For more information or to register for the next Battle of Shiloh Tour (usually in April ) contact us.

#19 - Grant's Last Line

Return to the Table of Contents

Quotes from Actual Battlefield Participants

Notes from the Field . . .

While the battle raged at the front, the scene at Pittsburg Landing had become increasingly bizarre. In every Civil War battle, soldiers whose courage failed them, or who became separated from their units, or were lightly wounded, or accompanied a wounded comrade off the field, would drift to the rear of the battle zone. Demoralized and babbling tales of woe about how their units had been "cut to pieces," these fugitives gave the rear area of any heavily engaged Civil War army, even a victorious one, the appearance of unmitigated disaster.

This phenomenon was especially intense at Shiloh because the battle itself was especially intense, continued from first light till last light, and involved many troops who had not previously been in battle and were ill-prepared for this one. To top it off, the demoralized fugitives of the Army of the Tennessee at Shiloh were brought up short by Tennessee River itself, which increased their panic and massed them in a demoralized mob that some estimated as being as large as 10,000 men by the end of the day. Grant and various other officers tried to rally this men and get them back into the fight, but to no avail. Some of the skulkers tried to swim the river. Others would have rushed the steamboats at that landing if the boats had not backed into mid-stream. With thousands of legitimately wounded men also present, the scene at the landing was an appalling one.

Wounded soldier Ira Blanchard of the 20th Illinois described the scene he saw from the hospital boat to which he had been carried: "From the boat I could look out on the bluffs near the landing, where thousands were collected who had skulked away from their regiments and were crouching behind trees and rocks in abject terror, while men were entreating and threatening with every means in their power to induce them again to join their ranks and not disgrace their country, their flag. But all to no purpose; they clung to the shelter of the bluff as to dear life, and the crowd of panic stricken wretches kept increasing until the banks were black with them."

Meanwhile, as the Union front continued to fall back through the late afternoon hours, Grant was busy preparing a final defensive line here, on a ridge overlooking the deep ravine of Dill's Branch. He had his chief of staff, Col. Joseph D. Webster, start assembling a line of artillery here. Webster took a couple of reserve batteries, added the army's five big 24-pounder siege guns, and then pushed additional batteries and fragments of batteries into line as they fell back toward the landing after being driven from positions farther forward. By 5:00 p.m. he had more than forty guns in line.

That final line ran from the river just above the landing, inland along the north rim of Dill's Branch ravine, and then curved northward to Snake Creek, where it just covered the Snake Creek bridge. Grant and his men had been hoping all day that Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace's 7,000-man division would be arriving via that bridge at any moment, though Wallace's men did not arrive until about sundown.

This final defensive line was about a mile and a half in length. Manning it in support of the guns were about 18,000 infantrymen, the battered divisions of Sherman and McClernand on the right, Hurlbut's relatively intact division and even a remnant of W. H. L. Wallace's men, now commanded by Tuttle, on the left. The Federals still in the ranks were tired but determined. E. D. Roe of the 50th Illinois later wrote that when his regiment "formed its last line on Sunday evening it was in better fighting humor than at any time during the day. It was worth several years of common life to feel as we did then. I cannot explain my feelings, only I know that we all felt alike."

Supporting the line from the river, the U.S. Navy gunboats Tyler and Lexington hurled their thirty-two- and sixty-four-pounder shells up the Dill's Branch ravine, across which the Confederates would have to charge in their final assault.

With all its advantages, however, Grant final line had one unavoidable drawback. It was the last possible line before the river. If this line gave way, as every previous one had done that day, it was all steeply downhill to the river. There would be no place to rally and no time to get even a fraction of the troops away from the landing by boat. If the last line did not hold, Grant, Sherman, and the Army of the Tennessee were finished.

Grant remained calm and confident, although he could tell the Rebels were gathering the strength for a final push and an hour still remained before nightfall. About 5:30 p.m. troops along Grant's last line near the river spotted Confederates advancing toward them across the broad ravine. "A grander sight no man ever saw than this coming of the Confederate army," wrote George McBride of the 15th Michigan. "I live[d] an age in a moment." Webster's artillery opened with a roar that seemed to shake the ground. The gunboats joined in. And then, the Rebels halted, fell back, and withdrew out of range. Anticlimactically, the first day's battle at Shiloh had effectively ended. Beauregard, who had succeeded to top Confederate command after Johnston's death, ordered his forces to halt and withdraw out of range as they were preparing for the final attack. He believed they had accomplished enough for one day and could easily finish off Grant's army in the morning. "The victory is sufficiently complete," he wrote in his order to his subordinates, to which Braxton Bragg, who had been arranging troops for the final assault, bitterly complained, "Was a victory ever sufficiently complete?"

Could the Confederates have broken Grant's last line and effectively annihilated his army? Veterans and then historians have argued the point from that day to this. The answer is probably not, yet they had come too far and paid too high a price not to make the one last attempt that just might have given them the payoff for all of it. But we'll never know what would have happened.

Artillery firing continued through the last few minutes of daylight. To Lt. Col. William Camm of the 14th Illinois, "The sun looked like a ball of fire as it went out of sight, and the clouds of powder smoke hastened the glooming."

That night a thunder storm came up with a cold, driving rain. The only building then standing at Pittsburg Landing was a single log cabin, and it was in use by surgeons performing hasty amputations. The pile of severed limbs grew steadily outside.

With no place else to go, Grant sat under a tree in the rain, puffing stoically at his pipe. There Sherman found him. "Well, Grant," said Sherman as he approached the commanding general sitting under a tree in a cold rain, placidly puffing a cigar, "we've had the devil's own day, haven't we?"

"Yes," Grant replied between puffs. "Lick 'em tomorrow, though."

And he did.

Return to the Table of Contents
Previous Stop - Hell's Hollow

Copyright © 2003, The Center for the Study of the American Civil War. All rights reserved. Contact Us.