William T. Sherman recalled meeting Grant around midnight. The ever-rumpled general was standing under a tree, sheltered from the rain, puffing on a cigar. Sherman, thinking that a stealthy retreat across the river was the only possible alternative, mumbled something about how badly the day’s fighting had gone. Grant nodded, puffed some more, and replied, “Yes. Beat ’em in the morning, though.”10
The greater part of Don Carlos Buell’s army arrived during that stormy night. The next day, these fresh soldiers marched into battle singing “Dixie,” of all things. Whether it was a taunt or they genuinely liked the song (as President Lincoln did), their enthusiasm energized Grant’s shaken and sodden troops. By midmorning the Federals had retaken most of the ground they had lost the previous day, though the Confederates, now commanded by General P. G. T. Beauregard, contested every inch of ground fiercely. The Rebels hoped to keep the battle going long enough for General Earl Van Dorn to arrive with his army from Arkansas. When Beauregard learned that Van Dorn could not come in time, and now outnumbered with the arrival of Buell’s troops, sixty-two thousand to forty thousand, he broke off the battle and retreated through the mud toward Corinth. The battle ended with both armies occupying pretty much the same ground as they had prior to the fighting. Since the Confederates left the field, however, the Battle of Shiloh was a Union victory.
The toll for this no contest was unprecedented in American annals: roughly thirty-five hundred killed, equally divided between Confederate and Union forces, with more than sixteen thousand soldiers wounded on both sides. Henry W. Halleck, commander of all Union forces in the West and known as “Old Brains” for his erudite textbooks on strategy, blamed Grant for the high casualties and urged his dismissal. Lincoln demurred, “I can’t spare this man; he fights.” A Union soldier put a poetic coda on the battle: “Gentle winds of Springtime seem a sighing over a thousand new made graves.”11
Nearly two months later, on May 30, General Beauregard quietly abandoned Corinth and escaped with his army while a large federal army under the command of “Old Brains” camped nearby unaware. The subsequent federal occupation of Corinth cut a vital east-west rail link for the Confederacy and doomed Memphis. Loss of towns and cities hurt the Confederacy, but their armies remained intact, and until the South could not field a credible fighting force, the war would continue.
Battles can have an importance far beyond their strategic implications. Shiloh advanced the Union cause only marginally, but it changed the nature of the war in the minds of both soldiers and citizens on both sides forever. These were not grizzled veterans who took the field on successive spring mornings; most were new recruits, unaccustomed to battle, yet eager for combat, and armed with strong convictions about God, country, family, and home. They had spent most of their military lives in camp, not in combat. They cheered lustily when bugles sounded the assembly, signaling the order to line up and march out to fight. In the next moments they would find out a great deal about themselves. They would see and hear things they had never seen or heard before. No stories from those few who had experienced combat could replicate a battle. It would change them, or kill them.
Shiloh, General Sherman noted, “would have cured anybody of war.” The one battle had doubled all of the casualties of the war up to that point. Most of the young men engaged in the battle would have agreed with the soldier who wrote, “I had no idea of war until then, and would have given anything in the world if I could have been away.” A Confederate soldier who retreated with Beauregard to Corinth now cursed the war he had once welcomed: “Oh! What suffering, what misery, what untold agony this horrid hell-begotten war has caused.” Any romantic notions of war had fled. He admitted that he was “awful tired of being a soldier.”12
At Shiloh, soldiers witnessed the destructive potential of modern weaponry. The serene landscape had become a grisly tableau. Stretches of meadow puddled with blood and rainwater; in the woods, trees bursting with the buds of spring now appeared fractured, with large branches broken off or sundered altogether with just trunks remaining. Scarcely a tree did not exhibit bullet holes up and down its trunk; shrapnel protruded from the mud like abstract sculptures; and strewn all about, the detritus of things left behind: sardine boxes, soggy biscuits, belts, hats, canteens, and rucksacks. Dead horses and mules lay prostrate at random intervals. And the sea of dead men. Worse, those yet barely alive, breathing in spurts, a frothy saliva dripping creamily from their mouths down to their ears, strings of matter from their brains swaying in the breeze.
