The Battle of Shiloh: West Tennessee and Pittsburg Landing
ON the westerly bank of the Tennessee, two hundred and nineteen miles from its mouth, is the historic spot of Pittsburg Landing. Its site is just below the great bend in the river, where, having trended many miles along the boundary-line of Alabama, it sweeps northerly in a majestic curve, and thence, flowing past Fort Henry, pours its waters into the Ohio. The neighboring country is undulating, broken into hills and ravines, and wooded for the most part with tall oak-trees and occasional patches of undergrowth. Fens and swamps, too, intervene, and at the spring freshets the back-water swells the creeks, inundating the roads near the river's margin. It is, in general, a rough and unprepossessing region, wherein cultivated clearings seldom break the continuity of forest. Pittsburg Landing, scarcely laying claim, with its two log cabins, even to the dignity of hamlet, is distant a dozen miles northeasterly from the crossing of the three State lines of Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee,--a mere point of steamboat freighting and debarkation for Corinth, eighteen miles southwest, for Purdy, about as far northwest, and for similar towns on the adjoining railroads. The river-banks at the Landing rise quite eighty feet, but are cloven by a series of ravines, through one of which runs the main road thence to Corinth, forking to Purdy. Beyond the crest of the acclivity stretches back a kind of table-land, rolling and ridgy, cleared near the shores, but wooded and rough farther from the river. A rude log chapel, three miles out, is called Shiloh Church; and, just beyond, rise not far from each other two petty steams, Owl Creek and Lick Creek, which, thence diverging, run windingly into the Tennessee, five miles apart, on either side of the Landing.
On this rugged, elevated plateau, encompassed by the river and its little tributaries like a picture in its frame, lay encamped, on the night of the 5th of April, 1862, five divisions of General Grant's Army of West Tennessee, with a sixth, five miles down the bank, at Crump's Landing. .
The leading division of Buell's Army of the Ohio lay at Savannah, nine miles down the river, on the other bank. Wearied that night with their four days' march from Columbia, Nelson's men slept heavily. A long rest had been promised them, to be broken only the next day by a formal Sunday inspection, and leisurely during the week ensuing it would join the associate Army of West Tennessee; for transportation had not yet been made ready for its passage of the river, nor had General Halleck yet come down from St. Louis to direct the movement on Corinth, for which it had marched. Behind Nelson, the rest of Buell's army trailed that night its line of bivouac-fires full thirty miles backward on the road to Columbia.
Silent in Shiloh woods yonder, within sight of Grant's camp-fires and within sound of his noisy pickets, lay, grimly awaiting the dawn, forty thousand Confederate soldiers. It was the third of the three great armies drawn together that night towards Pittsburg Landing,--an army supposed by its fourscore thousand dormant foes, from commanding general to drummer-boy, to be lying perdu behind its Corinth field-works, twenty miles away. It had crept close to the Union lines, three-fourths of a mile from the pickets, less than two from the main camp,--so close that throughout the night the bivouac hum and stir and the noisy random shots of untrained sentinels on the opposing lines indistinguishably mingled. This stealthilymoved host lay on its arms, weary after a hard day's march over miry roads on the 4th, a day's forming on the 5th, and a bivouac in the drenching rain of the night intervening. No fires were lighted on the advanced lines, and, farther back, the few embers glowing here and there were hidden in holes dug in the ground. Most of the men lay awake, prone in their blankets, or chatted in low tones, grouped around the stacked arms, awaiting the supplies which commissaries and staff-officers were hurrying from the rear; for, with the improvidence of raw troops, they had already spent their five days' rations at the end of three, and were ill prepared to give battle. But others, oppressed with sleep, had for the time forgotten both cold and hunger. .
Ere the gray of dawn, the advanced line of Johnston's army, composed of Hardee's corps, strengthened on its right by Gladden's brigade from Bragg's, stealthily crept through the narrow belt of woods beyond which all night they had seen their innocent enemy's camp-fires blazing. No fife or drum was allowed; the cavalry bugles sounded no reveille; but, with suppressed voices, the subordinate officers roused their men, for many of whom, indeed, the knowledge of what was to come had proved too exciting for sound slumber. Bragg's line as quickly followed, and, in suit, the lines of Polk and Breckinridge.