Shiloh, 1862

Today is September 12^th, and the ISIS-al Qaeda-Taliban-Bad guys didn’t do anything to America on the 11^th, the thirteenth anniversary of al Qaeda’s attack on the US.  So that’s a good thing.

Yesterday we spent 6 hours touring Shiloh Battlefield, just six miles north of our relaxing camp site at Lebanon UMC in Michie, Tennessee. And that’s a good thing for me.  Not quite so good for Mona as she really has no interest in the details of any military action.  Mona says she is glad to make a visit to scenes of past human carnage and degradation because they are usually beautiful, natural in setting, and offer some wildlife.  But to feel your spine tingle over the location of a trench where a certain person may have breathed their last, or a field where it took eleven charges over 8 hours to dislodge an enemy (Hornets nest-Shiloh)… not her thing. 

So she happily, so she says, finished a good book as I drove us around the field where in two days, Sunday April 6 and Monday April 7, 1862, more Americans died in battle than in every war fought by Americans prior, put together. I believe she’d have been happier had I found a BATHROOM somewhere on the battlefield other than at the beginning of our 20 stop auto tour. L  I, on the other hand, found a tree to hide behind near stop 11.

The complete set of pics will be on Facebook if you enjoy my kind of detail, but if you, like Mona, want the skinny on a battlefield, read on.

The battle began just a couple of miles north of FROG, our RV.  Though we are camped where some of Albert Sidney Johnston’s Army of the Mississippi, CSA, camped Saturday evening April 5. A half mile east is Ivan’s Store, an apparent 1940’s remnant of business on the Corinth, Mississippi to Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee Road. Corinth was the central railroad hub of the western Confederacy.  Pittsburg Landing, on the Tennessee River, was Ulysses Simpson Grant’s gathering site and depot for his Federal Army of the Tennessee and Don Carlos Buell’s Union Army of the Ohio (later the Cumberland).

Grant was planning to drive south and smash Corinth. Johnston moved first. Surprise!!!  And it truly was.  The dawn attack by the Confederates swept right through the just waking federals like a knife through butter. Or more aptly, like a bayonet through flesh.

But in a couple of hours Grant and his generals had organized a defense all along their line that held in spots for hours and never became a rout.  Meanwhile his reinforcements, General Lew Wallace’s Corps a few miles north of him at Savannah, TN, and Buell’s entire army, were fast marching south.

The toughest defense occurred in what the Rebels called ‘The Hornets Nest’ for its fearsome fire from massed muskets and Union Artillery.  

But the Yankees, many from the neighboring states of Kentucky and Missouri, and states farther north in America’s Midwest, held solidly for lengthy periods in other places too, like Rhea’s Spring, where 70% of the 6^th 

                                 Mississippi were shot down in ten minutes.

Or in the George Family Peach Orchard, where the bodies couldn’t be stepped over the day after the battle.

And so many others that the scene at what became known as Bloody Pond was hardly uncommon elsewhere on fields and in woods all over the area.

Shiloh Methodist Episcopal Church, from which the battle gets its name, was another hot spot. Destroyed in the battle and rebuilt years later the pastor of our home church now, Jim Rogers, pastored there some years 

                                           ago. 

It is still a fiercely Confederate congregation.  That does not mean they wish the dissolution of the union, or the return of slavery.  They simply want remembered the sacrifice of so many of their ancient neighbors for a cause they do still believe in: States rights. 

Many in America’s heartlands, wherever they may be, are ardent RED Democrats or Tea Party Republicans. And they want Jeffersonian Democracy, which still means small to tiny federal government, mixing into their affairs. So unlike hating people groups like the KKK, Skin Heads and Neo-Nazis, who use the St. George's Cross red flag as a misunderstood symbol of hate, the Confederate Battle flag doesn't mean ‘we hate blacks’, or ‘the south will rise again’. It means freedom to good Americans and people who see it as a symbol of their historical heritage. Yes, sadly, sometimes at someone else’s expense. But then, that seems pretty much any Blue Dem or Reps desire as well. It seems all too human.

A Union boy camped at Pittsburg Landing wrote home before the battle that he could not believe how blessed he was to be living in such a warm and beautiful climate after just weeks before being in the pre-Spring north. The peach trees in George’s orchard were in full bloom as the cannon and rifles of both sides tore them down to stumps.

More high ranking officers were killed or captured on Shiloh’s first day’s fight than ever before in any American battle.  And the highest ranking American ever to be killed in battle to today’s date, A S Johnston, was one of them. Wounded, he felt he could remain on the field.  But twenty minutes later he collapsed from the saddle to his death. The bullet had severed an artery behind his leg and he bled to death without knowing it; his high boot having filled with his blood.

General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the commander who fired first on Sumter, took over the army that evening and as dark fell was sure he only needed to mop up what was left of the Union Army the next day. But he did not know that Grant’s reinforcements were arriving and replacing his battered men by the minute, all night long.

  

Grant attacked first and kept attacking all day.  Not that PGT Beauregard did not keep trying to break the Yankee’s momentum and regain what had been gained the day before.  He led his men gallantly and well but by the end of the afternoon one of his aids compared their situation to that of a lump of sugar in hot water. ‘Just ready to melt away’.

 As Confederate Cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Tennessean himself, protected their retreat, the Confederate Army marched, did not flee, south back to Corinth where in several months they would again be facing Union guns, this time over dug in walls.

PS: The battleground was preserved here much differently than its eastern cousins. The population hereabouts is still very rural, and not much greater than it was in 1862.  Also, the US Government began saving the ground as hallowed as soon as 1866, so that it was not being plowed up or built on at all. 

So when Smithsonian Institution Scientists arrived to check out what were thought to be Indian mounds on the battlefield, they found an undisturbed, complete Mississippian Indian Town preserved by nature itself.  Only one mound had been disturbed during the battle and that was for some of the Union dead to be buried on its top. Full pics are on Facebook.

It was on the one mile walk through this heavily wooded town site that I was finally able to see a live armadillo.  We’d joked, at their sad expense, about the dozens of dead ones we’d seen since Southeastern Colorado along the highways, but here was one snuffling along the ground right on top of the head mans mound!  And deer, squirrels and birds abounded in this natural setting as well.

We finished the evening at the nearby Hagy’s Catfish Hotel.  A down home, reasonably priced (all the catfish you can eat for $15.00- on the bone) riverside eatery that’s served up its fine food to Shiloh tourists since 1938. We shared one meal of two big catfish filets, sweet potato, slaw and a huge bowl of hush puppies.

Then we headed back down the Corinth-Pittsburg Landing Road, TN-22 today, just as the Confederate Army had, though we stopped at Lebanon Church. We were tired. But dear Lord, our bellies were full, and those soldiers were not only worn down to nothing, some hadn’t eaten anything much since leaving Corinth 5 days before.

Sleep came quick to both of us, but not before Mona finished another book, and I finished watching the 1950’s Sci-Fi , George Pal classic, “When Worlds Collide”. Yes, Mona.  The book IS better.  By far.  But it’s a classic movie!!

-Ken