Shiloh

Shiloh, Tennessee

Place of Peace. The Shiloh Church, built in 1851 was site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

We left Kentucky Lake and continued our way up the Tennessee River. Seems weird to say up, when we are traveling south but the river starts in Knoxville and is 650 miles long. We will travel up to about mm 648 in the coming months. We started on the Tennessee at mm 25, missing the first 25 by using the Cumberland River from the Ohio River and not going to Paducah to the Tennessee. The River flows from Knoxville south west to Guntersville, Alabama where it meanders west, north west to where Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi meet, then it flows north to the Ohio River at Paducah, KY.

The area where Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama meet is rich in civil war hisotry and we took the opportunity to visit Shiloh National Military Park as it sits on the banks of the Tennessee river. We had briefly visited the park 4 years prior, when we purchased Now or Never in Mississippi. Shiloh is just a brief drive from the marina we called home for seven months.

A big part of the Great Loop is learning and sight-seeing within our great country. The first few weeks we haven’t done much discovery beyond the waterways and have been trying to figure out our new life routine, escape the heat, and keep our 14-year-old golden happy. Friends joined us from home, and we thought visiting this battle of the civil war would be of interest.

We headed to Shiloh from our marina in Clifton, TN, and started at the visitor center with a film on the 2-day battle in April of 1862. The Battle of Shiloh (also known as the Battle of Pittsburgh Landing) was an early battle of the civil war. The park itself is immense, well marked, and paints a vivid picture of this come-from-behind victory for the Union.

Per the brochure from Shiloh National Military Park.

– Gen. Ulysses S. Grant ‘s capture of Forts Henry and Donelson (we saw Fort Donelson from Cumberland River near Nashville) in February 1862 forced Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, Confederate commander in the area, to abandon Kentucky and middle Tennessee. To prevent a Union advance into the Mississippi Valley, Johnston concentrated his forces at the strategic railroad hub at Corinth, MS. In mid-March, Grant steamed up the Tennessee River, disembarking at Pittsburgh Landing, 22 miles northeast of Corinth. Ordered to wait for Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio marching over land from Nashville, Grant prepared to advance on Corinth.

Johnston, however, seized the initiative, and led forty-four thousand men against Grant. At dawn, April 6, a Federal patrol discovered the Union camps in the forest and fields around a small log church called Shiloh meeting house. Grant’s forty thousand men stubbornly contested the onslaught, and unparalleled slaughter resulted. General Johnston bled to dead from a leg wound, and Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard assumed Confederate command. Grant’s divisions, pressed back nearly two miles, still held the important river landing, where Buell’s vanguard arrived at nightfall. Reinforced overnight with thousands of fresh troops, Grant counterattacked in the morning.

For six hours, outnumbered confederates fiercely resisted until they could hold no longer. To save the army, Beauregard ordered a retreat to Corinth. The battered Federals did not pursue. Shiloh’s 23,746 casualties forecast an increasingly bloody and protracted war, leaving in doubt the question of who would control Corinth’s railroad junction. –

The Battle of Shiloh (also known as the Battle of Pittsburgh Landing) was the bloodiest engagement of the Civil War up to that point, with nearly twice as many casualties as the previous major battles of the war combined.

The Battlefield is just shy of 4000 acres. After the overview film and checking out the visitor center displays, we embarked on a self-paced driving tour with our a/c on high as it was 95 degrees the day we visited. One could easily spend a day or two and not see everything.

We found Mann’s Battery, Battery C, 1^st Missouri Light Artillery – Hurlbut’s 4^th Division, Army of the Tennessee. Three guns of this battery were engaged from Sunday afternoon, April 6, 1862, and remained in position all night.

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Leaving our port of Clifton, TN the following day, we cruised by Pittsburgh Landing. It was saddening to see that there were no markers, no indication that anything had happened here. Close to 24,000 men lost their lives and there is nothing on the river to indicate this was Pittsburgh Landing and the gravesites and mass graves of these men just through the trees. The Shiloh National Cemetary is humbling.

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For anyone interested in America’s military history, Shiloh Miliary National Park is a must-stop.