Over there, an Illinois regiment partially buried in ashes, victims of a brush fire kindled by dead leaves, stems, and hot projectiles on the first day of battle before the rains came. Those not reduced to ashes were bloated and blackened beyond recognition. Some held out their hands in a clawlike position as if grasping for something in their last moments.13
At a makeshift Confederate hospital, a former hotel in Corinth, nurse Kate Cumming gasped when the wounded flooded in “mutilated in every imaginable way.” On the Tennessee River, supply boats served as floating Union hospitals, with wounded men “mangled in every conceivable way, the dead and dying lying in masses, some with arms, legs, and even their jaws shot off, bleeding to death, and no one to wait upon them or dress their wounds.”14
At Shiloh, every moment threw someone into a profound moral dilemma that neither the Bible nor conventional ethics addressed back home. A young soldier sent to the rear to restock his company’s ammunition supply came upon a severely wounded boy who begged for help to be carried out of harm’s way. But the young soldier could not lift the boy and left him to die.15
Combat at Shiloh and thereafter was at once a group experience—marching and firing as a unit and forging a bond of brotherhood with comrades—and a very individual encounter, where certain sights and sounds became indelible, and others went unnoticed. The smoke and noise added to the confusion, and the numerous incidents of “friendly fire” lent the “fog of war” considerable credence. Sam Watkins, a private in Johnston’s army at Shiloh, observed that he was so busy loading and shooting his rifle that he saw little of the battle, but remembered vividly a comrade who stepped out of the ranks and shot his finger off to avoid the fight. Whatever romance Watkins associated with war, Shiloh cleansed for all time. He ridiculed the “pomp and circumstance of the thing called glorious war,” as he looked across the battlefield at “the dead lying with their eyes wide open [and] the wounded begging piteously for help.”16
Tens of thousands of young men now understood the transformative nature of combat. The real battle was often not against the enemy but against oneself. The recruit must cope with fear; some did with an excessive bravado; others sweated profusely or shook; many went silent; a few shot off parts of their hands or feet. Some found a ditch or a gully where they hid while the battle raged. The sensations of sound, light, and smell were so overwhelming that some soldiers forgot fear entirely. When they engaged the enemy, this thought was common: “I didn’t know it was like this.” On the first sight of wounded soldiers, “Why, they’re no better than mangled rabbits—I didn’t know it was like this.” The smell of battle, the dizzying mixture of oil, smoke, blood, and sweat, combined with the fear caused some men to vomit. The reassuring voice of an officer: “The best, of the worst of it, is that after the first fight it comes easy, my boy, it comes too easy.” After the battle, the new recruit experienced “a new birth.… He could never be the same again; something was altered in him forever.” A soldier wrote to his mother after his first battle, in June 1862, “I don’t believe I am the same being I was two weeks ago.”17
It was futile of these young men to think they could calibrate their emotions and will their fate. In truth, the private soldier controlled nothing. Like “the youth” in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), he could run at the first sight of fire, receive an accidental head wound from a comrade, and blindly stagger back into battle, where he becomes wildly aggressive and emerges a hero. Only his desertio
n is willful; the other occurrences are pure chance, and yet these are deeds for which his comrades praise him. Such logic as existed in battle often resulted in the opposite of what one would expect. Yet the experience of war was transformative. The hope was that all of this dying would transform a nation, but as future president James A. Garfield exclaimed, “My God, what a costly sacrifice!”18
Self-knowledge was sometimes the only discernment during a battle. At Shiloh, the smoke, the woods, and uneven terrain obscured the fight. A Union soldier swore that after two major battles he had yet to actually see a live Rebel. Sound more than sight guided the soldier to the direction of the battle. At Gettysburg, a Union soldier shouted to a colleague, “Which are the rebels and which are our men?” His companion shouted back, “You pays your money and you takes your choice.” They could only hope that their rifles fired into the smoke found their appointed targets.19
