The dawn attack came without warning. Nearly 44,000 Confederates, led by General Albert Sidney Johnston, slammed into the Union Army near a simple log church called Shiloh. The Federals had marched into southwest Tennessee believing one grand battle would end the war. By midday, those hopes were shattered.
Union Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman rallied their stunned troops, but the Confederate attack had already done its damage. For most soldiers on both sides, Shiloh was their first taste of battle. The casualties were unimaginable.
Even Johnston, considered by many the best of the Confederate generals, lay dead. By mid-afternoon, the fight shifted to a dense thicket in the center of the battlefield. Survivors would later call it the Hornets’ Nest. There, 6,000 stubborn Union soldiers repulsed attack after attack.
After hours of piecemeal assaults, Confederate leaders shifted every available cannon to bear on the position. For more than an hour, the guns pounded the thicket, pinning down the Federals. The stakes were enormous. The Union had invaded to sever a crucial railroad junction just 20 miles south at Corinth, Mississippi.
That railroad was the Confederacy’s only complete line connecting the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic Ocean. In the East, the Union had already been humiliated at Bull Run, just 20 miles from the White House. Another defeat in the West would be a crushing blow to Lincoln’s hopes of reunifying the nation. While the battle raged in the Hornets’ Nest, another fight was about to explode in the steep terrain overlooking the Tennessee River.
There, a frightened 16-year-old named John Cockerell stood among the ranks of the 9th Illinois. Earlier in the day, he had become separated from his father’s regiment during the fierce clash near Shiloh Church. A lieutenant with the 9th Illinois had convinced the young Ohioan to fight with them. “We can do it, boys.
They are coming, but we’re going to hold our ground. You understand that? Ohio, you’re going to stick with us. We’ll get you through this today.
We will be victorious, boys. We’ll get you back to your family and to your unit. ”
Now, Cockerell and the others waited for an attack that was sure to come. “Everything looked weird and unnatural,” he later wrote.
“The leaves on the trees, though scarcely out of the bud, seemed greener than I had ever seen leaves and larger. With a suddenness, there came from all along our front a crash of musketry. Actions took the grotesque form of nightmares. The roar and din of the battle in all its terror outstripped my most fanciful dreams of pandemonium.
”
For nearly three hours, the Confederates delivered what Cockerell called a dreadful baptism of fire. Among those killed was Frederick E. Vogler, the chipper young lieutenant who had invited Cockerell to fight with his regiment. “The enemy fire became so terrible we were driven into the ravine.
They kept firing as long as cartridges lasted. It was at this point our blue line wavered. Out of the ravine we survivors poured, pursued by the howling enemy. I remember my horror at the thought of being shot in the back as I retreated from the top of the bank and galloped as gracefully as I could.
”
In this bloodbath, the 9th Illinois lost more men killed and wounded than any Union regiment at Shiloh. Cockerell somehow survived. He joined a line of Union stragglers retreating back to the Tennessee River. In the crowd of fear-stricken and dejected soldiers, he met a man who belonged to his father’s regiment.
“Did you see my dad? ”
Enquiring of the fate of the regiment, the man told him it had been entirely cut to pieces and he had personally witnessed the death of his father. “Seen him shot from his horse. I’m sorry, son.
”
This filled Cockerell with dismay, and he determined, non-combatant that he was, to retire from the battlefield. For the Federals in the Hornets’ Nest, the situation had grown desperate. In late afternoon, both flanks of the Confederate Army pressed forward, tightening the noose. The stubborn Union soldiers were surrounded.
Some managed to slip out of the trap, but for many there was no escape. General Benjamin Prentiss, who had survived the opening Confederate assault some ten hours earlier, found himself surrounded in a wooded ravine. He surrendered along with more than 2,200 Union soldiers. Union commander Ulysses S.
Grant hastily established a two-mile-long last line of defense. The Confederates mounted one final assault, but the Union line stood firm. After thirteen hours of fighting, the exhausted Confederate troops pulled back to the captured Union camps. With Albert Sidney Johnston dead, General P.
