General Albert Sidney Johnston’s nearly 44,000 Confederates crashed out of the dawn woods around Shiloh Church, catching the Union Army completely by surprise. The Federals had pushed deep into southwest Tennessee, convinced that one grand, decisive battle would end the war. Within hours, those hopes were shattered. Union commanders Ulysses S.
Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman scrambled to rally their stunned, bleeding troops as the Confederate attack rolled over camp after camp. For most of the men on both sides, this was their first taste of battle, and the carnage was unlike anything the nation had ever seen. By midday, the Confederates had paid a terrible price for their success. Johnston himself, considered by many the finest general in the South, lay dead on the field.
The fight shifted to a dense thicket in the center of the battlefield, a place the survivors would forever call the Hornets’ Nest. There, around 6,000 stubborn Union soldiers repulsed attack after attack as Confederate officers hurled their men forward in costly, piecemeal charges. After hours of failure, the Confederates massed every cannon they could bring to bear and pounded the position for over an hour. The stakes could not have been higher.
The Union army had invaded to sever a vital railroad junction just twenty miles south at Corinth, Mississippi, the Confederacy’s only complete rail line connecting the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic. In the East, the Union had already been humiliated at Bull Run, barely twenty miles from the White House. Another defeat in the West would be a crushing blow to President Lincoln’s hopes of reunifying the nation. Amid the hell of the Hornets’ Nest, another fight was about to explode on the steep terrain overlooking the Tennessee River.
There, frightened sixteen-year-old John Cockerell stood in the ranks of the 9th Illinois. Earlier that day, the young Ohioan had become separated from his father’s regiment during the fierce clash near Shiloh Church. A cheerful lieutenant from the 9th Illinois had convinced him to fight alongside them. Waiting for the attack he knew was coming, Cockerell later wrote that everything looked weird and unnatural.
The leaves on the trees, scarcely out of the bud, seemed greener and larger than any he had ever seen. Then, with suddenness, a crash of musketry erupted all along their front. The roar and din of the battle outstripped his most fanciful dreams of pandemonium. For nearly three hours, the Confederates delivered what Cockerell called a dreadful baptism of fire.
Among the dead was the chipper young lieutenant who had invited him to fight with the regiment. The enemy fire became so terrible that the survivors were driven into a ravine, and the blue line wavered. Out of the ravine they poured, pursued by a howling enemy. Cockerell retreated, horrified at the thought of being shot in the back as he scrambled up the bank.
The soldiers called their first experience of combat “seeing the elephant,” and in that bloodbath, the 9th Illinois lost more men killed and wounded than any Union regiment at Shiloh. Somehow, Cockerell survived. He joined a line of stragglers retreating toward the Tennessee River and met a man from his father’s regiment. “Did you see my dad?
” he asked. The man told him the regiment had been entirely cut to pieces. He had personally witnessed the death of Cockerell’s father, seen him shot from his horse. “I’m sorry, son.
”
Filled with dismay, Cockerell, a non-combatant musician, determined to retire from the battlefield. Back in the Hornets’ Nest, the situation for the Federals had grown desperate. In the 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 assault hours earlier, surrendered along with more than 2,200 of his men. 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, believing they had won a complete victory. With Johnston dead, General P. G. T.
Beauregard assumed command and dispatched a message to Confederate President Jefferson Davis describing a complete victory. But Grant was not ready to concede defeat. He knew reinforcements were on the way. “Not beaten by a damn sight,” he muttered.
That night, Sherman came up to Grant, wondering what they would do the next day. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own time today, haven’t we? ” Sherman said. Grant looked at him.
“Yep. We’ll lick them tomorrow, though. ”
Sherman was taken aback. This man was not going to retreat.
He was going to go on the offensive. The other high officers believed they would escape across the river during the night. Grant alone never doubted he would win. Late that night, a violent storm engulfed the battlefield.
Thunder and lightning mixed with cannon fire from Union gunboats to create a night no soldier at Shiloh would ever forget. Men lay in the woods listening to the sounds of wild hogs feeding on the wounded, with no way to shut it out. When the sun came up, they knew it would all start again. When day broke, Beauregard believed the great victory was won and that it was just a matter of mopping up.
But overnight, 13,000 soldiers under General Don Carlos Buell had arrived from Nashville, and General Lew Wallace reinforced Grant with another 5,800 men. According to one Confederate soldier, Federal troops sprouted from the ground like mushrooms. As a small squad of Confederates prepared breakfast, firing began suddenly on the line. A wild-eyed rider arrived with news of Buell’s arrival, warning them to run for their lives.
