Shiloh National Military Park sits just north of the border of southwestern Tennessee and northeastern Mississippi. Of the major battlefields of the American Civil War, Shiloh lies farther out of reach to the average tourist than the others. By car, the fields lie two hours by car from Memphis and three from Nashville. As a result, you will not find as many visitors on the spread-out grounds as some of the other Battle parks. It is important to understand the build up to Shiloh to better figure out why there was even a battle here.
The April 1862 battle represented a turn for the worse in casualty generation in the context of the war. A combined total of 23,746 casualties resulted from the two-day fight, a harbinger of Civil War battles to come. It would get worse, much worse.
CIVIL WAR IN THE WEST
Much of the attention focused on the armies fighting in Virginia. The Peninsular Campaign was about to begin. On the west side of the Appalachian Mountains, the forces of the Confederacy faced major setbacks. Their armies were not enough to cover the vast region to begin with. A series of blunders made matters much worse.
Albert Sidney
The Confederate theater commander was Albert Sidney Johnston – West Point 1826, a classmate of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. A Kentuckian by birth, Albert Sidney left the army in 1834 to help his dying wife. He went on to move to Texas two years later, enlisting as a private in the Texian army. He rose to command that army in early 1837. Going on to serve as Secretary of War for Texas, he eventually moved back to Kentucky in 1840.
With the onset of the Mexican War, he volunteered for service gaining election as colonel of the 1st Texas Rifle Volunteers. That unit’s soldiers’ enlistments soon ran out and Zachary Taylor appointed Johnston as inspector general of Brigadier General William O. Butler – another Kentuckian. Butler suffered a wound at the battle of Monterrey and Johnston took command. His cool demeanor in action led Taylor to comment, Johnston as “the best soldier he had ever commanded”.
OUT AND BACK IN
He resigned again in October 1846. Johnston, leaning towards the Whig political party, found himself not very desirable in terms of military appointments made by President Polk, a Democrat. That changed after the war with the election of Taylor, a Whig, to president. Johnston was appointed a major, becoming a paymaster for the district of Texas from 1849 until 1855. At that point, President Franklin Pierce made him the new colonel of the newly raise 2nd US Cavalry Regiment serving in Texas.
Johnston commanded US forces marching to replace Brigham Young as governor of the Utah Territory in 1857. The crisis gained a peaceful resolution with his role relished by Federal commander Major General Winfield Scott who recommended him for a brevet promotion to brigadier general. Then at the end of 1860, Johnston sailed for California to take command of the Department of the Pacific.
A NEW BEGINNING
With the Civil War, Johnston, a slave owner, resigned his commission once again in early May 1861. He came east riding overland to Texas. Johnston’s former classmate, Davis, appointed him as a full general and made him the second ranking officer in the Confederate Army behind Samuel Cooper. He gained assignment to command the Western Military Department meaning everything west of the Appalachians.
Davis wanted the Confederacy to hold as much territory as she could, sending forces out to the frontiers. Some of his appointed generals did not serve him well, however. Leonidas Polk and Gideon Pillow made matters worse when they marched from Tennessee to occupy Columbus, Kentucky 3 September 1861. This move drove Kentucky from its neutral stance to a pro-Union posture. With fewer than 40,000 men spread from Missouri to the Appalachians – 10,000 men members of the Missouri militia – Johnston had a hard time recruiting more men and an even worse time trying to find arms and supplies for the troops he did have.
FAILINGS OF OTHERS
Three battles in early 1862 made his situation worse yet. First, a force of 4,000 under Felix Zollicoffer suffered 533 casualties during their rout at the battle of Mill Springs – 19 January. In response to the defeat, Davis sent a brigade under Brigadier General John B. Floyd west along with General P.G.T. Beauregard to act as second-in-command for Johnston.
The next hammer to fall occurred first on the Tennessee River where Fort Henry fell quickly with the men absconding a few miles to the east to help defend Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River. Polk oversaw the defense of both forts.
Johnston’s main force saw a build up in central Kentucky at the time in Bowling Green. With the fall of Fort Henry and things looking bleak for Donelson, as well, Johnston moved his men south to Nashville in order to not be trapped. He also sent an additional 12,000 troops to Donelson to build up his forces there. Gideon Pillow and John Floyd were sent along with Brigadier General Simon Buckner to stiffen the command at Donelson.
