Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 32.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

The battle of Shiloh [from the New Orleans, la, Picayune, Sept., 25, 1904.]

by Gen. Marcus J. Wright.

General Grant in his ‘Memoirs’ says: ‘The battle of Shiloh, or Pittsburg, has been, perhaps, less understood or, to state it more accurately, more persistently misunderstood than any other engagement between the National and Confederate troops during the entire rebellion.’

This is as true now as it was when it was written. Most of those persons who have written of Shiloh on the Union side have confined themselves to discussing the comparative achievements in that battle of General Grant's command, the army of Tennessee, and General Don Carlos Buell's command, the army of the Ohio. Most of those who have written from a Confederate standpoint have confined themselves to the discussion of what should have been the final result should General Albert Sidney Johnston not have been killed, and should General Beauregard have pressed forward instead of ordering a retreat on the afternoon of the second day's battle. So that what we have mostly of the battle of Shiloh from those who write of it is not what was actually done by the two great armies on that field the 6th and 7th of April, 1862, but ‘what might have been.’

Shiloh was the first great battle that had ever been fought on the American continent. When the American colonies entered into the war for independence in 1776, they had only an aggregate population of three millions, scattered along the Atlantic Coast from the Penobscot river in what is now the State of Maine, to the Savannah river in Georgia. In 1812, when the second war with Great Britain was begun there were about seven million people in the United States. No great armies were assembled, and no great battles, as measured by great numbers, were fought.