General Sherman continues:
“This green point of timber is about five hundred yards east of Shiloh meeting house, and it was evident here was to be the struggle. The enemy could be seen also forming his lines to the south.... This was about 2 p.m. The enemy had one battery close by Shiloh and another near the Hamburg road, both pouring grape and canister upon any column of troops that advanced upon the green point of water oaks. Willich’s regiment had been repulsed, but a whole brigade of McCook’s division advanced beautifully, deployed, and entered this dreaded wood.... This I afterward found to be Rousseau’s brigade of McCook’s division.
“Rousseau’s brigade moved in splendid order steadily to the front sweeping everything before it; and at 4 p.m. we stood upon the ground of our original front line, and the enemy was in full retreat....
“I am ordered by General Grant to give personal credit where I think it is due, and censure where I think it merited. I concede that General McCook’s splendid division from Kentucky drove back the enemy along the Corinth road, which was the great center of the field of battle, where Beauregard commanded in person, supported by Bragg’s, Polk’s and Breckinridge’s divisions.”
General Sherman lived many years in the belief that he had fully and truly stated the facts in this matter, but we now know from a veracious history to which I shall refer, “compiled from the official records upon the authority of the Shiloh Battlefield Commission,” that what Sherman supposed to be a concentration of the Confederate army under Beauregard, including many divisions under distinguished leaders, was only Colonel Looney, of the Shiloh Battlefield Commission, with his regiment “augmented by a few detachments” from others, “driving back the Union line to the Purdy road” and enabling the Confederate army to “leisurely” walk away unmolested without our even suspecting it!
At the time Sherman came to us, Willich, with his large regiment, was just going into the open field and our reserve brigade—Kirke’s—was taking our position while we retired to the road to get a supply of ammunition which had come forward meantime; so that Sherman saw the advance and repulse of Willich, and the re-forming, deploying and advance of Rousseau’s brigade that so favorably attracted his attention as to merit official praise.
Between three and four o’clock in the afternoon we had pushed the enemy, still fighting, back to the vicinity of Shiloh Church. This, as afterward appeared, was Beauregard’s headquarters which he vacated about two o’clock, from prudential motives, and, manifestly by an afterthought, sought to minimize the fact of his own defeat by making it appear that an order to withdraw his army had been given long before. As a matter of fact, we know now from the records that the only order given was an order to the extreme wings of his army to fall back to this very point as a concentration of his forces against the center of our army.
Rousseau’s brigade continued its slow but relentless advance until we reached and passed the church itself, when the forces immediately in our front in the vicinity of the road broke in disorder, leaving, however, a considerable body of the enemy on our right against whom the regular battalions right-wheeled and whom we pursued half way through the former camps of Sherman’s troops lying parallel with the Shiloh branch, completing the rout of all the enemy’s forces in sight. They fled in disorder across the branch, and we were ordered to rejoin the brigade. At the final rout of the enemy at 4 o’clock p.m., we were astraddle of the camps of McDowell’s brigade of Sherman’s division, and this is what General Sherman refers to when he says in his report:
“At 4 p.m. we stood upon the ground of our original first line and the enemy were in full retreat.”
In this final movement the troops of Sherman took no part, nor was the division of General Lew Wallace or that of McClernand in sight. And this is what General Sherman admits by his frank confession that: