His independence and success at Shiloh gave Forrest the confidence to act on his own and as he saw fit, and so turned him into a rebel within a rebel movement. And when that rebel government collapsed and left disaster in its wake, its most loyal and competent outsider rightly gained further credence without culpability. No wonder Lee was reported to have turned down the leadership of the controversial Klan and suggested Forrest instead; even if the myth has no historical basis, it reflects general Southern perceptions that a tired Lee was above such a controversial terrorist group, and that a precipitous and unabashed Forrest who had personally killed dozens of men was not only not bothered by such an unorthodox organization, but also far better suited and eager to lead it out of local oblivion.
Forrest—slave trader, veteran of duels, overseer of executions, and killer of twenty-nine bluecoats in battle—had once been praised by the Southern military aristocracy for his undeniable service to the cause, but also been denied command commensurate with his unmatched military genius due to his controversial background and near illiteracy (not to mention his dangerous temper and reckless speech). So in the same fashion the Klan would serve the interest of an unrepentant South, which nevertheless publicly shied away from open association with the organization’s repugnant methods of whippings, beatings, torture, lynchings, and murder.
There were many ripples from Forrest’s heroism at Shiloh—both his subsequent short-term successes in prolonging the war in Tennessee and his lasting contributions to the idea of war as blitzkrieg (“firstest with the mostest”). It is no accident, for example, that Gen. George S. Patton, also a fan of the great marches of William Tecumseh Sherman, saw in Forrest brilliance unmatched by any other American general and may well have drawn inspiration from close study of his Tennessee campaigns. But rightly or wrongly, the legacy of Forrest has reverberated now for more than a century, most prominently through the rise of the Ku Klux Klan—a terrorist clique that rode at night with the same fervor and unapologetic violence as had once before its first grand wizard against Union intruders.
I end with an anecdote of a visit to Memphis in February 1999. On a cold February afternoon, I encountered not more than a half dozen visitors in the warmth of the Civil Rights Museum, now incorporating the hotel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In contrast, outside in the wind and rain at the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the city’s central park I counted at least ten visitors, as well as flowers lying at its base. The public perhaps recognizes a ripple of Shiloh that military historians often overlook.
Postmortem
“The South never smiled again after Shiloh,” wrote the New Orleans diarist George Washington Cable. However, in the battle’s immediate aftermath it at least breathed a sigh of relief. General Halleck soon arrived to assume command from Grant of a huge force of invasion and then proceeded to fritter away any opportunity of destroying Beauregard’s retreating army by a ponderous and dilatory march on a soon-to-be-evacuated Corinth, Mississippi. Still, if Shiloh did not lead immediately to a Southern collapse in the West, the undeniable Union victory left the Mississippi open. Soon a reassigned Grant lost no time in assembling his Shiloh veterans for an assault on Vicksburg. Yet, despite the undeniable strategic significance of the Union victory, the enduring fascination with Shiloh lies elsewhere, in the human story of the soldiers who fought there.
The two-day battle destroyed two generals—Lew Wallace and Albert Sidney Johnston—and created the careers of two others, William Tecumseh Sherman and Nathan Bedford Forrest, with murderous consequences for their poor adversaries in the years to come. Many of the Civil War’s military luminaries on both sides were also involved—Grant, Bragg, Beauregard, Halleck, and Buell. Two future presidents—Grant and Garfield—were veterans of the battle, along with a former vice president of the United States, John Breckinridge. The future navigator of the Colorado River, John Wesley Powell, lost an arm at Shiloh, and the Confederate Henry Morton Stanley, of later Stanley and Livingston fame, was captured there. Both felt that their later careers were formed in part by what they had seen and done at the battle. Was the human drama of Shiloh, then, in some ways different even from the larger and more momentous collision at Gettysburg, or the more murderous hours at Antietam or Cold Harbor?
Perhaps. While it was not the deadliest engagement of the national conflict, Shiloh was the first real carnage of the Civil War, a bloodbath in which there were nearly 24,000 combined Union and Confederate casualties. Of the some 110,000 who fought over the two days, nearly one in four men was missing, captured, wounded, or dead by Tuesday morning, April 8, 1862. In fact, there were more casualties in two days of fighting at Shiloh than in the combined total of all of America’s wars up to that time—the Revolution, Indian conflicts, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the battles of 1861 and early 1862.
