Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  The obvious question, then, was why the Hornet’s Nest assumed such prominence in history books. Here, Allen turned from physical anthropology to psychology. “Let’s put ourselves in the heads of those Yankees in the Hornet’s Nest,” he said, pacing up and down the Sunken Road. “We’re in this thicket where we can’t see the rest of the battlefield. There’s rebels coming at us, in bits and pieces, all day long. Then suddenly we’re still here and everyone else has retreated. It seems like we fought the whole battle on our own.”

  As prisoners, Allen went on, the 2,200 men captured at the Nest had months to talk over the battle and also to bond with each other. After the War, they formed a vocal veterans’ group called the Hornet’s Nest Brigade, led by their commanding officer, Benjamin Prentiss, an influential politician who outlived most of his contemporaries. “He was eager to foster the impression that the Hornet’s Nest and his role there were crucial to the battle,” Allen said. “He played it up big, particularly later in his life.”

  So gradually the myth grew, until the Hornet’s Nest became the battle’s turning point. The Sunken Road, in fact, wasn’t even called that in initial reports of the battle. But as time passed, the shallow wagon trace became deeper and deeper in veterans’ memories, eventually leading to its nickname. “Grant once said that Shiloh was the most misunderstood battle of the Civil War,” Allen concluded. “It’s taken me awhile to grasp how true that was.”

  From the Hornet’s Nest, Allen led me to the woods and narrow fields near the Shiloh church, where he believed the battle had in fact turned. It was here that the oncoming rebels almost crushed the Federal right flank. But Sherman’s men held, fell back, counterattacked and stalled the Southern advance. Again, the landscape told the story. All around us rose monuments to Midwestern units that sustained losses of 30 percent or more. Scattered among these slabs were Confederate burial trenches, well-manicured rectangles of grass bordered by cannonballs. They looked rather like putting greens. One burial pit held over 700 rebels, stacked seven deep. Four of the five known burial trenches at Shiloh lay near here.

  Allen said that rangers on morning patrol sometimes found Ouija boards, divining rods, notes to the dead—even a funeral card with a picture of a man whose cremated ashes had been spread here in the night. “One woman came into the visitors’ center saying she’d been meditating by one of the pits and had communicated with a soldier named Billy Joe, who told her ‘he wanted out of there,’” Allen said. “I’m sure he did.”

  Allen believed the final body count at Shiloh was double the official killed-in-action figure of 3,500 dead. At this early stage of the War, neither army had any real system for handling casualties. On the first night at Shiloh, hundreds of soldiers lay ungathered on the battlefield. Allen had found accounts of hogs enjoying a “carnival feast” of the dead. Some parts of the battlefield also caught fire, roasting both dead and wounded men. Ambrose Bierce, of course, made a clinical examination of one such assembly: “Their clothing was half burnt away—their hair and beard entirely; the rain had come too late to save their nails.” In the end, many bodies may simply have vanished without ever being counted.

  Wounded men who survived long enough to receive medical care also fared poorly. Allen guessed that fully 2,500 of those listed as wounded at Shiloh later perished from their wounds, often superficial injuries that became infected. Prisoners also died at a staggering rate, usually from dysentery.

  A few weeks before visiting Shiloh, I’d gone to the National Archives in Washington and perused reports from wartime field hospitals. Doctors listed the treatment given each soldier, typically amputation, splinting, or a “water dressing,” a wet bandage that did little but spread infection (doctors didn’t learn about sepsis until after the War). Doctors also wrote brief follow-ups on their patients. Among the most common notations: “probably mortal,” “died of tetanus,” and the oddly redundant “mortally, died.”

  But what had struck me most were the doctors’ notes on what they called the “seat of injury” for each soldier. An astonishing number of wounds were seated in the “testicle” or “thigh and privates” or “leg and scrotum.” Allen explained the grisly logic of this. Officers constantly implored their men to “aim low” to avoid firing over the heads of the oncoming enemy. “Also, human beings have a tendency to shoot towards the center mass,” he added. “So you see a lot of hits to the abdomen and groin.”

