Confederates in the Attic (27 page)

It went deeper than that. The South’s failure to stop the North at Shiloh ultimately led Elijah’s unit to another great battle at Chickamauga. Captured there, Elijah was sent to a prison camp in Indiana where he died a few weeks before the War’s end. Soon after, Elijah’s widow died of cholera, so their kids were raised by a brother who moved to Missouri, near where Bill now lived. “Ultimately, I guess, I’m trying to figure out what my place in the big picture is,” Mays said. “I am who I am, geographically and politically, because of what happened here.”

Mays picked up his briefcase and headed deeper into the woods. I stayed on the log and rested awhile. Until now, I’d regarded others’ retracing of their ancestral footsteps as a bit odd and obsessive. Like birdwatchers who tramped around the globe, fanatically compiling “life lists,” these combat genealogists seemed to be missing the forest for the trees.

But Mays’s story forced me to recall a lonely trip of my own, ten years before, to a remote region of what was then still the Soviet Union. Armed with old maps and a family memoir, I’d trudged
through ankle-high mud until I found the wagon road my father’s father traveled on the day his family fled Czarist Russia. The road ultimately led to a Baltic seaport, to Ellis Island, to me. As Mays had put it, I was who I was because of what happened on that muddy trace in 1906. Thinking back on the trip, I felt envious of Mays and the others I’d met at Shiloh. They had a blood tie to a patch of American soil that I never would.

A
T MIDDAY
I
REACHED
the visitors’ center, a modern building near the Tennessee River. A park ranger named Paul Hawke collected my two-dollar entrance fee. I confessed that I’d already gotten my money’s worth wandering Shiloh since dawn.

Hawke smiled. “One of the pilgrims. We get them every year. Every day, really.” Hawke’s last posting was Pea Ridge, an Arkansas battlefield just off the interstate. “You could tell that half the people stopping there had just seen a sign for a national park on the highway and thought, ‘Clean bathrooms—let’s stop!’” He’d also worked at Gettysburg, which drew thousands of tourists who knew little about the battle, except that it was one of those sites to which all parents should drag their kids. But accidental tourists rarely turned up at Shiloh. “It’s not on the way to anyplace,” Hawke said, “so you tend to get a very devoted breed.”

Shiloh’s isolation, though, hadn’t spared it a growing problem at battlefields across America. The boom market in Civil War relics had unleashed scores of treasure hunters who scavenged after dark with metal detectors. Rangers now patrolled the park with night-vision goggles and had once nabbed two men toting over 130 artifacts. Relics also turned up accidentally; just a month before my visit, a gardener found a live cannonball while planting grass near the visitors’ center. “The dud ratio for Civil War ordnance was fifty percent or more,” Hawke said, “so there’s still a lot of unexploded stuff lying under the ground.”

Hawke, it turned out, specialized in such half-hidden remnants of the Civil War. As part of his park duties, he tramped through the woods around Corinth, searching for earthen defenses thrown up by the Confederates. Hawke had even founded the “Civil War Fortification
Study Group,” which met annually to discuss new research on earthworks. The prosaic nature of the subject appealed to Hawke’s modest nature. “We tend always to focus on the biggest and bloodiest events in war,” he said. “But if you think about it, earthworks are the one tangible survival from the Civil War put there by soldiers themselves for the express purpose of fighting.”

Hawke conceded, though, that earthworks weren’t always that tangible. Most had so eroded that they remained invisible to the naked eye at ground level. But their imprints could be spotted in infrared photographs taken from the air.

“Wars leave what’s called ‘ghost marks’ on the landscape,” Hawke said. This struck me as an apt metaphor for the traces of Civil War memory I myself had been searching for in the course of my journey.

As I chatted with Hawke we were joined by an imposing figure with a handle-bar mustache, tight jeans, cowboy boots, a Stetson and tortoiseshell glasses. He looked like a bookish gunslinger. He turned out to be the park’s historian, Stacy Allen, who agreed to take a few minutes to answer some questions I had about Shiloh.

As it happened, we spoke for three hours and toured the whole battlefield. By the time we were done, this somber, bespectacled Kansan had made me wonder if everything I thought I knew about Shiloh—and about many other battles—was closer to fiction than to fact.

