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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The vast majority of the Union advances, even by Buell's fresh army, if you call it fresh, all across the battlefield except on the extreme Confederate left where they are outflanked not once, not twice, but three times by Lew Wallace's division. And so Lew Wallace is really the fulcrum of
that puts the pressure on the Confederates and forces them to fall back incrementally, just like Grant had fallen back incrementally the day before. But the Confederates will continue to resist, and even as they fall back off the battlefield, even on April the 8th there, you mentioned Forrest, and kind of this rear guard action a little bit that I think sometimes gets blown out of proportion.
You hear a lot of this thing about Forrest gathering one of the Union soldiers and pulling him up on his horse and using him as a shield as he rides away and all that kind of stuff. I'm convinced that's a bunch of hogwash, that there's no...
evidence whatsoever i found a lot of manuscript material in writing the book that described fallen timbers this little battle on the 8th and nobody mentions this if i had seen that in real time i think i would have mentioned that to mama as i'm writing home to her you know but nobody mentions it i'm convinced that's a fabrication the band would have done a big number about that one
Shallow will be the real fight for Corinth in the railroads. Later in May, when Hallett comes down and gets on Grant for not folding his letters correctly and all that kind of stuff, he will move on southward to Corinth. The Confederates will retreat without a battle. And this is part of what dooms Beauregard.
Just days before, Beauregard has sent a message to Richmond that says, if defeated here, we lose the Mississippi Valley and probably our cause. And this days later, he retreats without fighting a battle. So Jefferson Davis is thinking, if Corinth is so important, why don't you fight for it? And so he'll remove him for other reasons as well. But this ends Beauregard's career in a lot of ways.
At any rate, so shallow, yes, is the battle for Corinth and for those railroads and the largest battle in the Mississippi Valley campaign. So that is extremely significant. Also significant, of course, is the cost of this thing. We mentioned the 23,000 casualties. There's some evidence that that's even higher than that.
Those are the reported numbers, but the evidence points to even larger casualties maybe. But what this produces is the first really big battle of the war. I often say, you know, America collectively gasped. at the casualty figures of Shiloh, because we've never seen anything like this in American history.
The Revolutionary War, the War of 1822, the Mexican War battles, these are more casualties than really the size of armies. Winfield Scott didn't have an army this large, as large as the casualties at Shiloh in the whole Mexican War. So it's a huge shock to the nation. The only thing Americans have to compare this to are Napoleonic battles.
And so they referenced Napoleon and Austerlitz and Waterloo and Yena and Wagram and some of those. So this absolutely gets the nation's attention. And instead of this whole, you know, three months and the war is going to be over type thing, they start figuring out we have got ourselves into a mess here and we don't see any way out of this anytime soon.
And indeed, it'll take another three years to get out of this.
Well, there are a lot of rumors about Grant. He had left the Army before the Civil War, of course. Rumors of drunkenness. He had failed in his attempts to even support his family. You know, he tried real estate. He tried farming. He tried everything in the world and failed. But at the beginning of the war, he's working for his father in Delena, Illinois. And so, you know, he was down and out.
But, you know, this is the old idea, do people make great events or do great events make great people? Both ways, of course. But in this case, the event, and we dare say this about Abraham Lincoln as well, the event made the great person. Because in three or four years, Grant will be commanding the entire Union Army. In seven years, he's president of the United States.
So it completely changes his fortunes here. But there are some pretty low points in Grant's service here, and after Shallow is absolutely one of those. During the Clark campaign, he thinks of residing and going home, and it's Sherman, by all accounts, that talks him out of it and says, no, you've got to stay.
And my, how things would have been different had Grant quit and gone home and we'd never heard anything else out of him. But he continues on through the Vicksburg campaign, winning more. He's on a little bit of a short leash even then. But then on through Chattanooga and moving to the east and all that, he makes his name there.
Yes, I'm actually working on a comparative history of Napoleonic battles with Civil War battles and how they compare and contrast and all that. It's really interesting.
Showing 61–76 of 76 · page 4 of 4
← Previous