cwla - Shiloh Aftermath File

Aftermath
During the first few weeks following the battle, both sides claimed a victory. The Confederates based their claim upon the facts that they had inflicted an almost complete rout on the Federals on Sunday, April 6, and that they had been able to hold a part of the field until they withdrew in good order on Monday. Furthermore, they said, the Union armies were so battered that they were unable to pursue.
The Federals claimed the victory upon the grounds that on Monday evening they had recovered their encampments and had possession of the field from which the Confederates had retired, leaving behind a large number of their dead and wounded.
After the Battle of Shiloh the Confederates were compelled to withdraw southward. Corinth was abandoned to the North on May 30th, severing the railroad from Memphis to Chattanooga. By the end of June 1862, only those forts on the Mississippi River near Vicksburg remained in Southern hands. After a long siege, Vicksburg fell to the North on July 4, 1863, cutting the Confederacy in two.

(Text Adapted From: Shiloh Historical Handbook Series - publication of the National Park Service. 1961.)

Participant's Quotation(s)
FROM: Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Vol. I, by Ulysses S. Grant, 1885-1886: pp. 354-358, 365-368, and passim.

After the rain of the night before and the frequent and heavy rains for some days previous, the roads were almost impassable. The enemy carrying his artillery and supply trains over them in his retreat made them still worse for troops following. I wanted to pursue, but had not the heart to order the men who had fought desperately for two days, lying in the mud and rain whenever not fighting, and I did not feet disposed to positively order Buell, or any part of his command, to pursue. Although the senior in rank at the time I had been so only a few weeks. Buell...had been for some time past, a department commander, while I commanded only a district. I did not meet Buell in person until too late to get troops ready and pursue with effect; but had I seen him at the moment of the last charge I should have at least requested him to follow.
I rode forward several miles the day after the battle, and found that the enemy had dropped much, if not all, of their provisions, some ammunition and the extra wheels of their caissons, lightening their loads to enable them to get off their guns. About five miles out we found their field hospital abandoned. An immediate pursuit must have resulted in the capture of a considerable number of prisoners and probably some guns.
Shiloh was the severest battle fought at the west during the war, and but few in the East equalled it for hard, determined fighting. I saw an open field, in our possession on the second day, over which the Confederates had made repeated charges the day before, so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground. On our side National and Confederate troops were mingled together in about equal proportions; but on the remainder of the field nearly all were Confederates. On one part, which had evidently not been ploughed for several years, probably because the land was poor, bushes had grown up, some to the height of eight or ten feet. There was not one of these left standing unpierced by bullets. The smaller ones were all cut down.
Contrary to all my experience up to that time...we were on the defensive. We were without intrenchments or defensive advantages of any sort, and more than half the army engaged the first day was without experience or even drill as soldiers. The officers with them, except the division commanders and possibly two or three of the brigade commanders, were equally inexperienced in war. The result was a Union victory that gave the men who achieved it great confidence in themselves ever after.
The enemy fought bravely, but they had started out to defeat and destroy an army and capture a position. They failed in both, with very heavy loss in killed and wounded, and must have gone back discouraged and convinced that the "Yankee" was not an enemy to be despised.
After the battle I gave verbal instruction to division commanders to let the regiments send out parties to bury their own dead, and to detail parties, under commissioned officers from each division, to bury the Confederate dead in their respective fronts and to report the numbers so buried....
The criticism has often been made that the Union troops should have been intrenched at Shiloh. Up to that time the pick and spade had been but little resorted to at the West.... Besides this, the troops with me, officers and men, needed discipline and drill more than they did experience with the pick, shovel, and axe. Reinforcements were arriving almost daily, composed of troops that had been hastily thrown together into companies and regimentsfragments of incomplete organizations, the men and officers strangers to each other. Under all these circumstances I concluded that drill and discipline were worth more to our men than fortifications....
The endeavor of the enemy on the first day was simply to hurl their men against ours-first at one point, then at another, sometimes at several points at once. This they did with daring and energy, until at night the rebel troops were worn out. Our effort during the same time was to be prepared to resist assaults wherever made.
The object of the Confederates on the second day was to get away with as much as their army and material as possible. Ours then was to drive them from our front, and to capture or destroy as great a part as possible of their men and material. We were successful in driving them back, but not so successful in captures as if further pursuit could have been made. As it was, we captured or recaptured on the second day about as much artillery as we lost on the first; and, leaving out the one great capture of Prentiss, we took more prisoners on Monday than the enemy gained from us on Sunday....
The navy gave a hearty support to the army at Shiloh.... The nature of the ground was such, however, that on this occasion it could do nothing in aid of the troops until sundown on the first day. The country was broken and heavily timbered, cutting off all view of the battle from the river, so that friends would be as much in danger from fire from the gunboats as the foe. But about sundown, when the National troops were back in their last position, the right of the enemy was near the river and exposed to the fire of the two gun-boats, which was delivered with vigor and effect. After nightfall, when firing had entirely ceased on land, the commander of the fleet informed himself, approximately, of the position of our troops, and suggested the idea of dropping a shell within the lines of the enemy every fifteen minutes during the night. This was done with effect, as is proved by the Confederate reports.
Up to the battle of Shiloh I...believed that the rebellion...would collapse suddenly and soon, if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies.... But when Confederate armies were collected which not only attempted to hold a line...from Memphis to Chattanooga, Knoxville, and on to the Atlantic, but assumed the offensive and made such a gallant effort to regain what had been lost, then...I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest....