The sounds occasionally obscured more than they helped. The roar and thunder of sixty-four-pound howitzers echoed off hillsides and, combined with relentless rifle fire, could render a soldier temporarily deaf. At other times, the sense of sound became acute. Veterans could tell the differences in bullet calibers; “some of them come with a sharp ‘clit,’ like striking a cabbage leaf with a whip lash, others come with a sort of screech.… Then there are others … that whistle on a much higher key, and snap against a tree.” Artillery rattled against trees “like a handful of pebbles against the side of a building.” And sometimes, the soldiers themselves provided sound effects, shouting to relieve tension or giving the famous Rebel yell to strike fear into the enemy. The moans and shrieks of the wounded added to the cacophony of battle.20
Now and then, the soldier could see a blue sky, the pink of a cherry tree in bloom, and the green of a meadow. Armies fought in the spring, summer, and fall mainly, and the South of the rolling countryside, shaded woods, and meandering streams and creeks put on a dazzling natural display. Nature’s calm beauty contrasted with the tragedy unfolding before the soldier, and it momentarily startled him that such harmony could exist amidst such horror.
The bigger reasons for being there, the reasons for the war, scarcely entered a soldier’s mind in the midst of chaos and death. He might muse on the theological and metaphysical nature of the conflict in letters home or in confessions to his diary, but never in battle. In combat he fought for himself and his comrades. That was all that mattered. To infuse the soldier with noble purpose in the midst of incoherence is to overlay implausibility on a reality. He was a machine, more properly a cog in the larger machine of war. His movements were not his own; the enemy, his officers, his comrades, the weather, the terrain determined where he went and what he did. In the most mechanized war fought up to that time, he was part of the industrial process that aimed to kill the enemy in the most efficient manner. “Like an automaton, I kept loading and firing, oblivious of everything about me except that musket and my duty to load and fire it,” a Union private wrote at Antietam. As much as the sight of death sickened, it also elicited a sense of accomplishment, a job well done. Confederate artillery officer Osmun Latrobe rode over the grisly fields of Antietam and remarked with satisfaction, “I … enjoyed the sight of hundred[s] of dead Yankees. Saw much of the work I had done in the way of several limbs, decapitated bodies, and mutilated remains of all kinds.”21
Could such misery produce a greater end? Are we doing the work of God or the devil? Joseph Hopkins Twichell, a Congregational minister who believed in the righteousness of the Union cause, asked these questions after his first battle in May 1862: “It was a sight too piteous for speech. It seemed as if the universe would stop with the horror of it. I could only cry to my own leaded heart, ‘It costs too much.’”22
Shiloh separated the soldier from his civilian life, a breach that only time and peace could close, and sometimes nothing could. “I know that no one staying at home,” a Union soldier wrote, “can have any idea of what this army has been through.” The soldiers viewed with increasing disdain the civilians’ insatiable desire for war news, for action, for concrete results, none of which, of course, could be had without considerable cost. A Union soldier wrote sarcastically, “We aren’t doing much just now, but hope in a few days to satisfy the public taste with our usual Fall Spectacle—forty per cent of us knocked over.” The loopholes in both northern and southern conscription laws fueled some of the animosity, but soldiers knew that the gap between what they saw and experienced and what civilians read and believed was unbridgeable.23
Soldiers often questioned civilians’ capacity for sacrifice. Residents of Nashville and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry clashed in the streets when the soldiers attempted to burn bridges and supplies before the advancing Union army in February 1862. When Memphis fell the following month, an embittered Rebel soldier noted that the city’s residents “are lukewarm in the southern cause and if the Yankees will protect their cowardly carcasses and save their property, they would give up the Southern cause without striking a blow.” Several months later, another Confederate soldier gave this accounting: “God seems to have consigned one-half of our people to death at the hands of the enemy, and the other half to affluence and wealth realized by preying upon the necessities of those who are thus sacrificed.”24
While understandable, these complaints did not account for the suffering of families who coped without a breadwinner, or worse, with his death. It did not account for the refugee families in the South who fled in advance of Union troops. Nor did it account for the daily worry about losing a loved one. War is that way. It creates an estrangement compounded by unknowing.