  To Allen, the full details of these and other horrors of Civil War battle were only beginning to emerge from the mythic haze enveloping the conflict. “Each generation sees the War differently, and that’s why interest in it will never die,” he said. The first generation—the veterans themselves—tended to couch tales of battle in high-blown Victorian prose about courage and sacrifice. “It wasn’t their style to dwell on the graphic details of injury and death,” Allen said. (An obvious exception was Ambrose Bierce, shot in the head at Kennesaw Mountain and deeply embittered by his wartime experience.)

  Later historians, relying heavily on veterans’ accounts, also glossed over the War’s grisly side, highlighting instead the battle tactics and personalities of generals. But Allen, born in the mid-1950s, belonged to a generation that had grown up watching the Vietnam War on the nightly news.

  “I think the next phase of Civil War scholarship—my generation’s phase—will be to hit the American public with the reality of how horrible the War really was,” he said. “You read surgeons’ reports and learn that a big problem wasn’t just missiles, but also bits of clothing and leather and grime and flesh that got blown into wounds. The teeth and bone from others ahead of you could be deadly projectiles, too.” He paused, pointing at a line of cannon on the battlefield. “We look at these nice beautiful weapons and tend to forget what they did to the human body.”

  Driving back toward the visitors’ center, Allen pulled in at the most popular stop on the Shiloh auto tour: the site of Albert Sidney Johnston’s death. I’d recorded the scene in the crude cyclorama painted on the walls of my childhood attic, with a bullet arcing cometlike across the woods and striking Johnston in the chest. In reality, Johnston bled to death from a wound in the back of his knee and might have been saved by a simple tourniquet.

  Allen walked me to a tree stump marking the site. The stump listed so precariously that it had to be supported, like a ship’s mast, by halyards running between the tree and an iron fence surrounding it. A plaque said the stump was all that remained of the tall oak tree under which one of Johnston’s aides, Isham Harris, found his wounded commander reeling in the saddle. Harris dragged Johnston into a ravine, where the general soon expired. In 1896, Harris returned to identify the spot for posterity.

  Allen let me study the stump for a moment, then said, “We haven’t done dendrochronology to determine the stump’s age, but we have studied old photos of the tree it belonged to.” He paused. “It probably wasn’t here in 1862, and if it was it couldn’t have been more than a sapling.”

  Before permanent monuments went up across the park, key sites were marked with signs nailed to trees. So after Isham Harris located the spot, a sign went up on the nearest tree, saying “Johnston death site”—though the ravine where he actually died lay some distance away. Early visitors apparently became confused and assumed the tree marked the exact spot and the exact tree under which Johnston died. Allen also thought it likely that the septugenarian Harris, searching Shiloh’s woods thirty-four years after the battle, got the site wrong altogether.

  “Either way,” Allen said, “we’re worshiping a rotten piece of wood that probably wasn’t here at the time of battle.” But the stormdamaged tree had been revered for so long that efforts by Allen and other rangers to uproot the stump had provoked protests—even anonymous letters threatening, “If you remove that tree you’ll be sorry.” So the stump survived, a relic of misremembered history. “Legends die hard,” Allen said. “But Mother Nature is doing a good job on that tree for us. It’ll be gone before long.”

 
Allen left me there, beside the oak impostor, feeling exhilarated but also unsettled by his decoding of the battlefield. Before setting off on my journey, I’d known that heated debate still raged around the War’s causes and legacy. But I’d naively assumed that scholars had closed the book on battlefield matters. After all, Shelby Foote and others relied on the authoritative-sounding Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, known as the O.R. to Civil War buffs. The O.R., 128 volumes in all, were compiled by the government soon after the War, mostly from firsthand reports. Historians could also turn to the vast, Talmudic body of interpretive literature published on the War since.

  But if Allen was right, this received wisdom was riddled with inaccuracies, false memory and self-serving distortions. Nor was he a lonely revisionist. I later learned that Civil War scholars were rethinking numerous battles and questioning the reliability of long-revered sources. After Gettysburg, for instance, Robert E. Lee—presaging the doctored body counts in Vietnam—fudged his report on the debacle and the appalling casualties he sustained. Lee also ordered George Pickett to destroy his scathing report on the disastrous charge that bore his name.