G. T. Beauregard assumed command. At his headquarters near Shiloh Church, he dispatched a message to Confederate President Jefferson Davis describing a complete victory.
16-year-old Thomas Duncan was a Confederate courier. “With a seeming victory in our grasp, and with the brave, though depleted and disorganized army of the blue at bay at river’s brink, we saw the battle cease for the day. ”
But Grant was not ready to concede defeat. He knew reinforcements were on the way.
“Not beaten by a damn sight,” he muttered. All of the high officers, with one exception, seemed to believe that they would pull out and cross the river during the night and escape. The one exception was Grant himself. Night came, and Sherman approached him to see what was going to happen the next day.
“Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own time today, haven’t we? ”
Grant looked at Sherman and said, “Yep. We’ll lick them tomorrow, though. ”
Sherman was taken aback.
This guy was not going to retreat. He was going to go on the offensive the next day. It was an incredible thing to do. Late that night, a violent storm engulfed the Shiloh battlefield.
Thunder and lightning combined with cannon fire from Union gunboats to create a night no soldier would ever forget. “The woods that first night, especially, are filled with sounds that we could never accurately reproduce. There were soldiers who wrote on that first night of hearing the wild hogs feeding on the wounded. And having to listen to that all night.
And there’s no button you can push to shut it off. And then when the sun comes up, you know it’s going to start all over again. ”
When the sun came up that second day, Beauregard believed he had won the great victory, and it was just a matter of mopping up. The Union Army was in terrible shape.
They had been driven back. Their confidence was broken. They were finished. But defeat was the last thing on Grant’s mind.
Overnight, 13,000 soldiers commanded by General Don Carlos Buell had finally arrived from Nashville. General Lew Wallace reinforced Grant with another 5,800 Union soldiers. According to a soldier from Louisiana, Federal troops sprouted from the ground like mushrooms. Confederate courier Thomas Duncan: “A small squad of us were preparing breakfast.
The firing began suddenly on the line. A wild-eyed rider brought the arrival of Buell, warning us to run for our lives. ”
April 7th was like day one at Shiloh, but in reverse. Beauregard’s stunned Confederates rallied, fighting desperately to hold the onslaught of the reinforced Federals.
“It’s no longer a sense of getting up and finding something to eat this morning. It’s getting up and finding something to put in my musket so I can fight this battle because this battle has come back, and it’s come back into my face. ”
A continued breakdown in the Confederate chain of command only made matters worse. Colonel John Moore commanded a makeshift brigade of three regiments, which included his own 2nd Texas Infantry.
Moore was ordered to advance his brigade across a peach orchard, but to hold his fire. In the woods ahead of him, Moore was told, waited another Confederate force. They had been told they were friends. The soldiers located in front of Moore’s approaching men were not friends.
They were from Indiana and Ohio. John C. Moore: “Even after the enemy opened fire, my officers reported the order was still given not to fire on our supposed friends. In one instance, after a private returned the fire of the enemy, a staff officer drew his pistol and threatened to blow off the man’s head if he fired again.
”
The chaos Moore and his men faced was experienced by many Confederates on Shiloh’s second day. The fighting was every bit as fierce and bloody as the day before. Confederates under Beauregard’s leadership fought bravely, but now outnumbered and overwhelmed, they were steadily driven back to Shiloh Church. An aide to Beauregard summed up the situation: “The fire and animation has left our troops.
”
Shortly after 2:00 p. m. , Beauregard issued an order unthinkable just eight hours earlier: Withdraw. “They came so very close.
To be so close to victory so many times and never quite be able to achieve it. It was almost like it was something that they were reaching out for and could never quite get it. ”
General Grant remained under orders not to engage the Confederates. For now, he was content to have recovered the Union camps lost the previous day.
Confederates endured a bitter 20-mile march back to Corinth, Mississippi, where they would dig in to defend the town’s vital rail junction. After Shiloh, lamented one New Orleans resident, the South never smiled again. Shiloh illustrated that war was here and it was deadly. They would have to invest everything into the war to win their cause.
