Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  I walked into the middle of Duncan Field and turned slowly in a circle. Here was a 360-degree panorama that corresponded to the Platonic ideal of a Civil War battleground I’d carried in my head since childhood. A broad meadow bounded by wilderness, with a mud-chinked log cabin lying in amongst the trees. The crooked, hand-hewn simplicity of a split-rail fence. The Sunken Road, worn down by pioneer wagons toting apples and timber and corn. Bronze-snouted cannons poking out from between tall oak trees.

  Succumbing to a boyish impulse, I rushed the Union line, trying to conjure the buzz of bullets that gave the Hornet’s Nest its name. Then, reaching the Nest, I turned and became a Yankee, crouched in the Sunken Road with an imaginary musket resting on the split-rail fence. When I was a boy, the field would have instantly filled with smoke and flame and shrieking rebels. But now, as a fantasy-impaired adult, I found myself glancing around self-consciously to make sure no one was watching.

  I sat on a log and gazed at the pastoral scene through grown-up eyes. The Nest was lovely, covered in pine needles and moss and speckled by sunlight glinting through the trees. From this vantage, the whole notion of a “battlefield park” seemed a contradiction in terms. Preserved here for eternity was peace, beauty and quiet—the precise opposite of the events memorialized.

  When Ambrose Bierce arrived at Shiloh on the battle’s second day, he found a “smoking jungle” quivering with cannon fire and “the sickening spat of lead against flesh.” The woods had been reduced to blasted stumps. “All the wretched debris of the battle still littered the spongy earth as far as one could see,” Bierce wrote. “Knapsacks, canteens, haversacks distended with soaken and swollen biscuits, blankets beaten into the soil by the rain, rifles with bent barrels or splintered stocks.” Mutilated horses lay everywhere, as did men, “all dead apparently, except one.”

  Bierce studied the wounded man. “He lay face upward, taking in his breath in convulsive, rattling snorts,” Bierce wrote. “A bullet had clipped a groove in his skull, above the temple; from this the brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings. I had not previously known one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain.” Bierce debated whether to bayonet the dying man, but decided otherwise and marched on.

  Now, where 100,000 men had clashed that April day in 1862, I sat alone on a moss-covered log, listening to a solitary bird warble somewhere in the trees above.

  IF THE RAW FEEL of battle eluded me, another piece of Shiloh’s history was easier to grasp. As Scott Sams pointed out, Shiloh had two pasts: the actual battle, and its remembrance by those who fought there. “In our youth our hearts were touched with fire,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, twice wounded in battle. “We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life at its top.” In later life, these same men helped lay out Shiloh and other battlefield parks, recalling in Wordsworthian tranquillity the brave deeds of their youth and memorializing themselves for posterity.

  When Shiloh became a park in the 1890s, each state was allowed to build one monument cut from enduring materials, such as granite, marble or bronze. Iowa’s memorial stood seventy-five feet high, weighed over half a million pounds, and had to be hauled to Shiloh by barge and ox. It showed a woman symbolizing “Fame,” inscribing the names of dead Iowans into the monument’s stone. A nurturing breast slipped from her loose robe. Park rangers later confided to me that Fame nurtured Boy Scouts these days, who snapped pictures of each other sucking on the monument’s marble nipple.

  The post-War South couldn’t afford monuments on this scale. Nor were all Southerners enamored of battlefield parks, which diehards regarded as a perfidious scheme to glorify Yankee victory. In the end, most Southern states did erect monuments at Shiloh, but not the hundreds of additional memorials to individual units constructed by the North. So, as in war, blue massively outnumbered gray at Shiloh and most other battlefields.

  Also, while Northern monuments tended toward the grandiose and triumphalist, Southern memorials possessed an elegiac quality that was somehow more powerful, at least for me. The most striking by far was a monument honoring soldiers from all Southern states, “Whether sleeping in distant places, or graveless here in traceless dust.” Erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy near the high-water mark of the rebel advance at Shiloh, the memorial showed a downcast angel surrendering a laurel wreath to a Grim Reaper-like figure. The sculptor titled his work Victory Defeated by Death and Night. The death was that of General Johnston; night referred to the darkness that denied the rebels a chance to complete their near-triumph on the battle’s first day.

