Civil War Places

Seeing the Conflict through the Eyes of Its Leading Historians

Gary W. Gallagher, J. Matthew Gallman, Gary W. Gallagher, J. Matthew Gallman

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469649542
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Much has been written about place and Civil War memory, but how do we personally remember and commemorate this part of our collective past? How do battlefields and other historic places help us understand our own history? What kinds of places are worth remembering and why? In this collection of essays, some of the most esteemed historians of the Civil War select a single meaningful place related to the war and narrate its significance. Included here are meditations on a wide assortment of places--Devil's Den at Gettysburg, Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, the statue of William T. Sherman in New York's Central Park, Burnside Bridge at Antietam, the McLean House in Appomattox, and more. Paired with a contemporary photograph commissioned specifically for this book, each essay offers an unusual and accessible glimpse into how historians think about their subjects. In addition to the editors, contributors include Edward L. Ayers, Stephen Berry, William A. Blair, David W. Blight, Peter S. Carmichael, Frances M. Clarke, Catherine Clinton, Stephen Cushman, Stephen D. Engle, Drew Gilpin Faust, Sarah E. Gardner, Judith Giesberg, Lesley J. Gordon, A. Wilson Greene, Caroline E. Janney, Jacqueline Jones, Ari Kelman, James Marten, Carol Reardon, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Brenda E. Stevenson, Elizabeth R. Varon, and Joan Waugh.

I BATTLEFIELDS

PLACES OF FIGHTING

1 THE CHURCH IN THE MAELSTROM

STEPHEN BERRY

Interior of Shiloh Church, Tennessee (Photograph by Will Gallagher)

But go ye now unto my place which [was] in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people.

—Jeremiah 7:12

Before it named a battle and a battlefield, Shiloh Church was the center of a community. Erected in 1851, the humble church sat at a small crossroads in heavily wooded tableland three miles west of the bend in the Tennessee River where waters that have run all the way from the Appalachians cease their westward track across the top of Alabama and plunge due north, back into Tennessee and all the way to the Ohio River. The congregants of Shiloh Church were mostly Methodist, but their meetinghouse was more than a place of worship; it was their school and their muster grounds, the place where they went to picnic and play, gossip and talk politics. What they couldn’t get at the church, they got at the only other public facility within walking distance: Pitts Thacker’s grog shop located just up the road at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee. Prior to its demolition, then, Shiloh may not have been a town, but it did possess the minimal qualifications of an American community: a church and a bar.

Growing up around Shiloh Church, Elsie Duncan remembered her community as an idyll in the woods. The forest was beautiful, she said, “with every kind of oak, maple and birch, [with] fruit trees and berry bushes and a spring-fed pond with water lilies blooming white.” As the nine-year-old daughter of Shiloh’s circuit-riding minister, Elsie knew the woods well. On the morning of the battle, she remembered that “the sun was shining, birds were singing, and the air was soft and sweet. I sat down under a holly-hock bush which was full of pink blossoms and watched the bees gathering honey.”¹

Disembarking at Pittsburg Landing, many of Ulysses S. Grant’s soldiers saw not an idyll but a muddy, squalid waste, which, in fairness, Shiloh also was. (Even one local historian damningly noted that “a more unprofitable spot of land, perhaps, could not have been selected … for a battleground … with less loss to the country.”) “Pittsburg Landing … excited nothing but disgust and ridicule,” said one Federal. “A small, dilapidated storehouse was the only building there.” The surrounding area was “an uninteresting tract of country, cut up by rough ravines and ridges, [where] here and there an irregular field and rude cabin indicated a puny effort at agriculture.”²

The Federals were equally unimpressed with Shiloh Church—a “rude structure in which … the voices of the ‘poor white trash’ of Tennessee mingle in praise to God.” “It is not such a church as you see in your own village,” one New Englander explained: “It has no tall steeple or tapering spire, no deep-toned bell, no organ, no singing-seats or gallery, no pews or carpeted aisles. It is built of logs … chinked with clay years ago, but the rains have washed it out. You can thrust your hand between the cracks [making it] the ‘best-ventilated’ church you ever saw.” Such estimations drip with class bias. They also drip with judgment.³

The Federals knew that Shiloh Church was proslavery, pro-Confederate. It was formed after the great schism in the Methodist Church in 1844, when, ironically, the local proslavery congregants fled a church called “Union” to form their own church west of the river. To many of the invading Federals, Shiloh Church was a perversion—“a little log building in the woods,” said one, “where the people of the vicinage were wont to meet on the Sabbath and listen to sermons about the beauties of African Slavery.” Reading their Bibles, such Yankees had decided that God demanded a rough equality—no man should be a master; no man should be a slave. Reading the same Bible, the Duncans and their neighbors had concluded that God had fitted an entire race for slavery—whites had been chosen, blacks had not.⁴

