It Might Get Messy

The first few days of April 1862, union soldiers camped around a little Tennessee River town called Pittsburgh Landing were jumpy [1]. They heard things at night, saw spooky shadows and ghostly traces in the woods. Their officers laughed and called them sissies. After all, just a couple months before they’d taken both Fort Donelson and Fort Henry, key confederate facilities gumming up Federal activities in the Mississippi Valley. What could go wrong?

They found out early on the 6^th, when 44,000 southern troops started to press the Federals. Things were bloody but even through most of the day, until the confederates finally brought up enough artillery to clear out a stubborn focus of Union resistance in a tightly-grown forest grove known as the Hornet’s Nest. The horrific aftermath of the late-afternoon cannonade was that the union forces were rolled back across the fields and orchards near the tiny Shiloh Church (named by the congregation after the Hebrew word for “place of peace”) to the river banks. Oh, and as the afternoon wore on, it started to rain.

In short, it was a mess. The north got their asses kicked right across the landscape, as a large force of reinforcements kept getting lost on the farm roads and never made the battlefield.

Toward midnight, Ulysses Grant looked for a place to get out of the rain and get some sleep. He tried a little cabin atop the river bluff that had been his headquarters earlier in the day, but it was full of surgeons doing what surgeons did in those days—hacking limbs off soldiers so the infections from where clothing and other crap were forced into wounds by minie balls wouldn’t kill them later. Grant ended up down by the river, under a big oak tree.

William Sherman found him there. Grant was stretched out in his heavy wool coat, hat pulled down over his face so his cigar would stay lighted while he snoozed in the downpour. Sherman said “Been a hell of a day, huh Grant?” Grant opened one eye. “Yeh” he said, “lick ‘em tomorrow, though”. And went back to sleep.

And he was right. The lost divisions of reinforcements showed up, the confederates couldn’t hold the hornet’s nest, and the union mopped up the battlefield on the 7^th.

Without Grant being fully functional for the rest of the war, there’s a fair chance the union wouldn’t have won. And who’s to say that his smoking somewhere north of a dozen cigars a day wasn’t part of what kept him functional in a world where he watched men by the thousands march their faces into the rifles and cannons of other men who shot them down by the thousands?

But those cigars also killed him. As the tumor in his throat grew and he weakened, his doctor had to up his dosage of cocaine during the day and morphine at night. The second volume of his memoirs was a lot more hassle to produce than the first. That tumor shut him down just days after he delivered the manuscript to Mark Twain, who published it and made Grant’s wife financially comfortable where she might have otherwise been nearly destitute [2].

And why am I telling you, my patient readers, this interminable anecdote? Because this weekend I passed a drug-related milestone of my own. Not sure whether it equates to the cigars or the morphine, and either way we would have to assume some conceptual linkage between my life and Grant’s. Perhaps we’d better not go there. I’ll just say that I weaned myself off the last of my Xanax. You get addicted to it over the long haul, so you have to cut down your dosage by chipping up the tablets over time. I took the last quarter tab this weekend.

And I’m sleeping just fine, thank you. Sometimes my throat is painfully swollen in the evening, but a big glass of chocolate milk smooths things out. I may not have any worthwhile memoirs to write. But I’m not gonna die of a massive throat tumor either. And I can keep my head clear of Xanax while scribbling weblogs for y’all!

Thanks for being here, everybody. Check out some Philippines stuff over at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , next week hopefully we’ll start having some Outer Banks material to post there. Professional blog still running at http://aehsfoundation.org/ . Love you all!

Notes

[1] This story comes from Winston Groom’s excellent Shiloh: 1862, National Geographic Books, 2012.

[2] Waugh, J. 2009. U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth. UNC Press, Chapel Hill.