How could anyone smile with that vision of the future? For the next few days, Union soldiers undertook the gruesome task of burying the dead. Even the hard-bitten General Sherman was moved. “The battlefield was a heart-sickening sight.
The dead were lying in every conceivable shape. Some had fallen, their guns fast in their hands. Others had received the messenger of death, and with their lifeblood ebbing away, had sought the shelters of logs and trees, and laid down to die. ”
“It’s impossible for us to imagine what it must have looked like.
The smell is awful. There are burial details every place. And maybe the biggest horror of all is as the Union Army is trying to reorganize itself, and wagons are going back and forth across the battlefield, the wheels of the wagons will dig up shallow graves, and you will see corpses lying there being run over by wagons and by horses. And what a horrible thing.
You have to think to yourself, is this going to happen to me? ”
At Shiloh, the total casualties were a staggering 24,000 men. A single battle claimed more casualties than all of America’s previous wars combined. “They did arithmetic.
All of a sudden they could realize, ‘Uh hell, that’s more people lost in 2 days than we’ve lost in all the wars we’ve fought to date. ‘ That becomes apparent to everyone. Golly. In 2 days we’ve amassed the same amount of killed, wounded, and missing personnel in our military bodies as we’ve accomplished in nearly a century of existence.
That’s shocking. ”
You think about the connections of that 24,000. This begins to affect homes. It affects communities.
It affects loved ones, friends. Entire communities end up having a bad day because a sizable preponderance of their young men 18 to 29 are gone. They’re no longer there, or they’re totally torn to pieces and maimed for life. And it just reverberates.
The great battle Grant and others hoped would end the war was in fact just the beginning of a brutal war no one could have imagined. When the battle began, John Cockerell was a young musician. Now, in the aftermath of bloody Shiloh, the 16-year-old was a combat veteran. Near dusk, he wandered through the ransacked camp of the 70th Ohio, the last place he had seen his father alive.
Through the haze, he saw a sight he could hardly believe. “The 70th Regiment came back after the most terrible fighting and campaigning. At its head rode my father whom I supposed to be dead. He was pale, haggard, and worn, but unscathed.
My father had not seen me nor heard from me for more than 60 hours. He took me into his arms and gave me the most affectionate embrace my life had ever known. ”
Seven months after Shiloh, John Cockerell returned to the Ohio home he had dreamed of during the battle. He would become an accomplished journalist, writing for the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Washington Post.
Years later, he would write about two days in April 1862 when the world appeared to turn upside down in the thick woods along the Tennessee River. Two weeks after their defeat at Shiloh, the Confederacy suffered another blow in the West. A fleet of Union warships under the command of Admiral David Farragut captured New Orleans, the South’s largest city and most important port. And for Confederate troops over a thousand miles away in Virginia, the war effort began to falter.
Union General George McClellan, nicknamed Little Napoleon, had a bold plan to take the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. In March 1862, McClellan landed more than 100,000 troops at Fort Monroe and began to fight his way up the peninsula towards Richmond. At Seven Pines, Confederate Commander Joseph Johnston was severely wounded and replaced with a rising star named Robert E. Lee.
Four months after it began, Lincoln ordered McClellan to return his army to Washington. For the Union, the Peninsula Campaign was a military disappointment. Yet, it was a seemingly minor incident a year earlier on the tip of the very same Virginia Peninsula that ignited a sweeping chain of events that would alter the course of the war. May 1861.
Three runaway slaves rowed a stolen boat and surrendered to the Union-occupied Fort Monroe. Their arrival created a legal dilemma for the fort’s commander and for the United States Army. President Abraham Lincoln refused to recognize the Confederate government. He considered the Southern states to be in rebellion.
Therefore, federal law still applied in the South. Legally, the escaped slaves were the property of their Southern owner and must be returned. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was still on the books. It was still the law of the land.
