Dr. Timothy B. Smith
speaker
76 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Timothy B. Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Sure. At the time of Shallow, we're only a year in. You know, if you compare that maybe with World War II or the Revolution or something like that, this is very, very early in their stages. So April 1862, there hasn't been a lot of Just what I would call huge battles, maybe Napoleonic style battles.
Yeah, you've got Bull Run and no offense to the Bull Run folks, Fort Donaldson, Wilson Creek, things like that. But these are fairly small revolutionary type battles, Revolutionary War type battles, Mexican War, you know, War of 1812 size battles. And as a result, when you reach shallow and you have this massive battle, This is kind of the beginning of the war a little bit.
It's when the thing is getting serious. It's starting to move past the early moves, the initial feeling each other out, the initial mobilization type stuff. And what leads to shallow, of course, is the Union forces are moving southward along the Tennessee River, trying to pierce this Confederate defensive line in the west that stretches all the way from
the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River across all the way to Indian territory, in fact. And as the Union forces move southward, the Confederates are trying to defend their port railroads, and some of those are near shallow, and that's what brings the armies to that battlefield.
Spot on. There are different debates over what constitutes the Western theater. Some include the Trans-Mississippi is the Western theater. A lot of historians prefer to call this area Western Kentucky, Western Tennessee, Middle Tennessee, Northern Mississippi is really the Confederate heartland, which kind of gets at the importance and the significance here. All these rivers, all these railroads.
I used to joke about the movie Trains, Planes and Automobiles. This is literally railroad, steamboat, wagons that connect the two. So the Industrial Revolution has had a huge impact on warfare. And you see this not just in America, the Crimean War before this, somewhat in the Mexican War as well in America.
But the Civil War, you know, you get into the debate of the first modern war, all that kind of stuff. I happen to believe every war is the most modern war at that point. There is no first modern war. But, you know, the Industrial Revolution absolutely has a significant effect on the Civil War. And we see that vividly at Shiloh.
He doesn't get a lot of attention, and rightly so. He's not very good. He is America's military theorist. He takes the old Napoleonic Germany mindset and brings that to the fighting men of America. Wrote the book, for instance, you know, the elements of military art and science that a lot of American officers use. So
He is very set in his ways, very rigid in doing things the way Napoleon would have done it. And as a result, he doesn't turn out to be a very good general. Grant, you know, that relationship, you always talk about jealousy and all of that. I'm not so sure it's jealousy. Highlight biographer John Marslake basically says that the two spoke two different military languages.
Alec just didn't like Grant because he didn't do things by the book. He was kind of sloppy. He was not, you know, a rigid by the book kind of guy. Just tell you one interesting story real quick. When Alec shows up after shot, he gets all over Grant for fighting this battle and for not being prepared. You're not ready to fight another battle if we have to, all that kind of stuff.
And at one point he tells him, I'm getting letters from your officers and they are not folding their letters correctly. You have your officers fold your letters correctly by military style. And I'm sure Grant's thinking, how are we going to win this war if we don't fold our letters correctly? You know, so that illustrates the difference kind of between the mentalities of Halleck and Grant.
Well, as they say in real estate, location, location, location, of course. Yes, shallow is very much part of the Mississippi Valley campaign, starting up at Belmont, Fort Henry, Fort Donaldson, all the way through Vicksburg. Shallow, in fact, is the largest battle in the Mississippi Valley campaign. So it holds that importance. But what makes the ground at shallow itself important?
is basically the landing on the river itself. There's nothing really at Shallow that makes it important in terms of people saying, okay, we're going to fight a battle here. In fact, Shallow was never intended to be a battlefield. It was intended to be a staging area for further Union operations southward against Corinth, Mississippi, and those important railroads.
So the Union Army will camp there largely because in the spring of 1862, the Tennessee River has risen so much that most of the landings up and down the river are underwater. Pittsburgh Landing being the one or two, there are a couple others around, but the one good one that provides access not only to Corinth, but also good camping areas, good fields to drill the troops, all of that.
So the lead elements that are exploring this area figure out this is a good place to camp. This is a good place to land the army. And that's the reason the Union army camps there in the days and weeks before the battle. Of course, the Confederates realize, okay, we've got to do something about this incursion. And that's why they march northward from Corinth to attack the Union forces there.
So that's why we wind up with a battle there.
Well, when Phil Scott, of course, the author of the Anaconda Plan, is ridiculed at the beginning of the war, that's going to take way too long, way too many troops. It's going to be a three-month war, and the thing's going to be done. Well, the basic formula that they win the war with after four years is basically the Anaconda Plan.
And so here, a year into the war, they are working through the process of strangling the South, as an Anaconda will do. It takes a while to build ship, to implement the blockade, of course. One of the major tenets of the Anaconda plan is to open the Mississippi River, which, again, shallow is very much a part of that.
It's convenient the way these rivers, you know, we talk about the Industrial Revolution and the rivers and the railroads and all of that. The rivers really play a more important role, at least early in the Western theater than the railroads do because they are pointed directly like daggers into the heart, this art land of the Confederacy.
And as the Federals move southward, they're trying to move south along the Mississippi River, but they are blocked at Columbus, Kentucky. But conveniently, they can step over 100 miles to the east, move straight down the Tennessee River, and get where they need to go out flanking Columbus, and then step back over to the Mississippi and continue on down to Vicksburg.
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