The First Great Battle of the Civil War Pits 100,000+ Men For Two Days at Shiloh (Pittsburgh Landing) , Tennessee....
Welcome to the latest installment of our Civil War Rewind series, where we note major events in the War Between the States, exactly 150 years after they happened. We had a bit of a break here, but we're actually a few days late on this one. Being pretty ill, we forgot to check the dates for a spell there...
Up to this point in the Civil War, the battles were pretty limited. They were all one day fights, and not that many causalties. Then there was Shiloh, which was named for a small church near the center of the battle. Here, the battle lasted two full days, and even went a third down the road in Fallen Timbers. The actual area was called Pittsburgh Landing, on the banks of the Tennessee River, downriver from Ulysses S. Grant's win at Fort Donelson. Like many battles involving Grant, the first day went the South's way, with a tragic occurance, and Grant's tenacity won out in the end....
Grant's Army of the Tennessee was alone near the landing, awaiting reinforcements from Gen. Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio. Just down the road, Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston , commander of all Western forces, realized that Grant was vulnerable, and needed to be hit now. Like it often happens in early April, the weather did not cooperate, and Johnston's planned April 4th attack was pushed back two days...
Early on April 6, 1862, Johnston struck dead center on Grant's forces and quickly took control. Faced with the South on one side and the Tennessee on the other, Grant had nowhere to go, and nothing to do but stall Johnston until Buell could come... Grant passed these orders to Gen.'s WHL Wallace and Benjamin Prentiss, with orders to 'hold til the last man'. Wallace filled this order to the fullest, fighting until he was wounded and died six days later...
Prentiss and his 4500 men were up against 18,000 Confederates - and it was only 200PM. Prentiss had only taken command under Grant five days earlier, and his Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa troops were green. He planted his troops in a Sunken Road that became the epicenter of hours of furious battle, including hand to hand combat. The area would later be known as The Hornet's Nest... Eventually, Prentiss surrendered with 2500 of his men around 600PM, long enough to pretty much end the South's day - or so they thought.
Like most Southern generals, Albert Sidney Johnston was aggressive and gallant.. He decided to personally lead troops further up before nightfall, when he was wounded in the femoral artery in his leg. A normally non-fatal would if addressed quickly, Johnston fought on and bled to death that night, unknown to his troops. Replacing him for the next day was the leader of Fort Sumter, PGT Beauregard. Beauregard prepared for an all out assault the next day, but the field had changed....
Overnight, Don Carlos Buell's troops landed from the Tennessee, and quickly set up to assist Grant. Whereas the day before, Johnston had a small and rare advantage troopwise, Beauregard was now outnumbered 40000 to 30000 - and he didn't figure it out for a while. Buell and Grant attacked from the river the next morning, and Beauregard mistakenly counterattacked, which nearly destroyed his army... They were precipitously pushed back from the landing, across all the gains they made the day before, all the way to Fallen Timbers - but not without the first shining moment for a Southern legend...
Holding the rear guard in Cavalry was Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who took his substantial money and formed his own cavalry. Faced with a retreating army, Forrest advanced to protect them - and ended up smack in front of the Union troops! Taking fire directly in front of him, Forrest ended up grabbing a Union soldier and putting him atop his horse as protection. Once he was safe, he pushed the soldier off and left safely. Forrest would eventually be credited with 32 kills and 30 lost horses in the War... While most generals had little or no success against Grant, Forrest would be the scourge of the South for the entire war.
Shiloh was indeed the first truly great battle of the Civil War: 101,000 involved troops, 3500 dead, 23,746 total casualties, including missing and captured troops.... It would be the battle that all others were measured for a while, where men would eventually say 'I was almost as scared as I was at Shiloh'. The sad part is, there would be 100 other Shiloh's - or worse. In some places, more men would be killed than than in 30 minutes elsewhere... The Western theater would be pretty quiet for some time, and the focus would move back to Virginia, and a man stuck behind a desk in Richmond, but soon to finally get in the field...
Thaks for reading this latest piece in the Series, and we'll be back with another one real soon!
.
No comments:
Post a Comment