Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [29]
Halleck had finally managed to achieve overall command of the area and conceived a plan in which Buell and Grant (once he was restored to command) would move south, meet at Pittsburg landing on the Tennessee, and concentrate their forces, then push on to Memphis. This plan was jeopardized almost at once by Buell’s slowness—it is possible that Buell had not forgiven Grant for preempting his flotilla and his limelight to undertake the attack on Fort Henry—so that Grant arrived at Pittsburg Landing before Buell, to face a larger Confederate force under the command of generals A. S. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard.
Whether Grant was drinking or not remains open to question, but he was certainly not at his best. It may be that the quarrel with Halleck and the temporary loss of his command had shaken his confidence, or that Julia Grant was still on her way south to be with him, or that he wasn’t confident that Buell would arrive in time to be of any use. Or it may simply be that Rawlins’s concentration was focused elsewhere and that Grant had access to whiskey again (the one item that was never in short supply in both armies). For whatever reason, Grant spread his forces out loosely on the south side of the Tennessee River, and placed his own headquarters at Savannah, nine miles west (and downstream) of Pittsburg Landing, and on the opposite side of the river, which meant that he had to commute back and forth by river steamer every day. He later claimed that he was waiting anxiously for the arrival of Buell, who had agreed to meet him at Savannah, but that seems unlikely—word could have been left there for Buell to ride down to Pittsburg Landing as soon as he arrived, and it is just faintly possible that Grant didn’t want to risk anybody in his army seeing him drunk. In any event he seems to have had no idea that the Confederate forces were concentrating at Corinth and moving directly toward Pittsburg Landing to drive his army into the river.
The first warning the army received came in the late afternoon of Saturday, April 5, in the shape of thousands of terrified rabbits and deer, clearly being driven through the woods by something, which began to run through the Union encampments. Behind the fleeing wildlife were more than 41,000 Confederate soldiers, who had marched out of Corinth and were now within two miles of the Union lines. Several sharp firefights took place that night between outlying Union troops and Confederate skirmishers, but nobody seems to have bothered to inform Grant, who was nine miles away and had unwisely telegraphed Halleck before going to bed: “I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack being made upon us.” Only a few miles away Johnston dismissed Beauregard’s more cautious appraisal of the Confederate situation by saying, “I would fight them if they were a million!”
Good as his word, at dawn Johnston attacked, flinging his full forces against the Federals—most of whom were only just waking up or boiling their coffee—in one long, extended savage blow that took Grant’s whole army by surprise, as well as Grant himself, who heard the firing as he breakfasted. Still ignorant of where Buell was with his twenty thousand men, Grant limped on board a steamer—he had taken a severe fall from his horse a few days earlier—and set off toward Pittsburg Landing. He stopped at Crump’s Landing, where he had inadvisably placed Lew Wallace, to order Wallace to advance toward Pittsburg Landing—Wallace, as ill informed as Grant,