Ulysses S. Grant to push his troops toward Corinth, Mississippi, the strategic intersection of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad and the Memphis and Charleston Railroad and a vital troop and supply conduit for the South.
The encounter proved devastating—not only for its tactical failure, but for the extreme number of casualties. After Shiloh, both sides realized the magnitude of the conflict, which would be longer and bloodier than they could have imagined. To consolidate his forces and prepare for operations against Grant, Johnston marshals his forces at Corinth.
The Confederate retreat is welcomed by Grant, whose Army of the Tennessee needs time to prepare for its own offensive up the Tennessee River. Grant's army camps at Pittsburg Landing, where it spends time drilling recruits and awaiting Maj.
Grant is ordered not to engage the Confederates until he has been reinforced by Buell's army, which is marching overland from Nashville to meet him. Once combined, the two armies will advance south on Corinth. On April 3, Johnston places his troops in motion, but heavy rains delay his attack.
By nightfall on April 5, his army is deployed for battle only four miles southwest of Pittsburg Landing, and pickets from both sides nervously exchange gunfire in the dense woods that evening. April 6. Intense fighting centers around Shiloh Church as the Confederates sweep the Union line from that area. Despite heavy fire on their position, Union troops counterattack but slowly lose ground and fall back northeast toward Pittsburg Landing.
The bullet severs an artery and the commander bleeds to death. Pierre G. Beauregard is appointed the new Confederate commander. Believing his army victorious, Beauregard calls a halt to the attacks as darkness approaches.
He is unaware that overnight Buell arrives with reinforcements for Grant. April 7. Beauregard immediately orders a counterattack. The Confederates are ultimately compelled to fall back and regroup all along their line.
About p. On April 8, Grant dispatches Brig. William T. Sherman and Brig. Thomas J. At Fallen Timbers, six miles south of the battlefield, they encounter Rebel cavalry under Col. Similarly, the notorious Bloody Pond, today a battlefield landmark, could be myth. There is no contemporary evidence that indicates the pond became bloodstained. In fact, there is no contemporary evidence that there was even a pond on the spot.
The sole account came from a local citizen who years later told of walking by a pond a few days after the battle and seeing it stained with blood. The long-held belief that Grant arrived at Pittsburg Landing only to be greeted by thousands upon thousands of Union stragglers is also a myth. The frontline divisions of Prentiss and Brig. William T. Sherman did not break until after 9 a. Cynicism aside, there is a real need to correct such errors. Such an ambivalent attitude toward facts, continued and perpetuated through the years, not only produces false history but also diminishes the record of what actually happened.
The most boring fact is always worth more than the most glamorous myth. In an effort to correct historical errors and analyze the myths, here is a brief analysis of several myths about the Battle of Shiloh.
The matter of surprise is a major topic of discussion among military historians and enthusiasts. Of course, most military tactics are common sense. When fighting either a bully or an army, who would not want to sneak up on an opponent and get in the first punch?
One of the most famous of all surprises in military history is Pearl Harbor, where Japanese planes attacked the U. Pacific Fleet based in Hawaii. The attack on December 7, , was indeed a surprise, with bombs dropping out of a clear blue sky. Shiloh is another well-known example of a supposed surprise attack.
One author has even gone so far as to call it the Pearl Harbor of the Civil War. In actuality, Shiloh was not all that much of a surprise. The assertion of surprise came initially from contemporary newspaper columns that described Union soldiers being bayoneted in their tents as they slept.
The most famous account came from Whitelaw Reid, a newspaper correspondent for the Cincinnati Gazette. But Reid was nowhere near Shiloh when the Confederates attacked, and he actually penned his nearly 15,word opus from miles away. The idea that Reid perpetuated and that is still commonly believed today is that the Federals had no idea that the enemy was so near. Nothing could be further from the truth. For days before April 6, minor skirmishing took place.
Both sides routinely took prisoners in the days leading up to the battle. The rank and file in the Union army knew Confederates were out there — they just did not know in what strength. The problem lay with the Federal commanders. Ordered not to bring on an engagement and convinced they would have to march to Corinth, Miss. Grant was not about to go looking for a fight in early April, certainly not before reinforcements arrived from Nashville in the form of the Army of the Ohio, and certainly not without orders from his superior, Maj.
