Timothy B. Smith has written two revisionist books that carry on the earlier work of this school. This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and the Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park (2004) looked at the establishment of the battlefield park and how that effort shaped how modern historians and readers alike view the battle of Shiloh. In a memory study, a field that is becoming quite popular, Smith argued that David W. Reed’s work in building the park created the dominant school of thought centering on the importance of the Hornet’s Nest. Smith’s next book, The Untold Story of Shiloh: The Battle and the Battlefield (2006), was a collection of essays delving into a variety of topics, including myths of Shiloh and the historiography of the battle. Both works continued the emerging revisionist treatment of the battle.11
The foundations for this nascent revisionist school were poured several decades ago. In 1966, Otis Edward Cunningham graduated from Louisiana State University with a Ph.D. in history. Working under Dr. T. Harry Williams, Cunningham wrote his dissertation “Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862,” a detailed study that focused largely on the battle itself.12
Although Cunningham’s excellent work predated both McDonough and Sword, his dissertation laden with original interpretations was universally ignored by historians in the 1970s. Neither McDonough nor Sword cited Cunningham in their bibliographies. As a result, the revisionist school launched by Cunningham in the 1960s took a thirty-year sabbatical. It would not be resuscitated until the 1990s, when historians Daniel, Allen, and Smith began taking a serious interest in this groundbreaking dissertation and incorporating it into their own research.13
Dr. Cunningham examined the old stories related by Reed and the veterans and invigorated them with a unique freshness not found anywhere else. He located previously untapped sources rich with personal anecdotes and peppered his narrative with them to enliven his work. His study also made positive historiographical advances in the study of Shiloh. Unlike many historians, Cunningham was never content to merely accept the standard version of events. Instead, he carefully studied the sources and analyzed what they revealed. For example, he was the first historian to question the existence of sixty-two Confederate cannon in Ruggles’ artillery-studded line. By carefully examining battery reports and other documentation, Cunningham was able to account for and confirm only fifty-one artillery pieces in the line. Apparently, Reed had not taken into consideration the losses suffered by some of the Confederate batteries earlier in the day.14
Another of Dr. Cunningham’s contributions was the manner in which he dealt with the Hornet’s Nest thesis, which by this time was deeplyingrained in the American consciousness. He was the first historian to publicly challenge the idea that the Sunken Road was sunken. He did so by quoting extensively from the participants’ own letters and diaries and concluded that the nature of the road was not what gave the Union forces a decided advantage. He believed it was the open fields of fire on the flanks and the impenetrable thicket at the Hornet’s Nest that made the Sunken Road position almost impregnable. Moreover, where the Reed School counted as many as twelve or thirteen different charges against the Sunken Road line, Cunningham documented only seven (and perhaps eight), a calculation with which most modern historians agree.15
Unlike most historians writing before and after him, Cunningham’s study is a much more contextual look at the battle. He emphasized places other than the handful of famous sites like the Hornet’s Nest, Peach Orchard, and Bloody Pond. The fighting around the Crossroads (where the Hamburg-Purdy and Corinth-Pittsburg roads intersect) offers a prime example.
Today’s readers of the Civil War are the most informed in history, and yet even most diehard Civil War buffs will draw a blank when asked if they know anything about the fighting at the Crossroads on the Shiloh battlefield. Cunningham spent fully as much ink on the western side of the battlefield around the Crossroads (an entire chapter) as he did on any other part of the field. He detailed the fighting in that sector and gave it the attention it deserved. The combat waged there is now recognized as more important to the outcome of the battle than previously believed. It should be kept in mind that Cunningham was emphasizing that area of the battlefield forty years ago.
Dr. Cunningham’s treatment of the second day at Shiloh, while not as in-depth as his first day’s narrative, was in the 1960s the most detailed anyone had written on the April 7 fighting. His unique east-to-west divisional organization methodology is in our view easier to understand than other treatments of the fighting.
