The Shiloh National Cemetery became established in 1866. Officially closed now to new burials, there are some 3,695 – 3,584 from the Civil War era – buried here with 2,359 being unknown. Many of the dead were from the Battle of Shiloh. Men from different regiments lay buried where they fought after the battle. With the establishment of the cemetery, the soldiers were reinterred here, still keeping to their regimental group when possible. Three Confederates lie among the dead, two known – dying as prisoners of war – and one included within the ranks of the unknown. Many dead soldiers also came here from nearby battlefields and hospitals – some 565 different locations. Several veterans from the Spanish-American and the World Wars lie buried here, too, along with one veteran of the Revolutionary War.
SHILOH NATIONAL CEMETERY
Originally, wooden headboards marked the graves, but after about ten years, granite stones replaced them. Tall stones used for the known dead with short square stones for the unknown. The stone wall around the cemetery went up shortly after the cemetery established with the ornamental iron gates added in 1911. A cemetery superintendent used to live in the adjoining house – similar to what you found at other national cemeteries. The cemetery became added officially to the National Park in 1943.
Among the monuments inside the cemetery is a pyramid of inverted cannons that notes where Grant’s headquarters was located on the night of 6-7 April 1862. On the east edge of the cemetery along the bluff edge is a group of six soldiers lying in a semi-circle with a cannon pointing out over the river just beyond. The men were Wisconsin color bearers who all died carrying their regimental standards in the battle.
CEMETERY ORGANIZATION
Map showing various sections of cemetery plots.
Regimental dead from the battle were gathered after the battle.
The bulk of those buried here lie in alphabetical sections, A through P minus O. On the east side atop the bluffs overlooking the Tennessee River and on the north and some of the south sides lay dead reburied from different regimental graveyards -29 – originally scattered across the battlefield. Most of the dead lie in unmarked graves. Some of the dead lay elsewhere gathered up by their families for reburial back in their hometowns.
wisconsin color bearers
Centrally located above the river are the six dead Wisconsin color bearers who fell in the fighting.in defense of their camp west of Spain Field and the Sunken Road. They originally guarded the flagpole for the cemetery before it was moved a few yards to the west. A howitzer looked out from the group for years, but it seems to be missing today.
As you enter the cemetery, you walk past a solitary grave for a drummer. Evidence shows the man buried here probably did not serve as a drummer, though he may have participated in a band. The name “Henry Burke” is also probably wrong and should read “Heinrich Budke” of the regimental band of the 58th Ohio. Budke did not die during the battle, but shortly afterwards 28 April 1862.
officers’ circle
Surrounding an upturned cannon are a series of graves circling the cannon – “Officers’ Circle”. Minor officers lay buried here including First Lieutenant William Lester of the 21st Missouri – died of typhoid fever just before the battle 28 March 1862; Quartermaster John Mathews served aboard the USS Essex. Scalded severely during the bombardment of Fort Henry, he died a few days after the battle 6 February 1862. Captain John L. Miller served with the 12th Tennessee Cavalry dying in the last months of the war 19 April 1865. Private John C Stahel of the 181st Ohio also died late in the war – 15 January 1865 – no cause of death noted.
There are two unknowns buried here as well. One – #3582 – appears to be the grave of Major James Edwin Powell, the young man who led men from the 25th Missouri (his regiment) and later with men from the 12th Wisconsin in the scouting party discovering the main body of the Confederate army. Giving some sort of early warning, the Federal army had a chance to slow down the onrushing torrent.
14th ohio battery – Burrow’s battery
Another section in the southeast corner of the cemetery, still above the bluff, lie the four men of the 14th Ohio Battery – Burrow’s Battery. The battery used a type of cannon – Wiard – rarely seen. Out of the 95-man crew, 29 became casualties, included the four dead buried here. Additionally, 70 of the horses died in the fight. The battery figured strongly in the late morning fight supporting McClernand and Sherman’s divisions. In the fight, they lost all six of their guns. They were recovered the next day though the Confederates did their best to make them unusable.
Battery commander, Captain Jerome B. Burrows, was wounded in an elbow and it was feared he might lose the arm. He did not and would go back to Ohio where he practiced law becoming a judge in the 1890s.
regimental burials
Nine of the regiments have buried their dead in semicircles with an obelisk standing in the middle engraved with the unit’s name. Set in the woods on the south and north sides of the cemetery, the rings of dead serve as a counterpoise to the mass of ranks set between.