I have often wondered whether, in naming their church Shiloh, the parishioners knew what they were letting themselves in for biblically. Certainly they knew their Bible better than I. Then again, they didn’t have Google. “Shiloh” is typically translated as “Place of Peace”—which is, let’s face it, the kind of irony Civil War historians and the public find irresistible. But as anyone who has lived long enough knows, there are richer complications (and deeper sadnesses) than irony. Before Shiloh was a “town” in Elsie Duncan’s west Tennessee, it was a city in ancient Samaria. As the book of Jeremiah tells us, the ark of the covenant resided there for untold years before the locals, somewhat typically, ran afoul of the Almighty. Ancient Shiloh’s inhabitants were guilty of the usual crimes: they had oppressed “the stranger,” “shed innocent blood,” and otherwise profaned the name of God. And so did God smite Shiloh in a biblical bloodletting intended to serve as an example to the Israelites of how lucky they were to be merely enduring the Babylonian captivity: “Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, mine anger and my fury shall be poured out upon this place, upon man, and upon beast, and upon the trees of the field, and upon the fruit of the ground; and it shall burn, and shall not be quenched.”⁵ “Shiloh” is probably correctly translated as “Place of Peace,” but it could also be translated as “Place of Desolation.”

In his memoir, Grant said that Shiloh “has been perhaps less understood, or, to state the case more accurately, more persistently misunderstood, than any other engagement between National and Confederate troops during the entire rebellion.” Grant had a vested interest in saying so: most observers at the time believed that he had made grave mistakes there. To his everlasting credit and occasional shame, Grant was doggedly offense-minded, and by his own admission, prior to Shiloh, he had never quite considered the possibility that he might be attacked. “Contrary to all my experience … we were on the defensive,” he said of the opening action on April 6, “without intrenchments or defensive advantages of any sort.” This might seem to implicate him as a commander, but he said he had decided that his men were so green they needed drill more than trenches. Probably they needed both. Certainly I agree with a Confederate officer’s assessment that Grant’s position “simply invited attack.”⁶

Leading the Confederates, Grant’s antagonist Albert Sidney Johnston had a bad first day too—not least because he got killed. Most historians regard Johnston as more or less complicit in his own undoing, for having sent off his surgeon and for generally leading from the front. The truth, however, is that Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman had close calls at Shiloh also. It was that kind of fight. As one soldier remembered, the bullets seemed to come “from too many points of the compass.” “A man who was hit on the shin by a glancing ball … [was] hurt … awfully,” the soldier continued, “and he screamed out. His captain said, ‘Go to the rear.’ As the line broke and began to drift through the brush, this soldier came limping back and said, ‘Cap, give me a gun. This blamed fight ain’t got any rear.’”⁷

The sense of chaos at Shiloh was undoubtedly amplified by the terrain. “I had always supposed, from pictures I had seen, that armies were drawn upon each side of a big field,” noted one Federal. “I didn’t understand how we could fight in those woods.”⁸

Certainly many of them did not fight very well. Grant admitted that most of his men were “entirely raw … hardly able to load their muskets according to the manual.” “In two cases, as I now remember,” he later said, “colonels led their regiments from the field on first hearing the whistle of the enemy’s bullets.”⁹

Where some of the soldiers had trouble shooting, others had trouble not shooting. “As many of the guns had been wet by the rain,” remembered Lieutenant Edwin Rennolds,

it was thought best to fire off all of them, clean them out and reload. Major Swor rode rapidly along the line, saying: “When I give the command, ‘ready, aim, fire,’ aim about ten paces in front and fire into the ground.” Before he reached the end of the line some of the men, catching the word “fire,” thought the enemy were advancing and began to fire, and soon most of the guns were emptied. Several men who were standing in front were in great danger and some were wounded. Much confusion prevailed for a little while, many believing that the battle had opened.¹⁰

At Shiloh, many officers were so green they didn’t even know what their generals looked like. Colonel H. T. Reid was approached by a stranger who said gruffly, “After the men have had their coffee and received their ammunition, … move [them] to the top of the bluff and stop all stragglers and await further orders.” Reid stared at the man blankly for a moment before the stranger satisfied his curiosity: “I am General Grant.” Another officer requested ammunition from a stranger “with stars on his shoulders” who sat on his horse as a king might a throne. “I [do not] believe you want ammunition, sir,” the latter said furiously. “I looked at him in astonishment, doubting his sanity,” the officer noted, “but made no further reply than to ask his name.” “It makes no difference, sir,” came the reply, “but I am General Buell.”¹¹

Such mix-ups are amusing. They could also be deadly. After his heroic holdout at the Hornet’s Nest, Union general Benjamin Prentiss tried repeatedly to surrender, but every time he successfully did so new rebels would emerge from the woods and fire on his men even after being ordered to stand down. As one survivor remembered, “The firing did not cease until General Prentice [sic] told the rebel officers that if they did not stop, he would order his men to take their guns and sell their lives as dearly as possible.”¹²

Where their greenness most showed was immediately after the battle, when they got their first look at the carnage. “They were mangled in every conceivable form,” said one soldier. They were “mangled in every conceivable way,” said another. They were “torn all to pieces,” said a third, “leaving nothing but their heads or their boots.” “They were mingled together in inextricable confusion,” said a fourth, “headless, trunkless, and disemboweled.”¹³

There is a problem in Civil War history that I will dub the “problem of gore.” Those of us who have written a lot of Civil War history inevitably face a conundrum: when it comes to the material realities of the battlefield, how much is “enough”? Do I really tell my audience that, at the end of day one, Shiloh’s spring dogwoods, in full bloom, are festooned with arms, legs, and entrails? Is that gratuitous? Or is it necessary?