The counterattack had power, purpose, and mass, and it was totally unexpected. April 7th was like day one at Shiloh, but in reverse. Beauregard’s stunned Confederates rallied and fought desperately to hold back the reinforced Federals. A continued breakdown in the Confederate chain of command only made matters worse.
Colonel John Moore commanded a makeshift brigade of three regiments, including his own 2nd Texas Infantry. He was ordered to advance across a peach orchard but to hold his fire, told that friendly Confederate forces waited in the woods ahead. The soldiers in front of Moore’s men were not friends. They were from Indiana and Ohio.
Even after the enemy opened fire, Moore’s officers reported that the order was still given not to fire on their supposed friends. When one private returned fire, a staff officer drew his pistol and threatened to blow the man’s head off if he fired again. The chaos Moore faced was experienced by many Confederates on that second day. The fighting was every bit as fierce and bloody as the day before.
Beauregard’s men fought bravely, but now outnumbered and overwhelmed, they were steadily driven back toward Shiloh Church. One aide 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 had come so very close to victory, so many times, and never quite been able to achieve it. It was as if they were reaching out for something they could never quite grasp.
The Confederates endured a bitter twenty-mile march back to Corinth, where they dug in to defend the town’s vital rail junction. After Shiloh, one New Orleans resident lamented, the South never smiled again. For the next few days, Union soldiers undertook the gruesome task of burying the dead. Even the hard-bitten Sherman was moved.
He wrote that the battlefield was a heart-sickening sight, the dead lying in every conceivable shape, some with their guns fast in their hands, others who had sought shelter behind logs and trees before laying down to die. The smell was awful. Burial details were everywhere. And perhaps the greatest horror came as the Union Army tried to reorganize, wagons rolling back and forth across the battlefield, digging up shallow graves and running over the corpses.
At Shiloh, total casualties reached a staggering 24,000 men. A single battle claimed more casualties than all of America’s previous wars combined. In two days, the nation had amassed the same number of killed, wounded, and missing as it had in nearly a century of existence. Entire communities lost a sizable portion of their young men, aged eighteen to twenty-nine.
The great battle Grant and others hoped would end the war was, in fact, just the beginning of a brutal conflict no one could have imagined. When the battle began, John Cockerell was a young musician. Now, in the aftermath of bloody Shiloh, the sixteen-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 was coming back after the most terrible fighting. At its head rode his father, whom he had supposed to be dead. Pale, haggard, and worn, but unscathed.
His father had not seen him nor heard from him for more than sixty hours. He took his son into his arms and gave him the most affectionate embrace the boy’s 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 Union fleet under 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, launched a bold plan to take the Confederate capital of Richmond. In March 1862, he landed more than 100,000 troops at Fort Monroe and began fighting his way up the peninsula toward Richmond. At Seven Pines, Confederate commander Joseph Johnston was severely wounded and replaced by 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 that same Virginia Peninsula that ignited a sweeping chain of events that would alter the course of the war. In May 1861, three runaway slaves rowed a stolen boat and surrendered to the Union-occupied Fort Monroe.
Their arrival created a legal dilemma. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was still on the books, and strictly speaking, the United States Army was obligated to return them to their owner. The next day, a Confederate officer arrived under a flag of truce and demanded the property back. The fort’s commander, General Benjamin Franklin Butler, rejected the request.
The runaways had revealed they were going to help construct Confederate gun emplacements aimed directly at Fort Monroe. Butler curtly dismissed the Confederate officer, calling the escaped slaves “contrabands of war. ”
Butler reasoned that they were still property, but enemy property, and therefore lawful for the Union to seize in wartime. Within days, he had two hundred fugitive slaves at the fort’s door, and he took them all in.
He realized that by seizing this source of labor and aid, he could weaken the Confederacy. In Washington, Lincoln and his cabinet followed the unfolding drama. The president took no formal action. He was not going to encourage people to break the law, but he certainly was not going to see slaves who ran away returned to their bondage.
He later told Congress that slaves who had achieved their actual freedom were not going to be molested in that. The news of the contrabands spread quickly, both throughout the Union and among the enslaved themselves. Enslaved people did not want to be degraded or brutalized anymore. They did not want to exist as property.
They did not wait for Lincoln to free them. They became agents in their own emancipation. Lincoln had hoped to keep the opposition to slavery and the restoration of the Union on two separate but parallel tracks. He wanted to solve the rebellion militarily and slavery politically.