  Even pictures could lie. New research revealed that the captions on many well-known photographs were wrong. And some of the War’s most famous pictures were staged, with corpses dragged across battlefields and posed for dramatic effect. Historians had also found previously untapped sources—wartime diaries, unpublished letters, obscure court records—that led to wholly new assessments of familiar subjects.

  Trying to make sense of all this, I later called back Shelby Foote. He calmly acknowledged that Stacy Allen’s view of Shiloh might well be valid, and that all of his own generation’s work was open to challenge. “I could redo my entire three volumes on the Civil War without using one bit of source material I used the first time,” he said, “and probably come to very different conclusions.”

  But this didn’t bother Foote. Like Stacy Allen, he felt each generation had to reinterpret the Civil War by its own lights. “I don’t think that I could have written what I wrote in less than a hundred years after the War,” he said. “It took that long for North and South to see each other honestly through the dust and flame.”

  Now, it seemed, a new generation had to cut through some of the dust and flame kicked up by Shelby Foote and his peers.

  LEAVING JOHNSTON’S DEATH SITE, I trudged back to the Sunken Road. It was now ten hours since my arrival on the battlefield. I was famished, footsore and burnt by the Tennessee sun. Resting for a moment, I caught sight of a lanky figure in sky-blue trousers, a trim blue jacket and a Federal kepi. The only Northerner I’d met at Shiloh was the bus driver from Minneapolis. So I decided to ambush one more Yankee before calling it a day and retreating, like the rebels, to Corinth.

  Up close, the man’s “impression” appeared carefully crafted: handmade brogans, period spectacles, a bayonet scabbard and a canteen slung just so across his chest. He stood before a tall monument with a book open in his hands.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “could I ask you something?”

  The man looked up from his reading. “Yes?”

  “I’m researching a book about memory of the Civil War—”

  “That’s odd,” he interrupted. “So am I.” He spoke formally, with a slight accent I couldn’t place. Then he said, “Are you by any chance Tony Horwitz?”

  I studied him again. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

  He smiled and thrust out a hand. “I am Wolfgang Hochbruck of the University of Stuttgart in Germany. I sent you an e-mail months ago. You never responded.”

  Before setting out on my journey, I’d posted an Internet query with a Civil War chat group, searching for ideas and contacts. The first flood of responses proved so soporific—mostly lists of unpublished monographs on obscure regiments—that I’d quickly stopped tuning in. Then I’d hit the road and forgotten all about my cyberspace foray. Wolfgang must have tried to contact me some time after that.

  “Sorry,” I said. “What did you message me?”

  “That we should compare notes,” Wolfgang said. “What were you about to ask me a moment ago?”

  “Why you’re standing out here in the sun in a blue uniform, looking at that monument.”

  He handed me the book he’d been studying: Shelby Foote’s Shiloh. Wolfgang said he’d first read the novel at age nine in German translation and identified with one of the characters, an immigrant artilleryman named Otto Flickner. Foote based Otto’s story on the history of an actual unit from Minnesota, Munch’s Battery, which saw action near the Hornet’s Nest.

  Thirty years later, Wolfgang was now making the same sort of pilgrimage as the lawyer from Missouri and the bus driver from Minnesota. Lacking a real forebear at Shiloh, he’d found a surrogate in the fictional Otto Flickner and was retracing his steps across the battleground. The monument he now stood before showed a Minnesota artilleryman holding what looked like a giant cotton swab. “I am wearing the uniform,” Wolfgang said, “because I thought it would add to the experience of being Otto.”

  Otto Flickner was an odd choice of characters to inhabit. In the novel, Otto abandoned his position and fled all the way to the Union rear. This, too, was based on fact; during the first day’s fighting, many Union soldiers broke and ran.

  Wolfgang knew all about Otto’s flight; it’s what drew him to the character. “He watched the Confederates come charging, again and again, shooting and screaming. Then he ran.” Wolfgang paused. “Wouldn’t you?”

  He opened Shiloh again and consulted a map to locate the next stop on Otto’s retreat route. This German professor and I obviously had a lot to talk about. So I bummed a few swigs from his canteen and hobbled along as he hiked briskly through the woods.

