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the Rebel army was under Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, whom Winfield Scott, general in chief of the Union armies, had declared to be “the finest soldier I have ever commanded.” All knowledgeable Union officers should have at least calculated that Johnston might not keep his army idling in Corinth like a bunch of cardboard dummies waiting to be attacked or besieged.
    On April 4—two days before the storm—a Yankee lieutenant and half a dozen men on picket duty were captured by Rebel cavalry. When a detachment of the volunteer Fifth Ohio Cavalry went out looking for them, its commander, Maj. Elbridge G. Ricker, rushed back to report encountering a whole Confederate line of battle, complete with artillery, just two miles from Sherman’s headquarters near the little Shiloh church. To prove his point, Major Ricker had brought back ten Confederate prisoners and the splendid saddle of a Rebel cavalry colonel they had killed. Sherman’sresponse was dismissive: “Oh, tut-tut. You militia officers get scared too easy,” and he chided Ricker for running the risk of drawing the army into a fight before it was ready.
    That same morning, a captain and two sergeants from the 77th Ohio strolled away from their camp to visit a nearby cotton plantation about a quarter mile to the south. As they reached a line of trees they beheld, across a field, “the enemy in force, and to all appearances they were getting breakfast. We saw infantry, cavalry and artillery very plainly.”
    The captain sent one of the sergeants dashing to Sherman’s headquarters, but by this time Sherman was so annoyed that he ordered the sergeant
arrested
for sounding a false alarm!
    The next day Col. Jesse Appler, commanding the 53rd Ohio, sent Sherman a report of gray-clad infantry in woods to his front. Appler had already called his soldiers to arms when Sherman responded by having a messenger tell Appler, in front of his men, “Take your damned regiment back to Ohio. There is no enemy nearer than Corinth!”
    Major Ricker’s Rebel prisoners, who had been confined in the Shiloh church, presently became talkative with their guards and boasted that there was a great Confederate army poised to attack next day. In response to a guard’s inquiry as to whether there were enough “greybacks” in the woods to make “interesting hunting,” a resentful Rebel private told him, “Yes, and there’s more than you’uns have ever seen, and if you ain’t mighty careful, they’ll run you into hell or into the river before tomorrow night.”
    None of these things seemed to faze Cump Sherman or Sam Grant. From the time the Union forces began arriving at Pittsburg Landing, Confederate cavalry had kept a close eye on them, and skirmishes were inevitable, some of them deadly. But even as thereports began to pile up ominously in the early days of April there was little or no alarm that something besides enemy cavalry or an infantry company or two might be lurking in the deep woods.
    Sherman seemed more determined than ever to put the lie to scaredy-cats. “For weeks,” he scoffed, “old women reported that [the Rebel army] was coming, sometimes with 100,000, sometimes with 300,000.” He brushed off these worried reports by saying that at worst the Confederates were conducting a “reconnaissance in force.” He even estimated its strength as being “two regiments of infantry and an artillery battery.”
    On April 5, the very eve of battle, Sherman sent a note to Grant in response to an inquiry about enemy activity in the army’s front: “I have no doubt that nothing will occur today other than some picket firing. The enemy is saucy, but got the worst of it yesterday and will not press our pickets far. I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position.”
    That evening, secure in his mansion downriver, Grant doubtless relied on Sherman’s appraisal when he sent a telegram to Major General Halleck, his superior in St. Louis, “The main force of the enemy is