And strictly speaking, the United States Army was obligated to live up to the tenets of the Fugitive Slave Law. The next day, a Confederate officer, under a flag of truce, arrived at Fort Monroe and demanded the property back. The Union fort’s commander, General Benjamin Franklin Butler, quickly rejected the request. The runaways had earlier revealed that they were going to help construct Confederate gun emplacements, guns to be aimed directly at Fort Monroe.
Butler curtly dismissed the Confederate officer, calling the escaped slaves “contrabands of war. ”
“Contraband means property. And so, there’s this legal term that enters the lexicon, and it is latched onto and used throughout the end of the Civil War. And what Butler’s thinking is that they are still property, but they are enemy property, and therefore it is lawful in a time of war for the Union to seize them.
So, he justifies allowing these slaves to stay in Union Army lines as contraband. And within a few days, he had 200 fugitive slaves at the fort’s door, and he took them all in, confiscating them as contraband of war. He realized by taking this source of labor, the source of aid, that it would weaken the Confederacy. ”
In Washington, D.
C. , President Lincoln and his cabinet followed the unfolding drama. He took no formal action for now. “It took the Union Army by surprise, and it took the Union government by surprise.
It took Lincoln by surprise. They were not expecting this. They did not plan for it. They had not encouraged it.
They had not put out a welcome mat for the enslaved to come into Union Army lines, but they came anyway. ”
Although Lincoln was not going to encourage people overtly to break the law, he certainly was not going to see slaves who did run away returned to their slavery, to their bonds, to their chattel status. To the contrary, he said, “I’d be damned in time and eternity if I ever allowed that to happen. ” Slaves, he said to Congress, “Slaves who have achieved their actual freedom are not going to be molested in that.
” That was as much as waving a very large flag that said, “Come hither and find safety. ”
The news of the contrabands at Fort Monroe quickly spread throughout the Union. The news also spread among the enslaved themselves. “What powers the need for freedom for enslaved people is they don’t want to be degraded anymore.
They don’t want to be brutalized anymore. They don’t want to exist as property. So, all of a sudden you have government officials, you have military officers who are confronted with the fact that we have to take black concerns seriously. ”
At this point, you now had growing refugee camps within Union lines and in all of the border states.
They didn’t wait for Lincoln to free them. They were agents in their own emancipation. Lincoln hoped at the beginning of the war to keep the opposition to slavery and the restoration of the Union running on two separate but parallel tracks. One problem, the problem of the rebellion, he wanted to solve militarily.
The other problem, the problem of slavery, he wanted to solve politically. What he found, though, a year into the war, was that these two tracks, as much as he was trying to keep them separate, insisted on converging. The contraband issue triggered a fundamental question. Were the contraband still slaves?
Or were they now free? “There is a dynamic, a collision of people on the ground. Slaves running to Union armies. Union armies not knowing how to handle this problem, but knowing that if they sent those slaves back, that they simply would be abetting the Confederate war effort.
”
That step that slaves took toward Union lines triggered a process. Congress passed a series of largely ineffective laws called the Confiscation Act. It was legislation the president opposed. Lincoln’s own views on abolishing slavery continued to evolve.
Early in the war, he favored a plan to remove freed slaves to a colony outside of the United States. In summer 1862, he wrote to newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Lincoln said, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it. ”
And yet, that very summer, in a secluded cottage on a hill overlooking Washington, Lincoln began to pen a document that would do exactly that.
“And it’s in the aftermath of the Peninsula Campaign that Lincoln realizes that they need to move toward a policy that wages war not just on the Confederate army, but on Confederate society. And the first step in that direction, he decides, is to begin emancipating the slaves. ”
In the wake of a string of devastating defeats on the Eastern Theater, Lincoln now saw emancipation as a military necessity. He said, “We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.
”
Lincoln’s coming action would test the constitutional limits of the office of the presidency. The Constitution provided that the President of the United States be the Commander-in-Chief in time of war or rebellion. But it didn’t describe what the powers of the Commander-in-Chief were. No one was really sure.
Within those war powers, what was he allowed to do? “Well, he should be allowed to do some things which will weaken the enemy’s ability to carry on war. What will weaken the Confederacy’s ability to carry on war? Free their slaves.
