The Battle of Shiloh

In late 1861 President Abraham Lincoln and his generals put together a strategy that they hoped would win the Civil War and reunite the Country. Part of this plan was to win the war in the west. To do so they would have to seize the Mississippi River and split the Confederacy in half. The officer they chose to execute the plan was Major General Ulysses S. Grant. At the same time President Jefferson Davis and his generals developed their own plan to destroy the Union Army and capture Washington D.C. The officer President Davis chose to carry out this plan in the west was Major General Albert Sidney Johnston.

On April 27,1822 U.S. Grant was born in Ohio he was raised a country boy and for that reason became very good with horses. In 1839 he went to WestPoint Military Academy, where he graduated the lowest in his class. In 1846-1848 he fought in the Mexican-American War where he showed promise as an Officer. After the war he was stationed in California and his new wife stayed in Missouri. Because of this separation he started to drink too much. The drinking forced him to resign his commission and he returned to Galena, Ohio with his wife to run his father’s mercantile store. He was a very bad businessman and by the start of the Civil War the store had closed and he was close to bankruptcy.

At the start of the Civil War the governor of Ohio gave Grant a Commission of rank of Lieutenant Colonel for the State Militia. At first he served as a Recruiting officer and later he was given command of a small army. With this army and with the help of the Union Navy in early 1862 Grant captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson that were located on both the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. After Fort Henry Grant moved his Army south where he planned to meet up with General Buell who was marching south crossing the Tennessee River. Buell was to meet Grant at Savanna, Tennessee. At a place called Pittsburgh Landing Grant pushed his forces out and on April 6,1862 was attacked by General Johnston at 5:00 A.M. in the morning. This was a surprise attack and took the Union forces completely off guard. The Union Army was routed and hundreds of its soldiers were slaughtered. At 2:30 P.M. that same afternoon Johnston was wounded in the back of the leg, the bullet hit a major artery and because Johnston refused any medical attention and kept on commanding his forces, he bled to death. With his death the Confederate States of America lost one of its best Generals. The sad part of all this is that a simple tourniquet would have saved his life. 

That night the wounded and the dead were all over the battlefield. Not just the Union side but also the Confederates. A fire started and burned a lot of the wounded soldiers to death and those who were not burned died of thirst and a lot of the dying soldiers were found by a pond that was on the battlefield. A great number of them died while trying to get a drink and the water the next morning had turned pink from the blood of the dead. A rainstorm put out the fires. 

name Shiloh means peace That night Grant was in turmoil about what had happened and when asked by General Sherman what he would do he answered “We lost today we’ll lick em’ tomorrow.” This is very important because it shows the type of man General Grant was. No matter how many times he was beat he always got back up again and kept on fighting. The next morning Buell joined Grant’s army and the two of them won the battle of Shiloh. This was seen as the bloodiest battle up to date, of course it was surpassed later on in the war with even more bloody battles. The irony of the battle and where it was fought is that the and on those two days peace was nowhere to be found.

General Grant went on to be Commanding General of the Union forces and after the war he became the President of the United States not once but twice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom, The Civil War Era, Ballentine Books, New York, 1988

Stein, Richard, Battlefields Across America: Shiloh, Twenty-First Century Books, New York, 1997

Tori Raney

8^th Grade

Rossville Jr. High