On the battlefield, the regiment was the basic unit of maneuver. It had its own colors (distinctive flag) and, in many Northern units, badges or other insignia that were worn on caps.
At the Shiloh stage of the war most men were volunteers. Many had had training in their hometown militia but most had not. Later in the war both sides conscripted men, with dubious results.
Artillery was broken down into batteries of four to six guns each; in Confederate armies it was usually assigned at the brigade level, but Union armies assigned it to divisions. Artillery was rated by the weight of the iron shot that each piece fired (i.e., 6-pounder gun, 12-pounder gun, 32-pounder gun, etc.) or by the diameter of its barrel (i.e., 6-inch gun, 8-inch gun, 10-inch gun, etc.). The most popular weapon during the first two years of the war was the 6-pounder smoothbore (served by a five-man crew), which was later replaced by the 12-pounder bronze “Napoleon” (served by a nine-man crew), with an effective range of more than a mile. At Shiloh the two armies had 235 cannons of various sizes divided about equally between them.
Infantry drill was not merely the quaint parade field formality that it has become in the military today but a dead-earnest part of 19th-century warfare. When troops weren’t marching, fighting, or performing other duties they were drilling—half steps, step and a halfs, right wheels, obliques, close file, about-face, left flank, right flank, left wheel, right wheel, at ease, at rest, and dozens more commands all orchestrated and anticipated to be executed dainty as a French minuet. In major army movements, such as at Shiloh where thousands of men marched shoulder to shoulder to mass their fire on an enemy, they were expected to arrive at a precise point at a precise moment in order to produce the desired effect. The slightest variation in terrain—such as we shall see at Shiloh: a swamp or stream, bramble thicket, hidden gully, even a fallen tree—could throw the plan out of whack, so attention to marching orders was paramount.
At Shiloh and elsewhere, the firepower of an assault could be stunning. The principal infantry weapon of the Union army was the .58-caliber Springfield with an effective rage of 500 yards (at 200 yards—twice the length of a football field—it could drill a hold through an 11-inch pine plank).
Confederate infantry were usually equipped with the .577-caliber British Enfield rifle, with similar characteristics. During battle infantry soldiers had an effective aimed firing rate of three rounds per minute, so that in the full fury of an assault, such as at Shiloh, it would not be inconceivable that during any given minute on the battlefield some 50,000 to 100,000 deadly projectiles would be ripping through the air toward flesh and bone. The weight and size of the bullet, even as it hit a hand or foot, was sufficient to disable a man.
Medicine had progressed very slowly from the days of the American Revolution. Antibiotics were in the future, and the raw power of a bullet striking a limb invariably brought on gas gangrene, an infection usually caused by germs and filth on the clothing being driven into the wound. This could be deadly within a few days, and it was common medical practice to amputate limbs that had been struck to spare a patient’s life.
Artillery pieces had developed considerably since Napoleonic days. Ammunition was divided into shot, a large, spherical solid iron ball, and shell, a hollow iron ball filled with gunpowder and fused to explode in front of, or above, an enemy formation, flinging deadly pieces of metal shrapnel as it burst into pieces. For “close range work” cannons could be loaded with case, canister, or grapeshot, all of which sprayed out lethal iron balls, and sometimes the guns were loaded with whatever else was available, including nails, nuts, bolts, pieces of chain—even rocks. Artillery was especially feared by the troops because of its shock value and ghastly effects.
The bayonet, which in many Civil War rifles was attached to the barrel, was then considered an extraordinary weapon, supposed to put a singular type of fear and loathing into the hearts of the enemy for it carried with it the likely prospect of hand-to-hand combat, with all of its dreadful implications.
Among all the noises of the battlefield, the drum stands out as one of the most peculiar and alarming. Drummers, or drummer boys, were attached to each rifle company, and were principally employed to keep cadence while marching. But the drums were also used for signaling such things as “assembly” (the “long roll”), “attack,” “retreat,” “chow,” “officers’ call,” and similar messages in camp or on the battlefield.2 Drummer boys, some as young as ten years old but most in their teens, were often on the field during a fight, and sometimes as an inevitable result were wounded or killed. The sound of the drum on the battlefield had been used for several hundred years to disturb and unnerve the enemy, similar to the hair-raising buzz of the rattlesnake’s tail.