Due to the relatively small circumference of the battlefield, the inclement rain followed by unaccustomed heat, the two-day duration of the intense killing, and the inability of both sides to care for the wounded and dead, the battlefield was a macabre nightmare of stinking blood, flesh, and mud that left an indelible impression on all who fought there. And hundreds of reporters and sightseers sailed up in the battle’s aftermath to survey the killing field. Adjacent to the Tennessee River and near to both Union and Confederate populations, Shiloh was an easy battle to reach for both sides; in addition, the melodrama of the first day’s Confederate advance followed by a stunning Union recovery made good copy and invited speculation on how the Confederates lost their first-day gains—and why Grant’s victorious army was almost lost in the first few hours of the fighting.
The nation and the world were shocked by the butcher’s bill, as newspapers and politicians rushed to assess blame, creating heroes and then demolishing them in a matter of days as contradictory reports from the confusing two-day slugfest trickled in for months afterward. Something or someone—Grant? Sherman? Wallace? Beauregard?—surely had to be responsible for the needless carnage, especially when the realization set in that after thousands of casualties, both sides claimed victory and neither army was really routed.
The sheer scale and unpredictability of the Western theater also made its first decisive battle utterly unique. Unlike the rather static front between Washington and Richmond, the West was a vast landscape where armies marched hundreds of miles to capture key cities like Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans, seeking to turn entire border states such as Kentucky and Missouri into constant battlegrounds and wrestling over control of hundreds of miles of the Mississippi. A single set battle might open up or close down thousands of square miles of territory and thereby send whole states into the Union or Confederate camp—unlike the seesaw fighting in the quagmire of northern Virginia.
More important, Shiloh was the first full-scale battle in which rifled musket fire and canister shot on a large scale had ripped apart charges of heroic soldiers, shocking officers and enlisted men alike—and establishing the principle that the courage of running head-on against the enemy could be as suicidal as it was lunatic. Shiloh first took the glory out of battle. In forty-eight hours it dispensed with the idea that a single set engagement might settle the Civil War. Both sides learned that a day’s killing might so disable an army that even the victors could not really dominate their adversaries given the huge parameters of theater war in the West. No wonder nightmares of the battle grew rather than diminished in the minds of veterans on both sides, despite the even greater killing to come.
The focus in the energy of the country had also shifted from east to west in the years before the war. It was no accident that presidents, novelists, and great generals to come were all assembled on the Tennessee River. Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and the Western Confederacy of Texas, Tennessee, and the Mississippi River states were where the great transformations in American life were taking place, as the railroads, the nascent industry surrounding the Great Lakes, the frontier, and the Mississippi River all drew the most audaci
ous and talented Americans of the mid-nineteenth century. So it was natural that among the tens of thousands of such men who met each other at Pittsburg Landing were dozens who would go on to change radically the course of American history—but only after they themselves were first changed by Shiloh.
CHAPTER 3
The Culture of Delium,
November 424 B.C.
The Battle
Imagine a rolling plain of dry grain stubble, extending for not more than a mile before being cut off by ditches on both sides. Crowd fifty thousand men on it—some nearly naked, others weighed down with more then sixty pounds of arms and armor. Have them mass into two huge armies and then collide at a run with edged iron weapons—all striving to kill one another through their collective muscular strength at stabbing and pushing. Then end the entire sordid business in about an hour—with over two thousand corpses littering the ground in a trail of blood and entrails for a mile. Finally, simply forget about the afternoon’s carnage and assume it never occurred at all.
The battle of Delium is just that—a gory nonevent. At best it is known only as one of many such hoplite bloodbaths of the past, in which thousands of Greek infantrymen lined up to spear the enemy, push the opposing phalanx off the field of battle, claim victory, and then return home. Most were obscure and sometimes stupid fights in far-off places of a distant age, of little interest or meaning in the grand sweep of history, rarely prominent even in the story of Greece, and entirely without any relevance for the lives of Americans today. After all, not more than a few thousand out of some 300 million Americans know what or where Delium is.
