As another Lame Cherry exclusive in mater anti matter.
I have no idea why God provides the Gifts of the Spirit He does, but one of my many is I enjoy history. I started enjoying it when I got A's in school, so I put more focus on it, and it has been instilled in me that I enjoy memoirs of people who lived events. I suspect in the turmoil of this America, that I have been reading the past years a great deal on the era of the Civil War, and have digested volumes and one thing keeps coming to mind in these actual histories is how much Ken Burns Civil War is bullshit.
I first groaned at his theatrical production when he began featuring Negroes as the main theme, which abolitionist propaganda or as Lincoln termed them, "radicals". No one in the North gave much of a damn about the Nigger situation. As Protestant Christians they did not like it, did not want it in their States, but they were not blaming Southerners for it as it was just something distasteful and not a national focus, even during the majority of the war. I'm not going to revisit all of this in the archives in the Lame Cherry, but in knowing the facts, I frowned at wondering now how much of what Burns was producing was factual.
That is what this post is about, Pittsburg Landing in fact. You would know it as Shiloh. The reason the Union forces were at Pittsburg Landing was the transportation lines there for the South. They had to be cut. This was preceded by General Grant having moved to control the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers for control of that watershed in cutting the Confederacy. This culminated in the taking of Fort Donelson, and the evacuation of Nashville. What was next was Pittsburg Landing.
In the Burns fiction, there were 3 days of hard fighting. Grant was driven back the first day. More fighting the second day and the South would have annihilated the Union forces, except darkness fell and General Albert Sidney Johnson died of blood loss, but General Buell arrived at the night, overwhelmed the Confederates and victory was achieved. That is all bullshit and we know this from the quote below from General Grant and from the memoirs of General Sherman.
In one of Burns' segments he has Sherman looking for Grant in the night storm, finding him under a tree, away from the screams of amputations in the hospital, with Sherman saying what a rough day it was and Grant replying, "Lick em tomorrow".
According to General Grant, the reason he was where he was, was in meeting General Buell who appeared on the afternoon of the second day. The reason General Grant was where he was, was because his horse had fell on him, before the battle and his boot had to be cut off as his ankle and foot were that swollen. He was in severe pain. So he went to the hospital to try and sleep, but people were being operated on, and that was not going to help him rest, so he went back outside, in the rain as his foot was in pain and he was sitting there when Sherman found him.
The reason Grant said, "Lick em tomorrow" was he knew the Union forces were going to drive the Confederates from the field, because they had won the battle already that day.
Buell's forces did not engage in combat.
The following passage begins on page 365 of volume 1 of President Grant's memoirs. The South threw all they had at the Northern lines on day one, drove the North back, but the North held. The South had worn their men out in the charges. Grant makes a comment that his troops buried 4000 Confederates, that is twice the number reported. Day 2 the Confederates under PT Beauregard, were busy in retreat with as much stores as they could move to Corinth Mississippi which is where they were located. Day 2 saw the Union forces retaking their line positions as the South engaged in delaying actions in combat. The roads were horrid, so that on the 3rd day General Grant did not have the heart to send his men who had fought hard for two days, to send them in pursuit due to fatigue.
The facts are below by General Grant.
It is possible that the Southern man started in with a little more dash than his Northern brother ; but he was correspondingly less enduring.
The endeavor of the enemy on the first day was simply to hurl their men against ours—first at one point, then at another, sometimes at several points at once.
This they did with daring and energy, until at night the rebel troops were worn out.
Our effort during the same time was to be prepared to resist assaults wherever made.
The object of the Confederates on the second day was to get away with as much of their army and material as possible.
Ours then was to drive them from our front, and to capture or destroy as great a part as possible of their men and material.
We were successful in driving them back, but not so successful in captures as if farther pursuit could have been made.
As it was, we captured or recaptured on the second day about as much artillery as we lost on the first ; and, leaving out the one great capture of Prentiss, we took more prisoners on Monday than the enemy gained from us on Sunday.
On the 6th “Sherman lost seven pieces of artillery, McClernand six, Prentiss eight, and Hurlbut two batteries.
On the 7th Sherman captured seven guns, McClernand three and the Army of the Ohio twenty.
At Shiloh the effective strength of the Union forces on the morning of the 6th was 33,000 men. Lew. Wallace brought 5,000 more after nightfall.
Beauregard reported the enemy’s strength at 40,955.
According to the custom of enumeration in the South, this number probably excluded every man enlisted as musician or detailed as guard or nurse, and all commissioned officers—everybody who did not carry a musket or serve a cannon.
With us everybody in the field receiving pay from the government is counted
Excluding the troops who fled, panic-stricken, before they had fired 4 shot, there was not a time during the 6th when we had more than 25,000 men in line.
It always begs the reality of scrutiny, when Ken Burns was this wrong about his docudrama on Pittsburg Landing, then how very much is he wrong wrong wrong on this entire series being nothing but a liberal propaganda.
Nuff Said
agtG
