[We give way in this issue to Judge Lewis M. Hosea, Judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati and late Brevet Major U. S. Army, 16th U. S. Infantry, who gives us the viewpoint as seen by Buell’s army. In this paper by this distinguished gentleman, appears the best description of how it feels to be under fire and how the Confederate columns appeared that we have ever seen.
That particular description deserves to live as a classic and no one may read it without afterwards seeing “the surging line of butternut and gray moving rapidly across our front” and “the accompaniment of a leaden blast of hell sweeping into one’s face as though it were a sort of fierce and deadly wind impossible to stand against.”
It will also be observed that Judge Hosea takes decided issue as to certain facts published in the History of the Shiloh Battlefield Commission which we take pleasure in publishing and will accord the same privilege to any one who cares to reply, as it is by this kind of personal testimony that the truth of history is eventually established.
To the readers of Taylor-Trotwood we wish to state that these Historic Highways of the South have been running serially through Trotwood’s Monthly for fifteen months and include The Hermitage, The Creek War Highways, New Orleans, Battle of Franklin, Ft. Donelson, Shiloh and others.—The Editor.]
The two days’ battle at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, fought on Sunday and Monday, April 6th and 7th, 1862, viewed from the standpoint of forty years later, looms up as one of the most significant contests of the great Civil War. The entire battlefield was a wilderness of scrub oak and kindred growths, unbroken save by a few settlers’ clearings located at random upon a plain traversed only by irregular “woods-roads,” and by drainage ravines leading by winding courses into the two creeks bounding the field of operations on the north and south—these discharging into the Tennessee River behind the Union Army.
The troops were for the most part new and untried, and the conditions of the ground made the transmission of orders difficult and uncertain. It was impossible for commanders of large bodies to obtain a comprehensive view of the field so as to perceive and provide intelligently for the varying exigencies of the battle as it progressed. They could only guess the swaying movements of the fight by sounds of musketry and by the chance reports of messengers who could locate nothing by fixed monuments. Nor could the men in ranks, or even regimental officers, see beyond a limited distance; and the direction of enfilading or turning movements could be discovered only by the course of bullets among the trees or the tearing of the ground by solid shot or shell.
These things made the battle a supreme test of the quality of the individual units of the army rather than of any directing skill of its higher commanders. The bulldog courage of individual groups of men who hung on and fought “to a finish,” or who, like Prentiss, sacrificed themselves where they stood because of no order to withdraw, delayed the general advance of the enemy and thus saved the first day from overwhelming and complete disaster. It became a case of “night or Blücher;” and when, toward evening, the leading regiments of Buell’s army arrived upon the field and interposed a fresh line of resistance, the Union troops had been driven from the field and huddled as a mass of disorganized fragments in a semicircle of half a mile radius about the landing.
But the Confederates drew off flushed with the spirit of victory and ceased fighting only to prepare for an expected certain and triumphant finish in the morning. Knowing that they had the Union forces hemmed in the semicircle of their lines extending from river to river, every Confederate soldier fully believed that surrender or annihilation of the Union forces would be easy of accomplishment.
This was the spirit and purpose that animated the Confederate forces on Monday when they began to attack soon after daylight on that second day. To the forces of Buell, arriving during the night on transports from Savannah (on the river twenty miles below), and marching up the bank in the dim light of dawn to form a cordon around the fragments of Grant’s army, the scene was dismal and discouraging in the extreme. Making our way through the thousands of men huddled on the bank, hearing at every step the doleful prognostications of defeat, the wooded plain above presented to us visible proof of the disastrous conflict of the day before in the dead and wounded who lay unattended, and the broken and discarded arms and equipments that strewed the ground. These were the sights and sounds that greeted us as we marched to our place in line of battle on the second day; and they fully justified the compliment paid us by our brigade commander, General Lovell H. Rousseau, who says, in his official report of the battle in substance: “Seldom have men gone into battle under such discouraging circumstances, and never have they borne themselves more gallantly.”