Shiloh, 1862 (2 page)

T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
S
HILOH ON
A
PRIL
6
AND
7, 1862, was the first great and terrible battle of the Civil War and the one that set the stage for those to come. It was so bloody and destructive that in many cases soldiers writing home simply could not find words to describe it. “I cannot bring myself to tell you of the things I saw upon yesterday,” wrote one man, or, another, “The scenes of the past few days beggar description.” Anyone who has seen the violence and death of battle, who has experienced the horrors of war, will understand a person’s reluctance to revisit it, to reengage their feelings in it, but Shiloh elicited a particularly strong response.

One of the early chroniclers of the battle, the historian Otto Eisenschiml, wrote, “I consider Shiloh the most dramatic battle ever fought on American soil; if not the most dramatic battle ever fought anywhere. True, Gettysburg was bigger; Vicksburg was more decisive; Antietam even more bloody, but no other battle was interwoven
with so many momentous
if
s. If any of these
if
s had gone the other way, it would have had incalculable consequences.”

Since the beginning of the war, everyone knew that a big battle in the West was inevitable, even if they did not know where or when. But in early 1862 when Ulysses Grant took an army up the Tennessee River it was apparent that the Confederates could not tolerate this intrusion, and as the months passed by both armies began to build strength. The stakes were enormous—control of the Mississippi River Valley, the heart of the Confederacy.

By the time the Civil War broke out, great advances in weaponry had been made in both artillery and small arms, but both complex strategies and, more important, the field tactics used to carry them out remained Napoleonic, meaning they were outmoded by nearly 50 years. Thus large columns of infantry again and again were needlessly and recklessly exposed to the worst kind of close-on slaughter (there is no other word for it). Nor had medicine made any appreciable inroads other than the invention of crude anesthesia that was often unavailable. The result was a ruthless battlefield butchery almost unimaginable at that day and time. Americans, for instance, suffered more casualties in the daylong fight at Shiloh than all of the casualties during the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War
combined
.

The battle was fought on some of the worst imaginable terrain, at least for those on the attack, a site chosen almost by accident—thick, brushy oak and other hardwood forests cut up with ridges, deep ravines, and miry swamps that made control of troops problematical if not impossible. In this small, mean patch of ground in the far southwest corner of Tennessee near the Mississippi border, the Tennessee River hemmed in the battlefield to the east, while the
deep, moccasin-infested morass of Owl and Snake Creeks defined the western boundary. There were few cleared areas—farm fields of perhaps 40 acres, or clearings carved out by Indians in earlier times, or natural-made openings created in the past by the violent tornadoes that often tore through that section of the country. Confederate troops on the attack would have to cross these open fields, while Union defenders often had an advantage of being able to hide in the wooded edges, clumped around artillery pieces, the mobility of which, for both sides, presented stern battlefield challenges.

And what of the troops of these two great armies soon to form and fight here? At Shiloh, so early in the war, the vast majority of the soldiers were completely green. Some had never fired their rifles; some had never even been taught to load their rifles; some in fact had no rifles at all. A day before the battle, a Texas regiment unpacked the trunks containing its clothing and discovered, to its horror, that the quartermaster had given them uniforms that were completely white. “It was like wearing your own shroud!” one of the Texans complained. An outfit of Louisiana Confederates went into the battle wearing their prewar state-issue militia uniforms, which were blue, and consequently they were shot down by their own side.

The officers were likewise untested. With the exception of Ulysses Grant and several of his brigades that had recently stood some combat downriver, few on either side had heard a shot fired in anger except some of the older men during the war with Mexico in 1846. With the Civil War still young, even many regimental officers on both sides offered themselves up as unmistakable targets by riding their horses into battle within clear range of enemy fire. There were West Point graduates in both armies, but most of the
senior and practically all of the junior officers were, until recently, civilians, whose only experience was with their hometown guard or militia. A considerable number of these turned out to be lawyers, who tended to insist that everything be put down in writing.

Grant himself was an enigmatic study, as we shall see, undistinguished, accused of dereliction, and certainly at that point an unlikely candidate for command of such an important army in such an important battle, which was viewed far and wide in the North as a great showdown, the battle that would end the war. There was some justification for this notion, since if the Rebel army was destroyed at Shiloh there would be nothing between the South and ruin. Federal forces so deep in Confederate territory would have had their choice of which Southern cities and capitals to capture or destroy before marching east to converge on Richmond, then in the early stages of a siege by George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac.

Apart from the horror, “confusion” might be the most accurate description applied to the battle itself. The Confederates were confused simply getting to the battlefield, struggling in violent rainstorms along roads that were barely ruts in the ground, and wondering once they arrived if the enemy was not alerted and waiting for them, as in a trap. The Yankees, for the most part, were blissfully unaware that a great Rebel army had come out of its lair seeking a war of annihilation. In the case of commander Grant, it was the first and, essentially, the last time he was ever surprised in battle.

Many of the soldiers, on both sides, had come “to see the elephant,” a quaint expression of the times that implied confronting something novel, huge, and terrible—something few if any of them had seen before. It was a lively turn of phrase with grave implications.

All battles are tragic. The larger the battle, the greater the tragedy. And Shiloh ranks high on the list of the largest Civil War engagements. In human suffering it left many widows and orphans and mothers to weep. It almost on its own account changed the mind-set of the military, the politicians, and the American people—North and South—regarding what they had unleashed in creating a civil war.

