Was General Ulysses S. Grant drunk at Shiloh? If so, how drunk was he? How many drinks did Grant require to be victoriously drunk?
We know the answer that President Lincoln gave to a delegation that protested against a drunkard being retained in high command.
"I should like to know what brand of whisky General Grant drinks," he said, "for I should like to send a barrel of it to every general in the Union army."
Probably Father Abraham, whose sense of humor and proportion never failed him, would even have arranged for an attendant, supplied with a quart flask and a measuring glass, to accompany each Union general.
"The battle is going against us, sir," the attendant would say. "You need just this much more, sir — just the amount that General Grant took in the crisis at Shiloh — and then we shall win."
If there ever was a battle which called for everybody on both sides to take a drink, it was Shiloh — the bloodiest battle of the West in the Civil War — the ugly, mauling, slashing, wrestling, decisive battle of the upper Mississippi Valley.
The percentage of little-trained volunteers killed and wounded in its bulrushes on the two days of April 6 and 7, 1862, was as heavy as the percentage of the casualties in the three days' struggle of veterans at Gettysburg.
This was not the first occasion that the charge of drunkenness was brought against Grant. After a gallant record in the Mexican War, Captain Grant resigned from the regulars at a California frontier post in 1854.
So the War Department records have it. But tradition has it that the resignation was the alternative of a court-martial for too hard drinking.
"In the boredom of a frontier post of that day," said a successful general in France, "when there was no pastime but to play poker and drink, a man of Grant's intellect was bound either to get drunk or go crazy."
It was up to Grant to make a living in civil life, and in this he was no shining light. He failed at farming. He hauled cordwood in St. Louis. He drifted to Illinois where he was a clerk in a leather store when the Civil War began.
With the call of vast masses of volunteers to the colors, when only regulars knew military drill, the leather-store clerk suddenly became somebody in the community.
Captain Grant, West Point graduate, veteran of Mexico, was given command of a regiment.
He had an idea that war is fighting and not marking time in camp. While other commanders held off from attacking to get their recruits drilled and perfectly ready, Grant realized that the Confederates had raw troops, too, and that they were drilling and getting ready just as fast as the Federals.
On he principle that he was as ready as his enemy, Grant concluded to stop worrying when he had superior numbers and, by attacking, to make the enemy do the worrying. He would train his men in action instead of on the parade ground.
The principle worked — for he was the man to make it work.
He took Paducah without waiting for orders. He won Belmont and Fort Henry.
Never mind winter weather. The enemy was shivering, too. There he was, getting his second wind after hard mauling before Fort Donelson in February, '62. Few-worded Grant: "I propose to move immediately upon your works." No terms but "unconditional surrender."
Mighty news was flashed from the banks of the Cumberland in Kentucky. Like that unknown Lindbergh who flew while others marked time, this unknown Grant, who fought while others prepared, had shot his name up to the stars.
Fifteen thousand prisoners! U. S. Grant! The North made it "Unconditional Surrender Grant."
But within two weeks the North was stunned to hear he had been relieved of his command by Halleck.
"Grant has been on a spree again," was the whispered word in Washington, while the nominal charge was insubordination.
Halleck was a good man to have in the office to keep the files straight — the kind who would tell a boy whom he sent with a message to an address on East Ninety-sixth Street to report his progress by telephone every ten blocks.
Grant was not much on reports. For two weeks Halleck had had no word from him. He heard that Grant had been in Nashville without asking him.
Grant thought Nashville was within the limits of his command. He was hurrying the enemy out of town and getting ready for the next blow.
And he had sent reports. But a telegrapher on Halleck's lines of communication, who was covertly "rebel," thought the information would be more useful to the Confederates if he did not let Halleck see it at all. If that telegrapher had been able to "can" U. S. Grant for good, the war might have lasted longer.
Father Abraham agreed with the country's view that a general who had won such a smashing success as Donelson, although he was poor at reports, had better be left in command until he lost a battle — especially when many of his other generals were not teetotalers and were losing battles.
