Confederates in the Attic (26 page)

Each year, Sams explored a different aspect of the battle: the role of artillery, for instance, or a theme, such as fear. His costume was a way of getting deeper into the experience, a sort of pilgrim’s scallop. The army jacket was the one he’d worn during his own army service in Germany. The flag was a replica of the banner carried by a Tennessee unit at Shiloh.

Sams also carried the same map of the park Bryson Powers had shown me, covered with topographical lines and tiny circles and squares labeling monuments and markers. “I’m a concrete person, not an abstract one,” Sams said. “I try to look out over the field and see what they saw. It doesn’t fall into place until I look hard at the ground, but then it’s click, click, click.”

Running his finger across the chart, he explained that the hundreds of red circles denoted “the good guys,” while blue represented Union positions. Pointing at a rash of blue and red dots in an otherwise blank section of map labeled Lost Field, he plunged straight into the woods. “My theme for this year is chaos,” he called over his shoulder.

I scrambled after him. Ten minutes later, scratched and sweaty, we emerged in a small clearing. This was the aptly named Lost Field. Several markers to Mississippi units skirted one edge. A marker labeled Burial Place: 49th Illinois Infantry perched at the field’s center. Judging from the close-packed graves, this lonely glade had witnessed one of the short, sharp clashes that together comprised what Foote called the “disorganized, murderous fistfight” that was Shiloh.

Sams turned to me with a contented grin. “You always read about the confusion,” he said, “with all these panicked units wandering through the woods and bumping into each other.” He gazed across the cramped, grave-strewn field. “Click, click, click,” he said.

As we straggled back to the road, Sams showed me another grave: a stone in the shape of an oak stump, etched with the name “J. D. Putnam.” A short text on the stump said: “His comrades buried him where he fell and cut his name in an oak tree which stood here. In 1901, Thomas Steele recognized the burial place, the name he helped to cut in 1862 still being legible on the stump.” The Wisconsin veterans replaced the stump with this granite replica as a permanent marker of their position at the battle.

“I like to think of these old guys coming back and remembering what they went through as young men,” Sams said. “No other war in America could both sides come back and say, ‘This is where it happened, this is what I did.’”

Glancing at Sams’s map, I realized we stood near the scene of the battle’s climax, at the so-called Hornet’s Nest. I asked Sams if he wanted to have a look. He shook his head. The park opened soon and he wanted to finish his mission before Shiloh filled with visitors. “I’ve got some chaos to check out over by Bloody Pond,” he said, vanishing into the trees.

The Hornet’s Nest was a tangled copse of small trees and brush. A split-rail fence ran along its front, just beside a wagon trail known as the Sunken Road. On the other side of the road lay a bucolic pasture called Duncan Field. On the first day at Shiloh, 6,000 Federals crouched in the Hornet’s Nest and Sunken Road, fighting back eleven rebel charges across Duncan Field. The twelfth charge—aided by what was then the largest artillery barrage in U.S. history—finally forced the Union defenders to surrender. But the Yankees’ staunch
defense of the Nest turned the whole battle, stalling the rebels long enough for Grant to regroup and take on reinforcements. Or so I’d always read.

I walked into the middle of Duncan Field and turned slowly in a circle. Here was a 360-degree panorama that corresponded to the Platonic ideal of a Civil War battleground I’d carried in my head since childhood. A broad meadow bounded by wilderness, with a mud-chinked log cabin lying in amongst the trees. The crooked, hand-hewn simplicity of a split-rail fence. The Sunken Road, worn down by pioneer wagons toting apples and timber and corn. Bronze-snouted cannons poking out from between tall oak trees.

Succumbing to a boyish impulse, I rushed the Union line, trying to conjure the buzz of bullets that gave the Hornet’s Nest its name. Then, reaching the Nest, I turned and became a Yankee, crouched in the Sunken Road with an imaginary musket resting on the split-rail fence. When I was a boy, the field would have instantly filled with smoke and flame and shrieking rebels. But now, as a fantasy-impaired adult, I found myself glancing around self-consciously to make sure no one was watching.