Allen’s revisionism sprang from his academic training as a physical anthropologist. “Traditional historians tend to ignore the best primary source out there—the ground,” he began. “If you read it right, you realize a lot of the written history is simply wrong.”

Most history books, for instance, described the 1862 terrain at Shiloh as covered in impenetrable spring woods. But after watching spring unfold for six years at Shiloh, Allen began to wonder if this was really so. Studying old weather charts and nineteenth-century farm records, he discovered that spring came to Shiloh very late in 1862. Most trees remained bare. Allen also learned that Shiloh’s farmers cleared their land for crops and fenced livestock out of the fields. So cattle and hogs roamed the woods, chewing the undergrowth and trampling it down. “Overall, the landscape was still pretty wintry at the time of the battle,” he said. The confusion at the
battle, he added, was probably due more to smoke, dust and poor maps than to dense foliage.

Allen also studied what lay under the ground. After the two-day fight in 1862, Grant ordered the dead of both armies buried in mass graves “along the line of battle”—in other words, where they fell. It was therefore logical to conclude that the burial trenches indicated where the heaviest fighting occurred. Yet no burial trenches had ever been found near the Hornet’s Nest, where Union defenders supposedly turned the battle by beating back repeated rebel assaults across Duncan Field.

“Strange, isn’t it,” he said, driving me back to the Sunken Road and gazing out at Duncan Field. “There were supposedly eleven or twelve charges here, yet we can’t find many bodies to speak of.” Allen had also studied the rosters of the units that fought in and around the Hornet’s Nest. He found that their casualty rates were much lighter than for others at Shiloh.

Again, the landscape offered a clue, at least in Allen’s view. The historic tablets scattered across Shiloh had been carefully placed by a battlefield commission in the 1890s, with the help of returning veterans. Each tablet was intended to mark the exact spot where individual units fought. Yet there were no such markers in Duncan Field. Instead, markers for Southern units that fought here clustered in the woods on either side of the pasture.

“Grandpa was brave but he wasn’t stupid,” Allen said. “He avoided that field. Wouldn’t you?” In the end, he’d documented only one attempted charge across Duncan Field and concluded that the other assaults—seven in all, not eleven—worked their way along the thicket bordering the pasture.

Allen also believed that heedless assaults across open ground were much rarer throughout the War than was commonly supposed. The most notable exceptions, such as Franklin and Pickett’s Charge, proved the rule: frontal attacks had become suicidal because of newly improved rifles that could kill at seven hundred yards. Rifled guns, which replaced the much faultier smoothbore muskets used in earlier wars, also cut down another romantic staple of Civil War lore: bayonet combat. Allen had found almost no hard evidence of hand-to-hand fighting at Shiloh, and suspected the same was true at other
battles. In fact, bayonets and sabers accounted for only one half of 1 percent of wounds in the Civil War. I later learned that there wasn’t one confirmed bayonet wound in all of Pickett’s Charge.

Allen’s sleuthing revealed another twist to the story of the Hornet’s Nest. He’d done time-and-motion studies of units that later claimed to have fought in and around the Nest. It turned out many of them couldn’t possibly have done so. Allen smiled. He’d come to the kicker of his story. “When you look at the whole battle,” he said, “what actually happened here was almost incidental to the outcome.”

In Allen’s version, the crucial combat at Shiloh occurred on either side of the Nest, where the South concentrated its first-day attack. Some rebel units from these flank assaults made piecemeal contact with the Nest during the day. But it was only after the rebels had pushed the Union back on both flanks that they converged on the Nest, which had by then become a lonely Union salient. So the main reason the Federals in the Nest hung on so long was because the Confederates were busy hammering other positions for most of the day.

The obvious question, then, was why the Hornet’s Nest assumed such prominence in history books. Here, Allen turned from physical anthropology to psychology. “Let’s put ourselves in the heads of those Yankees in the Hornet’s Nest,” he said, pacing up and down the Sunken Road. “We’re in this thicket where we can’t see the rest of the battlefield. There’s rebels coming at us, in bits and pieces, all day long. Then suddenly we’re still here and everyone else has retreated. It seems like we fought the whole battle on our own.”

