Shiloh: An Introduction

The April 1862 battle in south central Tennessee was a watershed in American history, in the war between the states, and in the evolution of the US Army. In two days more men fell than had in all of America's other conflicts since 1775 combined. One of the brightest hopes of the nascent Southern Confederacy was killed in the battle, the first of many "what ifs" of the war. Furthermore, Shiloh showed both the combatants, in what Winston Churchill would later call "the last war between gentlemen," what the future of the conflict would be like: desperate fighting between determined men led by officers learning their trade as they went, and losing thousands of men in the process. Finally, it was at Shiloh that the US Army began a steady transformation from a farmer's and shopkeeper's provincial militia to a professional military organization.

But absolutely nothing was certain in the spring of 1862 in regarding the course of the year-old war between the states (no one just then was quite certain what it should be called). Both sides "green together," in Lincoln's words, were stumbling and fumbling at fighting a war for different goals and with different technical means, but still both fighting it on the longest hostile frontier in the history of warfare.

The Union was building a huge armed force of volunteers, so many that some had to be turned away. Most had survived the first winter of the war (though the death rates from disease were appalling); arms and equipment were flowing in from contractors good, bad and indifferent; officers were learning what to do or were leaving; and in general the Army and Navy on both sides were starting to believe that if there really was a war to be fought, it was to be a grand adventure.

The troops may have been preparing for a grand adventure, but at that time no one really knew what it was going to look like. For decades since the advent of the rifled musket and the gun-howitzer, arguments had raged in Europe and in the Americas about the appearance of the modern battlefield. Some authorities held that the rifled musket made artillery obsolete, others that shrapnel made infantry a thing of the past, yet others that cavalry had seen its day, and still others that a return to the pike and shield as auxiliary to the ammunition-wasting rifled musket was just around the corner.

Through all this, American infantry doctrine and tactics in the mid-19th century were based almost entirely on the French drill manuals of the early 1850s. Their foundation was the French infantry experience in Algeria in the 1840s, which emphasized rifle marksmanship that depended on range estimation (to set the rear sights) and athletic close-order drill to transform marching columns into firing and skirmish lines, and close quickly with the enemy to minimize losses to rifled muskets and artillery.

But by 1860 these tactics were called into serious question, and by spring 1862 training and indoctrination were in a state of confusion, with no one quite sure what should be taught to the new recruits. This was because in the Piedmont War of 1859 (France and Austria fighting over Italy) the bayonet had been decisive on the battlefields, and the rifle had not. The bayonet-and-smoothbore advocates crowed that all the theories of the past decade based on the rifled musket were wrong, while the rifle-and-artillery promoters argued that the Piedmont experience was a fluke.

This argument led, rather than to conflicting training, to practically no tactical training at all for most of the infantry. Range estimation was not systematically taught (indeed, only a few got to fire their weapons before battle) and physical training was non-existent (walking close-order drill did not require the stamina, nor did it deliver the impact, of striking the enemy at a dead run).

Add to this the plethora of small-arms calibers, from just under half an inch (0.45) to over three-quarters of an inch (0.79) in diameter, and the admixture of smoothbore and rifled musket weapons, shotguns and sporting arms in the infantry ranks, clearly most of the infantry was anything but ready to fight.

Despite the apparent unpreparedness of the infantry, artillery doctrine and theory appeared to be validated by the fighting in the Piedmont War. The new rifled guns were especially useful against fortifications, and the effectiveness of rifled artillery against enemy guns was great. However, artillery required a great deal of logistical support As long as the militia batteries were not organized to support large units, their great admixture of calibers and types was acceptable. When they came together problems in logistics, deployment and crew training became glaringly obvious. Clearly, the artillery in many cases wasn't a lot better prepared to fight in the spring of 1862 than the infantry.

American cavalry doctrine, quite unlike the European experience, was seen as proven against the Indians. No one in America saw that European horse soldiers had anything to teach their New World counterparts. But the cavalry had lessons to learn about supporting large infantry forces, about fighting other horse soldiers at least as well armed as themselves, and about encountering artillery. In short, the cavalry was nearly as bad off as the artillery, but not quite as unprepared as the infantry.

Finally, there was the non-too-trivial issue of leadership. Though some school-trained leaders were available, their most valuable practical experience was in camp construction, logistics and engineering. The US Army taught the theory of large-unit maneuver and organization but had practiced it only once in the previous generation, in Mexico. Most of the Army had been operating as small detachments and only occasionally as regiments. Larger units such as brigades were only on paper, so few officers below brigadier general had any experience with the required formations for anything larger than a company, leave alone leading divisions of men in battle. The Manassas and Henry/Donelson experiences had provided a day's practice for a few, but that was hardly enough.

The armies on both sides were green from the ground up in early 1862. The men were generally unfamiliar with their weapons and the tactics to use them; most of the officers had little experience in marching their men from place to place let alone fighting battles; and the quartermasters were bedeviled by conflicting and even redundant requirements.

It was here that the Union and Confederate armies started that fateful spring, and very soon the consequences of these conditions would be felt.