FROM: Shiloh by William Swinton

It was not, however, until much later that the true import of the battle of Shiloh was discovered; and it was found that the immediate revelations of the battle-field were of small consequence compared with subsequent developments. In order to comprehend the full significance of Shiloh, we must know, on the one hand, the great Confederate possibilities which were forever buried on that field, and, on the other hand, the great Union actualities which thence took rise and grew to maturity.
It is difficult to picture the keen disappointment with which, on Monday afternoon, Beauregard having given the reluctant orders to withdraw from Shiloh, turned his horse's head towards Corinth and rode through the gloomy forest aisles. His hopes were entirely dashed to the ground; and a well-founded expectation of carrying the war into the North was for him entirely gone. Called from Virginia to the West by a deputation of its despairing citizens, headed by Colonel Pryor, who fancied that in the hero of Sumter and Manassas, they saw their deliverer from the perils that compassed them, he had promptly accepted the summons, and went to Tennessee with the purpose of setting afoot an aggressive campaign. Before he could accomplish this intent, fort Henry and fort Donelson fell, with all the superincumbent defensive line. Annoyed, but not in despair, he commenced afresh; and, discovering that he had been shamefully deceived as to the force he would find ready to take the field in the West, he bent himself to creating those numbers which in Virginia he had demanded as a prerequisite for starting. The disaster at Donelson he accounted severe, but not irreparable. His original plan was to concentrate all available forces between Humboldt and Bowling Green, and fall on Buell, whose advance he then regarded as much more dangerous than Grant's. The fall of Donelson and the prompt Union demonstrations up the Tennessee and Cumberland, left no doubt of the course to be adopted thereafter. It was clear that Grant was determined to push on to the Memphis and Charleston Railroad--a line of supply important to be kept intact. Beauregard therefore resolved that everything should be abandoned in Central Tennessee for the moment, and all concentrated on some point near the western terminus of the Memphis road. These forces, while gathering, would naturally defend the road (though that, in his plan, was of secondary importance), and, at the earliest moment should be hurled forward in an offensive movement through Tennessee and Kentucky, falling on each of the Union armies in turn, and crushing them both. This plan he suggested at once to General Johnston, proposing at the same time to serve as second in command. Beauregard's courier met Johnston before the latter had got to Murfreesboro', on his way from Nashville, and that officer, accordingly, continued his retreat south-easterly towards the Tennessee, to join Beauregard, with the view to march "onward to t he Ohio."
Thus weighty was the purport of the battle delivered at Pittsburg Landing. The genius of Beauregard had effected a double change in Confederate policy, making concentration take the place of distribution, and the campaign no longer defensive, but offensive. Before his day the Confederate popular idea of military defence had been primitive and juvenile. It was to ridge and stripe the broad valley with numberless lines of parallel earthworks, behind which forces were to be deployed from flank to flank; when one line should be carried, retreat would be had to another and another, even to the last row of parapets. Both parties indeed began by planning campaigns in metaphor; and if the one had its dream of an "anaconda coil," the other clung not less closely to its whimsical fancy of a "last ditch." But when Beauregard arrived, what he found marked out for a second offensive line, he cut short, strengthened and assumed as the base of an aggressive campaign. His inspiration was the true one; and, with proper support, it had met success. As it was, it barely failed. So complete wap the surprise, that General Grant himself writes that he had not thought an attack possible until several days later, and, when the assault began, "did not believe that they intended to make a determined attack but simply to make a reconnoissance in force." Sherman, too, avers that he did not discover the enemy were attacking in force until long after he had sent back for reinforcements.
Such, then, was the dangerous movement, which, but for an unexpected turn of fortune, might have carried, in the words of Buel[l], "the remnant of Grant's army prisoners into the enemy's camps." What limit to its onward roll might have been opposed thereafter, it is hard to say. Being frustrated at the start, the Confederate leaders concealed, as far as possible, the true intent of the campaign, and Beauregard, by adroit phrases, covered up the depth of his disappointment; but Bragg, less reticent, declared it, in his official report, a movement "which would have changed the entire complexion of the war." Such it indeed was. I symbolize Shiloh to myself as the representation of the South rampant and flaming in the house of Mars. It was a fierce massing and hurling forward of everything to gain a supreme object--the conquest of the Mississippi Valley. But it spent its fury and its force in vain; and it is a notable fact, that never again in the Valley of the Mississippi were the Confederates able to take the offensive.