Henry W. Thus Grant ordered his frontline division commanders Sherman and Prentiss not to spark a fight, and they made sure their soldiers understood that directive. As a result, not wanting to prematurely begin a battle, Federal skirmishers and pickets continually withdrew as the Confederates probed forward.
The lower echelon leadership was not all that convinced the fight would take place at Corinth, however. For days, brigade and regimental commanders had witnessed Confederates near their camps. Several patrols even went forward, but no major Confederate units were encountered. Finally, on the night of April 5, one Union brigade commander took matters into his own hands.
Sending out a patrol without authorization, Colonel Everett Peabody located the Confederate army at dawn on April 6. His tiny reconnaissance found the advance skirmishers of the Southern force less than a mile from the Union front. The Confederates promptly attacked, and the Battle of Shiloh began. The resulting delay in the Confederate assault on the Union camps allowed the Army of the Tennessee to mobilize.
Because of the warning, every single Union unit on the field met the Confederate assault coming from Corinth south, or in advance of, their camps. For decades after the battle, Prentiss was hailed as the Federal officer who took it upon himself to send out a patrol that eventually uncovered the Confederate advance and gave early warning of the attack.
Finding himself surrounded, however, Prentiss surrendered the noble and brave remnants of his division. Historians through the years then accepted that report at face value, one even labeling a photo of Prentiss as the Hero of Shiloh. In actuality, Prentiss was not as involved as legend has it. He did not send out the patrol on the morning of April 6. When he found out, Prentiss told his subordinate he would hold him personally responsible for bringing on a battle and rode off in a huff.
His division began the day with roughly 5, men, only to dwindle to by that morning. When Prentiss took his position in the Sunken Road, his numbers were nearly doubled by an arriving regiment, the 23rd Missouri. Prentiss had lost almost his entire division, and could not have held his second line without the veteran brigades of Brig. Prentiss was in an advantageous position to become a hero after the battle, however.
Although he remained a prisoner for six months, he was able to tell his story. Peabody and Wallace were both dead from wounds received at Shiloh. Thus Prentiss took credit for their actions and became the hero of the fight.
Prentiss never even mentioned Peabody in his report, except to say that he commanded one of his brigades. Prentiss, the only Federal officer who could get his own record out, thus benefited from public exposure. In the process, he became the hero of Shiloh. The veterans of the various armies vehemently argued their cases after the war. Even Grant and Buell entered the fight when they wrote opposing articles for Century magazine in the s. Grant claimed his army was in a strong position with heavy lines of infantry supporting massed artillery.
His effort to trade space for time throughout the day of April 6 had worked; Grant had spent so much time in successive defensive positions that daylight was fading by the time the last Confederate assaults began, and he was convinced that his army could handle those attacks. Buell, on the other hand, painted a picture of a dilapidated Army of the Tennessee on the brink of defeat.
Only his arrival with fresh columns of Army of the Ohio troops won the day. The lead brigade, commanded by Colonel Jacob Ammen, deployed on the ridge south of the landing and met the Confederate advance. Likewise, the troops were massed in compact positions. Good interior lines of defense also helped, and two Federal gunboats fired on the Confederates from the river. Grant poured heavy fire into the Confederates from the front, flank and rear. Only elements of four disorganized and exhausted Confederate brigades crossed the backwater in the Dill Branch ravine as gunboat shells flew through the air.
Only two of those brigades undertook an assault, one without ammunition. The Confederates topped the rise and faced a withering fire. They were convinced. Orders from Beauregard to withdraw did not have to be repeated. Grant had the situation well under control and could have fended off much larger numbers than he actually encountered.
For many years after the battle, former Confederates castigated General Beauregard for his actions at Shiloh. Beauregard, however, called off his Southern boys and thus threw away a victory.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The controversy had its beginnings while the war still raged. Corps commanders Maj.
William J. Hardee and Braxton Bragg later pounced on Beauregard for calling off the attacks, even though their immediate post-battle correspondence said nothing de-rogatory about their commander. After the war ended, Southerners began to argue that being outnumbered and outproduced industrially were reasons for their defeat, and also blamed the battle deaths of leaders like Johnston and Stonewall Jackson.
Another key element in their argument, however, was poor leadership on the part of certain generals such as James Longstreet at Gettysburg of course it did not help that Longstreet turned his back on the solidly Democratic South and went Republican after the war and Beauregard at Shiloh. The sum of all those parts became known as the Lost Cause. Hardee, Bragg and thousands of other former Confederates argued after the war that Beauregard threw away the victory.
