The 45th Tennessee was there when Albert S. Johnston died

When you visit Shiloh Battlefield great significance is placed on an area called the Peach Orchard. The area is tour stop 13 at the national battlefield.

The spot is where the Confederate Army of Tennessee tried to turn the Union left at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 6, 1862.

It was one of the most crucial moments in one of the four most important battles of the Civil War.

Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston hoped to reverse a series of Rebel losses in the Western Theater by surprising Union Brig. Gen. U.S. Grant’s forces near Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River.

Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston

Grant had easily defeated some of Johnston’s subordinates at Fort Donelson and Fort Henry. Nashville had fallen without a whimper to Union Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio.

Johnston, a Texan, was regarded as one of the best, field commanders active in the U.S. Army when he resigned and joined the CSA. He was held in even higher regard than Robert E. Lee, particularly by his U.S. Military Academy classmate and friend, Jefferson Davis, who had given him an impossible mission.

Appointed a full general in August 1861, Johnston assumed command of Department No. 2 (the Western Department) the following month. He was placed in direct command of what was initially called the Army of Central Kentucky.

Davis had assigned his friend to defend a line from the Appalachian mountains across the Mississippi River to the Kansas territory. He had, at first, only 20,000 poorly (or often non) equipped, inexperienced soldiers.

While Johnston was trying to form an army, another U.S. Army veteran, William J. Hardee, was ordered to gather a brigade of Arkansas troops. Episcopal Bishop Leonidas Polk, a U.S. Military Academy graduate, joined theater No. 2 as a lieutenant general. With a force of 5,000 men, Polk seized the town of Columbus, Ky on Sept. 3, 1861. On Nov. 7, 1861, Polk defeated Grant at Belmont, Mo. It was Grant’s first action in command.

Johnston relied heavily on recruits from the Volunteer State like the 45th Tennessee, an infantry regiment that included five companies of Rutherford County men.  The 45th was originally organized in December 1861 at Camp Trousdale, Sumner County, with 10 companies.

The 45th was initially assigned to Col. W.S. Statham’s Brigade of Maj. Gen. G.B. Crittenden’s  Division of the Central Army of Kentucky. Two regiments of Statham’s Brigade were dispatched to help hold the Cumberland Gap and Eastern Kentucky.

George Crittenden had been a career U.S. Army officer and was the son of U.S. Sen. John J. Crittenden. His brother, Thomas Leonidas Crittenden, was a Union general. Crittenden was ordered to take command of Confederate troops under Brig. Gen. Felix Zollicoffer.

Crittenden arrived at Mill Springs on the Cumberland River about the same time Union Brig. Gen. George B. Thomas was ordered to crush Confederate defenses in the Somerset, Ky. area.

Zollicoffer was killed near Nancy, Ky. at the Battle of Mill Springs on Jan. 19, 1862 in the first of that string of Union victories in the Western Theater.

The Confederate troops began a long retreat to Murfreesboro where Albert Sidney Johnston had retreated following the fall of Nashville. February 1862 found the Rutherford County troops near home.

A list of the unit’s field officers reveals a number of names familiar to today’s Murfreesboro residents:
Col. Addison Mitchell, Col. Anderson Searcy, A. M. Kirk, Richard Sanford, Lt. Col. Ephraim F. Lytle Major James B. Moore. Thomas D. Peyton, A. M. Dillin, William H. Sikes, Surgeon Henry H. Clayton, James C. Farmer,  Lycurgus Nelson and Levi B. White.

Statham’s Brigade was reassigned to the “Reserve Corps” of the new Army of Mississippi with Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge, the former vice president of the United States, in command.

Following the defeats at Mill’s Creek, Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, Johnston moved his troops to Corinth, Miss. to regroup, reinforce and form a strategy to retake Middle Tennessee while protecting the all-important Mississippi River.

The 45th was a young unit that had not seen any major action. They would soon take part in some of the heaviest action at Shiloh, which was to be the bloodiest battle of the Civil War.

A number of the recruits were in their mid-teens. A number of them were discharged from the army after Shiloh for being only 15 years old.  James Daniel Richardson of Murfreesboro was 18 when he signed up. He rose to the rank of major before being seriously wounded in the Battle of Resaca.

After the war, Richardson emerged as a prominent Democratic leader, U.S. Congressman and nationally known historian and editor.  He carried his wounds until the end of his life.

The 45th Tennessee was just one of the many regiments assembled by Johnston from across the region.  He merged the Army of Central Kentucky with the Army of Mississippi in with P. G. T. Beauregard as second-in-command. Corps commanders were Braxton Bragg, Leonidas Polk, William Hardee and George Crittenden.
At that time, Beauregard was the best-known Confederate general due to his victory at the Battle of Bull Run and for commanding the opening of the Civil War at Charleston, S.C.

Speed was of the essence. Johnston wanted to strike Union forces under Grant before they could be reinforced. Grant’s army was encamped at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River.

Johnston did achieve the advantage of surprise by attacking early on Sunday, April 6, 1862.

The Confederate forces had succeeded in driving Grant’s army back to nearly the river, however, men from Gen. Benjamin Prentiss’ Division held at a defensive position along an old country lane. Johnston, and many of his subordinates, was an advocate of frontal assaults.  Rebel infantrymen made 12 charges against Prentiss’ position without much success.

Johnston then decided to attempt to turn the Union army’s left flank, which was being held by the Fourth Division of the Army of the Tennessee with Brig. Gen. Stephen A. Hurlbut in command.

Hurlbut lined up his two brigades in an orchard and held that position until at least 1:30 p.m. when Breckinridge’s “Reserves Corps” were thrown into the battle. Johnston and Tennessee Gov. Isham G. Harris were in the area exhorting the troops and planning a major push through the Peach Orchard.

The young 45th Tennessee was struck with heavy fire from Hurlbut’s Division, became disorganized and fell back in a ravine near the Peach Orchard. Both Breckinridge and Gov. Harris tried to rally the troops, which refused to move ahead as a unit.

At 2 p.m., when the big push was set to begin, an agitated Breckinridge galloped up to Johnston, saying he could not get his men to make the charge.

“Then I will help you,” Johnston told him.

The general rode to the ravine and along the 45th’s front line. He was carrying a tin cup that he had picked up in Prentiss’ camp.

Riding along, Johnston tapped the regiment’s fixed bayonets with the tin cup.

 “These will do the work,” he said. “Men, they are stubborn; we must use the bayonet.”

Johnston, accompanied by Breckinridge, rode his horse out of the ravine, leading what was to be a successful charge.

But success came with a heavy price. Johnston had been mortally wounded.

The general didn’t realize it at first.  A wound from a duel years before, had left him with little or no feeling in his leg. A stray bullet had struck him behind the knee and lacerated his femoral artery. He was bleeding heavily into his high top riding boot.

The commanding general bled to death in minutes with his staff unable to help him. Gov. Harris and the others didn’t know that Johnston had a tourniquet in his pocket that might have saved his life.
And who fired the “stray bullet?”

It was a .58-caliber Enfield minie ball, a round used by both North and South troops at Shiloh.

Contemporary history attributes the fatal wound to a Parthian shot fired by Hurlbut’s retreating troops. “Parthian shot” links to a strategy once used to great effect by the ancient Parthian warriors of Iraq.  Pretending to retreat, they would lure the enemy close, then turn and shoot their bows. Time corrupted the term into the phrase “parting shot.”

Popular Civil War historian Wiley Sword wrote that the evidence supports the fatal shot was friendly fire from the 45th Tennessee, a unit which went on to fight with distinction until the end of the Civil War.