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The Nation's Pulse
Remembering Shiloh 150 Years Later
Like First Bull Run, Shiloh was fought on Sunday around a Methodist church.
The 150th anniversary of the Civil War is mostly passing quietly, commemorated by battle reenactments attended by the nation’s numerous Civil War buffs. Last year’s reenactment of First Bull Run (Manassas, Va.), the war’s first major clash, outside Washington, D.C., attracted a large but still less than expected crowd, thanks mostly to the oppressive July heat. That battle’s participants had felt a similar heat but lacked the option of not attending.
Fifty years ago, the Civil War Centennial was celebrated but afterwards was mostly remembered as a dud. Battle reenactments then lacked today’s panache. And social tensions lingered. The last veterans had only died a few years before. Their children were still numerous and active, such as U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Sam Rayburn. The son of a Confederate soldier, he worried that reenactors in blue and gray would spark renewed regional hostility. And of course, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. Defiant southern segregationists had appropriated the Confederate battle flag as their emblem.
Today’s remembrance of the Civil War is more dispassionate. The anniversary of Shiloh was in April. It’s not so much recalled as Gettysburg or Antietam. But it was at the time, in 1862, the bloodiest battle ever fought in North America, and probably the Western Hemisphere. Across 2 days over 23,000 were killed, wounded, captured or missing. Reputedly the South “never smiled” afterwards. And neither north nor south could then pretend the war would be short with minimal cost.
A recent visit to Shiloh, located at the bottom of Tennessee near Corinth, Mississippi, reveals a bucolic park nestled over the Tennessee River. The National Park Service’s typically immaculate maintenance of America’s battlefields often makes recalling them as scenes of mass carnage difficult. There is a national cemetery there, along with a stately visitor center resembling an antebellum mansion, countless monuments plus cannons, and acres of trees. Today’s battlefields, like most of America, are almost always more forested now than then, when farmers more thoroughly cleared their land for tillage or livestock.
Like First Bull Run, Shiloh was fought on Sunday around a Methodist church. At Bull Run, parishioners were heading to worship at Sudley Methodist when Union troops began streaming by, eventually seizing the church as a hospital. At Shiloh, where hostilities began before dawn, parishioners presumably knew better than to head for their simple log sanctuary, around which General William Sherman was encamped. Today, there is a recreation of the log church, alongside the modern Shiloh United Methodist Church, which looks old, made of stone and brick, but which was actually built in the 1940s. Its cemetery seemingly is favored by Civil War aficionados; even recent grave stones tout Confederate ancestry. The Sudley United Methodist Church at Bull Run also remains active, though sadly the original sanctuary, with its blood stained floors, was replaced in the 1920s.
Sherman was just one of several major characters at Shiloh. His commander was Ulysses S. Grant, by then already a celebrity for having captured only 2 months before Forts Henry and Donelson, which respectively guarded the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. At Donelson he had demanded and received “unconditional surrender,” which became his new moniker, neatly fitting his initials. The surrendering Confederate general at Donelson was Simon Buckner, a pre-war friend to Grant who was offended by the ostensibly ignoble demand. Bucker’s son would become a U.S. Army general who died at Okinawa 83 years later, the most senior American commander to die in combat during World War II.
The most senior commander to die in the Civil War arguably was Confederate commander Albert Sidney Johnston. “If he’s not a general, we have no general,” Confederate President Jefferson Davis reputedly declared. Robert E. Lee at this time was still relatively unknown, and Johnston could have become the South’s most celebrated hero. He moved his troops undetected within one mile of Grant’s unfortified army, and he easily swept through Sherman and others as he launched his surprise attack.
When his troops stopped to ransack evacuated Union camps, Johnston grabbed a Union tin cup, pronounced it sufficient booty for himself, and rallied his troops by clanging the trophy against their raised bayonets. Always at the front, he ignored a bullet wound to his leg, until he collapsed from his horse from blood loss, quickly dying. General Pierre Beauregard, the commander from First Bull Run, took command. Despite his regale name and appearance, Beauregard lacked Johnston’s audacity. Prematurely Beauregard telegrammed Jefferson Davis of a great victory at Shiloh.
Having been thoroughly surprised and whipped during the day, Grant that night, as his troops huddled along the Tennessee River, defiantly muttered, “Not beaten yet by a damn sight.” His subordinate, Sherman, told him, “We’ve had the devil’s own day.” But Grant reiterated: “Lick ‘em tomorrow.” This scene was re-created in the 1962 movie How the West was Won, with John Wayne portraying Sherman.
Thanks to Grant’s defiance, for which he would be celebrated countless times throughout the rest of the war, and reinforcements arriving throughout the night, the Confederates were routed the next day, retreating to Corinth. “Federal troops sprouted from the ground like mushrooms,” one Confederate would recall. Among those reinforcements was the command of General Lew Wallace, who had seemingly wandered lost with his troops on remote roads throughout the battle’s horrendous first day.