“Colors,” consisting of national, state, divisional, and regimental flags, were a military tradition that inspired profound and intense feeling among the soldiers. From the beginning of their training the men were taught that these symbols were sacred and to be protected at all costs. The flags were made of the best silks, embroidered with delicate braids of real gold by the ladies of the various towns or counties where regiments were raised. To lose one’s colors in battle was to lose one’s pride and, as we soon shall see, many a soldier in the Civil War fell guarding them with his life.
Quite a few Civil War generals experienced the Mexican War and, in theory, idealized the military tactics set forth by the French military philosopher Antoine-Henri Jomini, which stressed maneuver rather than frontal attacks. But at Shiloh, as elsewhere, this proved to be mostly lip service, at least by the Confederate leaders who, because the terrain was so dense and uneven, quickly adopted the famous advice of Napoleon’s grand marshal Étienne Maurice Gérard at the Battle of Waterloo and “marched to the sound of the guns.”
1 Occasionally, there would be separate battalion-size units of 400 or 500 men, about half as large as regiments, usually connected to state or local militia.
2 The cavalry used the bugle for these signaling messages.
Maps
THE UNITED STATES IN 1862 (UNION AND CONFEDERATE STATES/TERRITORIES)
WESTERN THEATER OF OPERATIONS: JANUARY 1862–JANUARY 1863
FORTS HENRY AND DONELSON: FEBRUARY 1862
CONFEDERATE ADVANCE ON SHILOH: APRIL 3–5, 1862
PITTSBURG LANDING BATTLEFIELD: APRIL 6, 1862, 5 A.M.
PITTSBURG LANDING BATTLEFIELD: APRIL 6, 1862, 9 A.M.
PITTSBURG LANDING BATTLEFIELD: APRIL 6, 1862, 12 P.M.
PITTSBURG LANDING BATTLEFIELD: APRIL 6, 1862, 4 P.M.
PITTSBURG LANDING BATTLEFIELD: APRIL 6, 1862, END OF THE DAY
PITTSBURG LANDING BATTLEFIELD: APRIL 7, 1862, END OF THE DAY
The UNITED STATES in 1862
CHAPTER 1
APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH
BY EARLY APRIL 1862 THE SPRING STORM SEASON HAD already begun in Tennessee. The thunderheads made up on the southern plains, then tore across the South with lightning and killer tornadoes. Terrifying as this was, it paled before the violent thing then gathering along the Mississippi River Valley.
From Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, Northern men had begun to converge. They marched in turn by squads, platoons, companies, regiments, brigades, and finally whole infantry divisions. As the cold Dixie weather receded and they tramped farther south, before them loomed a great battle they were told would bring an end to the war.
Up from the South likewise they came, from Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Arkansas; Tennessee, of course, was represented in full. And from the border states Kentucky and Missouri came men of both sides who fought as friend against friend, sometimes brother against brother. There were more than a hundred thousand in all—whose average age was not yet 20.
Down in the far southwestern corner of the state the winding Tennessee River straightens out for twenty or so miles after changing its course northward toward the wide Ohio. Halfway along that stretch is a bight on the western bank, occupied lon
g ago by a tribe of mound builders, now called Pittsburg Landing, a nondescript hog-and-cotton loading station perched before tall oak-strewn bluffs where steamboats put in from time to time. There they took on cargo and traded with the residents, who were fairly low on the scale of Southern sophistication in the era of King Cotton and the fanciful aura of moonlight and magnolias. These Pittsburg Landing people might have had plenty of the latter, but it was about all they had. The curse of slavery was barely a whisper in the scratched-out fields among the shocking thickets where they eked a living and went to Sunday meetings at an ax-hewn chink-and-mortar Methodist church named Shiloh chapel. The church itself was hardly better than a respectable Missouri corncrib in its design and architectural aspect, but it was a house of God and gave its name to one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.
