Jack L Kunkel - Our Fathers at Shiloh: A Step-by-Step Account of One of the Greatest Battles of the Civil War

Our Fathers at Shiloh

A Step-by-Step Account of One of the Greatest Battles of the Civil War

By Jack Kunkel

Table of Contents

Top

Forward

The Battle of Shiloh was fought deep in the Tennessee woods, far away from the intensely-reported, intensely-documented, intensely-visited Civil War battlefields in the East. It lacked the neatness and precision of many of the eastern battles. All battles are chaotic, but Shiloh was more so than most. And though the combatants were North against South, they were all considered "Westerners" by the folks back east. Today of course they would be considered Mid-Westerners. But at the time, the western combatants had more in common with each other than they did with their eastern cousins, including the fact that they all hailed from a more remote, wilder region, nearer to the edge of what was then the American frontier.

By the time the soldiers in the east got around to fighting their bloody battles of Antietam and Gettysburg, most of them at least had some training under McClellan and Lee. By contrast, with the exception of a few West Point graduates at the top of the command structure, the vast majority of the men on the field at Shiloh were complete amateurs at the business of war mostly local lawyers and politicians leading tens of thousands of their hometown boys into the gates of hell.

Because of their inexperience, combined with a typically straight-forward, Midwestern way of doing things, it's only a mild exaggeration to say that the tactics of the battle of Shiloh boiled down to 80,000 country boys loading their squirrel guns and a couple hundred cannon, and then lining up facing each other and blasting away. What's amazing is the absolute fury and tenacity with which these citizen-soldiers fought, the amount of damage they were willing to do to each other, and the astounding courage most of them displayed.

For those who survived the inferno without an emotional breakdown and without losing important body parts, Shiloh served as an excellent training-ground for future military leaders in the West. But their on-the-job training session certainly left a mess for us writers to explain. Possibly for that reason, many books on the subject tend to shy away from the actual battle, instead focusing heavily on the politics and battles leading up to the fight, so that it's often not until page 100 before anyone takes a shot at anybody at Shiloh.

But in this book I've confined the political foreplay to the first chapter. After that we get down to the battle itself, confusing or not. I've dispensed with footnotes, since this work is not intended to be a scholarly treatise, though I can back up the book-quotes if needed most of them came from the books listed in the References section. I consider myself a "splainer," rather than a "true" historian. For one thing I've never been to historian school, and for another I haven't spent decades doing in-depth research, pouring over newspapers, letters and journals. I admire those who do, and in my next life I might join them, but right now my object is to synthesize their collective findings and explain things in an interesting manner that readers can understand - taking full advantage of any maps, photos and/or illustrations I can create or lay hands on.

A pet peeve of mine with battle-books is their lack of maps relating to the text. I hate thumbing through 20 pages trying to figure out which map belongs to the text I'm reading! For that reason I've included maps in almost every chapter, both close-up and big-picture maps, most big enough to be visible from outer space.

But the participants at Shiloh weren't just pins on a map. So I've tried to include lots of their personal recollections. And since there weren't many photos taken of the field after the battle, and Shiloh's empty fields of today aren't terribly photogenic, I've settled for including numerous illustrations throughout the book.

Also note that I have a habit in the book of throwing out terms like "division", brigade", "regiment", like everybody knows what they are. But of course, not everyone does know what they are. If you're one of the benighted, I'd suggest you keep a handy bookmark on Appendix C, which explains these terms.

For those of you reading this book or listening to the audio, my goal is for you to come away with a better understanding of how the battle unfolded, step by step, and more importantly, what it was really like for the men and boys who fought in the terrible Battle of Shiloh.

Jack Kunkel

Top

About the Maps

Books present some challenges in displaying maps, so I thought I'd take a moment to explain how they're set up in this book.

First of all, included is the symbol index for all the maps:

Secondly, almost every chapter contains a "Close-up" map that pertains to the subject being discussed. But to give you an idea of where that close-up section of the battle fits into the rest of the battlefield, I've inserted a smaller, "Location map" somewhere above the Close-up map. The small square in the Location map shows where the Close-up map fits into the entire battlefield.

Finally, because there were usually several battles going on at Shiloh at the same time, I've also included an Overall map at the end of most chapters that shows you where all the units on the field were at this particular time.

Samples of all these maps are shown below.

The icons used in the book's maps

A sample Close-up map , displaying the locations of the units discussed in a specific chapter.

A sample Location map , displaying the battlefield location of the Close-up map shown above

An Overall map is usually included at the end of each chapter to display the entire battlefield situation at a certain time.

Online Book Maps

In addition to the maps included in the book, you'll also find plenty of links to online "live" Google maps in the digital version of this book.

Throughout the ebook I've sprinkled links for the fields, towns, buildings and other battlefield landmarks currently under discussion. Assuming your eReading device will handle it, these links will take you directly to an online Google map showing the modern location of the subject. You can zoom in and out of the locations as desired, and switch from road map to satellite view.

Chapter 1 The Road To Shiloh

The Soldiers

F ew nations were as unprepared for war, least of all a civil war, as were the combatants in April 1861 when the Slavery-State Rights powder keg exploded at Fort Sumter. At that time the U.S. Army numbered about 16,000 regulars. The Confederacy possessed no army at all except for the few hundred U.S. Army officers who resigned their commissions and joined the South. Within months, both sides would be training and arming tens of thousands of citizen-soldiers.

Both sides built their armies via a state volunteer system, and both Presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, called on their respective states to provide quotas of troops organized into companies theoretically 100 men per company and these companies would be combined into regiments theoretically 10 companies per regiment.