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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And so Sherman comes to Grant's headquarters and Sherman, of course, enters a room mouth first kind of thing. He just blurts out, well, Grant, we've had the devil's own day today. And Grant responds, yeah, lick them tomorrow, though. And so he chooses to stay and fight.
And this kind of brings out for the first major time, Fort Donaldson notwithstanding, this Grant under pressure that he's not going to give up. He's not going to give in like so many other Union generals did and hightail it northward. He's going to stay and fight it out.
Lots of them came out of the Mexican War and will learn a lot from the mix. This is the only experience really that they have in the field. And, you know, the field experience, this is this is why we send, you know, education majors out to do student teaching to get some experience. And this is their student teaching in the Mexican War.
And Francis Grant learns, he watches Zachary Taylor and he watches Winfield Scott. And he takes the best of both. He takes Zachary Taylor and kind of his nonchalance and, you know, don't worry about pomp and circumstance and all that. But out of Winfield Scott, who's very much pomp and circumstance, he takes kind of the manner of fighting, flanking out, maneuvering the enemy, that type stuff.
So Grant learns a lot. Sidney Johnson does fight in the Mexican War, particularly at Monterey. Fortunately, Johnston doesn't learn from Mexican war experience and proves to be, I think, a lesser general. He's just not really fitted to be a good general. You have to have a little bark and a little bite to make people do things that you need them to do. I like Albert Sidney Johnson.
I think he's just too nice of a guy. He's too lean, too methodical probably to be a good commander. And so when he's killed at Shiloh, I'm not sure that his death at Shiloh really makes that much difference at the battle itself due to the terrain situation that the Confederates are facing.
But I think it does have a larger impact later in the war because, as you say, nobody really ever replaces him. in a way that everybody takes the new commander to be the head and shoulders above everybody else. In fact, what they wind up doing is promoting one of the corps commanders from Shallow above the rest of them, which institutes a lot of jealousy. And that's Braxton Bragg, of course.
And the three main enemies that Bragg later has are the three other corps commanders at Shallow that didn't get the promotion. So Beauregard being one of them, right? Well, Beauregard is the second in command, and he's got a whole lot of other issues with Jefferson Davis. They don't like each other. And so when Beauregard gives up Corinth after Shallow, that basically ruins it for him.
Beauregard will never hold a major army command the rest of the war. So there's more than just military ability involved here. There's politics, there's personality, a lot of things involved.
Yes, Buell and Wallace combined will provide Grant with about 24,000 fresh troops. And when I say fresh, that means not engaged the day before. And they have marched a long way the day before. So they're not totally fresh, but they weren't engaged the day before. The Confederates, on the other hand, get one regiment of reinforcements. 47th Tennessee, that's 741 men.
So 741 men on one side, 24,000 on the other side. You can see which way this thing is going. And it's not a hard decision then for Grant to decide, yeah, we're going to stay here and we're going to fight it out. That certainly helps. But even if you compare this with other commanders, I often think if George McClellan had been in command of the Union Army here, what would he have done?
Given what he did at the peninsula and other places, you know, and the failure to pursue at Antietam, I'm not sure what he would have gotten out of there. Joseph Hooker at Chancellorsville, you know, would Hooker have fallen back? And again, people are counseling Grant to do this. But Grant said, no, we're going to stick and fight it out. And that's where he wins the battle.
He could have still thrown it away during the night.
That last line of defense at Shiloh, there's some 50 pieces of artillery in the first third of a mile inland from the river. And you've got the two gunboats, Tyler and Lexington, in the river itself firing up Dill Branch Ravine. The area is so strong. And this is one of the key things for battlefield preservation. And the federal government did it a long time ago in the 1890s.
The American Battlefield Trust is a wonderful organization still doing it today. But to be able to go to those battlefields, And to see the terrain, you really can't understand it until you go there. You know, there are a lot of people that argue, oh, the Confederates have just had one more hour of daylight.
Or if Johnson had just lived, they would have swept over Grant's last line of defense and won that battle. And I dare say the vast majority of those folks that argue that have never been to shallow and looked at Dill Branch Ravine and looked at the terrain. You can go out there and cross that thing on foot and put yourself in that position facing 50 cannons
in front of you and the gunboats to the side and all of that, and this thing filled with backwater and the steep fields and all that, there is absolutely no way. And so I've quit arguing with people until they go out there and actually see it. And then we can discuss, you know, from a level playing field kind of thing.
But if you go to Shiloh and actually see this, you're really not in a place to even comment on it, really.
Yes. Day two is very much a mirror image of the first day, just in reverse, because they're fighting back over the same areas. And so for all practical purposes, the Hornet's Nest Peach Orchard, all those same areas that become so famous on the first day become famous on the second day.
But what is really remarkable, I think, about the second day is really the fight that the Confederate Army that fought all day yesterday puts up. And in fact, they will stop cold turkey.
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