I presume that my opinion of this action on the Union side will already have been disclosed in the recital of the battle; but lest there should be any doubt touching this, I shall state in precise terms what judgments seem to be warranted by the facts. The retaining the troops on the left bank of the Tennessee River (unless for immediate advance, which was the object General C. F. Smith had in view when he placed the army there weeks before), and that, too, without any appliances of defence, was undeniably a great error on the part of General Grant. Nor can this verdict be regarded as traversed by a pungent statement made by General Sherman: "It was necessary," says he, "that a combat fierce and bitter, to test the manhood of the two armies, should come off, and that was as good a place as any. It was not then a question of milltary skill and strategy, but of courage and pluck." Now, with the deference due the opinion of a soldier so eminent as General Sherman, I submit that this declaration is specious rather than sound; for precisely in proportion to the importance of the result of this primal "test of the manhood of the two armies," was it incumbent on the Union commander to make such dispositions as would gain for his army the advantage in this "test." Of the tactics of the battle-field there is nothing to be said. The subordinate commanders acted on their own motion, according to the extent of their ability. The men fought stubbornly, and with no lack of solid pluck; but nothing could repair the original faults of disposition and the effect of the surprise. It is impossible to overrate the importance of Buell's arrival on the field at the close of the first day. And, as partizan malignity has tried to make it appear that Buell's oncoming was tardy, it is a simple act of justice to add that, on the contrary, his zeal in the previous marches caused him greatly to outstrip his orders. Moreover, not only did the weight he threw into the scale on the 7th redeem the field; but his proximity on the 6th--a proximity known to the Confederate commanders--relaxed the nerve of Beauregard's attack during the latter part of that well-nigh fatal day.
It now remains to speak of the territorial results of this battle. As the fall of fort Donelson was the signal for a general abandonment of the first Confederate valley line of defence, so the repulse of Shiloh was followed by the abandonment of the second. In order to concentrate troops at Corinth, Beauregard had been compelled to arrange the evacuation of Island No. Ten. On the morning after the battle of Shiloh, Gen. Mackall surrendered this famous but overrated position, with its remaining garrison, its magazines, artillery, camps, and camp equipages--everything in short which had not been previously transferred to fort Pillow. Immediately thereafter, the Union fleets passed down the Mississippi towards the latter point, and simultaneously General Halleck moved cautiously upon Corinth, with the three columns of Buell, Grant, and Pope. But Beauregard was already convinced that the campaign was lost in the West, and only sought to delay his opponent by a show of resistance, compelling him to lose time in making siege approaches. The theatre of war, therefore, presented at either wing the spectacle of a Union army laboriously spading its way towards the fortified position of its enemy, McClellan before Yorktown, and Halleck before Corinth. At length, however, the pantomime was over, and Beauregard, having held Corinth from the 7th of April to the 29th of May, evacuated it on the night of the latter day. The retreat had been made leisurely, and, under the cover of strong picket lines, Beauregard had sent south every possible thing that could be of value to him in Corinth. The remaining material he blew up in a tremendous explosion, which served as a signal that the Union troops might enter[.] In the capture of Corinth, which Beauregard himself declared "the strategic point of the campaign," the success of Shiloh was now rounded out and complete.
Even here, however, the results of that battle-field had not ceased. The fall of Corinth rendered fort Randolph and fort Pillow, river positions of great strength, and which had justified Beauregard's selection by the repulse of the Union fleet, exposed to a land attack in the rear. Both these positions accordingly were surrendered to the triumphant Union columns. Deprived of its river defences on the one hand, and the army which covered it on the other, Memphis, the most important city yet unconquered on the Mississippi, was forced to capitulate, and thus, in fine, the mighty tide of Union triumph rolled adown the shores of the great river. The operations around Corinth and Memphis had been, moreover, of very great assistance to the magnificent stroke of Farragut at New Orleans. The gathering of troops from all the Gulf States to Corinth, the accumulation of gun-boats, naval supplies, artillery and handicraft-men to Memphis and its forts, had been loudly complained of at New Orleans; and it had been with too much justice apprehended that the attention paid to barring the river at the north would result in leaving it unbarred at the south.
Inland, however, as well as on the river banks, the results of Shiloh were of portentous magnitude. The concentration and defeat at Shiloh and Corinth had uncovered all Central and Eastern Tennessee to the Union columns. The latter, raiding in every direction, found their progress comparatively unopposed, and began for the first time to make acquaintance with the interior of the Confederacy. As for the Memphis and Charleston road, that great object of the campaign had long since been secured, and was penetrated and broken in many places. With great facility, Mitchell's column, projected by Buell from Nashville long before Shiloh, reached and permanently broke up the railroad at Huntsville, five days after that battle. This energetic officer and others now marched boldly hither and thither in Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama. It was felt on all hands that vast as was the area to be reduced to the dominion of the Union, a great segment had already been overrun, and patience and stout hearts were all that the conquest of the remainder demanded.