But a year into the war, he found that these two tracks insisted on converging. Congress passed a series of largely ineffective laws called the Confiscation Act, 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 the United States.
In the summer of 1862, he wrote to newspaper editor Horace Greeley: “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. In the wake of a string of devastating defeats in the Eastern Theater, he now saw emancipation as a military necessity. “We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued,” he said.
Lincoln’s coming action would test the constitutional limits of the presidency. The Constitution made the president Commander-in-Chief in time of war, but it did not describe the full extent of those powers. Lincoln reasoned he should be allowed to do things that would weaken the enemy’s ability to carry on war. What would weaken the Confederacy?
Free their slaves. Give them every incentive to run to Union lines. Undermine the Confederate ability to continue the rebellion. On July 22nd, 1862, Lincoln unveiled a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to his stunned cabinet.
Secretary of Treasury Salmon Chase thought it 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 it immediately, but Secretary of State William Seward cautioned that it would be perceived as an act of desperation after the failed Peninsula Campaign.
The president agreed to wait for 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, nearly as many casualties as in two days at Shiloh. It was the bloodiest day in American military history.
Because the Confederates were forced to retreat into Virginia, the Union claimed victory, though tactically it was a draw. Five days later, on September 22nd, 1862, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It was a threat pointed directly at the Confederacy. The rebelling states had until January 1st to cease hostilities, or else slaves in those states would be forever free.
It was a revolutionary moment. For white Southerners, they recognized that this war for Union was now a war for Union and the destruction of slavery. The North had raised the stakes. The Confederates turned the proclamation into a rallying point.
Eight hundred miles from Washington, in the woodlands outside Corinth, Mississippi, they were determined to avenge their losses at Shiloh. Following their victory there, Union forces had advanced twenty-two miles south to Corinth and seized its prized railroad junction. For more than four months, a large garrison had occupied the strategic town. In October 1862, the Confederates were determined to take it back.
22,000 Confederate soldiers under 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. After a savage two-day fight, the Confederate attack was repulsed. Corinth was permanently under Union control.
The desperate gamble 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 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 was just a short two- or three-day walk from the breadbasket of Mississippi, an area of large plantations and a significant number of slaves. Once Corinth fell and was occupied by Union forces, it became the linchpin of Union control in northeast Mississippi. Before the war, escaping slaves had tended to run on their own, seeking freedom along an underground railroad leading north.
But this mass movement was unlike anything before. This time, they brought whole families. They brought their children. They calculated that this was the moment when freedom was going to come, so this was the moment to get the entire family out of slavery.
By war’s end, some 500,000 to 1 million of the South’s 4 million slaves would have escaped to Union lines. The Union garrison at Corinth was 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. Men who had grown up in Michigan or Iowa had likely never seen an African-American before.
For temporary shelter, the army issued the contrabands old tents. But at Corinth, the former slaves were determined to transform a refugee camp into a community. They laid out streets, built a church, a hospital, and a school. They planted and harvested crops.
Most importantly, they planted seeds of hope. They set up their own camps, grew food, tried to heal each other, and lived out some semblance of life as free or at least quasi-free people. Except now, for the first time, they were paid for their labor. In the South, it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write.
At Corinth, volunteers from the American Missionary Association arrived to instruct the refugees. They recognized that freedom would not mean much until these men, women, and children learned to read and write. It became a focus of life in the Corinth Contraband Camp. By March 1863, there were about 3,600 men, women, and children there.
Almost half 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 build and travel one hundred miles to a refugee center in Memphis. That was the end of the Corinth contraband camp. Its life was short, full of hope and promise, but blown away by the changes in the military situation. The story of Corinth was in some ways the story of what happened everywhere.
The 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 Lee’s Confederates positioned along the heights above the town. One Confederate stated the charging Federals melted like snow coming down on warm ground. The debacle resulted in 12,000 senseless casualties. Two weeks later, in the Western theater, came 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 under General William Rosecrans forced the Confederate army to retreat. It was a victory Lincoln desperately needed.
But the cost was staggering. At the Battle of Stones River, the armies lost a stunning 31% of their men, exceeding even the casualties at Shiloh. The shocking death tolls were another nightmare for a public growing numb to the bloodbaths of the war. Lincoln said that if there was a worse place than hell, he was in it.
In the dying light of 1862, America’s fiery trial seemed to be a war without end. Yet among the enslaved, word was spreading like wildfire. There was good news coming. A chariot was coming.