A Confederate attack opened a way for those inside to march away, but Pillow had his men retreat back inside the fort instead. Next, Pillow and Floyd escaped – Nathan Bedford Forrest also left with about 700 of his cavalrymen – the night before Buckner surrendered 12,000 to 14,000 men.
BUILD UP
With Donelson gone, the path up the Cumberland for Union gunboats opened and Johnston pulled his force retreating south to Mississippi. Nashville fell without a fight to the Federals at the end of February. Johnston decided next to build up the forces he had left at the rail hub town of Corinth in northeastern Mississippi. He augmented his force of 17,000 with forces sent from Polk from Island Number 10 and 10,000 under Braxton Bragg coming up from Mobile, giving Johnston a combined command of 40,000 to 44,700.
The Federals came south in two main columns. Grant worked his way up the Tennessee River by steamboat, intent on taking the fight to the Confederates in Corinth. Landing his force at Pittsburg Landing, twenty-two miles northeast from the Confederate concentration, he waited for further build up with the other Federal wing, the Army of the Ohio marching over from Nashville by Buell. Grant counted on about 49,000 men in his command while Buell figured on bring another 18,000.
ATTACK
Johnston elected not to wait for the Federals to finish their build up. He tried to defeat Grant’s men in detail before Buell’s arrival. They marched out of Corinth on 4 April, but weather and inexperience – Shiloh proved the first battle for the majority of Johnston’s ill-disciplined army – caused a series of delays. Not until the next afternoon did Johnston’s army deploy into an attack formation. The main Confederate thrust aimed at the Federal left.
“The battle has opened, gentlemen,” Johnston said, “It is too late to change our dispositions.” Turning to mount, he proclaimed: “Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River.” Trailed by his staff, Johnston rode toward the breaking dawn, and the sound of battle, with just hours to live.
TOURING THE PARK
That said, Shiloh might encompass one of the easier battlefields for the casual visitor to understand and visit. If you follow the National Park Service auto route, you pass by most of the main sites of the battles. To go beyond, you need to dismount from your vehicle and take to foot.
The important thing to remember was the battle took place over two days – 6-7 April 1862 – something the Park Service helps better explain by differentiating the different days by the shape of the tablets explaining the various points of action during the battle. Small rectangular-shaped tablets reveal the first day battles; oval-shaped markers let you know the actions happened on the second. Large rectangular signs sets the stage for the battles providing information about the units previously to the battle. Tablets lettered in blue refer to the Army of the Tennessee under the command of Major General Ulysses Grant; in red, you have actions taken by the Confederate Army of Mississippi while in yellow, these are the troops of the Federal Army of the Ohio led by Major General Don Carlos Buell.
PRE-TOUR STUDY
Before setting out on a visit to Shiloh, I heartily recommend viewing the two-hour online tour of the Park where you follow historian Timothy Smith (a former park ranger here) as he takes you on the auto tour of the Park. His history of the battle, Shiloh: Conquer or Perish, is an invaluable tool in addition. The American Battlefield Trust battlefields.org website lets you download the NPS Tour Map; provides you with an animated map of the battle and includes a Battle App for download, as well.
Begin your visit at the Visitor Center next to the National Cemetery sitting just above the Tennessee River at Pittsburg Landing. The Landing proved ground zero for Federal control and logistics for the Army of the Tennessee as that army made its way south from its victory at Fort Donelson further north along the same river.
ENDINGS
From the Visitor Center it is easy to visit the cemetery where the bodies of 3,584 of the dead lay – 2,359 whose identities remain unknown. While most of the graves here come from the Civil War, either the battles here or from the surrounding areas, as a national cemetery, other graves of veterans of America’s armed forces from the Revolutionary War to the Persian Gulf lie here, too.
The cemetery dates to 1866 when bodies were disinterred from 156 locations on the battlefield – Confederate graves remain on the fields – and 565 different locations along the Tennessee River. There are five Confederate mass graves marked on the battlefields though there were as many as twelve originally with only the five found by the park commission. The dead from the battle are drawn up around comrades from their same regiments. The dead were taken from original mass graves laid out by regiments after the battle.