Shiloh Read Online Free PDF

was a Captain among the men surely you were a Colonel among the
ladies. Such a pretty one too!
    Now you
must not be jealous, dearest girl, because if you could see these country Secesh women you
wouldn't be. They wear mother Hubbards & are thin as rails every one. It
must be because their men work them so hard I suppose, scrubbing clothes &
boiling soap & everything. They just stand on their porches & stare at
us marching by. O , if looks could kill. But really I
think they would like to have us on their side Vain wish!
    When we got to Paducah we were brigaded with two other Ohio
regiments in Sherman's division. That created excitement among us, for Sherman
had been removed from command of troops in November on suspicion of insanity.
He had told the Secretary of War that the government would need two hundred
thousand well-trained troops to crush the Rebellion in the Mississippi Valley
alone. But finally Halleck had decided that he was not crazy, just high-strung
and talkative, and had given him a division under Smith. Every man assigned to
that division was worried. Naturally no one wanted to go into combat with a
leader who might take a notion to storm a frozen river or a burning bam. And
our first sight of him wasn’t reassuring. He was red-headed, gaunt, skeleton
thin, with a wild expression around his eyes; he had sunken temples, a fuzzy
beard, and a hungry look that seemed to have been with him always. I never saw him
but I thought of Lazarus. His shoulders twitched; his hands were never still,
always fumbling with something, a button or a saber hilt or his whiskers. Our
first real operation, however, changed our minds about him—though, truth to
tell, it was not a successful movement.
    Halleck ordered General Smith to move up the Tennessee River
to Savannah—up means south on the Tennessee; that’s typical in this country. We
went on transports. We were green; most of us had never left home before
(officers as well as men, except the officers carried their greenness better)
yet here we were, traveling south up an enemy river past slow creeks and bayous
and brooding trees. I thought to myself if this was the country the Rebels
wanted to take out of the Union, we ought to say thank you, good riddance. The
men crowded the rails, watching the swampland slide past. None of them said
much. I supposed, like myself, they were thinking of home. It was a strange
thing to be in a distant land, among things you’d never seen before, all
because our people in Congress had squabbled among themselves and failed to get
along and there were hotheads in the South who thought more of their Negroes
and their pride than they did of their country. Lining the rails of the
transports, watching that dismal swampland slide past, there must have been
many a man who was thinking of home and the ones he'd left behind.
    I miss
you So much.
    From Savannah, Tennessee, Smith sent Sherman farther south,
toward the Mississippi state line, to break the Memphis & Charleston
Railroad which passed through Corinth where Beauregard was busy collecting the
scattered Rebel armies. This was probably the most important railway in the
Confederacy, the main supply line from the Transmississippi to their armies in
the East. Two gunboats escorted us up the river. It was good to have them.
Everyone, Rebel and Union alike, respected gunboats.
    We came off the transports at midnight in the hardest rain I
ever saw, and by daybreak we were far inland. Most of the bridges across the
creeks had been washed away. The rain came pouring. The cavalry, operating out
front, lost men and horses drowned trying to ford the swollen creeks, and
behind us the Tennessee was rising fast, threatening to cut us off by flooding
the bottom we had marched across. It was agreeable to everyone in the division
when Sherman ordered us back to the transports. The gunboats stayed with us
going back down the river and covered our disembarkation at Pittsburg Landing,
which we had passed coming up