3 Loomis fell against the left of Davis’s division, Colonel William E. Woodru≠’s brigade of three regiments—the 35th and 25th Illinois, 81st Indiana—as well as three guns of Captain Stephen J. Carpenter’s 8th Wisconsin Battery and the 24th Wisconsin, the last in Joshua Sill’s brigade of Sheridan’s division. Earlier that morning Woodru≠ had expressed concern about the gap that existed between Carpenter’s guns and the 24th Wisconsin . He requested that Sill bring forward additional regiments from the reserve. Sill, a thirty-one-year-old Ohio-born West Pointer described as “reserved almost to a fault,” agreed, but hardly had the 15th Missouri and 44th Illinois moved up than they were recalled. Davis told Woodru≠ that he would have to do the best he could with what he had.4 The battle on the far right had been raging for half an hour, and Woodru ≠’s men stood full alerted. The blue-coated infantry came on line behind a fence at the edge of a wood, fronted by a large cottonfield—the very one that Loomis would be diagonally crossing. “We waited till they got near enough and gave them a sudden volley which staggered them and they had to stop, but tried it again; as we were behind a fence we had a little advantage ,” James K. Wier of the 25th Illinois told his mother. Colonel Loomis, who had been wounded at Shiloh, did not even clear the woods before a cannonball struck a large limb that fell on his shoulder, so injuring him that he had to quit the field; he would resign after the battle. Command fell to thirty-five-year-old Colonel John G. Coltart, formerly proprietor of Coltart & Son, a Huntsville book dealer and publisher. Suddenly the Alabamians came under a raking fire, as Carpenter’s guns had them “mowed...

Share