Shiloh, 1862 (49 page)

Elsie’s mother had built only a small house at Shiloh and there had been discussion in the family of making it a larger and more elaborate place. But by the 1880s word got around that the
government wanted to turn the whole area of Pittsburg Landing into a large military park. This raised concerns that any improvements to the house would only be condemned by the authorities. By then the boys were grown and married and had children of their own, so they decided to wait.

In 1890 Major Hurt died, leaving Elsie a widow at the age of 37, and not long afterward Elsie’s mother fell gravely ill. By then Elsie had moved to Memphis and she caught the first train to Shiloh just in time to bid her mother goodbye. It had been her mother’s wish to be buried at sunset, and so she was, “in the old Shiloh graveyard,” Elsie said, near where the little church used to be.

That church had a curious end. After the battle, when the wounded and the dead had been removed from the bullet-pocked meetinghouse, someone issued orders to rip up the floorboards for coffins; someone else ordered the rest of the building dismantled to use its logs to build roads for Halleck’s march to Corinth. Before that could happen, though, Union soldiers began taking pieces of the bloodstained pew benches as souvenirs. Then, as word got out, crowds arrived, and soon they’d whittled the entire structure down to nothing, not even a foundation left, just to have a scrap of wood to say they’d been there.

They had come to see the elephant, and for many it was so terrible that they ran and hid beneath the bluff. It was terrible for others, too, but they stood their ground and faced it down, or died trying. No one who went through Shiloh would ever be the same. Confederate private Sam Watkins of the First Tennessee, Cheatham’s division, Polk’s corps, summed it up this way in his odd countrified
elegance: “I had been feeling mean all morning as if I had stolen a sheep. I had heard and read of battlefields, seen pictures of battlefields, of horses and men, of cannons and wagons, all jumbled together, while the ground was strewn with dead and dying and wounded, but I must confess I never realized the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of the thing called ‘glorious war’ until I saw this. Men were lying in every conceivable position; the dead were lying with their eyes wide open, the wounded begging piteously for help, and some waving their hats and shouting for us to go forward. It all seemed to me a dream.”

Watkins had it at least half right. For those who endured it Shiloh was more than a dream; it was a living nightmare that no one could forget. The sheer magnitude of the butchery staggered the imagination. In one sense, the battle had settled nothing except to keep the coffin makers busy. For two days, a hundred thousand American boys created a giant corpse factory in the Tennessee backwoods, and when it was over what was left of the Southern boys marched back to where they came from, and what remained of the Northern boys still held their camps and their field—the Yankee army had reached the Deep South, and though it got whipped from time to time it never was expelled.

The significance of Shiloh was not so much that the Rebel army failed to subdue Grant, or that Grant resisted it, than it was to impress on the nation—both nations—that there was never going to be any neat and exquisite military maneuver that would end the war, or even come
close
to ending the war. It was as if at Shiloh they had unleashed some giant, murderous thing that was going to drench the country with blood, just as Sherman had predicted back in 1860 during his fiery sermon at the Louisiana Military Academy.

As if to emphasize this, not even three months after the battle a shocking clash in Virginia between George B. McClellan and Robert E. Lee eclipsed even the horrors of Shiloh for utter savagery. What became known as the Seven Days Battles around Richmond produced some 36,000 casualties, of which more than 5,200 were killed—more than half again the Shiloh slaughter. The difference of course was that the armies were larger and the fighting lasted longer. But in that instance, the Confederates won, and so the score with Shiloh was evened, at least for the time being.

Another lesson that Shiloh taught, or should have taught, was not thoroughly learned until the final years of the conflict—which is that modern weaponry called for dramatic changes in Napoleonic tactics. The 50-year-old maxims about massed infantry charging and overcoming fixed positions was now outmoded. Charging in ranks directly against the kind of artillery and quick-loading small arms fire such as they had at Shiloh was a suicidal business and unprofitable unless you had plenty of men to spare, which the South did not.

With modern infantry training techniques, positions such as the Hornet’s Nest would be isolated, then bypassed through fire-and-maneuver tactics and left to wither in the rear. But such approaches were not understood at the time—everyone preached Napoleon’s old dictum “rush to the place where the firing is loudest”—and it wasn’t until the later years, after the fearful slaughter in the Peninsula, Antietam, Gettysburg, and the Forty Days, that it became clear, to the soldiers at least, the old ways were obsolete. Grant seemed to have learned something of this at Chattanooga, then forgot it again when he went east, but by then he had more than enough men to spare and against Lee he used his army as a
bludgeon instead of a rapier, despite the awful costs. In the end, of course, he turned out to be the winner, the Republic was saved from dissolution, and his victory was hailed as brilliant throughout the land, except, of course, in the South.