Always insisting he was faithful to his orders, Wallace spent the rest of his life seeking to redeem his reputation. He eventually succeeded by writing the massive best seller, the biblical epic Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which would famously become a 1959 film starring Charlton Heston. Its story has a Hebrew prince falsely accused and sold into slavery, only to reclaim his reputation in a chariot race against his Roman accuser, and later finding salvation by witnessing Christ’s crucifixion. Supposedly General Wallace, who also experienced Christian conversion, was autobiographically relating his own journey of recovery through the drama of Judah Ben-Hur.
“It all seemed like a dream,” later related one Confederate memoirist of his first exposure to combat at Shiloh. A new movie at the Park Service visitor center tells the battle’s story set to the tune of the resolute old 19th century hymn, “How Firm a Foundation,” a favorite for General Robert E. Lee and countless others of the time. The opening scene, thanks to the magic of computer graphics, shows dozens of chugging northern steam ships ferrying Grant’s troops down the Tennessee River to Shiloh after his great victories at Forts Henry and Donelson.
The Civil War was the first great industrial war in which massed armies moved with relative ease by steamship and locomotive, targeting strategic rivers and railroads. Against the unparalleled mechanized might of the north, the South never really had a chance, despite the audacity of commanders like Johnston and Lee. More than half a million more men would die after Shiloh, but the result was almost preordained.
Commemorating the Civil War’s 150th anniversary, and visiting battlefields such as Shiloh and Fort Donelson, itself a beautiful bluff over the Cumberland River with massive Confederate artillery still aimed north, are ways to pay an important tribute to the slain who built our nation.
About the Author
Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. and author of Methodism and Politics in the Twentieth Century. You can follow him on Twitter @markdtooley.
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Robert Nowall | 5.30.12 @ 7:40AM
I thought Simon Bolivar Buckner the younger died on Okinawa, not Iwo Jima...
Albert Constantine Jr.| 5.30.12 @ 8:38AM
That was going to be my first comment, as well. The American forces there still (or at least into the last 25-30 years) refer to the body of water around White Beach as Buckner Bay.
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 10:48AM
It would seem that military incompetence ran in the Buckner family.
Occam's Tool| 5.30.12 @ 12:16PM
Stuart, I remember reading about the moronic Bucknerian approach on Okinawa and thinking the same thing. All the ability to outflank in the world, and he insists on grinding frontal attack. Well, he paid the ultimate price for his tactical stupidity.
Occam's Tool| 5.30.12 @ 12:18PM
You are correct. A Marine general took over, to command the largest force under Marine command ever at that time.
Dean V| 5.30.12 @ 2:54PM
That would be Marine Lt. Gen. Roy Gieger, who was also the only aviator to command a field army in American history.
C. Vernon Crisler | 5.31.12 @ 12:32AM
I disagree that the South did not have a chance. Before Sherman's victorious march, Lincoln was almost sure to be defeated during the next presidential election vis-a-vis McClellan. McClellan would almost certainly have settled with the South.
Sherman was instrumental in winning the war.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 5.30.12 @ 8:44AM
Omitted from the saga of Lew Wallace was his post-war service as territorial Governor of New Mexico, where he plays a role in the legend of Billy the Kid.
Dean V| 5.30.12 @ 1:50PM
Wallace redeemed himself at the Battle of Monocacy, outside Frederick, Maryland, on 9 July 1864. Although his outnumbered force was defeated by Confederate general Jubal Early, Wallace delayed Early's advance on a vulnerable Washington one day, which enabled the capital's defenders to consolidate their defense and ultimately frustrate Early's attempt to seize the city.
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 2:33PM
Wallace really had nothing to redeem, as Grant acknowledged in his memoirs. The road taken by his division would have led him to the right flank of Sherman's division--had Sherman still been there. But Sherman had retreated more than a mile, and had Wallace continued, his division would have emerged in the middle of the Confederate army.
If there is anything for which Wallace can be faulted, it was in "countermarching" his division, instead of just facing about to the new route it was taking to join with Grant. By countermarching, the lead regiments had to go back up the road down which they had come, while the rear regiments stood in place. But Wallace had a good reason for countermarching: he had put his only experienced regiments at the front of the column, and if he had to defile in the face of enemy fire, he didn't want to do it with green units.
All in all, the treatment of Lew Wallace was as shoddy as the treatment of Benjamin Prentiss, whose dogged defense of the Hornet's Nest gave Grant the time needed to withdraw to a more compact and defensible line; it also absorbed most of the Confederate reserves, and, most importantly, killed A.S. Johnston, leaving Confederate command in disarray. Yet, in the aftermath of the battle, Prentice was vilified for "surrendering his command"--even though it had been surrounded and suffered appalling casualties.
The press was no more fair then than it is now.
Al Adab| 5.30.12 @ 3:42PM
Not to mention Ben-Hur.
John - The Mighty Fahvaag| 5.30.12 @ 6:30PM
For those of us who have actually done this in the field... (33rd Virginia Comany E - Emerald Guard) In more that a dozen re-enactments over something like five years. (including the 125th anniversary of 1st Manassas - then the new wife said no more... and it was so.)