Once the combat wrapped up on the Shiloh battlefield, Cunningham refused to end his study there, as most historians have done. Instead, he followed the armies south into Mississippi, treating the siege of Corinth for what it was: a vital part of the Shiloh operation. His decision to do so provides readers with a much broader and richer context of the Shiloh operation.
The footnotes in Cunningham’s dissertation explain the uniqueness of his early methodology. He delved deeply into the battle reports, soldiers’ letters, newspapers, and postwar reminiscences, but he also walked the field and documented action and troop positions by using the monuments and markers on the battlefield. Few other historians, before or since, have made such an effort. Even Reed, who placed the monuments and tablets, became mired in the detail and was unable to completely see the larger picture.
It should now be clear why Dr. Cunningham’s dissertation, important though overlooked in its time, is worthy of publication today. With the new revisionist school less than a decade old and just emerging into the academic world, Cunningham still has much to share with interested readers. His work is not forty years dated; rather, it was four decades ahead of its time, and Shiloh historiography has just begun to catch up with his path-breaking work.
Edward Cunningham was one of the bright young scholars of the mid-1960s. He was born Otis Edward Cunningham in McComb City, Mississippi, on July 20, 1940. He received his elementary and secondary education in the public schools of Pike County, Mississippi, and Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana.
In 1957, he entered Southwest Mississippi Junior College before transferring to Southeastern Louisiana College in Hammond, Louisiana, the following year, where he completed work on his B.A. degree in 1960. In September of that year he was admitted to Louisiana State University’s Department of History graduate program and received his Master’s degree in 1962. From 1962-1964 he was a graduate assistant at LSU, working toward his Ph.D. in American History. In September 1964, even while he was laboring to complete his dissertation, he joined the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Martin (UTM) in Martin, Tennessee, as an assistant professor of history. Whenever he could spare the time, he made the trip two hours south to visit the battlefield at Shiloh.
Dr. Cunningham taught at several schools across the nation, including Tulane University, and taught overseas to military men stationed abroad. He published only one book, The Port Hudson Campaign, 1862-1863 (LSU, 1963). Unfortunately, Dr. Cunningham’s career and life came to a premature end with his death on March 2, 1997.16
Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 is valuable in its original form because it provides a snapshot of what Dr. Cunningham was thinking and how he wrote in 1966. The overriding principle we followed in preparing this study for publication was to let Cunningham’s pen tell the story. It is inappropriate to attempt to speak for someone who can no longer speak for himself. Thus, with a few very minor exceptions (discussed at length below), what you are about to read was entirely written by Dr. Cunningham, who was an exceptionally fine researcher and writer (which made our job much easier). Light stylistic alterations were made in the main text to correct slight irregularities and minor issues of grammar and style (changing the designation of Sherman’s Division to lower case, for example). We left his entire set of footnotes intact, but we have added new material that has come to light over the years.
Our additions to the footnotes are clearly designated by the use of the following symbol: || Everything wri
tten after || is entirely our own work (the editors); anything before || was from the original dissertation. Any changes made to the original footnotes were purely stylistic in nature (changing roman numerals to Arabic, for example).
Some additional changes were made to the main text, and these require some explanation. The most basic changes came in the form of misspellings, which we simply changed without noting any difference. For example, Dr. Cunningham consistently spelled Lloyd Tilghman as Tilgham. He likewise spelled Charles Whittlesey as Whittlessley, and Fraley Field as Farley Field. These corrections needed to be made, and we saw no need to alert the reader in a footnote each time we did so.
Dr. Cunningham also made a few errors of fact. For example, he referenced William “Bull” Nelson as Samuel Nelson, confused Cairo for Paducah as the city at the confluence of the Tennessee and Ohio rivers, and accidently promoted 6th Iowa Captain Daniel Iseminger to the rank of colonel. On a few occasions, he also misstated some of the regimental numbers. None of these minor errors could be allowed to stand, but we did not believe each occurrence warranted an explanation in a footnote.