Generally, Civil War writers have determined that it is gratuitous. Stalking the battleground at Seven Pines, General George B. McClellan famously ruminated, “I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield with its mangled corpses & poor suffering wounded. Victory has no charms for me when purchased at such cost.” McClellan lacked what Civil War historians unreflectively call “moral courage”; he was unwilling to “face the arithmetic,” in Lincoln’s actuarial phrasing. We are generally prouder of Grant because he could pay the “butcher’s bill.”¹⁴

There are few bills I would not pay for my country to have ended slavery even a year sooner. There are, after all, greater sadnesses than festooned dogwoods. There were generations of black children who never went to school, a vast industry of commodified human beings, endemic rape, and leveraged sex, all of which is humiliating and painful to look upon as an American. Surely ending all of this—surely emancipation—“redeemed” this conflict.

And yet there are images of Shiloh I can’t get out of my head: the wounded Federal who lay strewn across a log, legs on one side, body on the other, conscious but immobile as fire crept across the leaf litter to ignite the log, burning his legs from his body but leaving his smoking feet on one side and his still-breathing torso on the other.¹⁵

Or the Confederate, bayoneted through the temple, eye distended, lying in a state of madness, pulling on his eye stalk: “He seems unconscious, and yet he has not lost sensation. He evidently received a bayonet thrust in his temple which caused the eye on that side to bulge out of its socket, and he has pulled at it till the optic nerve is out at full length. How it pops when the eyeball slips out of his hand. He has pulled at it till the optic nerve is real dirty; and from the delicate structure of the eye and its connection with the brain, we know he must suffer fearfully.”¹⁶

Am I really supposed to elide this? Am I supposed to edit this out because I am told that it is gratuitous, sophomoric, gauche, or unpleasant? Perhaps I am. But who exactly decided that reading about war should be pleasant? When Oliver Wendell Holmes said of the Civil War generation, “In our youth our hearts were touched with fire,” I think what he really meant was that “In our youth our retinas were burned with images that would never let us go.”¹⁷

On his second day at Shiloh, Mississippian Augustus Mecklin was awakened at midnight by orders to fall in. The rain was coming in torrents and the darkness was so intense he could barely see the officer leading him into position. Every so often, however, “vivid peals of … lightning” would ignite the landscape, searing Mecklin’s mind with one appalling image after another: first a “dead man, his clothes ghastly, bloody face turned up to the pattering raindrops,” then his friend slipping upon a corpse that lay dismembered in the road, then a Golgotha of “dead, heaped & piled upon each other.” How, Mecklin wondered, had men so quickly taken a beautiful “Sabboth morn” and rendered it an infernal hellscape where “monster death” held “high carnival”?¹⁸

Edmund Wilson was not a Civil War historian when he produced Patriotic Gore in 1961. He was, if anything, a renderer of literary judgment, having presided over earlier literary trials of French symbolism and Russian revolutionary thought. When he came to the Civil War during its celebratory centennial, then, he came to it with every bias of his age, sex, political persuasion, and quixotic temper except that of a Civil War historian. And when he finished reading more of what the war had produced than anybody before, he said flatly, “The Period … was not one in which belles lettres flourished.” But what did move him—and indeed moved him to the point of missing the point and condemning the war’s whole enterprise—was the articulate way these people wrote about horror. Walt Whitman embodied the same conclusion. Traveling to Fredericksburg to nurse his wounded brother, he discovered that his brother was fine. But Whitman was never the same: “These thousands, and tens and twenties of thousands of American young men, badly wounded, all sorts of wounds, operated on, pallid with diarrhea, languishing, dying with fever, pneumonia, &c. open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights, new things, exploring deeper mines than any yet, showing our humanity … tried by terrible, fearfulest tests, probed deepest, the living soul’s, the body’s tragedies, bursting the petty bounds of art.”¹⁹

With all due reverence for Whitman’s ejaculatory style, I think what he is saying is that the real war will never get into the books until we figure out how to grapple deeply with the violence. I entirely grant that the men and women of the Civil War era had an extraordinary tolerance for other people’s pain. Some of them could make fun of a dying man, wave at people with a dismembered arm, or boil a dead man’s bones to make jewelry. But it is cavalier to think that the national bloodletting didn’t affect them deeply or that behind their occasionally feeble metaphors—“corpses stacked like cordwood” and “hails of gunfire”—there wasn’t an ocean of feeling being poured out in a puddle of blood. “As if the soul’s fullness didn’t sometimes overflow into the emptiest metaphors,” Flaubert once ...