SHAKO: Road Trip to Arkansas-2

SECOND STOP: Shiloh, Tennessee and Corinth, Mississippi (Part I).

We hadn’t planned on spending time in Mississippi, on our way to Memphis from Bardstown, Kentucky, but when a scheduling hole opened up we decided to visit Shiloh National Military Park on Day 4 of our road trip to see the total solar eclipse in Arkansas.

The Park Service website advised that the Shiloh Visitor’s Center was closed for installation of a new exhibit, but the auditorium was open and one could still view the 20-minute film that explained the battle and the events leading up to it. The Park Service added that a satellite unit about 20 miles down the road in Corinth, Mississippi had lots of material on Shiloh and two subsequent battles in and around Corinth months later.

We caught the last showing of the film and were awed by the complexity of the battle and the terrible toll on both sides.

Chromolithograph of Thure de Thulstrup’s 1888 painting, “Battle of Shiloh.” (Library of Congress)    Click on the photo to enlarge the image.

Fought over two days, April 6 and 7, 1862, in southwestern Tennessee, Shiloh (also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing), was the biggest and bloodiest battle fought up to that point in the American Civil War. Out of some 85,000 troops engaged, the combined butcher’s bill for North and South was 23,746 Americans killed, wounded, captured or missing.

On the battle’s first day, some 44,000 Confederate troops commanded by General Albert Sidney Johnston surprised the Union forces as they were having breakfast and drove them back almost to the Tennessee River before Union commander, Major General Ulysses S. Grant, organized his 40,000-plus troops into a strong defensive line, interspersed with artillery, halting the rebel advance with intense cannon and small arms fire. Among the dead was Sidney Johnston, the Rebel commander, who was shot in the leg, didn’t know how badly wounded he was and bled to death.

Artillery lined up as they might have been on the Union’s last line of defense on the first day of battle at Shiloh National Military Park. (Photo: National Park Service)

Reinforced overnight with more than 20,000 fresh Union troops commanded by Major General Don Carlos Buell, it was Grant’s turn to surprise the enemy. The Confederates thought they had licked the Yankees the day before and were not expecting Grant’s bruising counterattack on the morning of April 7.  The now outnumbered rebels held for six hours, but finally gave way. To save the army, General P.G.T. Beauregard, who took command after Johnston was killed, decided to withdraw to Corinth, a strategic railroad hub and supply center just over the state line in Northern Mississippi.

The Tennessee River just south of Pittsburg Landing today. (4GWAR photo by Deborah Zabarenko. Copyright Sonoma Road Strategies, 2024.)

That’s just a brief description of this monumental battle. While the National Park Service film isn’t available, the American Battlefield Trust Shiloh website has an animated map that explains the events leading up to Shiloh as well as the series of clashes across the nearly 4,000-acre battlefield during the two days of combat.

As boy during the Civil War centennial 1961-1965, your 4GWAR editor read every comic book and magazine and watched every movie and TV show about the War Between the States, but my knowledge of the Battle of Shiloh largely came from the Civil War segment in the 1962 Cinerama film “How The West Was Won,”…

 

… and a Walt Disney TV miniseries “Johnny Shiloh” about John Clem, a 10-year-old drummer boy in Grant’s Union Army — who, it turns out, probably never served at Shiloh, although he did participate in numerous battles later in the war.

Capturing the crucial railroad junction of Corinth, Mississippi was actually Grant’s main objective when his troops camped at Pittsburg Landing after traveling up the Tennessee River by riverboat. They were awaiting Buell’s reinforcements marching overland from Nashville before continuing the advance on the Mississippi town of five churches, three hotels, a small women’s college and about 1,200 inhabitants. Most of the rebel troops who fought at Shiloh had arrived by train in Corinth. Two of the most important railroads in the Confederacy passed through the town. The Memphis and Charleston R.R. linked the Mississippi River with the Atlantic seaboard and the north-south Mobile & Ohio line connected the Gulf Coast to Columbus, Kentucky — less than a mile from the Mississippi River.

Corinth, Mississippi was fought over twice during the Civil War due to the city’s vital location of rail lines connecting the North and South. (Photo by Zack Steen at (WT-shared) Corinthms at wts wikivoyage via Wikipedia)

Corinth today, is a city of 19,000 with a lovely historic district, lush with flowering trees and stately old houses — many of the them with metal plaques or signs detailing some of the town’s violent and dismaying history in 1862. After the Battle of Shiloh, thousands of wounded Confederates and Union prisoners, as well as Beauregard’s battered army and its hundreds of horses and mules descended on Corinth.

One of the many historical markers on the streets of Corinth, Mississippi. (4GWAR photo by John M. Doyle. Copyright: Sonoma Road Strategies, 2024.)

But there were also some surprises and previously untold stories among the events memorialized around this Mississippi city. We’ll share them in the next installment on Monday.

Entrance to the Contraband Camp Memorial in Corinth, Mississippi. (4GWAR photo by Deborah Zabarenko. Copyright: Sonoma Road Strategies, 2024)

Coming Monday

SECOND STOP: Surprising Corinth, Mississippi (Part II).

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SHAKO is an occasional 4GWAR posting on military history, traditions and culture. For the uninitiated, a shako is the tall, billed headgear worn by many armies from the Napoleonic era to about the time of the American Civil War. It remains a part of the dress or parade uniform of several military organizations like the corps of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York.