Shiloh, 1862 (50 page)

All of the main features and events of the battle are preserved, including the Sunken Road, Bloody Pond, Hornet’s Nest, the notable roads and farm fields, as well as the remains of the trunk of a large tree beneath which it is said General Johnston breathed his last. The old Shiloh meetinghouse has been reconstructed. Daily tours are given by knowledgeable guides, or you can just drive or walk around as you please.

Shortly after the war ended, the bodies of Union soldiers were disinterred from their rude trench graves and removed to a new 22-acre military cemetery beside the river. Today the National
Cemetery at Shiloh contains the remains of 3,856 U.S. soldiers, including Union men who were killed in nearby battles later in the war and also some from other American wars. The bones of the Confederate dead are not counted among those in the cemetery but remain on the battlefield anyway, where they were originally cast into mass graves, one of these containing more than 700 bodies stacked seven deep. Their burial trenches are lined off by granite markers interspersed with cannonballs, as are many other important historical sites in the park.

In time, as the construction permitted, the states were invited to build commemorative monuments, which they did, beginning in the early 1900s, in granite, marble, and bronze—the most dramatic of which is a spectacular seven-story Greek column, topped by a huge bronze eagle, a tribute by the state of Iowa to its soldiers in the battle. As well, there are scores of smaller state, regimental, and other monuments at appropriate sites within the battle area—more than 400 in all.

Decades after the conflict ended the Southern states remained in financial straits from the effects of the war and Reconstruction and were unable to compete in monumental grandeur with their Northern brethren, who had thrived since the conflict; thus their memorials are noticeably fewer and smaller, though no less moving because of the pathos of their artistry. And though the original organizers of the park took great pains to emphasize that the wounds of war were healed, even today there hovers over the Shiloh battlefield the murky notion of defiant might-have-beens tinged with animosities of the past.

Consider, for example, the most prominent Southern monument, commissioned in 1916 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy: an elaborate 18-foot-tall granite and bronze tableau
fraught with insubordination and veiled with more awful meaning than a Greek tragedy.
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The soldier on the right of the statue “represents the Confederate infantryman who has snatched up his flag in defiance of the Northern Army … The one on the left represents the officers of the Confederate Army—head bowed in submission to the order to cease firing, when it seemed a Confederate victory was imminent.” In the center is a trio of weeping women, representing “Defeated Victory,” with the figure in front, representing the South, surrendering the laurel wreath of victory to the other two, Death and Night. “Death came to the commander [Johnston], and Night brought reinforcements to the enemy and the battle was lost,” or so says National Park Service Historical Handbook No. 10, published in 1951.

Not much in the way of reconciliation there, a half century after the battle, just a big “well, we ought to have won it” instead.

Perhaps even less conciliatory, right down the street stands the Illinois State Monument, a massive granite pedestal crowned with a substantial bronze figure of a woman seated on a chair with a laurel wreath of victory on her head and bearing a vague resemblance to Lady Justice. The same Park Service handbook interprets it this way: “In her right hand is a sheathed sword. The scabbard is held with a firm grasp as if in readiness for release of the blade and a renewal of the battle should the occasion arise. Her gaze is bent watchfully toward enemy territory to the south.”

For the statues, at least, it’s not over by a long shot, and considering the artistic tensions that their makers and backers injected into these insolent figures, a lively imagination could conjure up some fine Galatean mischief for those ghostly midnights when the myths say lifeless statues come alive.

And what of the boys and the men whose bones still molder beneath the fertile ground of Shiloh’s dark woods, the ones who went to see the elephant? There comes to mind an incident that occurred years later, about the time that the United Daughters of the Confederacy were building their memorial to the slaughter at the Shiloh National Military Park.

Across the Atlantic another slaughter was then in progress—one of the greatest in the history of all mankind—at the Battle of the Somme, in France, during the second year of the First World War. There, on a single day, July 1, 1916 —and mostly in the first
hour
of battle—more than 21,000 British soldiers were slain. Losses were particularly heavy in the trench held by the Ninth Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment; in fact, for all practical purposes it was wiped out and, as at Shiloh, the dead were summarily entombed in their trench, which was then shoveled over with dirt. Afterward, someone placed a wooden sign over it that weathered the years and said: “The Devonshires Held This Trench. They Hold It Still.”

One of their number was a 23-year-old lieutenant named William Noel Hodgson, who had been a promising poet, the son of a bishop of the Church of England. A day before the battle opened Hodgson wrote his final, and best-known, poem, entitled “Before Action,” the last verse of which says, with terrible prescience:

It was as if he had said it for all of them—the dead of Shiloh, of Waterloo, of the fields of France and Flanders; whether they all died in vain or whether none of them did, they were soldiers. They were not the politicians, or the editors, or the agitators, or the angry mobs but pawns in a greater game, and it was necessary for them to die, which, in the end, is what war is about. The Civil War was part of the growing pains of this nation, and in the process it cast off the scourge of slavery. Slavery would have been cast off anyway at some point, but better sooner than later, as doubtless the dead of both sides would have agreed, all things considered.