The soldiers tried as best they could to describe the war in their letters and diaries, but the unimaginable often proved impossible to convey. And the unimaginable stayed in the imagination forever. “A battle is indescribable,” a Union chaplain wrote in December 1862, “but once seen it haunts a man till the day of his death.” The scenes brutalized them and, to a point, inured them. Shiloh made them question God, man’s inhumanity, and their own salvation. William T. Sherman, a man rarely given to sentimental musings, found Shiloh a deeply unsettling experience:
Who but a living witness can adequately portray those scenes on Shiloh’s field, when our wounded men, mingled with rebels, charred and blackened by the burning tents and underbrush, were crawling about, begging for someone to end their misery? Who can describe the plunging shot shattering the strong oak as with a thunderbolt, and beating down horse and rider to the ground? Who but one who has heard them can describe the peculiar sizzling of the minie ball, or the crash and roar of a volley fire? Who can describe the last look of the stricken soldier as he appeals for help that no man can give or describe the dread scene of the surgeon’s work, or the burial trench?25
The slaughter at Shiloh shocked Grant into believing that the rebellion would end quickly. The Confederacy, he thought, could not sustain such losses and remain in the field much longer. Shiloh, coupled with the victories earlier in the year, gave Grant hope of an early peace. He realized soon after Shiloh, however, that the South could yet field vast armies. At that point, “I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.” The general’s body servant, who remained with him throughout the war, recalled “only one time when he [Grant] appeared troubled in his mind. That was … after the battle of Shiloh. He used to walk his room all night.”26
The press could not get out news of Shiloh fast enough. Civilians crowded telegraph offices to hear the latest from the front, and newspapers sold out as soon as they landed in newsboys’ hands. One enterprising fifteen-year-old Michigan lad who sold newspapers on trains passing through his town, knowing that news from Shiloh would sell out his stock quickly, arranged for a line of credit to buy large numbers of newspapers, which he hawked at higher prices. Using the profits from such sales, he founded his own newspaper and set himself to learn the art and science of telegraphy. Thomas Edison went on to work for Western Union during the later
years of the Civil War, where he experimented with improvements to telegraphic communications, launching his career as an inventor.27
The carnage at Shiloh created a dilemma for religious Americans on both sides. Evangelical Protestantism had defined the major political issues of the 1850s and influenced the sectional crisis and the war that followed. Each side had cloaked itself in righteousness. Yet, if the evangelical God was just and benevolent, how could He countenance the continuation of a bloody war? How could He approve of Christians killing each other? “How,” in the words of one troubled Christian, “does God have the heart to allow it?”28
Abraham Lincoln wrestled with this question, especially after the death of his son Willie in February 1862 and mounting casualties on the battlefields. God was not, for Lincoln, the intimate deity of the evangelicals, but an inscrutable presence whose ultimate purpose was unknowable. Lincoln’s view of a predestinarian God and the limits of man’s ability to mold events harked back to the Calvinism of his father rather than the optimistic free will proponents of early nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism. The war had taken turns beyond any man’s expectations. “God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party,” he wrote in September 1862. “God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.”29
As the war buffeted Lincoln’s faith, it transformed those on the battlefield. Religion offered an understanding and a rationalization of the death and destruction surrounding these young men. Their chaplains reassured them that death was but a midpoint between life and the glorious hereafter. They heard about the exalted nature of their sacrifices, that “the rivers of blood” had “hallowed” their nation. Elevating the war as a tale of suffering and redemption enabled soldiers to make sense of death. Or, it did not. Herman Melville’s poem “Shiloh: A Requiem” proclaims, “What like a bullet can undeceive!”30
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