Shiloh Reconsidered
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Shiloh Reconsidered.
What can I say about that bloody brawl in the Tennessee pine barrens that hasn’t already been said? Probably not a great deal, except…what happened there after the fighting?
People lived there before and after.
Few, perhaps, but enough for a flatboat landing, a dozen or two farm fields, a peach orchard, some cotton fields, and a small trading village that sported as many as a dozen permanent structures. Altogether, probably less than 200 souls lived in the area. Oh, yes, there was that meeting house, the one that PGT Beauregard used for a headquarters Sunday night and into Monday. People only build churches, large or small, when enough people attend services and help maintain them. So what happened to all those people? Tragically, we don’t know. There’s no known first-hand accounts of the battle by any civilians who lived in the area; none by non-combatants that we can call reliable. So we don’t really know.
They probably didn’t leave.
While it was a flatboat landing—thus seasonal—and only a few steamboats served that part of the Tennessee River, money was going to be short, despite the cash crops around. Bigger towns like Savanna downriver and Hamburg upriver might be attractive to the farmers whose livelihoods artillery shot to ribbons, but getting to either might have been a problem, and living there worse. While digging eight thousand graves might have been lucrative for a few weeks, at four bits a head, it wouldn’t last long anywhere in a wartime economy. An enterprising young man might find work, but one old enough not to be conscripted by the Confederates, probably not. And even the pluckiest young woman would find it hard. Neighbors might have helped each other, but it is doubtful that the three armies that moved through left enough for everyone.
The area may have seen some hard times until the fall, at least.
Riverboats from the Ohio River and beyond still served the communities Tennessee River above Muscle Shoals, but not a lot, and only when the river was high in the spring. It’s not likely that too many steamboats serviced the Tennessee in early 1862, since so many were working for the Union Army. Flatboats and keelboats, built locally to carry goods downriver, would have started their journeys from upstream as early as September to stop at Pittsburg Landing for a night or two, but that left them pretty destitute for five months, at least. There weren’t any relief agencies for civilians in 1862, except a few for the freedmen or “contrabands,” as the onetime slaves were called. But even then, what would Pittsburg Landing residents have to trade for what they needed? Wood, maybe. Perhaps some cotton, or their labor.
What would many of them have done?
While we don’t know for certain, let’s imagine for a moment a young bride whose husband is off in this army or that one, but gets caught in that brawl around her cabin in the woods. What neither Wife nor Hubby knew when he left is that she is with child. While she might have helped with the wounded of either army—or both—and paid in food or in cash, she’s now left on her own. Our sylvan image of the hardy farm wife milking the cows after her water broke is great for movies, but not especially realistic in those pine barrens after 23,000+ casualties, the spring crops either looted or destroyed, and any surviving livestock no longer surviving. Around Pittsburg Landing after the battle, there might not have been enough food for her to live that long, nor would the child have had enough before it is born. More tragedies. And children of either sex, and there might have been some, might have had a hard summer trying to gather enough to stay alive themselves, let alone their families or younger siblings.
Other adults may have been better off, but not much.
With most of the fields ruined by the battle, local water sources polluted, and any structures either shot to pieces or demolished, any surviving able-bodied adults may well have joined the armies when they left simply to trade labor for a living. While they may have returned with cash in a few months, that was still most of a spring and summer without necessary labor to clear the fields and woods, gather salvageable military equipment, and make habitable homes. Let’s remember that the armies didn’t come back to that part of the world after Shiloh: there was nothing there worth fighting for.
But Pittsburg Landing wasn’t abandoned.
Enough survived and stayed around so that the community stayed. The War Department created the National Cemetary in 1866; local labor was almost certainly used to dig up and rebury thousands. Locals used the original Shiloh Meeting House for building materials after it collapsed weeks after the battle (a replica is part of the battlefield park); they built a new church in 1952. There were still farmers in the area with complaints of pigs rooting on the remains of poorly buried dead as late as 1933, when the Federal government created the Shiloh National Military Park. People still live there, but how many are descendents of those who survived the battle, and the aftermath is unknown.
Just more unintended consequences of fighting a war.
The Devil’s Own Day: Shiloh and the American Civil War
Since I had no accounts of civilians in the area, I don’t talk about any of this in the book.
We know there were civilians, but we don’t know who they were. Available from your favorite bookseller or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
Recognizing "Palestine"
Historical Ignorance
And Finally...
On 8 March:
1855: William Poole/Bill the Butcher dies of his wounds in his Christopher Street home in New York, New York. Poole had been the leader of the Washington Street Bowry Boys gang and an enforcer for the No-Nothings, a militant nativist political party. John Morresy of his arch-rival Tammany Ring shot him. A heavily fictionalized version of Poole appeared in the 2002 Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York.
1942: Dutch forces surrender to the Japanese on Java. After a furious week-long fight with the invading Japanese, the Dutch commander, knowing there would be no relief or reinforcement, merely wanted to save what he could. The Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies that followed was anything but benign.
And today is NATIONAL PROOFREADING DAY. Here’s to all the professional proofers out there, including my old buddy Dave, who is bar none the best proofer in the business. These days, I’ve got software to do the job for me, but, sometimes I still get my metters lixed and oth stff mssed up. Corbadidlle Eotin swardlu!