In the months before war came, many in Congress and elsewhere had predicted a future “drenched in blood.” Yet few, it seemed, had actually believed or fully understood their rhetoric. Most Americans thought that if it came to blows, a relatively small fight or two would settle the thing, and life would return to normal. They simply could not comprehend a European-style conflict here in America, complete with “terrible armies with banners.”

But that is precisely what they got. Twenty years of unabated name-calling and hatred building had created a generation of young men who could be turned into raw killers—a recipe for tragedy. Shiloh was an early, stark, and frightening symbol of it, and rather than a finale that finished the war quickly the battle ended in cataclysmic failure on both sides. True, the North still held the ground, but only by an eyelash, and everyone knew it. Even Grant now conceded that the only way to restore the Union was by the total subjugation of the South—a colossal undertaking.

For their part, the Southern fire-eaters were forced to admit that one Confederate soldier could not, in fact, lick ten Yankees and, more ominously, that those selfsame Yankees remained deep in Dixieland, a new and undeniable menace.

As for the men—not just the soldiers, but the ranking officers, and the politicians, and the editors and stump speakers, the pulpit
preachers, and the eggers-on from all over the land—when the results of Shiloh were in they, too, had at last “seen the elephant” and were alarmed by what they saw, because their neat, easy plans now lay askew. Far from being over, the Civil War, it seemed, had barely gotten under way.

A
RMIES OF THE MID-19TH CENTURY WERE GENERALLY
organized on the Napoleonic model, and for purposes of command and control were broken down into the following units, with many variations, depending on manpower, including absences from illness, casualties, and other causes, details, and the like.

Rarely, if ever, did either army in the Civil War reach the full manpower of this table of organization, often lucky to have half the numbers shown here when going into battle.

On the battlefield, the regiment was the basic unit of maneuver. It had its own colors (distinctive flag) and, in many Northern units, badges or other insignia that were worn on caps.

At the Shiloh stage of the war most men were volunteers. Many had had training in their hometown militia but most had not. Later in the war both sides conscripted men, with dubious results.

Artillery was broken down into batteries of four to six guns each; in Confederate armies it was usually assigned at the brigade level, but Union armies assigned it to divisions. Artillery was rated by the weight of the iron shot that each piece fired (i.e., 6-pounder gun, 12-pounder gun, 32-pounder gun, etc.) or by the diameter of its barrel (i.e., 6-inch gun, 8-inch gun, 10-inch gun, etc.). The most popular weapon during the first two years of the war was the 6-pounder smoothbore (served by a five-man crew), which was later replaced by the 12-pounder bronze “Napoleon” (served by a nine-man crew), with an effective range of more than a mile. At Shiloh the two armies had 235 cannons of various sizes divided about equally between them.

Infantry drill was not merely the quaint parade field formality that it has become in the military today but a dead-earnest part of
19th-century warfare. When troops weren’t marching, fighting, or performing other duties they were drilling—half steps, step and a halfs, right wheels, obliques, close file, about-face, left flank, right flank, left wheel, right wheel, at ease, at rest, and dozens more commands all orchestrated and anticipated to be executed dainty as a French minuet. In major army movements, such as at Shiloh where thousands of men marched shoulder to shoulder to mass their fire on an enemy, they were expected to arrive at a precise point at a precise moment in order to produce the desired effect. The slightest variation in terrain—such as we shall see at Shiloh: a swamp or stream, bramble thicket, hidden gully, even a fallen tree—could throw the plan out of whack, so attention to marching orders was paramount.

At Shiloh and elsewhere, the firepower of an assault could be stunning. The principal infantry weapon of the Union army was the .58-caliber Springfield with an effective rage of 500 yards (at 200 yards—twice the length of a football field—it could drill a hold through an 11-inch pine plank).

Confederate infantry were usually equipped with the .577-caliber British Enfield rifle, with similar characteristics. During battle infantry soldiers had an effective aimed firing rate of three rounds per minute, so that in the full fury of an assault, such as at Shiloh, it would not be inconceivable that during any given minute on the battlefield some 50,000 to 100,000 deadly projectiles would be ripping through the air toward flesh and bone. The weight and size of the bullet, even as it hit a hand or foot, was sufficient to disable a man.

Medicine had progressed very slowly from the days of the American Revolution. Antibiotics were in the future, and the raw power of a bullet striking a limb invariably brought on gas gangrene, an
infection usually caused by germs and filth on the clothing being driven into the wound. This could be deadly within a few days, and it was common medical practice to amputate limbs that had been struck to spare a patient’s life.

Artillery pieces had developed considerably since Napoleonic days. Ammunition was divided into
shot
, a large, spherical solid iron ball, and
shell
, a hollow iron ball filled with gunpowder and fused to explode in front of, or above, an enemy formation, flinging deadly pieces of metal shrapnel as it burst into pieces. For “close range work” cannons could be loaded with
case, canister
, or
grapeshot
, all of which sprayed out lethal iron balls, and sometimes the guns were loaded with whatever else was available, including nails, nuts, bolts, pieces of chain—even rocks. Artillery was especially feared by the troops because of its shock value and ghastly effects.