The Battle of Shiloh: Landing and Stuart

It was now three o'clock, and the battle was at its height. Dissatisfied with his reception by Wallace, on the Corinth road, Bragg, on hearing of Johnston's fall, on the right, determined to move round thither and try his success anew. He gathered up the three divisions already spoken of, and, with specific orders of attack, flung them against Hurlburt, Stuart, and Prentiss. The assault was irresistible, and, the whole left of the Union position giving way, Bragg's column drove Stuart and Hurlburt to the Landing, and swept through Hurlburt's camp, pillaging it like those of Prentiss, Sherman, Stuart, and McClernand. Simultaneously, Polk and Hardee, rolling in from the Confederate left, forced back the Union right, and drove all Wallace's division, with what was left of Sherman's, back to the Landing,--the brave W.H.L. Wallace falling in breasting this whelming flood. Swooping over the field, right and left, the Confederates gathered up entire the remainder of Prentiss's division,--about three thousand in number,--with that officer himself, and hurried them triumphantly to Corinth.

At five o'clock the fate of the Union army was extremely critical. Its enemy had driven it by persistent fighting out of five camps, and for miles over every ridge and across every stream, road, and ravine, in its chosen camping-ground. Fully three thousand prisoners and many wounded were left in his hands, and a great part of the artillery, with much other spoils, to grace his triumph. Bragg's order, "Forward! let every order be forward;" Beauregard's order, "Forward, boys, and drive them into the Tennessee," had been filled almost to the letter, since near at hand rolled the river, with no transportation for reinforcements or for retreat. Before, an enemy flushed with conquest called on their leaders for the coup de grace. What can be done with the Union troops? Surely the being at bay will give desperation. Unhappily, the whole army, greatly disorganized all day, was now an absolute wreck; and such broken regiments and disordered battalions as attempted to rally at the Landing often found the officers gone on whom they were wont to rely. Not the divisions alone, but the brigades, the regiments, the companies, were mixed up in hopeless confusion, and it was only a heterogeneous mass of hot and exhausted men, with or without guns as might be, that converged on the river-bank. The fugitives covered the shore down as far as Crump's, where guards were at length posted to try to catch some of them and drive them back. The constant "disappearance," as the generals have it, of regiments and parts of regiments since morning, added to thousands of individual movements to the rear, had swarmed the Landing with troops enough -- enough in numbers -- to have driven the enemy back to Corinth. Their words were singularly uniform: "We are all cut to pieces." General Grant says he had a dozen officers arrested for cowardice on the first day's battle. General Rousseau speaks of "ten thousand fugitives, who lined the banks of the river and filled the woods adjacent to the Landing." General Buell, before the final disaster, found at the Landing stragglers by "whole companies and almost regiments; and at the Landing the bank swarmed with a confused mass of men of various regiments. There could not have been less than four thousand or five thousand. Late in the day it became much greater." At five o'clock "the throng of disorganized and demoralized troops increased continually by fresh fugitives," and intermingled "were great numbers of teams, all striving to get as near as possible to the river. With few exceptions, all efforts to form the troops and move them forward to the fight utterly failed." Nelson says, "I found cowering under the river-bank, when I crossed, from seven thousand to ten thousand men, frantic with fright and utterly demoralized." Of the troops lately driven back, he expressed the want of organization by saying the last position "formed a semicircle of artillery totally unsupported by infantry, whose fire was the only check to the audacious approach of the enemy." Even this was not all. The Confederates, sweeping the whole field down to the bluff above the Landing, were already almost upon the latter point. Such was the outlook for the gallant fragments of the Union army at five o'clock on Sunday.

A precipitous ravine, near the Landing, now somewhat checked the pursuit, while the Union gunboats at this point began raking the hostile lines. A powerful battery was arranged along the ravine, forty or fifty guns being posted in a semicircular line. At the same time the advance of Nelson's division, which had just crossed the river, rushed forward to take part in the battle.