On some occasions, Dr. Cunningham did not include first names for some of the characters in his human interest stories. This is understandable, because finding the names of some of these men in 1966 would have been a monumental research task. Today, however, it is quite easy with the National Park Service’s “Civil War Soldier and Sailor System” on the Internet. With that tool we found most, but not all, of the missing first names and simply inserted them into the text.
Dr. Cunningham made several statements of interpretation, some of which we agree with and some with which we do not. For instance, we believe Cunningham was on firm ground when he argued that General P. G. T. Beauregard could not have taken Grant’s last line on the evening of April 6, but do not necessarily agree with his claim that Lew Wallace would have been better off had he continued on his original march and suddenly appeared behind enemy lines. Whether we agree with his analysis and interpretation, of course, is not the issue. These are not facts that can be disputed, but issues over which many historians can and do disagree. On matters of this sort we left his original interpretation but indicated what we believe in the footnotes, usually including what more recent Shiloh scholars have to say on the matter.
There were, however, some errors we could not allow to pass that required more extensive treatment in the footnotes. For example, Dr. Cunningham asserted that Colonel Everett Peabody’s patrol (led by Major James Powell) marched out the Corinth-Pittsburg Landing Road toward Fraley Field. We now know with certainty that Powell led his patrol along what is today called Reconnoitering Road. We changed the text and alerted the reader in the footnote. Dr. Cunningham’s claim that Julius Raith’s brigade moved all the way forward to the 53rd Ohio camp in Rhea Field was incorrect, as were his conclusions that James Veatch’s first battle position was 200 yards behind John McClernand’s line at the Crossroads and that the Confederates penetrated Ralph Buckland’s first line at Shiloh Church. In each of these instances we corrected the text and alerted the reader in a footnote, complete with citations that support our position and usually with additional information about what other recent historians have said about the issue. However, mistakes like these were few and far between. Dr. Cunningham knew his subject extremely well.
Only one major alteration was performed on the original dissertation. In his chapter dealing with the Peach Orchard fighting, Dr. Cunningham inserted an unusual paragraph just two or three sentences long that completely unraveled the time line of the action he was describing. Its removal did not delete any material of significance. It is possible the paragraph was a holdover from an earlier draft and overlooked. Regardless, its removal is fully noted in the appropriate footnote.
In discussing Dr. Cunningham’s study, the late George Reaves, one of the all-time authorities on the battle of Shiloh, together with co-author Joseph Allen Frank, wrote: “[W]e believe this dissertation deserves a better fate than remaining a manuscript on microfilm.” We obviously agree.
We hope our goal of presenting Edward Cunningham’s work on Shiloh to the general public will please readers, spark ongoing vigorous debate, and broaden the knowledge of this great but terrible battle that is so special in the hearts of many people.17
Gary D. Joiner,
Shreveport, Louisiana
Timothy B. Smith,
Adamsville, Tennessee
Chapter 1
Along the Rivers
A POET MIGHT DESCRIBE them as arrows running though the heart of the Confederacy, but to the military and political leaders of the North and South back in 1861, the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi rivers represented something much more prosaic, yet vital: the probable difference between victory and defeat in the American Civil War. Besides serving as a major peacetime avenue of trade for the western states, these rivers dissected and divided much of the richest area of the South. With its tremendously greater industrial resources, the North could easily utilize these rivers as avenues of invasion into the heartland of the South, striking at the population centers of Tennessee, at the railroad lines connecting the Confederacy, and at the industrial centers that were beginning to bud, notably Chattanooga, Nashville, and Atlanta. The Confederacy, lacking the industrial facilities to build a powerful river fleet, would be forced to utilize river fortifications as a defense against a Northern push down the lines of these rivers.
One of the prizes in the war in this heartland region was the all important border states, Kentucky and Missouri. Not only for their geographical locations, but also as a fertile field for recruiting and obtaining munitions, these states were of the utmost importance to both sides.