Beauregard does bear some blame, but not for making the wrong decision to end the attacks. He made the right decision, but for all the wrong reasons. The general made his decision far behind his front lines, an area completely awash with stragglers and wounded. No wonder Beauregard argued that his army was so disorganized that he needed to call a halt.
Similarly, Beauregard acted on faulty intelligence. Based on such spotty intelligence, Beauregard thought he could finish Grant the next morning. In the end, the decision to call a halt was the right thing to do.
The castigated Creole did not throw away a victory, he merely put himself in a position to be blamed for the defeat already transpiring. Another Lost Cause myth of Shiloh is that Johnston would have been victorious had not a stray bullet clipped an artery in his leg and caused him to bleed to death. The result of both cause and effect situations led to Confederate defeat. To drive the point home, the United Daughters of the Confederacy placed an elaborate memorial at Shiloh in , with Johnston as the centerpiece and death symbolically taking the laurel wreath of victory away from the South.
Even modern scholars have sometimes taken this line of reasoning. Johnston biographer Charles Roland has argued in two different books that Johnston would have succeeded and won the battle had he lived. Roland claims that just because Beauregard failed did not mean Johnston would have. His superior leadership qualities, Roland concludes, could have allowed Johnston to spur the tired Confederate troops onward to victory. Such a theory of certain victory fails to take many factors into account.
First, there was no lull in the battle on the Confederate right because Johnston fell. A continuous rate of fire was not sustainable for several reasons, mostly logistics; ordnance departments could not keep thousands of soldiers supplied to fire constantly.
Most Civil War battles were stop-and-go actions, with assaults, retreats and counterattacks. The result was that the fighting at Shiloh did not rage continuously for hours at any one time or place. Instead it was a complicated series of many different actions throughout the day at many different points.
Second, the argument that Johnston would have won when Beauregard did not is also faulty. Rifled guns firing shell projectiles increased the range and effectiveness of artillery. More sophisticated systems of transport and organisation of supply, made possible by railroads and advances in industrial production, allowed for much larger armies.
Tactics had advanced little from the era of the Napoleonic Wars of the beginning of the 19th Century in Europe. Probably only the Prussian army with its long standing General Staff had conducted sufficient study of the impact of changes in warfare to enable it to train its staff officers and generals to control the substantially greater and more sophisticated armies of the period.
The French and British had first shown their failure to grasp problems of warfare in the second half of the 19th Century during the Crimean War. In each of these wars reliance was placed on successful colonial commanders who had no idea how to handle the large armies involved in a major war.
The Federal regiments wore dark blue. The Confederates in theory wore a light grey uniform. In practice the Confederate government was unable to maintain a proper supply of uniform clothing for its troops who wore whatever they could get their hands on. In many instances the most ready supply of uniforms lay in captured Federal supplies, leading to confusion on several battlefields, when Confederate troops were mistaken for Federals.
Lacking a manufacturing base and cut off from European import by the Federal blockade, the Confederate government was forced to equip its soldiers with stocks of weapons seized from Federal armouries located in southern states.
These were largely the old smooth bore muskets, of short range and notoriously inaccurate. Many Confederate troops, without even these weapons, were forced to use whatever firearms they were able to bring on enlistment. Artillery : As with small arms, the Federal access to European markets and its own manufacturing base gave the Federal army an immense advantage in the production of cannon. Broadly the Federal artillery was equipped with rifled guns firing shells, while the Confederate artillery was equipped with the old style smooth bore cannon, of lesser range and accuracy; firing ball, grape shot and case shot.
McClernand Brigadier General W. Wallace Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss Brigadier General Stephen A. Hurlbut Brigadier General William T. Wood Brigadier General Thomas C. Breckinridge comprising the divisions of: Colonel Winfield S. General Grant moved his Army of the Tennessee, using the Federal predominance in river shipping, south to Pittsburg Landing on the western shore of the Tennessee River.
Account of the Battle of Shiloh: General Grant has been accused of concerning himself too much with his own plans and failing to take account of Confederate intentions. Whether this is a fair general comment on General Grant he certainly failed to prevent his army being surprised on 6th April The Army of the Tennessee on its arrival at Pittsburg Landing encamped over an area of 7 miles along the main roads leading away from the river.
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