In researching for a timeline of events leading up to the April 6th attack by the Army of Mississippi, A.S. Johnston commanding on U.S. Grant's encamped Army of the Tennessee at Pittsburg Landing, I found two articles, one in New Century Magazine from 1885 describing the Shiloh campaign from the Confederate point of view, one written by A.S. Johnston's son, William P. Johnston defending his father's legacy and decisions leading up to the battle and his subsequent death on the field and one from American Review in 1886 in response by Johnston's second in command P.G.T. Beauregard.
The turn of the year in the western department of the Confederacy began with a shaky start. Grant had been surprised at Belmont but managed to recover his camp when Confederates under Leonidas Polk began ransacking his camp, allowing Grant to counterattack and then successfully debark his forces onto waiting river boats unmolested.
In his own article, Beauregard states the situation thusly:
General Buell's command was then at Bacon Creek, on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, not farther than forty miles from Bowling Green, and consisted of fully seventy-five thousand men. General Grant was near Cairo, and had twenty thousand men with him, ready to move either against Fort Henry or Fort Donelson, as might best serve his purpose. General Pope commanded not less than thirty thousand men, in the State of Missouri, and was, just then, seriously threatening General Polk's position.
With only 47,000 men of all arms and scattered about both Kentucky and Tennessee, Johnston had a problem. Numerically inferior and spread out over a large department, holding two rivers open and keeping union forces guessing, there was little room for loss.
Enter Ulysses Simpson Grant, his command strengthened after the Belmont debacle, and begins moving on Fort Henry.
William Johnston, lays out the strategic situation in the following light:
There has been much discussion as to who originated the movement up the Tennessee River. Grant made it, and it made Grant. It was obvious enough to all the leaders on both sides. Great efforts were made to guard against it, but the popular fatuity and apathy prevented adequate preparations. It was only one of a number of possible and equally fatal movements, which could not have been properly met and resisted except by a larger force than was to be had.
Beauregard, is a little more succinct:
Pressing upon Johnston that in his judgement, Forts Henry and Donelson could be saved by a concentration of available forces to prevent Grant's victory by fiat, he should ...
...concentrate at once all our available troops upon Henry and Donelson, and thus force General Grant to give us battle there, with every chance of success in our favor, and hardly any hope by him of obtaining assistance elsewhere. The adoption, I said, and above all the vigorous execution of such a plan, would not only restore to us the full control of the Tennessee, but insure likewise the possession of the Cumberland, and eventually secure a much better position to our troops as to the defense of Nashville.
To further jab at Johnston's son and propose himself as having been in the right, he adds:
My views were not adopted. General Johnston agreed to their correctness, in a strategic point of view, but feared that a failure to defeat General Grant, as proposed, would jeopardize the security of our positions at other points, and might possibly cause our forces to be crushed between Grant and Buell.
In the end, Fort Henry fell without a shot fired and Johnston, carrying what of the national stores had been kept in Bowling Green as could be carried, retired to Nashville.
Fort Donelson in turn is also lost as are a significant number of its defenders.
Relating this, William Johnston sates:
At midnight of February 15/16 General Johnston received a telegram announcing a great victory at Donelson, and before daylight information that it would be surrendered. His last troops were then arriving at Nashville from Bowling Green. His first words were: I must save this army. He at once determined to abandon the line of the Cumberland, and concentrate all available forces at Corinth, Mississippi, for a renewed struggle.
Or, was it Beauregard?
was then determined, that Fort Henry having fallen, and Fort Donelson not being tenable, preparations should at once be made for the removal of the army of Bowling Green to Nashville; that the troops at Clarksville would cross over to the south of the Cumberland, leaving behind them a force sufficient to protect the manufactories and other property established there by the government; that from Nashville, should any further retrograde movement become necessary, it would be made to Stevenson, and thence according to circumstances.
Absent is any mention of Corinth. An omission in his zeal to the younger Johnston's crime of omission (Beauregard is barely mentioned at all) or a taking of historical license by the surviving second in command?
We'll see more in coming posts.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
No comments:
Post a Comment