BUCKNER, THE DEFENDER OF DONELSON.
SHILOH—THE FIRST GRAND BATTLE
No Confederate who fought at Shiloh has ever said that he found any point on that bloody field easy to assail.—Colonel William Preston Johnston (Son of the Confederate General, Albert Sidney Johnston, killed at Shiloh).
In the history of America many battles had been fought, but the greatest of them were skirmishes compared with the gigantic conflicts of the Old World under Marlborough and Napoleon. On the field of Shiloh, for the first time, two great American armies were to engage in a mighty struggle that would measure up to the most important in the annals of Europe. And the pity of it was that the contestants were brethren of the same household, not hereditary and unrelenting enemies.
At Fort Donelson the western South was not slain—it was only wounded. The chief commander of that part of the country, Albert Sidney Johnston, determined to concentrate the scattered forces and to make a desperate effort to retrieve the disaster of Donelson. He had abandoned Bowling Green, had given up Nashville, and now decided to collect his troops at Corinth, Mississippi. Next in command to Johnston was General Beauregard who fought at Bull Run, and who had come from Virginia to aid Johnston. There also came Braxton Bragg, whose name had become famous through the laconic expression, “A little more grape, Captain Bragg,” uttered by Zachary Taylor at Buena Vista; Leonidas Polk who, though a graduate of West Point, had entered the church and for twenty years before the war had been Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, and John C. Breckinridge, former Vice President of the United States. The legions of the South were gathered at Corinth until, by the 1st of April, 1862, they numbered forty thousand.
Meantime, the Union army had moved southward and was concentrating at Pittsburg Landing, on the Tennessee River, an obscure stopping place for boats in southern Tennessee, and some twenty miles northeast from Corinth. The name means more now than merely a landing place for river craft. It was clear that two mighty, hostile forces were drawing together and that ere long there would be a battle of tremendous proportions, such as this Western hemisphere had not then known.
General Grant had no idea that the Confederates would meet him at Pittsburg Landing. He believed that they would wait for an attack on their entrenchments at Corinth. The position his army occupied at the Landing was a kind of quadrilateral, enclosed on three sides by the river and several small streams that flow into it. As the early days of April passed there were ominous rumors of the coming storm; but Grant was so sure that Johnston would not attack that he spent the night of the 5th of April at Savannah, some miles down the Tennessee River.
It was Saturday night. For two weeks the Union troops had occupied the undulating tableland that stretched away from the river at the Landing. There was the sound of the plashing streams overflowing from recent rains, there were revelry and mirth around the thousand camp-fires; but there was no sound to give warning of the coming of forty thousand men, who had for two days been drawing nearer with a steady tread, and during this night were deploying around the Union camp, only a mile away. There was nothing to indicate that the inevitable clash of arms was but a few hours in the future.