On Sunday morning, April 6, the fateful day, Elsie Duncan, then age nine, told of being in the garden of her family’s home about a mile west of Pittsburg Landing. The place was peaceful “as paradise” itself, she remembered, surrounded as it was “by a beautiful forest with every kind of oak, maple and birch,” plus “fruit trees and berry bushes and a spring-fed pond with water lilies blooming white.” Her father, Joseph, was one of the few substantial citizens of the area, owning a farm of 200 acres called Pleasant Land as well as being a circuit-riding preacher of the Gospel. Everybody had been on edge for several weeks, ever since the Duncans’ black nurse Margie had come back from a visit to the landing to report that there were “strange steamboats on the river, and Yankees camped in the hills.”
Hardin County, where Pittsburg Landing was located, was fairly typical of rural Tennessee outside the state’s main cotton belt. In the 1861 referendum on secession, the residents voted to stay with the Union, and there was still strong Union sentiment on the east side of the river. But on the west side, where Elsie Duncan lived, the young men had been formed to fight for the Confederacy, and had been drilling regularly, led by her own father, whom she described as a “drill master” in addition to his duties as a Rebel chaplain. It was at one of these drill sessions, or parades, that she spent her final time in “that dear old Shiloh church.” It had been appropriated for a Rebel celebration, she recalled, complete with Confederate flags and a chorus of little girls “dressed in red, white, and blue, and singing ‘Dixie.’ ”
The suddenness with which war had come to Hardin County alarmed everyone. Citizens began to plan for some sort of cataclysm as the blue-clad Federals arrived by the hundreds, and then the thousands, at Pittsburg and other landings along the river. Reverend Duncan had a cave on his property, “at the edge of the woods, just above the spring which was under a bluff just back of the orchard.” It was “about the size of a large room,” she said, and her father reinforced the roof with heavy planks and laid a floor, then “sealed the entrance off with brush and made a trap door with a ladder to go down.” It would prove to be a safe harbor when fighting broke out.
The people in that part of the country, she said, “did not know how long the war was going to last,” and so in a small cabin far back in the woods her father also hid “eight barrels of home-raised flour upstairs, buried a large box of home-raised hams in the garden and put a sweet potato bed on top of them.” The men, she recalled, “left everything as secure and safe as they could to protect their homes and families, and then left them in the care of the Lord” to join the Confederate army.
Thus, Elsie, her mother, Harriet, and her five children ranging in age from 7 to 15, as well as their nurse Margie, were home alone on Sunday morning, April 6, 1862, when from somewhere beyond the deep woods came the rough, guttural muttering of artillery like distant thunder. Elsie had not had breakfast and was out in the garden playing.
“It was a beautiful Sunday morning. The sun was shining, birds were singing, and the air was soft and sweet,” she said. “I sat down under a holly-hock bush which was full of pink blossoms and watched the bees gathering honey.”
Elsie Duncan hadn’t the faintest idea at that point—nor had many of the 40,000-strong Yankee host nearby—that something dreadful was brewing in the tangled forests to the south and descending upon them as swift and merciless as a cyclone from the southern plains.
The war was still one week shy of a year old, and the issues that had brought it on were not yet fully absorbed by the armies of young men who had signed on to fight it. For the sturdy, traditional midwesterners in the Federal service it was mainly about saving the Union that their forefathers created; for the majority of young men under the Confederate banner it was mostly about the invading Yankee army, which they saw as a clear and present danger to their homes and loved ones. The Emancipation Proclamation was long months into the future. The war was young; the men were inexperienced; some of the Northern soldiers learned to shoot their weapons by firing at things along the banks of the river, including people’s homes or barns, and a sizable number of Rebels were armed only with shotguns or squirrel rifles. It was a mean pity that less than three generations after the creation of the first authentic democracy the world had ever known, such a wretched schism had broken out among nominally peace-loving peoples. It is worth a side trip to understand why.
At the time of the Revolution, the U.S. population had reached 2.5 million, including 500,000 slaves. By the War of 1812 three decades later, it had grown to some 8 million, and just a half century later, on the eve of the Civil War, it had exploded to more than 30 million, including about 4 million slaves.