Hoplite fights in ancient Greece are ostensibly no more or less worthy of remembrance than the thousands of horrific battles of the pre-Columbian Inca or Aztec empires, whose generals, soldiers, and dead are of no import to the cruel laws of history, lost entirely to subsequent generations when there is not a Herodotus or Bernal Díaz del Castillo to write what he saw or heard. Thus most of the large Greek battles such as Mantinea (418 B.C.), Nemea (394 B.C.), or Delium, while important in the shifting balance of power of the classical city-states, were often not landmark historical events. They were nothing like Salamis (480 B.C.) that saved Greece from the Persians and prompted a play from Aeschylus. The Athenian disaster at Sicily (415–13 B.C.) wrecked the Athenian empire and was fodder for Thucydides’ observations of human folly. And Philip II’s victory at Chaeronea (338 B.C.) ended the free and autonomous Greek city-state and led to the end of Demosthenes’ career.
When the defeated Athenians trudged home, the neighboring state of Boeotia (pronounced “Beosha”) was as before—oligarchic and still free from the Athenian empire. There was not even the drama of Spartan militarism pitted against the liberalism of Athens that illuminated other battles of the latter fifth century. The Peloponnesian War itself was not shortened by the Athenian debacle, or perhaps even lengthened because of the Theban triumph. An increasingly beleaguered Athens would continue to be plagued by enemies north and south, and a victorious Thebes would mount no grand invasion of Attica to follow up its victory at Delium below the walls of Athens. Perhaps only an Athenian victory might have had any significance in the war, knocking Boeotia out of the conflict—as the general Hippocrates promised his troops in the moments before the battle—and thereby lessening the odds of an eventual Spartan victory.
No great generals of antiquity—a Themistocles, Pericles, Epaminondas, or Alexander—fought at Delium. Hippocrates and Pagondas are scarcely known outside of Thucydides’ brief mention of their respective commands for a day at the battle. Indeed, they vanish from his history as abruptly as they appear for their brief day. Even the tally of the dead was insignificant in comparison, say, to the nearly forty thousand Athenian casualties a decade later at Sicily (415–13 B.C.).
Nor is Delium near either a great city or an important road. Unlike the sites of many key battles, it had no intrinsic strategic value—no geographical importance of any kind. It is not a key pass like Thermopylae, which was fought over for twenty-five hundred years from the Persian Wars to World War II. Delium was not the natural meeting ground of great cultures, like Adrianople at the nexus of major rivers and the site of fifteen major engagements since Roman times, a city that guarded access to the Black Sea, southern Europe, and the Mediterranean and often seen as the demarcation line between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam. The landscape of Delium is not like the great battlefield of Chaeronea a few miles to the north, the critical bottleneck that opened onto the great plain of Boeotia and saw some of the greatest collisions of the classical, Roman, and medieval ages—and over the centuries with the likes of Philip II, Alexander the Great, Demosthenes, Sulla, and Mithradates on its soil.
There are no mute stone commemorations to the fight—no walls, castles, or even an occasional watchtower to be seen, no marble lion to mark the spot where the poor Thespians were slaughtered, no limestone plinth to memorialize the dusk run of the panicked Athenians. It is a hard battlefield to find today. Nature, the great leveler of the power of armies, played no macabre role at the battle: we are not horrified by the cruel seas of a Salamis (480 B.C.) that swallowed thousands of wrecked Persian seamen, or the horrible cold that froze entire armies at Stalingrad (1942–43). There was not even the horror of Okinawa’s (1945) or Shiloh’s mud (1862). Delium was mostly warm, flat, and mild. The suspense of this battle is not augmented by men falling into the sea as happened at Thermopylae (480 B.C.) or slipping off peaks tending Hannibal’s elephants in the Alps (218 B.C.).
Yet what went on for about an hour or so in that nondescript plain changed the life of ancient Greece and the nature of European civilization itself—a Euripidean tragedy inspired, Socratic philosophy preserved and altered, an artistic renaissance launched, a community nearly erased, a monster at Athens spawned, and Western infantry tactics themselves created. The ripples of Delium have lapped even upon us, the unsuspecting, nearly twenty-five hundred years later—in ways that we can scarcely imagine.
