OVERVIEW
Shiloh was the first truly bloody engagement of the Civil War, with more than 23,000 combined casualties (killed/wounded/missing). After the battle, all the bodies were thrown in a burial trench. Eventually, the Union dead were individually reinterred, although many bodies could not be identified. The rebel dead were left buried together in the trench.
THE BATTLE APRIL 6-7th, 1862
The battle arose when Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Tennessee moved by boat down the Cumberland river from Ft. Donelson, TN landed at Pittsburgh Landing, TN in preparation to attack Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston (yes, for those in Utah, that Johnston's army) Army of the Mississippi headquartered at Corinth, MI about 45 miles away. Grant was under orders to wait for Gen. Buell's army which was marching from Nashville, TN. It would take several weeks for Buell's troops to arrive. In the meantime, Johnston decided to attack before Buell could join with Grant . Despite the five days it took Johnston to get in place, due to rain and mud, Grant's army failed to detect the movements and failed to entrench.
Just before 5 am on the morning of April 6, 1862, a reconnaissance patrol led by Major John Wesley Powell (yes, for those in Utah, that John Wesley Powell), came under fire from charging Confederate troops and hurriedly put up a temporary battle line. After an hour of pitched fighting, these Union troops were driven from their position; however, their gallant effort allowed the unprepared Union main camp to organize into battle lines at a "sunken road" that extented for a mile or more.
At the "Sunken Road", the Union troops held back repeated Confederate assaults until the very late afternoon. To give the young men some sense of the difficulty of infantry charges, We timed JD and one of the other young men running across the open field from the Confederate position to the fence line of the Union defensive perimeter. It took him 38 seconds. Which would have been sufficient time for a cannon firing cannister (shrapnel loaded cannon shots that annilated infantry soliders) to fire 4 times.
On the far left of the Sunken road defensive perimeter was a Peach orchard which had a small pond. During the battle, the pond's water turned bloody from wounded men and horses. (We joked that the fish in the pond turned carnivorous because they followed our movements around the pond.)
It was in this area that A.S. Johnston was killed, mortally wounded by a bullet most likely fired by Confederate solider. For many Southerners, they believe that the loss of Johnston here resulted in the loss of the civil war, as Gen. Beauregard,( the second in command who had been reluctant to attack in the first place), did not continue the attack after the late afternoon and instead waited for morning. By their reasoning, continuing the attack would have destroyed the Army of the Tennessee and therefore eliminated the major threat to the South. (Most historian agree that the Civil War was won/lost in the Western theater, but whether a better general than Beauregard would have succeeded in crushing Grant's army on the evening of 6th is not so apparent.)
(STAY TUNED FOR MOVIE OF CANNONS FIRING)The center of the Union defense was finally broken when the Confederate troops assembled more than 500 cannon on the slope facing down to the sunken road in order to bombard the Union center. It was at this battery position that reenactors from the Alabama regiment (CSA) demonstrated firing a Civil War cannon. (According to the reenactors, in actual battle, most of the safety precautions the rennactors employed such as double mopping the cannon, bringing charges from the rear, letting the cannon muzzle cool, etc... were dropped.)
After their demonstration, the rennactors returned to their camp near the battery and we had a chance to talk with them about why they pursued it as a hobby. Many of them took spend about a third of their weekends a year doing it.
When the the Union lines were finally broken, they were able to retreat into strong defensive positions around Pittsburgh Landing and were reinforced during the night by the advanced forces of Buell's Army. The next day, they counterattacked and drove the Confederates back over the ground they had gained the previous day. At the end of the day, the Confederate army was in full retreat and eventually marched back to Corinth in defeat.
The number of American (both USA and CSA) casualities from this battle was more than from all American wars combined up to that time. While Shiloh resulted in large territorial gains for the Union army, the enormity of the casualities eclipsed much of the political advantage that might have otherwise derived. The thought that the war would end quickly vanished. Grant is later said to have realized after Shiloh that there would be no way to save the Union without complete conquest of the South.
INDIAN MOUNDS
Shiloh National Battlefield also by chance preserved indian mounds from what was once a large Mississippian Indian settlement. So we explored these as well.