Those of them who lived long enough witnessed the onset of extraordinary times. They rode automobiles into the age of skyscrapers, electric lights, movies, airplanes, and indoor plumbing, and they watched new wars arise on an almost unimaginable scale. When they were gone, the trust they passed along remained
exceptional in the American character, a willingness to fight, and to die if necessary, for ideas instead of conquest and territory, and for ideals rather than plunder and pillage—an exalted distinction by any measure.

T
HERE SHOULD BE A SPECIAL KEY TO HIT ON MY
keyboard that automatically and profoundly thanks all of the dogged historians who preceded me in the subject at hand, whatever it is, because when it comes to acknowledgments those are the first people who come to mind. They help shape the way you think, point you in the right directions, and give you intellectual food for thought. My thanks to the chroniclers of the Civil War, and in particular the Battle of Shiloh, are heartfelt, and my debt of gratitude is large.

Regarding Shiloh, the primary source of information as always is the U.S. Government’s
War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
. Known in brief as the Official Records, or OR, this 128-volume collection of reports, orders, letters, statistics, and just about any other practical scrap of paper produced by the Civil War armies and navies
must be the basis—in this case, mostly Volume 10—for any serious study of the subject. Likewise helpful is the
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War
series (B&L), published by the Century Magazine Company between 1884 and 1887. Here—specifically in Volume 1—are the voices of the leaders as they recall events during the war. Other solid primary information can be found in such collections as
Southern Historical Society Papers
(SHSP), a 52-volume set now in possession of the Virginia Historical Society, which contains fascinating personal accounts of the Confederate participants. Its Northern counterpart is the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States—or MOLLUS—which flourished in every Northern state after the war, and to which former Union officers read or presented “papers” recounting their wartime experiences.

I have not in the past been a big fan of the Internet as a source of historical information because one could not always be sure of getting the real goods. But in recent years—in recent months actually, and it is ongoing—sites such as Google Books have made available actual facsimiles of the MOLLUS documents held by the various states. And not just that; they are making ready for downloading many if not most regimental histories and other critical documents of the Civil War, including diaries and memoirs.

It is absolutely astonishing to me that I can type the name of a Civil War regiment or diarist into an Internet search engine and with a few strokes of a key download it into my computer, press the print button, and a couple of minutes later have the exact replica of a 150-year-old document sitting on my desk ready to be ring-punched and put into a binder. It is something that otherwise would have taken weeks or months for a library to locate, and often required a personal trip to distant state archives. Likewise,
the information age has made facsimiles of the OR, SHSP, and B&L available on discs at reasonable prices,
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and although they are somewhat awkward to use you can simply insert the disc into your computer and there it is. One can only believe that all these new research tools will make historical inquires far less time consuming for future historians.

In particular I would like to thank Sam Hood, himself a close relation of the Confederate general John Bell Hood, and Jack Dickinson, bibliographer of the Rosanna Alexander Blake Library of Confederate History at the Marshall University Library, for combing through the entire 40 bound volumes of the
Confederate Veteran
magazine (published in the South between 1893 and 1932, and containing articles and letters by Civil War veterans, both North and South) for Shiloh Battle material. It was truly a labor of great friendship, never to be forgotten.

As for general works, Bruce Catton’s and Shelby Foote’s volumes together have painted a fascinating backdrop for the theater of the war in the West. There are some good and highly educational books about the battle of Shiloh itself, including Larry J. Daniel’s
Shiloh: The Battle That Changed the Civil War
, Wiley Sword’s
Shiloh: Bloody April
, Edward Cunningham’s
Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862
, and James Lee McDonough’s
Shiloh—In Hell Before Night
. An invaluable source is
The Battle of Shiloh and the Organizations Engaged
(1902) by David W. Reed, a veteran of the battle and the first historian of the Shiloh National Battlefield Park.

Many of the major players—Grant, Sherman, Beauregard, Buell, and others—left their recollections in print for posterity, while the various diaries and memoirs of participants in the battle are located as described in the bibliography. It is regrettable that photographs or artist’s portraits of the diarists Elsie Duncan Hurt and Josie Underwood cannot be found. In the Underwood case it is almost certain that a portrait of her was painted at some point, but it was likely destroyed by the fire that consumed her family home, Mount Air. In any case a thorough search has turned up empty. A special mention, however, must go to the University of Kentucky Press and Nancy Baird for publishing and editing Josie Underwood’s Civil War diary. Much tedious, persevering, and obviously loving toil went into putting the manuscript into perspective by tracking down the backgrounds of all the players and painting an excellent picture of the setting.