And they did not want to be left behind. CONTENT:
General Albert Sidney Johnston’s nearly 44,000 Confederates crashed out of the dawn woods around Shiloh Church, catching the Union Army completely by surprise. The Federals had pushed deep into southwest Tennessee, convinced that one grand, decisive battle would end the war. Within hours, those hopes were shattered.
Union commanders Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman scrambled to rally their stunned, bleeding troops as the Confederate attack rolled over camp after camp. For most of the men on both sides, this was their first taste of battle, and the carnage was unlike anything the nation had ever seen. By midday, the Confederates had paid a terrible price for their success.
Johnston himself, considered by many the finest general in the South, lay dead on the field. The fight shifted to a dense thicket in the center of the battlefield, a place the survivors would forever call the Hornets’ Nest. There, around 6,000 stubborn Union soldiers repulsed attack after attack as Confederate officers hurled their men forward in costly, piecemeal charges. After hours of failure, the Confederates massed every cannon they could bring to bear and pounded the position for over an hour.
The stakes could not have been higher. The Union army had invaded to sever a vital railroad junction just twenty miles south at Corinth, Mississippi, the Confederacy’s only complete rail line connecting the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic. In the East, the Union had already been humiliated at Bull Run, barely twenty miles from the White House. Another defeat in the West would be a crushing blow to President Lincoln’s hopes of reunifying the nation.
Amid the hell of the Hornets’ Nest, another fight was about to explode on the steep terrain overlooking the Tennessee River. There, frightened sixteen-year-old John Cockerell stood in the ranks of the 9th Illinois. Earlier that day, the young Ohioan had become separated from his father’s regiment during the fierce clash near Shiloh Church. A cheerful lieutenant from the 9th Illinois had convinced him to fight alongside them.
Waiting for the attack he knew was coming, Cockerell later wrote that everything looked weird and unnatural. The leaves on the trees, scarcely out of the bud, seemed greener and larger than any he had ever seen. Then, with suddenness, a crash of musketry erupted all along their front. The roar and din of the battle outstripped his most fanciful dreams of pandemonium.
For nearly three hours, the Confederates delivered what Cockerell called a dreadful baptism of fire. Among the dead was the chipper young lieutenant who had invited him to fight with the regiment. The enemy fire became so terrible that the survivors were driven into a ravine, and the blue line wavered. Out of the ravine they poured, pursued by a howling enemy.
Cockerell retreated, horrified at the thought of being shot in the back as he scrambled up the bank. The soldiers called their first experience of combat “seeing the elephant,” and in that bloodbath, the 9th Illinois lost more men killed and wounded than any Union regiment at Shiloh. Somehow, Cockerell survived. He joined a line of stragglers retreating toward the Tennessee River and met a man from his father’s regiment.
“Did you see my dad? ” he asked. The man told him the regiment had been entirely cut to pieces. He had personally witnessed the death of Cockerell’s father, seen him shot from his horse.
“I’m sorry, son. ”
Filled with dismay, Cockerell, a non-combatant musician, determined to retire from the battlefield. Back in the Hornets’ Nest, the situation for the Federals had grown desperate. In the 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 assault hours earlier, surrendered along with more than 2,200 of his men. 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, believing they had won a complete victory. With Johnston dead, General P. G.
T. Beauregard assumed command and dispatched a message to Confederate President Jefferson Davis describing a complete victory. But Grant was not ready to concede defeat. He knew reinforcements were on the way.
“Not beaten by a damn sight,” he muttered. That night, Sherman came up to Grant, wondering what they would do the next day. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own time today, haven’t we? ” Sherman said.
Grant looked at him. “Yep. We’ll lick them tomorrow, though. ”
Sherman was taken aback.
This man was not going to retreat. He was going to go on the offensive. The other high officers believed they would escape across the river during the night. Grant alone never doubted he would win.
Late that night, a violent storm engulfed the battlefield. Thunder and lightning mixed with cannon fire from Union gunboats to create a night no soldier at Shiloh would ever forget. Men lay in the woods listening to the sounds of wild hogs feeding on the wounded, with no way to shut it out. When the sun came up, they knew it would all start again.
When day broke, Beauregard believed the great victory was won and that it was just a matter of mopping up. But overnight, 13,000 soldiers under General Don Carlos Buell had arrived from Nashville, and General Lew Wallace reinforced Grant with another 5,800 men. According to one Confederate soldier, Federal troops sprouted from the ground like mushrooms. As a small squad of Confederates prepared breakfast, firing began suddenly on the line.
