Firsthand Account of the Battle of Shiloh Written by a

Northern Soldier
Digital History ID 403

Author: Edgar Pearce

Date:1862
Annotation:
Under the Anaconda Plan, Union forces in the West were to
seize control of the Mississippi River while Union forces in the
East tried to capture the new Confederate capital in Richmond. In
the western theater, the Confederates had built two forts, Fort
Donelson along the Cumberland River and Fort Henry on the
Tennessee River, which controlled the Kentucky and western
Tennessee region and blocked the Union's path to the Mississippi.
The Union officer responsible for capturing these forts was
Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), a West Point graduate who had
resigned from the army because of a drinking problem and who
was working in his father's tanning shop when the war began. In
February 1862, gunboats under Grant's command took Fort
Henry and ten days later, Grant's men took Fort Donelson,
forcing 13,000 Confederates to surrender.
Grant and some 42,000 men then proceeded south along
the Tennessee River. A Confederate force of 40,000 men, under
the command of Beauregard and Johnston tried to surprise Grant
before other Union forces could join him at the Battle of Shiloh.
In two days of heavy fighting during which there were 13,000
Union casualties and over 10,000 Confederate casualties, Grant
successfully pushed back the southern forces. By early June,
Union forces controlled the Mississippi River as far south as
Memphis, Tennessee.
A first-hand account of the Battle of Shiloh, written by a northern
soldier, follows.
Document:
I received your letter last Sunday morning and will freely admit
that I was very much pleased to see that you had really devoted
a whole sheet to your unworthy brother away down South in
Dixie and in the midst of Secesh [the Confederacy], but although
it is a[n] exciting fact, it is here that we are in the midst of

Secesh [Confederates] for they lay all around us in the shelf of

death, and now only a few rods from [us are]...over 250 dead
bodies and all secesh, we did not bury Union men & rebels
together at all.... A great number of them were killed on Sunday
& when I rode on the field on Friday last dead bodies could still
be seen lying round in the brush. It was an useful 24 hours work,
but thank fortune now all is quiet and we still sit ...in our own
beds.... But...we know not at what time the hole may open again
in all its fury. We are directly in the advance, but now they have
moved hosts of our army to the front and we are back of the
center, and cannot be surprised as we were before....
He [the enemy] will at least make a desperate resistance, if he
does not make another attack himself, he is said to have an army
of 120,000 at his command, but he may not hold this number, 5
rebel deserts that came here a day or two ago say there he used
all the eloquence he was master of to get his men to make an
advance on us again but was unable to get his men to come up
to fire. If this is true than it shows that his men are sensible to
the last, for the probability is great they will get whipped most
outrageously, if they do try again, for we are the conquerors, and
they are whipped and disheartened.... We are flushed with
victory and they are disheartened by defeat, they were too
confident on last Sunday evening a week ago, when Beauregard
telegraphed home that this was a second Manassas [Bull Run],
that the Yankees fought with stubbornness, and with the bravery
of despair, but the southern blood was too much for them, and
that the Federals were completely whipped, in the next morning,
he would take and kill the whole of the Federal forces....
[Confederate] General Beauregard is an able General, or he
would not have caught us in the way he did before. I can't help
admiring him as a military man, though I do wish someone had
been lucky enough to shoot him. However Sidney A. Johnston
[sic], who was the Commander in Chief was killed, and I have
stood over his body....
I have rode over this field and through the dead...when the
stench was so intolerable that my company, and old soldiers at
that, had to throw their dinners all overboard, and that on
horseback too....I had human bodies for my landmarks from
Monday till Friday night, and by that time they were so bloated
that you could hardly tell what they were, and Union men at
that...literally torn all to pieces, heads gone and bodies cut right

in two...."
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