The drill for marching in files in most Napoleonic engagements required a strict adherence to the lead of the column. The point was to come up to the engagement and distribute the companies and regiments along the two man front from the four man file rank. So, some interesting dipsy doodles were performed to keep A company where it belonged to the left of B company and so on.
"Left into line wheel" was easiest because you just stepped up by number to the left and wheeled into line. "On the Right by Files into Line" was a tad more complex and essentially stopped the front company and "turned it inside out" so the right of the line always stayed the right of the line.
Wallace did what he was trained to do, and operated by the rules that dictated his movements.
In 1862, even though they rode on trains, armies still marched in formation into battle, and tore each other apart by aimed gunfire.
Pittsburg's Landing - Shiloh was a murderous affair, that's for sure. The war in the west is too often forgotten. Grant and Sherman's successes there kept the Union in the war, and provided the key leadership that eventually defeated Lee in Virginia.
R/John - TMF
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 7:11PM
It says something about the regression of tactics under Hardee's manual that perpendicular deployment, which had been the rule from Guibert through the end of the Napoleonic Wars, became something few could manage. At Shiloh, the Confederates approached the battlefield at right angles to the Union line and made a total hash of something that even raw conscripts could have done half a century earlier.
As Brent Nosworthy has pointed out, tactics in the Civil War were more similar to the linear methods of Frederick the Great, and, as a result, battles were just as bloody and just as indecisive.
Nosworthy posits that grand tactics (or operational methods) ultimately reflect the socio-political system in which they operate; after the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the reactionary regimes of Europe could not tolerate the distributed command structure that gave so much flexibility to Napoleonic armies. Instead of operating in small detachments on multiple lines of operations. Instead, it went back to linear formations operating on a single axis, which the U.S., always slave to tactical fashion, mindlessly copied (Hardee in point being nothing more than a translation of the current French drill book).
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 7:13PM
By the way, under the French 1791 Regulations, a battalion could deploy from column to line from either flank, but most often from the center company, whether in column of platoons (companies) or divisions (two company frontage).
John - The Mighty Fahvaag| 5.30.12 @ 8:41PM
Company order of that little diddy looks sort of like a fork blooming, the order of march makes not much sense if you saw the guidons for the companies, they would not be alphabetical order, but in order of deployment, Right of line first, then Left, then 2nd right, then 2nd left...
Did that too. There were a few guys trying more corn squeezin's than marching that particular weekend. It got really messed up really quickly.
I would imagine that under fire, to deploy along the line and fire a volley and then fire by files was more like die in droves as rains of lead from rifle-muskets. (I can hit a 4inch square target at 100yards with my P53 Enfield.)
What a stupid way to go to war.
r/John
Stuart Koehl| 5.31.12 @ 6:32AM
In fact, under pressure of combat, company order frequently went to hell, and the men formed into line however best fit circumstances.
As for dying in droves, Civil War battlefields were no more lethal than those of the Napoleonic or even the Seven Years War; both Shiloh and Waterloo had the same casualty rate (24% for both sides).
But casualties accrued at a low rate--normally just one or two per minute per regiments (see Paddy Griffith's research on Brawner's Farm and other engagements), and at a typical range of only 110-140 meters (as opposed to 80-110 meters in the Napoleonic Wars). In other words, the rifled musket changed little.
What did change was the willingness of one side or the other to close the final 30 meter gap and engage in shock action. While bayonet fighting has always been rare, bayonet charges were not--but the Civil War is noteworthy for their absence. In a bayonet charge, one side intimidates the other by threatening painful, pointy death, which causes the other side to retreat. That takes a certain act of will by the attacker, which most Civil War units and commanders lacked. Instead, the attack would peter out with the two sides blazing away at each other from as little as 50 meters, staying there until one side or the other ran out of ammo (almost unknown in the Napoleonic wars). Casualties might be heavy, but only because regiments could remain engaged with each other for an hour or more.
jaytrain| 5.30.12 @ 9:01AM
First off , it's Sidney , not Sydney . In itself a trivial point , but indicates that you and youur proofreader don't read so much as was once the case . Secondly , as to the landscape , you put 40,000 men in the neighborhood and trees tend to come down pretty fast for firewood and green wood does burn . The Park Service does a nice job of maintenence , but the driving tour is s o circumambulatory that one loses the straight ahead nature of the attack and counterattack .And lastly , any account of the fight that does not mention , much less discuss , Prentiss and the Peach Orchard is woefully incomplete .Nothing so captures the nature of the fight as the image of a few thousand young men slugging it out at close range, as peach blossoms waft through a spring morning like so many snow flakes .BTW , the Park Service has planted a few hundred peach trees there . By the time they are mature they should be quite a sight in twenty years, if anyone cares enough to visit .
Louis Jenkins| 5.30.12 @ 10:44AM
What is amazing is that Sidney marched his men to within yards of the Union encampment, prior to attacking. A union capt., on a perimeter scout told Sherman that there were Confederates out there, and Sherman told the man to "shut up." He didn't want to hear it. I understand that the Confederates even fired their guns to ascertain if they were dry or not after the rains of the previous days. The Union still won the battle the next day, and Sidney lost his life that day.
