 |
| The Tennessee Monument at Shiloh Battlefield. |
The Battle of Shiloh is generally considered a Union victory, but not without a terrible cost. Over the course of two days on April 6-7, 1862, Union and Confederate armies, led by Major General Ulysses S. Grant and General Albert Sidney Johnston respectively, suffered a combined 23,746 casualties in the The Battle of Shiloh in what was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War up to that time. Each side counted more than seventeen hundred dead and eight thousand wounded in addition to the missing, including Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, who was mortally wounded leading the Confederate charge on the first day of the engagement. Tennesseans killed, wounded or missing numbered more than 3,220. The monument pictured here honors those brave souls lost in the field of battle.
Ultimately, the Confederate army failed to reverse the momentum of Union forces through the Western Theater, and Gen. Grant turned back the Confederate advance, securing a major supply line through the heart of the Confederacy. However, the Union had no cause to celebrate, as northern newspapers criticized Grant for the tremendous loss of life, and for failing to mount an effective pursuit that might have destroyed what was left of the Confederate army.
To stand on the land where so many young men died, in a place that surely must have seemed like Hell on Earth for those two days in April 1862, was a very sobering experience that I'll not soon forget.
RELATED LINKS:
- Hundreds participate in Civil War re-enactment - Times Daily
- 149th Shiloh Battle Anniversary - The Jackson Sun
- The Battle of Shiloh - The Civil War Trust
- Battle of Shiloh - Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture
- The Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and the Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park by Timothy Smith - Google Books
- New York Times main page headline, April 7, 1862, The Battle of Pittsburgh
No comments:
Post a Comment