I sat on a log and gazed at the pastoral scene through grown-up eyes. The Nest was lovely, covered in pine needles and moss and speckled by sunlight glinting through the trees. From this vantage, the whole notion of a “battlefield park” seemed a contradiction in terms. Preserved here for eternity was peace, beauty and quiet—the precise opposite of the events memorialized.

When Ambrose Bierce arrived at Shiloh on the battle’s second day, he found a “smoking jungle” quivering with cannon fire and “the sickening spat of lead against flesh.” The woods had been reduced to blasted stumps. “All the wretched debris of the battle still littered the spongy earth as far as one could see,” Bierce wrote. “Knapsacks, canteens, haversacks distended with soaken and swollen biscuits, blankets beaten into the soil by the rain, rifles with bent barrels or splintered stocks.” Mutilated horses lay everywhere, as did men, “all dead apparently, except one.”

Bierce studied the wounded man. “He lay face upward, taking in his breath in convulsive, rattling snorts,” Bierce wrote. “A bullet had clipped a groove in his skull, above the temple; from this the brain
protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings. I had not previously known one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain.” Bierce debated whether to bayonet the dying man, but decided otherwise and marched on.

Now, where 100,000 men had clashed that April day in 1862, I sat alone on a moss-covered log, listening to a solitary bird warble somewhere in the trees above.

I
F THE RAW FEEL
of battle eluded me, another piece of Shiloh’s history was easier to grasp. As Scott Sams pointed out, Shiloh had two pasts: the actual battle, and its remembrance by those who fought there. “In our youth our hearts were touched with fire,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, twice wounded in battle. “We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life at its top.” In later life, these same men helped lay out Shiloh and other battlefield parks, recalling in Wordsworthian tranquillity the brave deeds of their youth and memorializing themselves for posterity.

When Shiloh became a park in the 1890s, each state was allowed to build one monument cut from enduring materials, such as granite, marble or bronze. Iowa’s memorial stood seventy-five feet high, weighed over half a million pounds, and had to be hauled to Shiloh by barge and ox. It showed a woman symbolizing “Fame,” inscribing the names of dead Iowans into the monument’s stone. A nurturing breast slipped from her loose robe. Park rangers later confided to me that Fame nurtured Boy Scouts these days, who snapped pictures of each other sucking on the monument’s marble nipple.

The post-War South couldn’t afford monuments on this scale. Nor were all Southerners enamored of battlefield parks, which diehards regarded as a perfidious scheme to glorify Yankee victory. In the end, most Southern states did erect monuments at Shiloh, but not the hundreds of additional memorials to individual units constructed by the North. So, as in war, blue massively outnumbered gray at Shiloh and most other battlefields.

Also, while Northern monuments tended toward the grandiose and triumphalist, Southern memorials possessed an elegiac quality that was somehow more powerful, at least for me. The most striking
by far was a monument honoring soldiers from all Southern states, “Whether sleeping in distant places, or graveless here in traceless dust.” Erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy near the high-water mark of the rebel advance at Shiloh, the memorial showed a downcast angel surrendering a laurel wreath to a Grim Reaper-like figure. The sculptor titled his work
Victory Defeated by Death and Night
. The death was that of General Johnston; night referred to the darkness that denied the rebels a chance to complete their near-triumph on the battle’s first day.

This was a microcosm in marble of the Lost Cause romance that took hold in the South after Appomattox. The Civil War became an epic might-have-been, a “defeated victory” in which the valorous South succumbed to flukish misfortune—Johnston’s untimely death, for instance, or Stonewall Jackson’s mortal wounding by his own men at Chancellorsville—and to the North’s superior manpower and materiel. I later found a program from the monument’s unveiling in 1917, which revealed another side to the unreconciled South. It noted the various objects placed in the monument’s cornerstone for eternity: flags, coins, a lock of General Johnston’s hair, and a photograph of two local dignitaries “in Ku-Klux regalia.”