By the election year of 1860 the United States had grown into a huge but unwieldy economic giant, selling commodities and foodstuffs throughout the world. During the 250 years since the first settlers landed on American shores, their rude paths and huts had given way to homes, many of them substantial. Highly developed roadways and waterways connected great cities north and south. In 40 years, steamboats had advanced from rudimentary vessels to floating palaces while railroads linked all important places, and the invention of the Morse telegraph and code 20 years earlier had spawned a nationwide web of timely communications.
In the Northeast great manufactories arose; New England embraced the shipbuilding, textile, and armaments industries, while around the shores of the Great Lakes and in Pittsburgh iron foundries produced railroad engines, cars, and track. Elsewhere plants and shops large and small turned out everything from leather goods to buggies and buggy whips, shoes and tools and rubber goods and all things in between. In the Midwest (then still known as the “West”) was the “breadbasket of America”; farmers in the Great Plains, many of them German and Scandinavian immigrants, raised corn, wheat, and grain for the vast flourmills of Minnesota and Michigan. Farther west were beef cattle and hogs, this last the staple meat of rural life.
The American South, ignoring the advice of some of its wisest citizens, produced few if any of these goods and commodities, but instead purchased what it needed from above the Mason-Dixon Line or from abroad. In the meantime it raised cotton. A visitor to the region in the 1840s made this analysis of southerners’ misapplication of capital: “To raise more cotton, to buy more slaves, to raise more cotton, to buy more slaves—ad infinitum.”
Indeed, until the turn of the 19th century the South grew very little cotton, save for the long-staple variety, which flourished along the Georgia seacoast and had few seeds, pods, or other entanglements to be combed (or ginned) out. The other kind of cotton, short staple, could grow in abundance almost anywhere in the South, but the manpower it took to hand-comb out the detritus wasn’t worth the effort. Then, in 1793, Eli Whitney invented his cotton gin and the entire Southern agricultural dynamic changed dramatically.
Go-getters began farming large upland tracts with short-staple cotton. In a few short years they wore out the soil and soon moved from Georgia and the Carolinas into the wilds of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, then jumped the river into Louisiana and Arkansas; it wasn’t long before the whole sunny South seemed to have turned into an ocean of white cotton bolls waving toward Texas
and the promise of the West. That was where some said the trouble started. With all the riches embodied in the American system, one would have thought that an abiding harmony should have existed among the sections of the country, but beneath its great prosperity America seethed.
The trouble in fact had started 250 years earlier, when a Dutch ship’s captain offloaded 62 miserable Africans at Jamestown, Virginia, introducing slavery to North America. They were the first of some 640,000 brought over before importation of slaves was officially ended in 1808. But the trade had spread throughout the Caribbean Basin, and in America to all the colonies, which became the states. Before the turn of the century slavery in the United States had appeared to be dying out of its own accord as “inefficient, wasteful, and increasingly morally repugnant.”
Then Whitney invented his gin and slavery was back in vogue in the South. Raising cotton was a highly labor-intensive business, with immense profits, and slaves seemed to be the only answer, even though the institution remained just as “morally repugnant” as before.
By the eve of the Civil War cotton accounted for two-thirds of America’s exports and in time cotton and slavery became almost inextricably bound together with every facet of Southern life. The larger plantations were like small cities, with their own gardeners, blacksmiths, carpenters, bricklayers, horse handlers, and, of course, field hands. Architects made their living designing mansions and offices for cotton agents (called “factors”). Steamboat companies hauled cotton from the landings and to the planters delivered European furniture, fine carpets, china, and so on. Engineers and draftsmen thrived by surveying cotton land. Southern lawyers represented the cotton interests and Southern doctors tended their ailments. Bankers, gin operators, railroad companies, warehouse owners, hoteliers, hardware salesmen, longshoremen, farriers, druggists, houses of worship, and houses of prostitution—all of these, and more, were in one way or another interdependent on the cotton trade. Even the myriad small “subsistence farmers,” who owned no slaves, tried to put in a few acres of the crop to earn a little cash.