Shiloh, TN

A morning breeze drifts up from the Tennessee River where trees hug the steep bluff at Pittsburg Landing in Shiloh Military Park. April 2012

In early April 1862 roughly 40,000 Union Troops disembarked from steamships here, march up this bluff and camped in the surrounding wilderness. Their eventual objective, thirty miles inland, the strategic Confederate railroad hub at Corinth, Mississippi.

Camping in the dense forests around a small wilderness church called Shiloh thousands of mostly inexperienced Union troopers along with their officers failed to heed evidence of an approaching catastrophe…

On the morning of April 6th 1862, 44,000 Confederate troops surprised and overran the lounging Union Army here at Shiloh sending thousands of soldiers running for their lives. The retreating Federals instinctively ran back toward Pittsburg Landing and the perceived safety of the steamboats and the Tennessee River.

The forests and ravines that surround Pittsburg Landing became a last-stand for the Union Army on April 6th 1862. Although many Union regiments stood their ground and continued to hold back the Rebel attack, thousands of panic stricken Union soldiers sought safety and escape from the Confederate onslaught in the lee of this bluff along the river that day.

As dusk and rainfall ended the fighting on April 6th Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, wounded in the fighting, approached his commander Ulysses S. Grant and remarked, “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Grant, himself wounded in a fall from his horse, clenching and puffing a cigar famously retorted, “Yes..Lick’em tomorrow, though.”

The following day, April 7th 1862, the regrouped and reinforced Union Army counterattacked and sent the Confederates retreating back to Corinth. The Battle of Shiloh ended with 24,000 casualties from both sides laying about the forests and fields of this remote locale in the Tennessee wilderness.

To the right of this photograph is the wide and deep Tennessee River. To the left, at the top of the bluff, now resides Shiloh National Cemetery where 3,500 mostly “unknown” Civil War soldiers are buried.

Image and text by Michael Falco