Hallowed Ground: Visiting Shiloh
The Shiloh Battlefield National Park is located in southwest Tennessee, west of Savannah, Tennessee and north of Corinth, Mississippi. It is considered one of the best preserved of all Civil War battlefields as it does not have major state roads passing through it. It contains a hundred and fifty monuments throughout the four thousand acre expanse. A visitor will most certainly take at least a day to visit this place where thousands of men in blue and gray met in combat on two days in April, 1862, to help determine the fate of a continent.
The Battle
On the morning of April 6, Union General Ulysses Grant’s forty thousand man strong Army of the Tennessee had floated up the Tennessee River and had disembarked from their steam transports at Pittsburgh Landing. The army was encamped south of the river around the Shiloh Methodist Church, a rude, log structure.
Confederate General Albert Sydney Johnson’s forty four thousand man army had been advancing from Corinth for the previous three days. In the early morning hours of the 6th of April, Johnson’s Army attacked Grant’s, taking the latter completely by surprise. General William Tecumseh Sherman organized a hasty defense on the right wing of the Union Army near the Shiloh Church and, after repulsing the initial Confederate attack, was forced to retreat.
Meanwhile, by the early afternoon, Union forces on the left, under General Prentiss, managed to form a strong position at a sunken road in what was later to become called “the Hornets Nest.” The Union troops repulsed attack after Confederate attack, until finally being overwhelmed at about four in the afternoon after the greatest artillery barrage ever seen until that day in North America.
By the evening, Grant had managed to establish a line just a few miles from Pittsburgh Landing. During an assault on that line, General Johnson was mortally wounded. General P. T. Beauregard took command of Confederate forces. By this time Confederate troops were so exhausted and the Union line, supported by artillery fire from gunboats on the river, so strong, that Beauregard was forced to call off the attack for the night.
The next morning, Grant, reinforced by General Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio, launched a counter attack. Beauregard, seeing that he could not win the day, ordered a full retreat. The Union forces, still exhausted from the previous day’s action, did not pursue. Twenty three thousand men on both sides were dead or missing in the bloodiest of American battles fought until that day.
Touring Shiloh
After stopping at the visitor’s center where there is a short film about the battle and a small museum, a visitor can take a self guided tour of the battle field. The first stop will be at Pittsburgh Landing, at the Tennessee River, where the Union troops disembarked and from where the Union gunboats providing supporting fire during the desperate fighting in the late afternoon and evening of April 6. The next stop is Grant’s Last Line, along a ridge a few miles from Pittsburgh Landing. The line of artillery, examples of which are still there, stretched from this point to about a half a mile west. The last line roughly coincides with the modern day Pittsburgh Landing Park Road. It was from here Grant fended off the last Confederate attack and, on the morning of April 7, launched the counter attack.
Next, one will stop at the Hornet’s Nest, where General Prentiss and three Union divisions held off the Confederates, allowing the rest of Grant’s Army time to get away and redeploy near Pittsburgh’s Landing at Grant’s Last Line. Ruggles’ Battery, along a ridge to the southwest of the Hornet’s Nest is the next stop. It was here that sixty two Confederate cannon were concentrated whose bombardment finally broke Prentiss’ line.
The next stop will take one to a mass grave where Union troops buried dead Confederates after the battle. Since statute forbids the burying of any man who fought for the Confederacy to be buried at a National Cemetery, the men in gray who fell at Shiloh remained buried and at four other sites on the battlefield. Next, the visitor will come upon a small pond through which Beauregard launched a counterattack against the advancing Union troops on April 7. The attack halted Grant’s Army temporarily, but did not break through. Beauregard decided to retreat after this failure.
The next stop is at the Shiloh Methodist Church. The original log built structure, around which much fighting took place and where Beauregard placed his headquarters, was destroyed after the Civil War. The current building is the home of an active Methodist congregation. There are plans to build a replica of the original church nearby. Shiloh is a Hebrew word for “place of peace”, an ironic name if ever there was one.
Next, the visitor will stop at Fraley Field, where a Union patrol ran into the advance guard of the Confederate assault in the early morning hours of April 6. After a brief skirmish, the Union troops were forced to withdraw. The next stop is the area of the first line of General Prentiss’ troops, hastily formed to meet the initial Confederate attack.
Next is the site of the Union camps which were overrun by the Confederates during the initial attack. A cannon marks the spot where Union Colonel Everett Peabody was killed trying to rally his brigade. After this stop is the site of a Union field hospital, where surgeons desperately tried to save the lives of wounded men during the battle.
The next stop marks the spot where General Johnson died. He was shot through the leg while leading a Confederate attack, refused to be evacuated to a field hospital, and died under the shade of a tree from blood loss. The stump of the tree still exists. A cannon marks the exact spot where Johnson died.
The next stop is the Peach Orchard where Union troops desperately began a fighting retreat toward Pittsburgh Landing. Nearby is the W. Manse George Cabin, the only log cabin still extant on the battlefield. Next is the Bloody Pond, where many soldiers from both sides stopped to take a drink and bathe their wounds. During the Union counterattack, many Confederates died in their pond, their blood turning its water red.
The final stop on the tour is the National Cemetery, where the Union dead of the battle are buried. Most of the graves are unmarked, owing to a lack of means of identification. Many regiments have their own sections of the cemetery.
Visiting Shiloh
The park is 110 miles from the Memphis airport and 150 miles from the Nashville airport. By road one can travel either along along I-40, exit at Lexington TN, and take Highway 22 South or, from Memphis, take Highway 57 East, then Highway 22 North. It is open from 8 AM until dusk all year except for Christmas Day.