Free them, give them every incentive possible to desert and run away to the Union lines, give them every reason to expect that the advance of the Union armies into the South will mean their freedom. Subvert, undermine, weaken the Confederate ability to carry on the rebellion. ”
To his stunned cabinet, Lincoln unveiled a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on July 22nd, 1862. Secretary of Treasury Salmon Chase thought it was too extreme.
Secretary of Interior Caleb Smith strongly objected and threatened to resign. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair feared it would cost the Republicans the fall elections. Lincoln pushed to release his proclamation immediately. But Secretary of State William Seward cautioned the proclamation would be perceived as an act of desperation in the aftermath of the failed Peninsula Campaign.
So the president agreed to hold the announcement until after a federal victory on the battlefield. The slaughter at Antietam was hardly the decisive victory Lincoln desired. On September 17th, 1862, along Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland, more than 22,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing. That was nearly as many casualties as there were in two days of fighting at Shiloh.
The Battle of Antietam ranks as the bloodiest day in American military history. Because the Confederates were forced to retreat into Virginia, the Union claimed victory. But tactically, the battle was a draw. Five days after Antietam, on September 22nd, 1862, Lincoln issued what he called a preliminary emancipation proclamation.
The presidential order was a threat pointed directly at the Confederacy. The rebelling states had until January 1st to cease hostilities, or else, on that date, slaves in the rebelling states would be forever free. “Delivering the preliminary emancipation proclamation was a revolutionary moment. It was a terrific blow against the Confederacy.
For white Southerners, when Lincoln issued it after the Battle of Antietam, they recognized that this war for Union now was a war for Union and the destruction of slavery. The North had now raised the stakes of the game. No longer just a war for Union, but a war for Union and for black freedom. That turned a war of conciliation into a revolutionary struggle.
”
The Confederates turned the proclamation into a rallying point. Eight hundred miles from Washington, in the woodlands outside of Corinth, Mississippi, they were determined to avenge the losses at Shiloh. Following their victory at Shiloh, Union forces had advanced 22 miles south to Corinth and seized its prized railroad junction. For more than four months, a large garrison had occupied the strategic town.
But in October 1862, the Confederates were determined to take Corinth back. Fire! 22,000 Confederate soldiers, led by Major General Earl Van Dorn, stormed through the Union defenses northwest of town, pushing the Federals back nearly two miles. The next day, Union artillery delivered a punishing blow to Van Dorn’s men.
After a savage two-day fight, the Confederate attack was repulsed. Corinth, once and for all, was under Union control. The desperate gamble to retake Corinth cost the Confederates over 5,000 casualties, nearly twice that of the Union defenders. One Confederate division alone lost 2,500 out of 3,900 of its men.
Just as devastating as the loss of human life was the permanent loss of the vital rail junction. In the fight for control of the Mississippi Valley, it was a blow from which the Confederacy would never recover. The timing of the Union victory at Corinth and Lincoln’s preliminary emancipation proclamation unleashed a movement throughout the Mississippi River Valley. Three months before emancipation was official, thousands escaped plantations and farms, taking their first precarious steps toward freedom.
One Union officer complained, “They will not even wait for January 1st. I do not know what we shall do with them. ”
For the enslaved, the Union garrison at Corinth had become a beacon of hope. “Corinth is just a short two or three days walk from the breadbasket of Mississippi.
There were large plantations and there were large farms and there were significant number of slaves. Same is true along the Tennessee River Basin in Northern Alabama. There’s a significantly large number of slaves. It’s a sizable preponderance of slaves present.
Therefore, they’re in close proximity to what? The linchpin of Union control in Northeast Mississippi, which is Corinth. Once it falls and is occupied by Union forces. ”
In the years leading up to the war, small bands of escaping slaves sought freedom along an underground railroad leading north.
But this mass movement towards Corinth and other areas in the South was unlike anything before. “Before the war, we tended to see men running on their own. We did not see whole families. We did not see couples bringing their children.
