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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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Posted on 02/07/2003 5:34:32 AM PST by SAMWolf
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are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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April 6, 1862 With the loss of Forts Henry and Donelson in February, General Johnston withdrew his disheartened Confederate forces into west Tennessee, northern Mississippi and Alabama to reorganize. In early March, General Halleck responded by ordering General Grant to advance his Union Army of West Tennessee on an invasion up the Tennessee River. Occupying Pittsburg Landing, Grant entertained no thought of a Confederate attack. Halleck's instructions were that following the arrival of General Buell's Army of the Ohio from Nashville, Grant would advance south in a joint offensive to seize the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, the Confederacy's only east-west all weather supply route that linked the lower Mississippi Valley to cities on the Confederacy's east coast. Assisted by his second-in-command, General Beauregard, Johnston shifted his scattered forces and concentrated almost 55,000 men around Corinth. Strategically located where the Memphis & Charleston crossed the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, Corinth was the western Confederacy's most important rail junction. On April 3, realizing Buell would soon reinforce Grant, Johnston launched an offensive with his newly christened Army of the Mississippi. Advancing upon Pittsburg Landing with 43,938 men, Johnston planned to surprise Grant, cut his army off from retreat to the Tennessee River, and drive the Federals west into the swamps of Owl Creek.  In the gray light of dawn, April 6, a small Federal reconnaissance discovered Johnston's army deployed for battle astride the Corinth road, just a mile beyond the forward Federal camps. Storming forward, the Confederates found the Federal position unfortified. Johnston had achieved almost total surprise. By mid-morning, the Confederates seemed within easy reach of victory, overrunning one frontline Union division and capturing its camp. However, stiff resistance on the Federal right entangled Johnston's brigades in a savage fight around Shiloh Church. Throughout the day, Johnston's army hammered the Federal right, which gave ground but did not break. Casualties upon this brutal killing ground were immense. Meanwhile, Johnston's flanking attack stalled in front of Sarah Bell's peach orchard and the dense oak thicket labeled the "hornet's nest" by the Confederates. Grant's left flank withstood Confederate assaults for seven crucial hours before being forced to yield ground in the late afternoon. Despite inflicting heavy casualties and seizing ground, the Confederates only drove Grant towards the river, instead of away from it. The Federal survivors established a solid front before Pittsburg Landing and repulsed the last Confederate charge as dusk ended the first day of fighting. April 7, 1862 Shiloh's first day of slaughter also witnessed the death of the Confederate leader, General Johnston, who fell at mid-afternoon, struck down by a stray bullet while directing the action on the Confederate right. At dusk, the advance division of General Buell's Federal Army of the Ohio reached Pittsburg Landing, and crossed the river to file into line on the Union left during the night. Buell's arrival, plus the timely appearance of a reserve division from Grant's army, led by Major General Lewis Wallace, fed over 22,500 reinforcements into the Union lines. On April 7, Grant renewed the fighting with an aggressive counterattack.  Taken by surprise, General Beauregard managed to rally 30,000 of his badly disorganized Confederates, and mounted a tenacious defense. Inflicting heavy casualties on the Federals, Beauregard's troops temporarily halted the determined Union advance. However, strength in numbers provided Grant with a decisive advantage. By midafternoon, as waves of fresh Federal troops swept forward, pressing the exhausted Confederates back to Shiloh Church, Beauregard realized his armies' peril and ordered a retreat. During the night, the Confederates withdrew, greatly disorganized, to their fortified stronghold at Corinth. Possession of the grisly battlefield passed to the victorious Federal's, who were satisfied to simply reclaim Grant's camps and make an exhausted bivouac among the dead. General Johnston's massive and rapid concentration at Corinth, and surprise attack on Grant at Pittsburg Landing, had presented the Confederacy with an opportunity to reverse the course of the war. The aftermath, however, left the invading Union forces still poised to carry out the capture of the Corinth rail junction. Shiloh's awesome toll of 23,746 men killed, wounded, or missing brought a shocking realization to both sides that the war would not end quickly.
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That has to be so awful. It's bad enough a family member died but to not even have a body to bury has to make it worse.
Happy the weekend's here?
As matter of fact, I am.
How are ya?
No graves reg., no ID system, no official dogtags. Dogtags or "identity disks" as they called them were available privately, and many soldiers purchased them for just the eventuality of being killed or severely wounded. But lots of folks on both sides got "lost" and never found.
Years ago I read a harrowing account in American Heritage magazine by a man whose only son was killed somewhere in South Carolina, and he went to try to recover the body. He eventually found him in a temporary grave, dug him up, put him in a tin-lined coffin and carried him home. Awful story, told by the man himself in the most prosaic terms but the horror rang through every word.
I had four gg grandfathers in the Confederate Army (my mom's family were either too old or too young, or in the case of her g grandfather had the good sense to immigrate from Scotland in 1863, really too late to get involved.) Some dealt with it better than others. One was a death-or-glory boy, wounded four times and loved every minute of it, active in the UCV after the war. One was a very shy and quiet man at all other times but apparently scared the hell out of everybody (and probably himself too) when he went to war, then settled right back down as a quiet farmer and merchant again. (My dad is sort of from this mold). The third one I believe suffered from shell-shock of some sort, he was offered a promotion after Shiloh but refused it, no record of wounds but was invalided out shortly afterwards and never did much of anything until he died of pneumonia at 56 . . . The fourth one I don't know much about, my g grandfather was the youngest child and died young so a lot of family history was lost on that side.
It was, all in all, a pretty rough war around here.
Because of the warm weather, General Grant ordered the Federal troops to bury the dead immediately. Many were buried in large trenches. Union and Confederate separately.
In the mass grave above (top photograph) more than 700 Confederates soldiers were stacked in layers seven deep.
That can be remedied more easily than you think. Southerners tend to be genealogy-mad anyhow, and I began doing family research back in the days when you had to walk around and get the stuff -- hunting down tombstone inscriptions in obscure cemeteries and poring over old wills and deeds in the Probate Court or Court of Ordinary. I had a bunch of stuff from my grandmothers (who were both genealogy nuts too - my mother's mother is descended from the brother of a Signer for Georgia. Of course, she's also descended from a plumber and a whole raft of dirt farmers. Genealogy is like that - lots of surprises for all.)
But nowadays with the internet - and particularly with the vast on-line resources of the LDS (whatever you may think of the Mormons' theology, they have been an incredible boon to genealogy!) - you can research your family history without leaving your comfy chair.
You want to get started, I can set you on the road. Even if your family immigrated recently there's a lot that can be done on line.
Even if you put it off til later, there IS one thing you need to do right now - it's the only thing that won't wait:
Find your oldest living relatives and pump them thoroughly for every scrap of information they remember about the family. My method was to take a small tape recorder and set it up inconspicuously nearby, and then start asking leading questions - "Tell me about Granddad. Where were y'all living when you first remember him? Do you know where he was born? Where did he go to school? What did he do for a living? When did he marry? Where was Grandma from? Did he ever serve in the Army? Where did they live after they were married?" Most elderly relations are pleased as punch to talk about their kin. I have the most amazing stories that I recorded or took down in shorthand from my grandmothers, my great-aunts, and my other relations. Even my dad was subjected to the dreaded tape recorder! But our real coup was using the same method on my husband's grandfather, who was a Methodist minister and U.S. Marshal (simultaneously!) out in Arizona Territory in the frontier days. WOW did he have some great stories to tell! We filled up 11 cassette tapes of his wonderful reminiscences and my F-I-L's secretary transcribed them all.
Once that oral history's gone, it's lost forever (or at least until we all meet on that beautiful shore).
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