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Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 10:47AM
I've been to Manassas Battlefield many times (I live about twenty minutes down Route 66), and I am curious to know where this Methodist church was supposed to be. Do you refer to the one at Sudley Springs? If so, First Manassas was hardly fought "around" it--the main action of the battle was fought between Matthews Hill and Henry Hill, the latter being the site of Jackson's "stone wall" stand, the charge of Stuart's "Black Horse" cavalry, and the final route of the Union forces.
Occam's Tool| 5.30.12 @ 12:14PM
A problem with Shiloh that my wife and I noted was the burying of Confederate soldiers in unmarked graves, in mounds, whereas the Union troops had neatly marked out Government cemetaries.
I hold no brief for the Confederate cause, and am a proud Yankee, but those men deserved to be buried with more dignity.
Al Adab| 5.30.12 @ 1:25PM
O/T:
Just finished Winston Grooms latest about Shiloh. Good narrative of the battle and events. There are some better military histories of the action, but this is a solid, readable account.
Occam's Tool| 5.30.12 @ 2:20PM
Thanks. He's a good writer.
Ghost of Cicero (NB) | 5.30.12 @ 4:44PM
Occam:
I'd also recommend Shelby Foote's series, "The Civil War." In MY opinion, its THE authoritative work about the war.
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 6:14PM
Foote also wrote a stand-alone piece on Shiloh.
Occam's Tool| 5.30.12 @ 10:38PM
I believe that was a novel. I have the 3 volume Folio Society version in my Library of the magnum Opus.
What was Nosworthy's book, Stuart?
Stuart Koehl| 5.31.12 @ 6:35AM
"Bloody Crucible of Courage"
See also Paddy Griffith's seminal "Civil War Battle Tactics"
CJW| 5.30.12 @ 8:34PM
NB
Good to see you back.
Victor David Hanson, who writes here, has an excellent book, The Soul of Battle, on Sherman's march through Georgia and South Carolina. He describes and compares Sherman's "march to the sea," Patton's " The Third Army's Race into Germany," and the ancient Greek Epaminondas' war against Sparta.
Stuart Koehl| 5.31.12 @ 6:37AM
I found that to be one of Hanson's weakest books, because he tried to stretch an extended metaphor beyond the breaking point. There were far more differences between Epaminandas' Thebans, Sherman's Yankees, and Patton's GIs than there were similarities.
CJW| 5.31.12 @ 7:39PM
Sherman's scorched earth policy has been criticized because of the brutality towards the civilians. I thought the comparison between Sherman and Patton of an agressive offense was on point to end the war as quickly as possible to reduce casualties that you have with a long protracted war.
Stuart Koehl| 6.3.12 @ 7:18PM
Except, of course, Sherman never did execute an aggressive offense. During the Georgia Campaign, he managed to advance all of a mile a day against Joe Johnston. In the Battle of Atlanta, he was on the defense against John Bell Hood. Then Hood took his army off into Tennessee, and Sherman advanced on Savannah against minimal opposition. The Carolina Campaign, in turn, was waged against minimal opposition. When attacked, Sherman stood on the defensive, beat back the Confederates, and resumed his advance.
Bill84728| 5.30.12 @ 3:16PM
The United States was in a quandary about the Confederate dead. First, they died in what was characterized by the Union as an insurrection. Second, the Confederate States of America, for which they gave their lives, was not recognized by the U.S. government as legitimate. Third, there was a lot of bitterness after the Civil War, and not all of it was Southern bitterness about the Lost Cause; a lot of it was Northern bitterness about the great slaughter and Southern refusal to show any sorrow for the rebellion.
So it's not too surprising that the U.S. government would decide simply to leave the Confederate graves as the Confederacy left them.
Red Phillips | 5.30.12 @ 3:23PM
"and Southern refusal to show any sorrow for the rebellion."
That's because it wasn't a "rebellion." It was a secession.
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 3:38PM
You lost. Winners write the histories. If Marse Robert were here, he'd tell you to get over it.
Red Phillips | 5.30.12 @ 4:27PM
The winner most certainly does WRITE the histories, but they can't change it.
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 6:15PM
You should still get over it. I have.
Red Phillips | 5.30.12 @ 10:56PM
Mr. Koehl, take a look around you at the out of control Fed Gov we have today. We have Mr. Lincoln more than any other to thank for changing us from a Constitutionally limited federated republic into a central state Leviathan. Every time I hear about trillion dollar deficits, runaway spending, etc. I think of ol' Abe. That's why I can't forget. Neither should you.
Stuart Koehl| 5.31.12 @ 6:38AM
Not really, but if it consoles you, continue to think so. Your misplaced wrath belongs with a certain New York patrician with dictatorial fantasies and delusions of grandeur.