This time around, they did. Because they calculated in their minds that this was the moment when freedom was going to come. So, this was the moment to get the entire family out of slavery. Because it was actually going to happen this time.
”
By war’s end, some 500,000 to 1 million of the South’s 4 million slaves would have escaped to Union lines. “The very presence of a contraband camp, I think, speaks to the testimony of black people’s ability to create power even in the most powerless situation. ”
The Union garrison in Corinth was, in fact, ill-equipped to deal with thousands of refugees. For many soldiers, it was the first time they came face-to-face with the sheer magnitude of the institution of slavery.
“And if you grew up in Michigan, you had a good chance you’d never seen an African-American ever. If you grew up in Iowa, you had a real good chance you’d never seen an African-American ever in your entire life. Then you start experiencing. And you’re seeing the conditions in which they exist within this society.
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For temporary shelter, the Union Army issued the contrabands old army tents. But at Corinth, the former slaves were determined to transform a refugee camp into a community. They laid out streets, built a church, hospital, and school. They planted and harvested crops.
Most importantly, they planted seeds of hope. “We’ve escaped, so now let us do what we have always been trained to do. We will set up our own camps. We will live in these spaces.
We will grow food. We will try to heal each other. We will try to live out some semblance of life as free people or at least quasi-free people. And so they did what they had always done.
They served each other. They served white people, because that’s what slaves are trained to do. Except they now, for the first time, are paid for their labor. It is just part of the transition from slave to freed men and women.
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In the South, it was illegal to teach slaves how to read and write. At Corinth, volunteers from the American Missionary Association arrived to instruct the refugees. “They do this because they recognize that freedom is not going to mean much until these men, women, and children learn to read and write and are educated. And so this becomes a focus of life there in this Corinth Contraband Camp.
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And the numbers increased. By March 1863, there were about 3,600 men, women, and children there. Almost half of them were children. In just a few months, Corinth became a model Contraband Camp in the Union-occupied South.
But the success was short-lived. Inevitably, the Union force at Corinth was ordered to move on. And so were the contrabands. They were forced to leave the community they had helped to build and travel 100 miles to a refugee center in Memphis.
“And that’s the end of the Corinth contraband camp. It disappears. It’s done. So, its life is short.
It has a lot of hope and a lot of promise, but it is blown away in some ways by the military, the changes in the military situation. And in some ways that really is representative of what happens in a lot of places and tells us something about what it means to become free in the middle of a war. The military situation is constantly creating upheavals in the lives of these men, women, and children trying to become free. So, the story of Corinth is in some ways the story of what happens everywhere.
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The Corinth contraband camp was at once a glimpse into a life of freedom and a harbinger of the struggles ahead. Its brief success was a glimmer of hope in a year that had seen north and south spiral into an abyss of hard war. In December at Fredericksburg, Virginia, was still another colossal blunder by a Union general. This time, Ambrose Burnside.
In a series of ill-advised frontal assaults, Burnside’s men were slaughtered by Robert E. Lee’s Confederates positioned along the heights above the town. One Confederate at Fredericksburg stated the charging Federals melted like snow coming down on a warm ground. The Union debacle at Fredericksburg resulted in 12,000 senseless casualties.
Two weeks later in the Western theater was another titanic battle. This one near the Tennessee town of Murfreesboro. Along the Stones River on the final day of 1862, Union and Confederate forces squared off for control of Middle Tennessee. For two days, the massive armies collided at places aptly named Hell’s Half Acre and the Slaughter Pen.
Union forces led by General William Rosecrans forced the Confederate army to retreat. It was a victory Lincoln desperately needed. But the cost in human lives was staggering. At the Battle of Stones River, Union and Confederate armies lost a stunning 31% of their men.
The casualties exceeded even those of Bloody Shiloh. The shocking death tolls were another nightmare to a public now growing numb to the blood baths of the Civil War. Lincoln said, “If there is a worse place than hell, I am in it.
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In the dying light of 1862, America’s fiery trial now seemed to be a war without end.