Just beyond
Victory Defeated
, I reached a simple hunk of stone chiseled with the names of Alabamans who fought at Shiloh. A minivan drove up with a bumper sticker that read “World’s Greatest Grandpa.” Leaping from the van, an elderly woman in a floppy hat ran her finger along the monument. “He’s still here!” she shouted toward the van. Then to me: “That’s my great-grandfather, Captain Thomas Jenkins.”

His great-granddaughter was a retired Alabama teacher named Edwina. She’d first visited Shiloh with her children in the 1960s and had now returned with her teenaged grandson. “We’re here so he can learn about his Southernness,” she said. Her grandson sat in the van’s backseat, listening to a Walkman. The world’s greatest grandpa perched impatiently behind the van’s wheel with the engine running.

I asked Edwina what she meant by “Southernness.”

“My husband’s a Northerner—from Boston, the worst kind—and
he’ll always be one,” she said. “We’re like night and day and we’ve been married forty-three years. He’s English and I’m Scottish, in ancestry and temperament. I’m very careful about how I come across to others. Not him. The other day we’re at the movies and people in front of us are talking. I was bothered but I didn’t say anything. He shouted at them, ‘You know there are others here!’ I could have melted through the floor.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this civil war. But Edwina reminded me. “He wants to tell people how to do things, the same way the North tells the South how to live, and did back then.”

Her husband honked the horn. From what Edwina had said, it seemed remarkable that she and the world’s greatest grandpa had stayed together forty-three years. “My South is my South,” Edwina shouted as the minivan sped off, leaving me alone with Captain Thomas Jenkins and his brave Alabamians. I reckoned they’d be pleased to know their efforts hadn’t been entirely in vain.

I pressed on, to Bloody Pond. It was here, at the height of the first day’s fighting, that men from both armies crawled to drink water and soak their wounds. Like other stops on the battlefield, the pond’s bank had a stand with a small audio speaker. I pushed a button and heard the testimony of a local man who visited soon after the battle. “There were dead men and horses, broken artillery carriages and dismounted guns in the pond. Soldiers taking dead men out of the water and laying them in rows on the bank. The water looked like blood.” Now, a father and daughter stood on the bank, skipping stones across the clear, cool water.

Parked nearby was a convertible Mercedes with a vanity license plate: MAYS. A paunchy man in an Izod shirt stood riffling through a briefcase balanced on the roof. Bill Mays was a lawyer from Missouri. He’d arranged his caseload so he could slip away from his office and drive six hours to be here on Shiloh’s anniversary. Like the bus driver I’d met at Fraley Field, Mays had come to track the path of his forebear, a rebel private named Elijah.

Mays dug through his briefcase for one of the elaborate park maps I’d seen several times already. “I’m a lawyer, so I always look for what the preponderance of the evidence suggests,” he said. He knew
that Elijah fought with the 52nd Tennessee, in a place called Cloud Field. A red dot on the map, near where we now stood, denoted a marker to the Tennessee men. But Mays was having trouble finding the corresponding spot on the ground.

I followed him as he plunged, briefcase in hand, in what he guessed was the direction of the monument. Within minutes, we were lost in thigh-high undergrowth. “I’ve been to battlefields in Virginia—they’re like golf courses compared to this,” he said, Izod shirt stained with sweat. As we rested on a log, swatting gnats, I asked Mays why it was so important to track his great-grandfather’s precise movements 133 years ago.

“I’m here because the issues are still here,” he said. “People still want to be independent of central authority. The evidence suggests that rebels like Elijah believed strongly in their individual right to determine what their government should be.” He started to open his briefcase, then paused, as though realizing he wasn’t in court. “I’m a Republican,” he went on. “Tracking down Elijah gives me some perspective on what it is I believe in, and what commitment to your beliefs is all about.”