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 3:36PM
Most of the time, the dead on both sides received a hasty burial, if at all. There was nothing like "graves registration", men did not wear dog tags, and if you wanted your body treated decently, you made private arrangements (portable embalmers were all the rage, early in the war).
But most of the time, the critical factor was time: absent refrigerated mortuary facilities, bodies began putrefying in less than a day, and battlefields littered with dead men and horses became health hazards. Horses were generally dragged into piles and burned. Men were shucked into large and shallow graves. Only officers and those who had kin in their units could be ensured a personal and marked grave.
At Shiloh, the Confederate dead where placed in pits because the Confederates retreated, leaving the battlefield to the Union. And since the Union army stayed in place for some time thereafter, it did its best to segregate and identify the bodies of its own dead.
On other battlefields, it was the Union dead who were unceremoniously chucked into a ditch. See, for example, the treatment of Robert Gould Shaw and the men of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers after the attack on Fort Wagner: all the dead were tossed together into the ditch in front of the fort and covered over with sand (since the fort has since vanished into the sea, the bodies have gone with it). In that case, the Confederates were making a deliberate statement about their use of colored troops in battle.
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 3:36PM
On other battlefields, things were not so neat. After Chancellorsville, both sides moved off the battlefield quickly--the Union to its side of the Rapahannock, the Confederates towards the Shennandoah to open the Gettysburgh campaign. As a result, the dead on both sides received a hasty burial at best. When the armies reoccupied the ground a year later at the Battle of the Wilderness, they were appalled to find that the bodies had been dug up and devoured by hogs and coyotes.
Only after the war did veterans groups on both sides begin the laborious process of reinterring the dead in military cemeteries, a process that, unbelievably, continues to this day as bodies continue to be uncovered in the makeshift graves near where they had fallen.
Frank Natoli| 5.30.12 @ 8:01PM
It was worse than that. At the time of Shiloh, neither side had developed any procedures for recovering the wounded or the dead, certainly not in the numbers that Civil War battles would produce. The awful statistic of Shiloh was that more Americans died there than in all previous American wars combined. On one of the nights, there was a terrific thunderstorm, and with the flashes of lightning, soldiers on the line could see hogs feeding on the wounded and the dead, lying between the lines.
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 8:18PM
At the Wilderness, wounded men between the lines were roasted alive when the underbrush caught fire. The lucky ones were killed when their ammunition exploded.
Petronius| 5.30.12 @ 1:45PM
I was told, "at Shiloh, the Dead walk." Wish I could have been there for the dawn walk on the 9th of April. I walked the site on a chilly sunny Friday afternoon in December. When I got my pictures back there were ghostly outlines not only on my prints, but the negatives and transparencies as well. They're still out there. And they make their presence known if they know you came to see them. Don't believe it? Read Ghosts of the Air by Martin Caidin.
All credit to those who live that history today. When a tourist tells the ranger on duty of seeing soldiers in the Hornets Nest and asking what time the re-enactment starts, and the reply is, "what re-enacment?" my heart soars.
Also read Confederates in the Attic. Walk a Battlefield. Visit any significant site. A taste of this cup may be offered.
Bill84728| 5.30.12 @ 3:03PM
Sherman: Rebs whipped us today.
Grant: Yep. Whip 'em tomorrow, though.
Bill84728| 5.30.12 @ 3:05PM
Disregard the above. Should have read the article. Duh.
Bill84728| 5.30.12 @ 3:12PM
Albert Sidney Johnson led the Federal troops against Utah in the Mormon War in 1857 or thereabouts.
Bill84728| 5.30.12 @ 3:21PM
Johnston. Duh again.
Red Phillips | 5.30.12 @ 3:24PM
We wouldn't have to remember all the Shiloh dead had Lincoln simply allowed us to secede as was our right.
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 3:37PM
You would have asked to come back in within a decade.
Al Adab| 5.30.12 @ 3:45PM
McKinley Cantor suggested it would have happened about the time of Wilson and WWI. Turtledove though has the South backing Germany against the Brits and the Union. Interesting both ways.
CJW| 5.30.12 @ 8:26PM
There may not have been a war if SC did not attack Fort Sumter. Stupid move. They should have waited out Lincoln, forced him to make the first move. There was a strong anti-war movement in the North that the South could have exploited had it not attacked if their goal was to secede and not maintain slavery.
The southern states should have abolished slavery instead of the attack on Fort Sumter. That would have weakened Lincoln's military options.
Most other countries abolished slavery without such a violent civil war.
Occam's Tool| 5.30.12 @ 10:43PM
Red: and B'ham wouldn't have become the incredible medical/university center it is today, either. As a guy who lived in the Confederacy for 15 years and loved everything except the heat of the summers, let me tell you: give it up.
There would have nothing keeping the destroyed Union from fragmenting into a bunch of smaller and smaller states and municipalities. My in-laws come from Winston County Alabama, famous for 2 things: the 1st 911 system in the US, and seceeding from Alabama in the Civil War.
Lincoln was correct to keep the Union together. Apart, both countries would have gone to no lofty destiny. And the South would have been much worse off. Slavery did White Southerners NO favors.