The battle of Delium was the last gasp of a failed Athenian offensive into the neighboring state of Boeotia, the region surrounding the ancient city of Thebes. The fighting itself broke out near the sanctuary of Delium in 424 B.C., between the phalanxes of Athens and the Theban confederacy in a treeless, open plain, only a few thousand yards from the vaguely demarcated border between Attica and Boeotia. The ancient site is probably near the lovely modern hamlet of Dilesi, once rolling hills of grainfields by the Euboean Sea, but now a growing cluster of seaside vacation homes that serve as weekend retreats for harried Athenians.
There were always long-simmering disputes over the serpentine and mountainous boundary. This traditional Boeotian-Athenian enmity was fueled also by Thebes’s past role during the Persian Wars. Nearly sixty years earlier she had led her Boeotian confederacy shoulder-to-shoulder with the Medes against her fellow Greeks. Indeed, at the Panhellenic victory over the Persians at the battle of Plataea (479 B.C.)—a few miles from Delium—the Athenians on the left wing of the Greek allied phalanx had plunged bitterly into the Theban turncoats and swept them in retreat along with their foreign overlords. In the bitter aftermath of the Theban humiliation during the Persian Wars (490–79 B.C.), raids and plundering expeditions by both neighbors continued throughout the fifth century B.C. as a series of stone towers and forts along their border was frequently captured, demolished, and rebuilt. Boeotia and Athens shared a history similar to France and Germany during much of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In the thirty years since the Persian Wars (479–47 B.C.), control of Boeotia had been decided on at least three occasions in its territory through dramatic pitched battles on the plains at Tanagra (457 B.C.), Oenophyta (457 B.C.), and Coronea (447 B.C.)—Athens first losing, then gaining, and finally losing for good its reign over her neighbor’s land in the space of a few hours over the decade. Boeotians had grown quite accustomed to the efforts of Athenian imperialists to cross the borders in order to spread radical d
emocracy among their own rural satellite villages.
But in 424 B.C. the battle was purportedly more than an outward fight over a few acres or even control over Boeotia itself. Rather, in the seventh year of her exhausting twenty-seven-year war with Sparta, now a major effort ensued by Athens to eliminate her “northern” front with Thebes so she might turn her attention southward exclusively to her Peloponnesian enemies. Only with a neutralized and largely democratic Boeotian confederacy would Spartan ravagers be prevented from marching on through Attica to rest in Boeotia. If the Athenians won a major battle inside Boeotia, raiding across the border would cease, and Athens might gain valuable Confederate troops from their newly pacified northern neighbors.
A few other factors fueled the Boeotian-Athenian hatred. Seven years earlier (431 B.C.), Thebes’s unprovoked and unsuccessful nighttime attack on the nearby small village of Plataea, an Athenian protectorate, had marked the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Add to these considerations that Thebes and her Boeotian confederacy were governed by a moderate oligarchy and so were despised by the democrats at Athens. And in general Boeotians were habitually lampooned on the Athenian stage—backward rustics in comedy, and unbalanced inbred killers of Greek tragedy. Indeed, Boeotians shared a Panhellenic reputation as “pigs,” rustic dullards who were both strong and stupid. For the Athenians the key to fighting these hardy farmers was to avoid a head-on collision of just the sort that took place at Delium. Later the historian Diodorus recorded that much of the Athenian defeat at Delium could be simply explained by “the superior bodily strength of Thebans.”
How did the Athenians in late 424 B.C. end up at the obscure valley near Delium in an unwise hoplite fight against such formidable people? To invade Boeotia, the Athenians, in the spirit of the volatile war making of the Peloponnesian War, had devised an overly ambitious plan of combined naval and infantry maneuvers to deploy troops at the front and rear of the enemy—an impractical scheme, and one, like her other similar fiascoes to come at Amphipolis (422 B.C.) and Sicily (415–13 B.C.), doomed to failure given the poor logistics, communications, and general absence of secrecy among ancient militaries. The Athenian general Demosthenes had sailed three months earlier, intending to raise a democratic insurrection through the southern Boeotian countryside by an unexpected amphibious landing. Then, aided by partisans, he was in theory to move east toward Delium on the very day Hippocrates and his Athenian hoplites marched northward to the border. The outnumbered Boeotian army would scatter between the pincers and the surrounding countryside arise in open revolt. Or so it was thought.
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