The other regiments are laid out in ranks though still with unit obelisks set in front of the unit dead.
Monument number two for the ninth illinois voulunteer infantry regiment
Illinois opted to make all of their regimental moments uniform in design. The 9th has their official State monument placed east of the Peach Orchard where they saw heavy fighting on 6 April. The official State monuments to Illinois regiments and artillery batteries are all of the same block design – they are the same on other battlefields, as well. The cost of each was $65,000.
Survivors of the 9th – they suffered a 50% casualty rate – from the battle placed this ‘extra’ monument in the cemetery to commemorate fallen comrades choosing a design unique from the norm with the exception of the monument to the Illinois cavalry. The monument of the 9th remains the only regimental monument in the cemetery. Also, the monument stands as the only second monument to a single regiment found here at Shiloh.
CONFEDERATE BURIAL GRAVES
The Federal army controlled the battlefield after the two days affair. The responsibility to bury the dead – from both sides – lay with them. Everyone lie, initially, on the battlefield. The mass graves separated Federals from Confederates with Union soldiers buried together by regiment when they could be. Confederates were gathered together in what is thought to be ten or eleven mass graves. Only five of these mass graves have been located today officially. The largest reports to hold 721 bodies stacked seven high.
Three Confederates do lay in the Shiloh National Cemetery: F.A. Rasch of the Orleans Guard (an unknown grave), Phillip Prosser of the 13th Louisiana, and R.E. Cook of the 18th Alabama.
You can find the five Confederate graves at different sites along the official auto tour route. One is found on the Jones Field Road just north of the Michigan Monument. There are two in the woods north and west of Woolf Field. Another is just east of the Shiloh Church and the last one is further to the south of Rhea Spring.
MORTUARY MONUMENTS
Those officers of brigade command level or higher who lost their lives at Shiloh are memorialized with a monument comprised of four pyramids of cannonballs surrounding an inverted cannon barrel. The Federal brigade commanders are:
Everett Peabody
Everett Peabody – his brigade involved in the opening actions of the battle. Wounded three times, the fourth instance killed him outright. Buried near the present monument, but Peabody’s body later removed back to his birth State of Massachusetts following the war.
Julius RaitH
Julius Raith, a German American regimental commander – 42nd Illinois – gained elevation to brigade command on the first day of the battle due to an illness with the normal brigadier. A veteran of the Mexican War, Raith suffered a hit in the leg above the knee. He survived, left on the battlefield for 24 hours before the victory on the next reunited him with the Union army. He developed tetanus from his wounds and died on a steamer returning him to Illinois where lies buried.
Adley Gladden
Adley Gladden was a Confederate brigadier general. A South Carolinian, he led the Palmetto Regiment in the latter stages of Winfield Scott’s Mexican campaign – severely wounded in the fighting at Mexico City. Following that war, he relocated to Louisiana after his wife’s death and led the 1st Louisiana at the outset of the Civil War. Gladden impressed Braxton Bragg as a temporary commander in the defense of Pensacola, Florida late in 1861.
Bragg was always concerned about discipline, and he had Gladden promoted and given his old brigade to command: four Alabama regiments plus the 1st Louisiana. Leading his brigade at Shiloh, they were in the first line of attack challenging Miller’s brigade in Spain Field. The brigade became heavily engaged and Gladden – as well as his second and third in command – fell wounded. A cannonball hit him in the shoulder badly mangling his arm. Soon after amputation, complications set in, and he died six days later. He lies buried in Mobile, Alabama.
William H.L. Wallace
William H.L. Wallace was a new Federal divisional commander at Shiloh replacing Major General Charles F. Smith who had injured his leg getting off a boat – he, too, would soon die of complications. Wallace was another Mexican War veteran having risen from private to 2nd lieutenant in the 1st Illinois. He was a lawyer and had even thought of joining Lincoln’s practice for a while. With the Civil War, Wallace again volunteered as a private but soon gained election to colonel of the 11th Illinois. By the time of the Battle of Fort Donelson, he had risen to brigade command in the division of John McClernand.
