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By Root 1746 0

in numbers by now, with Wallace’s and Buell’s men on the field, but the Confederates were very stubborn. They had not done any fighting before to speak of, but they did not propose to give up this fight until they had to, and they were hard to convince. Step by step they were driven back until most of the ground they had won the day before had been taken away from them, but they were not to be hurried, and some of this day’s fighting was as hard and as costly as anything that had happened on the first day. A regular army artillerist was told to take his six guns and blast some Rebels out of a thicket in his front. He hammered the place with canister and with shell, but it was a long time before this particular knot of resistance was broken. When he got to the place afterward he found one hundred dead Confederates and twenty-seven dead horses, not to mention a wrecked caisson, bushes uprooted by canister, and any number of young trees that had been splintered and knocked down by shell fire.… These Confederates had needed a great deal of persuading.16

But the tide had turned. By midafternoon Beauregard could see that his army had been fought out and that there was nothing to do but get back to Corinth as quickly as possible. The shattered Confederate army withdrew, and the Union army — equally shattered, except for its reinforcements — moved forward just far enough to make certain that its foes were really retreating, and then went into camp. It had lost thirteen thousand men and it had just been through two of the very worst days of the war. If the Southerners proposed to go back to Corinth, nobody near Pittsburg Landing wanted to keep them from doing it.

The battlefield was a fearful place, with unattended wounded men lying everywhere and hideous numbers of dead bodies turning black and swollen under the April sun. Burial details worked all week, sometimes digging regular graves, sometimes doing little more than toss dirt over dead bodies. In one place a great trench was dug to hold seven hundred dead Southerners.… A few weeks later a western regiment came up to the landing on its way to join the main body and tramped glumly across the littered fighting ground. The men passed one makeshift burial place from which, in ghastly symbolism, a lifeless arm was raised from the earth, an empty hand groping with stiff open fingers for the sky. A soldier looked at it, broke ranks, took a hardtack from his haversack, and put it in the open hand. Then he rejoined his comrades and the men tramped on to the front.17

2. Springtime of Promise

It had begun with flags and cheers and the glint of brave words on the spring wind, with drumbeats setting a gay rhythm for the feet of young men who believed that war would beat clerking. That had been a year ago; now the war had come down to uninstructed murderous battle in a smoky woodland, where men who had never been shown how to fight stayed in defiance of all logical expectation and fought for two nightmarish days. And because they had done this the hope for an easy war and a cheap victory was gone forever.

It had been possible, before, for a Northerner or a Southerner to believe that the other side was really not very much in earnest and would presently give up. Grant had had that delusion before Shiloh; so, perhaps, had Johnston, who whistled his men north from Corinth with contemptuous remarks about “agrarian mercenaries” in the northern army.1 After Shiloh no intelligent man could feel as Grant and Johnston had felt.

For Shiloh underlined one of the basic facts about the war — that it was being fought by men of enormous innate pugnacity: tenacious men who would quit a fight once begun only when someone was beaten. North and South had not gone to war in a mere fit of peevish irritability; the men they sent into their armies had something on their minds and were desperately in earnest.

Yet the spring when this fact became obvious was also, for the North, the spring of greatest promise — the spring in which final victory, if it could not be inexpensive, could at least be considered