As prisoners, Allen went on, the 2,200 men captured at the Nest had months to talk over the battle and also to bond with each other. After the War, they formed a vocal veterans’ group called the Hornet’s Nest Brigade, led by their commanding officer, Benjamin Prentiss, an influential politician who outlived most of his contemporaries. “He was eager to foster the impression that the Hornet’s Nest and his role there were crucial to the battle,” Allen said. “He played it up big, particularly later in his life.”

So gradually the myth grew, until the Hornet’s Nest became the battle’s turning point. The Sunken Road, in fact, wasn’t even called that in initial reports of the battle. But as time passed, the shallow
wagon trace became deeper and deeper in veterans’ memories, eventually leading to its nickname. “Grant once said that Shiloh was the most misunderstood battle of the Civil War,” Allen concluded. “It’s taken me awhile to grasp how true that was.”

From the Hornet’s Nest, Allen led me to the woods and narrow fields near the Shiloh church, where he believed the battle had in fact turned. It was here that the oncoming rebels almost crushed the Federal right flank. But Sherman’s men held, fell back, counterattacked and stalled the Southern advance. Again, the landscape told the story. All around us rose monuments to Midwestern units that sustained losses of 30 percent or more. Scattered among these slabs were Confederate burial trenches, well-manicured rectangles of grass bordered by cannonballs. They looked rather like putting greens. One burial pit held over 700 rebels, stacked seven deep. Four of the five known burial trenches at Shiloh lay near here.

Allen said that rangers on morning patrol sometimes found Ouija boards, divining rods, notes to the dead—even a funeral card with a picture of a man whose cremated ashes had been spread here in the night. “One woman came into the visitors’ center saying she’d been meditating by one of the pits and had communicated with a soldier named Billy Joe, who told her ‘he wanted out of there,’” Allen said. “I’m sure he did.”

Allen believed the final body count at Shiloh was double the official killed-in-action figure of 3,500 dead. At this early stage of the War, neither army had any real system for handling casualties. On the first night at Shiloh, hundreds of soldiers lay ungathered on the battlefield. Allen had found accounts of hogs enjoying a “carnival feast” of the dead. Some parts of the battlefield also caught fire, roasting both dead and wounded men. Ambrose Bierce, of course, made a clinical examination of one such assembly: “Their clothing was half burnt away—their hair and beard entirely; the rain had come too late to save their nails.” In the end, many bodies may simply have vanished without ever being counted.

Wounded men who survived long enough to receive medical care also fared poorly. Allen guessed that fully 2,500 of those listed as
wounded at Shiloh later perished from their wounds, often superficial injuries that became infected. Prisoners also died at a staggering rate, usually from dysentery.

A few weeks before visiting Shiloh, I’d gone to the National Archives in Washington and perused reports from wartime field hospitals. Doctors listed the treatment given each soldier, typically amputation, splinting, or a “water dressing,” a wet bandage that did little but spread infection (doctors didn’t learn about sepsis until after the War). Doctors also wrote brief follow-ups on their patients. Among the most common notations: “probably mortal,” “died of tetanus,” and the oddly redundant “mortally, died.”

But what had struck me most were the doctors’ notes on what they called the “seat of injury” for each soldier. An astonishing number of wounds were seated in the “testicle” or “thigh and privates” or “leg and scrotum.” Allen explained the grisly logic of this. Officers constantly implored their men to “aim low” to avoid firing over the heads of the oncoming enemy. “Also, human beings have a tendency to shoot towards the center mass,” he added. “So you see a lot of hits to the abdomen and groin.”

To Allen, the full details of these and other horrors of Civil War battle were only beginning to emerge from the mythic haze enveloping the conflict. “Each generation sees the War differently, and that’s why interest in it will never die,” he said. The first generation—the veterans themselves—tended to couch tales of battle in high-blown Victorian prose about courage and sacrifice. “It wasn’t their style to dwell on the graphic details of injury and death,” Allen said. (An obvious exception was Ambrose Bierce, shot in the head at Kennesaw Mountain and deeply embittered by his wartime experience.)

Later historians, relying heavily on veterans’ accounts, also glossed over the War’s grisly side, highlighting instead the battle tactics and personalities of generals. But Allen, born in the mid-1950s, belonged to a generation that had grown up watching the Vietnam War on the nightly news.