  En route, I learned about Wolfgang’s boyhood in the 1960s, which eerily mirrored my own. His father often traveled to the United States on business and returned with Civil War gifts for his son. Wolfgang played with the same plastic soldiers I had. He’d built cabins out of Lincoln Logs. He’d even pored over the same, wonderfully illustrated Time-Life book on Civil War battles that I’d studied.

  As he recounted these memories, Wolfgang pointed out an obvious circumstance I’d somehow missed. The early 1960s coincided with the Civil War centennial. Battle reenactments began in earnest; hundreds of Civil War books were published; war-related games, toy cannons and other mass merchandise abounded as never before. This helped explain why Wolfgang’s father returned home with Civil War trinkets. It also shed light on my own childhood fixation, which I’d tended to view, in a self-congratulatory way, as the eccentric passion of a boy born in the wrong century. Perhaps I’d been the opposite, a creature of twentieth-century commercial culture who had simply latched onto a product line current at the time. Other boys thrilled to John Glenn and spaceship models; I preferred Honest Abe and Lincoln Logs.

  We reached a riverside bluff topped by flat-topped mounds. A marker explained that the mounds were believed to have been platforms for ancient Indian temples. Scrambling on top of one of the mounds, as Confederate scouts had done during the battle, we gazed down on the Tennessee. It was just as I’d imagined: a wide, lazy river coiling through the countryside, with sandy bluffs and deep woods lining the opposite shore.

  Wolfgang was also matching the vista against his childhood imagining. Just below us lay the steep cliffs beneath which Otto Flickner and several thousand real-life skulkers had sought refuge from the battle. Some even waded out in their frenzy to flee the fighting. “So this is it,” Wolfgang murmured. “I have always wondered what became of Otto on the second day of battle.”

  When I asked why he identified so strongly with Otto, Wolfgang told me about his own military service. Drafted into the German navy at eighteen, he’d served as a torpedo man on a destroyer and found himself, like Otto, cramming projectiles into guns, in this case antisubmarine weapons. Wolfgang proved a capable seaman and the navy wanted to promote him. But he’d seen one of his fellow
crewmen commit suicide and several others “turn into monsters around all these weapons.” So he chose to become a conscientious objector and argued his case before a military panel. Citing Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he won release from the navy and later convinced three other torpedomen to follow his lead.

  “I said to myself after that, ‘I’ll never wear a uniform again.’” He fingered his Yankee costume. “Now, here I am.”

  Like me, Wolfgang had retrieved his childhood passion only recently. Accompanying his wife to America while she researched a Ph.D. thesis, Wolfgang discovered all the contemporary publications devoted to the Civil War. Then, on a weekend outing, he stumbled on a reenactment. “I realized there was this whole culture, or cult really, surrounding memory of the Civil War,” he said. Returning to Germany, Wolfgang began teaching American Studies classes that took as their syllabus The Red Badge of Courage, Gettysburg, Gone With the Wind, and other Civil War novels and films.

  Wolfgang had also formed a reenacting troop in Stuttgart, modeled on a German-American unit, the 3rd Missouri. The original 3rd Missouri included many left-wing political exiles who carried a red flag emblazoned with a hammer smashing chains. The new 3rd Missouri was almost as odd, including several women, four conscientious objectors and a U.S. Army chaplain. All portrayed privates. “Our democratic traditions must be remembered,” Wolfgang explained. The proceeds his troop solicited at reenactments were donated to a refugee camp in Bosnia.

  We sat there quietly for a while, watching barges float past on the river. I felt as though I’d stumbled on a body-double, a doppelgänger, here in the woods of Shiloh. Like Wolfgang, I’d drifted from a childhood fascination with the Civil War to adolescent embarrassment about it, and then to a deep distrust of all things military. Yet both of us had found outlets for our childhood obsession. Wolfgang studied war, I wrote about it. During my time overseas, I’d kept gravitating toward combat zones: in Iraq, Lebanon, the Sudan, Bosnia, Northern Ireland. For someone who professed a hatred of guns, I’d spent an awful lot of time watching people shoot at each other. “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result,” Winston Churchill memorably observed of his own time as a war correspondent.