Why Shiloh matters
The Civil War officially started with the shelling of Fort Sumter, but in many significant ways, it truly began with Shiloh.
POINT CLEAR, Ala.
The Battle of Shiloh began at sunrise on April 6, 1862—the Sabbath—as 44,000 Confederate soldiers swooped down on an unsuspecting Union Army encampment near Pittsburg Landing, a nondescript hog-and-cotton steamboat dock on the Tennessee River. What followed were two of the bloodiest days of the Civil War, leaving nearly 24,000 men on both sides dead, dying or wounded.
When it was over, the nation—two nations, as it were, for the moment— convulsed, horrified. Worse than the grisly statistics, Americans north and south were confronted with the sobering fact that Shiloh hadn’t been the decisive battle-to-end-all-battles.
There was no crushing victory— only unimaginable death. More, and perhaps many more, such confrontations were clearly in store. The Civil War officially started with the shelling of Fort Sumter, but in many significant ways, it truly began with Shiloh.
Union forces had been making their way down the Mississippi Valley for months, and a great battle to decide control of the region—and perhaps the war itself—had indeed been anticipated. The fate of the armies was sealed in mid-march when Grant’s 40,000 men began debarking at Pittsburg Landing, a mere 22 miles northeast of Corinth, Miss., where the renowned Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston had gathered 44,000 rebel soldiers.
At Johnston’s side was the dashing and magnificently named Creole general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, recently celebrated as the “hero” of Bull Run. Noted as a master of strategy and tactics, Beauregard urged an immediate attack against Grant, who was awaiting the arrival of a second Union element marching from Nashville under Gen. Don Carlos Buell. Johnston told the Creole to draw up the attack order for April 5.
Confusion and disarray reigned from the outset. First came an appalling mix-up in the muddy streets of Corinth, where the 9,000-man corps of the Confederate Gen. Leonidas Polk was encamped with all its wagons, animals and baggage. Polk idiotically refused to march without a written order, and it proved impossible for the other corps to move around him. At long last Polk shoved off, but the delay had cost the Confederates precious time.
A mighty rainstorm then doused the countryside in floods that washed out roads. Men became lost during the night, and by dawn they were so hopelessly entangled that the attack was postponed until April 6, a perhaps fatal error.
Meanwhile Grant’s army languished at Pittsburg Landing, supremely ignorant of the menace slowly lurching toward it.
The Yankee soldiers had not been told to fortify their positions—in fact, were ordered not to—which left them camping in the open like Boy Scouts, despite mounting reports from the most forward camps of a strong enemy presence.
On the cool, bright morning of April 6, when the reports could no longer be ignored, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman mounted his horse and rode forward—just as the main Confederate battle line emerged from a hedge of trees. As he reached for his field glasses a bullet struck his orderly in the head; the man toppled from his horse, dead. Sherman himself was hit in the hand and dashed off, shouting, “My God, we are attacked!”
The rebel army had come together at last. It presented a stirring and dismaying sight, as regiment after regiment, dressed in Confederate gray or butternut brown, advanced in three successive waves, each 2 miles wide. Banners waving, officers on horseback shouting orders, they marched in perfect lines. Sunlight glinted off their bayonets, and their bands played “Dixie,” but above it all the bone-chilling rebel yell rose from tens of thousands of throats.
Union officers tried frantically to put their units into fighting order.
Men, some of whom had received their weapons only days before, were hastily shoved into a line of battle. Artillery batteries that had never fired a round were raced to the front, where they began blasting into the surging enemy.
Among the first casualties was the 31year-old Col. Everett Peabody, a Harvardeducated engineer commanding a Missouri volunteer regiment. He was struck by four bullets during the first few hours of fighting, but held out to buy time for the Yankee divisions in his rear before a fifth slug pierced his skull.
All morning the Confederates drove the blue coats northward in a carnival of slaughter that left the mutilated bodies of both sides strewn in heaps. An estimated 10,000 of Grant’s troops fled the fighting and hid under the bluffs by the river, while a number of rebel regiments were banished to the rear for timidity in battle.
Johnston was exceedingly pleased with the assault. When word came from one of his commanders that a Tennessee brigade was refusing to fight, he rode to the scene and took charge, successfully capturing a Union strongpoint.
Returning from his charge about 2:30 p.m., Johnston suddenly reeled in his saddle. When lowered from his horse it was discovered that a bullet had severed an artery behind his knee. Within a few minutes he bled to death in his boot.
Beauregard took command, and as the afternoon wore on, the Confederates pressed nearer to Pittsburg Landing, the last Union stronghold.
A critical Union redoubt collapsed between 5 and 6 p.m. with the mortal wounding of Gen. W.H.L. Wallace, whose young wife, intending to surprise him, was at the landing.
As the sun cast its last, long shadows, it was beginning to look like the end for the Union forces.
Good news came with the arrival of Buell, whose forces would cross the river that night. It was not a moment too soon; Grant was drawing up for a last-ditch stand with his back to the miry wastes of Snake Creek. Union artillery pushed back a rebel assault, but soon the Confederates were sending reinforcements, organizing another, final charge.
Then came orders from a messenger: Beauregard, unaware that Buell had arrived, had called off the attack till morning.
The next day brought one of the war’s great reversals. An uproar of Union artillery was followed by a Yankee attack all across the rebel front. Beauregard put up a good fight, but the odds were hopeless and his men were spent. Sometime after 2 p.m. on April 7, he ordered a withdrawal from the battlefield, thickly littered with tens of thousands of bodies.
Nothing like Shiloh had ever happened in the Western Hemisphere. By comparison, the combined casualties at the First Battle of Bull Run, the most significant previous battle of the war, were 4,700. The two days at Shiloh had produced more casualties than all the previous American wars combined.
In Washington, a chorus arose for Grant’s removal. He was censured for dallying in a mansion, for failing to fortify, or reconnoiter, or even have a battle plan, for failing to pursue Beauregard. Much of this sticks, but there were also accusations of drunkenness, indifference and sloth, which do not.
In the South there was widespread dismay over the outcome and over the death of Johnston. Jefferson Davis wept with particular bitterness—they had been at West Point together. He never forgave Beauregard for calling off the attack.
Shiloh’s significance cannot be overstated. If the Union had lost badly, there would have been practically nothing standing in the way of a Southern invasion of the North. Kentucky would almost certainly have joined the Confederacy, and probably Missouri as well. Southern states would have rallied; recruits would have poured in. Lincoln would have had to shift his forces to defense, upsetting the military and political balance at the most critical time.
None of that happened, of course. Instead, Grant concluded after Shiloh that the only way to restore the Union would be the total conquest—in his words, “subjugation”—of the South. Shiloh impressed on everyone that there would never be one neat, brilliant military maneuver that would end the war. It was as if Shiloh had unleashed some tremendous, murderous thing that was going to, as Sherman had predicted on the eve of secession, “drench the country in blood.”