Promoted to brigadier general, Wallace directed his division in its defense around the Sunken Road where they held their own for some six hours until around 4:30 pm, as their position became surrounded; Wallace tried to extricate his men. Standing high in the saddle, he suffered a gunshot to the head. In the struggle to escape the Confederate net, he became left behind. Like Raith, he was recovered the next day during the subsequent Union advance. Moved to the Cherry Mansion in Savannah, he was reunited with his wife Anne who had come upriver to visit. His last words to her on 10 April were “We meet in Heaven.” He lies buried in his hometown of Ottawa, Illinois, next to his wife and his war horse, Prince.
MORTUARY MONUMENT FOR A. S. JOHNSTON
The other mortuary monument commemorates the Confederate army commander Albert Sidney Johnston of Texas, the highest-ranking officer of either side to fall in the war. Johnston had been one of the highest-ranking officers in the antebellum Federal army. He resigned his commission and his post as commander of the Department of the Pacific once Texas seceded. A longtime friend of Jefferson Davis, Johnston gained appointed to the rank of full general and given command of the Confederacy’s Western Department. The main problem facing Johnston strategically, he simply had too few men to carry out Davis’s desire to not surrender any part of Confederate soil to the enemy. That and he had the misfortune of having some subordinate commanders who were not very competent.
Johnston concentrated his army at Bowling Green in Kentucky at the end of 1861 against Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio. Forts became erected to defend the major rivers. Grant’s capture of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson tore a huge hole in his line forcing his own army to pull south giving up Nashville without a fight. He concentrated his army at Corinth, Mississippi and brought together other troops from all over his department. Johnston hoped to strike against Grant’s force which was making its way up the Tennessee River before Buell joined with him. Thus, he would retrieve something of the strategic situation.
Johnston at Shiloh
At Shiloh, his plan was to hit the Federal army hard on its left flank and cut it off from the Tennessee River and its base at Pittsburgh Landing. Johnston fell wounded in the leg while rallying troops fighting near the Peach Orchard. A major artery nicked, Johnston died in the ravine just to the south of the mortuary monument. There are some questions as to whether the wound was from friendly fire or not. His loss was a tremendous blow to Davis, “When Sidney Johnston fell, it was the turning point of our fate; for we had no other to take up his work in the West.” No one whom Jefferson Davis trusted as much, anyway. Johnston lies buried today at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.
SHILOH CHURCH AND CEMETERY
The original church at Shiloh dated to 1851, but that church was destroyed during and after the battle. A wooden structure dating to 1875 sits erected on the original site. The newer church began in 1929 though not completed until 1952. The log reconstruction dates to 1999-2001, undertaken by descendants of both Union and Confederate veterans, the Shiloh Church and the Shiloh National Park amongst others.
Across from the church is the community cemetery. Amongst the graves on the south end next to the artillery monument for Taylor’s Battery is the large obelisk for former Tennessee governor Leonard Ray Blanton. A former congressman – 1967-1973 – he served as governor from 1975 until 1979 when he became removed from office for selling pardons. He later served 23 months in prison after a conviction for trying to sell liquor licenses. He died in 1996.
Marie Ragghianti, the former Tennessee Parole Board chairperson, had been fired for not releasing felons who had bribed Blanton’s associate. She successfully sued the State leading to Blanton’s removal. Her legal representative in court none other than Fred Thompson who went on to become a U.S. senator from Tennessee. Thompson also got a start on an acting career playing himself in the movie “Marie” inspired by a book of the same title written by Peter Maas – “Serpico” fame.
http://www.hmdb.org/Marker.asp?Marker=31794
SHILOH INDIAN MOUNDS SITE
Just east of Cloud Field atop the bluffs overlooking the Tennessee River are several mounds. It is estimated that used to be a village of more than 100 houses here with eight large mounds – seven being substructure platform mounds and one was a burial mound.
The site was occupied from 100 to 1450 AD by people of the Woodland and later Early Mississippi and cultures. There were some six other subsidiary villages within a 20-mile reach of this site. Maize agriculture lay at the heart of the cultures. The mounds and remains found here give a good representation of earlier indigenous peoples found throughout the region.
The site, included as a part of the National Park for so long, has not suffered from much damage due to subsequent agriculture. In 1934 under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, the mounds saw excavation. One of the mounds served as a burial ground for the 28th Illinois before those remains removed to the National Cemetery.
