The Dead of Pittsburg Landing

     As the Federal army went into camp near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee in March 1862, one of the points of interest visited by the soldiers were the graves of the half dozen Confederate soldiers killed during the skirmish on March 1, 1862. On that day, the timberclad gunboats Tyler and Lexington carrying two companies of Illinois sharpshooters engaged a Rebel battery at the Landing supported by the 18th Louisiana Infantry. The gunboats laid down a heavy fire of grape shot and shells which allowed a contingent of sailors and the sharpshooters to land and burn a nearby house where the battery had been positioned. After this brief fight, the Federals returned to the gunboats having lost two men killed, six wounded, and three missing.

          A few weeks later, after the Federals had occupied Pittsburg Landing, William J. Srofe of Co. K of the 48th Ohio visited the Landing and recorded his impressions of the hastily dug graves. “Some of them were buried about one foot deep and some not so deep,” he wrote. “They had been buried about three weeks. I saw the faces of two and one breast looked very bad. One had been shot in the breast and above the eye. The stench was very bad. I have found 64-lb shells and balls here that had been shot by our gunboats two-and-a-half miles from the river and frequently dig shells out of the ground. I saw one tree, a poplar, about two feet around that a 24-lb ball had gone through.”

This depiction of a line of soldiers' graves taken on the Wilderness battlefield of Virginia could have been taken on any one of a hundred battlefields throughout the country by the war's end. "Whenever a body could be recognized, the grave was properly marked by a board placed at the head, on which was roughly carved the name and number of the regiment of the dead sleeper," one observer noted at Shiloh. "On a beech tree I found the name, number of regiment, and a Masonic emblem neatly engraved showing that a friend and brother had paid the last tribute due to the dead soldier whose body laid at its foot." 


          Chaplain John M. Garner of the 18th Missouri passed through the area a few days before the Battle of Shiloh and provided a macabre description of the shallow graves. “Riding up a hollow, I saw a mound of fresh earth on approaching which I saw the side of a dead mule’s face with one eye peeping out. Still on my way up, I saw another similar mound out of which stuck the hind leg of a horse with the shoe on. Just at the top of the hollow and on my right, I saw still another mound which I approached and what do you think I saw? At one end, I saw the corner of a soldier’s blanket. I rode to the other end and there saw a section of beef’s hide and a little further round I met the forehead and nose of a Secesh. Well thought, I, ‘Old fellow, you have fallen upon evil times lying here between two logs with a beef skin and a very little dirt for your covering.’ A soldier who was in the fight told me that the Rebels piled up six of their dead between those logs, threw the beef hide and their blankets over them, and then fled and that our men put the dirt on them. On the lower side of this mound, the top of the ground is covered with putrescent which flows from the decaying bodies and the big green flies have deposited their eggs which soon become maggots. What an end this! My heart sickens to contemplate it, but such is war.”

          Little did they know that the macabre spectacle that so enlivened their interest would become commonplace as Pittsburg Landing would become the final resting place for thousands more young men killed in the battle of Shiloh, interred both in the National Cemetery and at Confederate mass graves scattered throughout the battlefield. The Confederates, in taking the field on April 6th, had interred their dead in numerous mass graves. Captain Oliver Wood of the 13th Missouri noted that “on Tuesday I sent a squad of men to gather the dead together and bury them side by side. We could not get boards for coffins, so they were wrapped in their blankets and consigned to the earth. Some bits of boards were gathered up and the name of each was cut on them and stuck at the head of the grave to mark the place.”

After the war, the Federal government embarked on the grim task of exhuming the fallen Federals from their battlefield graves for orderly burial in national cemeteries. It was left to the Southern states to decide how and where to bury their fallen. Shiloh National Cemetery was established in 1866 and holds the remains of 3,584 Union war dead of which 2,359 are unknowns. 


 The Federals tended to bury their dead by regiments as Chaplain Garner recorded. “The aim was to group the dead, by regiments as far as possible, but many isolated ones were buried alone and unmarked. Little red mounds rose rapidly all about in that woods, some covering one man, others several men each. These were all marked, but the marking could not be durable, and the identity of many must have been lost in a short time. The dead animals were drawn together in piles and ricks of logs and leaves stacked on them; and then fire was applied. Hundreds of such fires were in full blast at the same time. The fumes from such quantities of burning, putrid flesh was almost unbearable, and it took so long to reduce these piles to ashes.”

          Charles E. Bliven attached to the Army Telegraph Corps arrived at Shiloh a week following the battle and recorded his impressions of the graves that pockmarked the land. “I wandered all over the field yesterday and the scene was a terrible one,” he wrote. “The almost countless little hillocks of fresh turned earth told the cost of the victory. The great heaps here and there show how hard the Rebels fought and how great was their loss. General [Albert S.] Johnston's grave is on the brow of a ravine and is surrounded by a neat fence. Whenever a body could be recognized, the grave was properly marked by a board placed at the head on which was roughly carved the name and number of the regiment of the dead sleeper. On a beech tree I found the name, number of regiment, and a Masonic emblem, neatly engraved, showing that a friend and brother had paid the last tribute due to the dead soldier whose body laid at its foot.”

 

Sources:

Letter from Sergeant William Jasper Srofe, Co. K, 48th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, Griff’s Spared and Shared website

Letter from Chaplain John Mordecai Garner, 18th Missouri Volunteer Infantry, Griff’s Spared and Shared website

Letter from Captain Oliver O. Wood, Co. B, 13th Missouri Volunteer Infantry, Portsmouth Times (Ohio), May 31, 1862, pg. 2

Letter from Charles E. Bliven, Daily Toledo Blade (Ohio), April 22, 1862, pg. 2

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