A wild-eyed rider arrived with news of Buell’s arrival, warning them to run for their lives. The counterattack had power, purpose, and mass, and it was totally unexpected. April 7th was like day one at Shiloh, but in reverse. Beauregard’s stunned Confederates rallied and fought desperately to hold back the reinforced Federals.
A continued breakdown in the Confederate chain of command only made matters worse. Colonel John Moore commanded a makeshift brigade of three regiments, including his own 2nd Texas Infantry. He was ordered to advance across a peach orchard but to hold his fire, told that friendly Confederate forces waited in the woods ahead. The soldiers in front of Moore’s men were not friends.
They were from Indiana and Ohio. Even after the enemy opened fire, Moore’s officers reported that the order was still given not to fire on their supposed friends. When one private returned fire, a staff officer drew his pistol and threatened to blow the man’s head off if he fired again. The chaos Moore faced was experienced by many Confederates on that second day.
The fighting was every bit as fierce and bloody as the day before. Beauregard’s men fought bravely, but now outnumbered and overwhelmed, they were steadily driven back toward Shiloh Church. One aide 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 had come so very close to victory, so many times, and never quite been able to achieve it.
It was as if they were reaching out for something they could never quite grasp. The Confederates endured a bitter twenty-mile march back to Corinth, where they dug in to defend the town’s vital rail junction. After Shiloh, one New Orleans resident lamented, the South never smiled again. For the next few days, Union soldiers undertook the gruesome task of burying the dead.
Even the hard-bitten Sherman was moved. He wrote that the battlefield was a heart-sickening sight, the dead lying in every conceivable shape, some with their guns fast in their hands, others who had sought shelter behind logs and trees before laying down to die. The smell was awful. Burial details were everywhere.
And perhaps the greatest horror came as the Union Army tried to reorganize, wagons rolling back and forth across the battlefield, digging up shallow graves and running over the corpses. At Shiloh, total casualties reached a staggering 24,000 men. A single battle claimed more casualties than all of America’s previous wars combined. In two days, the nation had amassed the same number of killed, wounded, and missing as it had in nearly a century of existence.
Entire communities lost a sizable portion of their young men, aged eighteen to twenty-nine. The great battle Grant and others hoped would end the war was, in fact, just the beginning of a brutal conflict no one could have imagined. When the battle began, John Cockerell was a young musician. Now, in the aftermath of bloody Shiloh, the sixteen-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 was coming back after the most terrible fighting. At its head rode his father, whom he had supposed to be dead.
Pale, haggard, and worn, but unscathed. His father had not seen him nor heard from him for more than sixty hours. He took his son into his arms and gave him the most affectionate embrace the boy’s 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 Union fleet under 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, launched a bold plan to take the Confederate capital of Richmond. In March 1862, he landed more than 100,000 troops at Fort Monroe and began fighting his way up the peninsula toward Richmond. At Seven Pines, Confederate commander Joseph Johnston was severely wounded and replaced by 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 that same Virginia Peninsula that ignited a sweeping chain of events that would alter the course of the war.
In May 1861, three runaway slaves rowed a stolen boat and surrendered to the Union-occupied Fort Monroe. Their arrival created a legal dilemma. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was still on the books, and strictly speaking, the United States Army was obligated to return them to their owner. The next day, a Confederate officer arrived under a flag of truce and demanded the property back.
The fort’s commander, General Benjamin Franklin Butler, rejected the request. The runaways had revealed they were going to help construct Confederate gun emplacements aimed directly at Fort Monroe. Butler curtly dismissed the Confederate officer, calling the escaped slaves “contrabands of war. ”
Butler reasoned that they were still property, but enemy property, and therefore lawful for the Union to seize in wartime.
Within days, he had two hundred fugitive slaves at the fort’s door, and he took them all in. He realized that by seizing this source of labor and aid, he could weaken the Confederacy. In Washington, Lincoln and his cabinet followed the unfolding drama. The president took no formal action.
He was not going to encourage people to break the law, but he certainly was not going to see slaves who ran away returned to their bondage. He later told Congress that slaves who had achieved their actual freedom were not going to be molested in that. The news of the contrabands spread quickly, both throughout the Union and among the enslaved themselves. Enslaved people did not want to be degraded or brutalized anymore.
They did not want to exist as property. They did not wait for Lincoln to free them. They became agents in their own emancipation. Lincoln had hoped to keep the opposition to slavery and the restoration of the Union on two separate but parallel tracks.