  This was a microcosm in marble of the Lost Cause romance that took hold in the South after Appomattox. The Civil War became an epic might-have-been, a “defeated victory” in which the valorous South succumbed to flukish misfortune—Johnston’s untimely death, for instance, or Stonewall Jackson’s mortal wounding by his own men at Chancellorsville—and to the North’s superior manpower and materiel. I later found a program from the monument’s unveiling in 1917, which revealed another side to the unreconciled South. It noted the various objects placed in the monument’s cornerstone for eternity: flags, coins, a lock of General Johnston’s hair, and a photograph of two local dignitaries “in Ku-Klux regalia.”

  Just beyond Victory Defeated, I reached a simple hunk of stone chiseled with the names of Alabamans who fought at Shiloh. A minivan drove up with a bumper sticker that read “World’s Greatest Grandpa.” Leaping from the van, an elderly woman in a floppy hat ran her finger along the monument. “He’s still here!” she shouted toward the van. Then to me: “That’s my great-grandfather, Captain Thomas Jenkins.”

  His great-granddaughter was a retired Alabama teacher named Edwina. She’d first visited Shiloh with her children in the 1960s and had now returned with her teenaged grandson. “We’re here so he can learn about his Southernness,” she said. Her grandson sat in the van’s backseat, listening to a Walkman. The world’s greatest grandpa perched impatiently behind the van’s wheel with the engine running.

  I asked Edwina what she meant by “Southernness.”

  “My husband’s a Northerner—from Boston, the worst kind—and he’ll always be one,” she said. “We’re like night and day and we’ve been married forty-three years. He’s English and I’m Scottish, in ancestry and temperament. I’m very careful about how I come across to others. Not him. The other day we’re at the movies and people in front of us are talking. I was bothered but I didn’t say anything. He shouted at them, ‘You know there are others here!’ I could have melted through the floor.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of this civil war. But Edwina reminded me. “He wants to tell people how to do things, the same way the North tells the South how to live, and did back then.”

  Her husband honked the horn. From what Edwina had said, it seemed remarkable that she and the world’s greatest grandpa had stayed together forty-three years. “My South is my South,” Edwina shouted as the minivan sped off, leaving me alone with Captain Thomas Jenkins and his brave Alabamians. I reckoned they’d be pleased to know their efforts hadn’t been entirely in vain.

  I pressed on, to Bloody Pond. It was here, at the height of the first day’s fighting, that men from both armies crawled to drink water and soak their wounds. Like other stops on the battlefield, the pond’s bank had a stand with a small audio speaker. I pushed a button and heard the testimony of a local man who visited soon after the battle. “There were dead men and horses, broken artillery carriages and dismounted guns in the pond. Soldiers taking dead men out of the water and laying them in rows on the bank. The water looked like blood.” Now, a father and daughter stood on the bank, skipping stones across the clear, cool water.

  Parked nearby was a convertible Mercedes with a vanity license plate: MAYS. A paunchy man in an Izod shirt stood riffling through a briefcase balanced on the roof. Bill Mays was a lawyer from Missouri. He’d arranged his caseload so he could slip away from his office and drive six hours to be here on Shilo
h’s anniversary. Like the bus driver I’d met at Fraley Field, Mays had come to track the path of his forebear, a rebel private named Elijah.

  Mays dug through his briefcase for one of the elaborate park maps I’d seen several times already. “I’m a lawyer, so I always look for what the preponderance of the evidence suggests,” he said. He knew that Elijah fought with the 52nd Tennessee, in a place called Cloud Field. A red dot on the map, near where we now stood, denoted a marker to the Tennessee men. But Mays was having trouble finding the corresponding spot on the ground.

  I followed him as he plunged, briefcase in hand, in what he guessed was the direction of the monument. Within minutes, we were lost in thigh-high undergrowth. “I’ve been to battlefields in Virginia—they’re like golf courses compared to this,” he said, Izod shirt stained with sweat. As we rested on a log, swatting gnats, I asked Mays why it was so important to track his great-grandfather’s precise movements 133 years ago.

  “I’m here because the issues are still here,” he said. “People still want to be independent of central authority. The evidence suggests that rebels like Elijah believed strongly in their individual right to determine what their government should be.” He started to open his briefcase, then paused, as though realizing he wasn’t in court. “I’m a Republican,” he went on. “Tracking down Elijah gives me some perspective on what it is I believe in, and what commitment to your beliefs is all about.”

  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.

  AT 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. In
stead, 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.