It is interesting to play the “what-if” game, which most trained historians scoff at as a nonhistorical pursuit, usually just before they indulge in it themselves. Before Shiloh, the war had been in its infancy, but there was really no way to stop it because Southern leaders insisted that they had already formed a new country and no longer wished to be a part of the United States. Their position on that aspect was nonnegotiable, and so was President Lincoln’s. In Sherman’s estimation, “the Southern leaders were mad,” which, coming from him, took on extra meaning.

And yet if responsible people in the South had looked at Shiloh as a harbinger of the long, bloody road ahead, it might have caused them to reconsider the wisdom of secession, but it would have taken a mighty effort by the women of the South, whose sons’ futures were reflected in the offal of Shiloh, to bring pressure on their husbands to change the course of history.

That, however, is the slenderest of what-if threads, for as appalled and revolted as southerners were over the slaughter at Shiloh, in the end—as it often does in such cases—the results of the battle seemed only to make them more intransigent, hostile, determined, frenzied even, like a disturbed bed of ants. In fact, one only has to look at the persistence of the South the following year, in 1863, even after the twin Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg—on the same
day
, and that day, ironically enough, the Fourth of July,
no less—and still the South was defiant and undeterred for nearly two more years. Grant had been unfortunately clairvoyant after Shiloh to predict that the war could not be won until the South was entirely conquered—or, in his words, “prostrated.”

The other what-if is less iffy and concerns the effect on the military fortunes of the Union if Grant had been defeated at Shiloh—if, perhaps, Beauregard had not called off his army and made one last grand charge to wipe Grant’s army from its last-ditch position at Pittsburg Landing and Grant had been forced to surrender.

Could it have been done? Maybe, but it is doubtful. Grant’s final position in the fading light of that April Sunday was unquestionably his strongest of the day, stronger even than the Hornet’s Nest. His army, what was left of it, was concentrated at last. Buell was not fully on the field but he was there. The Confederate units were scattered and exhausted after a long day’s fighting, and their commander Beauregard was more than a mile from the battlefront. Grant had massed enough artillery to blow whole ranks of Rebels to rags, and by then whatever Yankee soldiers still manning the line were, by the very definition of their presence, men of proven field merit.

Even so, if Beauregard—or Bragg, for that matter—could have rounded up another brigade or two and hit the Union line hard, who can say what would have happened? The Rebels had driven them all day, and they needed to break the Union line in only one place. Or if the Confederates had not missed the opportunity on the Union left after Chalmers and Jackson routed Stuart’s men, if they had then rushed the landing instead of wheeling left and joining the fray at the Hornet’s Nest … again, who can say?

Which brings us to what I think is the most interesting what-if about Shiloh. If Beauregard had, in fact, driven Grant’s army into
the river, or to surrender, then neither Grant nor Sherman would have been the stellar figures they became in the future battles of the war. Instead, they would have joined McDowell, McClellan, Pope, Burnside, and Hooker in the dustbin of U.S. military history—the failed Union generals. So the crucial question then becomes who Lincoln could have found to face Robert E. Lee in the East and Bragg and Joe Johnston in the West. The administration had such a sorry record picking commanding generals that there might have been an entirely different outcome.

By 1864 the war had become so bloody and prolonged, and the citizens of the North so discontented, that Lincoln himself was convinced he would not be reelected and said so in a private note to his cabinet. And Lincoln’s opponent, George McClellan, was campaigning on a platform of calling for a truce and compromise with the South. One thing for certain is that it was unwise—no matter how many men you had—to make any kind of mistake when Robert Lee was in the neighborhood. Let us then suppose that such a mistake was made against whomever would have taken Grant’s place, and that it led to Lincoln’s being defeated in 1864. The notion is almost too breathtaking to contemplate.

Of course none of these things happened. In the modern vernacular 150 years later, Shiloh “is what it is,” and what it might have been recedes into the blurry mists of historians’ daydreams and nightmares. What Shiloh is today, in fact, is one of America’s great national military parks.

What Elsie Duncan Hurt’s mother had heard as rumor came true in 1894, after Congress voted to consecrate nearly 4,000 acres at
Pittsburg Landing for the benefit of those who fought there, and those yet to come, to see and understand what had happened on this ground. It was a masterful undertaking that became a splendid example of historical conservation and interpretation. Unlike Gettysburg and some of the eastern battlefields that were bisected and crisscrossed by busy commercial thoroughfares, Shiloh remains fairly remote, pristine, and mostly undisturbed by modern intrusions.

By the 1890s more than a generation had passed since the war, and the pernicious national hatreds of the 1860s had begun to fade. A battlefield commission was formed consisting of former Union and Confederate officers. Old soldiers of both sides returned and trudged the ground around Pittsburg Landing to help locate and map their former fighting positions. None other than Colonel Camm of the 14th Illinois was selected as surveyor, and Maj. David W. Reed, of the 12th Iowa, who had been wounded at Shiloh, became its first secretary and historian. The only remaining building that dated from the time of the battle, a log cabin, was restored, and many of those erected afterward—presumably including Elsie’s mother’s new house—were demolished.