MOBILE, Alabama -- “All battles are tragic,” Winston Groom writes in his stunning new history, “Shiloh, 1862” (National Geographic, $30). But as he then goes on to prove for over 400 pages, Shiloh holds a particularly bleak distinction among a long list of horrific Civil War clashes that includes Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness and Franklin. It isn’t just because of Shiloh’s scale or number of casualties, both of which were suitably immense — 170 regiments fought, and more than 20,000 men were killed or wounded. It has more to do with the shock to the nation’s psyche, the realization after Shiloh that something truly terrible and profound had been let loose on the land and that there would be hell to pay before peace could return.
Groom has established an impressive reputation of late for engaging narrative histories. Just in the last few years he has written books about the Battle of New Orleans, Kearney’s westward march and Vicksburg. Each of these efforts has been marked by a nicely paced, readable, informed style leavened by brief biographies of the principal players and artfully chosen contemporary quotes (“I chose the good writers” he explains). “Shiloh, 1862” continues this tradition, and how. From his first sentences — “By early April 1862 the Spring storm season had already begun in Tennessee. The thunderheads made up on the southern plains, then tore across the South with lightening and killer tornadoes. Terrifying as this was, it paled before the violent thing then gathering along the Mississippi River valley” — the reader feels inexorably borne along toward the great battle.
Though the Civil War was already a year old by the spring of ‘62 and there had been a few battles, most notably Bull Run, nobody yet had a sense of just how long and terrible it was going to be. Shiloh changed that. Of the thousands of young officers and soldiers in both armies, few had “seen the elephant,” as the quaint 19th-century phrase went. Yet if they were mostly green, they seethed with sectional hatred. Groom does a real service in reminding the reader just how powerful this animosity was, stoked by years of bitter political debate and flare-ups like Bleeding Kansas and John Brown’s Raid. “Twenty years of unabated name-calling and hatred building had created a generation of young men who could be turned into raw killers – a recipe for tragedy.”
Shiloh began with a Confederate surprise attack through the blooming woods and thickets hard by the banks of the Tennessee River. Among the Johnny Rebs that day was a 21-year-old Welshman named Henry Morton Stanley. This was the same adventurer who, years later, would penetrate Africa to famously find David Livingstone. But on that soft morning he and a 17-year-old companion gathered violets and put them in their caps as a forlorn wish for peace. When they and their comrades exploded into the Union lines — “Dixie” playing, volleys of fire and smoke rolling before them — the enemy was overwhelmed and very nearly driven into the river. Some held their ground, and one Union youngster recalled his officer frantically “jumping up and down like a hen on a hot griddle” ordering him to shoot. When the lad answered that he couldn’t see a thing, the lieutenant ordered him to fire anyway, and he did, though thinking “it was ridiculous to shoot into a cloud of smoke.”
Groom writes in his author’s note that what most struck him about Shiloh was its “enormity, its ferocity, and most of all its disorder.” This last point is especially important in grasping what that battle was like for the common soldiers on both sides. Groom certainly gives the overall strategy and tactical developments their due, but at the same time his narrative manages to convey the confusion and chaos to, frankly, an uncomfortable degree. Clearly, Groom’s own military experience informs this perspective, inimitable by writers and academicians who haven’t “seen the elephant” for themselves. “Shiloh, 1862” is no dry, dispassionate history. It is rather a gut-wrenching look at what that terrible battle was like to those in the thick of it and what that augured for an innocent country.
John Sledge edits the Press-Register’s Books page. He may be reached at the Press-Register, P.O. Box 2488, Mobile, AL 36652.