The Battle of Shiloh

The Battle of Shiloh

Today was the first day that we were stationary - no where to go except the battlefield. Despite weather reports of area thunderstorms, the skies over Pickwick Dam, Tennessee looked blue, so we headed to Shiloh National Military Park.

As we pulled in, past several monuments to the troops that fought here and markers that identified who was where and when, I was stunned at the enormity of the land that was the battlefield. For two days in April 1862, the Federal Army battled the Confederates, with Major General Ulysses S.  Grant and Albert S. Johnston each in command.

We began at the visitor's center, where a 30 minute film and exhibits introduced us to the battle. A stop in the bookstore was next, where we purchased the auto tour cd, which navigated us around the battlefield detailing the chronology of the two day battle.

The first shots were fired on April 6, 1862 at 4:55am as Confederate pickets engaged a Union patrol. The Confederates launched a massive, unexpected assault that General Prentiss' division was unable to stop. They were overrun by 9:00am and many of the Union survivors fled.

Later in the morning, three Union divisions occupied an oak thicket for seven hours against repeated Confederate attacks. One soldier described the bullets whizzing by like angry hornets, and the area was to become known as the Hornet's Nest. During the battle, General William Wallace was killed and Prentiss, along with over 2200 Federal troops, was captured.

The federal troops withdrew further north and eventually made a fighting retreat to Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee river. 

While the Confederates continued their assault on the Hornet's Nest, which they eventually surrounded and captured, Grant was able to prepare a last line of defense to the north. That night, General Don Carlos Buell and his Army of the Ohio landed with reinforcements for Grant. A counterattack by the Union army at dawn, 50,000 troops strong, eventually forced General Beauregard, who took command with the death of General Johnston, to withdraw.

Casualties were numerous on both sides - almost 11,000 for the federal Army of the Tennessee, over 2100 for the Army of the Ohio and nearly 11,000 for the Confederate Army of the Mississippi . After the battle, federal troops buried the dead from both sides near where the fell. In 1866, the US Government established a national cemetery for the Union soldiers killed at Shiloh. They were disinterred from the mass graves on the battlefield and reinterred in the National Cemetery at Shiloh. The Confederates remained in five mass graves. Thirty-five thousand soldiers are buried here; two-thirds are unknown.

We spent the entire day at Shiloh, and could have spent more time if we had it. The experience was amazing. You were able to actually see where the troops were camped, where generals fell and where cannons were pointed.  At one point in the battle at the Hornet's Nest, General Ruggles brought the cannons from all the southern batteries to bombard the Union forces. Fifty two cannons are there, pointed in the same direction they were nearly 150 years ago. It was an unbelievable sight... and these guns were silent. I can't even imagine what the Union troops felt, seeing that intense level of artillery pointed at them.

If you have the chance to visit Shiloh, do it. The auto tour cd brought it to all to life, and the cemetery...those rows and rows of stoic white headstones, was a somber reminder of the lives that were lost.