SO Grant was put back in command of the Army of the Tennessee — to the great joy of the soldiers, who also preferred generals who won — on its way up the Tennessee River on flat-bottomed, shallow-draft side-wheelers.
His eyes were on Corinth and Memphis.
The fall of Donelson had cleared his way to make the most of swift movement before superior numbers could be gathered against him. He believed the Confederate power in the West could be crushed before the end of '62.
He put his army ashore at Pittsburg Landing and moved it up over the bluffs into the neighborhood of the little log cabin, Shiloh church, which was to give the battle its name. There he would wait for Wallace's division and Buell's Army of the Ohio to come up, before advancing.
His line, less than two miles from the landing, stretched across the triangle formed by the Tennessee River and Owl Creek. His flanks were protected by water and swamps, but his back was to water in case of retreat.
But Grant did not contemplate retreat. He was there to fight. He did not even intrench. Volunteers hated intrenching. Grant thought if they had trenches they might like to stay in them. It would weaken their offensive spirit. McPherson, his engineer, said it was poor ground to intrench. Grant would not fall back to better ground.
Maybe Donelson had made Grant too cocksure. He did not think the Confederates would attack. But this time he was against a general, Albert Sidney Johnston, of his own kind, who also meant to make the enemy do the worrying.
Johnston had been considered the ablest of the generals in the regulars before the war. President Jefferson Davis said of him, "If he's not a general, no one is." His death at Shiloh has been regarded as a tragedy for the Confederacy second only to "Stonewall" Jackson's death after Chancellorsville.
Johnston was not going to accommodate Grant by waiting till Buell and Wallace arrived. He would drive Grant into the river to swim or surrender. Then he would take care of Buell's army in turn.
There has been an everlasting dispute about numbers, but probably Johnston had just under 40,000 men and Grant just over 30,000, without Buell and Wallace. It was a small superiority to drive home a frontal attack.
Grant's volunteers were careless about picketing and not much given to scouting. Why bother? The "rebs" hadn't much guts. They would be in for a big surprise. The Federals were under Grant, and it was all right. They ought to have the war over by fall and spend the winter in New Orleans.
And the "rebs" were thinking they would be up on the Ohio when the war was over in the fall, and the only Yanks who would see the South would be there as prisoners. Grant's "hellion" invaders would be in for a big surprise. They would taste real battle.
Both were right about the surprise; right about its being a real battle; and never were soldiers more mistaken in their other premises.
At dawn of the morning of April 6 — the longest, wickedest day of the war in the West — the Confederates formed lines of battle. In superb confidence they swept forward.
The Federals of the front line, stiff from lying on wet ground, were rolling out of their blankets when they had their first warning in the blazing answer of the Confederate advance to the challenging shots of pickets. They left coffee boiling and bacon frizzling on the fire to spring to arms.
Many of the volunteers on either side were to have their first baptism of fire.
The Southerners had come from the lower valley — from the Mississippi lowlands, from Arkansas, from Texas, from Alabama; and the Louisianians were jaunty, proud, and different in their blue. A target that blue was to be all day, when the gray and butternut were invisible.
Facing the Southerners were the men from the upper valley — from Illinois and Iowa cornfields, from Ohio and Wisconsin.
Easy enough for Mobile to fight Milwaukee when they had never met and for years had been inflamed against each other; but Federal against Confederate Kentuckians and Missourians — neighbor grinding bayonet with neighbor and with members of the same family — realized how this war was brother against brother in deadly bitterness.
Few were from cities. There were few cities then in the valley. They were mostly from villages and farms and plantations, having the common spirit of men who had broken virgin earth as settlers in a new land.
Not a battle of professional tactics, but a raging scrimmage of man to man.
No plain of Waterloo, no orchards and farms of Gettysburg, but a field unmapped except for the sketch that the eye made on the spot in the heat of action, studying how to turn the lie of the ground to profit.
No village walls as rallying points. There were patches of clearing, of plowed ground, of second growth, of virgin forest, and swamps, and ravines, and stump lots, water-soaked by spring rains that continued to pour on the combatants in this free-for-all and hell-for-all struggle.