Kingofthenet| 5.30.12 @ 4:26PM
Thank God for U.S. Grant, he treated those treasonous Southern Swine the way they need to be treated....with No mercy.
Red Phillips | 5.30.12 @ 4:29PM
Do you feel better now? Secession is not treason. If it is, was it treason when three states (including two northern states) reserved the right in their ratification statements?
Brooksifier | 5.30.12 @ 4:32PM
"Secession is not treason"
So W. Virginia was not treasonous to secede from the CSA? Good.
Al Adab| 5.30.12 @ 7:02PM
W VA creation did however violate Article IV Sec. 3 which required the consent of the state legislatures involved. Just one of those interesting historical sidelights.
CJW| 5.30.12 @ 8:28PM
Al Adab
West Virginia has sent more of its citizens, per capita, to the military than any other state.
Very tough independent people.
Occam's Tool| 5.30.12 @ 10:50PM
Red: sometimes it is important to look at the stars when standing in mud. Bye.
KyMouse| 5.31.12 @ 11:53AM
Ah, that reminds me of "To Kill a Mockingbird," my favorite novel. The school play about the history of Maycomb County, in which Scout plays a Ham, is called "Per Aspera ad Astra," which they translate "from the mud to the stars."
Other translations say "difficulties" or other variations. I believe the phrase is from Seneca the Younger, by way of Kansas and NASA.
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 6:16PM
Grant let them up easy. Sherman even easier.
JimP| 5.30.12 @ 8:11PM
I'm curious. The Declaration of Indepence is a secession document and no where in the DOI does it state that the colonies' declaration was a one time and one time only deal. It does say that "When in the course of human events...." etc. So that's what the Confederate States did, they declared their independence via secession. Even Abe Lincoln said in 1848 while serving as a U. S. Congressman from IL, “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable and most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world."
My question to you is why do you believe in independence for yourself, but not for others?
Occam's Tool| 5.30.12 @ 10:50PM
Actually, Grant used quite a bit of mercy once he won.
Brooksifier | 5.30.12 @ 4:31PM
I wonder what would have happened if Stonewall Jackson had lived on to 1865.
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 6:16PM
He'd have been PO'd.
Al Adab| 5.30.12 @ 7:15PM
Historical analysis suggests that had Jackson still been in command at Gettysburg instead of Ewell, he would have taken the hills on the evening of the first day, with a Federal withdrawl following. Another "what if" we will never answer.
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 8:20PM
In which case, Meade would have fought the battle along the Pipe Creek Line, as had already been arranged. The Pipe Creek Line was much stronger than the Union position at Gettysburg, and would have been fought by a concentrated and prepared Union Army. Lee probably would have demurred from fighting there.
Ghost of Cicero (NB) | 5.30.12 @ 4:42PM
Shiloh is the first Civil War battlefield I ever saw. I can remember my father taking me when we first moved to Memphis. Even though I was only 9 at the time, the vastness of the place made an impression. And the hushed silence & beauty of it was almost breathtaking. Even the birds seemed to be kind of hushed there. It wasn't til I was in high school, & read Shelby Foote's 3 book series, "The Civil War," that I fully grasped the gravity of the battle of Shiloh. And I STILL refer to Foote's books often when writing about the war.
My Dad also took me to Ft. Donelson, which is also stunningly beautiful. Its hard, as the author mentions, to imagine those places as scenes of such horriffic bloodshed. Not far from Shiloh, right off I40 heading west actually, is also the battlefield of Parker's Crossroads. A lesser known site, but no less beautiful & important in the grand scheme of the war.
Occam's Tool| 5.30.12 @ 10:44PM
What I found that was interesting about Shiloh was the tackiness that prevailed right up to the cemetary---typical of Kentucky.
I found the pantheon-like memorial to the Illinois dead at Vicksburg mindblowingly awesome.
Stuart Koehl| 5.31.12 @ 6:44AM
Ever been to Gettysburg? Most of the memorials are preposterous. Though the battlefield restoration has returned the topography and vegetation to its battlefield state, you can'd do anything about all that marble.
Antietam stands in marked contrast, perhaps because it's so out of the way. Very few monuments, and the battlefield largely unchanged since the day of battle.
KyMouse| 5.30.12 @ 4:42PM
A friend of my mother's has some items that have always made the Civil War come alive to me. One of her ancestors was one of General Lee's physicians, and Mary Custis Lee gave the doctor a framed photo of Lee. It must have been an out-take, because his expression isn't very appealing, but it was framed with a lock of his hair -- a curl of white hair, tinged with yellow.
My mother's friend also has a small writing desk that Mrs. Lee gave her ancestor, and its tiny drawer contains a letter that thanks him for the medical care he gave the general.
Family treasures, indeed.
Occam's Tool| 5.30.12 @ 10:46PM
KY Mouse---understand, I never met you or your family while I was in KY, an event that, had it happened, have been absolutely wonderful for my wife and I.
