My Mississippi Manifest Destiny: Shiloh Part Three

The fiercest fighting of the Battle of Shiloh took place during the first day of the conflict on a dirt thoroughfare nicknamed "The Sunken Road," although it wasn't sunken when I was there two weeks ago, and I don't think it was then.

The ground inclines slightly on the right side of the road (the west), which gave the Northern soldiers, mostly from Illinois and Iowa, a minor advantage, until the Southern artillery weakened the Union forces. The Confederates dubbed this spot "The Hornet's Nest," because of the heavy gunfire they encountered. Brigadier General Benjamin Prentiss led the Federals in the Hornet's Nest, to the north of him were forces commanded Brigadier General William Wallace, who was shot during the battle--he died of his wounds three days later.

Next to the Hornet's Nest is the Peach Orchard. Gunfire and artillery barrages knocked many of the peach blossoms off the trees--the wounded and dead were covered with flower petals. On the left is the Peach Orchard as it looks today, the trees are newly planted, too young for blossoms I would guess. The fencing is there to prevent bark girdling by the many deer living in the National Historic Park.

Prentiss, who was captured along with 2,200 Union soldiers, held out for six hours--which bought time for Major General Ulysses S. Grant to concentrate his forces near the Tennessee River just as reinforcements arrived late in the afternoon. As I noted in my last Shiloh post, the fresh troops allowed Grant to win the battle, and the Confederates retreated to Corinth, Mississippi.

In that entry, I wrote that nearly all of the Confederate dead were buried in mass graves. For centuries, up until World War I, the combatants in most European and American battles arrived at an agreed-upon system to gather the dead and wounded. But Shiloh was the first major battle in the western theater of the Civil War, and the wounded were left on the field of battle, many of them desperately crying out for water. A few soldiers from both sides discovered the pond on the right, now known as Bloody Pond, neart the Peach Orchard, where they were able to quench, some for the last time, their parched throats.

Previous My Mississippi Manifest Destiny posts:

Shiloh Part Two
Shiloh Part One
Carl Perkins
The Varsity Theatre in Martin, Tennessee
Lincoln and Kentucky
Metropolis

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