Losing The Confederate Cause: An Interpretation Of Shiloh Battlefield

The second essay in a series on Grant's Tennessee River campaign

Johnston’s objective was the main Tennessee River landing point for Grant’s army as it prepared to march on Corinth, Mississippi in 1862

Surprise was hardly total. “For days before April 6, minor skirmishing took place,” Timothy Smith writes in The Untold Story of Shiloh: The Battle and the Battlefield.¹ “Both sides routinely took prisoners in the days leading up to the battle. The rank and file in the Union army knew that the Confederates were out there; they just did not know in what strength.”

By the time the Battle of Shiloh began, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston had already missed his window of opportunity to crush the Union force assembling on the left (southern) bank of the Tennessee River at Pittsburg Landing. His main body had taken four days to reach Shiloh, Tennessee from Corinth, Mississippi, which lay just 20 miles (32 km) overland to the south.

Contrary to the standing orders of his superior, Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had chosen not to entrench his troops. The gound simply did not favor prepared defenses. “McPherson, my military engineer, was directed to lay out a line of intrench,” Grant writes in his memoirs.² “ He did so, but reported that it would have to be made in rear of the line of encampment as it then ran.”

“The new line, while it would be nearer the river, was yet too far away from the Tennessee, or even from the creeks, to be easily supplied with water, and in case of attack these creeks would be in the hands of the enemy,” Grant argues. He admits he did not see the attack coming, but he was not unprepared to receive it, for the ground favored his position. “The water in all these streams was very high at the time and contributed to protect our flanks.”

Grant was floating his army downriver from Savannah, Tennessee. His gunboats had already conquered the Tennessee River all the way to the Great Muscle Shoals in Alabama. He was trying to avoid a fight with Johnston until his entire army had assembled, and so federal pickets withdrew as Confederates advanced on them that day.

The morning of Day One at Shiloh was not a rout. Grant’s commanders conducted a fighting withdrawal to the stronger defensive ground at Pittsburg Landing and the supporting fire of the Union gunboats.

Yet for the Confederates who overran Union encampments and captured two miles of ground before nightfall on 6 April, victory surely seemed to be at hand for those few hours before the Union counterattack the next day. Thus the myth of Shiloh endures in southern memory, and Johnston himself — mortally wounded — has been a saint to the Lost Cause.

Grant respected his enemy as “a man of high character and ability,” but he was unimpressed with Johnston’s performance in command. “My judgment now is that he was vacillating and undecided in his actions.”

Johnston had relied on Fort Henry and Fort Donelson to hold out and keep the Army of the Tennessee in Kentucky. When Grant overwhelmed them both in a matter of days, in “was not just a defeat, it was a catastrophe,” Larry J. Daniel writes.³ Johnston withdrew from Nashville to Corith. Union forces had cut the state of Tennessee in two, capturing Nashville, their first southern state capital, on 25 February.

Five weeks later, Johnston gambled on winning back the lower Tennessee River region that he had already lost. He was too late. Grant’s army was already too strong at Shiloh. By the end of the battle, Johnston would be dead and the southern cause in western Tennessee would be lost for good.

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