Shiloh National Battlefield

AKA Shiloh National Military Park.

Back when I worked for the National Park Service jokes about "cannonball parks" were common. Cannonball parks tend to attract two kinds of visitors: military history nerds and dog walkers. I have no clue what type of underground network exists among dog owners to alert them to the charms of walking Fido in a cannonball park but every cannonball park I've been to had more dog walkers than "real" visitors. Even Shiloh, which isn't exactly on the edge of a housing development like Kennesaw Mountain, had a dude walking two dogs in the rain. And there are almost always a zillion monuments to various dead troops. Thus, I'll confess doing site visits to places like Wilson's Creek didn't thrill me even though Wilson's Creek is refreshingly monument-free.  

Military history has never been a strong interest of mine and, let's be honest, a battlefield is a remarkably depressing place. You get to walk around a site that witnessed incredible carnage and then learn that despite thousands of people dying or being horribly wounded the battle didn't resolve much. Shiloh gets designated as the first major battle in the Civil War but all it seems to have accomplished is hundreds of bodies wound up in mass graves. The battle was in April 1862. The war didn't end for another three years. 

But I digress. Shiloh is the first cannonball park I've visited that really flaunts its cannonballs. Giant stacks of fake ones. They're prominent site markers for where various officers had their headquarters. The one shown commemorates the battlefield headquarters of brigadier general Thomas Sweeny, an Irish immigrant and Union officer. 

There's a sizable collection of other monuments, too. most dating from the 1920s. The one for Tennessee shows up on postcards, magnets, and other park memorabilia. It is, as such things go, not a bad looking monument. The scale is reasonable and the design isn't weird. It pays tribute to fallen soldiers with an obviously dead guy still gripping the stars and bars. It also makes sense that it would be a prominent memorial; the battlefield is in Tennessee and Mississippi so of course Tennessee is going to want something nice. Mississippi also has a decent monument, nothing too over the top but definitely memorializing their troops. (Photo is from a site that provides tips on planning visits to national parks.) 

Shiloh was interesting. I was glad we took the time to check it out. I did not know that it was the very first Civil War battlefield to be proclaimed a national battlefield. That happened early enough that Civil War veterans, both Union and CSA, were able to actively push for the commemoration and to attend ceremonies at the battlefield. As usual, the Park has a decent visitor center with nicely designed exhibits with historic artifacts and bits of trivia to flesh out the basic narrative (two day battle that CSA officers thought they were winning after the first day but then Union reinforcements arrived and Grant, Sherman, et al. pushed the CSA troops into retreating). The visitor center video describing the battle was good as it used the perspectives of ordinary troops on both sides. Decent casting for the re-enactments, too, which was a bonus. 

As far as I could tell, based on my admittedly thin knowledge of the war and the various officers involved on both sides, the most consequential effect of the battle was the death of General Albert Sidney Johnston. Johnston bled out from what he thought was a minor wound to the back of his leg. It took several hours for the blood loss to hit. By the time it sank in that he was seriously wounded, he'd lost too much blood and could not be saved. One of the most effective officers the CSA had, Johnston's death was a major blow to the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis notably said "[W]hen Sidney Johnston fell, it was the turning-point of our fate; for we had no other hand to take up his work in the West." Given that both armies had an over-abundance of incompetent, lazy, or generally useless officers I'm not sure that's true. 

One of my co-workers in Omaha actually worked at Shiloh when the author Tony Horowitz visited as part of researching the book that became Confederates in the Attic. He always claimed Horowitz quoted him in the book, but if he did it wasn't obvious when I read it. The co-worker's favorite fantasy was to somehow get back to Shiloh as Superintendent. I have no idea if the dude succeeded. It always struck me as a weird ambition, but who knows? Maybe he was originally from that part of Mississippi or Tennessee so it wasn't so much the park attracting him as it was him just wanting to get back home. I've mentioned before the penchant of some superintendents to snag their dream retirement location as a duty station for their final high three with the agency.