I disliked Kentucky, but you, yourself, redeem the state in my eyes, madam.
KyMouse| 5.31.12 @ 12:04PM
Such kind words! I am humbled to play a part in the redemption of my home state. I've lived in NYC, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. at various times, but have always come back to my roots. Various branches of my family have been here since Daniel Boone's time.
You'd have liked my dad's father, whom I've mentioned before. He hoed corn for 50 cents a day to buy law books, and became a fine self-taught teacher and country lawyer. In 1929, he defended a former student of his who had killed a man with a broken bottle while fighting off several guys.
And he taught a cardinal to come to his window for peanuts when he whistled for it.
Kingofthenet| 5.30.12 @ 5:26PM
IF I was a Southerner, I wouldn't be proud of my ancestor who fought in the Confederate Army, I would be embarrassed. like IF I was German and 'ol Grandad was a big Nazi and ran a Death Camp, I wouldn't exactly go around boasting about it, at best I would say he was FORCED to fight.
Ghost of Cicero (NB) | 5.30.12 @ 6:05PM
Not all Southerners owned slaves, just as not every member of the Wermacht was a die hard National Socialist.
And YOU don't need to be a Southerner to be embarassed about anything. You're a regressive. That should be enough for you to be embarassed about, even though you're too stupid to be.
chuck| 5.30.12 @ 6:24PM
Hey Navy Brat, good to see you!
I can guarantee to one thing, the vast majority of Confederate soldiers who are interred at Shiloh and the many battlefields all throughout the South, never owned a slave. Yet they were willing to lay down their lives because they hated those damned Yankees telling them what they could or could not do.
Kingofthenet| 5.30.12 @ 7:08PM
That only makes it MORE stupid. You could at least understand someone who had a financial interest in keeping slaves.
Ghost of Cicero (NB) | 5.30.12 @ 7:58PM
Yeah. G*d forbid anyone think they can do better for themselves than supposed geniuses like you.
chuck| 5.30.12 @ 10:43PM
And therein lays your problem, King. Some things are more important than money. The way you live your life, the values that you have, the loved ones in your life, are all much more important than financial interests.
Maybe someday you'll learn.......but I'm not betting on it.
Ghost of Cicero (NB) | 5.30.12 @ 8:00PM
Danmed right, Chuck! Good to see you as well my friend!
chuck| 5.30.12 @ 6:19PM
That's okay, we'd be embarrassed if someone like you was a Southerner.
JimP| 5.30.12 @ 8:38PM
Yet you are proud apparently of being from a region that continued the slave trade, even after it was outlawed by Congress in 1809. The slave trade with its infamous "middle passage" wherein the degradation, horrors and death of slaves was a calculated and accepted cost of business. A region that amassed huge fortunes from the slave trade which was the bedrock of its economy. Those fortunes financed the industrial revolution which made further fotunes from Southern slavery, btw. A region that continued to practice the slave trade right up to the start of the 'Civil' War. A region that happily and knowingly made vast fortunes from Southern slave produced agricultural products. A region that had slavery itself but couldn't make it profitable and when this region did away with slavery it did so on a gradual emancipation basis that ensured that no slave owner ever lost money on his 'investment' unless he chose to do so: and there is no record apparently of ANY Northern slave owner being this altruistic as a result of the passage of these laws)
JimP| 5.30.12 @ 8:39PM
A region that still had some slaves during the war against the Confederacy. A region that sold the vast majority of its slaves to Southern slave holders when it ended slavery. A region that went to war against the Confederacy not to free the slaves but to keep the Confederate states in the Union so as to not lose the taxes the Southern states paid. Those Southern states paid 70+% of all federal taxes (tariffs in those days) while 80% of all those taxes were spent on "shovel ready" projects in the North. This had been going of for decades. A region that, despite all the above, thumped its chest and wagged its finger collectively at the South about how awful the South was for owning slaves. Northern abolistionists were to ending slavery what Al Gore is to AGW. That is, total hypocrits.
Yep that's a lot to be proud of and be thumping your chest about here at TAS and wagging your finger while ignoring lots of incriminating history on your side. Nice work, 'King'.
JimP| 5.30.12 @ 8:48PM
And one final note: A region that even a century later was.... well, I'll let Dr. M.L. King sum it quite nicely.
"The racism and segregation in Chicago is worse than anything I have seen in the South. "I have never in my life seen such hate," said Dr. King, "not in Mississippi or Alabama." Chicago 1966 during the open housing marches.
Worse than Alabama and Mississippi. I lived in Alabama during Jim Crow, so I have personal knowledge of what Dr. King was referencing. Yet Chicago was worse, and by extension so too would the rest of the North be really awful too. Just not quite as bad perhaps as MS and AL in those days. I guess all the riots by Black people in all those big Northern cities were because they were fed up with the Northern "Nazis" keeping their jack boots on their necks. Yep, 'King' you sure can be proud.
Occam's Tool| 5.30.12 @ 10:48PM
JimP: my wife and I have always stated that the Civil War was a war in which the nice people were fighting for an evil cause, and the nasty people were fighting for the better cause.
