Civil War Armies in 1862

When reading up on official histories of Shiloh, one gets the impression that both U.S. Grant and A.S. Johnston were in command of great armies. One reads of the brigades, divisions, and corps and it is easy to build a picture of that organization with an eye on our modern military. We share titles and ranks and indeed there are some former volunteer regiments, national guard formations that can trace some of their lineage to the Civil War and the Spanish American War.

Easier still to envision that the regiments and brigades were organized and trained as whole organizations where brigade and division commanders were men of note and experience. Since WWII, we have lived in a nation where a large standing army was the norm, not the rule. This army is professional in character, all volunteer until the Vietnam conflict, and made up of men from all over the fifty states who trained as specialists in war.

The Civil War armies were of a vastly different character, more akin in make up to our current National Guard formations where men served with other men from the same geographic location and then only served in time of war. They were not professional at this early stage, only the experience of time would make them the soldiers who marched and fought each other at Gettysburg in June of 1863.

To understand Shiloh as a campaign and battle, we need to look at the character of these formations, how they were formed, and how they trained.


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A.S. Johnston or P.G.T. Buearegard, who was to blame part II

In the military, it is the commanding officer who bears both the responsibility for victory and the blame for defeat. A subordinate's actions can bring credit not only on themselves but on the one who sanctions their actions.

In the two accounts of the actions taken before and during the final act of the campaign now called the Shiloh Campaign, Buearegard and the younger William Johnston lay out the strategic situation prior to the fall of Forts Donelson and Henry and the ultimate decision to risk all and initiate a preemptive strike on the gathering federal army.

When the capture of Fort Henry separated Tennessee into two distinct theaters of war, General Johnston assigned the district west of the Tennessee River to General Beauregard, who had been sent to him for duty. This officer had suddenly acquired a high reputation by the battle of Bull Run, and General Johnston naturally intrusted him with a large discretion. He sent him with instructions to concentrate all available forces near Corinth, a movement previously begun. pg. 616 Serial: The Century; a popular quarterly Volume 0029 Issue 4 (Feb 1885)
Title: Battles and Leaders of the Civil War: Albert Sidney Johnston and the Shiloh Campaign. By His Son [pp. 614-629]
Author: Johnston, Wm. Preston

Though Johnston acknowledges that Beauregard had already begun to gather the available forces in his district in Corinth, he either neglects to give Beauregard credit for foresight or puts the situation in the correct light.

Beauregard, on the other hand, saw it a little differently.

February 16th, in answer to a dispatch of mine, asking if any direct orders had been issued to General Polk with regard to the troops at and around Columbus, Colonel Mackall, A.A. G., sent me this telegram: . You must do as your judgment dictates. No orders for your troops have issued from here. And General Johnston, in another telegram, dated February 18th, said: You must now act as seems best to you. The separation of our armies is now complete. pg. 9 Serial: The North American Review Volume 0142 Issue 350 (January 1886)
Title: The Shiloh Campaign, Part I [pp. 1-25]
Author: Beauregard, G. P. T.

Given free reign with the severing of Johnston's department into two halves, Beauregard attempts to show that it was his own initiative and not Johnston's directive to dispose of his forces accordingly. Although one can easily relate to the natural inclination to defend oneself or claim credit, both men play a duplicitous game with the facts.

If indeed it is Johnston's authority and ultimate responsibility to claim credit or endure blame for the actions of his lieutenants, then the younger Johnston can hardly claim credit for gathering Buearegard's district in Corinth and yet blame him for the abandonment of Columbus, Tennessee.

His own plan was to defend Columbus to the last extremity with a reduced garrison, and withdraw Polk and his army for active movements. Beauregard made the mistake, however, of evacuating Columbus, and making his defense of the Mississippi River at Island Number Ten, which proved untenable and soon surrendered with a garrison of 6ooo or 7000 men. pg. 616

Or, was it this way?

I was then at Jackson, Tennessee, where Colonel Jordan, my chief of staff, had just arrived, after an inspection tour at Columbus. His report, coupled with that of Captain Harris, my chief engineer, about the exaggerated extension of the lines there, the defective location of the works, and the faulty organization of the troops, strengthened my own opinion as to the inability of Columbus to withstand a serious attack, and rendered more imperative still the necessity of its early evacuation. General Polk, who had considered the situation in a different light, and who believed in the defensive capacity of the place, was at first averse to the movement. He changed his mind, however, upon my showing him the saliency of Fort Columbus and the weak points of its construction, and cheerfully carried out my instructions, when, on the 19th of February, the War Department having given its consent to the evacuation, he was ordered to prepare for it without delay. pg. 10

If Beauregard is to be believed, it was his own suggestion, with approval of the Confederate War Department, of the saliency of his opinion to abandon Columbus and concentrate then at Island no. 10. Yet, he could hardly have acted without Johnston's consent and approval, though in command of General Polk, he himself was under command of Johnston. William Johnston attempts to deftly ignore his father's acquiescence in allowing Beauregard to abandon Columbus and blame him for what became a lynch pin in the eventual loss of Island no. 10 in the end. If it was his responsibility to accept the acclaim of a right decision, it was also his to accept the blame for a wrong one, regardless of whose idea it was.

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A.S. Johnston or P.G.T Buearegard, who's to blame pt. 1

Long after the guns fall silent a war of a different sort wages. Death is not guarantor of protection from blame and the living take sides, often regardless of their wartime affiliation to pen excuses and treatises cataloging their hindsight and deflecting or laying blame where appropriate.

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.

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