He wanted to solve the rebellion militarily and slavery politically. But a year into the war, he found that these two tracks insisted on converging. Congress passed a series of largely ineffective laws called the Confiscation Act, 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 the United States. In the summer of 1862, he wrote to newspaper editor Horace Greeley: “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. In the wake of a string of devastating defeats in the Eastern Theater, he now saw emancipation as a military necessity.
“We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued,” he said. Lincoln’s coming action would test the constitutional limits of the presidency. The Constitution made the president Commander-in-Chief in time of war, but it did not describe the full extent of those powers. Lincoln reasoned he should be allowed to do things that would weaken the enemy’s ability to carry on war.
What would weaken the Confederacy? Free their slaves. Give them every incentive to run to Union lines. Undermine the Confederate ability to continue the rebellion.
On July 22nd, 1862, Lincoln unveiled a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to his stunned cabinet. Secretary of Treasury Salmon Chase thought it 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 it immediately, but Secretary of State William Seward cautioned that it would be perceived as an act of desperation after the failed Peninsula Campaign. The president agreed to wait for 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, nearly as many casualties as in two days at Shiloh.
It was the bloodiest day in American military history. Because the Confederates were forced to retreat into Virginia, the Union claimed victory, though tactically it was a draw. Five days later, on September 22nd, 1862, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It was a threat pointed directly at the Confederacy.
The rebelling states had until January 1st to cease hostilities, or else slaves in those states would be forever free. It was a revolutionary moment. For white Southerners, they recognized that this war for Union was now a war for Union and the destruction of slavery. The North had raised the stakes.
The Confederates turned the proclamation into a rallying point. Eight hundred miles from Washington, in the woodlands outside Corinth, Mississippi, they were determined to avenge their losses at Shiloh. Following their victory there, Union forces had advanced twenty-two miles south to Corinth and seized its prized railroad junction. For more than four months, a large garrison had occupied the strategic town.
In October 1862, the Confederates were determined to take it back. 22,000 Confederate soldiers under 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. After a savage two-day fight, the Confederate attack was repulsed.
Corinth was permanently under Union control. The desperate gamble 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 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 was just a short two- or three-day walk from the breadbasket of Mississippi, an area of large plantations and a significant number of slaves. Once Corinth fell and was occupied by Union forces, it became the linchpin of Union control in northeast Mississippi.
Before the war, escaping slaves had tended to run on their own, seeking freedom along an underground railroad leading north. But this mass movement was unlike anything before. This time, they brought whole families. They brought their children.
They calculated that this was the moment when freedom was going to come, so this was the moment to get the entire family out of slavery. By war’s end, some 500,000 to 1 million of the South’s 4 million slaves would have escaped to Union lines. The Union garrison at Corinth was 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.
Men who had grown up in Michigan or Iowa had likely never seen an African-American before. For temporary shelter, the army issued the contrabands old tents. But at Corinth, the former slaves were determined to transform a refugee camp into a community. They laid out streets, built a church, a hospital, and a school.
They planted and harvested crops. Most importantly, they planted seeds of hope. They set up their own camps, grew food, tried to heal each other, and lived out some semblance of life as free or at least quasi-free people. Except now, for the first time, they were paid for their labor.
In the South, it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write. At Corinth, volunteers from the American Missionary Association arrived to instruct the refugees. They recognized that freedom would not mean much until these men, women, and children learned to read and write. It became a focus of life in the Corinth Contraband Camp.
By March 1863, there were about 3,600 men, women, and children there. Almost half 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 build and travel one hundred miles to a refugee center in Memphis. That was the end of the Corinth contraband camp. Its life was short, full of hope and promise, but blown away by the changes in the military situation.
The story of Corinth was in some ways the story of what happened everywhere. The 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 Lee’s Confederates positioned along the heights above the town. One Confederate stated the charging Federals melted like snow coming down on warm ground. The debacle resulted in 12,000 senseless casualties.
Two weeks later, in the Western theater, came 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 under General William Rosecrans forced the Confederate army to retreat.
It was a victory Lincoln desperately needed. But the cost was staggering. At the Battle of Stones River, the armies lost a stunning 31% of their men, exceeding even the casualties at Shiloh. The shocking death tolls were another nightmare for a public growing numb to the bloodbaths of the war.
Lincoln said that if there was a worse place than hell, he was in it. In the dying light of 1862, America’s fiery trial seemed to be a war without end. Yet among the enslaved, word was spreading like wildfire. There was good news coming.
A chariot was coming. And they did not want to be left behind.