It is fortunate that the North had Lincoln and the South had Davis.
JimP| 5.31.12 @ 5:04AM
Respectfully and very briefly Occam, the North went to war to enforce the collection of taxes. Not to free the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation was a politicaly calculated act to help defeat the Confederacy. At the February 1865 Hampton Roads peace conference initiated by Lincoln, Pres. Lincoln offered to allow slavery to continue in all the Confederate states if the South would stop fighting. This is just a partial list of facts that show that the North was not fighting to end slavery. The end of slavery was an ancillary result of the war. The idea that the North fought a righteous crusade on behalf of the slaves is a propagandistic myth created after the war ended. It's true some Notherners were fighting to free slaves, but they were a very, very small percentage.
KyMouse| 5.31.12 @ 3:39PM
This is interesting, from the blog www.living.jdewperry.com:
"The depth of New York’s, and the North’s, lingering racial prejudice and profound ambivalence towards emancipation would not be fully revealed, however, until July of 1863. This was the time of the Battle of Gettysburg, and the introduction of new draft laws. From July 13 to July 16, mobs of angry New Yorkers, largely Irish immigrants, roamed the city. The mobs targeted draft offices and other symbols of their anger, such as prominent businesses and the mansions of the wealthy. But they quickly turned their anger on the city’s free black population, destroying black homes and a Colored Orphan Asylum, and lynching free black citizens in the streets.The largely working-class mobs feared that freed slaves would compete for their jobs, but they also made clear that they had little sympathy for the cause of emancipation, carrying banners which read, “We won’t fight to free the nigger.” Union troops had to be sent from Gettysburg itself to put down the riots, but not before more than 100 people had died.
"While these facts are largely unknown to Americans today, they were part of the common experience at the time for those involved. These are the historical facts which explain why New York City, and the rest of the North, was not an abolitionist paradise in 1861, intent on ending southern slavery and marching off to war to emancipate the slaves."
Red Phillips | 5.30.12 @ 11:01PM
"IF I was a Southerner, I wouldn't be proud of my ancestor who fought in the Confederate Army, I would be embarrassed.'
Then you are a disloyal scoundrel.
KyMouse| 5.31.12 @ 12:08PM
There were lots of people who fought because they believed their states, towns and homes were at risk of invasion by soldiers who would take whatever they needed or wanted. And in many cases, that was exactly what happened.
Stuart Koehl| 5.30.12 @ 8:16PM
"Despite his regal name and appearance, Beauregard lacked Johnston's audacity."
It wasn't Johnston's audacity that Beauregard lacked, leadership and ability. Before Johnston's death, he seems to have altered the deployment orders for the Confederate army, so each Confederate corps attacked in line, one behind the other, causing in the intermingling of units and a general muddle in command and control.
After Johnston's death, he was never able to exert command over the whole Confederate force, and seemed to become fixated on the Hornet's Nest, instead of pushing on to Pittsburg Landing to surround Grant.
Beauregard might have won the second day, too, had he bothered to entrench. Grant's counter-attack the following day might have ground to a halt before it even got started, requiring Union forces to reembark; that would have been the end of Grant's career.
Instead, Beauregard gave in to the lethargy that frequently befalls victorious generals and their armies. The ability to push troops--and one's self--to the edge of exhaustion and beyond, is what separates good generals from great ones. But at Shiloh, Beauregard didn't even rise to the level of good.
Tater| 5.30.12 @ 9:36PM
My great, great granddaddy was with Sherman and got shot in the ass on the first day of Shiloh, because they all ran. The brilliance of Shiloh was with Sherman and Wallace on the second day, not Grant, according to old Andy...as told by his son.
Stuart Koehl| 5.31.12 @ 3:13PM
There was no brilliance at Shiloh, just hard fighting.
C Smith | 6.5.12 @ 12:41AM
... Before returning, my brother and I sometimes visited a mass grave on the Forest side. One of my father’s early memories was of an honor guard firing a volley in remembrance of Twenty-Six Confederate soldiers. And of he and his brother, oblivious to the significance of the occasion, gleefully running to pick up shell casings. Pearl Harbor and Buna all too soon altered that innocence.
In recent years, a second monument appeared revealing a truth long latent in that trench. The day after the battle, by order of Colonel John McNeil, fifteen captives were tried, convicted, and shot where the old Wabash Depot once stood. And on the third day, Colonel Frisby McCullough was court-martialed on contrived charges, found guilty, sentenced to be shot, and with the apparent consent of McNeil, “paraded up and down the streets of Kirksville amid the jeers and shouts of joy of the Federals.” However, at his request as an officer, he was given one concession, to conduct his own execution: “What I have done, I have done as a principle of right. Aim at the heart. Fire!” However, his executioners failed to comply. And as a second volley was being prepared, he continued from the ground: “May God forgive you this barbarous murder.”
A remembrance of the City of Churches on the thirtieth day of May.
http://to-my-children.blogspot.....f-may.html