The geographical features of this heartland region, where the war was slowly developing, were significant. The two great rivers, the Tennessee and Cumberland, intersected the region, and would be of great use as a means of moving troops and supplies with minimum cost. The Tennessee was navigable from its mouth, through Western Kentucky and Tennessee, and into the northern part of Alabama as far as Mussel Shoals, while the Cumberland could be navigated far up beyond Nashville. In the eastern region were the Cumberland Mountains which could be crossed at certain passes, the most important of which was Cumberland Gap, if the Union forces could develop a strong enough army with a secure logistics base to immediately advance and drive out the comparatively small Confederate force in the area. The Tennessee and Georgia Railway ran up the valley of these mountains into Virginia, making it one of the main lines of communications between the Southern armies operating in that region and the Gulf States. At the city of Chattanooga, in East Tennessee, Unionist territory, this railway connected with the Georgia Central Railroad, which led into the heart of Georgia, and with the Memphis and Charleston, which passed into northern Alabama and Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee. From Louisville, Kentucky, the Louisville and Nashville line ran southward through Bowling Green a hundred miles and to Nashville, seventy miles farther.
From General Albert Sidney Johnston’s base at Bowling Green, the Memphis and Ohio passed through Clarksville, Paris, and Humboldt, Tennessee, and to Memphis, two hundred and forty miles away. Running from Paris, Tennessee, there was a branch through to Columbus, which was about a hundred and seventy miles by rail from Bowling Green, the center of the Confederate line. There was a double line of railroads directly from Humboldt into the state of Mississippi. From Nashville, Tennessee, the Nashville-Decatur line ran southward into Alabama, while the Nashville and Chattanooga connected Nashville with the Confederate railroad center at Chattanooga. As long as General Johnston could hold the line from Bowling Green to Columbus, he not only plugged off the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi rivers against a Unionist advance, but he also protected this powerful and important railway system. An advance overland by either army was apt to be an extremely difficult proposition, for the roads in Kentucky and Tennessee were usually of the ordinary country type, which was passable in the su
mmer, but was very difficult to move over when the rains came in winter and spring.1
Besides the transportation system, there were other pressing reasons why the South had to defend this heartland region. By retaining control of the region, Southern authorities could eventually draw large numbers of conscripts and drafted troops. If the Union army could occupy this region, then persons of lukewarm sympathy could be drafted into the Federal army. Also, mines in the extreme southeastern part of Tennessee, at Ducktown, furnished 90 percent of the copper mined in the Confederacy. Furthermore, Tennessee, with seventeen furnaces smelting twenty-two hundred tons of iron ore annually in 1860, was the largest producer of pig iron in the South.2 The Kentucky-Tennessee region was also tremendously important for the large quantities of food stuffs produced. In 1860, Kentucky produced almost seven and one-half million bushels of wheat, six times that of Alabama, while Tennessee produced five and one-half million bushels as compared to less than six hundred thousand raised in Mississippi. In the same year, Kentucky produced sixty-four million bushels of corn, and Tennessee produced fifty-two million as against twenty-nine million for Mississippi and thirty-three million for Alabama. This meant the Kentucky-Tennessee region not only produced adequate supplies for its own use, but enough to export, potentially, to other regions of the Confederacy, both for military and civil use. This region was also vastly important for livestock. In 1860, Kentucky was listed in the census records as possessing three hundred and fifty-five thousand horses, one hundred and seventeen thousand mules and asses, and more than a third of a million sheep, while Tennessee followed only slightly be hind with two hundred and ninety thousand horses, one hundred and twenty-six thousand mules and asses, and three quarters of a million sheep. At this same time Alabama only had a hundred and twenty-seven thousand horses, one hundred and eleven thousand mules and asses, and three hundred and seventy thousand sheep, while Mississippi followed with one hundred and seventeen thousand, one hundred and ten thousand, and three hundred and fifty-two thousand, respectively. Thus not only was this region a bread basket, but it also would be extremely useful for supplying re mounts for Confederate cavalry and work animals for Confederate ordnance and commissary depots.3 Tennessee also supplied more than a quarter of the scant leather supply that would be available in the Southern Confederacy.4 Economics as well as strategy dictated that the Confederacy must hold the line in Kentucky and Tennessee.5
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