Liaison they called it in France — the keeping of advancing units elbow to elbow. The fighters at Shiloh did not know the word nor how to apply the principles except in vague theory when all their parade-ground instruction was shot to pieces.
The only liaison at Shiloh was getting ahead or holding ground without getting trapped. The fighting instinct ruled; its liaison was the team play of gallantry.
When they saw there was a point that must be taken, the Confederates kept driving for it; when the Federals found a point strong for holding, they held gamely.
Out of the clouds of black powder smoke appeared figures that put fresh heart into the quailing, and decision in place of doubt; the figures of born leadership, which is not made on the drill ground, coming into their own. They rallied fragments of companies, battalions, regiments for fresh charges and fresh defense.
Weaving in and out, the Confederates kept on driving the Federals back toward the river.
There were scores of little battles making the whole battle. There were periods when all the thunders were concentrated in one spot. Again, lulls all along the line were followed by widespread renewal of the roaring struggle. There was a well remembered spring where the thirsty drank until they saw that the water was red with the blood of the wounded. And there was the Hornets' Nest. Here, on a ridge at the edge of a wood, the Federals had hastily put up breastworks.
Hindman's brigade failed in its charges to gain that critical point which was holding up the whole. A. P. Stewart's men exhausted themselves in fruitless assaults.
Gibson's brigade was ordered up. It was likewise beaten back under the crossfire of infantry and artillery.
General Bragg sent a staff officer to take the colors and not let go of them until he had planted them on the ridge. The staff officer seized them from a color sergeant as he fell, and sprang forward to find that there were only wounded and dead to lead up that slope thick with fallen men.
A regimental officer, bleeding from a bullet wound in his cheek, came up to him, crying, "What do you mean by taking my colors? Give them back to me! I'll carry them up! "And he, too, fell.
Not all were fighting, however. The shock of such quick introduction to the full fury of action numbed some with the thought, "God! I didn't know it was like this! Not for me!" as legs, shaken suddenly free of paralysis, beat it for the rear. Some Confederates stopped in captured camps, thinking the war was already won. Some Federals developed sprinting proclivities to a safe place behind the river bluff.
Five minutes of such battle "found out" men who might have gone through life never disabused of the idea they were natural-born devils in war or of the idea they were naturally timid. Officers who were good at speech-making and raising recruits, who kept their heads at bargains or in the courtroom, lost them entirely when bullets whistled past.
Some hulking giants, who were boss hands with their fists or in wrestling matches at home, suffered hysteria and nausea that put them on the sick list.
Other giants were landmarks of sturdy resistance or led charges. Mamma's darling might want to get home to mother, quick: or he might grind his teeth and set an example to the boasting village bully who was quailing when he found that bullying would not make bullets swerve from their courses.
A pale, slight village school-teacher, a clerk used to weighing out sugar and prunes a gentle leader of the Sunday school — folks at home thought it was a joke, his enlisting as a soldier — might have red blood that now surged into pasty cheeks. He might be ripping out oaths strange to his lips.
"Not another — inch! Here we stick." he mi give be yelling, or "Come on, you — s, use your bayonets!"
For you never know from previous associations who's who in a mix-up when free will rules the contest.
Oh, yes, the Yanks were finding that the Johnnies had guts of their own kind, and the Johnnies were finding, that the Yanks had guts; and each side was trying to prove that it had more than the other.
All day Grant was hoping that Lew Wallace would arrive with his division. But Wallace had taken the wrong road — which was pardonable in one of his military inexperience. Many who know him as the author of Ben-Hur never heard that he was at Shiloh.
Grant certainly needed the right kind of whisky as the day wore on. It was affecting him in the right way, if he had been drinking. He was not back with a bottle, or studying maps, or praying for luck to come his way; he was forth on the move along the front. Sherman on the right, Prentiss in the center, McClernand — who had Donelson veterans — on the left.
Grant must be on the move to make sure that vital parts of his line held to prevent disaster in withdrawal. He must make sure that some parts did not stay dangerously long when others gave way. Some of his commanders, when most of them were inexperienced, might be foolhardy or careless where others were too cautious.
Publication Date: April 13, 1929