The staggering casualties of the Battle of Shiloh shocked both the North and South, marking a turning point in public perception of the Civil War's likely length and brutality. It also cemented a name in the public imagination - Ulysses S. Grant.Don's guest is Dr Timothy B. Smith, author of 'Shiloh: Conquer or Perish'.Editor Ayman Alolayan, Producer Sophie Gee, Senior Producer Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
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Mount McGregor, New York, 1885. At a quiet, rustic cottage nestled among pine trees, the late afternoon sun slants across the porch, catching the silver in Ulysses S. Grant's beard. A blanket covers his legs, a knit cap warms his head. In his right hand, a knife-sharpened pencil moves steadily across a sheet of paper as he writes, carefully recounting events from 40 years earlier.
Grant's memoirs, begun the previous fall in New York City, would grow into a two-volume, 360,000-word work, an astonishing feat completed in just 11 months. It was intended not only to detail his role in the war, but to explain the broader moral purpose of the conflict. Shiloh would be the battle that shattered Grant's illusions about the war.
Like so many in the North, Grant had expected a swift Union victory. But in that wide clearing in western Tennessee, hemmed in by trees, he witnessed relentless close-quarters combat from dawn until dark, as Confederate troops hurled themselves against Union lines. The End
Dear listeners, glad you could join us. This is American History Hit and I'm Don Wildman. Well, today we resume our march. We started with the episodes on Fort Sumter and Bull Run, undertaking a chronological campaign telling the histories of the major battles of the American Civil War. Ought to take just about as long as it took to fight the war.
But it's worth it, considering the grave consequences and supreme sacrifices made. The Civil War would recreate the United States of America, continuing our great experiment. The war and its aftermath, often called the nation's second founding, shifted the very ground the nation stood upon, so we think it's vital to understand the very grounds those battles were fought upon and why they happened.
For now, we find ourselves in the early days, spring of 1862, out in the Western Theater, where the Tennessee River wends its way south past Hardin County, Tennessee, about 100 miles east of Memphis and 20 miles north of Mississippi. These Western regions, they were called in those days because that was the West,
were considered vital to both the Union and the Confederates, since occupying them meant controlling the vital water routes that ran through them, the Mississippi River, the Ohio, the Tennessee. So many supplies and troop movements would be delivered by these waterways. So, accordingly, a series of high-stakes battles would be fought at profound cost of men and treasure.
April 6th and 7th, 1862, was the Battle of Shiloh. And to help us understand this pivotal confrontation, we are joined by historian Dr. Timothy B. Smith, who teaches history at the University of Tennessee at Martin, author of a number of books, including Corinth 1862, Siege, Battle, Occupation, and Shiloh, Conquer or Perish, both from the University Press of Kansas. Hello, Professor Smith.
Timothy, nice of you to do this. Hello. Thank you for having me. Greetings. Let's start with the macro viewpoint of the war to this point. Back east, as I mentioned, there had been the Battle of Bull Run in Virginia, near the capital, a debacle for the Union. But since then, there's been improvements for them, most notably out west. Can you bring us up to date at this point in the war?
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